When you’re a spy, your job is your life— literally. You have no friends who aren’t expendable, no ID that’s not fake, no possessions except those that can be stuffed in a suitcase or left behind without a thought. But when you’ve been blacklisted, with your assets frozen and passports flagged, you lose everything, and everything changes. Your training tells you a couple things: find a place to lay low, figure out who you can rely on or exploit, and do whatever it takes to get back in.

But you don’t have a wealth of developed assets any more: you don’t have a network of co-workers and false identities and owed favors. All you have, all you are, is you. So you make nice with the few people who’ll have you, and rely on them more than you should— but if you’re too cold or uncaring, they’ll turn on you. And if you care too much, the people who are after you will exploit them to hurt you. And if you cared about them at all, you wouldn’t care about them even a little.

When you love a spy, whether it’s your boyfriend or daughter or army buddy or brother, it’s like being a member of a religion you didn’t sign up for. You’re just supposed to trust them: when you don’t know what’s going on, when you’re being lied to, when you see the person you care about act like a monster— you’re supposed to believe. And you have to believe, because a crisis of faith could mean damnation for both of you. You have to assume the best intentions, because if you blow his cover or undo her handiwork, you could both die.

But as much as your boyfriend or daughter or army buddy or brother might play God, it’s your job to bring them back to humanity. It’s been a long time since they’ve felt truly loved, and without someone to care about you, right and wrong becomes awfully blurry. When you’re paid to play a monster, sometimes the role catches up with you— so they need you. You need to believe in your loved one so that no one dies, and you need to be vigilant so that they keep their soul. And just hope to God you don’t get broken in the process.

Blowback is a game where you play spies blacklisted after a job goes awry, and the people who care about them. You can play this game with 3-5 people, and while playing it as a single game session is fun, it’s designed for long term play. It’s heavily inspired by the American television show Burn Notice and movies like the Bourne trilogy. As much as Blowback is about pyrotechnics and car chases, it’s a fish-out-of-water premise: spies stranded without their agency, normal people swept up in intrigue. And, like all multiplayer games, it’s about relationships— how much can you ask of someone, how much can you disappoint them before they turn their back on you?

The production of the game was funded with a generous grant from Lester “Wordman” Ward, as the first DivNull Lark. Final costs will go up on the Blowback blog later this week. Spoilers: with GenCon booth costs I believe I’ve gone a bit over, but it’s amazing what can be done with $1000. Preorders will hopefully pay for the initial print run, and following sales will fund the iPhone/iPad play tools planned for later this year.

The specs:
9×7″ perfect-bound softcover, 78 pages, full-color throughout. $24 (plus $5 shipping) gets you the book, plus PDF.

But enough about that, you probably want pictures:

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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I wanted to talk a little bit about how I design games. I don’t know that there’s anything particularly revelatory about my process, but as I’ve noticed an increased interest in genre sim (LOWERCASE S, we’re not talking about GNS here), I thought it might be interesting and/or useful. (And, since I promised full disclosure when it came to Blowback, I thought you might like a peek into how the game came about in the first place.)

I’m heavily inspired by media and pop culture. This should be no real shock to anyone remotely familiar with what I do, play, or talk about. When I start really digging on a book/TV show/movie or genre, it makes me want to play games that run in a similar vein. Which, half the time, means that I have to write a game that runs in a similar vein. So I start reading/watching critically, to figure out the formula.

Especially in television, the word “formulaic” is a derogatory dismissal, but almost everything runs off of some kind of formula. Really successful formulas provide a familiar structure while leaving a lot of room for variables, which makes each episode feel fresh and intriguing. The trick is finding the right balance between formula and variable, and making sure the variables are in the right places. So first thing: I consume a lot of the media in question, and I come up with hypothetical versions of the formula, refining until I’ve gotten it down. If I’m going for something genre-broad, I’ll concentrate on one particular inspiration and then cross-check my formula with another property in the same genre, to make sure that things are basically in the same ballpark; normally you’ll see a lot of, but not total, overlap between properties. In this case, for Blowback, I broke down the formula of Burn Notice and cross-checked it with the Jason Bourne trilogy and Spy Game.

The formula for Burn Notice goes like this: there’s a dude* who needs help. There’s a personal mission the main character has (which is a continuous mission throughout the series, a mystery he needs to solve), and he has to take care of his client while juggling his personal mission and his interpersonal relationships. The client missions tend to bring him closer emotionally to his loved ones, and his personal mission tends to drive them away. There is a strong antagonistic relationship between the main characters and a government agency, who serves as the foil.

Checked against the Bourne trilogy: there’s no dude who needs help, just the personal mission (continuous throughout the trilogy, a mystery he needs to solve), and he needs to take care of his loved one (first movie) while juggling that relationship and his personal mission. The personal mission takes the ultimate toll on his relationship. There is a strong antagonistic relationship between the main characters and a government agency, who serves as the foil.

Checked against Spy Game: there’s a dude who needs help. There’s a personal mission the main character has (to retire without incident), and he has to take care of his client while juggling his personal mission. The mission for the client brings him closer to his loved one (which is also the client), and the personal mission involves a strong antagonistic relationship between the main characters and a government agency, who serves as the foil.

