Berlin Nocturne, May 1954

 Another trip to the good old days of the Cold War with John B, this time something of a Berlin Noir theme with a Le Carre-ish plot in 1954 Berlin. The twist being that we were all the baddies - KGB, GRU and STASI.

As ever the session was enhanced by Johns provision of lovely maps. I found this one particularly helpful as is shows all the Allied and Soviet sectors and their respective HQs. 

A pretty motley bunch of spooks in dodgy hats assembled, naturally on the hottest day of the year so far, but at least it was set in May so we didn't have to wear coats as well. I was on the KGB team along with Mark and John A. Tim G, Russell and Micheal were GRU while Terry and Pete were Stasi. We all had team and individual briefings, and to add to the general paranoia, Stalin had recently died with Malenkov taking over and a purge currently underway of Berias adherents. 

The main issue confronting us was an apparent breach in security with various top secret items appearing in the hands of western intelligence. The KGB actually knew that it was because MI6 and the CIA had penetrated the comms infrastructure, but hadn't told the other agencies as we needed to protect our source, BLACKBIRD, at all costs on the orders of Moscow Central.

So, we needed to gently point the others in the right direction while protecting BLACKBIRD, and making sure to deflect any blame on us for leaks by pointing out moles. I was personally responsible for running BLACKBIRD and had to make daily trips to the western zone to liaise with him.

A few of us realised that this was based on Operation Gold, a brilliant intelligence coup whereby western intelligence constructed a tunnel to directly intercept Soviet communications. Here is a period map of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn - lots of tunnels in Berlin.

This knowledge didn't help much in the game as we could only work on the information we had available. In the end we came up with a cunning scheme to insert false information at various points in the system and try to determine the location of the leaks(s).

Things became rather fraught when my personal assistant was murdered via a staged suicide - she had access to BLACKBIRD material, and later major Popov of the GRU was actually killed in a shootout with French security forces while meeting a contact. Clearly the leak was getting out of hand.

Despite various technical measures, nothing really helped, and following Major Popovs demise, I was called to an urgent meeting with BLACKBIRD, who had been compromised. Moscow Centre approved his extraction, and my team devised an operational plan which may have borne a distinct resemblance to that in 'Funeral in Berlin'. It went rather better than the GRU mission had done. I rolled and 11 on 2D6 which helped, so BLACKBIRD aka George Blake was successfully evacuated to Moscow.

Following that we were able to inform the other agencies of the security breach and we were able to reroute our comms securely. irl the KGB sat on the knowledge of Operation for Gold for 18 months (!) to protect Blake.

The one thing we didn't managed to do was identify the mole in our midst, Major Burkhardt of the Stasi who was a double agent. We had our suspicions but could never get enough proof, but overall a good outcome for the KGB as we got Blake out. We even managed to purge a Beria traitor in our midst (Mark) who ended up in the gulag after unilaterally jamming the GRU wireless network. Less good for the GRU as they lost their main asset (GOLDFINCH) and Major Popov into the bargain. It transpired in the Kripo debrief that my PA had been murdered by neo nazis, but that will be another thread in a later game.

That was an excellent game, greatly aided by team breakout rooms and extensive use of private messaging which meant lots of secret stuff going on.

What fresh madness is this... Traveller

 Well, I firmly blame Alex at https://upthebluefow.blogspot.com/ for this. His fascinating efforts to make Striker into a playable tabletop wargame, have finally forced me to scratch a long standing itch and (re) buy a lot of my old Traveller collection.

I originally sold all this stuff back in the late 90s, but it is one of those things I regret, as you do from time to time. I had a happy old time with Traveller back in the 1980s, mainly with my pals from the University of London Wargames Club. 

Amazing how much of this stuff is still floating around, as it is well over 40 years old. Various trawls through eBay produced this lot, although a lot of it came from collectibles shops with eBay store fronts. I'm not interested in the modern versions, which have no doubt been mucked around with.

