The BND was formed by the Abwehr chief on the Eastern Front who brought his records over to the Americans in 1945, so yes.

Ethnically German definitely works.

In reply to Hapax Legomenon (msg # 5):

I'm figuring we all know each other to varying degrees ahead of time.

Adeline is a Lebanese Maronite, originally recruited as just an asset and then later trained to be an agent. Based on her complexion and features, she can pass for being from most of Europe, the Middle East, very northern Africa, or much of the Americas. She's good at three things:

• Polyglot. She grew up bilingual (French/Arabic) with extensive English. Since then she's picked up several more languages.
• Pickpocket/shoplifter. She's good taking/swapping things without being noticed and then disappearing into a crowd or around a corner.
• Seductress. She can work men over, which provides for a great pickpocketing distraction.

Unless any of you want to already start in Frankfurt, you'll all be on a Lufthansa Boeing 707 nearing the airport.

In reply to Adeline Khoury (msg # 9):

Nice!  I'll be playing a Brit by the name of Gin Shaw.  She'll be glad to pick a pocket or two herself, but she's just as much into full-on shameless thieving, picking locks and cracking safes and skulking about unseen and unheard and getting into places she's not been formally invited to.  :)

She is so, so very not the femme fatale type, though.  That niche is 100% yours.  :)

"...She's good at three things..."

What would you say she is best at? Because my first thought was, "That's three important team roles for one character. What are the rest of us going to do?" Having someone else express interest in sleight-of-hand stuff reinforces that feeling.

I am cool with her having all those skills, but within the team maybe just having one apex role. I sort of liked how the TV show Leverage clearly split the group into Hitter, Hacker, Grifter, Thief and Mastermind. Of course that doesn't map clearly onto 1960s espionage-- I am more admiring an RPG laying out clear differentiated roles. In my experience that can be very helpful. I am speaking purely as a player, and with no idea what the player and character dynamics of this group will be. I also absolutely do not want to offend anyone. I'm just kind of thinking out loud and throwing out a few reactions. It will help me refine my own character if I know what others' see their primary role is, so I don't duplicate that.

I don't think it's quite that broad. If you're going to charm someone at a bar and get their ID off of them, what do you need? Basically those three things. As far as team roles, she can only handle one part of the five you listed:


Since those sum some things up well, I'll use those. Older Mission Impossible did roughly the same.

She's really a grifter, not a thief. She can't do any of what Gin Shaw can do. She can get close to someone and get stuff (information, items) from them, which also works well for passing things surreptitiously and doing drops.

Thank you, that helps!

FWIW, I definitely don't feel my toes stepped on by having another character who can lift some poor dummy's wallet.  That's where Gin started her criminal career, but she quickly and enthusiastically branched out from there.  :)

If I had to name a secondary skill set for her, I'd go with alertness, perception, a keen eye for the subtle motion and the incongruous detail.  But mostly, she's the classical specialized Thief.

OK, since it is the tradition now, I will state three things I would like my character to be good at:
1. Paperwork, bureaucratic contacts, and forgery
2. Financial transactions and money laundering, particularly into and out of Eastern Europe
3. Cryptography

Jan Vrabec (birth name Johan Auberg) was born in Prague in 1926. His ethnically German father was a printer, and his Czech mother worked for a government department. The family were secular Jews. In 1938, when he was 12 years old, his family reluctantly became involved in espionage, using their contacts and skills to smuggle relatives and friends out of the country after the German annexation.

Jan was gradually drawn in, first as a boy who could move about the city without suspicion, acting as a courier. Later his small size enabled him to break into government and military facilities to photograph documents. He was known throughout the city to various and opposed political groups. His parents, brothers and sisters, and a few friends formed a small but effective spy network, eventually facilitating the escape of more than one hundred people into safety.

Later in the war, as the Nazi occupation government became more severe, the family goal shifted into mere survival. They worked various projects for political parties, gangs, and intelligence services from almost every nation. They bought and sold items on the black market to keep people in their neighborhood fed and medicated. When necessary, to save their lives, they worked for the Abewehr, and even rarely the Gestapo-- playing all sides against the other and somehow not ending up in a concentration camp or before a firing squad.

Miraculously, almost the entire family survived the war, only sister Marta being killed in the February 1945 Allied bombing of the city. In 1947, they had settled down, and were trying to put their lives as spies behind them, hoping to fit in under the new Soviet-backed government and rebuild the country. Then a typhus epidemic swept through the city. Jan's parents and two surviving brothers and sister all died within three days. Jan was left alone. The city burned the whole block as a quarantine measure.

