Encrypted Comms 2

[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode of Go Bag, we touch on a website that every handler in Delta Green should be aware of. A series on Netflix that we enjoy. [00:00:09] Speaker B: We have an incoming encrypted transmission. [00:00:12] Speaker A: That's right. It's an encrypted comms Q and A with grenades thrown from Laramie Wall Dan, AKA Dependable Skeleton, Spez Baby, Digital Hobbit and Rune Slinger. Hit it. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Strap in. Operatives, this is Go Bag. Your all access pass to modern day RPG loaded with bullets, backstories, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And here are your mission leaders, Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Welcome everybody to Go Bag. I'm your host, Sean. And joining me is my counterpart, Harrigan. How are you doing, Harrigan? [00:00:49] Speaker B: I'm all right. All right, how you doing? [00:00:52] Speaker A: Good. [00:00:53] Speaker B: We want to get right into what we've been up to. Once you want to start. Yeah, go for it, man. [00:00:58] Speaker A: All right. So I have been as far as covert action goes, my Delta Green game seems to be at the forefront of that side of my life, if you will. We wrapped up convergence. For those that know Delta Green, I've kind of narrated the end. I think I said that in the last episode of Go Bang on how we. I wrapped it up with like a 45 minute dialogue of how everybody turned out and it was finished. Then the question was, what am I going to run next for them in the Delta Green world? I. [00:01:34] Speaker B: For whatever reason. [00:01:37] Speaker B: You chose the difficult path. [00:01:38] Speaker A: I went Impossible Landscapes. [00:01:41] Speaker B: You did. [00:01:44] Speaker A: I think it's great. I like running it. I like the premise. I don't feel as though I am an expert, even though this is my second goal because it's such a beast. [00:01:57] Speaker B: Well, back up a second because I don't know if every listener will know what Impossible Landscapes even is true. But what is it, Sean? What's the. What's the thumbnail of what that. [00:02:06] Speaker A: It is the first full length campaign published by Art Dream Publishing, the makers of Delta Green the game. So there are lots of modules out there. There are lots of compilations. [00:02:19] Speaker B: Right. [00:02:19] Speaker A: You could get black sites. And it has five modules or five scenarios that they had previously a solo consolidated into one. Many are not connected. They're just. We'll put these five in a book and release the book as a hardback. But Impossible landscapes is the first full length campaign for like a 300 page. [00:02:40] Speaker B: Plus big ass campaign that spans decades, right? [00:02:44] Speaker A: It does. And it is centered around without any spoilers, I guess. I don't know if it's a spoiler necessarily, but it is more around the King in Yellow. Than it is Lovecraftian in nature. [00:02:59] Speaker B: Yep. [00:02:59] Speaker A: So those are two different things. [00:03:01] Speaker B: Right. So. But point being, it is a big, meaty piece of work that will take a. Take a. [00:03:08] Speaker B: A playing group a long time to get through. It's chunky, beefy. Someone even said chonky. [00:03:18] Speaker A: Like my cats. [00:03:19] Speaker B: There's a lot. There's a lot to it. And the reason why I'm putting this out is because, Sean, I think on the show and privately you have said, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this Delta Green group next. I don't know if they want to keep playing. I'm not sure how into it. Some of them are. Some of them are really into it. So I got to figure out what the next step is. So apparently I'll just play the big one. We'll roll out the big guns. [00:03:43] Speaker A: So Night Floors, I think, is a pretty good scenario. And Night Floors is the first chapter of Impossible Landscapes and it was actually done by Dennis Detwiller as a solo, as a single scenario. [00:03:57] Speaker A: It was never a long. It's just. It's kind of like. [00:04:02] Speaker B: I didn't know that was meant to be self contained. [00:04:05] Speaker A: It was. [00:04:05] Speaker B: Yep. [00:04:06] Speaker A: And it's kind of like masks of np, right. They have a precursor now to the modern day. [00:04:15] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. There's an. There's an opening that happens way before in the timeline than the main events of the module. [00:04:21] Speaker A: Correct? Yeah, correct. And so it's similar to how they kind of incorporated that, I think into Impossible Landscapes. So anyways, I kick that off and the thing is, we started off with like going through the section of the book of the home scenes and how to like boost the bond, boost your sanity. [00:04:40] Speaker A: Boost the skill at the risk of nailing down a bond. So he went through some of those things. I talked to Jeff about having incendiary grenades in his go bag and things of that nature. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Like you can. Anything you can buy in a local, big, major retailer. I'm all for those other things. Not so sure. We got to talk about those. [00:05:10] Speaker B: You know what you could do? You could take kind of a modern OSR mindset and say for the really special stuff, you have to quest for it. So if your character wants those incendiary grenades or that plastique or whatever, how do you propose you're going to get it? And you could actually play it out a little bit, have them meet some unsavory characters, have some things potentially go wrong. You could do that, right? [00:05:33] Speaker A: I can. I could. [00:05:36] Speaker A: So it. [00:05:36] Speaker C: He. [00:05:37] Speaker A: He kind of came To. I would say to his senses and said, you know, okay, I'll erase those. Not a big deal, you know, but. [00:05:43] Speaker B: And then. [00:05:44] Speaker A: But he has his go bag. And I did propose. If you're going to travel and you got to get there next day and you're a thousand miles away, you are simply not going to make it. [00:05:53] Speaker B: If you drive, you're going to fly. Yeah. Which means the go bag has to go through security. Right. Yeah. [00:05:59] Speaker A: So you guys take that for what it's worth. So we'll see. I think I could get through Night Floors and then determine whether to sprinkle in a bunch of other stuff before going further. [00:06:12] Speaker B: And having played. But on the player side of Night Floors with you, that scenario can eff you up pretty good all on its own. [00:06:20] Speaker A: Yes, it can. [00:06:21] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. [00:06:22] Speaker A: I'm trying to study impossible landscapes and I. When I've read certain forum posts, they're like, I would never run that because it's this format and that I wouldn't be keen on necessarily. So I am conscious of that. [00:06:38] Speaker B: A little bit more format. What do you mean by that? [00:06:40] Speaker A: Well, certain things that the characters will encounter that could frustrate the characters. [00:06:48] Speaker B: Oh, yes. It is not a game that focuses on the players having agency and knowing what the hell's going on. [00:06:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:58] Speaker B: Yes. So, yes, now I know what you mean. Yeah. So, yeah. [00:07:04] Speaker A: I don't want to drive my players, like, to the brink of, like, this is pissing me off as a player. [00:07:09] Speaker B: Like, it's a fine line. [00:07:11] Speaker A: Yes. [00:07:11] Speaker B: There's a lot of that in that campaign. [00:07:13] Speaker A: There is, and that's why a lot of people have complained. So we'll. We'll see how it goes. I'm. I'm still jazzed. I don't know if that's going to be the be all, end all. It'll be. It'll be interesting regardless. And then maybe I'll pivot. Jeff was Jeff and his spouse. I helped him out a little bit over the holidays to let their dogs out. And they realized it was my birthday at the time and so they bought me a little birthday present. Which is God's Hunt, the new hardcover. [00:07:42] Speaker B: For A Mark Dream. [00:07:43] Speaker A: Yes. [00:07:44] Speaker B: Which is, like you were saying before, a compilation or a collection of potentially related but not really related modules. Right, Correct. That are operas, I should say. [00:07:52] Speaker A: I think they touch on the God's teeth mainly thing that I have not digested completely. A lot of people be like, I would run God's teeth over impossible landscapes. [00:08:03] Speaker B: But really, even though the content in that is well known to be very problematic, I heard, in terms of like, lines and veils and that kind of thing. Right. Yeah. For those of us who are old pieces of leather and that stuff doesn't bother. It's great. It's not great for everybody. [00:08:18] Speaker A: Right, Right. So anyways, that is the Delta Green saga of Sean. I have not. We played Top Secret last week with Jason. So whether that drops prior to this episode or later, Jason Connerly of Nerds RPG variety podcast ran that for us. [00:08:37] Speaker B: Yes. Thank you so, so much, Jason. Like, that was. It was great to have somebody who knew the rules better than either you or I did. Kind of, you know, just at a. At a cold read, your experience having been decades ago, it was really cool to have somebody who had it at their fingertips. You know, run the game was good. Yeah. [00:08:54] Speaker A: And just so everybody's aware, Jason was not kind of pegged to do that originally. We had somebody else that was lined up. Couldn't make that happen. Jason stepped in and said, hey, he. [00:09:06] Speaker B: Filled in last minute for you guys. [00:09:07] Speaker A: And so as much as we would, you know, as much prep as he had at the time to make that happen, you know, he stepped up and did it for us. So very much appreciated. I know that I probably wouldn't have been able to do that and pull it off. [00:09:24] Speaker B: No, he did a great job. And we had, you know, we try to keep the vignettes reasonably short, between one and two hours, I think, is what we're maybe around two hours, what we're probably going to aim for. And we went a little bit long with Jason, but he took up like a full, I think, convention mod style module, four hour length, condensed it down. We had. We had fun. It was good. It was good. We may break down some of the, like, what we learned about what we still do and don't like about. About that system in a future episode. We're