Snitch, Snatch, Showdown: A Review of Operation Burning Presidents

Operation: Burning Presidents on RPGNow

I suppose the greatest accolade you can heap on any gaming supplement would be in its value outside the core audience. If you buy a roleplaying game that contains a rich and engaging section of advice on running a great game, designing brilliant plots, or preparing with minimum effort – then that deserves a wider readership. Even if you never run the game itself, you could certainly apply the principles communicated to your own games.

The same can be said for adventures. If you find an adventure in your hands that provides the raw components for a session without slavishly demanding you run it with a single system – all the better. It makes for a great resource to fall back on if you have more material to run games, and the publisher benefits from more sales.

I have found science-fiction adventures before now that have served entirely well as fantasy backdrops and horror supplements that have worked to tell a tale of the Old West. In this case, Operation: Burning Presidents provided a more straight forward vehicle for me to run an espionage session, but flung off at a tangent to embrace the world of horror and vampires presented at the core of Pelgrane’s Night’s Black Agents.

Form
Operation: Burning Presidents is a short, 18-page PDF supplement for the Covert Ops Role Playing Game. Published by DwD Studios, written by Anthony Hunter, the adventure comes in a two-column format, with colour cover illustration, but no internal artwork other than three maps.

While Hunter has written the mission to fit into the Covert Ops world, the level of mechanical crunch in the text means you can get a grasp of the difficulties and opposition without necessarily knowing the game at all.

Features
Operation: Burning Presidents runs to 9-pages of mission, broken roughly down into three encounters, 3-pages of maps, a 3-page Appendix with stats for non-player characters, and the rest given over to cover and contents.

The player characters become involved in a mission to uncover the whereabouts of a missing agent after a call from the local office. Assigned to a deep cover operation, the only clue is that he should have been meeting with an informant on the day he disappeared.

The adventure includes a briefing, GM background, then splits out the three primary encounters – mostly throwing the agents out into the sticks – over the course of about 6-pages of detail. Each encounter clearly highlights the nature of the situation, the location, key operatives involved, and their general state of mind, readiness and reaction to strangers. The text provides the GM with potential clues, angles and possible side tracks as you go.

At heart this is a straightforward mission to uncover a thread of clues by making contact with the informant. It benefits from clear maps – including one specifically prepared for the players to organise a tactical approach to a tricky situation. All being well, the mission should culminate in a high energy final encounter with the potential to rescue the missing agent – and the possible lead in to other missions in the Covert Ops line.

The text of the encounters provide useful options and points of view, taking into account different methods of approach and potential clues. In addition, call outs consider how the player characters might get involved personally and become engage in the mission without a traditional briefing.

For my part, as a GM needing to run a convention game, Operation: Burning Presidents provides enough information in a clear and structured format to serve as a springboard for a low-prep, single session game. As I said in starting out, I used Night’s Black Agents as my game without much extra work, aside from a little thinking time to entwine a horror angle into the scope and objectives of the enemy.

Final Thoughts
For an overworked GM with less real world time to get prep done, supplements like this provide a great fallback. Operation: Burning Presidents offers a clearly defined mission with more than one potential pay-off if the agents involved handle it well.

The style and presentation offer a GM all the information needed to run an exciting session of tradecraft, parkour and gunplay, with the mechanics tucked away for you to draw on (or not) as you please. Between sidebars, background and various clues, the mission can be a straight forward or convoluted as you (and your players) want it to be.

My copy was provided for review. Operation: Burning Presidents, Anthony Hunter, DwD Studios, $1.99 in PDF.