The Other OSR: For A Rainy Day

Stefan Meunch is dead. Died three days ago, between weekly visits. Part of the local catalogue round of check-ins for useless and washed-up old spies with nowhere to go and no future beyond a meagre pension, the bottle, and having lived out their usefulness, such as it was, getting by without bringing themselves to anyone’s attention. Only this time he has. The Factory went in and cleaned up as normal, confirmed the death was a heart attack, and was all ready to close the file when an analyst discovered that Stefan Meunch, a retired ex-spy, eighty-five years old, living on a not an entirely unreasonable state pension in a flat over an empty shop in a town in the West Midlands, had quarter of a millions pounds squirrelled away in off-shore accounts. How the hell did he get away with it, where did he get the money from, and who was paying him? More importantly, how did the fuck-ups whose job it was to do the weekly run of the catalogue of hand-me-downs like Stefan Meunch miss the fact that he managed to save quarter of a million pounds?

This is the set-up for the scenario, For A Rainy Day. Published by Just Crunch Games, this is a scenario for Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks, which describes itself as a set of “Universal Rules for Challenge-driven Games”. Specifically, For A Rainy Day is a scenario for the second Genre Set-Up in Sanction. This is ‘Agency: Outlet Work’, an espionage setting inspired by the grim, grimy, and pathetic espionage of the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron with dash of John Le Carré. The Player Characters are ex-agents, failures and fuck-ups, washed out of active service, but not out of the service. Reassigned to small towns and cities like Wolverhampton or Grimsby, the Agents do data processing, combing through reports and archives, and so on, before sorting it and sending it back to head office, with no explanations as to why or what the information is for. It is make-work, a window job, and that is all that the Agent will have until he retires. Yet the Agent hopes, and worse, he cannot help but want to apply his tradecraft. Part of the work involves the catalogue run. Just one more part of their tedious day in their tedious week in their tedious no-career between now and retirement. Probably a bit like Stefan Meunch, but without the quarter of a million. It’s their fuck-up and they have to find out what Stefan Meunch did to make them look like even more of a bunch of fuck ups, and how he got away with it.

‘Agency: Outlet Work’ is one of the best things in the Sanction rulebook—more so if you are a fan of the Slow Horses series—and For A Rainy Day is an introductory scenario for it. Just as ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ is inspired by the Slow Horses series, it should be noted that For A Rainy Day is inspired by a pair novellas that run parallel to the main novels in the series—The Drop and The List. Although a player may be familiar with the series and with both novellas, For A Rainy Day is only inspired by their set-ups, rather than the whole of their plots. In fact, For A Rainy Day is not a scenario in the traditional roleplaying sense, an adventure with a plot that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, it has a beginning—a very good beginning with the Player Characters being given a bollocking for their failure and their players a chance to introduce their characters and their very ordinary lives, and a middle, where all of the investigation takes places, with its grubby scrutiny and possible future for the Player Characters. The end is very much down to the players and what their characters think is going on. For A Rainy Day does tell you what is going on, but the players and their characters may get other ideas… Which is fine, since they are fuck-ups…

For A Rainy Day is heavy on investigation and tradecraft, though there are opportunities for violence too—though only for the Game Master, who is accorded good advice on running the scenario. This includes running it as an episode of a television series, using the provided table of prompts when appropriate, such as when a scene drags or is going nowhere, and reacting to the Player Characters and their actions as it is primarily a player-driven scenario. In addition, five pre-generated Agents, one for each of the standard Lifepath archetypes in ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ are provided for quick set-up and use with the scenario.

Physically, For A Rainy Day is short and simple. The layout is clean and tidy, everything is easy to grasp, and the artwork has a suitably drab, drizzled upon kind of feel.

For A Rainy Day can be used in conjunction with the espionage-themed roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice, but of course, Sanction suits the desperate, down-at-heel grottiness of both ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ and For A Rainy Day. The good news is that For A Rainy Day is the first in a series and it will get sequels, which is probably the most that the Player Character fuck-ups deserve. In the meantime, For A Rainy Day is a delightfully seedy introduction to the wretched world of ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ and its no-hopers.