I’m working up a demonstration game for the James Bond 007 RPG from Victory Games (1983). This adventure is to be set in January 1963, and I have chosen Vienna for my first Thrilling City. My current plan is to use Naples for my second Thrilling City, and a facility on the Isle of Capri for my Villain’s Lair. But I’m not very happy with the Nefarious Plot that I have at the moment, which seems trite and a bit tacky. I’d value some suggestions.
So, the head of the Vienna Station of “M.I.6” is an important link in a lot of operations in Eastern Europe, under diplomatic cover as the “Passport Control Officer” in the British Embassy to [neutral] Austria. Twenty-some years ago, during WWII he was obliged to make a hasty marriage to the pregnant daughter of a Bart. M.P. — they have a daughter, but have been divorced since 1946. At Christmas 1962 his daughter made an impromptu visit to Vienna to get to know her father (whose secret service she does not know about). But she has gone missing. The Head of Station V leaped to the conclusion that the KGB has kidnapped her to establish coercion over him, and supposed that Headquarters would be more anxious about the security problem than about rescuing his daughter as such. So he has gone into a bit of a frenzy trying to rescue her himself, using Departmental resources but not reporting to Broadway. The head of chancery reports this to the foreign office, who ask their liaison in the secret service (R1). R1 goes to R5 (the head of counterintelligence). They go to CC/E, who calls C/EA and P3 into his office, and next thing you know is that the C/D is briefing two player characters to go to Vienna without Station V being notified, to find out what the station chief is up to and fix anything that is wrong.
The PCs will find that the KGB has no intention of using the kidnapped girl to exert leverage over her father. In fact, the kidnappers don’t even know that the girl they nabbed at an underground dance party even is the daughter of an MI6 station chief. (Neither does she!) They kidnapped her, and a bunch of other girls, for some other purpose. But my only idea of what that other purpose is and what it has to do with Naples is not good enough. Suggest something better!
Spitballing on @RossM ‘s suggestion (and may be too much) but it made me think of OHMSS - the girls are being captured to use as a honeytrap at the Naples Games. They could be from lots of different countries (at the dance party), could be being brainwashed at a Viennese clinic, and the used to get close to either the male athletes or dignitaries from different countries. When they do they administer sleeping drugs to the key targets, who are then whisked off by KGB thugs to Capri to do something?
Perhaps as hostages for money for some sort of non official KGB plot for a rogue general?
The obvious answer is white slavery, but in VIenna? Unless they’ve got a quick and reliable route out of the country, it would be far too much work, because the newly independent authorities really don’t want that sort of thing happening in their city. And if you are doing that, why go to Naples when Trieste is on the way?
So perhaps there is an isolated community of, say, scientists working on a new ant terrible weapon, and the girls are being brought in to encourage them to work harder. That’s the sort of thing a third party could plausibly be doing in this world. If you were willing to go full OHMSS, they might even be the vectors for the weapon.
Union rules require a scene on the Riesenrad, and probably a horse-drawn carriage too. But this isn’t the Vienna of The Third Man; it’s the nouveau-riche Vienna of that sweet Marshall Plan money. (Good contrast for British agents used to a much more subdued and impoverished life at home.)
Yeah. I think it might be too obvious, and also in questionable taste. There is a danger of taking fire from both port and starboard for telling stories about trafficked women.
My original thought was that the women might be being coerced into participating in the production of KGB kompromat with which to blackmail Austrian and German and northern Italian politicians and business leaders, but that’s in poor taste given the current affairs of today and is, as Our Roger might put it, dispiriting material to deal with.
I was definitely thinking in terms of the Neujahrskonzert of the Wiener Philharmoniker….
Yes, but the Men’s Games are in September, whereas I want to set my adventure in Vienna in winter. Can we think of a nefarious plot that might stretch from January to September with a suitable sense of urgency? Or should I drop the winter-in-Vienna idea, which isn’t bringing much?
I’m sure there’s qualifiers and stuff in advance. But it’s a stretch.
I do like the idea of the mass disappearance being the type of thing that a James Bond figure would absolutely prioritise even if it’s not entirely relevant.
For all the machinery to move to get the PCs in place, daughter must have been missing for a few days at least, perhaps a week. And presumably no ransom note. She knows her father is here, that’s why she came here. So she is unable to communicate (kidnapped, imprisoned) or unwilling to communicate.
Perhaps it started off as a straightforward kidnapping for ransom, but when the crooks asked her who would pay to get her back, and she told them, one of them turned very pale and whispered to the others who Daddy was. They’ve got something much more valuable than they thought they were getting. But they don’t have the contacts to turn that into cash, and they’re trying to make them, while not bringing down kill squads from either side.
The head of Station V receives a demand for ransom instead of just having his daughter disappear. Or perhaps his estranged ex-wife gets it and contacts him. What’s his reaction? What’s HQ’s reaction to his reaction? Don’t they call in the Austrian police rather than send a couple of intelligence officers?
How do the PCs stumble into a Bond-Villain plot while they are trying to find and rescue a kidnap victim? And why do they follow the trail to Naples rather than report it back to the office?
While that’s simmering, let’s add another string to our bow.
What say that the head of Station V is acting squirrelly for a completely different reason. The PCs are still sent in by R5 to investigate Station V without letting the Station Chief know. But they discover a completely different Bond Villain plot having nothing to do with kidnapped women.
