Welcome to Sofia!
If Australia was smaller, made of water, and in the middle of Eurasia, it'd be the Black Sea. Bulgaria is a country on the west coast of it. Sofia is the capital of it.
You are either one of a handful of people playing a game of player-vs-player Night's Black Agents set there or are one of thousands of people reading a message to those people about a game you aren't playing.
(For the latter: I'll try not to make a habit of this.)
Ало! Откачалки!
The big news this week is, around midnight on a Friday, Viktor Gavrilov--portly, mid-fiftyish owner of several exotic dance clubs in the city--appeared sweating, crying and dancing on stage at his very own Club Nefertiti wearing nothing but his headset cellphone.
Rumor has it this was because one of the Russian mobs moving into the city was telling him, through that very headset phone, that they had his daughter and were going to kill him if he didn't.
This incident is just one of many lurid acts of intimidation and violence perpetrated by Russian gangs in Sofia in recent months.
What does this mean for you? Who knows? Depends on who your PC is--gangster, spy, waif, diplomat, and what your PC's secret goal is. That secret goal I've probably already given you along with your character sheet.
Achieve your goal and you'll win!
Die before achieving it, or be placed in such a position where achieving it is impossible and you lose.
There will likely be multiple winners and multiple losers.
Since this is a play-by-post game, you each have been given a private channel to talk to me on, but you may talk to each other or to everybody if you like, just remember to add me in.
Some of you have characters completely made that I gave you.
Some of you will need to add some details using the handy reference below...
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Either way, here's the important stuff...
That grid of numbers at the top is your health. You know what that is. Most bullets do d6 damage.
Everybody ignore the stuff about the size of your group.
If you already have a pre-made character I gave you, don't worry about buying points of stuff in red and blue. You already have points in stuff.
No matter how you got points (I gave them to you or you built your own PC) the way the system works is you
spend them to do stuff.
Left and middle columns are investigative/autosuccess abilities--you get 20 pts to spread throughout these 2 columns. Each thing you have at least 1 pt in means you can use it once in this game to find something out with it. You will get information. You spend these points and they do not come back during this game. Most of these abilities will have 0, 1 or mayyybe 2 pts. 3 if you're insane about that thing.
They aren't autosuccessful if another PC opposes you. But they usually won't for these abilities.
Nota bene: I am misusing this system and it isn't supposed to work exactly like this. It'll be ok, trust me.
The 3rd column is general abilities, in combat or tense situations they work on a gambling mechanic--they can fail. You spend them, too. 8 is a lot. Basically you roll a d6 and try to hit a threshold number I tell you or don't tell you, and declare how many pts you wanna spend before you roll. These points won't come back either.
Special/confusing stuff on there:
Human Terrain:
like anthropology and social sciences--"reading" a group or city or whatever.
Preparedness:
This is the skill to see if you have special equipment you need on you at any given moment.
Languages:
If you are making your character, you start with 1 language and get 2 additional languages per pt spent.
The following two are confusing because the points you get in them are recorded in the right column, but their specific details are recorded on the left.
Network Contacts:
These are people you know who do or know stuff. They have ratings and spend like other investigative abilities. You make these people up and assign them point values, like you can go "My brother Edgar is a 5 pt shoemaker" and now you have a 5 pt shoemaker contact. Those 5 points are in Edgar until you have Edgar spends them to do stuff, then they're gone. You can (and probably should) split your points up on multiple contacts.
Covers:
A lot like contacts--these are alternate identities you have. The more points you put in them, the more convincing they are. Once spent, these covers are useless.
You can let cover and contact points "float" until you actually need them--they don't have to make up specific people/identities they're assigned to right away.
The game starts basically immediately: you can send me private messages or your can post public behavior or rules questions in the G+ thread under this entry or you can start conversations with other players, just remember to plus me in to them.
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