DwD Studios

Warning: Spoilers for the module.

Dramatis Personae:

Neil: the outdoor survival expert (Scout)
Steve: the computer hacker extraordiaire (Tech)
Kir: half Russian, half Chinese (naturalized US Citizen) Trust Fund Baby (Academic)
Belinda: Ex Air Force MP, with a fair degree of intelligence experience (Detective)
Isabella: Israeli military sniper, with dual citizenship (Soldier)
(Tom): Ex military courrier who transported classified information (Pilot)
"John Smith": "My real name is classified." Infiltration expert (Thief)

So, we got through the island half of the mission today.

Last game, they went through their briefing, equipping, and got to the island, where they chose to avoid the cave entrance they accidentally discovered (because that looked like the best place to scale the cliff until then), and snuck up to the house. (Then Mote crapped out, so we're back to Maptool, which worked very well.)

They leave three of the better shots (Neil, Belinda, and Isabella) well positioned to cover the barracks, hiding in the trees. The other four are to go inside.

They started with John Smith climbing up to the second floor (outdoors), looking for a windows to open. I decided that since Stavros is a billionaire, he can afford air conditioning, and if it fails, he can afford more air conditioning. Ergo, there's really no reason why any of the windows should open. (I didn't want to let it be that easy.) They did peek in to a few windows, though, and learned nothing.

Back to the ground level, where they wandered around peeking in windows, and managing, purely by luck, to avoid the patrolling guard on the ground floor. Still no windows that will open. So, they tried to pick the lock on the left side door. Three or four times, to no avail. The last attempt, John Smith was heading back up to the second story, to just break a window, and failed his climbing roll. Oof. At the exact same time, the patrolling guard is literally on the other side of the door they're trying to pick the lock to. The guy (failing to) pick the lock (Kir, IIRC) fails his perception, the security guard critically fails his perception. Listening to his iPod, I guess. Around this time, our youngest player (Steve) pulled out his phone and started playing the Benny Hill theme song. The indoor crew will be referred to as the Benny Hill Gang (BHG) hereafter.

So (Tom) (player's name - we barely finished the character before the game started) heads to the front door, easily picks the lock, and notices (without being noticed) that there is someone patrolling inside. So they cautiously enter, sneaking past the security office (with two guards in it), and are spotted on the security video by said guards. The outside team sees the lights come on in the barracks. The inside team surprises the patrolling guard, and shoots him with a silenced pistol, just as the firefight ensues with the barracks. Turns out the outside team is more competent (or, really, luckier with dice rolls) than the BHG.

As the outside team engages in a nasty firefight, in which Isabella (the sniper) got basically bruised by a shot that barely exceeded her armor value (all but one of the characters chose the Agency Uniform with the armor upgrade over the bullet proof vest, BTW), Neil got moderately shot up, and the Belinda got hammered with a near-maximum damage hit. But they won. (The commander in the barracks was the second guy killed, BTW, leaving the rest with ineffective leadership.)

Meanwhile, the BHG kick in the door to the security office and charge in, guns blazing. Between surprise, and 2:1 odds, they take out those two guards, one of whom is the other commander. From there, it was all over quickly. The upstairs guard, the two outdoor patrollers, and the two on the dock, after listening to both their commanders eat it, decided discretion was the better part of valor, and hid. The servants, being unarmed, never come out of their rooms, and nobody bothered them (or the servants' quarters building). The main house and the barracks were both theirs.

So, the BHG has given the house a quick once over, and taken control of the server room, because they assumed that was where they would find the computer records they were after. Steve is very, very good at what he does, has a tech kit, and a seriously customized Agency laptop (Plausible Gadget, +10 to Tech roll), and he Had His Way with the room. He planted a tap on the fiber optic cable going to the mainland, installed custom malware in the firmware of the network drive array that would just do a complete backup to a CIA server over the next couple of days, and monkeyed around with various other, more obvious malware that would be easily found, as a distraction. And rolled a critical success. He left the room absolutely confident that neither the cable tap nor the NAS malware would be found before they had done their job.

The rest of the BHG poked around, and ended up upstairs, at the door to the master bedroom. Where they noticed the alarm and trap. And completely failed to even try to disarm either. First, they tried to go in through the wall to the private bathroom, but the entire master suite had reinforced walls that made that problematic without explosives. (They did debate the hazards of blowing up the building they were in, but common sense prevailed. Somehow.) With a small amount of prodding from the gamemaster, they formulated a plan that was actually a bit clever. Both Kir (who has a master's degree in international business and law) and Steve (who has a lot of experience with figuring out where rich people have hidden their digital secrets) figured that the server room would have all the above-board business records, but the stuff they were really looking for would be in the private office upstairs. So they left a good deal of obvious damage to the wall, and around the door (including a mattress over the pressure plate, with a dead guard on top), but were very, very careful to leave no evidence inside to show they had made it in. (One character was taking pictures of everthing before they touched it, to make sure it ended up where it started.) They wanted Stavros to believe they hadn't gotten in to the office, at least for a while.

