I’m working on a PbtA game about Cold War espionage, called The Service.

I’m working on a PbtA game about Cold War espionage, called The Service.

I’m working on a PbtA game about Cold War espionage, called The Service. It’s very much a love letter to Le Carré, Len Deighton and the ITV show The Sandbaggers. I’m aiming for a low powered, drab, bureaucratic take on the genre.

As for games, I’ve been influenced mostly by Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark, with some Monsterhearts, The Regiment and The Sprawl as well as others sprinkled in for good measure.

If any of y’all are interested, here’s the current, unpolished version. Any feedback more than welcome!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MEWifN23zNacjUJ9AUhxqiARIhkVpdTK/view?usp=sharing

62 thoughts on “I’m working on a PbtA game about Cold War espionage, called The Service.”

  1. The playbooks are intended to be printed and folded in half, like a passport. If you want to get them close to actual passport size, you can print them out at 70% of their size, but that’ll mean reduced text and space to write stuff down on.

    I’ll be sure to make a printer friendly version of the playbooks soon.

  7. Trevis Martin good call! I think I did at one point, but for whatever reason I didn’t steal as much from it as from the PbtA games. I ought to give it another look though.

  8. I don’t know how much you could directly steal but it’s a good way to think about setup and structure. And an excellent overview of Carre-like spying. It’s a game that really focuses on the spy/person and the way the inherent deception corrodes his/her relationships. The Trespass is the most interesting mechanism, but very punchy.

  9. Trevis Martin Thanks for the tip, I’ll make sure to check it out again. As I recall, I was really impressed by the atmosphere and the amount of research that had been put into it.

  11. Marshall Miller God yes, I love me some Q&C! Wrt the actual ops side of what I expect the players to get up to in play, it’s arguably more of an inspiration than the Sandbaggers. I wanted to keep the Cold War setting, but I expect it would be trivially simple to re-skin this project for a modern time. Or for that matter WWII/SOE.

  13. Lari Assmuth This is very exiting!! I’ve been looking for this type of PbtA for a while. Specially the low violence and more intricate intrigue (I have squeamish players!).

    From what I read this is very promising and already at play test stage!

    Things I would like to have or small improvements:

    * More GM aids such as pre-packed events (like in MASHED)

    * I like the passport look (very cold war and post-brexit, I wonder…) for digital but printing it will consume tons of ink!

    * I fear that the GM will struggle to join office workers (Main emphasis on the Researcher) with on field operatives (that happened a bit in MASHED between the Grunt and the medical team). I wonder if there is some kind of mechanics to facilitate the connection between different spaces or timings (something like the night and day cycle from Night Witches).

    I’ll try and schedule a play test of this in the near future and let you know. Thanks for sharing!!

  15. Acronico Meia Noite Very good points, thank you! I’ll definitely consider them, and yeah – need a printer friendly playbook version for sure! I’ll try to get that done ASAP. (Oh, for the record: not a fan of brexit but I’m Finnish so take that as you will) 🙂

  20. Lari Assmuth, One other comment that goes in the same direction of my previous ones: the Section Chief might have very little to do in heist type sessions. In MASHED there is also a Commanding Officer which coordinates the military hospital but this is a mandatory NPC (thus assigned to the GM) with specific roles and with significant character depth. This role can be assumed by different players as the game progresses: as Mark Plemmons puts it in his book: “The camp CO should be an NPC portrayed by the game CO [GM]; if another player ever becomes a colonel, he or she should take on the role of CO [GM] and let the former CO [GM] play something else.”

  21. Acronico Meia Noite Yes, this is something I’m struggling with figuring out, and the Station Chief was the last playbook I did out of these ones. I’m still trying to figure out how much the focus should be on the “home front”/the station and the infighting and bureaucracy in the SIS, and how much it should be focused on the missions/ops.

    Looking at MASHED and Night Witches in particular at the moment to try and figure out the right balance.

  22. Previously, I was leaning more towards the station chief as NPC, but then I started thinking it could be presented as more of an “opt in”-way of having a character with more externalised power as well as a fun way of portraying the office politics. Both The Sandbaggers and Le Carré are very much about the internal goings-on in the institutions of the SIS and the government, so that’s something I thought was important, but at the same time I wanted to keep the possibility open of having the Station Chief conduct operations along with the rest of the PCs, so as not to be left out of the action. For a long time, I though becoming Station Chief would be an advance that would give you access to certain moves and a fictional position, but then I figured you could have that as a playbook ether to be picked at start, or, maybe preferably, transitioned into using the Change playbook-advance.

    Still, I think you’re right that the more the game is mission-focused, the more it’s a problem that some playbooks don’t seem to fit too well into that sort of field work.

