Subplot Kudzu

 We had the 6th session of An Invitation today, and therefore started breaking some of the rules. For all of the previous sessions the plots were self contained - one 4-6 hour game slot, one plot - and involved matters of international espionage. This time we're doing a two-parter, and it's personal: the mark is the personal nemesis of one of the PCs, the team's Ubiquitous Black Engineer (UBE), who is a child of Opak Re, the super-tech African city from Planetary. Her nemesis is a British lord obsessed with discovering her origins (he's also, our heroes learn, a member of the Temple of Ra, the CFalk evil magician group who mix time magic and super science and think they're all reincarnation of Egyptian Pharaohs. In other words, they're barking mad). 

So at the end of the first episode, from the audience's perspective, everything has gone totally wrong: the UBE's attempt to get more information out of the mark has ended with her being kidnapped and locked into a specially built travel sarcophagus, after he reveals that he's done this once before, having traveled back in time after his previous defeat at their hands and knows that his current romantic conquest is actually working with the UBE to upset his plans, but he plans to spirit her away to Africa and subject her to a fate worse than death (time-manipulated personality alteration to make her his willing empress). Duh-duh-duuuuuuh!

What the audience doesn't know is that the party changed their plans at the last minute (which they really did during the e-mail planning session, with a sudden burst of brilliance from the Eye Candy PC led them to develop the "kidnap him, isolate him in a manor house and convince him that it's 1920 and he's returned to England from his empire to write his memoirs, then turn those plans to double cross both the British and the Prussians over to the right people" plot rather than the "infiltrate his expedition to the Congo and sabotage it" plot - so last minute that I decided that in the last iteration they _had_ gone with the Congo plot), that they had already realized that the Mark was setting up the expedition to lure the UBE into his clutches, had identified the sarcophagus as the means of transport and the UBE had lockpicks hidden under flaps of fake skin so she'd be able to escape once she was inevitably locked up (and go through his files now that she's inside his base). 

Rather than the mission being FUBAR, it is instead exactly going to plan. Next month's session, from a TV episode perspective, will begin with the scenes of everything going wrong last episode, the opening credits and the mark waking up to look as if he's much older, drugged to make him weaker and parapalegic, and the second half of the con well underway. Now they have a month to figure out how they'll keep him from suspecting and get him to write out his own confession. 

Plus, the session was worth it to get Diane to realize that the villain was indeed totally barking mad. 

I have had enough time, I think to digest the outcome of the first CFalk game (and have sent out the basic data on the second) and feel capable of discussing it here for comment. 

First off, my goal is to mirror the feel of the Mission Impossible TV show, which poses certain problems. I know from past experience that it takes about 4-5 hours of game timer to capture a 1 hour television episode. The problem here is that A LOT of the Mission Impossible plotting occurs off screen - we see Jim Phelps (or Dan Briggs if you're a classicist) get the outline of the mission, he selects the team and then they discuss the outline of the plan (obfuscated enough to keep the audience guessing). We never actually see them, ya'know, plan. Secondarily, asking the players to develop the entire plan gives them more agency then they are comfortable with (at least some of them) - they have an Objective and know that subtle strategies work in this setting better than violent ones, but otherwise they're on their own, which can be disconcerting if you're not used to it. 

To resolve these problems I opted for dividing the game into two parts: the actual play, and a pre-game epistolary PBEM in which the PCs get the basics of the episodes objective and a time frame in which they can do research, share the outcome of that research, plot, plan, develop one or two strategies and get a sense for the obstacles each carries. This would take a lot of time in table play, but since they have two to three weeks of PBEM time that isn't an issue. This lets us, in play, do the 'dinner party' scene and skip directly to the finalizing of the plan. Plus, it gives us all a lot of lovely in character notes and letters to keep CFalk's epistolary feel without mandating that anyone keep a journal. Finally, since people are directly posing questions or research to me I can support their decision making without reducing their agency - there is plenty of time for me to point out that one plan or another is not supported by the facts on the ground without being caught up in table momentum or groupthink, so the players hopefully have less fear on their plotting. I expect that will have to do less of that as the sessions go on. 

( behind the cut is the first invitation )

These have to be pretty carefully crafted, since I have to operate with certain ground rules for this to work: the information in it must be accurate and complete enough for the players to have a starting point (if I say that Tarkmann would let Liserl go under x circumstances but kill her if Y occurs, the players have to trust that); it has to suggest some genre appropriate courses of action (such as faking Schiffren's death) and discouraging non-genre appropriate ones (the indirect contact agents exist solely to make clear that killing Tarkmann will not solve the problem) without explicitly disallowing either. The second to last paragraph must absolutely and clearly state the objective to avoid confusion; and it has to give the players potential hooks for investigation and planning in the epistolary stages. It's harder than it looks. I'll discuss how this one played out tomorrow.