How It All Played Out

So how did everything actually go?

(Note that there's plenty of spoilers, and you may want to have read the relevant scenarios in Executive Decision and the Cavendish Memo to follow along here.)

In both scenarios, there was always enough discussion that I as GM had very little to do. I sat back and listened, occasionally answered questions, but in general the discussion moved enough and never got repetitive, so there wasn't much GM intervention needed. I had a few bits prepared to introduce new complications and thereby spur on new discussion. but if anything, I had trouble finding a good point to spring these twists on the players.


For the first scenario, the President was Matthew, who was pretty active and forceful and good at having the discussion flow around and making sure each person gave some input. They decided initially to delay saying anything about the memos, and just had the FBI (or whatever the appropriate agency would be) investigate the secretary's disappearance and the missing memo. So we assumed that they waited a day, then reconvened. In that time, the memos were leaked, and sothe White House wound up at a disadvantage on the news narrative. (The FBI did find that the secretary had been talking to a political rival Senator, but that was not much use). So the second day they had to figure out how to respond to the memos, which they succeeded pretty well in rebutting in the final press conference. The White House's story became that they were planning on meeting with Cavendish CEO in person and telling him "no" on loosening environmental policy, but trying to work out some other way to keep the factory in the country. I don't recall if anything was actually decided about a long-term policy change to help the corporation stay in the country.

President Campbell did a good job presenting their story to the press, answering the difficult questions and dealing with things. People had a positive reaction to his presentation, so it worked out well for the White House. Mostly, the reporters stuck to the pre-scripted questions, except for Adam, who didn't get a reporter (we were short one). Adam played a reporter from the Weekly World News claiming the President was a Reptoid. After being escorted out by Secret Service agents, websites devoted to tearing off President Campbell's human mask and revealing his reptilian heritage spread across the Internet.



The second scenario still played out pretty well, but ended a little worse for the White House. Amber played the President the second time, and still seemed to do fairly well refereeing the discussion. But though diplomacy with Kerzhakstan was repeatedly discussed, it was never actually pursued as a serious option. So the PCs never heard Kerzhakstan's side of the story, just the version in the international news. They did communicate with Russia, and Russia was, basically, looking for an excuse for violence against a country that seceded from them at the end of the Cold War. So since they had two warped, negative views of Kerzhakstan and a fair number of military minded PCs (Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, etc.) they wound up pursuing a military solution: send in a commando force to recover the pilot and plane and experimental doomsday weapon (!) and get out.

Doomsday weapon? There wasn't anything like that in the original scenario. That was made up by Director of national Intelligence Stacie, as she tried to find ways to fulfill her agendas. Everyone was surprised the DNI had a secret project like that, but isn't the head of spy operations supposed to do all sorts of sneaky, secret stuff?

Truth to tell, I had been considering putting a nuclear weapon in the scenario for the last two weeks or so, but eventually didn't do so. But Stacie adding it in amped up the tension of the whole crisis, so it was good. It did cause some suspension of disbelief issues for one specific player, but eventually it got smoother over enough for play to continue.

Initially it was some sort of experimental nuclear warhead, but at some point while I was out of the room the players changed that to an experimental anti-matter bomb. Other than the fact that they're stealing from Dan Brown I was okay with the change.


Because of an experimental antimatter bomb, the player characters decided to prioritize recovering the plane over saving the missing pilot. And so the final story was to lie to the Kerzhakstani ambassador and send in the military while distracted. I as GM couldn't see any way for them to pull off a military maneuver without someone getting hurt, so the pretty young pilot died in the crossfire.

(She was apparently the sexiest vegetarian in the armed forces... Google can tell you the weirdest things. I just searched for "air force lieutenant and found her.)

And since Russia was looking for an excuse, and because Kerzhakstan was terrified of Russia and had no idea who was attacking, both basically used it as an excuse to go to war with each other. And America wound up on the Russian side, contrary to the rest of the United Nations. Not great for international prestige.

Because of unexpected military action and unplanned doomsday weaponry, the prescripted reporter questions were much less applicable, so the reporters had to ad lib a lot more. And the President and Press Secretary Ross had a tougher time answering questions. Dead political martyr and internationally unpopular war don't work out too great for America.



Overall, I think it went well. Better than last time, on first impression. Some stuff could certainly be improved, and I had two technical difficulties while the larp was going on (the CD of "Hail to the Chief" kept skipping and one projector in the President's eyes burned out after a second of blinding light. I swear I tested this stuff ahead of time.).

One thing that I might do differently is sort Agendas out by scenario, as I did with the player characters (the little 1 and 2 in the upper corner of any character sheet shows which scenario it was in). And be a bit better prepped on what to tell the players at the start of each scenario... the relationship between Russia and Kerzhakstan was initially misunderstood by some players, and it was central to the second scenario. And possibly the Attorney General should be replaced by some other Cabinet official, as partisanship never came much into play. But nothing failed miserably, as far as I could tell.




At some point I might want to write a post musing about how political games like this will shift more rightwards/more conservative, just due to the nature of political thinking and how it works. But that's a post for some other day, if ever.