Leverage Role-Playing - Episode Two: The Cult Job

This weekend gave me the opportunity to run my second session of the Leverage role-paying game, titled "The Cult Job".

The story re-united Cleo Huntington (Kali's thief) with Ed Mason (Richard's mastermind) and John Cotton (Adam's grifter).  A new member of the underground railroad joined them: a hacker called Joel Hogarth (Jon Lee).

Hogarth used to create media and social manipulation for major marketing companies, but quit after finding it too soulless; he joined the railroad while looking for a new direction and moral purpose in life.  Jon portrays his character as quite a tech-savvy hipster, which may make Jon quite keen to join Richard in a future episode of Leverage that I am currently planning - about the scandalous effect of IT corporations on the San Francisco renters' market.

"The Cult Job" on the other hand, brought the crew to the outskirts of a small town in Texas called Palestine.  Their client was an eighteen year-old girl called Temperance Gilead.  She had been born and raised in a secluded community of Branch Davidians.  After running away from home and a marriage that her cult-leader father had arranged for her, she discovered that she had no birth record or social security number, and could not prove her US citizenship.  Her parents were refusing to confirm her birth status.  In other words, she was a victim of identification abuse, whereby parents withhold proof of citizenship from offspring who are of age to leave home, depriving them of a means to live independently and coercing them to return.

The underground railroad had given Temperance a place to live in one of their Texas safe-houses.  A retired member of the railroad - a former school teacher - was looking after her and helping to fill the gaps in her education. In the meantime, the crew had a specific goal - to steal a young woman's identity back for her.

Their target was far from ordinary.  The community that Temperance's father led was secluded from society.  They had previously been living apart in tents and trailers, but "David Gilead" had come into a lot of money within the last five years, enabling the Davidians to upgrade to proper buildings with water and power.  Joel and Ed did a little digging, and soon established that a former Wall Street shark called Chad Warren had experienced a personal meltdown after the recession and been recruited into the cult, donating his vast earnings.  They were also mortified to learn that Warren - in his late forties - was the man to whom Temperance had been promised in marriage, because of a "vision" that her father had in a dream.

David Gilead himself had several children via a number of different "spiritual wives" in the community.  He had become the cult's prophet after spending years as their most successful recruiter.  He had been very skilled at identifying vulnerable people and bringing them into the fold.  Temperance's mother June, Joel learned, was one such person; she had been a drug addict and had lost a son to child services before David Gilead found her, got her clean and in the process got control over her.  Temperance had told the crew that her mother had doubts in private about the cult leader, but never had the courage to stand against him.

-

The team did a lot of checks on the Branch Davidians while forming their plans, and they even learned of an active ATF investigation into one of the cult members.  A man called Jason Hall was suspected of buying assault weapons for the group.  That activity is not illegal in Texas, but he was also attending gun shows in the area and buying sufficient gun parts to create "franken-guns".  The ATF believed that he was selling those weapons to gang members for additional funding.  Arming felons would certainly be a problem, and the ATF were on high alert after the Twin Peaks shoot-out involving biker gangs near Waco.

Joel successfully hacked the ATF and got access to their file on the Branch Davidian investigation.  However, Joel is played by Jon, and his dice hate him.  He had difficulty rolling dice at any time in the game without getting a 1, and he incurred a serious complication while hacking the ATF.  The agency discovered that they had been hacked, and believed that the Branch Davidians were responsible.  This caused them to accelerate their investigation into the cult.

Jon rolled a lot of complications during the game, but every time he did, he received a Story Point.   By the end of the game, he had a stack of 4 to spend, which is a lot of power in a game of Leverage.  Jon has already said that Leverage may be his new favorite game, because it means that he actually gets compensated for his lousy dice luck.  I can almost imagine Jon whispering to his luckless dice "Strike me down, and I'll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine!"

-

The crew formed a plan to get some of the team into the Branch Davidians' compound, not by approaching them, but by tricking one of the cult's recruiters into thinking that they were prime candidates for converts.  John Cotton had an idea of the crew posing as a failing televangelist and a married couple who act as his film crew.  The televangelist would put on a terrible performance near the churches in Palestine, Texas, and the couple would voice their doubts about him within earshot of the cult's recruiter, convincing him that they were "in the market" for a new saviour.

Being a slick grifter in a sharp suit, John Cotton naturally took the role of the televangelist, while Joel and Cleo filmed him, making no efforts to conceal their disapproval of his terrible performance.

John Cotton: "Uh... ladies and gentlemen, I am today here to talk to you about Gawd... to speak with you on a level... about the Devil!"

Joel Hogarth: "Ugh, this is terrible.  Can you believe this?  He's really lost his way!"

Cleo Huntington: "To think how much I used to believe in him!  All those years I spent devoting time to him - now he just seems like a false prophet."

John Cotton: "As you may know... throughout the ages, servants of God have been able to handle snakes without fear of being harmed!  Well, I went out into the wilds today, and I  found this... death adder.  So, I will just reach into this glass box..."

Cleo Huntington: "Oh no - he's doing the snake thing again... give me strength!"

Joel Hogarth: "Did we remember to take that thing to the vet?"

John Cotton: "Aaaah!  See?  The snake has bitten me and yet I have not died!"

Joel Hogarth: "This is just painful to watch; he's really doesn't know what he's doing anymore."

Cleo Huntington: "There must be a better way!  Lord, send us a sign!"

Cult recruiter: "Excuse me; I couldn't help overhearing..."

-

So Joel and Cleo were taken back to the Branch Davidian compound and introduced to the cult's leader.  David Gilead was quite a clever and controlling mark, so he had a few aces up his sleeve.  He knew that the authorities were investigating him, and had already identified an undercover FBI agent in his community.  He was giving this agent false information and preventing him from finding anything significant; he was even keeping the agent from accessing a completely mundane storehouse, just to create a decoy.