not going to get into that right now. Right. [00:09:54] Speaker A: Well, and even to more. More credit to Jason, like, we weren't the most enthusiastic about the game. [00:10:05] Speaker B: That's not true. I definitely wanted to play it. [00:10:08] Speaker A: Yes, we wanted to play it. But if somebody were to listen to our show and then go, you know, I could run it for them and prove them, you know, that it decent game. Sure. But there's also the. Well, I'm not running for those two jokers because they. [00:10:23] Speaker B: Yes, because they're critical of it. [00:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Because every time I bring up something, they're just gonna laugh and have a good chuckle and. [00:10:30] Speaker B: And I think we were pretty respectful. [00:10:31] Speaker A: In that I would say we were absolutely. [00:10:34] Speaker B: I played the game that was in front of me, man. It's a mantra of mine, like, play the game that's on the table. Use the rules that are there if you can. Unless you go, house rules. And he. At the end of that, I remember him saying, I hearing. And I probably didn't change your mind, did I? And I'm like, nope, not at all. But I still had fun, you know, so, you know, we'll. We'll get it. We'll break that down maybe a little bit later when the vignettes start dropping for fans. Sean's been hard at work. He does all the work on this stuff, adding some kind of special features to the. At least the James Bond one so far, which means it takes a little bit. A little bit longer to edit. So I think we should see one of those soon, though. The Bond one dropping soon. [00:11:10] Speaker A: James Bond is edited. So we recorded the. We recorded the video. And what I wanted to do was Harrigan references some rules and charts, and then what's my score on my character sheet? And I actually take screenshots of what he's actually referencing. So if it's. If it's wrong, I could just go, like, I could put it. Edit over the text and go. I don't know what he's talking about here. [00:11:33] Speaker B: Right. Oh, it's probably a lot of those. [00:11:35] Speaker A: Well, no, it's. Surprisingly. I was like, it's almost funny when you're explaining it, and it's like, literally, like, says it right across the page in text. So I've taken screenshots of those and I've put them in where the video is, like, bringing down the row, highlighting the row. Here's the number that we're coming up with and how. And taking out some like. Well, hold on a second. I gotta look this up, right? Taking that out, crunching it a little bit. And so when I do the audio, I'm extracting that. But I would also want to put in those physical. [00:12:10] Speaker A: Images, and I could do that in a podcast. I could actually put them in as chapter markers without actually having it be a chapter. I could just have the. [00:12:18] Speaker B: Oh, like an image comes up right at the. [00:12:21] Speaker A: At a specific time stamp. [00:12:23] Speaker B: Again, though, that's. That's a lot of editing. [00:12:25] Speaker A: Creates a little overhead. But I just have to make note of where those would appear and put them in appropriately. And it's. It's tedious, but not. [00:12:36] Speaker B: Well, thank you for doing that. I think it's. I'm looking forward to it. I Haven't seen the first one yet. And we have top secret in the can as Sean is suggesting. So we have the ability to do another one or just release it. More like a. Just a regular podcast, right? Like a. It'll be two. Two and a half hours long, I think. [00:12:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That was really fun. Thank you again, Jason. [00:12:57] Speaker A: Yes, thanks, Jason. We'll be tapping you for future episodes by the way. Actual place. Don't know. Agent Provocateur. That's all right. We'll give you a few minutes. I'll send you a book. [00:13:10] Speaker B: I also am running Delta Green but it's play by post over on gamers plane and it's a. A solo operation. So one player, one gm. I'm the GM and I think I've talked on this show and other places a lot about how I like the smaller scope Delta Green stuff and I'm doing that. Finally. I'm like running. I'm focusing on shotgun scenarios that are from the Fairfield Project from that website which I think we've linked to before. Sean, if we haven't, maybe we can drop that in the show notes. I'm sure you have already. [00:13:38] Speaker A: I don't know if we've actually linked to the Fairfield Project. I don't think we have. [00:13:42] Speaker B: Maybe we should. [00:13:43] Speaker A: We will in this episode down below. Check it out. [00:13:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the. The Fairfield Project is a fan community that has deep connections back to the current publishers of Delta Green, Arc Dream to the tune of when they run a contest. The Arc Dream guys will actually award product to the people who win the contest at the Fairfield Project. And many, many of the adventures that have now been published by Arc Dream started off as shotgun scenarios including Last Things Last, the relatively famous starter one with you know that comes in the. The little quick. The free quick start. Right. [00:14:21] Speaker B: That is from the first year of the shotgun scenarios. So what a shotgun scenario is for those who don't know. I think we may have touched on this already. So apologies if we have. These are short and sharp 1500 word essays, adventure outlines, module or what are called operations or operas in the Delta Green landscape. These are short operas that introduce like what's going on? Who are the. Who are. You know, who are the players? What's the timeline? What happens if the players do or don't do these things. But over 1500 words, you're only getting a few pages worth of text down. They've collected hundreds of these by now by having an annual contest that runs through December 15th of this year. So by our date right Now, Sean, it's the 30th of November. People have about two weeks to get these in. I've got two ideas. I'm hoping to submit one of them, but I got to find the time to write them up. So anyway, long. Long story short, I find I love these little. These little sort of slice. They're shorter, they're sharper, they're. You know, I'll put it this way. I struggle with running adventures like Masks of Nyrlathotep and the bigger. The. All the Pathfinder adventure. Path stuff just isn't for me. Even though I'm not a Pathfinder guy, I can tell the books are just too big. The big five E adventures and even impossible landscapes like, I Don't love the Man. I gotta keep. I gotta consume all this, keep it in my headspace, remember. [00:15:45] Speaker B: Which character comes in when and like all that stuff, which can be brilliant. But I just. As a preference, I like leaner stuff that I add to and make it more organically my own. So, for example, for people who are fans of Rob Schwalb's adventures for both Shadow of a Demon Lord and then his newer game, I think it's Shadow of the Weird Wizard. Those adventures tend to be between like four and six pages and there's like really good ideas in them that you can easily build on. And the shotgun scenarios strike me as exactly the same way. So I'm running one right now with this one, this, this player dirigible who I mentioned on the show before. And basically I'm taking a lightweight framework and I'm building out a bunch of stuff that I think would be, you know, what else would be cool in this scene or what else could you do with it? So it gives the person who likes to build up their adventures from us, from a skeleton, it gives them all kinds of ways to do that. I said I was going to be short and I lied through my teeth. So I'm also running Delta Green and loving it, loving it already. We're starting to, you know, we're in the briefing right now in the play by post game. It's a very short kind of thing where it's like after the briefing, like go to the car with your go bag and get to this place, which is three and a half hours away, and look for this person. They're missing. They're a friendly. We want to find out what the hell's going on. And it's that simple of a setup to kind of get going. So it's pretty. It's pretty cool. Also still running the COVID ops game, which has pretty decent pace at this point. The players all seem pretty interested and pretty on board with what we're doing. And they're still, still in Prague kind of thing. So that's been fun. I've been listening again to a couple of restless classified podcasts, some really cool ones around CIA agents in Moscow in the 80s and what that environment was like, because the KBG knew who the CIA case handlers were and were why. I'll just say this, Sean. I'll, I'll, I have. I've only listened to the first half of these. Of a two parter, but there's a situation. One of the stories the two hosts tell is a case handler who knows he's watched at every minute of his time in, in Moscow, right. He goes for, he starts going for a run. He adopts this like, I need to get, get in better shape. I need, you know, to run, to clear my head kind of thing. The KB KGB team who watches him doesn't like that. And they start stealing his shoes so he can't go for a run. [00:17:58] Speaker A: I read that one. I have listened to that one. Yes. [00:18:01] Speaker B: It's so, it's so good. So this happens a couple of times to him because what they're thinking he's doing is he's going for a run to lose the tail and he's meeting with somebody who's doing a dead drop. He's doing something is what they're, what they're mad about. And at one point they steal his shoes for like the second or third time he's in his apartment, he looks at the ceiling and says, look, I'm just trying to get in shape. I am just, I need a, you know, for my mental health, I need to run. This is the route I'm taking. You know, please just allow me to do this. And the next day his shoes were returned in his apartment. So I remember, like, that was, that is insane. [00:18:37] Speaker A: I think that was the series where they were one of the, like the radar tech guy. [00:18:43] Speaker B: Correct, correct. The Russian, the Russian radar engineers wanted to defect. And he tried. And not just defect, but you like give them information to take down the Soviet Union because he hated, he hated where he lived. Yeah. Without going way into it is a fantastic, it's a two part episode is pretty fantastic, frankly. And then the big thing that I, that I did, that I mentioned, I think last time maybe two weeks ago now, I had a friend who