[James Bond 007] With some help from Spione

[James_Nostack]

This worked out very well, actually.  I do want to recount what happened in play, and some features of the James Bond 007 game, but I'll do Ron the courtesy of talking about Spione first.

Spione as a . . . Jeez, as a Sourcebook
"Sourcebook" is a terrible term for this book, but it's a point of familiarity for a gaming audience, and it's germane to my particular purpose, so that's what I'm using.

Spione presents an iintriguing and dimly-lit "wilderness of mirrors" in an impressionistic and inspiring way.  The factual part of the book is pretty short: you can plow through it in a single sitting, though sorting it out requires some time to reflect.  Spione comes across as a blizaard of agency names, turncoats, traitors, true-believers, nincompoops, and the occasional genius, all ensnared in institutional psychoses in an all-fronts marketing struggle that, at lot of the time, wasn't about anything except itself.

Spione is fantastic at conveying atmosphere, themes, and tone, and inspiration for further research.  If you're already familiar with Sorcerer & Sword, this is the spy-fiction equivalent.  You get the feeling that Ron really knew this stuff, at least for an amateur enthusiast, and that this book could easily have been four or five times longer had he really wanted to dig into history and competing theories.

What Spione is NOT, is GURPS: Berlin.  There's no decisive listing of everybody everywhere.  There's no lengthy listing of methodologies or painstaking day-by-day chronologies of who reported to whom about what.  The neighborhood descriptions are barely a sentence long, and popular iconic images of Berlin are mostly omitted.  There's no fucking street map, which is my one serious gripe.  If you're looking to grub around in the dirty details, Spione is a signpost but not the one-stop source.  (I'm okay with this, given the absurd amount of stuff you can find on the Internet, but YMMV.)

Spione Put to Good Use
JOSH: "Hey, my wife is out of town on Sunday.  Wanna come over and throw dice?"
ME: "Sure.  Are you still into that Doctor Who game?  Do you have to play the Doctor?"
JOSH: "Sure, if you want to play it.  But it can work with any time traveler."
ME: "Even . . . Kang the Conqueror?!?"
JOSH: "Sure."
ME: "What about Rama-Tut?  He is ripped, and wears a Pharaoh hat.  That way, everyone knows that (1) he is way ripped, and (2) he is really into Ancient Egypt."
JOSH: "Saves valuable time when meeting someone for the first time.  You can definitely play Kang, or Rama-Tut.  I'm just glad to cross this off my 'Never Played' list."
ME: "Do not get me started on the 'Never Played' list.  I've got James Bond 007 sitting on that thing for like two years."
JOSH: "Do you get to play James Bond?"
ME: "If only there were some clue with which to answer that question."
JOSH: "Can I play Timothy Dalton Bond?"
ME: "Only if you do everything FURIOUSLY and lose your shit over everything that happens."
JOSH: "I do that all the time anyway."
ME: "I got this thing Spione with my tax rebate.  I haven't really read it yet, but it has this whole heading that says, 'Do Not Use This For James Bond, Stupid!' so I think we have to use it for James Bond."
JOSH: "It's an attractive nuisance.  Like a trampoline at an orphanage."

That was Friday at about 5:03 p.m.  After maybe 90 minutes stewing over the text in Spione, I wanted to run something in the 1950's: I'm a big believer that pop culture icons like James Bond, Superman, etc. work best in their original historical context, plus, the only Bond novel I've read is Casino Royale.  Coincidentally, the novel takes place right before the start of Operation: Stopwatch.  Spione immediately gives me some background material on the era, and this particular exploit seems to have been a classic spy-fiction archetype: the triumph that wasn't.  Along with this we get some organizational sketches to suggest NPC's, notably CIA, SIS, Gehlen Org, KGB, and Stasi thugs; in a few cases we get specific names and a snippet or two of characterization.  The constant theme of Spy vs. Guy, riffing off Casino Royale, the strategy of Markus Wolf's HVA, and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold suggests a honey-pot theme, where there's some poor innocent third-party sap, and perhaps a not-quite-so-innocent-but-sympathetic figure pressured into this disgusting spy business.

From there it's just a smidgen of homework and thinking up a few set-pieces to keep James Bond busy.  Digging around on the internet, Bond clearly spent a large part of the war working with Henry Amies in Belgium for the Special Operations Executive: where else do you get total ruthlessness, haute couture, and beautiful women?   Bond is thus involved heavily in Operation: Ratweek, and maybe one of his old war-time enemies is now in the Gehlen Org and necessary to this project. 

