Most of my players are no fans of the anti-vaccination movement, and so the opportunity to take it on in a game of Leverage was always going to be popular. For this game, I snapped up the following:
Kali as Cleo Huntington;
Elle as Angel Cross;
Andy as Theodore Camberley III;
Jon as Joel Hogarth; and,
Mairi as Samantha "Sam" Jones
Sam was a new addition to the Underground Railroad - a former-USAF fighter pilot, who was sent on a badly-planned air support mission after her superior did not listen to her tactical advice. When she managed to survive and return, she found that her commanding officer had pinned the bad decisions on her. A punch in his face and one dishonourable discharge later, and the Railroad can count a battle tactician among its members.
This was my Christmas episode, in which the crew were called upon to deal with a crisis at the Seattle Children's Hospital. After an unvaccinated child was brought into the hospital, his measles spread to a girl whose immune system was compromised due to chemotherapy. This caused her death, and also led to the hospital's exasperated top oncologist to make some very angry public statements about the head of the anti-vaccination movement in Seattle - a Dr Otto Ire.
When I created the character of Dr Ire as the mark for this game, I mashed together a number of real life examples, including Dr Oz, Andrew Wakefield and Matthias Rath. This gave me a villain for the piece who was rich, litigious and the head of a profitable business empire built on the sale of vitamin supplements. Noting that celebrity nutritionists like Dr Oz have a significant celebrity following, I also wrote Dr Ire to have his own television show, as well as celebrity endorsements.
Dr Ire was suing the oncologist for defamation of character, and also using his anti-vaccination movement to harass the hospital. Claiming to his followers that the hospital's misuse of poisonous chemotherapy treatments was responsible for the girls death, Dr Ire was arranging protests outside the hospital, which were scaring parents and children away. The hospital's administration wanted to support their oncologist, but Dr Ire's lawsuit was burning through their litigation fund through a drawn-out discovery process, draining the hospital's resources.
Wanting Dr Ire to have support from a celebrity who was famous for being famous, I came up with Lauren McCallister as a "mark agent. I don't know whether "The Real Housewives of Seattle" is a real thing - they actually have a "Real Housewives of the Potomac" on US television now, so almost any major affluent area of the country might have a "Real Housewives" by now. I decided that Lauren would be such a "Real Housewife".
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In my view, the players had a solid strategy from the outset. Jon and Kali were very concerned about finding a way to neutralise the threat of Dr Ire's top-flight lawyers, especially because the mark in the previous episode - "The Rent-Controlled Job" - survived because of his legal team.
Looking at the mark map, the crew hatched a plan to cause Dr Ire's empire to collapse by convincing his celebrity fans that his nutritional products were poisonous. This plan played very much to Cleo Huntington's strengths; as a chef to celebrities and a skilled grifter, she was the ideal person to infiltrate the set of the Real Housewives of Seattle, just in time to get involved in their Christmas Special. Competition was going to be hot between the housewives regarding which one could put on the best Christmas spread (well, hire someone to make the best spread), and so Cleo decided to pose as the gourmet chef, swooping in to help Lauren McCallister.
Cleo's efforts to infiltrate the Real Housewives' production provided us with a good mini-tutorial on using two features of the Leverage game: Call-Backs and Distinctions. In promoting herself to Lauren McCallister as a caterer, Cleo made a reference to offering her catering services to Maurice Colman at the opening of his gallery in "The Sideways Job". Since this Job has not been spent from Cleo's rap sheet, the reference allowed her to do for free something that would normally have cost her a Story Point: in this case, activate her "Chef to the Stars" Distinction. This gave her a bonus to all of her attempts to sell herself to Lauren as the chef that she needed.
In her haste to outdo the other housewives, Lauren snapped up Cleo in an instant and started trusting her very quickly, even agreeing to allow Cleo to do a "nutritional work-up" for her.
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During their planning, the crew nonetheless discovered something that raised serious concerns for them. Theodore had been digging through Dr Ire's finances. He did not discover anything illegal; Dr Ire was making millions legally and even benefitting from tax breaks by holding charity galas (which he also used to advertise his vitamin supplements). However, Theodore learned that Dr Ire may be making preparations to move his manufacturing overseas, greatly cutting his overheads. Not only that, but Dr Ire was also in close contact with the Health Minister for the small African nation of Lesotho.
Looking deeper into Dr Ire's history, the crew learned that he had previously taken legal action against Medicins Sans Frontieres for defamation, after they spoke out against him for promoting his vitamins as a treatment for HIV in Lesotho, where HIV infection is a serious healthy issue. They resolved to find a way to attack his credibility at his next charity gala, hoping to discredit him before the Lesotho government could invest further in his snake oil.
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This led the players into some "dark territory", where they contemplated using their Story Points to create an asset in the form of a local celebrity whose child had died - someone with clout who could take issue in public with Dr Ire suing the children's hospital. If they could have such a person speak out against Dr Ire at a charity event, his reputation with his movement and the Lesotho government might suffer.