recommended Three Days of the Condor was like, you got to watch, you know, if you're interested in espionage these days and watching spy flicks and whatnot, check out that movie. It's a. It's an all time classic kind of thing. Another friend of mine is like one of his favorite movies. So I'm like, all right, I've never seen this movie. I'll watch it. So I did. Have you seen this movie Show? [00:19:26] Speaker A: Oh, dude, it's been so long. That's Robert Redford, right? [00:19:30] Speaker B: That is Robert Redford. We haven't talked about that. [00:19:31] Speaker A: It's been a while. I know that he was going into an office and there was a lot of typewriters. [00:19:38] Speaker B: That's a great takeaway from that film. I will sum it up and simply say, you know, for those who have an interest in certainly in old school espionage or a sort of 60s, 70s, this is like mid-70s that the movie was made, maybe even late 70s, 77 or something like that. I forget. I can go, we can go look for the show notes if you want. But it's a very entertaining watch. It is very much of its time. And for those who don't know me very well, I struggle with some of the filmmaking and directorial choices and styles that existed in the 60s and 70s sometimes. So in other words, when you get into that pre Sopranos, pre the Wire kind of level of direction of things, they're more play like. So there's a lot of like someone comes into the room, it's like, I'm gonna come into the room and deliver my line and everyone else in the room is waiting for them to say that very play like. And then the other person goes, I'm glad I waited for you to speak so that we could have a clear conversation. And now it's your turn to talk. Oh, is it now? Right, there's this like kind of artificial back and forth. It's got some of that going on a little bit. So there's some of its time stuff that grates on me when I watch some older movies, not every older movie, but some older movies just have a. They've just got a thing that I'm watching. I just got kind of a frown on my face when I'm watching it. Like this dialogue sucks. The. The action is frankly terrible. Like the fist fights and whatnot. Like Star Trek is better from the late 60s is better than this movie. Yes. With the two handed Kirk ax below, which is what Sean's pantomiming right now. [00:21:14] Speaker B: So there is. I'll just say I have mixed feelings about it. There is some incredibly cool gunplay Stuff where they have these silenced. The assassins in the movie have these silenced Mac Tens, which are just super cool. And the place that you mentioned, which is a branch office of the CIA in New York City with all the typewriters, this is a group of people who. This is pretty funny. They're supposed to be reading, quote, unquote, every book ever published. They're reading them all, I think, meaning the ones that are new that are coming out onto the market because they're looking for people communicating with each other in clandestine ways. So they're looking for codes, patterns, which is pretty cool. So this is collection of kind of like nerds who are in the office going through all these materials. And Robert Redford's character is one of those. One of those characters. And without, you know, I guess I'll. I will warn a little bit there's some spoilers here, but I'm not going to reveal everything. But basically there's a hit that's put on the whole office and everyone is killed except for Redford, who is like, he slipped out the back because he has his own way of sort of doing things and he's going to get everybody lunch. So he's just through. He's fortuitous and that he just isn't present when the hit happens. Right. So it just. It kind of goes on from there. There's some. There's some really stuff that I really like. Like there's clearly filmed on location in New York city in the 70s, and the city looks great. Like, the city looks incredibly grimy, dirty. For those who remember or just remember pictures of the city, even if you didn't live there back in the 70s and 80s before it really got cleaned up, it has that like the traffic, the smog, the trash on the streets, the homeless, like it's. It is kind of like a really great thumbnail of what 70s Big American cities were like. So it has that going for it. There's some really weird stuff around male female relationships, like Faye Dunaway's character that makes some pretty strange choices in the movie, you know, that are just. They don't seem to be written. Some of the female characters are not written all that well. I guess what I would say again, sort of of its time kind of thing. Right. I will tell you this, Sean. I think you know this. You know, I'm. I'm about as hetero as they come. But Robert Redford is so hot in this movie. Yeah, I think I do. Yep. [00:23:28] Speaker A: Dude is. [00:23:29] Speaker B: Dude is so hot. [00:23:31] Speaker A: 1975, it came out. But I do agree with Red. Like Redford looks top notch. Yeah. [00:23:38] Speaker B: Yep. Dude is so good looking. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And he's there. There is some pretty cool 70s spycraft in it. So at one point he is, shoot, he's like former like communication specialist when he was in the military before he mustered out and went to work for the CIA. Right. And there's a point where he wants to like intercept a phone call and he goes to a hotel where it's being made. He patches in with a manual patch kit to the switchboard, captures some ingoing outgoing phone calls. I'm not going to remember every detail here, but in the end he captures the dial tone that someone uses the. When you press the number, the number pad. And he has a computer in 1975, but he can call it Langley. And he calls the computer because the analysts have access to it to do, you know, to track down phone numbers and that kind of thing. And he plays the tones and it tells them the number. It's. It's really pretty cool. So he goes through this whole way of trying to find out who was called by this certain person after he called them. It's, you know, the plots, the plot is cool. I won't ruin that part. The plot is cool. It's not explained all that well until kind of the very end. So there's a lot of like, why was the hit in place? Who's after him? And is it the company? Is it the CIA who's trying to kill them? Is there a schism inside the CIA? So there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on. So in the end, you know, it's, it's worth watching and if you are not bothered by some of the 70s isms and some, you know, some of the clunk that's in older movies, you'll probably like it even more than I did. But I. Thumbs up I guess is what I would say. But I did not love it. But I liked it. [00:25:09] Speaker A: Not a surprise. [00:25:11] Speaker B: Yeah. All right, that's I think all I had going on. And you know what? We've taken some time here on our, our own personal like our worlds. Which is okay because what are we, what are we doing this week in terms of like a show topic? [00:25:26] Speaker A: We're going to feel a couple voicemails and a few write ins. Nothing too crazy. [00:25:30] Speaker B: Q and A show. Yeah, yeah, we got, we got several calls or one call, several emails and we knew we had some meaty stuff to talk about that we were both doing. In our own like Delta Green and Day of the Condor kind of, kind of lives. So we'll, we'll round out the episode with some Q A. [00:25:46] Speaker A: Right before we do, we have sit rep. [00:25:52] Speaker A: Give me the sit rep. So we'll put in the Fairfield Project and I'll link to that and, and some of the shotgun scenarios if you're interested. If you are in the Delta Green know you probably you may be already aware of many of these. It's ones that I stay away from because they're so short and I wouldn't know what I'm doing where Harrigan loves because they're so short and he would feel like he knows what he's doing. [00:26:14] Speaker B: So yeah, you know what, let me tack on one thing because there's a quirk about the Fairfield Project site. Yes, the Delta, the shotgun scenarios are not that easy to find. Like there's no menu item that says shotgun scenarios. You have to look in one and there's like three different menus on the site. It's kind of old school. I'm not in a good, good way necessarily. But once you find them, there's something to the effect of like, I think it's like scenarios and of the scenarios it lists a bunch of arc dream stuff, some longer fan made stuff. And then one of those is the shotguns. And then there's a way to get to the shotgun page which I just bookmark. But I wish there was a way. When you arrived at the Fairfield Project, just click a button like let me see the shotgun scenarios. And there's not. It's a bummer. [00:26:58] Speaker A: We'll hunt it down for you. [00:27:00] Speaker B: We will. I dropped the next one in. You want me to cover that? [00:27:03] Speaker A: Please. [00:27:04] Speaker B: We've talked a couple times about different like sort of documentary style shows that we have seen in different places. And I ran across one and I've watched I think three episodes so far and it's actually pretty good. And this one is called Spycraft and it's on Netflix and it, it focuses on the technology of the tradecraft. So there's a lot of like the use of satellites, the use of listening devices throughout the, you know, really from, from the Cold War on. And remember when I went on about recently about the typewriter, the IBM typewriter sort of scam that the Russians had running in, in Russia, they covered that in the series. So it's, I'm liking it so far. Some of the Netflix stuff is a little, little either a little lightweight or a little, I don't know, they don't give it much, much research, I think. This is not like that. This is. These are pretty cool episodes. I think it's a limited series. I think there's only one season. It's like maybe eight or 10 episodes, something like that. So I'm three in. It's so far it seems like it's worth watching. So for anybody who wants to get a little more on the tech side of things and how it's evolved through time, it's pretty cool series. [00:28:06] Speaker A: I don't know if I started that one. I don't think I got too far. Is it the one where it talks about, like, the one vault with every weapon made? [00:28:15] Speaker B: I haven't gotten to that yet. [00:28:16] Speaker A: Maybe that's not. Maybe it's either part of the series or I'm thinking of a different one. You just haven't gotten to it. I don't know. [00:28:21] Speaker B: But now I'm trying to remember. The