[Spione] Pronounced "kah-guh-beh"
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
One evening at the Embassy Suites lobby, a couple of friends and I came to a table where a bunch of people were choosing from a pile o'games. We were welcomed to join in (and add to the pile), and as often happens, two games were chosen for two newly-formed groups. I was a bit surprised and excited that the group I was in chose Spione. Let's see, we had ... Rachel, Danielle, Julie, me, and another male player I hadn't met previously, whose name is suddenly lost to me. Someone who was there, help me out with that. He was really fun to play with, too.
I'm pretty good at Spione introductions by now, and had my little decade maps and sheets ready to go. I decreed the 1970s mainly because that was the sheet on top of my stack, and we proceeded pretty quickly. I'd brought limited materials for con purposes. Story pacing in Spione is based on the number of Supporting Cast - the more there are, the longer the story, and typically, the more nuanced in terms of history and relative importance of any given character. German principals have more Supporting Cast than other characters, and older principals have more Supporting cast than other characters. Even one older German principal pretty much guarantees that two sessions will be appropriate.
Another, related variable is which agencies have employed the two principal characters as spies. There are seven agencies scattered across nine or ten operations in the book,* but the KGB and CIA give more Flashpoint cards than the others. This is a fancy way of saying that Supporting Cast are at higher risk in Flashpoints, earlier, if either of those agencies is involved.
So I knew that for con purposes, I should stick with younger, non-German principal characters and limit agency options to the KGB and CIA. This leads to a more rapid, single-climax kind of story, the sort you might see in a long-ish movie or a novella, and works well for a single session of two hours, or perhaps a little more. As it turned out, the principals chosen were Zeki Kemal, a Turkish foreign worker, and David Holly, a young American businessman, both of whom lived and worked in West Berlin, and the relevant players both (and independently) decided to pick KGB operations, one aimed at U.S. military intelligence and one at the CIA Berlin Operations Base. Huh! So we had a KGB-centric story, "spying on the west" with a strong American policy focus in the targets, in the southwestern end of the city. With only four Supporting Cast and maximal Card Numbers, we were set for some consequential drama.
It paid off big. I really enjoyed being a non-Principal player and contributing relatively little on my turns beyond characterizing people in the KGB spy hierarchy for both operations. Or providing background Color, for instance, having an inebriated foreign rock star vomit against a wall during one of many scenes on the Kurfürstendamm (it was Iggy Pop, if you want to know). I only had to sit back and enjoy the other players' enthusiasm in creating a brutal, selfish drama among the spies and their families, but with a pair of handlers who defied their superiors in order to protect those spies from being abandoned or sacrificed due to higher-up policy. So the protagonists weren't so much the Principals but two of the Network characters. This is a feature of the design, too - that protagonism is emergent, and the term "Principal" does not mean either player-character or protagonist, but only a particular relationship of those characters to the moral and logistic crises of the story.
As usual, the main thing to get used to in play was the expected content per person as we round-robined. Not because it's difficult or requires specialized knowledge, but because it's so easy. When a person stalled, all I had to do was remind them that only a tiny bit of imagery and/or forward-moving content was required, and not to concern themselves with "bringing in conflict" or any other sort of framing, driving material. Soon, the story was flowing and evolving in the usual way, without any effort because no one person had to contribute any more than he or she genuinely feels like at the moment of that turn.
Zeki did get saved from being burned ("rolled up") by the agency when the spying went sour, with a lover, the former handler, in East Berlin, but with every vestige of his former life wrecked and in two cases, tragically dead. David actually moved up in the KGB's hierarchy, practically unhead-of for a ground-level recruited spy, by rolling up that Network himself with the collusion of his handler. If we'd been playing Sorcerer, that guy would have ended with a Humanity score of solid zero.
I'd love to get some feedback from the other players about how that "flow" feature worked for them, or maybe didn't, or anything else about the game. I felt like people slipped pretty naturally into the setting and especially the spy networks themselves, producing a Le Carrè "agency dysfunction" feel that often takes groups a time or two to develop. Part of that may have resulted from the summary I presented in the beginning once the relevant agency was known, and part of that maybe from my early input for the KGB officers during play, but I know the majority of it came from everyone else. So I'd like to know what people thought of how we did it, so that I can reinforce it in later play too.
Best, Ron
* Also, conceivably, every espionage agency in the world had reasons to be active in Berlin during the Cold War. One of these days I'll get around to my dream of adding more sheets beyond those in the book, featuring Mossad, various Nordic agencies, the FBI (acting from the U.S. embassy in Bonn), MI-5 (who has no business in Berlin but operated there anyway), the U.S. State Department's mysterious Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the branches of U.S. military intelligence, the GRU, SISMI, and others from Cuba, Bulgaria, Egypt, Syria, and India.
Callan S.:
It's mostly a side point, but I think there's a big difference between there being no protagonists and there being protagonist(s), but we don't know who they are yet (we will at some point in play, once it emerges). Though I may be remembering things entirely wrong on whether that was said.
