Cold Iron War

The following is classified SECRET BRONZE MALARKEY SEVEN. If you are not cleared for SECRET BRONZE MALARKEY SEVEN, please disregard this material and report to unit security for debriefing. Failure to do so is an imprisonable offense.

It's the 70s, the Cold War is going strong as ever, and both sides are using changelings as operatives. They have no identities, their powers make them ideal agents in a variety of situations and the threat of being shopped to the Gentry keeps them well in line. For their part, changelings receive protection and prosperity for their services, and may be able to define themselves by service to their country - but is it really their country any more? In the murky depths of the great game, clarity is as rare as trust.

Primary inspirations are Ian Mackintosh's television series The Sandbaggers (and Greg Rucka's "spiritual sequel" comic series, Queen and Country), Tim Powers' novel Declare, Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Charles Stross' novelette A Colder War[1].

Agencies

The intelligence services of the Western countries each have their own means of dealing with changeling operations. These agencies often work together, even moreso than their mundane counterparts, but each nevertheless holds back its own secrets.

* The Office of Unspecified Activities is a division within the English Special Intelligence Service, which receives black funding syphoned from other divisions. The Office is perpetually under-funded, giving it a reputation for lateral thinking and risk-taking. While this engenders a grudging respect from other agencies, it also means that the O.U.A. is never fully trusted, even by its own superiors.

* The Irish changeling operations agency, Niamh, boasts the highest changeling-to-mortal ratio in the west, and is a storehouse of powerful magic and fae knowledge. However, the significant changeling influence, on top of existing tensions with England, means that Niamh's priorities are often not in line with its allies - the Irish changelings are often more interested in fighting the True Fae than the Soviet Union, and they require that vows be made before committing to joint actions.

* The exact specifications of MK-WIZARD are not known - that it's a CIA project is generally accepted, but assumptions regarding its size and capabilities vary wildly. MK-WIZARD's relation with European agencies is similar to the CIA's relationship with mundane Europe: They're considered to be over-funded cowboys who can blow in, cause havoc, and leave the locals holding the bag.

* On the other side, Soviet changelings are marshaled by the monolithic MOROZKO, a division of the KGB. The agency is exceptionally adept at exploiting the divisions between Western agencies, but its own unity is a flaw in itself; operational clutter and red tape accompany MOROZKO's vast scope.

Current wiki

One Roll Engine - Mutation

One of the things that most appealed to me about the One Roll Engine is the sheer variety of rules tweaks it offered. As an amateur game designer (like pretty much any gamer) I couldn't possibly resist the lure of a sleek system with a bunch of optional rules allowing me to customize exactly to what I'm going for in my own game.

At the moment, I'm trying to stat out characters for my "Wizard" setting - currently just Delta Green/Generic Monster Hunters with a Frank L. Baum theme and the serial numbers filed off, but I'm hoping to make it more unique as time goes on. At the moment, my goals for the game are:

• A horror game, using the Madness Meters to help players confront both the monstrous things that are out there and the monstrous things they'll do to fight them.
• But a more heroic game than, say, Call of Cthulhu or basic Nemesis. The characters are significantly competent, and their willpower of the characters in the face of Awful Things From Somewhere Else is enough to give them the edge to, if not destroy, certainly foil the plans of their foes; There's a much stronger "We can fix this" vibe, as opposed to CoC's "All we can do is prolong the inevitable". Mind you, none of this means that they're guaranteed to succeed, merely that success is a possibility.
  
• The villains the PCs will be fighting are mainly human or at least humanoid. In addition to letting me work with the standard damage silhouette, there should be the constant threat of slipping too far and becoming a lunatic servant of darkness or a demonhost or something equally unsavoury. (Villains and set dressing being an eclectic mix of Mage, Vampire, Unknown Armies, Conspiracy X and Kult)
  
• Players should be encouraged to set scenes, make up background material, and generally fuss about with the way stuff works. A no-brainer, IMHO.

The current mutation is mostly based on the Dark ORE system as presented in Nemesis, but with the following rules tweaks and patches:

• Stats cost 5d each (I'm almost certain this was a typo in the version of Nemesis I looked at, anyway). Source: Pretty much every other ORE game.
  
