The Void and the Guillotine Protocol
The Manifesto 🌑 29 March 2025
The new moon is a void. A space where everything resets, where what doesn’t serve you gets burned away. Guillotine Protocol came from that emptiness. I had to kill DoubleZero to make space for it.
DoubleZero was baggage. It started as a spiritual retro-clone of James Bond 007 and grew into a universal modern system. It served its purpose but wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I needed something focused on factions and ideologies. Moral dilemmas without easy answers. No cars, no gadgets, no quips.
Guillotine Protocol was the answer. George Smiley. Neil Burnside. Jackson Lamb. Quiet operators making hard choices. People trying to fix what’s broken, knowing they might break themselves in the process.
I broke a couple of years ago. I was buried in a firearms manual for DoubleZero, tracking every conceivable weapon, while another mass shooting played out on the news. I stared at the screen, feeling sick. I deleted the manuscript and walked away.
Escapism needs to feel possible. Someone, somewhere, quietly doing something to end the nonsense. No heroes, just broken people who’ve had enough. That’s hope.
Safety was a bigger problem. Real Bad Guy X? I didn’t want to end up on a list or have True Believers knocking on my door. Fictionalizing everything was the only way forward. Plausible deniability. A creative sandbox.
Finding a title was hell. Everything was either taken or unusable. And people crawl out of the woodwork for strange reasons. I got an email giving me grief over a title that had been used in a Yahoo! group playtest fifteen years ago. No published game. No trademark. No copyright. But I was supposed to be embarrassed for not doing my “due diligence.”
Then there’s platform censorship. Calling something a “political thriller” is dangerous when basic human dignity gets twisted into a political stance. All it takes is one complaint, and a whole list of title options dies.
Guillotine Protocol works. It tells the story. It’s safe. That’s enough.
Caffeine kept me moving for weeks, with Sandbaggers looping and The Wall shaking the walls. A sleep-deprived, overstimulated fever dream that created something worth playing.
The void is gone. Guillotine Protocol is here. Time to get to work.
I hope you’re doing well today.
Berin
540 pages. PDF and epub files included.
ISBN 9798315962601
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The Manifesto is the official source for news on upcoming releases, articles and opinions, and assorted ramblings on our games and our philosophy of roleplaying. New issues are released four times a month, on the new moon, first quarter moon, full moon, and last quarter moon, with special quarterly issues for each equinox and solstice. Stay connected and subscribe to The Manifesto now!
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