In 1583, court spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham sent an adept gnostic team to Prague on a mission he didn’t commit to public record. These men journeyed through rough and heretic-infested lands engaged in a task of maximum-security in the defence of the realm from increasing Catholic-fuelled aggression.

In the beginning, The Dee Sanction was a slightly different game from one that exists today. At that moment in time, I had as much interest in creating a system to support a Brave New World-a-like called Complex 214 as I did to release tales of esoteric espionage into the world. Indeed, if you read 214 — the first post on this blog, which span off from another blog (I have so many) called Omega Complex — you can see that my key objective seems to have been to spout a riff on The A-Team introduction with Elizabethan trappings.

However, though I might have cast suspicion and paranoia aside, much of what The Dee Sanction was back in 2014 remains.

Never Inaccessible

I always wanted to leverage the notion of Elizabethan times that people had from school, casual reading, TV serials and movies over high-end academic insight. The classic paperback roleplaying game Maelstrom definitely inspired. That little paperback made me want to play AND study more about history while not teaching a tedious lesson of the 16th century itself. I wanted to step forward—away from the simple adventure of an assassin contained in the books, choose your own adventure—and enter the wider world that Alexander Scott’s game spread before me.

On top of that, I wanted simple. I had one mechanic (more or less) from the outset. I wanted that level of simplicity that has allowed a tsunami of amateur game designers to bring their creativity to a welcoming public.

I wanted something I could bring to a convention and not spend 30 minutes explaining everything before the adventure kicked off. I could run The Cthulhu Hack almost instantly, spending 5 minutes creating characters from scratch and 5 minutes explaining the mechanics. The Dee Sanction needed to be that, too.

I wanted something I could sell to gaming newcomers and veterans alike based on that accessibility as a concept and a gathering of mechanics. Roll a die to face a challenge; a result of 1 or 2 means making progress with a complication, while any other result means simple success. Three hits, and you’re down. Sometimes, you can work simple miracles. Now, go. Play.

Something like that.

Competence with Threat

I wanted a game where a character could be broadly competent in a small number of areas to ease the team into the concept of working together despite the paranoia and suspicion. In The Dee Sanction, there’s a death sentence egging you on to help your companions and get the job done. In Complex 214, the punishment for failure wasn’t much different or less terminal (although advanced genetic tech meant that the latter wasn’t a permanent thing).

At heart, the current iteration offers a 50/50 chance of success doing something that you have some skill in. An Ability makes it possible to face a Challenge, and a D4 in a Resource means a coin flip to succeed. In the original, with a skill, you had a 44% chance of success, wanting a 6, 7 or 8 on a roll of 2d6.

The threat isn’t about being incompetent or outclassed (well, OK… maybe); it’s about vulnerability—you’re fragile, death-marked, in enemy territory, and reliant on other people, no less vulnerable. And you’re facing inhuman forces, both natural and supernatural.

All in One

The Cthulhu Hack often sells because you can play the game with only that book. You have all you need, and once you have done playing that first investigation, you have the tools to go on. Along with a simple core mechanic and an easily carried form factor for the book, it could set the game apart from the competition.

The Dee Sanction needed to be just like that.

There were tokens, cards, and odd dice in the early days, but they fell early in the playtesting. People enjoyed the game but didn’t feel that the accessories would make it an easy sell. What if you didn’t have the cards for character creation? What if you didn’t have the dice to support the narrative twists? What if a gust of wind carries away all the tokens?

The version of The Dee Sanction available right now can be played from the book with a normal pack of playing cards. Without the playing cards, you can take a pencil and stub the back onto the character creation pages to determine occupation, associations and so forth. It’s tempting to create some tables—like the one for Combat in the back of the old Lone Wolf books—to make it possible to recreate dice throws without dice or another handy randomizer (trust in the Internet or apps to save the day when you forget your dice… unless the batteries dead).

I find little comfort in writing. I find comfort in the research, but when it comes to gathering all that information together and it coalescing on the page, that’s another thing altogether. I find that the idea in my head rapidly becomes something far less captivating or exciting on the written page. Or I stumble over quite how to put something together in a compelling or accessible format.

That almost definitely comes down to Imposter Syndrome and a generous menu of anxieties. I realise that I have published a dozen books myself and written for half-a-dozen companies as a freelance; amidst all the printed books and scattered awards, I must be doing something right.

But, that’s not to say that it ever feels easy, nor that coming at a new book makes me anything but stressed. I have so many ideas and they all sound great inside my head, but the challenge of getting them down on paper—well, The Dee Sanction is a testament to what happens. Iterations of treacle-like progress have made it an uncomfortable project, though thankfully illuminated by many moments of joy in the research and excitement in promoting the idea through discussion and running playtest adventures.

It’s a weird experience. I desperately love writing and creating new game material, but comfort is not easy to find.

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.

In Complex 214, you may choose to improve your chances of success by exploiting a mutation, for example, or in The Dee Sanction, your association with one of many secret societies and cabals that influence events in Europe mean you’re better equipped than at first might appear.

When you face a challenge, you need to roll a 7 for success. Before you roll, you have the opportunity to use one (or more) of your secret abilities to expand the threshold for success. If you exhaust a single card, you move it to the left side of your character card, swivelled sideways. The threshold for success now expands by 1, up and down – so, a single card means you will succeed with a 6, 7 or 8.

The moment you use one of these cards, you open yourself up to scrutiny and the possibility that someone might notice your unexpected and suspicious success.

Once you’ve made your roll, failure isn’t necessarily the end of the challenge. Your colleagues have the opportunity to spend points from their own pools – whether Access or Power – to nudge you toward success.

Whether selfless or selfish in their intentions, if they spend enough points they can then take a Success Counter. However, before they do that they have another option. You still have your success, but they uncover a piece of Incriminating Evidence (or more than one if you actually exhausted more than one special card). The GM hands out a little black token, or other marker, to indicate the presence of this compromising information.

These little black tokens sit next to your character card until you reach a point in the adventure when your team might contact home. At that point, the number of tokens might well spell your doom – the form of which depends on the version of 214 that you’re playing. Nevertheless, it won’t bode well in matters of advancement or trust. In a one-off, it will be a determination of basic success; in an ongoing game, evidence will slow your development and, most likely, drive blood feuds and further distrust within the group.

This mechanic means you can have a means to uncover and assign mistrust and bad behaviour, without worrying too much about keeping track of the detail. No need to pass secret notes across the table or go into play stalling detail about the discovery. One of the team has seen evidence of your misdeeds – and you would do well to check yourself in future.