The Varne Network

You are a field officer of the Annexe, posted to Varne: a grey river city whose secret police is the Ministry of Quiet. You don't do the work yourself if you can help it. Your assets do: a cleaner on the Ministry's third floor, a tram driver who counts lorries, a priest who hears the wrong people's confessions. Each operation, your handler sends a tasking and a deadline. You draw a card off the Wire, choose your tradecraft and who you put at risk, then roll a pool of d6s against the target's counter-intelligence rating. Every 1 is a trace, and every trace lands either on you or on someone you ran. At the debrief you choose: protect an asset and pay for it, or spend them for one more piece of intel. Burn tracks fill. Assets get arrested, run or turn. Somewhere in the Annexe a mole is reading your reports, and one of your own people may already belong to the Ministry. After twelve operations, or the moment your Exposure fills, the closing file says what became of you: promoted, retained, burned, dead or defected. What's in the 36-page book Five pages of rules and two operations played out step by stepThe officer's file, the network sheet and a page for the people you loseTwelve asset cards with photographs and Burn tracks, plus four blank onesTwo tasking tables, the tradecraft table and a page of odds for every pool sizeThe Wire: 24 cards of leaks, doubts, sweeps, tails and lulls, with card backsA twelve-operation log, the closing file, variants and a quick reference You need d6s (twelve is comfortable), a pencil and scissors. One operation takes about ten minutes; a campaign is two or three evenings. The rules were run through 5,000 simulated campaigns: about half of all officers finish, and most who do have lost somebody. Varne, the Annexe and the Ministry are invented. No real agency or operation appears.