  24. Acronico Meia Noite Yeah, although as it stands, it might be possible to start out as chief if you wanted to. Not sure yet if this is a good idea or not…

  26. beyene yigeremu Do you mean what time it is set in? I think it could probably be any time from 1950–1990, but I was maybe thinking most about the 1970s or 1980s.

  27. A short historical timeline (for example a 1-year timeline) might be a useful player aid at the table, a longer and more detailed historical timeline covering 1970-1990 would be great in the rules. An even longer timeline of British intelligence would also be good so that people had some sort of institutional context, e.g. how WWII shaped the cold war intelligence organizations and how they were different in 1985 than they currently are in 2018.

  28. Marshall Miller Yes, I think (a) timeline(s) will be good to have. And probably a glossary and maybe a list of different countries’ intelligence and security services, terrorist organizations and so on.

  29. Brainstorming: I could see a threat map for England as well as PCs. Maybe axis are National, Corporate, Ecological, and Influence; ranges could be Institutional, Domestic, Abroad, Allied, Global, and Space. Then you could write the threat in one of those spaces to show what they were targeting. So, for example, if a Vietnamese agent was planning to organize a writers strike to disrupt the US film industry, then you’d put “NVA” in the allied range of the corporate axis because American companies are the target. I mean, you’d probably ignore it because “KGB” is also written in on the influence axis at the abroad range to remind you that a KGB mole is undermining operations in the Le Havre station, which is a more central threat (UK influence in France is more important to the SIS than their allies’ film companies; which is, in turn, way more important than the chemicals China is dumping of the shores of Japan).

  30. Marshall Miller I like that! And yeah, the sweet spot would be to always/usually have just a bit more happening than what the PC and the UK Station as a collective entity can take on at once. Drive home that idea of insufficient time/manpower/resources to cover the whole world. Oh, and what the Station chief chooses to prioritize can always be influenced by outside forces. Maybe there’s a juicy trade agreement on the table that the Japanese are using as leverage so that the Foreign office wants to bump their mission up?

  33. Begin every session by asking each character: Why are you still doing this job?

    End every session by asking each character: Is [what they said at the beginning of the session] still why you do this job?

  36. Or would/should a change in motives be a bigger thing? You could potentially have motive listed on the sheet, maybe incentivized by xp, but have some dramatically appropriate cue for changing it.

  38. Acronico Meia Noite Good question. I had originally envisioned it as being something the GM does on their own, but looking at it, I think at least steps 1 and 2 would be better to do together as a group. I think if payoff and heat increase is discussed as a group it will be easier to incorporate into the fiction in a meaningful way. Steps 3 and 4 I would tentatively say are better handled by the GM alone, and then filtered into the narrative from there, like managing fronts and threats in AW. Does that make sense?

  39. Also, just as a general comment, I got some really good feedback from Marshall Miller so where my head is at right now is thinking about a good way to shift focus more towards the office politics and less towards detailed “let’s go on a mission!”-type narratives. Just as you Acronico Meia Noite noted, it would be good to make sure the more desk-bound character types like the Researcher and the Station Chief don’t feel left out. I’m looking a lot at Night Witches for inspiration and thinking about ways the group might have to either zoom in or out on the office portion of play or the operations, depending on what they are interested in. This will almost certainly lead to some changes in the moves (basic and character) and the structure of play (operations–blowback–downtime). It may take a little while though.

  40. I’m also starting to feel there’s probably ways to streamline some stuff around stress and weaknesses, because that whole thing feels probably unnecessarily complex at the moment. It was also pointed out that the way weaknesses are worded at the moment is possibly not doing a great job about being sensitive in how mental illness is portrayed, so that’s something I will be looking into and probably changing up in some way.

  41. Lari Assmuth we are probably doing the 1st session either next week or the one after. Do you think you can draft a set of questions for a post play-test report? This would help me get feedback from the players.

  42. Acronico Meia Noite Wow, that’s great! I’ll give the questions a shot this weekend. It’s my first time doing this kind of playtest though, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll try to pinpoint what sort of things I’m curious about.

  44. Lari Assmuth, I was thinking on how to make violence something that has a big impact on operatives, specially the more soft ones (everyone except the Heavy and the Special Ops). I came up with 2 new moves:

    Backlash

    Every time you kill or horribly maim somebody and have an instant to contemplate it, roll -composure +stress. On a hit, You’re dazed for a moment, you lose track of something, someone or miss something important. Mark +1 stress. On 7-9 choose 1:

    * You panic: -3 composed on-going until the end of the scene.