First lot were these two. I was used to the original box set, and as it is impossible to tell on the internet how big things are, I was bit surprised to find that these were much larger than expected. All you need to play Traveller apparently.

Clearly the first set was missing Book 2, so I bought this. Except it turned out it wasn't, as the large format edition had rolled the original Books 1,2 and 3 into two volumes. Doh. The text seemed largely identical. I might sell this as surplus, but I actually prefer the layout in this one.

Between them, I'd forgotten how rich the basic set of rules are. I'm sure when we used to play we just ignored a lot of the stuff in here, we certainly never did any trading, but the whole thing is so well thought through and comprehensive. It very, very much reminds me of En Garde, but better developed.

To go with the basic set, you obviously need some background. The Spinward Marches are just a set of space regions to explore and have adventures in. I've got the GDW boardgames Imperium and Dark Nebula which also cover a lot of the Traveller Universe region of space, but the Spinward Marches is designed with RPGs in mind, not strategic space warfare.

This looks like a mint copy, but in fact many of the maps have been carefully hand annotated, adding in some of the useful stuff (Imperial star bases, refuelling points etc) which could so easily have been printed on the map, but instead is buried in the wierd hexadecimal gobbledygook system description codes.

The second supplement I bought back in the day was Mercenary, which adds military careers, some more interesting weapons systems, and a whole subset of mercenary adventures and the means to resolve them, including a combat system up to brigade level. The latter is sheer genius, straight out of Dupuys 'Numbers, Predictions and War', and the combat results most definitely do not reward the big battalions, but the better quality ones. I spent ages number crunching this one calculating force ratios and outcome probabilities when I should have been revising for my second year exams at University. Ahem.

The third supplement we got was High Guard, which has a much more advanced ship design and combat resolution system. I had a lot of fun doing starship designs with this, and we used to use them as an alternative to Starfire for space combat games. This also includes naval careers for characters.

The basic books, Merc, High Guard and Spinward Marches was all we ever really used for Traveller, as it had everything we were interested in, and even then, most of it came out of our heads.

High Guard can also lead off into a whole rabbit hole of its own via the Trillion Credit Squadron supplement and infamous 'Lenat Squadron' in the 1981 and 82 competitions which used computer assistance, a primitive form of AI, to minmax the rules and produce literally unbeatable fleets.

My good pal Mark is very interested in this stuff, see Geordies Big Battles: http://exiledfog.blogspot.com/2025/03/note-to-self-trillion-credit-squadron.html

In a class of its own however was..... 

Striker! Future tactical combat in the Traveller universe, by one Frank Chadwick.

Honestly, this one was just fabulous and we used to fight company level actions using these. I also invested/wasted a lot of time on vehicle designs when I should have been revising for my finals!  They included a functional Ogre and a lot of WW2 vehicles. sadly these designs were all lost when I sold my stuff.

I couldn't find a physical copy of these at a price I was willing to pay, so I just got the PDFs (four of them) from DrivethruRPG. Enough to look at anyway, and marvel that I actually used to understand these enough to play them, as they are pretty complicated by modern standards. They were worth the effort as they were very realistic indeed in terms of small unit C3 etc. Alex has done a great job of streamlining them and making into more of a wargame and less of an RPG engine.

I'm glad I own these again, they have been a painful hole in my library for decades now, but although they are fun to read, I doubt they will ever get played as written. They might provide some good background for some online RPG sessions though. And rest assured, I did pass my exams at the LSE quite respectably, despite wasting so much time wargaming. I had a bigger, faster brain then, and rather more energy.

NKVD Special Squad

 John B put on this cheery game covering special NKVD operations during the Siege of Leningrad in Jan/Feb 1942. I recall one historian (John Collier perhaps?) commenting that 'special' in WW2 usually meant something really, really bad for the participants.

There isn't a great deal of eye candy in these games I'm afraid, but we did assemble a motley array of hats. Jerry and I were in Ushankas, John in a soviet sidecap and Tim had his Russian bus conductors hat. 

