Agemegos

Re: Throwing curveballs at the spies Nope. Nothing came up when I googled it. Where can I read more? I was thinking more along the lines of an espionage campaign for agents of the British Secret Service set in 1979, when Sir James Bond has just been appointed the new M. The thing about this Globval Freqency is that there would be premise be different specialists called in for each different operation, so players would not have a single on-going character the way I like.

Re: Throwing curveballs at the spies That's an interesting thought, but I think I will be using it more for contacts and local staff, or as an occasional disguise, and less as a source of recruiting globe-trotting effectuators. If anyone wanted to play such a character in the campaign I am contemplatig I might suggest that the character ought to be an internationally-competitive triathlete or racing cyclist as well as a bicycle courier. That way he or she would be at least familiar with a bunch of countries, might have a smattering of languages, etc. And by the way: by the conventions of this genre, villains use Mac 10s: a hero would have a Ruger T-512 in the parcel.

Re: Throwing curveballs at the spies

Re: I made the GM cry....

Re: More questions I don't think it is called 'the outback', but the south-west of Tasmania is very rugged, little-populated, and difficult of access: mountainous and covered with heavy forest. I must go there some time.

Re: I made the GM cry....

Re: I made the GM cry....

Re: Throwing curveballs at the spies How about circus performers? Wildlife photographers?

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign

Re: Throwing curveballs at the spies Indeed. The British secret service has been recruiting from the universities as a matter of habit since at least the 1930s. That's where they picked up Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt. The universities, navy, army, Foreign Office, and banking industry are the 'business a usual' recruiting grounds that I think Bond might try to broaden away from. And of course you have to be aware that vocational training in Britain and the Commonwealth are organised differently than in the US and Germany. In England Law and Medicine and so forth are (generally) undergraduate (bachelors) degrees, taught at universities rather than at specialist graduate schools. This is an irritating mistake in Victory Games' Q Manual: the brief personal history listed for one of the characters has her doing a quadruple (!) degree at Cambridge as a qualifying course to enter medical school, which is not the way things are done in Commonwealth countries (or at least wasn't in period: some Australian universities have recently introduced four-year medical courses for university graduates alongside the standard six-year undergraduate medical degrees).

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign Indeed. So send him to language classes at the Foreign Office. Don't waste three years of his time on a superfluous course at Cambridge.

Re: Throwing curveballs at the spies FWIW: One of the inspirations I have in mind is the Bryan Brown movie FX: Murder by Illusion in which a movie special effects specialist ran rings around crooked FBI agents and the Mafia using his professional skills.

G'day Now as you may have read in another thread, I am planning to start up an espionage campaign set in 1979, with the PCs working their way up to "00" rank in the British Secret Service. The premise of the campaign is that the SIS (MI6) has been going through a bad patch of scandals and lack of success, and that Margaret Thatcher has appointed Sir James Bond the new M with a brief to rebuild the Service. So we suppose that Bond hands over SIGINT to GCHQ, and makes a radical return to HUMINT. We also suppose that he recruits a lot of new people from sources that the KGB will not have thought to infilitrate. This is going to have to involve recruiting people of ability from areas of endeavour that have not traditionally been thought of as fertile breeding grounds for spies, and hoping that their special professional abilities will give them capacities that will turn out completely unexpected to the professional spies. What are likely places for Bond to recruit from? - The medical profession? - RADA graduates? - The film and television industry? - Fleet Street? - Professional sports? Brainstorm! Regards, Brett Evill

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign The movies that are based on novels all (necessarily and properly) have difference of detail from the novels on which they are based. I haven't re-read You Only Live Twice recently, so I can't be sure that it doesn't say that Bond has a degree from Cambridge. But I clearly recall from when i did read it that in the novel Bond spoke no Japanese: he had to pose as a deaf-mute to maintain a cover. I wouldn't say it was out of character for Bond to speak several Oriental Languages. But I do think it would be out of character for him to spend three years at Cambridge studying for a degree. He is the sort of bloke who learns a language by going to a country where it is spoken, taking a lover, and mixing with people who do things.

