Planning: Fallout from the Extraction of Mr. X

Last time we met, the Agents managed to get a lot done, mostly by grabbing firmly upon a bunch of hooks I can build upon for new missions and the continuation of the current one. I'm going to use a method from Orbs and Balrogs which has served me well in the past. Orbs and Balrogs is an awesome, detailed and nuanced blog that I highly suggest reading.

These hooks are:

• Francois' Laptop
• His USB Thumb Drive
• A safety deposit key for a place in London
• A gun runner's vault
• Francois' cellphone

The vault is by far the easiest one to decide on- it's teeming with all sorts of great weapons to shoot people with. Instead of explicitly listing out everything inside, I'm likely going to give it a merchant skill between 10 and 12. For each specific weapon they hope to find, roll vs. the effective merchant skill to determine if it's there or not. Modify based on LC and how much I don't want them toting around hugely powerful explosives or .50 cal rifles (Virgil's Player: Now see, those aren't quite the same situation. Virgil can turn a .50 cal rifle into a game breaker, but we'd just blow ourselves up with decent explosives.)

The next big decision is which data storage device has Francois' local business information on it. This would be the information dealing his work with Lorin's organization, as well as information that was pertinent on Mr. X. I'm thinking that the USB stick acts as an encryption key that allows access to a partition on the hard drive that is storing a virtual machine with the credentials to log onto a secure private VPN routed through some random country (Romania comes to mind for no real reason) that will give access to the information. Francois likely had a tech savvy individual set this up for him and teach him how to go through the steps without breaking proxies left and right.

If you didn't understand that, don't worry, Tobias' skill levels for computer related tasks are outright ridiculous and he's also skilled in cryptography. I could probably write an entire post on how game-breaking a character such as Tobias is in skilled hands. Don't fuck with the communications expert. Ever.

So information is worthless without knowing what that information actually is. Again, I'm going to assign the data a skill level and do multiple checks to decide what's actually contained there. It's more organic than cherry picking everything. These are the stats on Francois' laptop:

Property	Notes
Base Research Time	1 Hour
Research Modifier	-2 (Messy), all data is written in french
Knowledge Base	Lorin's Business- 14 (+1 Research), PKK Information- 9 (-4 Research)
Specific Content	Name of Lorin's Suppliers, Past Client Info (+2 to research if cross-referencing with Francois' cellphone contact list), Details of a deal between the PKK and the CIA, Armament of the CIA squad the players have been tasked with eliminating, List of people disappeared on the orders of Egemen Atalar (-1 to Research)

For the specific content, I've already rolled checks for various things I felt the players might try to discern while going through the data. I rolled well on almost every check I made, meaning Francois must have taken comprehensive notes- albeit in french.

The Safety Deposit Key will be a hook for another mission, potentially something another team of agents goes to collect and then deliver to the players.

The CIA team is likely going to be 4-5 people, all of them spooks who are attempting to kidnap Egeman so that he can be investigated.

So I slept with the first half of this post completed last night and finally decided what it was that got everyone as angry with Egemen as they are- Project Olympus.

Project Olympus is an experimental training programing modeled after NATO training procedures- but started at a much earlier age. Egemen's implementation of the project involved children as young as five. Natalia is a product of the program, having been selected for it at age six and taken from her family.

Training under Project Olympus involves severe SERE-style exercises, physical conditioning, drug regimens,  and the completion of multiple black ops missions up to and including assassination. A lot of the people disappeared by Egemen either found themselves in the program- or dying at the hands of those going through it.

Details of that will obviously come out at the beginning of next session, prompting Logan to call the players to check the news and discuss things.

Now obviously, a lot of people are very alarmed at the rogue head of an intelligence agency disappearing- hence Agency 17 stepping in.

• The CIA was cooperating with the PKK elements within the Turkish governments with the hope of securing research data from Project Olympus. Capturing Egeman would allow them to interrogate him to learn what he knows.
• Anti-government forces want Egeman to answer for his crimes against humanity.
• The Turkish government wants to make a show of taking down Egeman to appease the anti-government protests.
• The US Government is denying any part in Project Olympus, as is the rest of the NATO community who are all in agreement that it was purely Turkish Intelligence who decided to step over the line.
• The PKK is hoping to take advantage of the chaos to improve their foothold in Turkey, but Egeman does not fit into their plans
• Egeman (Mr. X) wants to flee the country after ensuring that the CIA squad sent to retrieve him is eliminated.

Now, for the next mission, I'm thinking it's time to do something involving parachuting, the wilderness and roughing it away from society.