19th Level

“Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.” ― John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold With John le Carré's A Legacy of Spies coming out this week I've been rereading his George Smiley novels. Doing so has been getting me thinking about espionage RPGs. I don't have a ton of experience running or playing in espionage RPGs. I've been involved in a number of one-offs using Top Secret , Top Secret S/I , and James Bond . Back in my middle school and high school days of the 1980s such games tended to emulate the James Bond movies - some investigation/information gathering, with a lot of thrilling chases.  A lot of Call of Cthulhu  gaming over the past several years has taught me that gaming can be quite exciting with a high degree of tension with minimal combat. In Call of Cthulhu  combat is dangerous. If you need to fight someone, your best bet is to ambush. A fair fight is dangerous, even for someone with a high degree of...

HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos have had an influence on various forms of entertainment. Many episodes of Doctor Who and Star Trek have had a Lovecraftian feel to them. The early Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who with stories like Pyramids of Mars , Horror of Fang Rock, and Talons of Weng-Chiang have many elements to be found in the Cthulhu Mythos, like ancient aliens, god-like beings visiting the Earth, etc. Star Trek had references to the Old Ones placed by Robert Bloch in What Are Little Girls Made Of and many episodes dealt with the remnants of previous interstellar empires - the Iconians, known as "Demons of Air and Darkness" come especially to mind. And looking at the Mind Flayers of Dungeons and Dragons one cannot help but find influences from Lovecraft. What I've found rather interesting is those settings which go beyond mere influence from the Cthulhu Mythos but embrace their cosmos in its entirety yet put their own unique perspective on them. One of the...

"O fish, are you constant to the old covenant?" "Return, and we return. Keep faith, and so will we." - From Tim Powers' Declare , quoting  A Thousand and One Nights Over the Christmas holidays I spent some time reading the first three of John Le Carré's novels: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold . In the first two the protagonist is George Smiley, a spy about as far from James Bond as one can imagine. He's not a combat master, he's someone who thinks and knows an awful lot. I've heard this style of writing referred to as "stale beer" espionage novels. It is a world of blackmail, betrayal, and morally questionable actions. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold  involves a series of betrayals and deceptions such that it is impossible to find a "hero".   While such fiction is typically "mundane", it need not be so. For example, Tim Powers' Declare  is a WW2/Cold War...