Blowback

You play spies blacklisted after a job goes awry, as well as the people who care about them. You can play this game with 3-5 people, and while playing it as a single game session is fun, it’s designed for long term play. It’s heavily inspired by the American television show Burn Notice and movies like the Bourne trilogy. As much as Blowback is about pyrotechnics and car chases, it’s a fish-out-of-water premise: spies stranded without their agency, normal people swept up in intrigue. And, like all multiplayer games, it’s about relationships— how much can you ask of someone, how much can you disappoint them before they turn their back on you?

Pay what you want. Normally $10 for the PDF, this includes:

  • Blowback PDF: 76 pages, full color, 9×7″.
  • Printable character sheets
  • Job Worksheet
  • Operation Plan
  • Flow of play quick-reference

Basically it's everything you need to play except for the dice.

Game Type: 
Roleplaying Game
Collaborative Story
Crunch: 
3 - Mildly Crunchy
Players: 
3+
GM?: 
Yes
Free?: 
Yes
Excerpt: 

There are four basic skills, which work in different ways depending on the phase of the game:

  • Pavement is all about hitting the street; pavement artists know knowledge is not just power, it’s the best kind of power.
  • Diversion is everything that glitters. The bigger, the flashier, the better. Diversions know how to make an entrance.
  • Provocateur is the art of the chameleon. They know how to appear, be what is needed, and disappear again. A provocateur is all things to all people, none of them true.
  • Commando is straightforward force. It covers everything--the only things--open, honest, and indelicate in the spy business. Commandos know that sometimes, you have to get your hands dirty.

Before jobs can begin, you need to figure out the job that got everyone stuck here. You don’t know everything that went on; the spy life is a wilderness of mirrors and you can never see exactly the whole picture. The things you would know:

  • Where the job took place
  • What the objective was
  • The point where things went south