Okay, so the formula works. Now on to a brief digression about serial media, which is in and of itself, a formula.

Serial media works on a triple arc: there’s the short-term arc, which is that of an episode or a chapter or a movie subplot. There’s the mid-term, which is that of a television season or a whole book or a whole movie. Then there’s the long-term arc, which is that of a television series, the entire line of books, or the whole movie trilogy. Ideally, in each small unit, each of the three arcs is advanced in relation to their size.  Meaning that in each small unit, 100% of the small arc is revealed, less of the medium arc is revealed, and a sliver of the large arc is revealed. So when you look at the three-arc formula, you plug the elements of your genre into it.

Going back to Burn Notice. The small arc is about the client job, the medium arc is about the personal mission, and the large arc is about the mystery that needs solving. (You’ll notice I separated the mission from the mystery, even though I conflate the two earlier in this post. Especially with Michael Westen and Jason Bourne, the emotions of the personal mission— getting revenge— is separate and can be moved forward without necessarily moving the mystery forward in any tangible way.) Awesome. So then you just make mechanics that push these things to happen in those chunks. (Blowback does this with the job structure, the Push Pyramid, and the Agency’s options when rolls are failed.)

Now, there’s always a point at which you’ve modeled things too closely, and it stops being fun and starts just being a fanfic generator. So at each stage of the process, I ask myself “Is this all the structure I need?” in this case, it’s a resounding no. The job-push-failure structure gives me the main characters’ conflict arcs in a vacuum, but doesn’t provide any structure or incentives for making the relationships between the characters come alive. So let’s go back to the Burn Notice formula.

He has to take care of his client while juggling his personal mission and his interpersonal relationships. The client missions tend to bring him closer emotionally to his loved ones, and his personal mission tends to drive them away.

Good. Great. But WHY do the client missions bring him closer emotionally to his loved ones, when his personal mission drives them away? Because the client missions are more sympathetic. They’re dudes in distress. Helping a client is unquestionably good and shows your humanity. Getting involved with the Agency again drives away your loved ones because the Agency uses your loved ones against you, turns them into liabilities, and gets them hurt. So the important thing is to make the clients sympathetic, the Agency dangerous, and relationships easily strained. (Blowback does this with the easy job generator, the push pyramid and other Agency tools, and the stress charts).

Is this all the structure I need? Well, no. There’s a feeling of being all alone in this genre, too— the lone vigilante (backed up with friends). How do you express that dichotomy? And how do you avoid the Wolverine issue— having a group of three or four badass loners who never work together? The non-spies in these properties— Jason’s girlfriend, Michael’s mom— are important, but they don’t follow the same rules as the other main characters. That’s what allows them to be supportive of the spy characters while allowing them to still essentially function like lone badasses. So that has to get modeled too. (In Blowback, the difference between the stress chart for Civilian characters and the stress chart for Professional characters takes care of this.)

The really interesting thing here is the stuff that gets left out when you make a game this way. For example: Blowback doesn’t have a combat system, or hit points, or anything of the ilk. A conflict is a conflict, and the GM can injure you if he makes that move from the Push Pyramid, but that doesn’t mean you get a rock-climbing penalty or anything. Because in this genre, physical injury adds tension, but never concretely endangers a character’s ability to succeed at any given task— whether it’s getting your girlfriend to take you back or breaking out of a Turkish prison.

Anyway, that’s the broad-strokes overview. I’ll make another post soon about identifying variables and exploding options.

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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So I haven’t been completely happy with the cover of Blowback:

After some thinking, I decided the badass chick on the oil pipeline was great, but the game isn’t really about agents in the field. So I came up with this:

Which do you like better? Why? Anything you think I should change?

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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Andy K had some fantastic questions for me about the playtest document, and he agreed to let me share some of them and my answers.

Does every PC have to be involved in the big mess-up? In Burn Notice, only the main character was… For “bang” potential, I was thinking at least two need to be part of it, and the others have to have a serious past with those characters who were involved in the burn event, but does it only work when everyone was involved? (followup to that would be, “If so, what about civilians”)

All the Professionals were on a team. If a player wants to come up with a reason their character wasn’t there, that’s cool, and their absence might be enough to get them banished too. The major thematic difference between Blowback and Burn Notice is that all of the Professionals have been exiled– not just one. It works pretty well, and sort of cements the team aspect from the very beginning. Civilians are definitely not involved with the big mess-up (hence them being Civilians).

I’m having trouble understanding the Diversion skill: On the thread of Burn Notice, who would be good at only diversions? This seems to be almost a skill that can be replicated by the other three skills (particularly provocateur and commando). Thoughts on this? What are some things that happened in your other playtests that fell under the Diversion skill but not others?

Diversion is basically the stealth version of Commando, right. Where commandos go in guns blazing, intimidating people, head-butting goons when they run out of ammo– Diversions are indirect. They plant caches of weapons, they use explosives. I think that Fiona is more Diversion than Commando. Blowing up a building? Sure, that might be commando. Knowing how to make a complex explosive? I guess that could be Pavement. Making a complex explosive device rigged not to blow, but that looks like it’s fine, and also follows the signature demolition style of another wanted demolitionist? THAT’s Diversion. I hope that makes sense.