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As usual, the main thing to get used to in play was the expected content per person as we round-robined. Not because it's difficult or requires specialized knowledge, but because it's so easy. When a person stalled, all I had to do was remind them that only a tiny bit of imagery and/or forward-moving content was required, and not to concern themselves with "bringing in conflict" or any other sort of framing, driving material. Soon, the story was flowing and evolving in the usual way, without any effort because no one person had to contribute any more than he or she genuinely feels like at the moment of that turn.
That's nice and smooth, and clearly repeatable as a procedure - it is very simple. It's good to see something that perhaps is a naturally emerging part of your play being quantified into a fairly easy to follow procedure rather than left at a hazy sort of 'feel'. Having it in such a concrete form did quite the opposite of damage the fiction or make it flimsy.
I'm feeling I'm kind of talking about the lighting and sound system, so to speak, while a play is going on. Am I talking about the wrong stuff for this thread?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
You're staying on topic, no problem. That's not the lights and sound system; it's the basic and unavoidable foundation of play. Spione is one of those games in which the rules are operating at every moment, rather than being referred to as a subset of (or detour from) otherwise-freeform play.
You're right about the protagonism. Spione leaves that question entirely up to play. Conceivably, especially if no principal character discloses his or her Trespass history, the story can be devoid of protagonists and therefore accord with the grimmest, most angry Cold War spy fiction (Orchids for Mother, for example, or The Looking Glass War). Typically, one or another principal, or as in this case, one or more characters in the Network and Supporting Cast, end up being
One of my design goals was for play to produce results which could be adapted into a great movie or novel from any character's point of view, casting that person as the protagonist at least in his or her own mind. Or to put it more accurately, for that "adaptation" to become part and parcel of play itself if and when the people at the table found that desirable (usually intuitively, without dialogue or recognition).
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It's good to see something that perhaps is a naturally emerging part of your play being quantified into a fairly easy to follow procedure rather than left at a hazy sort of 'feel'.
I appreciate that paraphrase a lot. It's exactly what the design was aimed for. I'm interested in learning whether others at the table felt it to any extent. There's more to my interest than merely looking for compliments, because this was my best attempt at rules which gently and precisely organize fundamental speaking practices of play. It's easy for people to enjoy play but not recognize how the rules and their interactions contributed to the enjoyment.
Best, Ron
Callan S.:
I was hoping to read that feedback as well. Sure that procedure makes sense to me, but in the field reports are better than just what one thinks makes sense. If that isn't awkward to say.
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Conceivably, especially if no principal character discloses his or her Trespass history, the story can be devoid of protagonists and therefore accord with the grimmest, most angry Cold War spy fiction (Orchids for Mother, for example, or The Looking Glass War).
I tried to get my head around that idea, and in terms of the author writing it almost like a cry for help on the matter (like a general "What the hell can you make of these characters!?") that seems to fit (though quite grim if even the author can't make something of it). Protagonists are also a kind of real life message from the author, like a cry for help on a matter is as well. I think that real life message has to be there to some extent or...I dunno. It doesn't seem to fit otherwise?
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One of my design goals was for play to produce results which could be adapted into a great movie or novel from any character's point of view, casting that person as the protagonist at least in his or her own mind. Or to put it more accurately, for that "adaptation" to become part and parcel of play itself if and when the people at the table found that desirable (usually intuitively, without dialogue or recognition).
That's a question that comes to my mind as systems start to support more full bodied story creation - what's happening to these stories? Human memory is shocking - hell, if the forge goes out during this post and I don't have a copy, I wouldn't be able to recreate this post word for word even a minute latter.
Actually you just phrased it as 'produce results' that could be adapted to a novel, for instance (I stuck in the words 'story creation' here). As the spione web site put it, it's story now, a new way to author and enjoy spy-fiction. Are results enough in regard to that? As the results of play get better and better, there seems more and more to lose to the failings of human memory on the matter. That seems a real loss, my concern my motive for writing this bit. I know you might say that the results produced are never lost entirely, that they sort of merge with others and collect together over time in the mind. Perhaps like a compost heap? I would agree that does happen. But this seems like throwing perfectly good roses onto a compost heap to rot (rot into rich, fertile material, I totally agree. But it's rotting all the same)? That's what concerns me as the results of these systems gets better and better? Just to air that concern, in the end, I guess. Though if it's not over the top, in terms of temporaryness of memory. :)
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
The book deals with both of these issues extensively. The spy fiction in question is very definitely dissident writing, not in terms of one side of the Cold War vs. the other, but rather against the whole thing, written by people who've themselves been badly burned or used-up in the espionage game. I do not think it is obsolete for reasons that are better expressed at the Spione site.
One feature of the Spione project which I have not yet implemented well, and hope to get back to one day, is encouraging people to record their sessions in any way and to make them available at the site, and to do the same myself.
Best, Ron
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