Campaign Toybox
The Story: The rain that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs hit was black as pitch. From the black rain, naturally, came the Black Harvest. Whether the monsters were awoken by the nuclear strike or created by it quickly became a moot point: they were here. Abominations. Mutants. Leviathans. Something about the nuclear experiments causes them to rise, and the Americans had their hands full across Japan trying to kill and capture these things. Thankfully, they had some experience (and a squad of trained operatives) from earlier events in Arizona.
Once the dust cleared, two things became apparent. Top brass realised that the captured monsters would make perfect weapons. Then they realised that the Russians were doing their own nuclear tests, and must have their own monsters. In fact, it was soon discovered that the Russians were well ahead in the monster race. The monster gap had to be closed – and fast. The monsters were caught, tagged, studied and harnessed, fitted with obedience devices, and sent out to kill for America. Who needs an atom bomb when a well-directed hydra may do the job better and quieter?
Now it’s 20 years later and the war is cold as hell and deeply entrenched. And new men are needed to take over. Men who understand the desperate threat that hangs over America. Men not bothered by conscience in answering that threat. Men not given to cowardice when dealing with fifty-foot snakes and thousand-eyed freaks. Men who don’t ask questions. No matter what.
Style and Structure: The 1960’s is just made for espionage stories, of every level of grittiness. Adding monsters and kaiju may want you to aim towards silly but that loses some of the dark conspiracy and political edge that the cold war provides so well. And the moral dilemmas. Swapping monsters for atomic bombs is a perfect switch: they’re uncontrollable, indiscriminate and horrific in effect – and mad scientists have always believed they are necessary. You don’t want to moralise or preach but the moral ambiguities of the 60s are part of the fun – just take a look at Mad Men. Or to quote Warren Ellis in Planetary: “Even bomb-makers could be heroes in 1962.” And Planetary is the perfect example of how to weave monsters-of-the-week with conspiracy tales, with the X-Files a close second.
PCs and NPCs: The PCs will primarily be your standard 1960s government agents: black suits, black ties, black trilbies. But given their expansive remit – tracking down, capturing and later releasing as weapons terrifying monsters - they will need a wide variety of specialities: espionage, occult knowledge, big game hunting, arcanobiology, superscience, military expertise, and more. Certainly something this big will want representatives from all manner of intelligence fields and military branches, and expert co-ordinators to keep them all working together. Meanwhile, your NPCs can be everyone from the President down – or, if you prefer, up, to the secret levels above.
For an extra twist, you can also have the players create and play a stable of monsters. Each character could have one agent and one monster, and alternate between playing one or the other. This could mean swapping between human-only-espionage stories and city-bashing cathartic free-wheeling (which will help clear the tension and give your players a fun break now and then) or you can have some stories feature humans and monsters, with some players having fun not quite following the orders of their fellows, or trying to figure out how to escape their control collars. That might cause in-group strife but if everyone’s cool with it, exploring the power differential could be awesome.
Plots and Villains: Conspiracies are like horror: they thrive on the unknown. Discover too much and it’s all over. So it’s not enough to come up with a great big bad, you have to reveal it at just the right speed – just enough to keep them feeling like they’re making progress. You also don’t want the government to be totally evil or rife with conspiracy because that undermines the moral dimension of leaders with good ends and terrible means. Let the conspiracy come from the enemy’s infiltration, with trusted men inside the agency really working for the reds, or the heroes being used as pawns in multi-levelled shadow games they can barely understand. To stop the games collapsing in on themselves, keep the enemy clear: it’s all about the communist threat, and what world war might mean, should the monster gap ever be too large.
Sources: Le Carre is the master of the Cold War; start with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. James Ellroy also loves the period and The Big Nowhere is probably the best look at the terror of McCarthyism in action. Planetary, as mentioned, is also mandatory, and has plenty of stuff going on in the right period – Island Zero (complete with monsters), City Zero, the secret Artemis moon launch, and the deeds of David Paine and John Stone. The movie Thirteen Days is almost documentary footage of the Cuban Missile Crisis and is not to be missed for political background – ditto Kevin Costner’s other big period film, JFK. The X-Files is a primary source for how to pace things and how to bring in monsters, but don’t neglect other such shows, especially ones set and indeed made in the time period: The Invaders has G-men versus aliens, Secret Agent which later became The Prisoner gets conspiracy note-perfect and The Avengers may be campy but nobody has ever done strangeness-of-the-week quite so elegantly before or since. For humans recruiting monsters to help fight their battles, there is nothing more perfect than the new Dreamworks animated film, Monsters vs Aliens.
RPGs: It doesn’t take much work to run Conspiracy X in the 60s, and its secret timeline will serve you well for ideas in that period. GURPS’ The Prisoner is out of print but is an incredibly detailed treatise on the show, and GURPS Illuminati is a great companion volume (and GURPS Black Ops is a useful addition as well). Spies have never been done quite so comprehensively as they were in Spycraft (2nd ed was the better one) and their Project Archer setting deals with supernatural menaces. Dealing with superheroes and monsters also came under the remit of Aberrant’s “Directive” and their sourcebook was apparently pretty good – and much of the Aberrant line was also full of great conspiracy resources. Superhero RPGs are a good source for systems that can build monsters and agents in the same rules – Mutants and Masterminds has stats for agents and giant monsters already worked out, and settings like Freedom City and Paragons have plenty of government or pseudo-government agencies that could play host to Black Harvest. And let’s not forget Hunter: The Vigil, which has over a dozen groups and conspiracies (and mechanics) perfect for just these kind of shenanigans. Just roll back the clock, hand out the trilbies and let the magic begin.