More internet research reveals some of the supposed technical challenges in building the Berlin tunnel: some of these are simple enough to explain in a gaming session and give James Bond something risky to do involving a McGuffin or something.  This reveals that some awesome person has fucking mapped Hitler's Bunker, which is in East Berlin just over the border.  What an amazing place to have a show-down with your old Death's Head enemy! 

A smidge of digging into the Bond mythos suggests that Bond's best friend, Bill Tanner, sure looks like a mole.  Alexei Kronsteen, the chess genius from From Russia With Love makes a passable mentor, or substitute, for Markus Wolf.  Rosa Klebb, the ruthless KGB agent from the same novel, is just the sort of psycho who would be working for the very violent faction of the KGB or its offspring.  Red Grant even works as one of the many SIS / MI6 defectors, though it's surely pusing too much to include him in this outing.  Felix Leiter might sub for Ted Shackley.

Anyway: Spione plus maybe 90 minutes of Internet digging around gave an extremely satisfying little scenario that also hit on some of the central issues of trust, decency, love, and betrayal that are at the heart of good spy novels. 

[James_Nostack]

And a quick recounting of play.

Obligatory Opening Sequence
The Aden Protectorate, late 1953, office of the Resident Advisor to the Qu'aiti Sultanate of the Hadhramut.  Close up of James Bond, sweating as he tries to install plastic explosive and a rigging device to the inside of a large filing cabinet.  Outside, we can hear automatic gunfire, shouting in both English and Arabic.  We conclude, based on people running past Bond with files in their hands, that the office is under attack by the locals (stirred up, students of history will know, by King Ahmad bin Yahya of Yemen). 

Bond sets his bomb.  He and the Resident Advisor, Findley, with their teen mascot Ali, are the last to leave in a jeep from the motor pool as the station house is overrun.  Naturally, after a few moments they realize the fuel line has been cut by treacherous 17 year old Ali, who then tries to stab Findley.  Bond kicks the knife out of the child's hand, karate-chops his windpipe, and while Ali is gasping for air, rolls him out of the jeep's open door.  The station house detonates!  Bond and Findley load the jeep with Ali's body, and push it over a cliff at a tight turn to create a distraction.  But they must set across the rocky desert of the Hadhramut, pursued by vengeful local tribesmen on camels.  Eventually the two Brits take cover in a cave, and under the rising moon manage to flag down a British prop plane come to investigate the plume of smoke from the station house.

In Berlin
After the obligatory briefing--"One of our boffins has been sighted spending the nights in East Berlin.  There's no way he should be able to get across so routinely; the Stasi must be letting him through, meaning that he's being played, no doubt by an unscrupulous young woman.  Use your discretion, Bond--but for God's sake be discreet!"--and the obligatory bantering with Moneypenny, Bond tries to requisition a jetpack from Q Branch without success, getting a garrotte-watch and a bug-detector telephone mouthpiece.

In Berlin I go a little bit NPC-crazy, throwing in Bill Tanner, Felix Leiter, the engineering nerd Desmond Lewis, and ultimately William King Harvey ("So, you must be the British William King Harvey, huh?  I'll be straight: I don't like you fancy British toffs.  You're bad at fighting and your organization is penetrated by moles." "You'll find that S.I.S. does the penetrating these days.")  Harvey's news is that he's received official permission to dig the tunnel (now that they've already excavated several dozen meters) - everyone agrees to go out for a drink.

Stopping by his hotel room to drop off his bags, Bond discovers the maid has been murdered--a poisoned blade to the thigh, likely the work of KGB heavy Rosa Klebb.  Bond requests a different room, and talks to Tanner, who confesses he's got misgivings about working alongside Gehlen's men, and warns Bond that one of them is Franz Cadavus, a man Bond had tried to kill during the War.

At a casino / brothel / art colony in the French Sector, Bond meets Desmond Lewis's girlfriend, the East German Greta Schaefer, who is a knock-out and works in one of the steel plants manufacturing pieces for the tunnel.  Bond immediately begins putting the moves on her, to Desmond's dismay.  Greta won't flee East Germany because her family is still on the other side.  Bond lies and says he'll get them across if she agrees to defect tonight; Greta puts him off, it's too much to think about (i.e., must report back to the boss).

After dispatching an assassin in the men's room (because of course), Bond briefly chats with Cadavus, each recognizing the other, each maybe longing for the simpler days when they could just kill each other instead of having to smile politely.  Cadavus recommends that the simplest thing is to kill Greta and make it look like an accident.

