Night’s Black Agents After-Action Report #1: A Passage to Marrakesh

For the first time in about 20 years, I’m in a table-top RPG game. A small crew of guys and I are playing a game called Night’s Black Agents over Discord. This is a game based on the rules of Gumshoe, a game I’ve never played, and it involves superspy black-ops types trying to uncover a vampire conspiracy in Europe. And so, like how my friend BDubs does with the RPG sessions he runs, here’s the first Night’s Black Agents after-action report.

Shane is the Director (GM). Our crew consists of the following: 

Jonathan Crisp, played by Oghma: A wetworker, former CIA trained killer who is brutal yet emotionally fragile.Ricky, aka Skorpion, played by Alexandru Constantin: A former stuntman, our trick driver, and a smuggler. James Gowen, played by Ryan K.: Our black bagger, ace hacker, and a guy who knows how to get the information we need.Terrence Satterthwaite, played by me: Scion of English nobility, an expert doctor, trained swordfighter, and ladykiller. He’s Dr. James Bond, vampire slayer.

Night’s Black Agents is a very streamlined RPG system, and character creation is fun, with just enough complexity to make it interesting but not so simplistic as to be boring. Your choices of skills matter, but they won’t make-or-break your game before you even play; at least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten after our first session. You can choose a Background if you’d like, e.g., medic, wet worker, driver, and so on, each with a package of Investigative and General skills. These skills that come with a background package deduct from your pool of Investigative and General skill points. Each character, regardless of Background, if chosen, or anything else, gets a few basic minimums in certain skills, as well as in Health (typical RPG-style hit points) and Stability (think mental hit points). The remaining points can then be used to bolster these skills, or add new ones. Skills come in two flavors:

Investigative: These are things like research, languages, art history, flirting, streetwise, and so on. Since a large part of Night’s Black Agents involves acquiring clues and information, many of these skills are used automatically when declared by the player or the Director, no rolls required. One point in an Investigative skill makes you a trained expert at it, and you’ll get the clue. Additional points mean you might get more clues, or you can spend your point(s) to uncover more and more secrets and information. Don’t worry, point refresh. Some of these skills are very cool. Dr. Satterthwaite, as befitting a privileged English upper-crust individual, has a diverse and, hopefully, helpful skillset of things like multiple languages, flirting, reassurance, high society, flattery, art history, history, astronomy, and architecture, among others. General: Stuff you do; think active skills. Here is where your weapons proficiencies come in, as well as things like hand-to-hand, driving, athletics, explosives, concealment, hacking, and so on. These you do have to roll to accomplish. You can pump tons of points into these, with eight and above representing absolute badassery. However, Night’s Black Agents only uses one six-sided die, so there’s a challenge number you must meet, depending on the difficulty of the task. A difficulty of four, for example, means you need to roll a four or above. What you can do is spend points to add to your roll, meaning if you spend three points of the skill in question, you’ll automatically pass the challenge, whereas spending a point or two increases your chances, as long as you don’t roll a one. It’s a very fun, easy-to-grasp system that makes for quick play.

There are other rules I don’t quite understand yet, since I haven’t read the book, but they’ll come about naturally.

You also pick your character’s three sources of stability–a symbol, solace, and a place–which not only affect your character’s well-being, but can come into play in interesting ways. Lastly, there is your character’s drive, their motivation for doing what they do. This adds verisimilitude, and as always, the game doesn’t bind you with rigid “class” choices.

The game takes its cues from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as other vampire novels and movies, as well as films and TV shows about spies, action, and adventure. Taken, The Bourne Identity, Burn Notice, James Bond, anything you can think of. It’s more of a “story game” where the players sort of do what they like in the confines of the scenario the Director sets up, and can accomplish various tasks as they see fit given their unique skills and how the team meshes together.

Enough of this. On to the report.

Our small crew has worked together before, and has had some scary run-ins that have nearly derailed past missions. Who, or what, was responsible for those, we don’t know. But one day James received an encrypted email package of information with a mission, offering good pay . . . as well as the possibility of some answers. Who hired us is unknown right now, but we’ve been tasked to find American investigative journalist Olivia Liu before someone else does. Why they want her is also unknown, but the promise of answers to the forces that had menaced our previous missions is too good to pass up, even more appealing than the money.

Liu was last seen in Marrakesh, Morocco. Skorpion and Crisp were able to lean on some contacts of theres to get us to Marrakesh and, more importantly, get us kitted out with weapons, supplies, and a sweet air-conditioned bulletproof SUV. Skorpion was able to get us some forged Al-Jazeera press passes. Dr. Satterthwaite used one of his contacts to set up a safe house at a local hotel he’s familiar with. Gowan noticed that the email was sent using civilian encryption–good, but not the best. The plot thickened.