The Siege of Leningrad was a fairly awful experience for the Russians and mass starvation was rife over the winter of 1941 as supplies ran out and the 'ice road' supply route was very tenuous. In fact our mission wasn't particularly grim, there was criminal involvement in organised cannibalism with suspected links to rogue Party elements and we had to root them out. That all sounded like quite a worthy thing to be doing.

So we actually ended up doing the same sort of things as in our Berlin Noir games series, investigating crimes, doing some double dealing ourselves and dealing with corrupt officials. Slightly fewer demons in this game, although we do have to worry about Uncle Joe et al.

The game was much enlivened by the various maps and props which John produced. I was cast as Lt MA Alabian, Chekist and interrogation specialist. Our team had the usual mix of skills and characters, including a weapons expert, beaurocrat (very useful in the USSR) and even a shadowy figure from the external security branch.

Leningrad in the winter of 1941 was a very dangerous place to wander around, so much of the time we spent figuring out how to get from A to B without being set upon by bandits as nearly all the security forces were fighting at the front.

I wouldn't say our investigation went swimmingly well, we did uncover a link to a very senior Party figure, who as a personal friend of Stalin, was rather untouchable, as well as some links to dealings in the Baltic States. I won't go into too much detail on the game as John may well wish to run it again at some point, this being its third outing.

Eventually we did determine a suspicious location to investigate and got as far as mounting an armed raid (contemporary map of Leningrad above), sadly the baddies had been tipped off and we encountered a booby trap which wounded two of our party.

We did manage to get some leads however, and we will follow up with another foray at some point in the future to see if we can wrap things up. Afterwards John informed us that our casualty rate had been rather low, on one previous game only two members of the team survived! On our return to the Big House, we did find our commanding NKVD General had been summoned to Moscow, never to be seen again. I guess we stepped on someones toes.

Like the Bernie Winter/Geroen Rath games, that was a load of fun, and as we've all known each other for years, we worked well as an effective team. Playing over Zoom actually added to the experience as it gave plenty of opportunity for sending hidden messages, very important in the paranoid atmosphere of Stalins Russia.  Sadly for regular blog readers, it isn't very conducive to pictures or detailed narration, so I'll leave it there. 

Where Seagulls Dare!

On our latest Friday games day, Tim took us on an adventure of extreme silliness, Where Seagulls Dare, modelled on a popular war film from the 1970s. It bore some similarity to its predecessor, the magnificent Guns of Toblerone, which I've played a few times. 

The basic premise is that the players are a team of "elite" Commandos, tasked with foiling some dastardly Nazi plot, so once we've sorted ourselves out, off we go and biff the Hun, in the manner of an Alistair Maclean novel. 

In this case, we were off to find out what the Germans were up to on an island off the south coast of France. 

I very cleverly forgot to take a photo of the entire island, here are various key features marked out with index  cards, including the town, hospital, church, various villages etc. Consider it an area movement type system. 

And the mighty fortress perched on top of a huge mountain/box covered in a cloth. It can only be approached by a precipitous track or cable car.... This also has verious key locations marked in and around it was including something ominously marked as "Secret Base". 

The German garrison in the town included the inevitable M60 daubed in big German Crosses, as well as halftracks and a Kubelwagen or two. All Tim's 54mm stuff. 

This fine figure was in the SS HQ on top of the mountain. 

Each player had an individual figure. As I was assigned the role of Fifi, the Swiss/Dutch female SIS spy and "blonde bombshell", I got this charming figure. We were all to be parachuted into the island disguised as Germans, and before the mission, we had to sort out our equipment, much of which went into five cannisters, Although I was able to carry a pistol, knife and 50 feet of para cord. 

We wisely packed two radios, a flare pistol as backup, and lots of explosives and climbing gear, split across the loads. 

We also had individual objectives, some of which may have conflicted with other players. 