When he met Joel and Cleo, he saw an opportunity.  Here was a married couple with an interest in his group and television equipment.  Rather than being secretive, he invited them to film his group, figuring that media coverage would prevent the FBI from making any aggressive moves against him.  He was confident that he had enough control over his community that they would give Joel and Cleo a good impression.

- 

Meanwhile, Ed Mason and John Cotton decided to infiltrate the ATF encampment that was nearby, out of sight of the Branch Davidians' compound.  John had been keeping some fake FBI badges and windbreakers for just such an occasion, and so "Agent Pond" and "Agent Williams" rolled up to investigate.  At the same time, Joel was listening into the FBI's communication with their inside man.

Inside the camp, Ed and John encountered some very militaristic and gung-ho ATF agents, itching for a excuse to take on the Branch Davidians, and one highly-stressed FBI negotiator - the liaison to the undercover agent - trying to convince them to look for a non-violent approach.  Joel's earlier fumble was working against a peaceful solution; most of the ATF agents were now convinced that the joint-operation was under cyber-attack from the cult and they needed to act fast.

Ed and John backed the negotiator's play, and this is where Adam rolled a complication.  The negotiator, Agent Price, took Adam's character aside and said "So, you must be John Cotton, then!"  Earlier, John had tried to use his FBI contacts to learn more about the Branch Davidians, and news of his interest had clearly been conveyed to Agent Price.  However, the negotiator thought that John Cotton was present to represent the CIA, and he was not going to blow his cover, because John and Ed were the only other people backing his play.  Nonetheless, John now had no choice but to support Agent Price's decisions.

-

Meanwhile, Joel and Cleo were finding the Branch Davidians difficult to infiltrate, due to the group's paranoia.  They agreed to stay the night in a small house for guests, and Cleo attended a dinner for some of the women of the community.  She met Temperance's subdued mother.  She also met Kendall, a woman whose husband had left her because of her infertility; she was currently enjoying high status among the women as a prospective "spiritual wife" for David Gilead, who was promising to "pray with her" to cure her infertility.  Cleo also met another woman who was, with quiet anger, avoiding such advances; the cult leader had told the husbands of his group to observe celibacy, while he "fathered God's children".  This sounds crazy, but I modelled Gilead's behaviour on things that David Koresh did as leader of the Waco chapter.

Cleo did manage to slip away at one point, late at night.  She broke into the storehouse (easily - she picked the lock with her eyes closed just to make it more interesting) and realised it was a decoy.  Still, eluding the cult members was difficult; at times, Kendall seemed to be following her with a flashlight and a Stepford smile.

Joel used his computers to put footage from the community on the internet overnight, in the hope that this would deter the ATF from taking any violent action.  It worked, but Jon rolled a 1 in the process, causing a complication: the following morning, a couple of television news outlets had vans and cameras set up near the entrance to the compound, thinking that a wacky cult was opening its doors to public interest.  Now the crew had to contend with the media watching.  Jon's dice are the gift that keeps on giving.

-

The crew managed to turn their fortunes around on that new day, probably in no small part because Jon started to spend from his small arsenal of Story Points.  

Cleo tailed Jason Hall into the community's chapel, but then he disappeared.  Moments later, Joel saw Jason Hall leaving David Gilead's home with the cult leader, on the way to the morning sermon.  Realising that a hidden link existed between the chapel and the home, Joel decided that he would have a snoop inside the house, while everyone else was gathered in church.  He found a key under a plant pot with a note for Kendall; it was clearly intended so that she could let herself into David Gilead's home so that they could "pray" together.

Inside the cult leader's study, Joel quickly found a secret doorway, and a safe behind a painting.  This posed an ironic problem.  The crew's hacker was in the study, while their safecracker was stuck in the chapel, surrounded by people.  Fortunately they improvised; Joel stuck his earpiece onto the safe so that Cleo could listen and give guidance.  While other church-goers were kneeling in muttered prayers, Cleo was whispering "Right a bit... now slowly turn it to the left..."

Jon got his first lucky roll of the game and I rolled a 1, so Joel got to find pretty much everything he needed in the safe, including a photograph album containing proof of Temperance Gilead's parentage and the cult leader's laptop.  Joel also found the secret route from the chapel to the house; it went underground to a bunker, where Gilead and Hall had been keeping a large supply of guns.  The bunker was intended to be a place of last resort in the event of a Waco-style siege.

- 

The crew then formed a solid idea for destroying the mark.  Joel had been recording the undercover agent's transmissions to the FBI, and filming footage of David Gilead talking.  Using the editing suite on his Mac Book, he synched the audio with the footage and tuned the agent's voice to sound like the cult leader's.  He then left the composite playing on Gilead's laptop in his study.

In the ATF encampment, John Cotton and Ed Mason approached Agent Price.  John tipped off the FBI agent that the storehouse was a decoy.  "We re-tasked an X-ray satellite to photograph the storehouse on its way back to Cuba," he said.  "It's empty, but how we know this is classified, so don't tell the ATF where we got this."  Ed Mason then got Agent Price to arrange for a FBI helicoptor to do a fly-over of the Branch Davidian compound.  When asked why, John Cotton explained that the helicoptor would be picking up and delivering David Gilead to the FBI without a single drop of blood being spilt.  The negotiator was stunned; "I heard stories..." he said, "about Honduras... but I didn't think you could do things like this..."

In the chapel, Cleo tried to slip away from the congregation, but Kendall followed her.  However, this was a trick - Cleo used Kendall's suspicions to lure her into discovering the secret passage, and she followed it to David Gilead's house.  There, she entered the study and found a recording of her leader, ostensibly ratting out his cult members to the FBI!

What happened next was too fast for the mark to handle.  Kendall ran out of his home in hysterics, holding the laptop above her head for everyone to see, just as the entire community was emerging from the chapel.  The crowd turned to outrage and spontaneously began to chase down their leader, who ran from them.  Just at that moment, a helicoptor with big "FBI" markings swooped down with an agent on a rope ladder to rescue Gilead.  Acting on panicked instinct, the cult leader took the agent's hand and was whisked away... up high into the sky, where the television crews were able to film his escape.