    * You enter an hyper alert state: +2 sharp, -3 all other stats on-going until the end of the scene.

    * Blood vertigo: +2 hard,-3 all other stats, on-going until the end of the scene.

    On 10+ , choose 1 but this will cut deep, take a new weakness and play it out during downtime

    On a miss, this doesn’t affect you. Answer why, discussing it with a PC, NPC or your conscience (monologue) during downtime.

    In order to make it easier for The Heavy and The Special Ops I’m going to add this next move to their playbooks to choose if wanted:

    Ice cold

    When violence backlashes, your stress is not a part of the equation.

    Any thoughts?

  46. Acronico Meia Noite I really like the idea of a stress cost for violence. I think it fits the tone of the fiction perfectly. While I dig the idea of panic/hyperalertness/blood vertigo I’m not altogether sold on stat modifiers as the way to handle it. But I’ll be thinking of a way to incorporate stress for violence for sure – and I like the idea of ice cold for heavies/spec ops as well!

  47. One thing I was thinking was that stress could be a cost of the fighting moves. Incorporate it in the violence moves themselves so it’s an intrinsic part of doing harm?

  48. Maybe stress could be wrapped into

    When you return from the field, mark stress if you:

    Killed someone

    Were assaulted

    Lied in your debrief

    Failed your mission

    It was your first time to do any of the above

  49. Lari Assmuth I like the idea of taxing doing harm in general. Changing the Harm mode is something pretty fundamental so I let you do that. If you have something by the next time we get together then I run with it. Otherwise I’ll try my maxmin approach.

    Marshall Miller Does the last line mean that you mark stress twice if you’re a rookie? In addition to Downtime consequences I wanted to cause immediate ones that could hamper the op. Hence the stats change. The dice part of it is to reflect that the PC is not in full control of their subconscious reaction to violent acts.

  53. Acronico Meia Noite Those new oppositions and events are so good! I’ll comment on them in the document as well, but just wanted to say they are both super good in and of themselves, as a way to produce good spy fiction material, but also helped me think more clearly about the structure of play.

  54. Acronico Meia Noite Off the top of my head, I’m thinking events are like fronts, and opposition akin to threats. Ops are tools for the PCs to deal with events. Events are dynamic, and can require one, none or several ops to be “resolved”. Events can be introduced as a GM move, and as a part of the Blowback sequence. A good goal for the GM is to have the PCs juggle just enough events so they feel they’re not quite in control.

  55. Lari Assmuth Glad you liked it.Please add more if you want.

    Marshall Miller, I’m using your idea about motive in the upcoming game. I know the discussion is still on-going but if you don’t have a better way I’m iincluding a character building move (Motive) and a end-of-session move(sanity check):

    Motive: Write down why are you in The Service

    Sanity Check: at the end of each session ask your self if your motive for being in the Service remains unchanged. If not, cross that motive, write a new one and mark experience.

    Let me know if you have a better way of modelling this.

  58. I also think motive (or drive, or whatever it’s called) and class have a kind of potential for synergy, where motivation is completely internal (why do you do what you do) while class is something more external (how do people, possibly including yourself, see your position in the service/the world). Still thinking about how to give this a bit more mechanical teeth, while being relatively free to lean into more or less as you wish.

  59. Lari Assmuth Thanks for the playtest questions. I’ll have the players answering those at the end of the session.

    On another topic, while writing a small note analysing the functional possibilities of different playbook combinations I realised that one the most prominent and central characters in Le Carré’s books was missing. I made a new playbook called The Asset which is meant for a single session (guest player or one-shot) or for when one of the players has the Section Chief playbook which mainly acts during Downtime.

    It has the following description text:

    “You are the proverbial pawn of the game. Indispensable when you have leverage or knowledge. The sacrificial fool when you’re useful for nothing else. As The Asset you will use your position in your organisation, community or country to spy and conduct subversive action for the other side. Why did you turn on your own? How long can you keep it up as the stakes rise? You know this will end bad but something precious can be saved. Have you lost hope?”

    Please have a look in the link below and let me know what you think:

    docs.google.com – The Service: Notes on gameplay and playbook interaction

  60. Acronico Meia Noite Very nice! I’ll read it in detail and will comment on it probably later tonight. It’s a really good idea for a playbook and very in line with the fiction, as you note. I had briefly thought about including assets/agents at some point but then I decided to just include actual SIS officers. Looking back, there wasn’t really a good reason for that decision, though and I think this a really good addition.

    Will be fun to read your playbook/gameplay analysis as well!

  62. Acronico Meia Noite Cool! I would encourage you to use the new harm and backlash if it’s convenient for you. Sorry I haven’t had time to put it in the layout properly yet.

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