There were reports of flames and explosions, and for our LZ (disguised as German Paras), we dropped on some "mysterious scorched fields". Sadly we didnt find any obvious clues as to what was going on, and even sadder, a cannister went missing and poor Fifi died in the drop! 

Tim had a spare character, and I took over as Marcel the Corsican, leader of the local (communist) resistance, who liaised with the British agents. 

After much wandering around the island, the British finally worked out the delivery schedule of the airlanded secret supplies being delivered to the castle, and they managed to hijack a truck up to the top of the mountain, making it as far as the secret base. 

I'm amazed they even managed that, as before making it up the mountain, the team arrested one of their own men, and then another one murdered the Major in his sleep! Evidently there was some sort of treachery afoot. The (surviving) OSS Lt took over. 

Then they had a curious change of heart, and decided to head back down the mountain having had a good look around. 

Sadly Marcel and the Maquis chose this moment to Ambush the "German truck" coming down the road, and blew it apart with explosives looted from the "missing" supply cannister. 

A terrible misunderstanding? Or special orders from Stalin? Who can say, suffice to say I achieved all my characters objectives. In fact some of the team did survive, John (as the OSS Lt) infiltrated the investigating German patrols, and Pete (as  a war weary but irrepressible Cockney sergeant), managed to steal  a boat and escape to Spain! 

What was all the fuss about? Wunderwaffen of course. Tim had even made four of these magnificent rockets specially. 

That was rollicking good fun, even if it turned out to be more  grim and dirty John Frankenheimer type WW2 movie than Ealing Studios. 

The Ring of Five

John B took us on a trip to 1920s Berlin as crime fighters investigating strange goings on with a somewhat Cthulhu-esque angle to it. This is a sideshoot of his long running early twentieth century RPG campaign involving a number of characters in various alt history activities.

We were all cast as police of various types, I was Kommissar Bernhard Steyer of the Kripo with my trusty Wachmeister (John A), and tagging along for the ride was Russell from the Prussian Police (later the Gestapo), Pete from the Security Police (SD), Micheal as the Police Forensic Examiner and Tim as a youthful Kapitan-Lt Canaris, from some shady intelligence outfit.

RPGs are never very photogenic I'm afraid, but we did break out a few hats. As a big fan of Kommisar Gereon Raths adventures in the 'Babylon Berlin' series, I broke out my fedora and jaunty shirt for a night of cocaine and benzedrine fuelled dancing, as favoured by the good inspector to wind down.

Sadly my revelries were interrupted by news of a murder! A body had been found, apparently hacked to death outside the notorious Ring of Five club.

John provided us with a beautiful map of 1920s Berlin, which came in very handy, although many of the roads in the city centre still have the same names and follow the same routes on Google Maps.

Off we went to the night club to investigate whatever was happening. I won't bore you with a blow by blow account, but we uncovered what appeared to be a widespread conspiracy involving both various different political factions and a secret society with an interest in the occult and Teutonic supremacy. There were various references to 'Carcosa' and 'The Yellow King' as well as writings in an indecipherable form of ancient Cunieform. 

Thanks to excellent police work, we identified the baddies lair and it ended up in a shoot out as we stormed a flat in Moabit. We rescued a hostage, and very conveniently killed the head of the local German Workers Party (I'm sure they won't get anywhere) who also had the murder weapon in his possession. Case closed.

The only slight wrinkle was that the other main suspect, a gentleman of military bearing wearing a monocle, apparently disappeared in a flash of light as our police fought their way through the building. Although publically the case was closed and a serial killer brought to justice, these disturbing developments, along with links to the activities of Austrian agents and the involvement of Albert Einstein in some unspecified way, meant the privately the case was very much open. The Security Service took over and we were all seconded to the ongoing investigation. The next instalment awaits!

That was brilliant fun, very well researched, good fun to play and very atmospheric. The game was more on the realistic side of RPGs (so no level 20 Paladins with 200 hit points), and our various familiarities with police and forensic procedures came in very handy. I'm looking forward to the next one.