This apparent betrayal immediately shattered Gilead's cult following, but most of his followers had committed no crimes, so no violence occurred and no arrests were made at the scene.  The FBI did not even have a strong case against the cult leader, but now he had little choice but to provide evidence against Jason Hall, who otherwise might come after him.

The crew meanwhile, simply left without being captured in any footage.  They were able to provide Temperance Gilead with proof of her identity, and even ultimately re-unite her with her mother.

-

In the game's wrap-up, the crew soundly crushed the mark.  Jon rolled a lot of dice and was able to count most of them to get his result; David Gilead had strong dice (two d12s), but did not really stand a chance.

The wrap-up mechanic in Leverage is quite cool, because the main antagonist can get to roll a lot of dice, depending not just on his own abilities, but also on how many of his allies and resources can help.  The better the crew does at eliminating the mark's advantages during the game, the weaker he is in the finale.

What made this game interesting was that the players found a way to eliminate most of David Gilead's advantages because of the way that they tricked him, not because they ground down his allies.  The mark had a lot of things working for him, but those things were supposed to be threats to the crew because of the Branch Davidians' paranoia and nosiness.  Since Kali and Jon set him up by using the community's suspicions to bait them and letting them draw their own conclusions, David Gilead could not call on their dice in the wrap-up contest.  The finale was the kind of psychological Judo that can make a crew really dangerous.

-

I think that the game went well.  However, I think that I learned a few lessons that keep in mind for any future games, for my benefit and also for the players:

1) Don't let the planning stage of the story go on too long,  At the start, the players get a lot of information about the game, and they can spend a long time mulling over their options.  However, they should be reminded not to wait too long before putting a plan into action.  Inevitably, they are going to learn even more from people they meet and clues that they find during play, so - while they should think about their approach - no plan is set in stone.

2) Encourage the players to avoid being wedded to one idea for a solution.  They were initially thinking of ways to set up Jason Hall or David Gilead so that the FBI or ATF to arrest them, but they ultimately realised that the ATF were too gung-ho to really be part of the solution.

Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:

Identification abuse of a young girl in Texas
Biker shoot-out near Waco, Texas
Some material about David Koresh and his cult following
John Oliver on militarisation of the police
Nothing to see here. Move along. 

Leverage Role-Playing - Episode One: The Sideways Job

After what I consider to be a pretty successful game of Leverage on Saturday, I thought that I would write up the experience.  Kali, Richard, Adam, Beth and I played through an adventure that I had written called "The Sideways Job"; the story flowed quite well, and we all got to find out how the rules of the game work in practice.

First of all, we generated characters.  This took some time; I think in future I should help prospective players to make their characters before the day of the game.  The adventure itself lasted about 6 hours; character creation tagged a couple of hours on the front.

So the players fleshed out their parts in the story:

Richard was Ed Mason (the Mastermind) - a former tobacco-company executive, who had tried to turn whistle-blower after finding out about his corporation's horrific behaviour in third-world countries.  Ed's bosses out-maneuvered him, leaving him without a job or a credible case.  He tried to find a better life by joining the ACLU, but found that even they did not have the power to challenge corporate greed.

Kali was Cleo Huntington (the Thief) - a caterer to the rich and famous who used access to their homes and venues to scout them for burglary.  Cleo is a very different kind of thief to Parker in the television series - being both a gourmet chef and an expert fence.  In the parlance of the old Underground Railroad, Cleo would be a "conductor" - someone who has the skills to move people and items from place to place.

Beth was Maria Vasquez (the Hitter) - an EMT who used to be in the US army.  She did bomb disposal in Afghanistan, but indiscriminate drone strikes horrified her.  She then tried to be an army medic, but she was forced out of the army when her colleagues took a dim view of her providing medical aid to Afghan civilians.

Adam was John Cotton (the Grifter) - a shark in a sharp suit.  John was a good company man for the CIA, but he got tired of the bureaucracy that kept him from going after bad guys, just because they had moved to domestic soil.  So he took a leave of absence from the service to take action for himself.

So we have four highly-skilled individuals, each with their own issues with the establishment.  They made perfect members for the Underground Railroad.

The concept of the Leverage games that I am running is that the heroes are all members of a modern version of the Underground Railroad in the United States.  Since its days as a network that helped slaves escape to freedom in the nineteenth century, my fictional take on the railroad has become a network of safe houses and outlaw heroes, all working to tackle the injustices that the law fails to touch.

The table was at first split over what job to do; I had a couple of stories ready to be played, and while The Winter Soldier Job seemed perfect for Beth and Adam's characters, The Sideways Job seemed ideal for Richard and Kali's.  The latter sounded a little quirkier, I think, and so the group agreed to it.

-

The story started with Ed Mason contacting the network, so that he could assemble a crew for a job in Napa Valley, California.  Their base of operations was a townhouse functioning as a bed 'n' breakfast, but it was also a front - historically, it had been a safehouse for the railroad since the civil war.

Mason began to explain the job, pouring a glass of wine for the crew:

Ed Mason: "Thank you all for coming.  I've called you all here to discuss a job... about wine.  But before we go any further, I should clarify that we're here to help a family - not to kill anyone."

John Cotton: "For the last time, I am not an assassin."

Mason had been investigating insurance firms that avoid paying out, and had come across the case of Lorenzo Agnelli - a man who ran a small, commercial wine cellar not far from Santa Rosa.  He had made a claim after what he had reported as an arson attack on his cellar.  However, the insurers had refused, after their investigator discovered that Lorenzo's sister believed that their doddering father was responsible for the fire.  Without obvious signs of an accelerant, the local cops had no proof of arson - and they could not justify bringing in a CSI team.

