IT EMERGENCY! You play recently-trained IT emergency officers. Your job is to go out to customers who have an IT problem and fix it. These customers couldn’t solve their problem using the online help database, the web chat helpdesk, or the phone helpdesk. Their problem is therefore difficult, and they are likely angry. Your mission is customer satisfaction. And if the customer doesn’t come away satisfied, you don’t get paid. You’ve started this job in the last week. You have been thoroughly trained and issued a uniform, a van, spare parts, some basic tools and a laptop. One other thing. This is the week the world went to hell in a handbasket. The previously mundane world has suddenly become a lot more complicated. Magic has become real, or the dead have started walking and talking. The training didn’t cover this, but it should be fine. IT Emergency is for 3-4 players. WORLD CREATION Agree together: - Where is the game set? - What is the company you all work for? - What the broad nature of the weirdness is in your game? Don't get too bogged-down in the details of these things; leave a generous amount of room for them to be fleshed out in play. CHARACTER GENERATION For your character, choose: - A name. - Background (e.g. age, prior occupation, education, country of origin, appearance, ethnicity, gender). - A key relationship from outside work, and a Situation (see below) regarding that relationship that is currently Under Control. - Something that makes you feel alienated from your fellow employees, whether they know it or not. Whatever you pick, you’ll have the same basic skills and the same basic equipment and the same job to do as the other officers. You’ve only met your fellow officers in the last week, but you’ve formed an impression of each. Say what it is. MUNDANE AND FANTASTIC The current player (i.e. whoever's scene it is) plays their officer. The person to their right is the Mundane GM, and is in charge of everything else in the normal world. The person to their left is the Fantastic GM, and is in charge of everything weird. If there's a fourth player, they're the Company GM, in charge of anything that pertains to the company. This responsibility goes to the Mundane GM if there isn't a fourth player. STRUCTURE OF PLAY The game alternates between work phases and R&R phases, as follows: - AM shift (work) - Lunch back at base (R&R). There’s no GMs or Situations here, just a chance for the officers to interact. - PM shift (work) - Evening (R&R) Everyone gets one scene in each phase. ROLLING THE DICE When the game calls on you to roll the dice, you roll one white Mundane six-sided die and one black Fantastic six-sided die (or whatever colours you prefer). Possible configurations of each die include: - Success, if you rolled a 4+ on the die. - Failure, if you didn’t. - Explosion, if you rolled a 6 on the die. - Dominance, if the die rolled equal to or higher than the other die. The particular rule you’ve triggered will tell you which of the above apply. If a rule doesn’t mention a configuration, that means you ignore it for this roll. SITUATIONS A Situation is an ongoing problem of some kind, which could be Mundane or Fantastic. It might not be a problem for the IT emergency officer, but it will probably become their problem one way or another. A Situation can be at one of three levels: - Under Control. - Causing Difficulties to someone - Out Of Hand. When a new Situation is introduced it is Causing Difficulties by default. Moving a Situation towards the bottom of this scale is called escalating it, moving it towards the top is called de-escalating it. Situations can only be introduced or their level changed if the rules call for it. Whenever the rules call for a GM to introduce a Situation at a particular level, they can always opt to escalate an existing Situation to that level instead. TIME At the beginning of a scene, put a die where it is visible to everyone and set it to 1. When the rules call for you to increase the time die, set it to one higher. If it reaches 6, time has run out and you must return to base. The player says how they extricate themselves from any current Situations, and the scene ends. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION The Mundane GM decides whether the customer was satisfied at the end of a scene. Use your judgement, but indications that a customer might not be satisfied include: - You left a Situation Out Of Hand - You didn’t solve the technological issue you were called out for Indications they might be satisfied include: - You de-escalated one or more Situations. Optionally, the Mundane GM may decide to issue a commendation from the customer. Only do this when an officer has truly gone above and beyond, successfully. Officers receive performance pay in proportion to their satisfied customers. Commendations may lead to increased pay or promotion. THE RULES At the start of each scene, the Mundane GM may introduce a Situation that is Causing Difficulties. Whenever you roll the dice, you are using up precious time. Increase the time die by 1. When you first investigate a technological problem, roll the dice. The Mundane GM will tell you what the problem is and how your character can solve it. In addition, whichever die has dominance, the appropriate GM introduces a Situation of that type that is Causing Difficulties. If a die rolls an explosion, choose: the Situation is Out Of Hand, or introduce two Situations that are Causing Difficulties. When an officer wants to address a Situation, they say how they’re doing it and the Mundane GM decides if it can work; if there’s something else the officer needs to do first; and if there’s any other important consequences to that course of action. When the officer commits to the action, increase the time die by 1 (more if it seems like a particularly lengthy action), and trigger any other relevant rules. If an officer takes an action, ignoring a Situation that is Causing Difficulties, the relevant GM can escalate the Situation. If an officer takes an action, ignoring a Situation that is Out Of Hand, the relevant GM can say how that Situation is interfering with their activities, and rule that their action fails. When you address a Situation using charm, deceit or persuasion, roll the dice: - Mundane success: de-escalate the Situation; - Mundane explosion, set it to Under Control. - Otherwise, escalate a Situation or introduce a new Mundane Situation - If Fantastic is dominant, escalate a Fantastic Situation or introduce