episodes I've seen involve sort of. [00:28:27] Speaker B: Surveillance as a thing. So it goes all the way from, like, you know, the parabolic microphones and the, you know, the. Oh, the Russians. Oh, man, it's. It's. You know what? It's worth watching. When the Russians built a new embassy, a new building for the new u. S. Embassy in Moscow, they wired every freaking room with like, it's. It's really cool. And of course, the CIA does the same thing, but for Russian embassies and whatnot. But they get into really cool detail about, like, the construction of the buildings and what the opposing force was doing because they knew what had been wired. So it's really. It's really kind of like there's lots of tradecraft in it. And so that's one episode. There's another episode that's pretty great that's around sex and espionage and basically the whole honey pot, honey trap sort of angle and how, you know, how that goes back millennia, basically. [00:29:15] Speaker A: There's a crash of them in the 80s, though. They were seducing Marines. I remember eight. [00:29:20] Speaker B: Well, and. And more recently than that, there's these Russian. What are they called? Illegals. So they are not. They're not like part of the embassy. They're not a foreign national. They are in the foreign country, but they still have connections back to the Russian security services. Now it's. These are pretty cool episodes. They get into a lot of that. They're pretty good. [00:29:41] Speaker A: Have to revisit or visit, I guess, depending on if. [00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been impressed so far. It's been good. [00:29:49] Speaker A: Very cool. I'll have to put it on the To Watch list for sure. All right, let's get into encrypted comms. Sir, we have an incoming encrypted transmission. Okay, should we start with the written word or should we just start with the audio? [00:30:06] Speaker B: Surprise me. [00:30:06] Speaker A: Okay. [00:30:09] Speaker C: Sean and Harrigan, thanks for the mention in the Go Bag episode on Agent Provocateur and the livestream on the RPG Sean channel afterward in regard to the notion of premature imagination and any premature narration which comes afterward. Unlike a rules or adjudication error which negatively impacts fun, this is a potential issue which arises as a quality of how we play, and as such, it's something that only matters when it matters. I think that's. That's very true, but it matters a lot. In other words, there are some folks for whom this will never be an issue, and maybe they find it difficult to care, but they're likely to play with some folks for whom it's a really fun, draining big deal, ranging from just making any action encounter annoying to taking them right out of the reason why they want to play at all. It's a. It's a simple but subtle thing that can easily go unrecognized, and, as our own discussions in Sean's livestream have shown, can be hard to describe. So for me, when how we play decreases the satisfaction of the people in the group that we're playing with, I find that's a legitimate problem that I, as a member of that group, should try and understand and care about, even if it's a small thing or a preference thing, or tied to things that are less tangible than mistakes with the rules. So in the case of premature imagination, the result of something which should be resolved by the system or the ruling of the game master is instead simply assumed or declared by one or more players. And play continues as if the use of the system or the ruling of the GM had already been done, unless someone exerts themselves or interrupts to address and undo it. So it has that social aspect to it. It's an assumption of an outcome before any result or qualities have actually been determined in play in the way that the group expects them to be determined. So this error starts with prematurely imagining that outcome as having been established. One of the common examples that's easy to start with is I blow his head off. Rather than I shoot at him. [00:32:45] Speaker B: It. [00:32:46] Speaker C: Can become the group's problem. When that premature imagination then builds into a description that we all hear. [00:32:54] Speaker C: That assumption takes hold. There's lots of excitement of I blow his head off. But of course we know that the dice decide whether or not that actually happened. [00:33:05] Speaker C: So depending on who it bothers, you have annoyance at poor impulse control, or the risk of retcons, or the realization that there's now going to be a long out of character conversation to explain the system and the procedure again and blah blah blah. Or there will simply be disappointment when the system or the GM interjects with an opposing outcome like there's no upside when it's a problem. One of the more common reaction to this is when the player prematurely imagines success for themselves, especially in a heated moment with high stakes, and then must face the dice or deal with the actual framing of that conflict. But almost as common is where reasonable action is imagined, but as a completed string, regardless of the challenges for each step. This is really common in spy games such as I grab the MacGuffin off the table, draw my Walther PPK, put it between my teeth, grab the rope and leap out the window. Wow, what a cool moment. Until you start thinking of, well, there's the initiative order, there's a number of actions you can take, there's other characters in the room, each with their own actions, the rolls for dodging people trying to stop you from getting to the MacGuffin, people from stopping you to getting to the window, and of course the role to safely swing out that window, and so on and so forth. [00:34:23] Speaker B: It's. [00:34:24] Speaker C: It's an era of enthusiasm, of jumping the gun, of ignoring the culture and style of play and setting yourself up for disappointment. And it can kill any special atmospheres that you might like to go for, like horror or high action. And so it strikes me that it has some value to keep in mind. Anyway, thanks for listening. [00:34:51] Speaker A: Thanks, Anthony. That's Anthony Ruinslinger, if you listen to him. Casting Shadows is his podcast. He's joined me on the or the chat room. [00:35:05] Speaker A: On my live Saturday morning shows and has been. I've been on his show as well, but he wanted to clear that up after we mentioned it in a prior episode about premature imagination. I even brought it up on a live stream as part of it, as a topic. [00:35:24] Speaker A: It's an interesting thing because I see what he's talking about. I mean, I did it in the Bond thing. Like this is what I'm going to do. And I've gone and gone and gone, and Harrigan's like, well, hold on a second. Let's, let's first, you know, you got these goons. [00:35:43] Speaker A: Tackle the goons, etc. [00:35:46] Speaker B: But are we going to hear some of this when we do the Vignette. [00:35:49] Speaker A: I think we will. I think we could pick out certain things. You know, part of me is like, how much is the game get in the way if you are really going to run the game? Like, like, you know, like my buddy Jeff is that guy. I'm gonna reach over, grab this, swing across, you know, cap him in the knee, slide across the floor before the door shuts down, yada, yada yada. And then I'm the. Hold on, timeout. Let's determine initiative first, Jeff, to Anthony's point, but at some times, I don't know if that's a good thing. Just, well, hold on, timeout. I mean, yes, we got to roll the initiative, play by the rules, but I don't know, it's also dependent upon what game you're playing and how that is facilitated, I guess. I don't know. [00:36:45] Speaker B: I'm trying to remember the conversation we had on your Sunday Saturday stream that Anthony's talking about. Because we did. You. You dedicated kind of a whole hour to it. Right. [00:36:56] Speaker B: This was like two weeks ago. I'm trying to remember the. Some of the, some of the specific takeaways and go, go look at it maybe. [00:37:03] Speaker B: I don't know. This is this one. [00:37:07] Speaker B: One of the reasons why I think Anthony is. Has called in and been a little more explicit with what he's talking about is that, you know, we struggle with some, some offhand comments that were made. I think Peter was the one who brought it up originally. A couple weeks ago we looked at some text that that Rune Slinger had put on his. His blog a while ago and kind of talked through. You know, I think I probably flippantly said something like I don't really see it as much of an issue in my own games kind of thing. Which is probably one of the reasons why he's talking about here that, you know, it is for some people, it isn't for others. It seems so system and group dependent. Yeah. I don't know how you would ever establish some like rules of the road or best practice without it being decided by the group for the game. Knowing whether or not you had to roll initiative, how many at what the action economy looks like, how cinematic is it versus how little agency do you have if it's a horror game, like all those, all those things matter deeply. I certainly see what you're talking about, Anthony, that like if someone is. Somebody is like having a bad time at the table because of this kind of thing going on. I absolutely think it should be addressed, raised, discussed and, and fixed right like figure out how to with the system you're playing. How can we avoid that? I do think to what you're saying about Jeff Sean, like don't do that. Don't run your actions steamroller over the scene and everybody else who's present. In fact, you know where this can be really bad is in play by post games where you're kind of all posting in a vacuum. The scene has been set by the gm. Along comes somebody. I've seen this to horrific end in play by Powered by the Apocalypse Games because you know, there's lots of, lots of agency and if you're. There's no initiative. So if one person's successful the moves can kind of keep flowing. So I've seen people sort of seize the spotlight and just keep on going right to the detriment of locking everybody else out of the action. Now that means the GM is not doing their job, the MC is not doing their job of moving the spotlight around and whatnot. But it does happen. And that's related to this, I think, which is this whole idea of. I can picture these things. There's no rules for them. For example, like in, you know, Power by the Apocalypse Games and many games there's no rules to like cross the table and