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign Two of the novels are set largely in Jamaica, of course, and You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun have large sections set in the Orient. But Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Goldfinger have substantial parts set in the USA. Bond is largely a European operative, I agree. But I think he might go to the US to help his friend Leiter. And Leiter's agency contacts might survive the Johnson and Nixon years better that Bond's Service contacts would under the atmosphere we suppose to exist in Britain. Moreover, ten years or more living in DC, dong occasional bits of work for the CIA would give Bond contacts that would look good to Thatcher in 1979. One of the exra-canonical sources gave Bond a degree in Oriental Languages from Cambridge, but I consider it out of character. By the age of 45 Bond will be a bit too old to go messing about in boats, but he would be a handy man for training the SBS and directing especially M squadron. But on the whole I can't say I like the idea of Bond becoming a Royal Marines officer, so perhaps it would be better to leave him in Naval Intelligence and give him a job that involves co-operation with the SBS. Yes. Another advantage is that this would let me push him up to Captain or Rear Admiral. Fleming is quite explicit that Bond was RNVR, not RN. A lot of RNVR types were put into anti-submarine operations early in the war (my father among them), but they were mostly pretty inexperienced (professional seamen in the reserves were RNR, not RNVR--the two were merged in 1958). Recalling that a naval lieutenant is significantly more senior than an army lieutenant, and usually occupies an important position on a small ship, Bond would have had to be something special to be both young and a lieutenant RNVR. According to Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, the prerequisites for a [routine] promotion from sublieutenant RNVR to lieutenant RNVR were three month's service at sea and a minimum age of 28 years. Indeed. And a combination of budget cuts and bureaucratic pettifoggery would irk Bond intensely. Indeed it might. I haven't had any luck yet borrowing a copy, so I ordered one from a second-hand book dealer in San Francisco. It ought to be here in six weeks.

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign [shamefaced] I have a pretty good idea [/shamefaced]

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign All good suggestions. I am particularly taken with the idea that he might have set up a PI firm with Leiter and perhaps other old contacts. Where should they be based? Jamaica? Hong Kong? Washington? Monte Carlo? If he were to return to service with the RN, what do you think he might do? He is not enough of a seaman to command a ship, and he wouldn't be a lot of good as anyone's first lieutenant. Naval Intelligence, perhaps? Or something to do with the SBS? Good thought. My researches have brought me across several suggestions that the SIS (MI6, the Service, etc.) got bogged down in bureaucratic inertia in the 70s. This is arguable, since Fleming continually updated Bond's implicit biography to keep him abreast of the times and continually in his late prime (ie. young enough to do the job, old enough to be jaded about it--about 37) over the ten or twelve years in which he wrote the stories. The result is that from the evidence in the books one can argue any of several dates of birth from 1918 to about 1930. Some punters are very keen on 1923. The result is that I can defensibly pick a date to tune Sir James' age in my campaign date. And speaking of a campaign date, I am toying with the idea to slip on year back, and have Sir James appointed by Margaret Thatcher on her first day in Number Ten. I'll see whether the Inter-Library Loan Service can dig it out for me. The National Library of Australia ought to have a copy.

Re: Loony conspiracy theories My first Justice, Inc. campaign (in 1986) featured the International Fascist conspiracy (controlled by Ciano), the Second International (commanded by Stalin), the Zionists, the Bavarian Illuminati (commanded by Charles E Hughes), the Freemasons (commanded by Winston Churchill as chief-of-staff to George VI)), the Catholic Church, the Brothers of the Sword (commanded by Borman), and the Assassins involved in a complicated underground struggle so labyrinthine that they often lost track of who was whose puppet, and sometimes of which secondary conspiracies (Rosicrucians, Knights of Malta, KKK, Nazis, Opus Dei, the SS, the Thuggee) were controlled by whom. I worked in every bigoted and xenophobic conspiracy theory I could find in an elaborate web of intrigue and deception. It was particulary important that these cons-iracies were not terribly well co-ordinated, so that some parts of each conspiracy were taken in by the deceptions of other parts of the same organisation. The plot of the campaign involved an attempt by the Illuminati to portray Hitler as a Zionist mole in the delicate alliance between the Fascists and the Brothers of the Sword, the Illuminati hoping that this would make his backers turn on him in time to avert a world war. Unfortunately the Swiss Zionists had been taken in by the deception, thought Hitler must be an agent of some other branch of the Zionist conspiracy, and were struggling to conceal the (fake) evidence. Meanwhile, Hitler's personal agents were trying to destroy it without letting either of his backers work out what it was. The 'evidence' fell into the PCs' hands in a café in Zaragosa in March 1939, and a fun if very confusing time was had by all as they tried to get it to Philadelphia. This campaign gave rise to such deathless quotes as: "Eh Gringo! Take me to Grenoble.", "At least it will be a democratic bloodbath.", and "There, looming in the doorway, you see a figure seven feet two-and-a-half tall, two axe-handles across the shoulders…" (chorus) "…and with a face that only a mother could love."

