00 '79 : A campaign idea

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

Sounds like a fun campaign setting.

Have you ever read John Pearson's James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007? It does a good job of building a plausible background for Bond based on the biographical bits Flemming included in the novels as well as fitting Bond in the historical era in which they were written.

Yeah. I hunted it down (with considerable difficulty) at one stage and read it, but I can't find my copy now. It's one of about seventy-five books that seem to have gone missing somehow. It was useful, but I seem to recall there being some lurid material in it about Bond's activities in Paris before WWII that I didn't find in keeping with the canon.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Brett

• The PCs are new field agents who have been recruited because of extraordinary skills that they developed in unconventional places: Royal Engineers and Royal Commandos NCOs, and that sort. One PC might be an ordinary decent criminal; another a stage magician; or an American private investigator; or a pentathlete; or a foreign correspondent; or a safari guide.

Wouldn't they all have to be British subjects, or at least in the Commonwealth?

Originally Posted by martinl

Admittedly, part of the fun of the idea, at least for me, is the image of half of MI5 hanging out in The Village.

This would be something important to think through- what happened to all those suddenly "retired" operatives? For example, I saw somewhere that most of modern Russia's organised crime is now run by ex-KGB who lost their jobs due to downsizing, and had no other jobs appropriate for their skill-sets and lack of ruth.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Wouldn't they all have to be British subjects, or at least in the Commonwealth?

By the rules, as far as I know, they would all have to be British residents for legal purposes, willing to swear the standard oath (to bear a true allegiance to HM and Her successors according to law), and if not British subjects, willing to give an undertaking to be naturalised as soon as the law would allow. The SIS had a penchant for employing ideologically-sympathetic foreigners. I don't know how British law stood at the time on the difference between British subjects and British citizens: in Australia we only started distinguishing between British subjects and Australian citizens in 1973.

And Bond was always fond of Americans.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Brett

• It's late 1979.
• Thatcher has appointed a retired field agent to take over as the new Control/C/M: Sir James Bond.

Late 1979 would be squarely in the Roger Moore era, just after Moonraker.

Originally Posted by Brett

I don't know how British law stood at the time on the difference between British subjects and British citizens: in Australia we only started distinguishing between British subjects and Australian citizens in 1973.

Without checking, I think Australians could travel to and work in Britain fairly freely, without visas or work permits, until some time in the mid 80's.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by martinl

Because Bond is a name, not a man.

This reminds me so much of Casino Royale (the one with Peter Sellers).

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Late 1979 would be squarely in the Roger Moore era, just after Moonraker.

Yes, but this James Bond would have been born in 1921 and retired to Jamaica in 1966. He's 58 years old, a relic of the Cold War, and thinks that the only think more "not done" than drinking Champagne warmer than 38° Fahrenheit is listening to the Beatles without earmuffs. You wouldn't see him dead wearing flared trousers with a suit of any sort, least of all a DJ.

Without checking, I think Australians could travel to and work in Britain fairly freely, without visas or work permits, until some time in the mid 80's.

I seem to remember something about needing a Certificate of Patriality around 1985. My mother, an Australian citizen, was entitled to and preferred to use a British passport until the late Seventies.

[Captain-Captain]

I might mix a bit of Linda Thorson era Avengers here. In one episode, "Mother" who clearly runs MI5 is framed as a Soviet agent by his MI6 counterpart. This would serve as a cause for "The Great Purge".

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Brett

The SIS had a penchant for employing ideologically-sympathetic foreigners.

Allegedly, however, these people were subject to an extremely solid glass ceiling in the course of their career. One got the distinct impression that the Old Boys with Regimental and School ties would have prefered to hire only decent Englishment, with maybe the occasional Scot for diversity and a Welshman for the choir, but found that the pool of Englishmen who spoke Hungarian (or the local equivalent) and were willing to visit countries where due process means not shooting you before they've officially settled on a name for you was rather shallow, even to the point of dryness.

Stateless refugees with decades of experience in a strange limbo of espionage were eagerly snapped up at barely-above-sweatshop wages, for their invaluable knowledge base if nothing else, but these wogs certainly weren't officers of Her Majesty. A properly distant God whose mysterious and genteel ways are eluciated by a respectably agnostic Aglican clergyman help us, we can't let foreigners make decisions in public!

Of course, the odds are rather high that the best technical operators, as well as the ones with the most encyclopedic knowledge and instincts for their field, will have been foreigners like Smiley's Toby Esterhazy. As long as they didn't have to be the public face anywhere, not even for a brief meeting with MPs.

[martin_rook]

I would recommend, for inspiration, watching the early 80s BBC series Sandbaggers. It's about MI6's Special Branch, and the series was created and written by a fellow who held the same job as the main character, the director of ops. This isn't quite the M position I think, but somewhere between M and the field agents. It's much more realistic then Bond, but it could give some good ideas about managing the internal politics. Most episodes seemed like their real nemesis wasn't the KGB but MI5!

What made me think of it in connection with this is that the D-Ops was once a Sandbagger -- that is, a field agent -- himself. There's an episode where a foreign dictator has arrested a British couple and intends to execute them as spies. When the D-Ops was a field agent, this guy had tortured and killed one of his friends. So, on the political side, he writes up a proposal that Her Majesty's Gov'ment assassinate the dictator, even though they aren't supposed to be killing foreign heads of state. While he's cashing in favors on one hand to get that green-lit, on the other hand he sends both his field agents (they usually only seem to have 2, 3 at most) on a mission into Germany which could have been accomplished by just one of them. So if the proposal goes through, he'll have no agents to send to carry it out. Oh, in that case, it looks like D-Ops himself will have to go back into the field to carry out the assassination. No, it absolutely isn't a personal vendetta...

I could totally see Bond doing something like that. Sending the PCs away on an odd assignment while there's trouble brewing elsewhere. Clearly keeping them in the dark about something. What's M up to...?