pick the thing up off the table unless somebody is competing with you or the building's falling down or whatever. Right. That's where you get into some mechanics around making a save or some sort of opposed role or whatever. Right. I do think it's on the. It's on the comes back to being on the GM to prevent those things from happening in a way that is harming somebody's play experience kind of thing. Right. You also might get to a point where the way that a certain game plays out is not going to be to somebody's liking. Like the way the mechanics support the hold up. We have to do this, this and this first mechanically. Like I think I mentioned before a couple of times, fate has the. When you roll the dice, there's a negotiation, right. There's a. Ooh, look at my result. Let me see what, what else I can do. I'll spend a fate point. I'll invoke this aspect. Might be a room aspect, might be an aspect on the vil, an aspect on your character. But you're paying a fate point and you're increasing your die roll by two. You're doing that in the middle of your narration. So the narration starts with well, I draw my ray gun and I fire at him. And the way that Fate describes it is with. With an ellipsis, with a dot, dot, dot. I fire my gun. You roll with ice. You negotiate the outcome, and when you end up with the, you know, the, the success, you then say, or gm or you then say, you get him right in the chest, he's disintegrated kind of thing. But you don't do that last bit, the shot in the head, until you've resolved it with the dice. There are other mechanics, Sean. We're playing right now Deathmatch island and the Agon Games. You roll the dice first and then you have to piece together what does it mean so you don't prematurely narrate anything. [00:40:54] Speaker A: Nothing. Yeah. [00:40:56] Speaker B: You know what? You almost adopt a old school DND style of declare your action before we get into the phases of how it's going to run. Like, what are you doing? I plan to move and attack. I plan to fire my bow twice at the back line of their archers. Deathmatch island and Aegon. Pick up from that a little bit. Like, what are you trying to do overall here? Okay, cool. Build your dice pool, roll your dice now narrate. And, and you know, the games. Go, go. They slew back and forth from that very hard line. Like, narrate everything afterwards to what Anthony's talking about and what you're saying that Jeff does where people narrate too much. I still struggle with encapsulating it in a meaningful way that I could talk about it with my group. It's more like when you, you know, when you see it and address it when you see it. But having my blabber about all that. Anything else occur to you that we need to address here? [00:41:49] Speaker A: No, I think it's going to be dependent upon the table and the situation I get sometimes. I think the enthusiasm gets to a point where it can roll into that and the GM can inject. And I think it's part of role playing games. [00:42:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's related as well to the whole deflation that can come from. It's a critical moment. There's a. Maybe not even a long description, but an awesome description of how meaningful this is to the character. Right. Like, this is what I've been waiting for the whole freaking campaign for. And they, they, they fumble, they roll a three, they roll a 99, whatever. Right. It's just a wet fart moment. I see that as more deflating and more often, especially in D20 and percentile games and frankly in YZE games too, where the dipole can turn on you. Right. And and that's where all these games that lack metacurrency, they don't. You don't have nothing to say about it, right? You just, you just look dumb now. Now I do think this is where it's down to the table. I'm going to retract my last statement. It's down to the table in the GM to make sure you're not looking, you're not looking dumb. Unless it's a comedic game, there's a reason why the character failed in this moment. But you can make it so that it fits with the narrative and even with the characters like motivations and drive. Like what led them to this moment, the failure can still be meaningful and in many cases it can actually still be success if you want it to be. And the GM can extract a heinous toll on the character to be successful. It's the. This, that topic, Sean, is what I'm going to return to in my own in Harrigan's Hearth. I mentioned on your stream recently actually this whole idea of pulling some story games, some fate empowered by the apocalypse approaches out of those games. Because I don't like those games as much as I like trad games these days. I like a more straight ahead experience that appeals to more people. But I like being able to drop in that methodology for what does failure mean when you had this moment? What can you do with it? I think you can pull out some really cool mechanics and approaches from the the more story game side of the industry and drop them on top of Call of Cthulhu, on top of D D on top of all those games and get some really cool outcomes. I'm gonna write that up. [00:44:06] Speaker A: Looking forward to it. [00:44:09] Speaker B: Cool. All right, what else do we got in the mailbag? [00:44:12] Speaker A: Got one more audio if you will. [00:44:16] Speaker B: All right. [00:44:18] Speaker D: Hey fellas, it's Laramie. First time calling in, so I thought I'd hit a couple quick notes. While I'm not the world's biggest espionage gaming fan, as you guys have met me, I'm roughly as covert as James Bond driving a tank through Main Street. However, a couple little quick notes. One regarding notes at a con game. I'm also a fan of pulling people away from table. I had a game two, three years ago at Game Hole and I don't remember what was there off top of my head. I want to say Victor, Shannon, a couple of the fellows no just pull people off the table and half of them were decoys. It was me pulling somebody off the table going hey, we're just doing this so People think we're talking. So let's talk for a minute. And we're not going to do anything. We're just going to look at each other and you good. Okay, let's go back to the table. That works great. And you can do that. You know, I kind of did that in my home game. My Harrigan's been in my basement. There's a room adjacent to where my gaming table is and that's, hey, let's go grab a beer because that's where the cake fridge is. So back to this last episode. Now, in my VTE game, we have a separate channel that we can go over to that's called the keg fridge. And that's just a private channel for me and one of the players to go talk in. And it works out great. You're talking about specificity of weapons. I'm getting into weird frontiers a little bit. And the table I will be using is one half of a page for all firearms. If you're Harrigan, there's also a 20 page appendix that gets into all the nuances of all the firearms that I do not care about. But Harrigan, buddy, it's there for you and I'm happy for you. [00:45:49] Speaker D: And last but not least, I would like to also point out when you guys were discussing. [00:45:55] Speaker D: Harrigan, trying to deduce where people are from. If you're going to discuss St. John's I recommend you go out and look at the QMJHL's fantastic St. John's Sea Dogs logo. It is a fantastic sweater. It's a beauty. And we'll see you guys next time. [00:46:10] Speaker B: Cheers. [00:46:12] Speaker B: Thank you, Laramie. [00:46:15] Speaker B: Man, that guy. So Sean and I are both smiling here. We both know Laramie personally. In fact, I wouldn't know Laramie without you, Sean, without your former podcast and the community and all that sort of stuff. And Laramie, I'll out him, out him a little bit. He lives in, in Iowa and I have business in Iowa from time to time. So a couple times a year, a couple, three times a year, I try to swing by where he lives and we get, we get a beer, we get breakfast, something like that. He works in late shifts, so he's not always, doesn't always have the easiest schedule, but sometimes we'll, you know, we'll hook up when I'm going back to the airport and we'll, we'll shoot the bull for a while. He's a, he's a great guy. Thank you, Laramie, for the, you know, the, the gun nuts up. I have that game on my shelf behind me, I think. So I should go, I should go dig in. Old west games can have some of the greatest gun tables of all, quite frankly. It's good stuff. I also will mention Sean, he threw out there at the end the whole, the whole St. John's thing and the Sea Dogs or whatever. Like he's. You're going to have an audience of about two people that understand what he's talking about. That is the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League in Canada. The Canadian system is very different from the US System in terms of where the hockey players, how they're brought up, how they, you know, what their opportunities are. It's nowhere near as much of a collegiate system. It's much more of a junior hockey kind of thing. All across the country there's these different leagues that young men play in before they go to the NHL or try to get to the NHL kind of thing. It's a, it's an on ramp to the AHL and then the NHL and that of kind kind of thing. So way to, way to bring in some really esoteric stuff. Laramie Love that. What do you think, Sean, if his pulling people away from the table without, without needing to. [00:47:50] Speaker A: I mean, I think it's, it's good. I'll probably end up having to do that when I run my in person espionage Cold War game. I may bring in details though, like filler details that are maybe not important. Like they're not like, hey, this is. Now you got to start scheming. Or this is kind of what you realize, but still giving them info. To think that there is still a purpose in getting them off the table. Although I have had gay masters do that. Like, okay, we're just gonna stand here and talk for a second to make it look like we're talking. And then I want you to go back and just laugh. I mean there's something to be said about that, but. [00:48:34] Speaker A: Sometimes you could, you could give the player something confusing like, okay, this is what happens. My fear is that whatever. If I did come up with something I didn't, I don't want them to internalize it too much if it's really irrelevant. [00:48:49] Speaker A: But it does help with the chemistry of the table. I think when you, especially with this covert action game, it's going to be Cold War specifically, it's going to be quite a nuance in how