I've been running the Andor Game for nearly 20 sessions (19 as of this past Saturday), and I've been really happy with the results so far. I've been sticking primarily with the original West End Games 1e ruleset, but supplementing with material from later WEG supplements, tools from Traveller and the various Sine Nomine games, and fan materials. I've also switched to using rules tweaks put together by Bill Slavicsek, the original d6 game designer, for speeding up d6 1e combat. I'm used to the quick resolution of OSR combats, and the original opposed rolls of the system were really inhibiting my ability to run lively and engaging combats.
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"Morlana One Concept Art,"
Peter McKinstry, Andor |
The original WEG system is highly cinematic in nature, drawing from the swashbuckly pulpy feel of A New Hope in particular, and doesn't accommodate some of the more espionage-forward components I want to include in this particular game, so it's time to start hacking together some rules.
Agents and Networks
I wanted my players to run their own spy network, giving them a chance to conduct legwork and even operations without player characters needing to be on hand at each turn. Cribbing from the Domain Skills and Advisor Ring concepts used in the Hill Cantons campaign, I put together seven espionage stats for NPC agents: Analysis, Combat, Ranger, Social, Stealth, Technical, Unusual. These attributes, rated in Xd6+Y (just like the standard WEG d6 stats) are used for resolving the espionage shenanigans that the PCs may direct their agents to each week, if they choose to abstract out an agent's actions. Not every agent has ratings in every attribute, however. "Nek," the pugnacious Duros logistics officer, has Combat 3D and Ranger 3D, but no ratings in any other stat. Nek can fight or lead expeditions, but won't be able to schmooze his way through high society. In contrast, the Sullustan maintenance worker "Dewback" has Analysis 2D+2, Stealth 2D+1, and Technical 4D; he's able to tackle technical problems (construed broadly here, things that a Star Trek science officer or engineer might work on) and can maybe handle the occasional research project or stealth mission, but isn't going to be any good at a stand-up fight or a schmoozing scene (which would require Social).
If the PCs want to interact with the agent as a standard NPC (like having them come along on an operation during a game session), then I'd fully stat out the NPC as normal; the espionage stats are to be used for resolving a given week's mission in one or two rolls, and interpreting the result based on the d6 difficulty thresholds (Easy DC 10, Moderate DC 15, Difficult DC 20, etc).
In contrast to the Domain Skills framework of the Hill Cantons, the PCs don't have espionage stats of their own. This facilitates the PCs going out and doing adventure-y things while still letting their cell make progress on slow-burn projects and work towards their mission goals through the agents.
Example: Fronz wants to have an agent surveil a known ISB operative, see who he's talking to over the course of a week, and assemble a dossier of his contacts. The GM informs Fronz that this will be a Stealth roll. Looking through the available agents, Fronz selects the one with the highest Stealth, Krim, rated at a 3d+2. Fronz rolls and reports that Krim has gotten a 12 -- the GM checks and determines that Krim's succeeded on an Easy difficulty challenge, but failed at something that's Moderate or higher.
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"Jedha Crowd," concept art
Matt Alsop, Rogue One |
A major inspiration here was the usage of
Attributes in the browser game Fallen London, where a given storylet in the game will often resolve perhaps a week's worth of actions and decisions with a single Attribute check. I wanted to do the same thing, using broad evocative attributes to capture a bunch of activities and getting to a quick resolution. Some examples of Operation Lamplighter activities that used a single stat check were surveilling Imperial Security Bureau offices and trying to find targets potentially vulnerable to blackmail (
Social), or assisting an allied local gang in setting up defenses against increased Imperial repression (
Combat).
To prevent eager-beaver PCs from just overwhelming a beleaguered GM with downtime instructions, PC groups are limited in the number of cells they can control (i.e. groupings that can be given specific downtime tasks); it's capped at the number of dice of the group's highest command score. Operation Lamplighter's highest command rating is 6D (the Wookiee demolitionist/surgeon Dr. Grozdak), so the players can control up to 6 cells. Even if Dr. Grozdak increases his command skill to 6D+1 or 6D+2, he still maxes out at 6 cells; it's only when command gets to 7D that they'd be able to add another cell.
Cells can have individual agents (statted out as discussed above) or "mooks," faceless cell members. If a cell rolls badly on a crucial test, the players may elect to reroll at the cost of losing one cell member (presumably a mook when possible, but theoretically it could also be losing a full agent). This would usually represent some misadventure and the cell member being killed during the action, but it could also mean them needing to withdraw from the cell for any reason (should the downtime action in question be something unlikely to generate lethal results).
Progress Bars and Opposition
Some tasks will take a bit longer to resolve, like analyzing monthly shipments going to/from the local ISB research facility and trying to determine information about what's going on inside (appropriately enough, an Analysis test). In these circumstances, the agent's roll is added to a progress chart. As GM, I decide that pulling information about the ISB base through freighter logs is going to require 50 points of research; each week, the agent is allowed to roll their 2d6+2 Analysis stat and add those results until they get to 50.
