WoF factions

[Crafty_Pat]

P.S. Hello all. I'm not dead, although the lack of sleep for the past nine weeks sometimes makes me wish it. I'm a 1st year teacher and it's the first nine weeks. If you ever say that teaching high school is an easy job, I will come over to your house and personally set your feet on fire.

Equi! Good to have you (sleep-deprived or not) back! You can go stand next to Pat - he'll make you look well-rested, no matter how sleep-deprived you are

::groggy::

Whowhat? Huh? Did I hear my name?

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz

<snort> Fluffy pink entrails, what? I didn't order none! Leave the man alone! He's bipolar!

::mumblemumblemumble::

[Lee]

It's an undertaking, but it should be fun. Be sure to report back and let us know how it goes!

The first session was last saturday, I choose to be as blurry as possible as I'm still not sure how I'll deal with the SA/WoF mix and I really prefer to read the book before making the world making decisions. I've decided to separate the spyworld in "leagues", the classic spy and the super spies, all the characters are coming from the classic league and have just been drafted in the big league. They don't really know who they're working for yet and who are their ennemies. That'll give me some time.

Two lessons learned:

1) you're never prepared enough, I'm not new to RPG so I knew about this one but after many years of "retirement" it was a tough restart.

2) Never, Never, Never schedule a session a day there might be a major sport event. France - England Rugby World Cup game sucked half of my alloted time.

[Equinox]

The first session was last saturday, I choose to be as blurry as possible as I'm still not sure how I'll deal with the SA/WoF mix and I really prefer to read the book before making the world making decisions. I've decided to separate the spyworld in "leagues", the classic spy and the super spies, all the characters are coming from the classic league and have just been drafted in the big league. They don't really know who they're working for yet and who are their ennemies. That'll give me some time.

Let this linger for a while. It will keep things interesting .

In a (now defuct) SFA setting game, the players had just been recruited by the Company to perform missions. All the players knew was that they had been tasked to an extra-governmental task force wiht an immense budget and support system that operated "para" (that is to say, "not quite") legally. It was interesting to watch their reactions as they had their first mission briefing from some ex-military CIA officer (who looked like he should be the poster boy for military recruitment) who called himself John Hunter and a well-dressed, dreadlocked gentleman from Italy who called himself E. Quentin Knox. The tension between the two was obvious, even while poorly understood...

...and was further complicated when Mr. Knox gave them a package to deliver on their next assignment and asked them not to say anything to Hunter about it, and Hunter asked them to report any unusual goings on by Knox...

...and the waters became even muddier when said package exploded mere minutes after they delivered the package and were on their way to the mission objective.

At that point, "good guys" and "bad guy" was relative, and they weren't quite certain if they were backing the right horse, which was exactly how I wanted it.

[TheAuldGrump]

And now that World on Fire is available FLAGS should be unfurled soon.

The Auld Grump, just finished statting out next weeks NPCs... time for my bed.

[MartialIX]

Raising this one from the dead, but I've got a question...

Looking through the cards for the SpyCraft CCG over at Cards Not Words, and noticed that the PITFALL trio of commanders are Banshee.Net agents.  Was there a shift in their alignment between CCG and RPG?  Or is that because they took over the Illuminated Futures building?

[OverNinja]

Sax and Century have the Project: Pitfall text on their cards.

[Crafty_Pat]

Raising this one from the dead, but I've got a question...

Looking through the cards for the SpyCraft CCG over at Cards Not Words, and noticed that the PITFALL trio of commanders are Banshee.Net agents.  Was there a shift in their alignment between CCG and RPG?  Or is that because they took over the Illuminated Futures building?

There's a piece of fiction that explains it, which I'll hopefully be getting out soon, but the up shot is that Century set up a loose, experimental coalition by convincing some of the captured Banshees that helping Pitfall was in their best interest. The Banshee starter in question was in fact a Pitfall-run op.

[Salsa]

The basic idea is that no one in the setting is entirely clean and everyone has something to hide. The relationships between the factions are laid out, though all the factions have been shattered to bits by the events of the last five years, making the individual characters their own ultimate arbiters. Thus it's easy to have characters from all the factions working together toward a long-term cause, or to have them alternate between friends and foes as the plot and their personal stories dictate.
 

lol I can see the number of Liaison subplots skyrocketing all along a WoF campaign...

[iconoplast]

I have to say - as someone totally new to Spycraft, reading through World on Fire as my introduction to the setting... I thought Project Pitfall was the default agency.***

Especially because it seemed set up to offer PCs the chance to play ex-members of three other factions.