that rolls. [00:49:05] Speaker B: Yeah. It strikes me as, again, something where the kind of the vibe of the table and the, and the game you're playing matters a lot. Like I can easily See, if you're playing some sort of, you know, if there's a PvP element, some sort of player, player versus player, or competitive element, you'll. You'll want to stir the pot, right? If you're playing Paranoia, if you're playing the cinematic version of Alien, where people have these agendas that change throughout the course of the game, pulling them aside, even if you don't have anything meaningful to say, will make people suspicious and just kind of is good, you know, but there's other games where it's just. I don't see it being a thing, you know, just. There's no need to do it. I would also say that I think is an extended gang of people he plays with pretty consistently, so they know each other pretty well. They're a gaming group that's kind of goes way back kind of thing. So they. There's probably a lot of, like, humor and a lot of just, you know, camaraderie in those moments, as opposed to doing this with a bunch of strangers where you're like, hey, I just wanted to pull you aside and look at you awkwardly for a bit. Okay, now we're good. Let's go back. They're gonna be like, you're a freak. What is. What is with you? [00:50:06] Speaker A: Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much, yep. [00:50:10] Speaker B: Thank you for. For calling Laramie. Not really the first time you've called, but, you know, we'll let that slide. [00:50:17] Speaker A: Right. [00:50:19] Speaker B: For those that know. They know. [00:50:21] Speaker A: They know. We brought it up here. Dirty bugger. [00:50:25] Speaker B: Okay, good. Yeah, good, good. [00:50:26] Speaker A: We did it. We did it. After game Hookah. I think we brought it up in the beginning where I was outing him as Mudskipper. [00:50:31] Speaker B: Oh, that's right. That's right. [00:50:34] Speaker A: You want to tackle. Tackle Dan's first one. [00:50:39] Speaker B: Yeah, let me. Let me do Dan's. So Dan, also known as Dependable Skeleton, by the way, if you're on various social medias, I'm not sure how widely he uses that, but Dan says just listen to your podcast on teasers and cold opens. So just recently, and I wanted to give you my experiences, I ran a James Bond 007 campaign off and on during the 90s and eventually came up with this teaser mechanic. Players got to choose who was the hero character of the teaser who used his PC for the session. So the. The hero who became the PC. Okay. [00:51:14] Speaker B: All others, I'm with you. There's only One of the PCs was in the teaser. All others got to run. The villains, thugs, bystander, NPCs. Hero points were earned as normal for the hero. But the villain characters got to earn hero points for their PCs and they would get to use those later in the adventure. One additional mechanic was that the player was was the players running. The villains could only earn hero points at ease factor two or below. I started at one, but no one would try at that level. This had two reasons. One, they would fail much more spectacularly than otherwise, which plays into the Bond cinematic narrative. Two, they'd get used to trying things that they were that they perceived to be harder or downright impossible without penalty. It's the villains and the thugs dying, not their PCs. So you see what he's angling for here is he's getting them to try some higher risk stuff because they're not risking their own PCs. Right? Kind of cool. Definitely looking forward to Sean's cheat sheet on the subject. Dan Warby thank you, Dan. We always appreciate, you know, you've been, I think, a consistent listener and writer in of. Of good stuff that we can use. I think we got one more coming up from you here, but you know what? I think we should maybe do Mirko's next because Mirko, Sean, it is related to this. It's all about these cold openers and teasers. And I think the vibe I think or the takeaway I think people should have is that on top of the things that Sean and I covered a couple of weeks ago when we talked about about them, there's other things you can layer on here that are really neat. Like what Dan's talking about here where you, you know, you have a rotating spotlight for who the PC is in the teaser, but he built in mechanics that everyone else benefits from. Similar to what I was saying before, but it might be like a whole different team that ends up getting like tpk'd aced so you get to see how difficult the villain is kind of thing. This is just a different slant on that. Let's. Let's read Mirkos and then we'll, we'll stitch them together. [00:53:06] Speaker A: Cool. All right. Mirko, AKA Digital Hobbit, writes, listening to the latest episode right now regarding Cold Opens, the GM of the outgunned game I played at Gamehole. COD did this really well, but with a slight twist. We started in media res with a snowmobile chase. No idea why we were there or who the opponents were, but we were in the middle of trying to escape from a bunch of enemies. Also snowmobiles. After that scene, we flashed back. Wait a minute, why not motorcycles? That's all I'm asking. I continue. [00:53:39] Speaker A: Because Snow. [00:53:42] Speaker A: Didn'T stop. For my eyes only. [00:53:47] Speaker B: For your eyes only. [00:53:48] Speaker A: For your eyes only. Sorry. Anyways, after that scene, we flash back to two days earlier and played out the scenes leading up to that chase, including the start of the mission. Once we caught up to the present, we picked up where we had left off, including some grit we had lost during the opening. It worked great. Quickly got us into the action, gave new players a quick taste of the mechanics, and established the cinematic vibe for the adventure. I may borrow this approach in the future. [00:54:18] Speaker B: Love it. What do you think? [00:54:20] Speaker A: I like it. He took it in stride. I don't know if everybody else would be like, why are we here? [00:54:25] Speaker C: Why? [00:54:25] Speaker A: What is going on? I don't understand. Like, you had to put a little faith in the game master that it's all going to come together. Otherwise people will be like, I don't. I don't like how this started. [00:54:39] Speaker B: Right. Like, don't play with those people, maybe. [00:54:42] Speaker A: Right. Well, it's a con game. They signed up. Right. I. I sign up for this. [00:54:47] Speaker B: I think it fits the genre, is what I would say to that for. [00:54:50] Speaker A: Okay. [00:54:51] Speaker B: You know, outgunned is like action adventure. Not quite. Maybe a little more on the action side of our covert action stuff, but certainly. [00:55:00] Speaker B: These kinds of cold, you know, in the middle of things in media res moments are, man, they're very common in this, in this genre. Very common. You know, even to the point where you're trying to. If you're watching a movie or something, you're trying to figure out, like, when what. Because it's not always obvious. When was this. Does that. Is that in the past? Is that. Has that not happened yet? And then, you know, the penny drops. You're like, oh, I get it now. Either because they've established a timeline, or you just, you know, it all fits together in some unique way. You're like, you can kind of start to start to put two and two together. [00:55:32] Speaker A: So here's my only caveat to that opening. When you do the. Hey, here's where we are. We're going to start here. Then we're going to go backwards in time to start with the brief and then move forward to eventually hit that point. I'm not going to die. [00:55:52] Speaker B: Yep, I was about to talk about that. Oh, sorry, there was a. No, no, no. You're. You've already. You, You've. You've. You pulled the cap off what I think is potentially a problem with any of these flashbacky things where you don't make it. [00:56:05] Speaker A: I propose that to you. We are going to run Delta Green. And I said, after Impossible Landscapes or during that era, I said, if you want to play that old character, you're welcome to do that. And you're like, but this is running in the past. And I'm like, well, I said no. Yes. And you were like, no. I said, okay, because of that. [00:56:24] Speaker B: That's a little, little different. [00:56:26] Speaker A: But yes, but it's the same premise. Like, well, my character ended in 2015 and now you're wanting. I'm. You're allowing me to play a character and the year 2000. [00:56:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So what Sean's talking about with my impossible landscape character, there's a scene in the 90s, then there's a scene in the 2010s or something. It kind of becomes modern ish day. Right. And you know, the character clearly survives through that, through all the trials and tribulations and has a, has a fate, has an ending. At the end of. As far as we got in that game, which was not the ending, we, we flamed out a little bit, you know, and then Sean said, I'm going to run a different game. Do you want to play that character again? It's, we're back in the 90s and to me, playing a whole like opera felt like too much to force in. In case something dramatic happened to the character that I wouldn't have been referencing in the, in the earlier game we played in the future, blah, blah, blah. So here's the difference. I think, Sean, what you were suggesting was, was an entire adventure in a very deadly game that can kill your character or make them insane, like easily outgunned. We're in the situation that Mirko's talking about. We're talking about running one or two scenes that you have to survive in a game where you have all kinds of meta currencies that will allow you to keep going and has a fail forward mechanic and all sorts of stuff. So I think though, that's, that's the difference I would paint there. I still think it can be a little funky. Like what, what did he say about the grip that you lost in the first scene? Like did you know, no longer have grit or did that lack of grit return? Maybe when you caught up on the. [00:58:03] Speaker A: Timeline, Once we caught up to the present, we picked up where we had left off, including some grit we had lost during the opening. [00:58:11] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. So if you lose some grit during the opening, when they played that second scene, which was the first scene in the timeline, you, you have perfect grit. You have, you haven't Taken any damage or anything. Right, okay, interesting. I mean, it's still. There's a