Ideas Are Easy

[jason taylor]

Operation Phantom:


The players are a team from agency GMs choice. Their assignment: to make up a notational special agent that can strike fear in the enemy and divert his assets. They not only have to make their notational agent a master of all kinds of skills of covert war but find in the paper an appropriate number of incidents that can plausibly be credited to him.

How "knowledge" of this nonexistent Bond look-alike is supposed to be given is to be arranged. Perhaps your team has a double that does such missions regularly.

Varients include continuing to pump out notational Bonds and giving them notational subagents.

The team can include any mix, possibly the traditional one of the badass, the femme fatale, the techno-wizard, the perky girl, etc.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Operation Phantom

An amusing notion. And one that fits well with an idea one of my friends once proposed to explain the various actors portraying Bond in the movies: there's not really a James Bond. Rather, he's an artificial persona that the various agents adopt, pretending to prefer martinis shaken not stirred and so on, so as to provide an extra layer of insulation between the enemy and their actual preferences and psychology. When Roger Moore succeeds Sean Connery, he starts to portray that Bond identity, which goes with the number 007, not the men. It's a way to hide the handles that the real agents have while concealing their identity, and just expose the Bond persona in its place. if the enemy is bound to learn something about your double-oh agents, might as well manufacture a story for them.

Operation Phantom goes one step further, and takes out the singular real agent, leaving Bond as just an illusion created by the whole team.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

An amusing notion. And one that fits well with an idea one of my friends once proposed to explain the various actors portraying Bond in the movies: there's not really a James Bond. Rather, he's an artificial persona that the various agents adopt, pretending to prefer martinis shaken not stirred and so on, so as to provide an extra layer of insulation between the enemy and their actual preferences and psychology. When Roger Moore succeeds Sean Connery, he starts to portray that Bond identity, which goes with the number 007, not the men. It's a way to hide the handles that the real agents have while concealing their identity, and just expose the Bond persona in its place. if the enemy is bound to learn something about your double-oh agents, might as well manufacture a story for them.

Operation Phantom goes one step further, and takes out the singular real agent, leaving Bond as just an illusion created by the whole team.

That's pretty good. Kind of like Chuck Finlay in Burn Notice.

[dcarson]

The Avengers had an episode Two's a Crowd where a Soviet spy named Psev was in the UK. It was eventually shown that he was actually his entourage of four and some special effects. The name is from the initials of the four Vogel, Boris Shvedloff, Josef Pudeshkin, Alicia Elena.

[jason taylor]

One time in real life MI 5 was running a notational agent. Then a big op went down which the agent should have spotted from his location(I think it was Torch). So they gave him notational cancer, a notational death, and a notational obituary and fed all this through their double to explain why they hadn't seen this. Naturally the Germans bought the whole thing. It required going to the paperwork of drawing up a legend for a new notational agent to replace the old one as even German intelligence would not believe that resurrection was a normal event. But no one was inconvenienced by that except the Germans and some poor clerk back at MI5 headquarters.

[David Johnston2]

A mech warfare game where both sides got their advanced weaponry from two rival interstellar polities in a cold war with each other.

[RyanW]

Had an idea that would be an interesting background for a super:

A criminal learns to create physical psionic projections that he uses to fight injustice as a penance for his past crimes. No one but his closest confidants is aware that the "hero" is actually a manifestation of a prison inmate, and no one in the prison is aware of his regular "escapes."

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by RyanW

an interesting background for a super

I like it! Might even have to steal it...

[RyanW]

"A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get nuclear winter instead of sunshine." - Ian Malcolm (paraphrased)

One thing I've always thought would be a scarily easy alternate timeline:

The cloud cover over the US is ever so slightly different on September 25, 1983. Just different enough that the Oko satellite array doesn't mistakenly report a nuclear launch by the United States against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union proceeds blissfully unaware of the flaw in their detection system.

Instead, the weather conditions needed occur on November 9, 1983. Right during the middle of Able Archer 83, which the Soviets already feared was a cover for a real attack.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

That's pretty good. Kind of like Chuck Finlay in Burn Notice.

And it's really like North By Northwest which tells the story of the inevitable moment when some poor sap gets misidentified as the phantom agent.