Your mission, if you choose to accept it….

Just saw Johnny English Reborn over the weekend. This is what I imagine a well-run Risus espionage game to look like. The Johnny English movIes should be required viewing for anyone wanting to run a fun Bond-style adventure. It successfully sets up the appropriate cliches and then gleefully skewers them.

Optional Rule: Spies Like Us

Maybe it’s because I finished reading the International Spy Museum Handbook of Practical Spying, or maybe it’s just the book inspiring memories of playing Top Secret, but I’ve been itching to play me a spy game.

However, one thing seems to be missing from most systems: rules for your agent’s cover. Here’s my idea for adding covers to Risus.

A spy can take a special cliché simply called Cover Story. This cliché cannot be ranked higher than a player’s specific spy cliché. If you have Roguish Confiscation Agent (4), the best you can have for your Cover Story cliché is a (4).

Before undertaking each mission, a spy must document specifically what their Cover Story cliché entails. Perhaps something along the lines of Investment Banker. For all intents and purposes, for the length of the mission, the spy is also an Investment Banker (4).

When the mission is over, the spy can pick a different Cover Story.  Maybe next time out, she wants to be a Fashion Photographer (4).

However, here is where Cover Story changes things a bit. You still have some memory of your previous Cover Story (and only the most recent cover story). However, you effectively work at 1/2 of the cliché level (round down). So if our Roguish Confiscation Agent (4), using the Cover Story of Fashion Photographer (4) needed to do something as an Investment Banker, she could, but it would be as an Investment Banker (2).

There may be times when that (2) works out better than the (4) due to difficulties and target numbers.

I don’t know if such a rule is necessary (most likely, it isn’t). I thought I would submit it for flavor. An agent’s cover story is an important part of any mission and I thought it would be interesting to allow agents to change their cover story between missions.