The first two come from Wired.com’s pretty fascinating Danger Room blog about the world of the military and national security.

• The US is thinking of starting up a special assasination squad – right or wrong (and I lean towards wrong) it would make a pretty fun game.
• While you’re running your assasination squad game, perhaps you could use some interesting spy tools.

It’s not from Danger Room, but the CIA has recently declassified their Manual of Trickery and Deception as well. It’s apparently all about using stage magic for spy purposes, but imagine if it had real magic as well?

How are the pirates organized? (Are there pirate leaders, financiers, and specialists?)

The financiers are the most important since they organize and plan the big shot operations and are able to pay running cost[s]. Financiers always need to forge deals with traders, land cruiser owners, translators, business people to keep the supplies flowing during operations and manage the logistics.  There is a long supply chain involved in every hijacking.

Pretty interesting stuff and it has all sorts of applications – for modern games obviously, but also for any other game. How do you orgnaise getting rid of that loot? It doesn’t have to be as easy as going down town and selling it off.

Go on!

Now you’ve had a chance – and how cool is that – what a wealth of possibilities for a RPG that could be. The whole set up: elite criminals brought together by a corrupt merchant, an unbreakable vault (could be technological, could be magical), and the final betrayals by both an unhinged friend and by the merchant himself (or not) would make for a great session or series of sessions.

I’m tempted to do it a short campaign next time the Mythic Senguko Japan GM is away for a period. I’m thinking:

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: the PCs are three Tileans and a halfling employed by a Sea Elf merchant in Marienburg; or
• GURPS DMZ:  based on the DMZ comic series, the PCs are a ragtag bunch of survivors hired to do pretty much everything that the story says, but in the New York DMZ. This has the advantage that you don’t have to come up with too many of the new details – no extra tech like you’d need for a sci-fi game, no weird magic like for the WFRP game.

Knowning my players, it’ll be the WFRP game they’d chose but it would be fun either way! What would you run with this set up?