But Lorenzo was sure that he had been targeted; the fire had not harmed his customers' wine, but had destroyed his family's nest egg - four bottles of Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951, which had a combined value of over $200,000.  When checking the scene, Cleo found evidence that someone had picked the lock to the wine cellar, but it was so subtle that the police had missed it.

What made the wine valuable was its scarcity; less than twenty bottles of Penfolds Grange 1951 exist.  Since the Agnelli family had no personal enemies, Maria hacked a wine trading website's database to see whether anyone else in the area claimed to own the same wine, because destroying another owner's collection would increase the value of the surviving bottles.

Sure enough, they found their prime suspect.  A man called Bertrand Colman was on record as owning three bottles.  With some quick research, the crew learned that Colman used to be a hedge fund manager, but he had gone to prison for eighteen months for lying about the value of investments to his clients and misappropriating their money to spend on himself.  Although the court had fined him heavily, his victims had always claimed that he had hidden assets from the FBI, preventing them from recovering much of their money.

While Bertrand had been in prison, his brother Maurice - a PR guru for exhibitions and art galleries - received a lot of overseas investment to set up and direct his own gallery in Santa Rosa and fill it with art.  When Bertrand came out of prison, he immediately got a new job as the day manager at this gallery.  He was later given the bottles of wine from his brother as a "reward" for his work, as if they were just ordinary bottles of plonk.

[I should perhaps have put a trigger warning on this game for Richard.  He has a real loathing for white-collar crooks, especially the ones that get away with their crimes even after they have been caught, by hiding assets overseas.  He immediately realised that the wine and the gallery were all just fronts so that the mark could retrieve his hidden assets from abroad, and it got Richard pretty fired-up.  The upside was that he delivered a really good "reason why the mark sucks" speech to the other players, just as Timothy Hutton has done on so many episodes of the show.]

Cleo Huntington: "If he understands the value of the wine, why destroy it instead of stealing it?"

Ed Mason: "He can destroy it because he doesn't care about it - he just uses valuable things as a way to move his money around.  This guy's a total crook - he's the kind of person who'd take a baseball bat to a Ferrari if he thought it'd make him money!  And what about all the other people that he stole from?  They're all innocent victims too!  Helping this family is not all we're going to do; we're also going to get back everything that he stole before and return it!"

John Cotton: "You don't do things by halves do you?"

John Cotton used his FBI contacts to do a little digging into Bertrand and discovered that in prison he had shared a cell with a fraudster called Eric Bradley, who had been convicted of hiring men to burn down his restaurant so that he could collect on the insurance.  [Adam asked a really spot-on question during the planning phase of the game and it paid off].  As soon as Eric Bradley came out of prison, Bertrand had hired him to be the gallery's security chief.

-

The first major scene featured the crew attending a function at the gallery.  In a single call, Cleo manipulated Maurice Colman into letting her provide the catering for the function, and so she and Maria were present as staff.   Cleo had even managed to swing access to the gallery on the previous evening, giving her plenty of time to scout the location's security and valuables.  She was surprised to find that nothing in the gallery was particularly valuable - the paintings were all hype, but the security was top-of-the-line.

Maria had to tolerate serving champagne flutes to rich snobs, but when you have a directional microphone hidden under your tray, a high society function is a great way to eavesdrop.  She caught a conversation between Bertrand Colman and the owner of the vault where he kept his wine, in which he said when he was going to take his bottles to auction.

Posing as guests, Mason and John Cotton did not have as much success working the room - they managed to rub the thuggish security guards the wrong way.  Nonetheless, Mason found a major clue; a genuine art enthusiast had heard a rumour that Maurice had been buying up paintings of real value, but not the scraps that were on show in the gallery.

After the function, Mason made further contact with the art enthusiast, and discovered that he had heard about the art purchases from a man by the name of Carlton Connor.  Cleo recognised the name; Connor was one of her black market contacts.

-

Cleo arranged a meeting and was able to convince her contact that she had goods that Maurice Colman might like to buy [Kali had given Cleo a special Talent, which meant that she almost always has something of value to trade].  Thus, she was able to get Connor to spill valuable information: Maurice had bought all of his valuable paintings at once, which suggested to Connor that they were purchased so that they could act as hidden assets.

This left the crew scratching their heads.  Why would the Colman brothers still need to hide assets?  Bertrand's scheme had apparently worked; the $1.2 million dollars that had been invested in the gallery was effectively clean; Bertrand could hardly be re-tried for his previous financial crimes.  Nonetheless, the crew had a couple of plans: (a) find a way to swipe Bertrand's wine bottles during their transit to the auction house, and (b) sell Maurice a painting with a tracking device and follow it; hopefully it would lead the crew to the other hidden paintings.

Suspecting that the Colman brothers were setting up an insurance scam, John suggested that the crew get hold of the insurance details for the gallery.  The gallery's firewall caught Maria's spear-fishing attack, but - by presenting himself to Maurice as a competitive insurer - John Cotton was able to get a valuation for the gallery.  The crew was surprised to find that the valuation seemed about right for the real value of the gallery and the artworks inside it - about $400,000.

So, with no sign of insurance fraud, the crew were back to the original question: what possible need existed to hide assets?  Then, one by one, the truth dawned on them...

Ed Mason: "Wait... what if Maurice is hiding the paintings from his own brother... making him think that all of the money is in the gallery?  I mean, it's not like his brother knows anything about art...."

Cleo Huntington: "That would make sense for the security; I saw a laser net on a painting that was worth more than the painting itself!"

John Cotton: "That would also explain why the security guards are on alert - they don't know what they're guarding isn't worth much."

-

I think my favourite scene of the whole game was the scene that followed.  The crew decided to make a play for Bertrand's wine bottles at the auction house, as opposed to trying to break the wine out of a cutting edge vault or trying to snatch it in transit.  They knew that a group of Bertrand's goons would be bringing the wine to the venue in a secure case.  Mason got a copy of the case, and - with help from Lorenzo - Cleo forged a set of three bottles of Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951.  She made sure that the corks could not pass authentication though - the plan was to switch Bertrand's bottles for fakes that would land him in trouble for fraud at the auction.