An alternative start: daughter has come to Vienna to connect with her father, but she isn’t going to ignore the nightlife. She gets into some sort of trouble (one of the people at a party that was raided for drugs, say) and dad reflexively pulls the shadow levers to get her out of it because going openly to the police would get a mark on his British file (“daughter is a means to blackmail”). The shadow levers come to people’s attention, as in your original setup. So the agents arrive in Vienna to find that the thing they’ve come to deal with is practically resolved already, it’s a minor bit of corruption at very worst, except for this dangling loose end…
A local criminal organisation wants to be part of a larger organisation (spectre).
To prove themselves they need to kidnap people from a nightclub.
In reality the spectre organisation doesn’t rate the locals and so sets them up by getting them to kidnap the daughter. British resources are wasted dismantling the local group letting the spectre group proceed with their real nefarious plan
How about this? The villainy didn’t disappear the daughter either to get leverage over her father, or to add to a collection of kidnapped blondes, but because she saw something or learned something that they needed to keep secret — in short, that she found out something about the Nefarious Scheme.
Would it be too un-Bondy if she were already dead?
That promises to be an interesting scenario in its own right, and tempts me to run something a bit more grounded. But for a JB007 adventure I need to bolt it onto something more grandiose and less personal.
So: the hook leads to the KGB unit that the criminals are trying to trade the girl to, and they have been kidnapping children, spouses, and elderly parents across Austria to put concerted pressure on a whole array of officials and business magnates to…?
What if it’s not the KGB? My old gang from ANU have forbidden me ever again to use South American Nazi clone armies, but maybe fresh blood recruited from the Internet aren’t quite jaded by my favourite tropes. The only thing that shouts “Nazis!” louder than 1960s Austria would be the 1960s Costa del Sol.
Also takes advantage of the night life, and falls in with a crowd of young, rich socialites - while not rich herself, the caché of dad working at the British Embassy is enough to get her accepted in their circle, as having an inside connection to the embassy may help with obtaining visas in this pre-Schengen time.
This group of socialites has been kidnapped by a small-time local gang to ransom to their rich parents, not realising who they have kidnapped.
This kidnapping has in some way interfered with a larger scheme by the real bad guys (Spectre, South American Nazis, etc.) - they were going to kidnap one of the other socialites in order to blackmail her parent (given the time and place, most likely father) who is in a position of power - e.g. president of Zentralsparkasse der Gemeinde Wien or similar
The real bad guys have thus killed the original kidnappers and taken the kidnappees (you’re trying to steal what I’ve legitimately kidnapped!).
They have no interest in the victims other than their target, but are not letting them go so they cannot raise the alarm.
Whether or not they bad guys plan on letting them live is another question.
KGB scientists have some form of research which requires women’s participation. This gendered element need not be skeevy or sinister. Perhaps they want to ensure their new technology is effective on a broad spectrum of the population (or make more representative crash test dummies). Maybe they need a supply of hormones, or genetic material, most easily sourced from female humans. They’ve no interest in holding anyone hostage at all! They could have kidnapped the women, but equally they might just have offered a group of students cash for participating in their research. The girls are aware it’s probably not the sort of thing they should go blabbing about, and view it as a bit of an adventure, so they just decided to vanish for a few days on the assumption it’ll all be fine.
Some subset of the girls know something. The KGB rounded up - whether by aggressive means or under some pretext - anyone who seemed plausible, and are trying to work out who has the information they want (or want kept secret). They don’t want to cause an incident, and don’t necessarily have nefarious plans for the girls in general. Maybe the KGB have their own “Bond” trying to weasel information out of the girls. (just noticed this links to Agemegos’ idea)
The KGB happened to know that some third party was using the underground dance party as cover for their activities. Perhaps testing weird drugs on participants? Perhaps simply a smokescreen for other crime and espionage. KGB agents rounded up everyone, girls included, and are keeping them under observation. They don’t want to let the Brits know what they know, and assume any investigation is really an attempt by the Brits to investigate the underground activities.
The Bond Villain of the piece might be the one the KGB were trying to interfere with, or that some girls unwittingly know information about.
I do like the idea of the original kidnappers being themselves replaced by someone else.
I’d like to try attacking this from the other end.
Suppose that you are a KGB nerd in the propaganda and subversion side of the business, in particular in a department that surreptitiously funds organisations in the West that are not actually communist of pro-Soviet, but that tend to weaken and disunify the West: “useful idiots”. Tougher nuts than you with more notches on their Makarovs have snaffled control of peace movements and anti-nuclear movements; you are stuck with monarchist and legitimist movements. You have managed to put together a secret international monarchist action front, the members of which are unaware of being Soviet puppets. Budget time is only a year off. It would be nice to have a high-impact operation that set monarchists around the world against corrupt bourgeois liberal democracy. What comes to mind?
Suppose that you were a grandiose Bond-movie villain who was obsessed with inspired by the idea of restoring legitimate royal rule to Europe to replace the disastrous republics that left the bodies politic vulnerable to fascism, nazism, and communism and eventually establishing your own credentials as, say, King of Poland. Suppose further that you were accepting subsidies from both the KGB and some very creditable Middle-eastern monarchies awash in petrodollars. What sneaky shit would you get up to promoe your cause and envenomate one of the hands that feeds you?