# Blowback tags: #game/rpg/blowback ![[Blowback (cover).jpg|400]] ![[Blowback (bullet art).jpg|400]] **Blowback** is Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat's GM-less, co-op spy drama about the messiest consequence of the spy life: blacklisted operatives dumped in a city where everyone is a liability, and the only people who still love them are the civilians who never signed up for any of it. Published by Two Scooters Press in 2010 and wearing *Burn Notice* and the *Bourne* trilogy on its sleeve, it's a game full of car chases and wiretaps that's secretly about the far more dangerous question of how much you can lean on the only people left who'll have you before they crack. ## Setting The players are a team of **Professionals** — **Lifers** and **Artists** who botched a job so badly their agency froze their assets, flagged their passports, and disowned them — alongside the **Civilians** who care about them: partners, parents, siblings, army buddies. No network, no backup, nothing but a hometown (ideally your own, deliberately made "sexy and dangerous" by the person running the game) where they scrape by on odd jobs while unravelling the mystery of who burned them and why. The whole premise rests on a frankly idealistic assumption: that these operatives genuinely love the people in their lives, that the job only matters because of what they might lose doing it. The game is at once about pyrotechnics and about fish out of water — spies stripped of their agency, normal people swept into intrigue, and the fine line between protecting the ones you love and using them. ## Mechanics ### Roles & Characters **Blowback** is cooperative and competitive at once. One player takes **The Agency** — the chair that would be called GM elsewhere, responsible for everyone the team meets: clients, bad guys, informants, even the helpful contacts who might quietly be leaning on them. Everyone else plays **two** characters, a Professional and a Civilian. Professionals split between **Lifers** (four skills at 4, 3, 3, 2; relationships thin) and **Artists** (a single sharp skill at 5, but better at people). **Civilians** are the untrained anchors — a couple of piddling skill points, but the weightiest relationships on the table. ### Skills The four spy skills each play differently through the game's phases and carry a flaw that undoes you under pressure: **Pavement** (street knowledge and leverage, undone by an itch for control), **Diversion** (flash, traps, and distractions, undone by paranoia), **Provocateur** (the chameleon, undone by seeing everyone as an asset), and **Commando** (straight-up force, undone by brutality). ### Resolution The dice are honest d6s and a 4 or higher is a success. In **Analysis** you bank your preparation: go **Without Incident** and you earn a number of prep dice equal to half your skill rating, rounded down — and The Agency takes the same again; go **For Broke** and you roll your full skill, keep every success, hand The Agency every failure, and your margin — your **Momentum** — carries into the next roll you make with that skill. Overuse a skill and your nerves are shot: you can't touch it for the rest of the job, and you're obliged to play out whichever ugly trait it drags to the surface. ### The Job Each job runs a three-phase cycle — **Analysis** (plan, prep, pick a **Handler** — always a Professional — and take the gig), **Operation** (spend your banked prep dice against The Agency, and note that every failure you roll is a gift to whoever's screwing you), and **Blowback** (where the relationships, inevitably, start detonating). Played as a single session it's fine; the design really wants the long game, and 5-7 jobs is the sweet spot before the truth finally comes out. ### Relationships This is the reified heart of the game. Every relationship is rated in points, and those points are literally how much stress the bond can absorb before it snaps. The stress charts differ between Professionals and Civilians — a spy gets twitchy when lied to, a civilian gets twitchy when *asked to lie*. Stress a bond to zero and it **breaks**: no more asks, no more favors, no more expectations — though a desperate person can extract a **promise** from you to buy the thing back, a promise that snaps the relationship for good if you break it. Relieve stress by doing the decent thing, and in Blowback you can raise or lower a relationship — on the *other* person's sheet, because the only bond you control is how much you let others push you. That same tide drives the game's only real growth in expertise: Professionals gain it when someone writes off their bond, Civilians when a Professional leans in closer. ### The Agency A whole chapter coaches whoever's running the other side of the table — how to spin up jobs on the fly, how to dress up a hometown in menace, and how to wield the **Push Pyramid** to keep the screws turning just when the team thinks it's caught its breath. ## Editions **Blowback** is a single, self-published game from **Two Scooters Press** (2010; the text is credited 2009-2010). *The print edition is in the library*, joined there by an earlier **playtest** copy of the same game. ## References - [Blowback (buy, name-your-own-price) - itch.io, by Elizabeth Sampat](https://elizabethsampat.itch.io/blowback) - [Up a Creek and Against All Odds — Blowback role-playing game (review) - Geek Buffet](https://geekbuffet.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/up-a-creek-and-against-all-odds-blowback-role-playing-game/)