Recently, I've decided to revisit a numbe of older games that I wrote, mainly for 24 hour RPG contests. The one that I feel has the most potential is Okhrana, a game of Russian political emigres dodging the Czarist secret police in turn of the century Paris.

Those who were at Spodley Grange may remember the game. It's functional, in that the mechanics and structure of the game do work in play. They are not without their flaws, indeed it will likely take a few iterations of the text before it can deliver something consistently enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, the Spodley Grange weekend playtesting event saw the first ever playtest of Okhrana, a game I initially wrote for the 24 Hour Espionage RPG competition hosted by the Modus Operandi website. The pre-playtest version of the game text can be found here.

I entered into the playtest with a certain amount of trepidation: would the game actually work? Would it provide the kind of experience I was aiming for? In addition, this was the first game I had ever created that did not have a traditional GM role, with the role being distributed throughout the group (in the manner of Contenders, for example).

So, you'll see an attachment as part of this post. It's for a game I've just done (in quite a bit less than 24 hours) for the 24 Hour Espionage RPG event being run by Modus Operandi.

So, what's it all about? The Okhrana were the secret police of Czarist Russia and as one of those strange quirks of history, they had an office in Paris to keep tabs on emigre revolutionaries and so forth. They also had the full co-operation of the French government and police, I might add. So, the game pits the revolutionaries, anarchists, etc, against the agents of the Okhrana in belle epoque Paris (1899, to be exact).