tiny bit of jank in there where, you know, maybe you shouldn't have been able to make one roll because you would have rolled into that scene. Not in perfect shape or whatever, but in terms of like a high flow. It's not what the game's for. And a high flying action simulating a movie. It works, I think, perfectly well. I do think the grittier games have to be careful. You have to be careful about that. Now we're going to go back in time and there's this presumption that you'll make it and all that kind of stuff. [00:58:51] Speaker A: Right, agreed. Thanks Mirko and Dan for those two things. Write ins. Yeah, I pulled Mirko's off the discord, so he probably isn't even aware we're talking about it. [00:59:05] Speaker B: It's not even really a write in. It's just he was. He was musing idly waxing poetic. Yes, yes. Sorry, Marco, but the point is you can take those cold opens, those teasers in many directions, including in the past, different characters. You're playing the villains. You're playing some scene at the end of the movie which will. You'll reveal later is important. There's all sorts of ways you can go with it. Pretty cool stuff. [00:59:30] Speaker A: Last one is Spez Baby. You want to read? [00:59:34] Speaker B: Let me do that. [00:59:35] Speaker A: It's up to you. Sure. [00:59:36] Speaker B: So this is from Spez Baby, better known as Peter. Hi Beggars. Very interesting episode on Agent Provocateur. I was intrigued because I like T2K Twilight 2000 and I'm currently running a Tales of the Old west game that's a third party YZE Old west game. I was disappointed to hear that the game falls down on organization and editing. Hate to say, but you might have convinced me out of buying it. I kind of hate to hear that because I think the PDFs worth it. I don't know if I would get the hardcover. What do you think, Sean? [01:00:09] Speaker A: I mean, I don't know. To me, I've probably picked up worse. Like I've probably picked up all good formatted books and then the game sucks. [01:00:18] Speaker B: No question. [01:00:19] Speaker A: Right. [01:00:20] Speaker B: So I think there's a good game in Agent Provocateur and it suffers from its. Its editing and it's. I do want to play it and that way we can kind of verify this whole like does the medic. Is the metacurrency enough to prevent the YZE system from t boning you? Feeling like you're a high powered agent or not, I don't think we have the, we don't have the proof in the pudding yet on that. But I hate to, hate to hear that someone's like gonna, you know, just shrug it off and ignore it. [01:00:45] Speaker A: But yeah, I mean it's usually the opposite where we're talking about great games all the time and people are like, oh, I gotta go buy another game. Thanks a lot, Sean. You're breaking my wallet. [01:00:55] Speaker B: You know, fair enough. If you don't. If you only want to collect perfect games is not a perfect game. Right? [01:01:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's. I don't think it's that bad. [01:01:05] Speaker B: I don't regret buying it in the hardcover you have two of them. [01:01:09] Speaker A: Such a fan of it before I got into it. [01:01:12] Speaker B: Put it this way. I bought the hardcover off Amazon so obviously no PDF and then I later bought the PDF. I think it bears cruising. [01:01:19] Speaker A: I think if you're a YZE fan and you are a covert action fan, I think it is the game to buy. [01:01:26] Speaker B: 100%. 100%. At least for now. [01:01:30] Speaker A: For now. [01:01:30] Speaker B: Okay. In. And he continues in terms of previous careers. So he's still talking about Agent Provocateur. Do you think the game would be improved if they shifted those to similar roles used in spycraft such as Faceman, Soldier, etc. Make it more about what the agent does now, not what they did before. [01:01:50] Speaker B: I'm going to stop there and ask Sean that question because I think he knows spy crap better than I do. I know what, I know what Peter's talking about here though. [01:01:56] Speaker A: I do too. And I do get. I don't understand the like well I did this thing before I was doing the espionage thing. I was doing this before I was CIA guy and it, it assumes like these guys are being recruited. I used to be a taxi driver. Let's pull you into the CIA. Right. Where it's just I'm a career agent person. I mean I guess you could incorporate their background into it. Well, in high school I drove cab, you know, right out of college I drove cab while I was in college. So to his point, to me it seems like this. They're weird like traveler esque character, life path. Jen. [01:02:37] Speaker B: They are and I, and I think that is a very purposeful design decision. [01:02:41] Speaker A: It is. I don't, I don't think I'm a fan of that particular take though I understand it. [01:02:47] Speaker B: So a more common take in the YZE and Twilight 2000 is an example of this Veosin is an example of this. Tales from the Loops, an example. Usually you have an archetype and it's who you are. It's your elemental role on the team. Right? So people can quickly connect. Put the Legos together, click, click, click, click. Oh, I understand how all this works. You're the kid, you're the professional, you're the whatever. And this is not that. But I tell you one reason why I'm curious again. Maybe we'll see it in play. One place that my players and I have struggled a little bit with, COVID Ops. Covert Ops does this kind of cool thing where the skills are very, very large scale. So skills are like soldier, thief, technician, that kind of thing. Right. Like they're broad categories, they're almost like professions or areas of wide areas of specialization. But the game gives you almost nothing on who were you before you became an agent. And because of the fact that it is not class based, it is not archetype based, but you have these wide ranging skills that people overlap a little bit. There's a little bit of like, who am I in that game with the agents? I can tell. There's a little bit of like, why would I have been recruited? What was my role before I became a member of the sector organization? And I think Agent Provocateur is trying to address that problem by doing the traveler type thing. And many games do it right where you have some careers behind you. So you have a bit of. A little bit of a path. And Peter's going to ask about this in a minute here. Actually, there's a little bit of a path going on just from what you used to do kind of thing. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Sean, I think this is where you like lean on that so you get more experience, I think in that game if you leverage your career. Is that right? Or your former career? [01:04:27] Speaker A: I don't recall. [01:04:28] Speaker B: Maybe I don't remember. [01:04:29] Speaker A: I don't remember. [01:04:30] Speaker B: I don't remember if you get to use an extra die or if you get more xp, one or the other. Let me continue because this next, this next piece here before he's put your topics, it matters. So also does Asian Provocateur offer a life path character generation system like many other YZE games, maybe switching to something like that could beef up the agents. So the answer is no. Correct? If I'm remembering right, yeah. [01:04:51] Speaker A: There isn't a diff. It is in a definitive life path system similar to T2K, I would say, since he references it earlier. [01:04:59] Speaker B: Or Forbidden Lands the addendum they publish. Remember the. The. The booklet that they sent with it? [01:05:05] Speaker A: Yes. [01:05:06] Speaker B: Yeah. There is not a light path system full stop. And I think. I think the former career is meant to be a lightweight version of that. So certainly you could try your approach, Peter, and say I want the archetypes to be what you are today and I want to use a little light path system to generate who you were coming into the agency kind of thing. Would work really well as it does in many other Y E games. All right, I'll continue. Unrelated. I'm not sure Harrigan is right. Maybe I shouldn't continue. I'm not sure Harrigan is right about the OSR being responsible for player skill in social situation social situations. It kind of ignores the long history of the reaction role plus charisma mod in many old school games. I'd lay the blame and we'll explain what the blame is here in a minute. I'd lay the blame more squarely on LARP and storytelling games of the 90s for that theater kid affectation. Anyway, very enjoyable episode. So this is getting back to the whole like, do you recall the exact conversation this was? [01:06:06] Speaker A: This was around you specifically said, I think this is attributed to old school games because it takes the player knowledge to trump the character knowledge. When we were talking about like my specific example is Jeff doing intimidation or persuading a suspect, if you will, that they're investigating. And Jeff has done that professionally. So he role plays it and it's really good. But I. My argument would be that's not who Jeff's character is. [01:06:36] Speaker B: Yes, yes. [01:06:37] Speaker A: And you said that has to do, I think with some of the OSR mantra because it does come to player knowledge over character. [01:06:44] Speaker B: I think what I said is that now that those muddies are further watered. Excuse me, those waters are further muddied by the OSR approach. Correct. Which is which Peter's now saying, I'm not so sure it's that. Right. I'm just trying to get in my head my, my memory Swiss G's as you know. Sean. Yes, I do remember the conversation. I don't remember the. The genesis of it as to why we were talking about that. That sort of like do you roll or do you let the person just role play and when do you make the decision? I think what we talked about at the time was these games have mechanics or they don't. Including games like. Like swivers that purposefully say there are no mental or social stats in this game and we want you to role play it. Full stop. I'm going to disagree here. I'm going to hold my ground. What, what Spez Baby is saying here. So he says, I'm not sure he's right about the OSR being responsible for player skill and social situation. Ignores the long history of reaction roles. I'm not talking about reaction roles. I'm not talking about figuring out how the monsters view when the party monsters or NPCs when the party comes in. And you know, I mean most of the OSR games will say if there's not a reason for them to already have an attitude towards the players, the PCs, I should say