I read this through a gaming link; Malcolm Craig, game designer and actual cold war expert, rates this as the best background to the Cold City RPG (or at least, he did when we interviewed him for the Smart Party). So, months later, I’ve finally read it – and it’s a cracking read, a classic John le Carre that manages to convey very well the setting of shifting allegiances and bureaucratic machinations of a (fictionalised) 1970s operation.

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What’s it about? Well, the Alec Leamas’ network in East Berlin has collapsed, so he’s recruited for one final mission – he’s set up to fall into ignominy, so he’ll be recruited by the East Germans as a double agent, from where he can bring them down from within – sort of. I don’t want to share too many spoilers, but that gives you the flavour of it – and there’s some great bits in it that you can incorporate into games, whether set in a similar setting (like Cold City) or not.

Going Underground to be Recruited

Now, you’ll need player buy-in for this, and a big set-up to pay it off, but the central plot at the start of the book really could work in a game; your heroes need to be banished, down on their luck and fallen from grace, in order for them to be recruited to infiltrate a bigger evil. It’s a particularly murky kind of play in the novel, but I can see this working in an awful lot of genres. 

I’m sketching out a One Ring scenario featuring this just now! Your heroes need to find the informants sending crucial information to the Dark forces; what better way than to be sent to the prison in Tharbad to be recruited – they’re always looking for bandits and adventurers are only ever a few steps away from criminals.

Also see prison breaks where the first step is to be sent into the prison, a staple of fantasy and superhero plots. I’d want some sort of system for the encounters they have while down on their luck to allow players to really feel how low they are, before a turnaround – prison brawls maybe, but also think about requests to do morally dubious things. A chance to explore the characters’ actual moral compasses.

Slow Chases

One of the final scenes sees the protagonist make a break for it to West Germany over the wall; there’s an agonisingly slow drive across East Germany, trying to not attract attention, through alleyways and onto rough ground. We don’t do chases enough in games anyway, but how about some slow, stealthy ones – where you have to try and shadow the captain of the guard through the festival procession without alerting suspicion, or to not lose that particular TIE fighter from your sights as the Death Star looms overhead.

It’s easy enough to parse this as a skill challenge step-by-step, where each failure might bring more attention. Even sneaking out of an enemy area, overrun by guards, could be handled like this – and how many times in sci-fi games do PC smugglers actually get to smuggle?

Failure As Over-Success

This is an underused fail-forward, in my experience, but it happens a few times in the book. You jump the guard in the dark – but instead of subduing him, kill him, causing problems down the line. You persuade Control to look after the girl from the library – but they pay her a personal visit, attracting suspicion and getting her involved in the whole affair. A few games, notably Apocalypse Keys, make a real feature of rolling too well leading to this kind of over-success, but there’s no reason it can’t be a regular failure twist in other games – you succeed on the face of it, but fail in your larger/longer term goal.

So, three things to take from a classic spy novel. I’ve got more of these bubbling up over gaming inspiration from films and literature, so let me know – are these posts something you’d like to see more of?