The alarm wasn't actually a problem, since it connected to the server room and security office downstairs, and Steve already had that in hand (while altering the various logs to ensure that no record of their getting in to the office would be found). The electrical trap, however, they just blew it on, and set off while trying to pick the lock on the door. And I rolled one point of damage. Sigh.

So they get in to the sanctum sanctorum. They find the laptop on the desk in the office, which Steve spent about an hour copying the hard drive from. While he was doing that, the office was thoroughly searched, and everything photographed. They also found the invitations, of course.

They knew the police (or military) would be on the way, but they had a competent minion in the form of a fisherman (skilled backup) waiting with the Zodiac boat, who was monitoring the police radio bands, and they knew that once the alarm went up they'd still have at least an hour to get out.

A successful perception noticed the office was smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, and a bit of fooling around figured out how to open the secret door to the stairway down. They snuck down to the bottom of the stairs, smelled the cigarette smoke from the two guards, saw the submarine, and left, escaping notice. They did not see a certain object on the wall in the cave, due to not leaving the base of the stairs.

Meanwhile, the outside crew went through the barracks, finding the armory, which they failed to pick the lock to, but the ex-cop Belinda had the clever idea of just getting the keys off the dead guy by the door, and they found the armory and the stairs down to the cave, and also snuck away unnoticed. They also photographed the GPS log from the helicopter on the pad, which doesn't have much of interest, but they were quite thorough. (They also found Stavros' homemade porn collection, which likely won't be much use in trying to blackmail him, but might prove handy if any of the various young ladies looks useful. Plus, I think they're kinda pervy.)

So, they get word the police are on their way by helicopter, and hightailed it. The fisherman (the backup guy) had a Medical skill, which none of the PCs have (yet), so he stabilized the two who were seriously shot up, and gave an aspirin to the sniper for her bruise. As they motored back to the mainland, the captain hailed the police helicopter and reported that he'd heard quite a lot of gunfire coming form the island, and they thanked him for his help.

The two seriously shot up characters spent some time in emergency surgery at the CIA safe house, then they had a 12 hour flight back to the US, which time Steve spent cracking the encryption on (some of) the files recovered from the laptop, which Kir (well within his element) started to analyze. They found a lot of damning evidence that Stavros' charity is structured in such as way as to easily funnel (launder) a lot of money without anybody else knowing where to, and in the list of charities supported were several known fronts for terrorist groups. But not enough, in and of itself, to act on.

Now, at this point, were they to operate by the book, they should file their mission report, and debrief to the FBI, since the party is in Boston Harbor, and thus inside the United States. That's what they should do. But it takes just a little mental gymnastics to come up with following chain of logic:

The party is in about 48 hours. They have a 12 hour flight to the US. Debriefing with the FBI will take a full day, and the FBI will need a full day or more to get warrants, at which point the party is long over and Stavros well beyond their jurisdiction. In addition, while the FBI is pretty good at long term infiltration - placing moles in criminal organizations - they're really not very good at short term, ad hoc infiltrations. Their normal approach to this sort of situation would be to raid the party with warrants and a SWAT team. The CIA, however, trains quite thoroughly in this sort of thing.

Plus, technically, they're not actually really breaking any serious laws. The CIA isn't prohibited from operating in the US, nor even from gathering intelligence in the US. They're only prohibited from performing law enforcement functions in the US. Since Stavros is a foreign national, who only very occasionally is in the US, there is zero chance that any intelligence gathered will ever be used in a court, and any action taken on it would almost certainly be taken outside the US anyway. Ergo, the only real crime they'd be committing would be party crashing. So long as they don't get caught, they're golden. (If they get in a gunfight, well, they'll probably need new characters, because I'm not running a game based on prison gangs.) So they're planning to crash the party. (This was my analysis based on what one would expect in a spy thriller movie. John Smith's player, a military vet with intelligence experience, said he's had that briefing, and said my take on it was dead on. The only repercussions would be if it became a political incident, rather than a legal issue.)

But that's next game.

(Attached are the floor plan images I used for Maptool.)