The crew tag-teamed the situation really well, despite the obstacles in their way.  Maria staked out the gallery and tipped off the rest of the crew as the security guards drove to the vault.  Mason waited in a coffee shop opposite the auction house and notified Cleo and John as the guards arrived.  Then John got the desk clerk out of the way by "accidentally" spilling coffee on her jacket.  This got her to go the bathroom, but there was a catch - John noticed that the clerk had a security badge, but he could not get it from her.

Meanwhile Cleo set herself up behind the desk and got ready to receive the guards and the wine.  Knowing that she did not have a badge, she asked Maria to be ready with a distraction, in case the guards asked about it.  Of course, nothing distracts people quite like hearing their car alarm go off while they're making a delivery, so Maria put a brick through their car window.

Cleo Huntington: "Can I help you, sir?"

Eric Bradley: "Yes - this is for lot 34.  Wait... aren't you supposed to have a ba..."

*Weeeeoooooo - weeeeooooooo*

Eric Bradley: "The car!"

Cleo Huntington: "Right you are, sir.  Lot 34; got it.  I'll make sure it's delivered."

*Yoink*

Cleo then slipped away with the case, so that when the real clerk returned, all that was needed was for Mason to land the con, by delivering the fake case to the auction as if it were Bertrand's.

This is where the whole plan went sideways.  Bertrand had traveled to the auction house separately, and he arrived just as Mason was handing over the case.  Bertrand knew all of his security guards, and knew that Mason was not one of them.  He confronted Mason and asked him what he was doing, and his attempts to claim that he was one of Eric Bradley's men did not convince.  Panicking, Mason tried to flee the auction house with the case, but ran straight into the security guards that were outside inspecting their car.  Watching from a distance, Maria saw Bertrand's goons grab Mason, bundle him into their car and drive away.

[The whole scene was a great piece of teamwork, but on the very last action, Richard rolled snake eyes on 2d8 - a massive complication.  As he said at the time "It's all gone Pete Tong!" - for me, it was beautiful.]

And yet, this being Leverage, even though the crew's plan seemed to have unravelled, they still found a way to save the day, as if they had a perfect back-up plan all along.

-

Mason still had his earpiece in, and so the rest of the crew could hear him being questioned in the car.  When asked who he was, Mason hit on a new plan: "I guess you caught me - I work for your brother; he hired me to get the wine from you."

Bertrand and his goons decided to drive to the gallery to confront Maurice.  Hearing this, the rest of the crew drove to the location to be ready to act.  Bertrand arrived, and had his men frog-march Mason to Maurice's office.

Maurice Colman: "Who is this?"

Ed Mason: "No use pretending you don't know now, Maurice; they caught me!  The jig's up..."

Maurice Colman: "I have no idea who this is!"

Ed Mason: "Bertrand's gonna know everything now - about you taking his money... about the real valuable paintings!"

Maurice Colman: "This is preposterous!"

Ed Mason: "Well, I do have this proof..."

Mason produced a recording of Cleo's conversation with Carlton Connor, when he revealed that Maurice had been buying paintings worth close to $750,000 on the black market to be hidden assets.  Turns out Cleo had been wearing a wire [got to appreciate a good flashback].

Maurice at first tried to stutter an explanation, but then he suddenly bolted out of the room, with Bertand and Eric Bradley in hot pursuit.  He managed to lose them by locking a door behind him, and he raced out to his car to escape, carrying a collection of painting tubes from the gallery's storeroom.  Throwing them into the back seat of his car, he started to drive away.

Of course, in Leverage as in horror films, one should always check the back seat.  As the car was pulling out of the lot, the trunk quietly opened, and Cleo rolled out, clutching the tubes.  Of course, as soon as the crew figured out that Maurice was trying to steal from Bertrand, they knew that he would have to make a break for it with the valuable paintings, which would flush them out into the open.  So, Cleo was waiting for Maurice in his car.

Of course, Mason was still in trouble; he was stuck in an office with two security guards, and could be handed over to the police....  But then came a knock at the office door.  When one of the goons went to open it, it was slammed back in his face, knocking him prone - as Maria strode into the room and laid out the other guard with a single right hook.  Time for the crew to make off with the spoils.

-

So in the end, Maurice lost all his wealth and had to go on the run from his own brother, but what about Lorenzo and the wine?  When Cleo took the wine from Eric Bradley, she checked it and realised that Bertrand's bottles were also fakes - Maurice had even conned him about the value of his wine investment.  So she entered them into the auction anyway.

Bertrand managed to avoid getting in trouble for fraud by pinning the crime on Eric Bradley, but the crew found a way to turn even this to their advantage.  Since Bradley had a criminal history of fraud and arson already, not only did this help Bertrand use him as a scapegoat, but it helped the crew to link Bradley to the fire in Lorenzo's wine cellar, especially since he was handling the same wine as the one that the fire destroyed.  This was enough to convince Lorenzo's insurers of the legitimacy of his claim and get the Agnelli family their money.

So Bertrand lived to fight another day - but he did not live well, having lost his brother, his henchman and almost $1 million - most of his ill-gotten gains - to the crew.  With Cleo's black market connections, the crew also had the means to liquidate the paintings and return money to Bertrand's original victims - just as Mason had vowed to do.

[The finale was actually pretty tough, because the players were taking on two marks, when most games of Leverage only pit them against one.  They had done a really good job of attacking Maurice Colman's network of agents and resources, and Richard had a powerful clue to use against him.  However, Bertrand still had a lot of his network, which meant that he had a lot of dice to roll in the 'Wrap-up Flashback' - including any of Eric Bradley's characteristics that applied.  So one antagonist lost in the final test against the crew, but the other won.  This does not mean that a bad guy beat the crew, but it does mean that he did not get his full comeuppance; his henchman went to jail instead of him; maybe Bertrand Colman will be back in a future episode.]

