All right, here's the long promised actual play post about my ongoing game, Project Tenebrous, which is going to win the R-map contest.

Way back when the TV show Alias was cool, I thought to myself: "This overdramatic superspy nonsense is brilliant. I should combine it with other brilliant things and then I'd be brilliant." So I picked the Suicide Squad from DC Comics, and the final piece was the X-Men from Marvel Comics.

Alias was a show about a young woman with a double, then a triple (then later back to a double) life - she was a college student, she worked for the CIA, and she was a double agent inside an evil version of the CIA called SD-6.

Suicide Squad was a comic book about minor supervillains of the DCU who were hauled out of prison and thrown into deadly missions by shady figures in the US government who wanted deniability. This damn cool idea was added to when they actually routinely killed off members of the team.

The one thing I wanted to take from the X-Men was the "wah wah everyone hates us" supers subgenre. (If you're interested in it for gaming purposes, check out the game Brave New World. Ignore the online crying and blubbering about the metaplot, it was never important anyway.)

I thought up a breakpoint for the history of this game: the Sputnik launch broke a piece of alien technology preventing humans from developing into mutants. This was long enough ago that people would be able to identify mysterious events as potentially being mutant-caused but not so long ago that everyone's already worked out the big questions of mutancy.

Here is the website.

Here is the theme song. (I use the Editors' version because it's more hard-driving. But same principle.)

I picked out the game system: MURPG. The one with stones being moved around sheets and no dice or anything. Damn cool supers system. I concocted a few extra Actions and Modifiers and did a cheat sheet on movement in combat, which is really vague in the book.

Did I mention this was the year 2003?

This will become gigantically significant later.

I got my group together and I gave them the pitch:

Your characters will be the first mutant "task force" created, secretly, by the CIA. There were three basic "types" of character I would accept. Here's quote from the Character Creation cheat sheet I made up:

"The Criminal. Someone who self-identifies as a criminal or a thief. They commit crimes to make their living. They are approached by the CIA and offered new identities, payment, an eventual pardon, and the force of the Agency to keep the authorities from being too much of a hassle, in return for their service (Carrot.) They also are threatened with various measures should they revolt against the Agency, including re-incarceration, targetting of their families and/or friends and associates, etc. (Stick.)"

"The Naif. Someone who committed a minor crime, but because of their mutant powers, was placed at the Castle. Again, the CIA offers them the opportunity to eventually get their lives back (the carrot) and threatens the destruction of that life should they revolt (the stick.)" (The Castle is the nickname for the Federal Corrections Institution - Bellewether, the mutant detention center/jail/prison operated in Louisiana where all mutant offendors, large and small, end up.)

"The Volunteer. Someone with mutant abilities and some connection to the military, the police, or the government, who has a particular shady goal or nasty enemy that they want to defeat, offered the opportunity to go after that goal or enemy if they cooperate with the Agency (carrot), and something that the Agency can threaten if they revolt (stick)."

The character pitches I got were surprising. Not one person, nobody, wanted to be a Criminal, and only one person wanted to be a Volunteer. The remainder were all Naifs.

I had a delinquent who had run away from home and "just tried to get along" before she got nabbed for serial trespassing (living in people's homes when they were away.)
I had a soldier whose power was not entirely in his control and who had been the subject of a previous attempt at using mutants by the government but who had been blamed for his lack of control of his powers.
I had another delinquent who had been the subject of much more violent attempts to capture, and had responded more violently, but who really "just tried to get along" before her arrest too.
I had a woman who had "fallen in with the wrong crowd" because her boyfriend and fellow mutant had joined up with a mutant supremacist group with terrorist elements and she became hunted because of her connection with him.

And I had one volunteer who had been framed for murder (by her brother, unbeknownst to her) and the CIA knew the truth and would dribble information out to her about it so she could clear her name.

This was shocking to me! The X-Men angsty stuff had been denigrated by my group and myself for many years. I was expecting a team of wisecracking, sunglasses-wearing, Gen-X twerps. Instead I got a gaggle of neuroses.

The other thing I told everyone up front was "I expect there to be player character deaths in this game. So don't get too attached to your characters." But by the time character generation was over, everyone was so happy and enthused with their characters that I knew everyone would be miserable if anyone died. Campaign redesign ensued. I would no longer be trying to get a player character killed every three sessions at most.

