Role playing From: Eric_S_Klien@cup.portal.com Date: Tue, 11 Sep 1990 03:47:40 +0000 At MIT, there is going to be a live role-playing game lasting 10 days, Sep 13-23rd, with a break for Rosh Hashannah. Each player will get a character and will actually act out the part in and round his or her classes. Mostly in the evenings, eighty players will congregate and talk to one another. Many will have fun role-playing and sharing their character personalities. Others will have secret motivations, and be trying to accomplish some covert task. For instance, if a player was a KGB agent, he may try to feign innocence and get the CIA to trust him. A major goal of this game is to be realistic. Players will learn something about real politics or real spy stuff without it getting academic and boring. Also players will get the chance to interact through e-mail with around eighty other people in the largest e-mail/live game I have ever heard of. It should be quite an experience. I cannot seem to reach the list rec.games.pbm, and this is why I write to you. Would you please post this for me? Anyone interested should send email to drwho@athena.mit.edu and I will send back a questionnaire and most information about the game. We can take up to twenty e-mail roles, there is plenty of room. Thank you! -Jon The Real World An angry Soviet Union destabilized the World War II treaty. The global spread of communism should not be restrained by the formal partitioning of Europe, they felt. Over the following years Soviet aggression gripped Eastern Europe firmly and found footholds globally. Because not everyone agreed with the treaty, the Cold War became an attempt to break the rules without getting caught. The Cold War was stabilized by a new "treaty". The balance of power in Europe was renegotiated in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), an international organization of the superpowers and all European powers. The Helsinki Final Act, signed by 35 nations in 1974, clearly defined boundaries so that the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe but could not expand further. Everyone agreed with the treaty (mostly) and this stability made possible arms talks and the building up of trust that led to the end of the Cold War. Today, instability again reigns in Europe. A new cold war may ignite because of outdated treaties with meaningless rules that can be bent. Relaxed security exposes the jugular of Europe to terrorist assaults. A new conference must bring order. To temper another cold war which he may lose, Gorbachev has proposed another major CSCE meeting for November: Helsinki II. Two years of talks by negotiators will build trust onto bargains and positions, and it will all rest on posturing the top leaders of all nations make initially. Jockeying for position and setting the agenda in November will determine the bounds between which negotiation takes place. Fundamentally, a global answer must be found, and all else will be detail. The Game What you have just read is real. What you are about to experience is also real, as real as we could make it. Together we will simulate in October the upcoming conference in November. To prepare, we interviewed a dozen professionals, and researched dozens of books. The real CSCE and government simulators provided us with the information to build a clear model of the world today. Fiction and previous Assassin games provide a medium for excitement and intrigue. For behind the intense negotiations lurks a backdrop of desperate men in desperate times. The phrase that comes to mind is "covert operations". This is the base for our game. Simulations and conference models educate, but are academic and sometimes boring. Assassin games explode with fast-paced intrigue and fantastic role-playing, but sometimes do injustice to reality. For the first time the two are merged into a completely new experience. The Blurb It is October of 1990. A changing Europe demands guidelines and controls, or else the stability of East and West may shatter. Held in historic Berlin, the guidelines for a new Europe will be forged in the CSCE. Each nation during the Cold War has built secret assets and operations. Before the game changes, it is time to play those cards. - Bold new proposals by the Soviet Union lead an international anti-terrorism debate. - Riots in Romania and other Eastern European countries tip new democracies who promise but cannot give immediate results. Her power base in decline, Margaret Thatcher is desperate for success. American Congressional elections necessitate U.S. results. For some this conference means life or death as a political power. - NATO and the Warsaw Pact stand as outdated relics that must change or perish. The Soviets and Chinese stand as outdated governments whose only chance for survival lies in change... or violence. - For the developing nations, western aid packages to the East bloc means less for themselves. Nations like Israel and Egypt are desperate to maintain full western support. Weakness may lead to death as a nation. - The remaining few hard line pockets of communism see the conference as the final irreversible step to democratic stability. For their ideology, this is the final battle. The last chance to stem the tide of their downfall. - Tempers are rising. Intelligence must predict where and when the pot will boil over and be prepared to act. - As always, there are those who see personal gain in the loss of others. Money and power is there for the taking. You determine the outcome. You play the negotiators that strive for domination, and the intelligence that backs them up to insure it. A new cold war is upon us. It may last a brief 10 days, or may last a lifetime: you decide.. Up