I've got all sorts of ideas about Caliber I Media Opportunity Ops, PR Officers attached to squads the way Political Officers once were, and the PCs struggling with asking themselves all those tough questions that haunt Century in the fluff.

So, while Pitfall may have been unplayable in the CCG, I don't see any compelling reason to declare it off limits in the RPG.   What am I missing?

*** - I haven't actually finished reading WoF yet, so I may be missing the part where the book explicitly says different.

[Mortadelo]

Nothing forbids playing Pitfall agents, neither Franchise or Eternal PCs.

And in the CCG you could play a Banshee deck with Century and Madeleine Sax as leaders.

[Crafty_Alex]

I have to say - as someone totally new to Spycraft, reading through World on Fire as my introduction to the setting... I thought Project Pitfall was the default agency.***

Especially because it seemed set up to offer PCs the chance to play ex-members of three other factions.

I've got all sorts of ideas about Caliber I Media Opportunity Ops, PR Officers attached to squads the way Political Officers once were, and the PCs struggling with asking themselves all those tough questions that haunt Century in the fluff.

So, while Pitfall may have been unplayable in the CCG, I don't see any compelling reason to declare it off limits in the RPG.   What am I missing?

*** - I haven't actually finished reading WoF yet, so I may be missing the part where the book explicitly says different.

Hey Iconoplast,

Good to see you on the boards! My players had the same reaction - they wanted to run down and kill all those "rogue agents" from the factions I think a Pitfall campaign could be a great way to introduce people to the shades of grey in the world - start them off as Team America World Police, then through their ops and encounters with faction agents, they start to discover things are not quite the way they though they were...maybe eventually they could even turn to double agents (if they wish) and join the revolution.

At least, that's what I would try

[Crafty_Pat]

One of the guiding principles when writing World on Fire was and is that no one's necessarily right. It makes the setting very hard to scipt, as I have to constantly play Devil's Advocate to my own muse, but it produces a setting that's literally wide open. You can play it from any angle and using any Factions, for or against any other Factions. It's compelling in the same way that the real world is - on your terms, from your perspective.

[Psion]

One of the guiding principles when writing World on Fire was and is that no one's necessarily right. It makes the setting very hard to scipt, as I have to constantly play Devil's Advocate to my own muse, but it produces a setting that's literally wide open. You can play it from any angle and using any Factions, for or against any other Factions. It's compelling in the same way that the real world is - on your terms, from your perspective.

In addition to making it hard to write, it makes it hard for me to GM. My usual MO is to plunk a motive in front of the players that they obviously want to do.

Of course, tapping into this to muddy the waters along the way is something I'm cool with. 

That said, I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of the Bloodvine as heroes from any angle (other than "enemy of my enemy" with Pitfall._ I'm tapping into the idea of various less that sympathetic eurotrash revolutionaries from Alias as a starting point, but that's about all I got right now.

[Crafty_Pat]

In addition to making it hard to write, it makes it hard for me to GM. My usual MO is to plunk a motive in front of the players that they obviously want to do.

This was an anticipated hazard, but an acceptable one for the potential results.

That said, I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of the Bloodvine as heroes from any angle (other than "enemy of my enemy" with Pitfall._ I'm tapping into the idea of various less that sympathetic eurotrash revolutionaries from Alias as a starting point, but that's about all I got right now.

Muse on what honor and respect mean to organized crime families, then apply that across Europe. Should give you a kernel to play with until the Flag arrives.

[Krensky]

That said, I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of the Bloodvine as heroes from any angle (other than "enemy of my enemy" with Pitfall._ I'm tapping into the idea of various less that sympathetic eurotrash revolutionaries from Alias as a starting point, but that's about all I got right now.

Muse on what honor and respect mean to organized crime families, then apply that across Europe. Should give you a kernel to play with until the Flag arrives.

There's also the fact that while no faction is right, the Franchise is very, very wrong. Just because Bloodvine is greedy, selfish, and criminal doesn't make then Evil, or at least in comparison to the Franchise and the AEG. Even if you view the whole family that way, there's nothing that prevents the rank and file to oppose the big bads of the setting.

Also, it's useful to remember that traditional continental European organized crime is a different animal then the US or UK forms. Not that it's any less violent or cancerous, but it's traditionally (and especially in literature) more refined and clings tenaciously to it's roots as actual protection for the poor and disenfranchised from the state and nobility. This is essentially fictional today, but it's an organizing ideal.