Now I don't know if you remember 2003. Those of you outside America might remember it very differently than those inside America. The Iraq war had just started. It enjoyed 75 percent approval rating by America. Government officials were on TV daily to tell us that the two options were: 1) nuclear annihilation by Saddam-backed Al Qaeda Mexican immigrants (or something), or 2) a war so easy that the streets would be strewn with flowers and candy. And anyone who thought differently was regularly attacked as a traitor to their country who should be shot if we could spare the bullets.

At the time I concocted the missions for this game, I really did not want to get into the Iraq question. War on Terror rhetoric was way too pointed, and pointed at me personally, for it to be anything other than raw. I decided I would put aside the real-life politics except insofar as the two people in charge of the group would have different views:

One, Major Vining is a career intelligence agent and War on Terror true believer. However, she is more protective of her bureaucratic position than she is enthused about the War in Iraq.

The other, Frank Moby is also a career intelligence agent - but an analyst, among those highly concerned with the decision to go to war in Iraq.

So their attitudes would, I hoped, establish that I wasn't trying to nail down anything with respect to the Iraq War, or Guantanamo Bay, or torture, or all the other important real-world issues of the day by stacking the deck with people they'd have to deal with all believing the same way. I should note that everyone in my group opposed the war.

But what we learned in the real world did eventually come into play in the game world, in a very unexpected way.

There was a third mission but things were pretty much wrapping up by that point because two of the players were getting set to move to Los Angeles. I thought about continuing the game without them but I had just gotten into the groove of just how powerful the characters were and what kinds of situations I could throw at them. (A teleporting character can bypass security, a phased character can avoid damn near all physical harm, so I was sure to put in a ton of ridiculous security around everything and have a bunch of idiots shooting off guns for no reason.) Moreover, I intended to keep in touch with them at least a little and I knew they'd be disappointed if the game kept going without them. So I shelved it.

Three years passed and although I did nothing with the game, it changed.

First and foremost, the two friends moved back to Tucson and after a rather disastrous game ran by one of them I got some great feedback not only from them but from the rest of the group on what everyone was after in gaming. Basically they wanted to experience a cool story and play an interesting character interacting with each other, but past that there was no agreement. This made it so much easier on GMs for the group because we knew what we needed to do: team-based games with not a lot of individual one-on-one plots (although a bit was okay) and mission based games without deep involved plots with a lot of twists. It also gave me permission to do something I'd never done before - a true metaplot, changes in the world that would take place without interacting much with the individual stories of the characters.

The reason that was important was because of the second change: Between 2003 and January 2007 when the game restarted, the whole War on Terror exploded into a gigantic pile of dogshit. The Iraq War was a disaster and everyone knew it, Guantanamo was an embarassment and everyone knew it, and everything the administration had tried had inevitably slid into a morass of blood and stolen money. It wasn't even controversial anymore. It wasn't controversial anymore.

That meant it was mine.

YES. Hot damn this is great stuff.

I looked at my notes and remembered the third mission from the first game was one in which the team was sent to blackmail a South Asian warlord's lieutenant into giving them information about a weapons deal and then breaking up the deal.

Other missions included:

Going to Kalasvania (fictional Eastern European nation dominated by mutant-led mafiosi) and breaking up a deal between the mob and the Russian intelligence service to obtain access to a mysterious computer through the use of a mutant teenager who was capable of interfacing with machines. (He had been sold to the mutant mercenaries hired by the Russian government by his parents - which the team found out when they tried to return him to them.)

One of my favorites: the superintelligent mob boss incarcerated in the Castle hatches a scheme whereby the too-helpful parents of my wife's character agitate against conditions in the prison, forcing the CIA to quickly and quietly return her to prison until media attention dies down. The mob boss offers to make it all go away if she and her friends will go out to LA and look for the client book of one of his high-priced madams which was stolen by mutant operatives of a rogue FBI agent who is trying to set herself up in business as his successor. That one was great because although they did eventually tell their boss they were going to do it, he told them "you're on your own and I don't want to know more", and it was quite a romp. As it turned out, they got caught up in a conflict between the LAPD, the goons who had accidentally tortured the one solid lead to death, the madam and the FBI agent - whose career had previously been ruined by the soldier in the group. It was a hoot, probably the best one so far.

They were sent to Europe, several cities, to solve the disappearance of a researcher who, they found out, had been funnelled money by an anti-mutant group to go further than his WHO grant and begin to concoct an anti-mutant biological warfare agent. He was targetted for assassination by a mutant supremacist group, for kidnapping by the government of the island nation whose economy was based on mutant slavery, and naturally for a rather uncertain "rescue" by our heroes ("Are we really sure we want our bosses to have access to this guy?"), with INTERPOL and local police all over the case. This one was high action, with lots of things blown up and shot at and NATO tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia and all sorts of craziness.