• Body above 2 now gives extra wound boxes: +1 in the body location at 3, +1 in each arm at 4, and +1 in each leg at 5. (Source: Godlike)
• Mind and Sense, added together, equal Initiative in combat: In the event of a tie, the higher Sense goes first. (Source: ORE Toolkit, slightly tweaked)
• Command and Empathy, added together, equal Will, which works a lot like it does in Godlike/Wild Talents, albeit with a few changes to reflect the gritty-but-still-adventurous tone I'm going for. You can spend Will to:

Add 1 die to any die roll before rolling, or buy off the cost for multiple actions, called shots, etc. A maximum of 2 dice may be added or bought off in this way per roll.

Bump yourself one back in the initiative queue (that is, declare as if your initiative were just slightly better than whoever would be acting before you)

Remain conscious: Remove one point of shock damage - Like the name suggests, you would generally only use this to remain conscious when you really should be K.O.'d.

Ignore pain: Ordinarily, getting hit at all makes you lose a die from your highest set. Spend a point of Will, no problem.

Remain sane: After failing a Madness check, the character generally wigs out and behaves badly. Spending Will allows you to continue acting normally. This doesn't make the Failed notch go away, or prevent any disorder the player may get from the failure: It just allows the character to act normally rather than flipping out.

The magic system definitely runs on Will, although the exact mechanics of that still need to be hammered out.

• Running out of Will, however, is a Very Bad Thing. All the character's dice pools are halved until they regain at least 1 point of Will. Thus, a player with 1 Will remaining who fails a Madness check may be forced to decide between acting crazily but effectively, or else remaining calm at the cost of the last of their willpower.
  
• Still trying to sort out the mechanics of when to gain or lose Will, although the "Natural 10" and being awesome suggestions from Godlike seem good. Making a character lose half their Will on a failed Madness check seems pretty damn cruel, considering the game penalties that already exist for such failures, but it is arguably in keeping with the general flavour of the Will-Madness relationship I'm trying to bolt together here (especially Self checks, which are more or less by definition about the betrayal of who you thought you were). Also, players will have damn good reason to spend Will on Madness checks, making them much more likely to be have Hardened notches than Failed - Not necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to our badass monster hunters blurring the line between "badass" and "psychopath". As for magical characters, losing half their Will on a failed magic check seems like a good limiting factor. Play with fire, you get burned.
  
• The critical failure and critical success rules from Wild Talents seem like a gas: A roll with no successful sets in which no dice are above 5 counts as a critical failure, a roll with at least one successful set and all the dice above 5 is a critical success. These don't have any set mechanical effect, they're just there because they're one of those bits of old-school rules cruelty I have a fondness for. In general, a critical success should carry its set over as bonus dice to another roll (as in a critical success on a Madness check giving a bump to an attack on the monster that caused it) - Failing that, a critical success can squish/squash a roll, or maybe just flat-out add 1 to the roll's Width. Critical failures, as usual, are left to the GM's tender mercies.
  
• Adding another player-control mechanic, this one outside the ambit of the PCs' personal/psychological abilities, seems like it might be overwhelming or confusing for newbies (and yeah, also for me), but dammit, I love Whimsy Cards, so they're in.
• Speaking of stuff I love (and chances for players to be cool), Reign's Ridicule mechanic is awesome. The idea is that the character makes up a one-liner or comeback for a given line or situation, and the GM tries to ensure that the trigger line or situation comes about, giving the player a chance to crack wise action-hero style. I think this would work extremely well with the setting (after all, the characters are basically action heroes - and making light of the seriousness of their situation is very much in genre). Only trouble is, I can't think of a Nemesis skill that would map well onto it. Oh well, I can always just go the Reign route and make it a separate skill entirely for players who want to be smartasses.
• Idea I'm toying with: Will and Madness: If a character is already at maximum Will and is entitled to an extra point, for instance from a natural 10 or excellent roleplaying, they may experience a breakthrough, removing a Failed or Hardened notch. I'm not sure how I feel about this - ruleswise, it implies that characters can simply will themselves sane or unviolent. I'd probably want to limit it to thematically appropriate times, if I end up using it at all. There's also the question of whether to charge Will for it - A character losing half his Will to bump off a notch seems would be a reasonable trade of a renewable resource for a permanent injury in a non-stressful cases (and might be a component of the Counseling skill in this mutation), but in the field it turns what was a pure bonus one Will point lower into a mixed blessing. Maybe give the player the chance to decide whether their character has an epiphany or not.
  