-

A good time was had by all, and I am hoping to run more jobs in the future.  The crew might have slightly different membership next time; I can run a game for a crew of up to five, and the point of the Underground Railroad is that different members of the network may show up when a call for aid goes out.  This creates plenty of room for players to duck in and out of a series of games, not requiring the consistent attendance of a role-playing campaign.

Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:

Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951
Swiss banks and hidden assets
A hedge fund fraud of comparable scale to Bertrand's crimes
The problem of lack of resources to investigate non-fatal arson
The penalties for wine forgery

Narrative Tools

Like many role-players, I have heard the terms "crunch" and "fluff" being used to describe the content of game books - "crunch" being the writing that covers rules and mechanics, and "fluff" being a game's setting and its stories.  Lately, however, I have noticed that some role-playing games have a third element: narrative tools.

I am writing about the part of a game book that advises players and story tellers about creating and structuring a game so that it tells a good story, and I have come to realise that it is an element that a lot of rule books sorely neglect.  In many role-playing games, the only concession that the core book makes to advice on narrative tools is a short section on games-mastering tips.  I'm not trying to be overly-critical; such tips as "don't make the players roll dice for every little action that their characters take" are reasonable advice.  However, I have recently had the chance to read game books that show just how far guidance on using narrative tools has progressed; games writers are now able to offer much more developed ideas that help with the pace, structure and drama of games.  The games master sections in old White Wolf books seem dated and thin by comparison.

For my birthday, Adrian bought me a copy of Monster of the Week, a tabletop game in which players take the roles of monster hunters, dealing with a variety of threats, in the same vein as such television shows as Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Of course, such a game concept has been done before; the aforementioned franchises have their own dedicated tabletop games.  However, what Monster of the Week has to set it apart from the others is a very commendable section on narrative tools.

For example, the game asks the story teller to assign a category to every non-player character that he or she creates.  Minor characters, collectively referred to as "Bystanders", should each have a word to express that character's purpose in the story.  An "Innocent" is a character that appears in the story to do the right thing or remind the player characters what the moral course of action is.  A "Detective" is a minor character that is in the story to rule out explanations for events.  I really like that the book specifies "rule out" - in that short phrase, it reminds the story teller that the job of solving a mystery should fall to the players, and so non-player characters should usually steer an investigation without solving it.

The point is that Monster of the Week encourages games masters to think "why am I making this character?"  This can help to prevent doing things in a game that serve no real purpose.  The game also has a very good section on story arcs.

I think that one of my reasons for being so keen on the development of narrative tools is because they stack.  Since they are tied neither to a game's system nor to its setting, any ideas that you get can be combined to help in the writing of other games.  When creating a game, nothing stops me from combining what  Monster of the Week has taught me about pacing with, say, what Leverage advises about the effect that certain plot twists have on players' psychology.

Shared Storytelling is a Battle Royale

Everything that I know about running a LARP, I learned from pro-wrestling.

I know I've written the above line on this blog before (entry here), but I did say that I would re-visit the similarities between pro-wrestling and live-action role-play.  Previously, I was writing about endings and the effects of "hot" or "clean" finishes.  Today, I read an article - "How to become a better Larper" - that Elle had posted on G+, and I was reminded again of the overlap between the skills that LARPs require, and the skills that wrestlers develop.

From watching wrestling and reading about it, I've learned that the skills that contribute to a successful wrestling show are the same ones that make a LARP game enjoyable for all of the players.  Similarly, the behaviour that is most destructive to the long-term prospects of a live-action chronicle is just as poisonous in a wrestling promotion.  Elle's review of the above article said something that applies equally to LARP and wrestling: "We create shared stories, emphasis on shared.  It's not all about you and your character.  The best games are those where everyone works together to make the most awesome story they can manage."

Wrestling is, of course, a form of storytelling in which some of the participants are very experienced and have well-established characters, while others are new to the business and trying to catch a break.  A promotion's success depends on it having a number of characters and plot lines that have "gotten over" with the fans.  "Getting over" is a common term that people in the wrestling business use to describe success, but they don't always mean popularity.  For a heel, success is being booed and widely despised.  The important thing is to elicit a strong reaction, which is described as "heat".

Of course, some wrestlers are only concerned with their own success, but the most respected are the ones that understand the need to share the limelight and not put themselves before the story.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson in the history of wrestling comes from the fall of WCW - a wrestling promotion that Ted Turner once owned.  With his backing in the 1990s, WCW became big enough to rival Vince MacMahon's WWE, which had for years been the biggest wrestling company in the world.  However, WCW threw away all of its money and success.  Part of its downfall can be attributed to wrestlers behaving in ways that you might expect from problem players in a long-term LARP.

A major problem was that a clique of wrestlers - including Hulk Hogan - were making story decisions behind the scenes.  Hogan may be a wildly popular wrestler among fans, but he made his reputation in the days when the industry was refusing to acknowledge publicly that wrestling is staged.  Behind the scenes, he has for a long time had a reputation of not knowing how to promote anyone but himself.  When he and a group of well-established and like-minded wrestlers had influence over the booking in WCW, they hogged the limelight.  This caused WCW shows to become boring and predictable; week after week, Hogan and his group - the nWo - would always triumph.  Backstage, the most influential group of wrestlers were acting like they were a class above the others.  In an interview about WCW, AJ Styles - who was a rookie when he worked there - said that if guys like Hogan, Kevin Nash or Scott Steiner were arguing about plot in the locker room, then it was time for everyone not in the clique to leave and go somewhere else.  This soon became not just an arrogant way to treat less-experienced wrestlers, but also an arrogant way to treat the fans.

The nadir came with "the finger poke of death".  A great main event match between Hogan and Nash for the world title was promised, but the plot twist was that Nash was in league with Hogan.  Hogan poked him in the chest, and Nash lay down to be pinned and ceded the world championship.  The fans were outraged; sure - wrestling's fake, but the customers nonetheless expect to see an entertaining staged fight.  This kind of treatment, combined with a few other terrible business decisions, caused WCW's fan base to start hemorrhaging supporters, eventually leading to the promotion's collapse.  By the time that Vince MacMahon purchased WCW as a way of dismantling it, it was worth so little that Chris Jericho once said that, if he had known at the time how little it sold for, he would have put in a competing bid.