It seems that if you Go For Broke, there’s a high chance that you’ll get really screwed, put in a rut that you can’t dig out of: Say for example someone who has a 4 or 5 in a skill that rolls all failures… seems to bury them in a hole (with a future -4 or -5 modifier to the NEXT roll, which likely no one in the group could ever roll enough dice to get out of) they can never escape. Or am I missing something?

On page 10, in the sidebar there’s a heading called Becoming a Liability. You can overcome being a liability by getting rescued– a team member with a bigger pool can rescue you, but they’re operating with your penalty. This means it’s best to get rescued as part of Mission– so that you can steal additional prep dice and stuff. Civilians are more likely to become liabilities due to their smaller die pools, so the penalties there are also more likely to be small. It’s harder to rescue a Professional, which I think is thematically appropriate.

Of course, I have done a crap ton of playtesting at this point, and no one has ever become a liability. So it’s all theoretical.

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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The text of Blowback is done. Three quick bits of supplemental material (revised character sheet, Push Pyramid, and Job Dossier), and it’s ready for outside playtesting. I should get the supplemental material done tomorrow.

Let me know if you’re interested in running it for me, and I’ll share the document with you (and thank you in the book). You can comment here, or on Facebook, or on Twitter, or email me… You get the idea.
(And if you just want to give me thoughts on it, I’m interested in that too. I just want to control how many people have access to what is almost the final text.)

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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Things have been going along decently for the last couple of months, with a few hiccups. But we seem to be back on track:

Game Completion

I totally missed my deadline of having a completed game text by Dreamation. Part of this was due to my entire family getting violently ill, myself included; mostly, though, it was the convergence of multiple projects and not enough hours in the day. Right now, though, the text is 80% finished and it’s looking great— all that’s left is to write up the last bits of The Agency Handbook and the author notes, and then it’s just compiling appendices from there on out.

The game itself is finished, design-wise, and I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly. I need to get a multi-session playtest going, just to double-check the game progression works as well as I think it does, and then we’ll be gold.

Budget

After some deliberation, I’ve decided to shell out $200 to Mr. Ryan Macklin for game editing. Let me be frank: despite my high esteem for Ryan, and how flattered I was when he reached out to make the offer (he’s the best in the business, and super busy with projects like Primetime Adventures 3.0), I was dubious about shelling out 20% of the grant to have someone go “Hey, just so you know, your participles are dangling.” In my past projects, I’ve had multiple people take multiple passes at the plaintext version of the document simply because they enjoyed the project and were willing to be a pair of fresh eyes, and that’s worked out fine. So, after Ryan made me the offer at Dreamation, I told him that I was pleased and thankful and that I would think about it.

During my thinking— which, in all honesty, tended more towards “It’s a generous offer, how do I politely say no?”— Ryan made this blog post about his editing philosophy. Which made me say, “Oh. I need that.”

It wasn’t a decision I made easily, but it was a decision worth making. Since there’s a lot more riding on this game than on a usual release for me, and simply because I love this game and I’m a damned perfectionist, it needs to be right the first time. People need to be able to understand the rules, my intent in writing them, and what they should be able to change or throw out if they want and still have a workable game. Part of the problem is that I always understand that stuff intuitively, because I’m the one who wrote it— and the friends who check out my stuff are also pretty used to the way I communicate. Not everyone will be. So I’m willing to take the risk and make the investment in a better text.

I’ve also shelled out another $50 on art, which altogether, brings the leftover budget to $642.50.

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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Things are going really well for the text of Blowback. I finished writing the final section of the players’ guide, and have started The Agency Handbook. In the meantime, I’m running a contest over on Story Games asking people to stat up their hometown. The coolest town wins you a free book!

Budget post coming soon.

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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Hey guys! It turns out I’m running Blowback on Sunday morning, not Saturday. Sorry. You can still get in touch with me about playing in it, though!

Here’s the latest version of the Blowback document, and it includes Mission: Blowback: Playtest document 2

Enjoy!

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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Hi guys! I’m running two official games of Blowback as a part of Indie Games Explosion at Dreamation 2010 in Morristown, NJ (February 18-21). The first game is Thursday night at 8 PM, the next is Saturday morning at 9 AM. These are “playtest track” games, so you can get into them one of two ways: if you’ve signed up for a playtester badge at the con and are interested in Blowback, let me know. If you haven’t signed up for a playtester badge– you’re getting a regular or GM badge– let me know, and I can invite you personally. I want to do my best to ensure that everyone who wants to try Blowback can.

Going along with that: if neither of those times work for you, get in touch with me and I’ll try to put together something off-the-schedule for you at another time. (If you find other people who want to play at that time, even easier.) I never really sign up to play games before the con itself, so my schedule’s pretty open.

Anyway, the take-home lesson here: if you want to play Blowback at Dreamation, comment or email me. And if you want to just hang out, contact me too. Chances are I’d love to hang out with you again\meet you.

Filed under: Blowback by Elizabeth
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