That's the current set of ideas, but obviously there's a ways to go on this. Any suggestions, tweaks or glaring errors?

The Wizard

The Wizard is an organization that fights supernatural threats. They operate through anonymous e-mail accounts, dead drops, code-named agents and a very few safehouses. The organization lacks an official history, although there are plenty of rumours, and seems to have no goal other than protecting humanity as a whole from the bad things that threaten it - although that's certainly enough to keep them busy.

The central command is, naturally enough, called the Emerald City. Almost nobody knows where the Wizard is headquartered, or even if the Emerald City refers to a specific location in the real world, and those that do know are not upfront with the information. Mission briefings, orders and information requests from the Emerald City are channelled to agents directly - there is no formal structure to the organization. Although individual agents and operational groups may gain and lose prestige in the eyes of the organization, this prestige does not translate into authority, and agents cannot order each other to do anything. Generally, of course, more experienced agents will know what they're doing, so it's still a good idea to listen to them, but nothing says you have to. By contrast, if the City gives a direct order, you'd damn well better pay attention.

Agents of the Wizard generally belong to one of three "sections", called the Woodsman, the Scarecrow and the Lion. Each has its own general field of expertise, and many operational teams and individual agents make up each section and specialize further. Nobody outside the Emerald City knows exactly how many agents the Wizard has.

The Woodsman is the front line section of the Wizard's operational agents, and the division the PCs will be working for. Woodsman agents investigate credible reports of supernatural activity, gather field data for the Scarecrow, and put down any hostile entities they encounter. Woodsman operatives are also tasked with inducting new members into the conspiracy, as they are generally the first ones to make contact with civilians who have encountered the supernatural.

The Scarecrow is the information-gathering arm of the organization. Sources range from musty texts, to website rants, to classified documents. Given time and clear information, the Scarecrow is capable of providing highly relevant material for almost any situation. Unfortunately, time and clarity are rare things in a field operation, and the Scarecrow has a perhaps undeserved reputation for providing incomplete or seemingly irrelevant data. Still, against the Wizard's enemies, the right bit of mythology or information (or even the wrong one) can mean the difference between life and ugly fanged death.

The Lion is the hammer that gets called down when the Woodsman fails. Requesting Lion intervention is admitting that the mission has been botched so badly it's completely unsalvageable, and tends to create massive headaches and paper trails for the rest of the organization. Nevertheless, Lion operations are often highly effective when it comes to destroying their primary targets, though cavalier when it comes to collateral damage. Additionally, Lion agents are tasked with covering up the existence and operations of the Wizard, providing back-stories and credentials for field operatives as needed, and with handling any agents who go rogue with information or materials which could threaten the Wizard's existence (More typical rogue agents are generally left to the Woodsman). Lion operatives have a reputation as kill-crazy psychos or emotionless men in black.

In addition to field agents, the Wizard maintains a number of static agents across the country. Referred to as Munchkins, these agents are given the bare minimum of information to do whatever specific task they've been assigned (generally providing equipment for field agents, couriering messages or maintaining a safe house). In most cases, they're so in the dark that they don't even know their own moniker - which is probably for the best.

There are a lot of explanations for the naming scheme. One of the most popular is that it's a magic thing: As far as anyone knows, the Wizard is an exclusively American organization (and may actually be part of the US government), and it's an American story, so the City thinks the names give them some kind of edge. They might even be right. Of course, it has been pointed out that in the actual story, the Wizard is a fraud, and the various section namesake characters are flawed and retain these flaws despite the Wizard's "solutions". Some agents figure that this is some sort of reverse psychology. Other, more cynical agents just smirk, and whistle "If I Only Had a Brain" while reading Scarecrow reports.