This led to players tentatively making such comments as "Can we get a dead child as an Asset?".
"We're all going to Hell," Jon lamented. I think the players were being a bit hard on themselves, considering that most fantasy role-play consists of subterranean home invasion and killing sentient creatures for their loot. When writing Leverage games, I often have to come up with plot elements that are both horrible and tragically plausible, so having the players join in did not perturb me. If anything, observing the Story Point system and players' creativity create meta-angst for them was interesting.
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A twist in the story took place at the charity gala, when Sam spotted a young African male approaching a podium while Dr Ire was giving a speech. Being able to assess a combat situation in the blink of an eye, Sam realised that the young man had a gun and was trying to shoot Dr Ire. She also noticed that Dr Ire's bodyguards had also observed him, and that he was more likely to get himself killed than to harm his target. Sam intervened, tackling the man to the ground.
Dr Ire's bodyguards were actually Lesotho soldiers that had been tasked with protecting him, and were more accustomed to shooting at problems than the proper rules of being a bodyguard (e.g. focus on protecting the principle). They opened fire, and Sam took a bullet in the shoulder blade. Despite this injury, she was still able to bundle the young man into a backstage area and overpower one of the bodyguards, allowing Angel to swoop in and smuggle the man out of the building.
The crew later learned that he was a medical student from Lesotho whose sister had died from AIDS. His studies enabled him to learn that the vitamin pills that she had been prescribed were snake oil; grief-stricken, he came looking to take revenge on their supplier, Dr Ire.
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After the event, the crew gathered more information about Dr Ire's situation. Due to the panic caused at the charity gala, he was now secluded on one floor of a hotel with the Lesotho health minister, with security guards patrolling the floor and no-one but Dr Ire's closest associates able to visit.
Joel met with and interviewed a doctor from Medicins Sans Frontieres, whom he had encountered at the gala. From him, Joel confirmed that the Lesotho government had already been running trials of Dr Ire's vitamin treatments for HIV in Lesotho. These trials had done nothing but cost people time that proper treatments could have added to their lives, but a history of western exploitation in Lesotho had helped Dr Ire to convince the health minister that such treatment was just a Big Pharma conspiracy to create third-world debt.
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Meanwhile, Cleo's role in the job was proceeding according to plan. She not only prepared a mild poison to make Lauren physically sick, but - after getting access to the McCallister home - she swapped out her vitamin pills for ones that would reveal, under testing, more dubious artificial ingredients.
The poison became effective at just the perfect moment: when Lauren was presenting a taster spread to her other housewives. This resulted in her swooning and then throwing up on live network television, much to the schadenfreude of her rival housewives. Lauren was mortified, and Cleo used this opportunity to persuade her that the "dietary work-up" had raised some questions about her vitamin supplements. Lauren agreed to find out what the ingredients were in her tablets - the ones that Cleo had forged for her.
At this point, the plan started to come together for the crew. Checking the mark map, Mairi pointed out that turning Lauren against Dr Ire would at least split his empire in half. The two of them shared a PR man and a lawyer, and the PR man would choose Lauren as a client over Dr Ire, since she was the bigger celebrity, and a local sports star was also speaking out against Dr Ire (because the players did ultimately get their "dead child" asset).
After creating a scare for Lauren about her vitamins, Cleo convinced her to go with Angel to confront Dr Ire in the hotel - realising that she would be allowed access, since Dr Ire would think that Lauren was his ally. This turned out even better than the crew expected, because Lauren - ever the drama queen - showed up at the hotel with a camera crew. She then talked her way to Dr Ire's hotel room, where she accused him of poisoning her and issued him with a lawsuit - on network television and in front of the Lesotho health minister!
Suffice to say, this was the coup de grace that the crew wanted to deliver for the wrap-up montage. Dr Ire still left for Lesotho, hoping that his business plans would proceed, but was surprised when the health minister had him arrested and thrown into a Lesotho prison as soon as his 'plane landed. Discredited and now with much greater worries than defamation of character, Dr Ire's lawsuit against and harassment of the Seattle Children's hospital both went away. So the crew helped to give sick children a merry Christmas, while providing some riveting Xmas television entertainment for the rest of Seattle.
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I think that the game worked well, and I had a lot of fun playing Lauren McCallister, partly because I felt that doing so injected more personality than I had offered in previous games, and partly because she worked very well as an annoying diva. Even in the latter stages of the game, her character had players grinding their teeth. "Don't worry; she's on our side now," Elle tried to assure Andy at one point. "I know," he replied "but I just hate her so much!"
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found using the following links:
John Oliver on Dr Oz and Nutritional Supplements
Ben Goldacre on Matthias Rath
Jenny McCarthy - my inspiration for Lauren McCallister
Seattle Children's Hospital Oncology
Information on Lesotho from Medicins Sans Frontieres
