Burn Bags and Backstories
Spies travel light, but they carry more than they admit. The toolkit might be minimal, a burner phone, a passport, a matchbook with a number, but the real weight is personal. Every operative in espionage roleplaying has a history, even if no one talks about it. That history shapes what they are willing to risk, what they will never say out loud, and what they will burn to protect.
Guillotine Protocol is built for this kind of narrative gravity. It is not a game about characters with clean slates. It is a game about people who have already seen too much. You are not starting at zero. You are already in the middle of something, even if you do not know what yet. That is why backstory matters. It is not just character flavor. It is mission context.
Burn bags exist for a reason. Spies destroy records, shred photos, dissolve memories on contact. That tells you something. Even in fiction, characters are not blank. They are self-editing. Every forged identity sits on top of a truth they do not want found. As a player, you get to decide what was erased and what refuses to stay gone.
When you build characters for an espionage game, think in layers. Start with the legend, the cover identity. Then build the operative, the professional underneath. But do not stop there. Ask who they were before any of this started. Ask what they lost, who they used to be, and whether they ever believed they would get out. That is where the story begins.
The tension in Guillotine Protocol does not come from the mission going wrong. It comes from what the mission means to the person who is carrying it out. Did they volunteer? Were they pressured? Are they trying to prove something or erase something? The best espionage characters are haunted not by ghosts but by choices.
The gear is replaceable. The intel is valuable. But the past, that is the part that sticks. Let it shape the way your character hesitates. Let it shape what they do when no one is watching. That is where the emotional core of espionage roleplaying lives.
540 pages. PDF and epub files included.
ISBN 9798315962601