We landed in Marrakesh and milled about the market. Crisp, who along with the Doctor speaks Arabic, was able to use his streetwise skill to learn from some locals that the American journalist was staying at a hotel in Jemaa el-Fnaa, the main market square and a touristy area. The team also learned that, while locals would be used as eyes and ears of whomever was after Liu, a foreigner would be the muscle who would actually do the kidnapping. We headed over there to case the place, a former manor turned into a relatively dumpy hotel.

There were some suspicious characters around the hotel, two locals on motorcycles across the street eyeing the hotel with a third, empty motorcycle near them, and an out-of-place, well-dressed white man sitting at a cafe . . . all gleaned thanks to Gowen and Crisp’s urban survival and noticing skills. The plan was this: Crisp, Gowen, and Skorpion would neutralize the lookouts one way or the other while the Doctor sneaked into the hotel, found Liu, and brought her to safety. Easy, right? For this crew, it actually was.

Crisp sauntered over to the white man at the cafe, took one bullet out of his pistol’s magazine, and slapped it on the table. “The next one’s going in your head. You’d best step off,” he said, or something to that effect. His relatively high intimidation skill made the guy nearly soil himself. He also revealed he was working for MI6. “You shouldn’t be here,” Crisp intoned. “Leave your radio and earpiece.” The Englishman did so, not wanting any trouble. Was he a weenie, or smart? Will he be back? We’ll see. My money is on smart weenie.

The motorcycle guys pose a different challenge. Do we intimidate, attack, or distract? Skorpion opts for the latter, imitating the most obnoxious American partying tourist he can and inquiring where he can get some sweet hashish, man . . . all while Gowen swipe their keys. This lets the Doctor slip into the hotel, but he spends a few points of infiltration anyway to help him get to Liu’s room unnoticed. Once in the hotel, Skorpion drops the pretense and starts insulting the men, who keep their cool because, as we’ve been informed, the police in Marrakesh do not tolerate any disruptions to the city’s vital tourism industry.

The Doctor picked the lock to Liu’s room and finds the roach-infested pit empty. It looks like the American reporter left in a hurry, but thanks to the Doctor’s streetwise skill, he finds a hastily scribbled note with the name Hasan Safet, a contact the Doctor knows from previous trips here. There’s also a big file folder full of interesting, cryptic, and creepy stuff–travel itineraries to Romania among them. The Doctor is a trained researcher, and he’s able to quickly find some more interesting information, including talk about vampires, of all things. There’s something called the Harkness file, something like that; I can’t remember but it’s something that will require further research when there’s time.

A sound at the door forces the Doctor to hide. Another Moroccan youth come in, but he’s ambushed by the Doctor with a knife to the throat and orders not to move. The Doctor searches the kid and finds motorcycle keys, a knife, and a small radio. He shepherds the kid outside where he’s interrogated by the rest of the team in a very surreptitious manner. He claims to know little, and along with the other two motorcycle riders was working with the Englishman–that’s where his radio went to. 

The Doctor uses his reassurance skill to make the kid understand if he lays low and keeps his mouth shut, he won’t be hurt. The crew piles into the SUV and Skorpion rides in the direction of Safet’s place, hoping the team can intercept Liu before the bad guys do . . . whoever they are. I remember at one point Skorpion used his cop talk skill to pump a local officer of the law for info while using the fake press pass, and a $100 bill, to glean a sighting of Liu and her general direction.

Thanks to Skorpion’s excellent driving, and judicious application of skill points, we win the chase–a successive series of challenge rolls between Skorpion and the bad guys, with some pooled points the rest of us can throw in–getting through the narrow, crowded streets, human barricades, and other traffic, closing the distance first so Crisp can jump out and force Liu into the van. Skorpion then pulls some more epic driving maneuvers to lose our tail and get to our safe house, Gowen and the Doctor reassuring Liu on the way.

We made it this far without attracting any heat from the local police, or even getting shot at, but we did see some out-of-place vehicles taking off, so the chances are that trouble will be finding us very, very soon. Our session ended because it was late and we’re all too old to be staying up wicked late playing an RPG. 

On the whole, I like it! It’s fun, doesn’t require tons of number-crunching, and can easily be played over a Discord chat. It’s a resource-management game, what with the spending of skill points, and while we didn’t have any combats yet, so far I’m a fan of the Gumshoe system. Apparently there are tons of setting books for it, but I find it works very well for this type of spy-thriller scenario which makes sense given Night’s Black Agents‘ pedigree as an offshoot of Gumshoe.

Our next step will, obviously, be to debrief Liu, find out who is after her and why, and get out of Morocco and to some of Skorpion’s old SAS pals in Gibraltar alive.

I like how each character type gets their chance to shine. And so far, the team has worked well together–remember, according to the story we are all old friends and teammates. 

I hope you enjoyed this type of post, and I’m psyched for next Wednesday’s session. I’d forgotten how much fun TTRPGs can be.

Not a TTRPG, but The Swordbringer would make an excellent setting: Dog-men Warriors! Freaky alien monsters! High technology meets sword and planet! Gunfights and swordplay on a faraway, hostile alien world! The adventures write themselves. Check out the books here.