Style and character musings

[jeregenest]

A spy is above all a man of politics . . . He must have the breadth of thought of a strategist, and meticulous powers of observation. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor which never ceases. – John Le Carré, “To Russia, with Greetings” (1966)

The characters are drawn from the US Intelligence community or from various public and private spheres which lend themselves to security work. All are dysfunctional in some way, and the characters are typically betrayed by the institutions that they accept in their lives. The spirit of the game is to be cynical about institutions while taking a humanistic approach toward our characters. A central theme that I hope will be developed throughout the game is the struggle between individual desires and subordination to the group's goals.

Professional spies are mysterious, unpredictable, omnipotent, admirable yet criminal. Are they honorable patriots who compromise themselves for a just cause? Or are they liars, thieves, “a procession of vain fools, traitors” who play on the weaknesses of others to gain information?

I believe that Gumshoes format will allow many important events to occur out of a direct session and avoid artificial exposition in the form of flashbacks. Though frankly I’m all for the flashbacks when necessary.

While this is a spy game we will be inverting most of the conventions of the spy thriller genre. Our action sequences will be few, and over quickly. No surprise given how much an influence Sandbaggers is, but I also like the way Leverage handles this, with few exceptions Elliot is bad-ass without every beating anyone up on screen.

Comments

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by, and as I look round me now I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me, but I am one of them. – John Le Carré, Smiley writing to Anne in The Honourable Schoolboy

You need to know what your character’s strengths and weaknesses are, and have some idea how he or she will react in a given (ordinary) situation. Since you will be involved in the shadowy world of espionage, it is particularly important to consider:

• What are your institutional ties?
  
• Detail one weird thing about your background. This is one I want to flesh out as a group. No fearless monster hunters, but the character has to be posed to accept the world they live in.
  
  
  It is very important that the characters be three-dimensional. This means, in short, that I’m really hoping to discourage gimmicky characters. There is a kind of baseline norm here, and the further a given character is from it, the more you should ask tough questions.
  
  One of the areas I hope to draw horror from here is the basic problem of modern society where our loss of touch with our full human nature and our consequent tendency to engage in meaningless but destructive action or to wallow in contemplation and thought which leads only to more rationalization and justification of the process of dehumanization which engulfs us. The spy is a forced to act out this basic modern dilemma in his own individual situation. As a professional secret agent, he is part of an increasingly ineffective bureaucracy, but, as an agent in the field, a man out in the cold, he is in a situation where every action is real, a matter of life or death to him.