At the end of the night, Bond steals Desmond's passport, fakes it up with his own photograph lifted from the assassin, figuring that the Stasi always lets Desmond through.  He crosses the border, trails Greta to her flat in Lichtenberg.  Greta waits around outside, as if expecting someone, and then goes inside, frustrated. 

At which point Rosa Klebb, perched on the fire escape, tries to shoot Bond.  They exchange a few shots, before realizing that distance, visibility, and cover made it pointless.  Klebb tries to scale the fire escape; Bond gives chase; they exchange shots along the way as lights go on across the neighborhood.  At the fifth floor, Klebb swings back over the railings to get below Bond who's now on the stairs.  Bond pivots and kicks her down to the third floor escape.  As she's rising to her feet, he crashes down on her with pummeling blows to the face, until Klebb is incapacitated.  Bond hesitates, unsure if he can bring himself to kill her.  (I'm not sure why: this was a curious role-playing choice.)

At this point Greta climbs out onto the 2nd floor fire escape, a small pistol pointed at Bond.  She asks that he leave immediately.  Bond persuades her to let him come in and wash off the grime.  Inside Greta's flat, she explains that her mother is held in a Stasi prison, as one of the leaders of the '52 workers riots.  Greta doesn't want to spy, but there it is.  She's about to shoot Bond when he backhands her, sweeps her up, and kisses her passionately.  A demure 1950's veil descends, rising with Greta absolutely enamored with Bond, who lies and assures her he will rescue her mother.  Fretting about Klebb, Greta suggests that Bond tie her up; the slap earlier will convey that she was overpowered.  "Don't tell dear little Desmond about us, my love.  It would ruin him."  Bond flees into the night.  To be continued, some day.

James Bond 007 as a Game
Works pretty well, actually, but the resolution system is rather intrusive.  First you have to look up stuff on a multiplication table (which, no fooling, occupies a good quarter of the character sheet!), and then cross reference that with a universal look-up chart to get your "degree of success," and then your degree of success means different things in different contexts.  So almost every little thing involves flipping back and forth between three charts.  It ends up creating something that's very faithful to the style of the films, but it's like watching them through the fine orderly mesh of a screen door. 

Because I spent a lot of my time learning about Berlin, I didn't really get all the rules down 100%.  For example, someone definitely should have frisked Bond for weapons at the border crossing; Klebb was likely aiming at him the whole time and her first shot might have been more effective.  Combat is one of those situations where even when it makes sense to run, odds are that someone's going to shoot you in the back or chase after you, so it's almost better to stick it out and fight.

James Bond 007 RPG meets Spione
So one of the techniques used in the 007 game is "hero points."  I have no idea if any other game was using them by 1983, but basically they're used by the PC's to edit their environment ("There's a rheostat at the bar.  I'm going to make it so hot that Desmond takes off his jacket so I can grab his passport") and also improve their degrees of success.

The official rules are pretty open-ended about the GM's authority to award Hero Points.  After thinking about the Spy vs. Guy divide, I decided that Bond earns a hero point every time he acts like an utter heel - such as, ruining Desmond's chances of happiness with this girl, regarding the dead maid with total indifference, and misleading Greta about his intentions.  This led to a pretty interesting dynamic, where Bond is clearly the protagonist but also a somewhat contemptible human being.  ("Yo!  Just because I'm giving you an incentive for this behavior, doesn't mean you have to keep jumping up to beg for them!"  "I can't help myself!  Now I know how Scott feels!" [a friend who simply cannot pass up a mechanical advantage, especially if it involves acting like a total dick to a trusting NPC.])  So I may need to tweak that reward mechanism a little.

Anyway, so far it's done a good job of conveying a ruthless, intelligent person for whom human feelings are just a tool to be exploited, but who occasionally feels certain amounts of guilt--the player did seem genuinely unwilling to kill Klebb in cold blood, even though he knows she is a murderous KGB thug.

[Ron Edwards]

I think your description of how Bond "emerged" during play is about as perfect a portrait as one could get from the better novels + a smidgeon of cinematic influence along the lines of Connery and Moore.

I don't suppose you had the time for a scene of him at dinner?

Best, Ron

Edited for thread-repair - RE

[James_Nostack]

I don't suppose you had the time for a scene of him at dinner?

