(Yes, the game has a new and better title now!)

So the game has a specific premise of sorts, now. You and your friends/crew/whatever were working a job, and for a reason you’re not sure of– sabotage, perhaps, or outside influences– the job went horribly awry. As a result you’ve been completely blown, and you’re stuck in your hometown with your friends until you can win your way back into the agency’s good graces. You start knowing very little about the job, what the goal was, and who was involved, but as things progress in the game you get more and more clues. Right now I’m waffling between creating some kind of mechanized output system that generates clues at appropriate times in the fiction, or just making that one of the GM’s jobs.

The character sheet is a dossier: real name, known aliases, picture. Specializations and calling cards. And then there are two other parts:

Profile: this is what your character thinks they want. The thing that you’re making clear is your objective– you want to get out of the city and get back into the agency, you want to retire peacefully and get everyone to leave you alone, you want to defect, you want to go into witness protection.

Psychological evaluation: this contains all of the stuff your character doesn’t realize they are or they want, but seems obvious to outsiders. This is the stuff your character isn’t self-aware enough to notice, or would deny, or doesn’t realize is as important as it is: “Subject is clearly in love with his demolitionist, has delusions of grandeur and enjoys playing hero. Dangerous thrillseeking tendencies, perhaps due to a broken childhood.” and so on. You can add to or change this stuff as the game goes on.

The game progresses in a series of jobs, and each job has three types of scenes: Analysis, Mission, and Blowback.

Analysis scenes are about carefully prepping for the job at hand. Coming up with contingencies, bugging phones, surveillance, information gathering. During Analysis scenes, your relationships are used as bonuses, and favors can be exchanged.

Mission scenes are about doing the hands-on work. Infiltrating a gang on a job, exchanging money for a hostage, confronting a Boss, showing your true identity/face to the enemy. During Mission scenes, your relationships can be used as penalties, and fallout from favors can be revealed.

Blowback scenes are about what happens after and between missions, relationship issues, and dealing with fallout. During Blowback scenes, relationships can grow, diminish, or break.

More later.

Filed under: Dissolute Games by Elizabeth