Agents of CISRA

Keepers and Hunters: Eric Fattig, Karen Twelves, Adrienne Mueller, Sean Nittner
System: Monster of the Week
Supplement: Tome of Mysteries

Welcome to CISRA, the Center for Invasive Species Research and Assessment.

Your mission is to investigate paranormal activity, determine its threat level, and, if possible, bring it in alive to study.

It’s very important that nobody knows who you are or what you’re doing there. The public isn’t ready to find out what types of monsters live right in their home town.

Our Monster of the Week game using the Tome of Mysteries with rotating Keepers. We played Agents of CISRA, a government agency aware of monsters in our world, and curious to study them. We had a live capture policy but sometimes we were glad just to survive the encounters…and other times we rebuked the idea that what we hunted were monsters at all!

• Jessica Stillman, the Professional (Adrienne). Our by the books leader who transferred into CISRA from other agencies. Smart suits, always armed, recruited Stasia rather than capturing her).
• Mordecai Stillman, the Expert (Eric). Jessica’s older brother who saved her life in a car accident many years ago, but since then has grown distance. Has many fringe ideas, which is why Jessica brought him in.
• Malik Najar, the Flake (Sean). A conspiracy theorist who asked enough prying questions that the agency decided it was more practical to induct him into it’s secrets than keep denying them. Wears trendy clothes and has a vast sneaker collection. Saw Stasia start a fire through sheer force of will.
• Stasia Malinovski, the Spooky (Karen). A young woman who remembers little of her past, but knows she isn’t like everyone else. Constantly wondering when CISRA would decide she was too much of a liability, Stasia worked to stay under the radar, and help others like her do the same.

Resources

• cover identities
• support teams

Red Tape

• hostile superiors
• live capture policy

Employees

• Gene McCleud – Directory of Operations – little patience for fools
• Brian Gomez – Really good at looking things up (former employee)
• Romeo Roberts – The new Brian!

Mysteries we played

• Damn Dirty Apes
• The Curse-Speach
• A Church with a View
• Arachne Genesis
• Attack of the Rapid Moss
• Creature Feature
• The Crystal Assassin
• Darkness Falls
• Elvis Has Left the Building
• Going to Pieces
• Hollow Lake
• The Quiet
• The Circles
• Transfer of Power
• Bride of the Mole King

Adventure logs written by Adrienne. Thank you!

What Rocked

Monster of the Week worked really well for rotating the Keeper. Each Mystery, whoever was the Keeper had their agent stay behind, sometimes to as the person running ops, and sometimes offscreen completely.

The Mysteries in Tome of Mysteries were mostly well suited as missions a shady government agency would send agents on, and the more we played, the more lore we built up collectively about what CISRA was really about. Things like Malik’s casual observations he’d share with the hunters when we was running ops:

Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies.

Eric Schmidt (CEO in 2004) was born April 27, 1955. The exact same date as Daniel Frisa, Member of New York state assembly and delegate to Republican National Convention from New York, where Eric was also invited as his guest. Coincidence?

After the acquisition of Maps, Google stripped 1406 locations from the map before being published in 2005. There is still to this day underlying code that will remove those locations if one of their algorithms or a user tries to add them.

Our little department only dates back to 2002 but that’s because it’s changed hands and names several times. Before we were in Dept of the Interior, we were part of the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. Records are slim but it looks like we were once called OSIRIS (unsure what the acronym was) and that we’ve bounced around between departments. That’s likely howe we’ve been forgotten about. Endless reclassification. However, none of the CISRA offices appear on any version of Google Maps. So were we forgotten about or intentionally hidden?

I loved the relationships our characters started with and how they grew. Was Jessica a shill for the agency or did she have limits? Was was there any truth to Malik’s conspiracies or were they all just flights of fancy? Did Mordecai make otherworldly deals for his knowledge or was he just a student of the occult? Was Stasia just a monster waiting to be our next case, or was she the only one who could save us from ourselves? I loved each of these characters and how they dealt with the sometimes awful things we did.

What could have been improved

At the start of the game (while we were picking systems) Karen said she wanted a game were we weren’t killing people, and that ended up being a more difficult requirement that I thought it would be. We still wanted to play an adventure game with conflict and danger, but we just didn’t want to make killing other sentient creatures part of it. We built the framework of CISRA around the idea of studying the unknown, even though that has plenty of morally abhorrent elements, they felt like something we’d be up for grappling with. As play proceeded however, I think we could tell the game was destined to end because more and more as players (and characters) we struggled with the core conceit of locking up creatures that our agency called “monsters”. The actual term was more like paranormal aberrations, but the way it mirrored how so many cultures have othered minorities and called the monstrous came more and more into focus as we played.

To add to that frustration and discomfort, we noticed a tendency that the one person of color in a Mystery was also the monster. It wasn’t every time, but it happened enough that it started reinforcing the sense of “othering” that we weren’t loving. The good news is that it moved the play towards ending as we broke away from CISRA, seeing that are Hunters weren’t the same people we were at the start, and that the agency was never what we thought it was.

Since we were all using the same source material (Tome of Mysteries) we didn’t want to read Mysteries that we weren’t going to run, so that often meant picking one more or less at random (the name sounded cool) and then running it. Once or twice we’d skipped one because it had content we didn’t want to play with or because it wasn’t suited to our style, but I wish we had figured out a better way to have more options without spoiling mysteries for ourselves.