Maganomia – Are you a Smiley or a Bond?

Thinking about stories of spycraft in Elizabethan England, there’s a question that needs to be discussed at each gaming table. Are your agents more like George Smiley or like James Bond? Either’s a fine choice, ands so long as you flag it properly, players can mix these types, but it needs to be discussed. Let me unpack it.

If there were a supervillain that needed assassinating, George Smiley would find a cleaner with a drinking problem, and blackmail or bribe him into slipping sleeping pills into the guy’s favourite decanter of whiskey, and then planting a suicide note in a little used book. Smiley wouldn’t do it himself, either. He’d have an agent as a cutout. Smiley’s deliberately dull, but absolutely meticulous in his craft. The guy’s dead, and no-one knows he’s been murdered, except for the cleaner. The cleaner has no idea who is responsible, and isn’t a credible witness if they go to the police.

Bond would drysuit SCUBA to the man’s private island, crash a party, then introduce himself with his real name. After that he’d get slightly drunk, dance the tango with the supervillain’s mistress, and humiliate him over a card table. Bond might then shoot the criminal at close range with an underpowdered pistol, like his favourite Walther, or just insult him and leave. Bond’s tradecraft is terrible, but he’s fun to play.

What are your players expecting to do?

You see both types of spy in the Elizabethan secret services, as seen in the dichotomy between Thomas Phellips and Andrew Parry. Stephen Alford, the author of “The Watchers”, makes it clear this is because, in the real world, Parry’s spycraft is terrible, but for gamers, it means there’s clear real-world precedent to Bond it like a madman if you want.

We don’t know a vast amount about Thomas Phellips. He made sure of that. The letters of his we have are from the archives of his patrons. We know his father was a wealthy merchant class, so he had studied mathematics at University but was not loyal to a noble family. He was so skilled a cryptographer that on one occasion at least, intercepted messages were smuggled to him from England to France, where he was on a mission, to let him have a crack at them. We have vague physical descriptions from some of Walsingham’s contemporaries. That’s about it. A deliberately plain man, sitting at Walsingham’s elbow, as they look out over the invisible chessboard. There were others like him in Walsingham’s service – men skilled in numbers, listening and silence.

Andrew Parry a different sort of fellow. He claimed to be under Lord Burley’s patronage, but how much that was the case is not clear. He used to throw parties among the emigrant English Catholics in Paris and Italy. He claimed this was to recruit agents, but how skilled he was at that, given that Burley was not willing to front him as much cash as he wished, is not clear. Like Bond, he makes himself the centre of the attention, tells everyone who he is, and tries to get by on money and charm. This was a pain for Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris, Lord Cobham, who was trying to run a professional espionage outfit, and had this dilettante keep turning up with reports and requests for money. I suppose Cobham, who had to keep tabs on Parry, might have used him as a distraction.

Magonomia, given its magic, tends to pull you a bit toward Bond, because it’s fantastic and magic items are our equivalent of a laser watch. That being said, even Bond, with his boys-own-adventure attitude, isn’t all that far from some early Twentieth Century British intelligence services. The SOE loved weird plans and did have a workshop to make spy gadgets, under Charles Fraser-Smith. They really did pay agents to sleep with the wives of foreign ambassadors to get their secrets (the author Roald Dahl, for example). They did have a stage magician on staff, helping to plan the deceptions before the D Day landings. More recently, there really was an assassin who committed murder in public using an alchemical poison on the tip of the Bulgarian umbrella. You can make a historical argument for why people like Parry thought they were doing an absolutely marvellous job.

I’d repeat you can do both with historical sources to back you. In the real world there are people like Cardinal Allen fielding agents into England, who are more in the Smiley mould, but the guy who shot William the Silent in the chest, and the men who tried the same thing with Elizabeth, were more on the Bond end of the spectrum. The key point, is that your group decide if people like Bond and Parry are ridiculous or not. Your opponents need to respond in a way that meets player expectations, so you need to deliberately state what those are.