a new one. When you address a Fantastic Situation on its own terms, roll the dice: - Fantastic success: de-escalate the Situation; - Fantastic explosion, set it to Under Control. - Otherwise, escalate a Situation or introduce a new Fantastic Situation - If Mundane is dominant, escalate a Mundane Situation or introduce a new one. SCENE STARTING When you're the Mundane GM setting a scene, come up with something you think will be likely to be interesting to the active player. If you've got something, great! Otherwise you'll need to reach out to other players for help. The first direction you should reach out is to the Fantastic GM, who might have something in mind as a setup for weirdness. Ask the Fantastic GM if they have something interesting to pose. If so, good. If not, then you need to reach out to the Company GM or the player. Use this sequence of priority each time so you don't get bogged down in the scene-brainstorming process. The idea is to have a simple process that you can execute quickly and get back into the think of play. Once you have a scene idea, you don't need to spend a lot of time hashing out the details of the scene before you start playing it out. That defeats the purpose! Just get the ball rolling and things will go from there. IDEA BANK If you don't have a ton of ideas you love for your setting, company, and weirdness, that's okay. We've got you covered. Here are a few: ---SETTING A College Town Don't worry, they are all basically the same. Typically A College Town will be populated by students and recent college grads as well as quirky local professionals and eccentric academics. There will be regular folks too, but don't worry, they don't need technical support. The typical problems these folks have are related to device misuse. Students try to keep their snakes warm using the heat shed by their computers, lazy writers put coffee cups in their CD trays, mathematicians try to run sophisticated geometric analysis on their netbooks instead of the purpose-built supercomputer at the number theory lab, beer pong casualties. That sort of thing. This means that you'll likely encounter physically damaged hardware and you'll need to carry spare parts. Wall Street There are basically only investors and bankers here. That means that everyone is a drone who can only be told apart from the other drones by the subtle differences between their expensive Italian shoes. Some of them are also slightly older than the others, but basically here your customers are people with no faces. Try not to let it get to you. These people typically have two kinds of problems: professional security problems related to their money handling activities, and personal security problems related to keeping secrets from the other people in their lives. You see, the business of handling money, at the highest levels, is really the business of handling secrets, and these kinds of people just kind of get into the habit. You will need to dress nicely and bring the kind of attitude that suggests that you are capable of discretion. The Suburbs The suburbs are where city people go to get out of the city. Your suburban customers will commonly be two classes of people: comfortable retirees and professional families. The typical problems that these people will have are related to using a hammer to do a screwdriver's job. How do I send email with Photoshop? Can I play a movie in my word processor? That kind of thing. You're not going to need extra parts, probably, but gird your mental loins for a lot of patient explaining. City Downtown Every city is a little different, but every city has this part, where large and small businesses push up against tiny apartments with soaring rent. There is a great diversity of customers here, and along with that comes a diversity of problems. If you don't want to choose a more narrow theme, choose a city downtown as your setting, and pick a couple of quirks to make it feel specific. New York, for instance, is famously irritable and dirty. Your customers will give you a hard time. San Fransisco has a great food scene, so maybe some of your customers there will be restaurants. You don't have to make this complicated but do try not to make it anonymous - unless, like Wall Street, that is the idea. ---COMPANY Mom & Pop You are a small, locally-owned company. You probably know the boss, or are her son or daughter. At a Mom & Pop Company, Situations relating to the company will typically be the kinds of problems that any close-knit family unit has - misunderstandings, competition over the car, petty rivalries, long-standing emotional baggage and so on. Security Firm You are a middling-sized but important security agency and you perform tech support for them. You are not a team of commandos, that's the guys in the other building. If you work for a security firm, you have relationships with your coworkers at work but you're encouraged by the higher-ups to keep from getting too close to each other; fraternizing is strictly forbidden, and the privacy of the client is always paramount. You probably have a military-inspired corporate jargon and you call your customers "clients" or something. Multimedia Giant You are Apple or the equivalent. For your company, brand is everything. You have to look a certain way, talk a certain way, use the right tools and drive the right cars. Your mission, if you work for a Multimedia Giant, isn't really to solve problems at all. It's to leave the customers feeling good. ---WEIRDNESS Snake People It turns out that a goodly portion of the human population are actually snake people from the underground empire. They have been infiltrating us for almost a generation now, and basically everyone knows one. He's probably your boss, honestly. The Opinionated Dead Dead people aren't staying down, and the old saying, dead men tell no tales? Turns out that dead men want to tell tales, and they have a LOT of them. Be careful when dealing with zombies, because they will TALK YOUR EAR OFF. Benevolent Alien Invasion The aliens are here, and they look like three-foot yeti crabs, and they want to help us with unlimited emission-free energy. Also they have a plan for world peace. But they want to live in our houses and they SMELL REALLY FUNNY. They say the only way to implement their plan is for a crab person to live in every household. Please note that crab aliens don't know how to use human technology. Their own devices are based on three-dimensional tanks of charged image-bearing plasmas.