Author: Graham Willmott

Shadows specialising in Espionage:

So I am running for a group of Shadows who picked the Espionage focus. In general I am really happy with this however it has left me with a couple of questions and thoughts about the direction of the game.

1. How does the espionage focus play with Turf? The ideals of spies and covert ops are very much at odds with overtly holding ground, and restricting activities to certain areas of the city really crimps the options for scores. I described their initial turf as somewhere where potential clients could get in touch innocuously but I am stumped for good ideas to represent expansion… maybe offices/fronts in other/better parts of town?

2. Espionage as a focus seems to rely more on client-derived scores for profit – someone needs to want the information that the espionage will provide. Therefore it feels as though it places more on the GM to come up with interesting job offers… which is fine, but it conflicts a little with the idea that the best scores are player-derived. How have other groups running spies dealt with this, particularly with regards to Coin reward.

Thanks!

Advice for longer scores?

So I’m running a Blades game (hurray!) though the whole table is still coming to grips with the rules and Doskvol as a setting I’m pretty happy about the start.

The player-proposed second score is an operation that will take several days to play out. Blades seems to be more focused on smaller, more single night type affairs (otherwise the restrictions on DTAs etc. don’t start to fit the fiction so well). Has anyone got any advice for longer span scores? Assume that just now no one aim that has been proposed is significant enough to warrant making an entire score of its own.