Escaped gaming meme: Devil's Playground

[mithriltabby]

There are certain types of people who don’t work out so well in government agencies. They may be loyal to their government and thoroughly patriotic, but have too much initiative or too little discipline to obey orders if they think they can come up with something better. This doesn’t work well in situations where you need a clear chain of command and the leaders can depend on their orders being carried out, even if the people doing so can’t see the big picture.

But what to do if you’re a government and have employees with these talents and a mind to use them? The ones who will happily loll on a beach for the rest of their lives are cheap to take care of by comparison: a good pension and they’ll leave all the espionage skills behind and start gardening or coaching Little League or finally making the time to enter that Zen monastery they always wanted to get away to. It’s the idealists, adrenaline junkies, and morally challenged you need to worry about. If you leave them on their own, they might start making trouble... or be willing to work for someone else who wants to make big trouble. If you imprison them, they’re likely to turn bitter and look for revenge, and develop all kinds of useful contacts while they’re in prison.

So you put together a covert agency to employ them and keep those active minds and hands busy with something vaguely useful for your own purposes. Make sure the agency has plausible deniability for your government, and let the employees know that they have incentive not to put their sponsors in a position where they have to issue a plausible denial by having them raided as a terrorist cell. Point them at problems that your regular intelligence agencies are having trouble solving, or at targets where the ratio of risk to reward is too low for the regular agencies. And let them know that if they think they can disappear and live out the rest of their lives quietly somewhere, they’re welcome to do so... but that your profilers consider it rather unlikely that they could manage this stunt, and that you’ll be very cross if you pop up making trouble.

If the covert agency is good enough at finding its own problems to solve that are helping out with your policies, give them free rein. (You can’t have too much good information about space aliens, Rambaldi artifacts, and secret conspiracies.) Let them finance their operation by raiding drug smugglers and making off with boatloads of cash; it reduces the size of your own secret budget and helps deal with those pesky druglords that are hard to prosecute legally. If something comes up that looks right for their talents, pass them the job. But never, ever, ever allow them to become bored.

Possible character roles in such a campaign:

• Military: loose cannons from the Army Green Berets, Rangers, or Special Forces; Navy Seals; Air Force Pararescue; Marine Force Recon, etc. (The A-Team)
• Law enforcement: mavericks from the FBI (X-Files) or a police force (Lethal Weapon).
• Intelligence: excessively independent operatives from the CIA, NSA, MI-6, etc. (James Bond and just about any regular on La Femme Nikita or Alias)
• Criminals: burglars, hackers, smugglers, grifters, maybe even hit men that have been diverted from the regular justice system and all charges suspended as long as they play nice. (Lupin III cast, Sneakers, Hudson Hawk, Leverage, White Collar)
• Token Sane Person: someone from any official government organization assigned to help herd cats in this group of lunatics.

Comments

This could be fun!

[weregamer.livejournal.com]

You know, Sliphas has gotten so ... boring ... after taking that second draft of the Tears of Myrkas.

But I suspect that I couldn't keep up the insanity long-term. I'm just too careful with my characters.

Re: This could be fun!

[mithriltabby]

The insanity level required is only that of player characters. The paranoid sniper, thief, demolitions expert, or hacker could be a valuable part of such a team. (“I can’t keep myself from breaking into places... it’s too much fun!” “I think we can find a productive way for you to satisfy your obsession...”) The important thing is that they’re motivated to stay in such a group— either because they’re the Token Sane Person who’s following orders and trying to herd cats, or because they’re the sort of person who’d be doing this sort of thing anyway so they might as well do it with some degree of government sanction.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

...happily hums the A-Team theme...

[mithriltabby]

Aha! I’d been trying to think of an example for the military background characters. Thanks!