Alas, no.  I presume you mean the classic Bond-and-Mastermind-Flirt-over-Dinner scene?  The one problem with this particular scenario I've cooked up is that the two sides wouldn't be able to mingle as freely as they might in another environment.  For example, I have a hard time imagining that Mischa Wolf could just invite William King Harvey to come over for dinner, or that they would run into each other at a "mixed" social event.  (Yet another tragedy of Cold War Berlin: it makes the Bond Dinner much harder to contrive!)

I haven't reviewed the game's random events table at great length--it's sort of this charming way to handle the drip-drop of clues in a mystery scenario by way of just wandering around in a sandbox.  But it does require taking a pretty strong hand at scene framing, and maybe somewhere in the charts is a, "The Bad Guy Invites You To Dinner" result.

[Ron Edwards]

Actually I was referring to scenes in which Bond devours gross amounts of gooey, saucy, rank foodstuffs, each bite described in detail. I have never again been able to read the date scene in Casino Royale out of sheer nausea.

Since that aspect of textual Bond has never made it out of the novels onto the screen or otherwise into the popular understanding of the character, I don't suppose it would make it into role-playing either. However, just for myself, should I ever be playing the character in this game, you can bet that he'd start with a mass of frog-eggs in a cocktail glass, then pheasant goulash drizzled with chocolate, with a mango-mint-strawberry-vodka chaser.

More to the point: hero points as you describe were definitely in widespread use across many games at that point whether they were in the textual rules or not; I remember them from Champions especially and also that some people used chunks of experience points in AD&D toward the same ends. I don't know when or in which game they were finally formalized in the text, but if it was this one, I wouldn't be surprised.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

Ha!  We talked about the Casino Royale dinner scene prior to play too.  What really sticks out to me is that Bond, who is meant to be this fancy sophisticated lower-upper-class gentleman, is so goddamn gauche that he has to name drop everything. 

I don't know what the food scene is like in Chicago, but New York is filled with these assholes.  "Oh, sure, I suppose Artichoke Basile's is good pizza (though I think they've fallen off a lot since they got their sit-down place by the High Line), but if you really care about the quality of your mozzarella di bufala, your only choice is Motorino's.  Oh, and last week I had the best ramen..."  I once had an internship where the next to me could not go a single day about boasting about different kinds of steaks he had eaten. 

I presume a lot of this reflects food-porn for contemporary English readers, which I seem think was still on a rationing system long after the war, though maybe not as late as 1953.  But of course part of it is also just that food fashion has changed a hell of a lot in 60 years.  There was a BBC show that made it to one of the American cooking channels, The Supersizers Eat... which was sort of a combination food history lesson, cosplay, and a little bit of gender politics.  The episode focusing on 1950's English food was simply frightening.

But I wonder if what we're seeing here, too, is pop culture transforming notions of British aristocracy into mere consumer choices.  Obviously modern conspicuous consumption has very long roots going back to the Gilded Age if not before, but Bond is probably the biggest British pop culture export after the Beatles, and certainly far more tied up with issues of social class and "veddy veddy British" atmosphere.  I wonder if everything in Q Branch is actually ordered from Hammacher Schlemmer.

I'll be curious to see if this habit is retained throughout the later books.

[James_Nostack]

I ran an exo-quel (like an interquel, but bookending the initial session) with two other players.  It wasn't 100% satisfying as I wanted to keep a very tight grip on the timeline, but there was the foundation for an interesting "Spy vs. Guy" dilemma.

Obligatory Set-Piece
In our opening action sequence, CIA agents Felix Leiter and Richard Loubeau are conducting a false flag gig essential to the success of Operation: Ajax.  Posing as socialist party members allied to Mossadegh, they plant a bomb at the villa of a prominent Shi'a cleric when nobody's home.  Felix knocks out a guard when the latter is momentarily distracted by a limousine arriving at the house: the cleric's wife and toddler have arrived home too early!  Felix and Richard scare the innocents off with random gunfire and socialist epithets, escape the villa after a vigorous chase by additional guards, and the bomb detonates.  Outraged by the Socialist Party's actions, the clergy comes out against Mossadegh, giving the Shah and his American handlers--including Maj. Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, Sr.!--a crucial bit of elite support when the coup occurs a few days later.

Back to the Future: Berlin 1954
We then jump, as before, to 1954 Berlin.  Leiter and Loubeau are now involved in Operation: Gold under the direction of William King Harvey, basically assigned to do whatever they feel like doing so long as it smooths out the operation.  This indulgence takes the form of posing as experimental artistic-photographers so they can mingle with the Berlin art scene of hot chicks.  (This is an artifice of the James Bond 007 game, where all secret agents have 100% proficiency with photography.)

Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Stand Under a Falling Brick
In this capacity they come to know Frau Besse, manager of the artist colony/night club/gambling parlor where the CIA & SIS guys hang out after hours.  Richard in particular decides to trail Besse's troubled little protege, Gabrielle Vogel, an abstract painter and heroin addict, when Frau Besse worries that her addiction would render her easily exploitable by the East. 

Richard tries to follow Gabi, fails.  Tries to flirt with her, fails.  Tries to follow her again--and somebody literally drops a brick on his head from a third-story building.  Badly injured, he barely makes it back to the station house.

(Meanwhile Felix has trailed the pretty East German girl and confirmed she's meeting with Rosa Klebb.)

The next day, the two men compare notes, and fuss with current ally and Nazi war criminal Franz Cadavus, who claims to have a brilliant new lead which he forbids anyone from investigating.  To recuperate, Richard spends the day trying to create a crazy photo collage to one-up Gabi.

Back to Where It All Began
Then James Bond arrives and all goes as stated before, though Felix's player is initially mystified to find a Turkish assassin unconscious in the Men's Room and initially thinks it's a Super Special Clue until gently reminded, hey Bond's in town stuff like this always happens.

Gabi's Story
As Bond is off seducing East German factory girls and fighting Rosa Klebb, Felix throws a large amount of money in Gabi's direction, basically telling her to model for Richard, because he's a terrible artist and is suicidally depressed.  (Simultaneously, Richard is cleaning up at the gambling tables shouting, "I'm a winner!")  Felix learns that Gabi is the disgruntled daughter of a Nazi civil engineer, who has taken up abstract art because it's aggressively not-useful.  Gabi is seriously dismayed that, for generations, idiotic Americans will hear "Germany" and equate it with Nazism, overlooking her people's great contributions to music, poetry, philosophy and art.  As a German patriot with an anti-Rightist outlook, she's sympathetic to Communism for artistic/ideological reasons.  Felix - surprisingly to me as GM - concludes Gabi poses no serious risk to the operation.

Meanwhile, Frau Besse coos over Richard's injury, and points out that rather than follow Gabi to find the dealer, it would have been simpler just to ask Besse: the man is Juergen Fisch, a West German gangster, black market supplier, numbers racketeer, and gambler.  She gives Richard the address of Fisch's club.

Leiter and Loubeau resolve to pay Fisch a visit, once Loubeau's head would has healed.  (Also, at this point we'd probably caught up to Bond's timeline, and I didn't want to get too far ahead.)

The Human Element
Though the players aren't consciously aware of it, Gabi Vogel poses a serious problem.  As a Communist sympathizer, she's already prone to helping the East.  As a habitue of Besse's place, Gabi would be able to spot unfamiliar Americans or Brits.  And as Fr. Besse notes, her addiction makes her easy to exploit.

What the players do not know, is that Gabi's supplier Fisch is already bag-man for the HVA: the numbers racket is just a way for agents to collect payments unobtrusively by presenting specially coded tickets.  Gabi could fall under Fisch's sway and become an agent; this will happen if the players do nothing.  Alternately, the agents could exploit Gabi themselves, and turn her into a double agent.  Or, they could figure out a more humane approach.

The Other Human Element
The players did not poke their noses into Cadavus's side-operation, but the Gehlen Org has identified a cuckolded Stasi personnel clerk who handles travel accommodations for visiting Russians who is ripe for turning. 

James Bond 007 meets Spione Again
At this point, my use of Spione was mainly in figuring out what other plot-lines might exist in Berlin for other players to pursue.  Part of that involved thinking about who becomes a spy, and why.  (I like the result with Gabi Vogel quite a lot, actually.)

I also used Spione to track down other works for reference, including The Spy Book, From Yalta to Berlin, A Perfect Spy, and From Russia With Love, the first third of which is uproariously, hilariously camp in the style of the 1960's Batman TV show.  I've decided that while the East Germans will be presented as actual people with motives, the Soviets will spend as much time chewing scenery as humanly possible. 

(Also, what jackass cast Lotte Lenya, who was a great beauty in her day, as the hideous, ranine Rosa Klebb, so that this will be how pop culture remembers her?)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi James, whose name is most unfortunate in this discussion,*

I'm seeing three distinct goals in play which may not be entirely compatible, and which possibly might diminish your fun in the next session progressively from its diminution in your second.