you can roll on this 2D6 table. It'll tell you aggressive, hostile, wary, friendly, whatever it is. Right? That's just setting the table for where things kind of go from there. And the charisma modifier bit, man, you are well into like second edition and beyond before that matters at all in any kind of social interaction. Action doesn't matter in original Dungeons and Dragons, doesn't matter in bx. In BX I suppose you could do some kind of weird roll under charisma thing, but while that's present, you don't see it leaned on very much. Usually the charisma modifier is used for how many followers you have and all that sort of stuff through AD D I try to convince somebody you don't make a charisma check in most of those old school games. And then when we're talking osr, of course, I think by now I probably had mentioned this more than once. I believe OSR games represent this like idealized version of old school play, not the real old school play. Like the way we played in the 70s and 80s is quite different than an OSR game now. And in many cases I like the OSR better because it's either injected some modern DNA into the mix or it has refined that some of those older play methods. Right. It's fine. Sanded off some rough edges and that kind of thing. The part that I struggle with though is this whole like the LARP community I don't think is all that big when you get right down to it compared to the role playing community and the storytelling games. I think he's talking about vampire, isn't he? Mainly maybe Amber. The storytelling games of the 90. Sean is making I have no freaking clue face at me right now. [01:09:29] Speaker A: Well, it could, it could be. [01:09:30] Speaker B: Appreciate the backup. [01:09:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm here for you man. [01:09:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:09:35] Speaker A: And that is the storytelling system specifically. Right. Isn't that what I thought it was. [01:09:40] Speaker B: I thought it was. Maybe Peter can tell us on the Discord or another. Another write in exactly what he means here. [01:09:46] Speaker A: The saga continues. [01:09:48] Speaker B: I am the worst person to address this because I played and have played exactly zero of those games, whether it's changeling or werewolf or vampire or pot sticker or Bumble Bunny or whatever. Like, what I'm saying is there's many of them and I don't know what they are right. Like, and those are not my, those were not my style of games in the 90s. They remain not my, not really my thing today. So I'm not a very good authority to speak on them. But when does that help me? Back before, I mean. [01:10:20] Speaker B: Pretty much never, right? So I did do a little sniffing around and the vampire games have very, very specific social mechanics where you're rolling dice to seduce, to intimidate, to influence. Like, very specific. They're diced their D10 dice pool things. So I don't know, Peter, you haven't convinced me. I guess what I'm. What I was trying to get at is that in the modern age the OSR games have introduced this whole, this whole angle of you should just play it out and be a smart player and try to not roll dice. You should try to resolve the situation in front of you through smart play. And that can include talking smartly to the NPCs, right. As opposed to rolling up and saying I want to make a charisma check or I want to make a persuade check or whatever. The OSR ethos that some people have would, you know, like the Chris McDowell stuff from into the odds is this all day long, like have a conversation about it and see what, what flows out of that conversation, you know, and you only roll the dice when there's a real risk, when you're saving against something. Otherwise the GM is doing almost an FKR style. Well, what would happen if you said that this would happen logically and they're using their experience and they're, and they're using their ability to kind of like network all of the possibilities together to create the pathway that you're going to go down. Oh, if you said this and you said that you made them happy, but you're going to piss them off by saying that and it just evolves without any dice by hitting the table. So maybe, maybe give us a bit more on what you're thinking around the LARP and storyteller side of things. People again, you know, I think we all know this. People can take an approach they like from one game they try to apply it everywhere. So people, I've seen people try to apply these, like, osr don't roll the dice approaches in games that have very specific mechanics for resolving things where you're supposed to be rolling the dice. Play the game that's in front of you, man. That's. That's my advice. So thanks for writing and calling everyone. Sean and I are still getting the rhythm down about how often we're going to do these Q and A sessions. I think we both really enjoy them because it lets us get a little more interactive with people and a little deeper into some of the discussions that, you know, we kind of blow past when we're doing an episode where we have a main topic, we have a mission brief as well, where we know we got, you know, 45 minutes or more of content just around that. So we don't always give as long a response to some of the questions, but I think we can on these Q and A shows. [01:12:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. Thanks, everybody for writing in. And I agree with Harrigan. We may trim down the length of a normal episode when we're talking about encrypted comms and then save a few for these, like kicking things over on my side because sometimes we get into covert action, then we get into role playing games, and then we get some of those role playing games topics that we can apply to covert action. So it kind of blends a little bit. Like the cold opens are one thing, but getting into premature narration, that could be the whole RPG hobby as a whole, which can take a little bit more detail in addressing. [01:13:19] Speaker B: So. [01:13:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I would, I would say this. If people have thoughts about how well the formats are working so far, let us know, like, if you either hate the Q and A shows or you want to see more of them and, you know, don't want us to address any of the, the listener feedback in the regular shows. We can do that. We can also nuke the Q A shows if people hate them. And we can maybe break up the, the main briefing a little bit more kind of thing. Sean? [01:13:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I did a podcast a while ago. I did a survey and said, hey, what kind of parts do you like of the show? And kind of get some feedback that way might be something we throw out there as we determine what season two might look like in the format of shows. Like, we don't know if you like our banter kind of heavy on the front end. It might be a little bit more than you're used to in some other shows. And same with the, the Write ins and call ins and things of that nature. So we've gotten feedback that the length of the show and the episodes are like two hours. Yeah, no problem. I just hit pause and then I come back and I know other people, maybe not so much. [01:14:19] Speaker B: But, you know, I worry about our sample size with that. And I think, you know, we're going to have a slightly shorter show today at least. But when we got into, I think, a couple of the game reviews, we started going a little longer. [01:14:30] Speaker C: Right. [01:14:30] Speaker B: We were. We broke Top Secret into a number of parts. I think we tried to cover James Bond and Agent Provocateur a little more all in one. I think bonded two parts and Provocateur had just the one. But it made them very long, very long episodes. Let's put it this way, the people that we know who listen to the show, who are either friends of ours or acquaintances or we know on Discord, most of them are like, thumbs up, like, no problem. But that's not everybody who listens. So if you do think, guys, this would be way better if it was under an hour. You know, if you could trim it down. Let's hear that. Like, we'd like to get your feedback. [01:15:00] Speaker A: On as well, please. So throw us a [email protected] or hit us up at 929 Big Dice and let us know what your thoughts are. Even if it's like 10 seconds. Like, hey, I really like this part of the show. Or how you've covered X or Y. Maybe not so much this because the negative can also be constructive. Make it constructive. Negative or positive or the. [01:15:24] Speaker B: Or, yeah, it could be like, you know, just get rid of that Harrigan guy and you are good to go. [01:15:28] Speaker A: Sean, get rid of Harrigan. Get rid of Sean. [01:15:32] Speaker A: Be a better show. [01:15:34] Speaker B: Get two new hosts in a different topic, a different. [01:15:38] Speaker A: These things be great without these two. [01:15:44] Speaker B: Just have Sean do the audio engineering on two other people talking about something else. That might be our. That might be the trick. [01:15:54] Speaker A: Rest of it could get thrown to the. To the wind. [01:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:15:58] Speaker A: Thank you everybody for tuning in to Go Bag. I appreciate it on behalf of my co host here again, I'm Sean. Thanks and happy gaming. See you on the next one. Want more of Sean and Harrigan? You could find Sean at YouTube.com @rpgshawn where he streams every Saturday at 8:00am Central Time. You can find more of Harrigan's RPG musings at harriganshearth.substack.com links in the show notes. This episode of God bag brought to you with help from the following field operatives, special agents, black ops directors and friendlies. Joe Swick, Roger French, Merkel Froehlich, Tony Sugarloaf, Baker Hus Caro, Laramie Wall, Eileen Barnes, Heptalima Aaron Raila, Wayne Peacock, Old School DM Jeff Walken, Yorkus Rex, Eric Salzwedle, Phil McClory, Jason Hobbs, Michael O', Holland, Remy Billido, Crystal Eggstad, Eric A.V. voronak, Brian Kurtz, Chad Glamen, Jim Ingram Orchestra Chris Shore, Brian Rumble, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Keneally, Andy Hall, Jason Weitzel, Salt Hart, Kelly K. Ness, Tad Lechman, Nicholas Abruzzo, Matthew Catron, Curtis Takahashi, Angela Murray, Mr. White 20 Jason Connerly, Shannon Olson, Ryan West, Kristen McLean, Larry Hollis, Glenn Seal, Jake at Faded Quill Gaming Tess Trekkie, Tim Jensen, Kelly Ness, Nubis Christopher Lang, Crog Peter Skaines and 1d4 Khan James thank you, agents. We appreciate it.