Finally they were sent, on a tip from the Bryngali (Genosha-like, if you know Marvel, the mutant slavery government above if you don't) secret service on a trip to the middle of Africa where they discovered the mutant supremacy group had started a space program powered by mutant abilities in order to obtain information and materials from the mysterious alien artifact that had been broken by Sputnik. This was an interesting mission not so much because of what happened on it, which was pretty much a freewheeling "our plan went south? well, let's just teleport around and punch things" time, but what happened before and after.

So far the group, other than the one "off the books" adventure, had not done much in the way of massaging the information they were giving to the CIA. For one thing, even if they wanted to, they didn't do any work at keeping their story straight because 3 out of the 5 players in the group just don't really care for that kind of roleplay and won't participate in it, ever (much to my chagrin when I am playing my usual confidence tricksters opposite them... )
However, after this mission, they falsely told the CIA that the whole thing was a trap, in order to discredit the Bryngali and keep them from being able to use this intel as goodwill in their campaign to be recognized by the U.S.

I had implied that the team was coming under a lot of pressure from "the White House", really the Vice President's office and the National Security Council to "do something about Iraq". And when I started the next session with the statement, "Bryngali special operations forces located Saddam Hussein, eliminated most of the resistance near him, and provided the location to American troops, effecting his arrest." everyone just groaned. They all knew what this meant. The nation that enslaved mutants and which had powerful friends in the anti-mutant movement in the U.S. was going to get government sanction. Then when I said, "The Agency has been cut out of Iraq decisions at the National Security Council and we have to do something to get back in." everyone's mouths dropped open. They knew right then, they were going to Iraq.

The actual mission itself was fairly tame - stop a convoy of trucks with rockets and explosives from coming over the border, escorted by radical Islamic mutants belonging to a fictional faction I made up. But the resonance of playing in the Iraq War was just so strong that everyone said they felt the atmosphere was unbelievably charged. Everything that could go wrong, they expected it to, just by the nature of it. Still, I might have done more with it than I did, but what the hell. I got the thrills I wanted just setting UP the mission.

Most recently they broke up a deal between a Bryngali official fleeing as his nation began the slow build-up to civil war and a drug cartel which might have included hypertechnological weapons and even a nuclear device.

Some interesting final thoughts:

1 - Where the fuck did this giant website come from? I don't know. I started out even more ambitious though, with in-character blogs for people commenting on the events of the game, fake judicial decisions and news stories (some of which survive), and so on. I think part of it is that MURPG is such a simple system that slapping an NPC up on the site is an easy thing to do and makes it fun.

2 - I tried to scatter a few individual plots in, not very much, as I noted, our group can't tolerate that, but a little bit didn't hurt anyone - the PI investigating her brother framing her for murder, the soldier dealing with family issues as his wife battles cancer and his kids hate him for not growing old. Stuff like that. I really honestly do nothing whatsoever with these scenes and try to get them out of the way quickly. But I guess they're accomplishing what they are supposed to do, people seem to like them.

3 - I've put together a metaplot, here is the broad outline:

Bryngali enters a period of civil war. The mutant supremacists back the rebels. The US is under pressure to back the government. However, in case anyone hasn't noticed, our military is stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan and there's no way they could respond. So the US fakes a willingness to broker peace talks, in order to detain rebel leaders on Bryngali's behalf. This blatantly unethical move pisses off the career diplomats in the State Department even more than they already are. And it makes the mutant supremacists attack the US. An overstretched National Guard tries its best. And soon the protagonists are called on to make a choice about who they're truly loyal to...

That big choice will be more or less the end of the game. There may be two future chapters someday.

Thanks a lot for posting this, Jason!

Play more. Post more.

That's really cool stuff. I hope you keep updating this thread as your game goes on, especially after your timeline hits the spring of 2004, when all the Abu Ghraib horrors hit the media. Considering that you've got characters who will execute torturers without mercy (even ones who surrender), setting them up to choose between mutant terrorists or the U.S. government could get very, very interesting, huh?

Jason,

Thanks for posting the AP. I'd forgotten that Tenebrous was that cool game you mentioned in March whilst bragging about your wife until I followed your link. This campaign rules, it would be a great Marvel Max title. I dig how you pegged your influences and pushed them into the background to give texture to the stories.