As you can tell, I've listened to a few commentaries from current and former wrestlers about the rise and fall of WCW.  Shane Douglas, whom I mentioned in my last post about wrestling, once remarked "That's why you should never let the lunatics run the asylum."

I think that this is something that Larpers should give some thought: an entire multi-million dollar company that was built on storytelling collapsed, and part of the cause was people playing in cliques, plots being decided among people that had a conflict of interests, and wrestlers refusing to share the limelight with others.

Personally, if I want a story about someone learning to share, I think about a wrestler called Rhyno.  When Rhyno (real name Terry Gerin) finished his training in Detroit, he asked whom he was first going to beat in the ring.  Seeing that he still had a lot to learn about shared story-telling, his coach and promoter Scott D'Amore said that he would make calls and get Rhyno into any wrestling show or promotion that he could arrange - provided that Rhyno lost every single match for the first year of his career.  Partly, this was about Rhyno getting some humility and "paying his dues" - almost all of the wrestlers in the industry have to spend the early part of their careers taking losses while they learn the ropes.  However, the other part was about teaching Rhyno to participate in a story without having to "win" it.

Some of the most respected wrestlers are the ones that have learned to make stories interesting without needing those stories to end in their favour, and some Larpers could learn a valuable lesson from their examples.  For instance, in his autobiography A Lion's Tale, Chris Jericho describes an occasion when he was playing a heel and scheduled to lose to Goldberg - a popular face.  Goldberg was winning a lot of "squash matches" - that's a term for a quick one-sided fight that serves to show just how powerful a character is - and he was due to squash Jericho too.  Backstage, Jericho convinced the booker Eric Bischoff not to change who would win - but to let his character perform some promos in which he would mock Goldberg and flee, weaseling his way out of facing Goldberg directly for a few weeks.  The idea was to wind up the audience, to make it more satisfying for them when Goldberg did eventually get his hands on him.  The idea paid off and Bischoff and Goldberg both appreciated it afterwards - because Jericho was thinking about what would generate heat for the story, rather than what would make him look good.

LARPs rarely if ever ask players to accept that their characters are going to lose outright, so to my mind, we should actually have less temptation to ignore the responsibilities of shared storytelling than wrestlers do.  Nonetheless, we still occasionally see some players that want to hog the plot and shut down others' roles.

Perhaps this is a useful analogy: in wrestling, fan reaction is "heat"; for Larpers, "heat" is player interest.  Imagine that a player is blocking others' enjoyment of the game (and perhaps - as Elle mentioned - using "My character wouldn't do that" as an excuse for not involving other characters).  That player is taking heat out of the game.

Before I stop drawing this parallel, I should mention one practice in wrestling that I would strongly recommend in LARP chronicles - the skill of "putting someone else over".  Some experienced wrestlers - once they have become high-profile - use their prestige to benefit others.  They ask to be given story lines with talented but less-experienced wrestlers that need a push to help them be noticed.  This is pro-active limelight sharing.

Perhaps the best example from wrestling is the Undertaker - a wrestler who rarely loses, not because he's selfish but because his character is intended to be a very powerful monster.  The man who plays him - Mark Calloway - has a lot of years of experience and input into his story lines behind the scenes.  What the Undertaker has occasionally done with his reputation is use it to draw the spotlight to a relatively new wrestler by losing or having a closely-fought match with him.  When Undertaker lost to Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania, it was the first time that anyone had ever beaten 'Taker at that event, and he had been appearing at Wrestlemania for over twenty years.  By conceding this epic winning streak to Lesnar, Calloway was actually endorsing his opponent in a huge way.

In LARP, character patronage is even easier; it does not have to entail losing a fight with another character.  No matter the form, it can be massively helpful.  I spent a long time in the old Cam UK vampire game playing a relatively low-powered Ventrue, and it was hard to get involved in plot at times, because many characters in that clan were insular, only interested in empire-building for themselves.  As a result, I have a very clear memory of the London game where I first met Tim Edwards, because he was playing a powerful character that actually delegated work and was interested in sponsoring less powerful characters - getting others involved.  Those kinds of interactions can make a player's game for him or her, and should never be underestimated.

I guess the above is a very long-winded way of saying this: "The principles of shared storytelling are really important to live-action stories, and if you don't believe the Larpers that say this, then wrestling can provide all the proof you need."

See you all around, hopefully sooner rather than later.

The Suikoden Model

The prospects for my two-part LARP idea are looking promising; I have received some enthusiastic reactions from potential players and also an offer from someone to act as co-storyteller.  For now, I will keep the volunteer's name a secret... but I'm quite excited about the game and how it may work.

At the same time, I want to do more pen 'n' paper role-playing in 2015.  I've mentioned before that I miss tabletop games, especially running one of my own.  The biggest hurdle seems to be people's availability.  My friends have such busy lives at the moment that signing up to a campaign of tabletop games is just too heavy a commitment, especially when any campaign that I come up with would be competing for a regular time slot with all the other ideas for campaigns, LARPs and regular social engagements that my friends have.

However, Dom's one-shot Cthulhu game has given me an idea.  He ran a single scenario three times for different groups, and he was able to do this because he had a large base of interested players, but each with limited availability.  Dom explained that he usually runs Call of Cthulhu as a campaign, but with players unable to commit to a regular campaign, he developed a one-shot adventure that lasted for about eight hours, and played with three groups of five.

We have a large pool of players in the local area, but all with a lot of commitments.  I don't propose to have a single scenario that I run multiple times, but I have a game - Leverage, which I deeply want to run - that is designed for episodic play.  Each game is supposed to be a stand-alone job lasting for a few hours of play.