Now identified as an ethnic German, unwelcome in Soviet-aligned Czechoslovakia, and cut off from his contacts, Jan drifted from one refugee camp to another, barely surviving as one of millions of "Displaced Persons" in Europe. In 1949, when he was 21, a former German intelligence officer now working for the Americans recognized him. He was recruited into that man's network. For the last 12 years Jan has been doing freelance work for the British, French, Israeli and other governments who need his particular set of skills.

In 1967 he is 41 years old, but looks 60. He is tall, thin with skinny sloping shoulders, grey hair with resigned brown eyes the only thing alive in a hollow, cadaverous face.
This message was last edited by the player at 17:17, Sat 18 Aug 2018.

So far we have two young, fit women and an older man. A good cover might be sports team and manager? Or nightclub singers and manager? Or computer technicians and supervisor?

While I'm not going to give away too many details this early, the forgery skills are going to be needed and you might end up staying on a campsite.

Forgery can be really handy, even more so at a time when few things were computerized like today and so a good forger had more flexibility.

Yes, and it complements the other two characters' skill-sets. If I wasn't clear, he is best at forgery, then at finance, then last he has some skill with codes.

Gin could maybe pass for an athlete if it's gymnast.  Is 'computer tech' even a thing yet in 1967?

Big computers, that fill a room, yes. Punch cards, teletype data entry (screens or monitors for most did not come along until much later). Magnetic tapes are high tech in this era-- 16 MB storage was high end. AND, a lot of early computer techs were female. Their job title was often even called "calculator", which is why that name was chose for the little handheld devices that came out about ten years later. Government and big industry were really the only users.

http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1965/

(I would have chosen 1967 but its year listing has some non-important entries in it. 1965 at least showcases equipment that was important and actually used.)

Huh, nice!  That would surely be a useful cover or skill set for someone, but alas, that someone is probably not Gin.  :)  She won't likely be passing for someone with much formal education any time soon.

And research universities and the like. I'm a big fan of Pat Humes and was going to post a little something, but it seemed like too much.


I think your timeline is off a little on this one. Check "Scientific American," June 1946. That's when "electronic calculator" first came into use as far as I know. Meanwhile, "calculator" was in use for people who calculate (like those doing the jobs you mentioned) for a few hundred years prior to this time period.

Yeah, I think we are really saying the same thing here. I was mostly referring to what I guess are technically called pocket calculators, like the HP-32, introduced in 1975 for $395. I have vivid memories of my Dad's model from this time. I wasn't referring to when a word first appeared in a magazine, but rather the interesting linguistic phenomenon around automation and wide-spread tech adoption. Although there were certainly desktop calculators, they weren't mechanically reliably and most of all didn't have widespread penetration into the market (at least in the USA) until the mid 70s, when normal people needed a word for these new (to them) machines. So I was mostly commenting on how people called computers were replaced by machines called computers. And people called calculators by machines calculators. And (horse-drawn) cars were replaced by combustion cars. In most cases, they kept the same name for the function even when it became automated. I think it is an interesting example of how languages change and adapt.

... I just realized I named my character Gin and picked a portrait of someone famous for playing a Jyn.

If we're doing "three main things," my character's best skill is interrogation (idk how much IC knowledge we're supposed to have of each other, but OOC, he was an Interrogator with the Studies and Observation Group in Vietnam from '62-'66). He's also decent with languages and can hold his own in a gunfight.

As for the timeline of calculators--they certainly weren't widespread until into the 70s. My dad used a slide rule all through college and didn't have to buy a pocket calculator until grad school (incidentally, I think it was also an HP-32)

Omg, someone with actual fighting skills?  That's just crazy town.

Just out of curiosity - it occurred to me to notice that this game has neither a Mature nor Adult flag.  Are we definitely aiming for a PG-13 here?  Not that I have any complaint about that, just want to make sure we're all on the same page.

... this question may or may not have come to mind while I was pondering the virtues of our sexy French seductress. :D

I've added the Mature flag. Thanks for the reminder. Sorry about that.

As for your cover, it's going to have to convince at least one border guard who may be an actual officer of an opposing secret service.

That's...  going to be interesting.  :)  Looking at the cast list, there's going to be eight or possibly even more of us if more players join, all of us with wildly divergent backgrounds and skill sets (hopefully).  Coming up with a front that can plausibly tie us all together sounds like a pretty narrow needle to thread, y'know?

Well, I can always split the party as you go up against the Party.

Hello everyone! Canadian RCMP reverse engineer and technical specialist here to help! :)