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign In what sort of capacity, do you think? A desk job at the SIS in London? Chief of an important station? Liaison with the CIA in Langley? Something else?

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign Exactly the thought I was planning to pursue! It's funny that you should mention that, because it was watching this very movie that inspired me to run this campaign. And I'd call it 'deeply flawed' rather than 'execrable', perhaps because I watched it in bed with my girlfriend and through a warm post-coital glow of universal goodwill. I thought it was pretty funny, though very silly.

Re: Brainstorming a James Bond campaign Right. And he isn't rich enough. His pension isn't going to run to Taittinger and custom-made cigarettes. He'll need an extraordinary rep to come back to head a national intel agency after having brokered political and military intel on a free-lance basis. Perhaps we would do well to suppose that most of his work was with comercial and industrial intel rather than political and military. Good line. This is the sort of unconventional ability that would give Bond an edge over conventional rivals for the post, and that would make him a strong candidate as a reforming M. This is of course not the same M who was in the top job while Bond was active: Sir Miles Messervy is twenty-five or thirty years older than Bond, and will long since have been replaced. Bond was offered (and refused) a KCMG at the end of Moonraker, and even though I will not be treating the novels as absolutely canonical in detail he is working at the level at which a KC** is expected at retirement. A KCMG (he works for the Foreign Office, so the Michael and George is the appropriate Order) is a knighthood. That is something of the idea I was aiming for. More State School alumni, and a fair number of people who had developed useful and unexpected skills outside of the intelligence community. One of the inspirations in the back of my mind is SF: Murder by Illusion: not for Brian Brown's acting, but because of teh idea of someone with special skills unknown to Intel fieldcraft throwing curves at the professional spies.

G'day I've started a new thread about a campaign inspired by the James Bond novels. It is in the Dark Champions forum, which i think is appropriate, but I am placing this notice for people who (like myself undtil last week) think that espionage is an 'other genre'. Regards, Brett Evill

G'day I am planning to start up a new campaign for agents of Her Majesty's Secret Service, in the spirit of the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming (as distinguished from the films from EON productions on one hand and the Smiley novels by John Le Carré on the other). The premise is that James Bond was born in 1918, retired from field work in 1963 and with a KCMG, and was recalled to take the post of M in about 1978. Sir James is on a commission to reorganise and rebuild the secret service after a time of perceived ineffectiveness or failure. The PCs will be new agents, recruited from outside the intelligence community, to as part of a 'clean start' rebuild of the Operations Section. The events of the novels will not be treated as canonical. Still less those of the movies or the organisational details in the RPG by Victory Games (excellent though it is in general). Please help me plan the campaign. 1. What might Bond have been doing between 1963 and 1978? 2. What events of the late 70s might have been behind Sir Maurice Oldfield being sacked and Sir James Bond being appointed to replace him? (It might of course be something unknown to the publis or to history.) 3. What new arrangements and focus might a man like Bond introduce in the late 1970s? 4. Is there anything in what I have specified that you think could be improved? 5. Does this post belong in Dark Champions or in Other Genres? Regards, Brett Evill

Re: Liberty or Freedom League? Alliteratte, alliterate! It's later than you think!