Espionage Branch of my Genre Tree

Another opportunity rife with wide adventure swings is the Espionage branch of my genre tree. The act or practice of spying is fraught with the edible tension we all crave when we set down face to face around the game table. This branch of the genre tree should speak loudly with tantalizing titles promising rich role playing rewards for players comfortable with public speaking, and relevant acting skills.

Whether flinty Boogy types or sexualized dimensional tramps character is king, style is substance, and the well is deep and dark. Therefore I do adopt the following three broad catagories in which to offer my gathered players to chose from;

3. Espionage;  3.1 Cyberpunk, 3.2 Hard Boiled, 3.3 Time Travel.

Holy sh$t, many places one can go off of the above three. Get your free flowing narrative style ready for this gas fueled adventure combination! For Cyberpunk I suggest grabbing a soft bound copy of R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook. It will easily strip down for use with the simple rules found in Trollish Delver’s USR role playing system.

Hard Boiled, now you have got some range here. Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, these are some of the usual tropes. These turn of the century Sherlock Holmes styled intrigues are all ripe for the Cthulhu mythos to be thrown at them. Elliot Ness, and his band of Untouchables run into werewolves? Play some Warren Zevon, how can you miss!

How about finding inspiration from one of Fiasco’s great playsets like Havana 1953? Spies, mobsters, whores, rebels, players, tourists.

Time Travel opens up all dimensional opportunities for your players to wander into paradox bending adventures. Whether you draw your inspiration from Zelazney’s Amber series, the serial television programs of Dr. Who, or horrible movies such as Looper there is plenty of material available to throw at your players. In the next few posts I will show you the detailed campaign settings I would plan to use.