One goal is the pure excess and nearly parodic celebration of Bond-ness, especially the cumulative icon mainly based on the movies, and with the texts considered mainly insofar as they informed the movies. This is what James Bond 007 the RPG is all about, clunky mechanics and all. It shows up very clearly in your framing devices as provided by that game.

Another is the presence and in-play resolution of Spy vs. Guy stuff, based mainly on thematic influences of Spione and of some parts of some of the Bond fiction. It seems to show up mainly in the in-play equivalents of Flashpoints and in some of your prep/play content like making the East Germans actual people.

Still another is what I think of as "GM as creative schizophrenic" who would very much like to enjoy his or her memory of the work as a masterpiece, in terms of both internal causal events and accurate historical content that gets folded in as either causes and effects.

Take it from a man who GMed Champions and other supers RPGs for a solid decade with the equivalents of these three priorities, based on a certain idiosyncratic ideal of Marvel Comics, uppermost in his mind: you have to choose which one really matters, and let the other two be occasional sources of low-pressure content and Color, and furthermore, be subject to the Rule of Cool rather than high standards of accuracy or emotional depth.

See, if you were using Spione as merely sourcebook, that'd be great, but you're not. You're trying to get the meat of Spy vs. Guy into play as a feature of the protagonist's (and the player's) decision-making in there. And other things, basically, pick a specific moment of any of the three things I described, and you'll see how shoehorning either or both of the other two in there will screw it up. You'll end up becoming a control freak who demands that the player-characters react precisely how you want the players to direct them.

And that'd be a shame, especially because you'd be sabotaging the players who seem to have entered into all of this with a good will and trust in your originally-stated commitment.

Best, Ron

* No! I expect you to die!

edited to restore display, no change to text - RE

[James_Nostack]

Yeah, I can see what you're saying.  That an game pairing  immediately decried as an abomination should face problems isn't a shock!

I should be clear that my diminished enjoyment of the second session was knowing that we had to, ah, "pull out" early to avoid elaborate timeline problems, rather than from an incipient clash of creative agendas.

That said, the clash of agendas is incipient.  I don't know how well you know the James Bond 007 game - in some ways it's quite clever - but the Random Event table is somewhat at odds with what I am trying to do. 

Example from play:

ME: Richard, whatever you're trying to sell, Gabi isn't buying.  "You're not a photographer.  You don't even have a flash cube.  You're a bored American businessman playing games and flashing money around.  Go take it to Besse's, she's got lots of girls who like to play games for money.  Leave me alone'". She turns and stalks off down the street, her heels clicking angrily on the pavement.

RICHARD: Hell.  Well, I still wanna know where she's heading.  I wait in an alley for little while, and then I am going to set out after her as stealthily as I can.

ME: (He has already tried this and failed, so I don't want to just re-do the roll.  Hmm, what does the Random Event table say?  "ATTACK.  A sinister attack upon a character, taking such forms as poisonous snakes, tarantulas, and gruesome impaling traps, will be triggered when the character returns to his hotel room..."  What the--poisonous snakes?!  Okay, let's ditch the hotel room, set it here in the alley, and, gee, what's the noir equivalent of poisonous snakes?  How about someone tries to drop masonry on him?)

RICHARD: (dice give him some warning but not enough to escape all harm.)

A small part of this difficulty is that these events sometimes assume a scene has been framed in a particular way, but mainly, they're more appropriate to a particular high-octane adventure story, i.e., a James Bond film.  Of all the nerve!

What I am trying to do, to the extent that I can, is run a particular sub-set of Bond novel, where Bond is presented with some human dilemmas and will either get involved too deeply, observe from a safe distance, or cynically exploit as the player chooses.  The trick is making this a background feature/inspiration for pulp adventure stuff.

The historical accuracy stuff I'm not that big on: while I would love to see some period clothing and some contemporary shots of neighborhoods for the sake of providing descriptions, I am fine bullshitting my way through Berlin.  That said, when someone else goes through the trouble of mapping Hitler's Bunker onto 5-foot squares, you gotta use it.  The bit with the super-detailed opening scenes is just to establish the illusion of credibility.

(This doesn't mean I don't find the history fascinating for non-game reasons!)

So in terms of priorities, it's (1) action movie with espionage dressing, (2) built around NPC's in crisis when possible, (3) in a historically unusual place that we care just enough about to acknowledge how historically unusual it was.  The game system does offer the possibility of using lower-level agents, who would be far closer to ordinary humans and therefore might be more suited to a slow-simmering cat & mouse type of spy story.