There’s a new campaign running in our Saturday game.  It started out just as a toss-off but might be building into the bones of a real long-term game.  I wanted to do a post-WWII espionage game, set just after the war, when Europe is still mostly under Allied military jurisdiction.

It was a period of intense criminal activity:  smuggling, spying, prostitution, materials theft from the militaries.  Germany and Austria are split between the US, UK, and USSR; Trieste is cut into two zones, one of US control, one under the UK, but with Yugoslavian partisan influence.  The Balkans are either turning to Soviet-style government (Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia), or resisting this move (Greece, Hungary, and Turkey.)

In other words, a prime period for a role playing campaign.  The period lends itself to everything from post-war espionage, to classical criminal opportunism, to super-science, post-war pulp fiction.

I started off with a character for the wife, a Modesty Blaze-inspired Greek partisan-turned-smuggler.  She moved guns, ammo, food, and other sundries past the British fleet in the Adriatic and ionian Seas, and the Greek laws (who imposed, at the time, a 100% tariff on foreign goods!)  She is pitted against heroin smugglers, Greek communists, Greek Security Battalions (most of which were fascist-allied, but were “rehabilitated” after the war ended.)  She is joined by her crew of partisan cut-throats, led by her Irish-American wheelman, Adonis-like twins with little in the way of moral compasses, an Italian that defected during the war.

They were working for the partisans and British SOE during the war, and tool around in their Italian MAS (Motoscafo Armato Silurante) providing weapons to anti-communist, or communist forces, or doing the odd bit of spying for the British.

The flavor of our campaign, so far is down and dirty, realistic, but with a touch of the early James Bond/Modesty Blaze pulp spy fiction.  For the game, I’ve been using Hollow Earth Expedition because it’s easier to cobble together the guns, cars, and other equipment of the period (mostly, it’s still pre-war cars, boats, etc.) than it would be in, say James Bond or Spycraft, but just about any modern-setting game system should do the trick for this kind of game.