What if I also have a pool of players, and each one has a character.  When I come up with a game, it is designed to stand alone, for any five of the players in that pool depending on their availability.  I can then design other one-shot games that are all part of the same campaign, but completely different groups of players could come together on each occasion to tackle the scenario.

This allows the game to cater for players' availability.  Some overlap could exist between the different player groups, because some players would be more available for games than others.  In concept, that would be fine, and could even create some continuity between episodes, even though no player would be required to attend every installment or even more than one installment.  Another advantage of this approach is that I would not have to run the same game twice.

I think I should refer to this idea as the "Suikoden" model of forming a player base for a pen 'n' paper game.  It reminds me of the Suikoden computer RPGs; the player in those games takes the role of an army's leader, and his castle can have over one hundred named characters in it.  However, for the "adventuring-party" sections of the game, the player travels around with a party of up to six of those characters.  What Suikoden provides is the ability to swap out members of the party and field a team that could be different every time.

This could easily gel with the concept of an episodic game about neo-pulp outlaw heroes.  Imagine a network of numerous vigilantees, including thieves, masterminds, con artists, hackers and fighters, and - every so often - a call for help goes out, and a short-term Crew is assembled to deal with the problem from the available members of the network.  I think that the Suikoden model may be the best option that I have for running some tabletop role-playing in 2015 that fits into other people's social calendars, and also lets me role-play with a greater variety of people.

Fear of the Unknown

On Saturday, I participated in the third run of Dom Camus' Call of Cthulhu one-shot game.  This is, I think, the only "tabletop" game* that I have played all year, and my biggest regret of 2014 will probably be that I didn't get to role-play nearly as much as I would have liked.

The game was truly excellent and a lot of fun, and had an interesting pre-amble.  I'm used to the gamesmaster explaining the background and setting of the story at the start of the game, but Dom gave a quick briefing about Call of Cthulhu's literary history.  What I had not realised previously was that so much of the material that I recognise from the role-playing game and Arkham Horror comes not from HP Lovecraft's books, but from the work that Sandy Petersen did to fill in the gaps.  I can understand why this was necessary for a role-playing game; gamers need insight into the material if they are going to create their own stories in the Mythos.  However, this got me thinking about whether filling in the gaps meant sacrificing part of what makes Lovecraftian horror so effective - and whether the rules of role-playing games might have this effect on other types of horror.

Part of the scariness of Lovecraft's works comes from gods and monsters that are incomprehensibly alien.  They not only play on fears of monsters and the existential terror of an uncaring universe, but also on fear of the unknown - more than that, the unknowable.  Part of the artistry of Lovecraft's creatures is that they remain mysterious even after they have been witnessed directly and investigated closely.  However, when a game inevitably must give numbers and rules to those creatures, it seems to take some of the scariness out of them.

Only some of it, of course.  Lovecraft's monsters certainly have the advantage that they are terrifying on multiple levels; they're still vast, powerful and hostile, and they inhabit a merciless cosmos in which humanity's insignificance is utterly apparent.

For a more solid example of role-playing rules detracting from horror, I would probably refer to White Wolf's vampire games - Masquerade or Requiem.  The more they codified vampires, the less scary they became.  I'm not surprised that - after 1st edition - Masquerade progressed from a game about personal horror to being about the politics of super-powered immortals.  Having rigid definitions about who can do what is useful for creating divisions, but useless for fostering a fear of the unknown.  Vampire books invite participants to know the source material - to read about what the various clans can do and what varying capabilities vampires have.  As a result, the setting doesn't deliver shocks to the players, even if it should to the characters.  To achieve that effect, a storyteller would probably need to cast a lot of source material to the wind.

The unknown seems to me to be a vital tool for cultivating a sense of immersive horror for players - so that they are actually daunted and not just affecting fear for their characters.  The most success that I have had trying to make a game scary was a session of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space - an episode I called "Dead Memories".  I think that it worked because the antagonist was not a familiar monster or alien from the Doctor Who television series; I came up with an alien that fed on nostalgia and induced hallucinations to trigger memories.  The players had no frame of reference for what they were facing, and I think that this made them respond with more authentic trepidation.

Threats for which we have no frame of reference seem to work well as sources of horror in other media as well.  I think that one of the most effectively scary aspects of Silent Hill was its lack of familiarity.  It provided no clear details about what was happening; players could only really figure things out by experiencing them.  Similarly, I found that Time was a very eerie antagonist in Sapphire & Steel, due to ambiguity about its capabilities.  It certainly helped to give a science fiction show the feel of ghost stories.

One thought that occurs to me is that some heroes in science fiction and fantasy have ambiguous abilities.  The Doctor is a good example, but pulp heroes sometimes fit the bill too.  They are often able to pull off incredible feats, but the audience is not expected to think too closely about how they managed those feats.  Characters that have great power but loosely-defined limitations can be fun or scary, I suppose, depending on whether they are on your side or not.  Perhaps the Doctor, for instance, is an eldritch horror because of his ambiguous capabilities - from the perspective of a Dalek or a Cyberman.



*Granted, I spent most of the game sitting on the floor.

Streamlining

Over time, the live-action games that I run seem to be getting shorter and shorter.

LA Confidential lasted for five sessions, as intended.  Upwick Manor hadf a three-episode length.  Now I have a plan for a game - The Last Day of Babylon - that is only two sessions long.

Perhaps the end point is that I will start writing one-shots.  Or will I end up with games that are shorter than that, if even possible?

In a way, planning LARPs seems a little like designing a training package for work.  The more practice I get delivering it, the more streamlined the product becomes.

I think that this is the result of developing as a planner for LARPs.  A lot of storytellers in both live-action and tabletop have had games that run down to a close without reaching a proper finale, myself included.  Past experience suggests to me that wrapping up is better than fading away.  Also - since friends and acquaintances have increasingly busy lives - a game with a fixed finale seems a far less daunting commitment than one with no clear end-point.