In the event that an action might be resisted, I can quickly assign a skill level for the local ISB office or other opposition (using the WEG framework of 2d being an average stat, 4d for a specialist) and roll against the agent's stat. An opposition success might mean a simple negation of the agent's action ("Ronto reports that he hasn't been able to find a way into the base; their patrols are too frequent and he aborted the recon"), increasing surveillance or prepping defenses (making future checks harder, summoning more security), or even killing or capturing the unlucky Rebel agent.
Depending on GM adjudication, a mook (or mooks) may sometimes be sacrificed by the PCs in order to let an agent escape an opposition roll that would otherwise have killed them.
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Street Scene concept art
Gus Mendonca. Star Wars 1313 (cancelled) |
Designing NPC Agents
So far I've been custom creating most of the Operation Lamplighter recruits, but I'm working on putting together tables for quickly generating new potential agents. The main inspiration for this is my beloved HBS Battletech game, which featured a lifepath generator for the mercs you hire. (Check out Kiva's design diary about it here - and read her other design diaries and work while you're at it.) Obviously granddaddy Traveller's lifepaths play a role here, as do the lifepaths of other MechWarrior RPGs. But the HBS Battletech game also adds both specific statboosts and descriptive tags that characters can acquire when being generated by the system - so a character doing a stint as an assassin as part of their backstory might not only get increased Gunnery or Tactics scores, but also has the "assassin" tag that can feed into random events.
My hacked-together implementation of lifepaths for Op Lamplighter (still VERY work-in-progress) takes some of the tags and pathway progressions developed for Battletech (like "Spacer" or "Lucky") and adds in some professions that are particularly Star Wars-coded (many specifically taken from the old Decipher CCG, which thought it was worth calling out a few niche professions as really fitting the Star Wars vibe). The ultimate goal is to be able to put together a series of lifepath rolls that both develop an NPCs background/history and assign espionage stats and tags, ideally automatable like a space version of Meatshields.
Dark Money
While I'm a fan of the grubby grotty "count every coin" vibe in my OSR games, that didn't quite feel right for Operation Lamplighter. Inspired by the "Mon Mothma needs to commit financial crimes to fund the Rebellion" subplot in Andor, I decided that the game would only look at kilocredits, and that purchases of anything underneath 1000 credits can be handwaved.
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"Bespin Citizen" concept art
Ralph McQuarrie, Empire Strikes Back |
The PCs have access to "clear" accounts (standard official banking, but under Imperial audit scrutiny), "dark" accounts (available for shady dealings, but potentially subject to loss / volatility), and cash on hand (subject to loss/destruction/holdup/etc). In a given month, one can only transfer 10 kcr from dark accounts, or 5 kcr from clear accounts, into cash, so spending large amounts of cash on sketchy expenditures can be tricky.
Tracking this has necessitated a lot more spreadsheet play than I'm used to, but given that we're dealing with the regular PCs, their horde of NPC agents, tracking a calendar,* and potentially having multiple freighters swanning about the sector, using a spreadsheet was inevitable.
*"I warned you," the ghost of Gygax smirks. "'IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN UNLESS STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE KEPT,' in all caps and everything, but all of you laughed at me. Who's laughing now??"
Double-Blind Imperial Opposition
Note: I started prepping this component of play around Christmas, but cancelled the process after checking in with my players. One player specifically (and very reasonably) did not want to have player-vs-player dynamics in the game, so this component remains unimplemented in practice.
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| ISB Board, Andor |
I was considering trying to add in a bit of active opposition to the players by roping in some other friends to play the role of the ISB supervisors of the Dusk Nebula sector. The ISB players would see the weekly newsbriefs that I was already writing for the players (along with other sector-wide ISB-exclusive reports), and would direct the active efforts to root out rebel cells. I wrote up five ISB special agents, each with their own espionage stats as described above. These would function as the active units for the ISB supervisors, agents who they could deploy across the sector to form their own intelligence networks and operate against the PC cell. Both sides would submit weekly actions for their agents in a double-blind system, with neither side having concrete information on exactly what the others were up to...up until someone's forces were discovered, or went kinetic.
Having a group of players actively taking on the ISB roles was intended to be freeing, by helping reduce the cognitive load in generating large-scale opposition activity and adding a frisson of competition between the ISB and Rebellion players. But it would have fostered a PvP element which is entirely reasonable for someone to want to avoid -- and it would also have increased the cognitive load in terms of resolving double the NPC agent interactions each week!
(Plus, I was hoping for snide bickering and moustache-twirling from the ISB players in their "ISB-briefing-room" channel in Discord, riffing off the wonderful ISB board scenes in Andor.)
Double-blind play is always tricky to implement from a logistics standpoint, if nothing else, but the ability to restrict channel access in a Discord server makes it much more feasible. I had fun trying to GM a Battletech invasion mini-campaign a few years ago, and I think that the double-blind format would fit delightfully well into an espionage framework.
What sorts of actions would you want to see in an espionage game framework? What sort of play would you want systems to facilitate?
