I’m finding it hard to write games and develop an updated Heroes of Hellas setting, so I’m taking time off from running games (to recharge the GM batteries – which needs doing) to concentrate on working on my proposed HoH Tyre game. I’m expecting to receive the latest Hanuvar novel by Howard Andrew Jones this week, which will definitely put my mind in a Mediterranean mindset.
 
Sadly, Howard Andrew Jones has been diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer, so we may lose the best (in my opinion at least) writer and editor of sword & sorcery currently working in the genre.
 
As for games at our house, my wife Alison has been on fire lately with her 1920s spy games featuring my PC, Reggie Fairfax, who works for a small UK intelligence unit known as the Protocol. Recently, Reggie was helping out MI6 after a White Russian Archduke was assassinated in Paris in a seemingly ‘crime of passion’ affair. An MI6 man who had known Archduke Paul before the Great War admitted that he was a devil with women and treated his mistresses extremely badly. However, this spy – Oswald Rayner – wondered if it was a Soviet hit. The Soviet’s had been after Rayner since 1917, so it was too dangerous for him to go to Paris himself in case it was the Soviets, and as Reggie was based in Paris….
 
So, Reggie spent far too much time drinking vodka with White Russians for a few days, looking into the affair. He finally concluded that it was a crime of passion committed by Princess Olga Orekhov, who had had a brief but unhappy affair with the pig Archduke Paul and whose husband appeared to be a flamboyant homosexual. Reggie felt sorry for the beautiful blonde woman, who seemed desperate for affection (she had been coming on to Reggie), so he invited her around to his flat to tell her he knew she had killed Paul, but that he was not going to tell anyone, and if things developed a certain way, he had champagne on ice…
 
Boy, did I (and Reggie) get it wrong! Princess Olga, her (heterosexual) husband, and their ADC, were a OGPU assassination squad. Alison had totally blindsided me! Archduke Paul was their first strike against a White Russian cabal organising an anti-Soviet resistance. The real Princess Olga and Prince Orekhov were dead in a Siberian grave and the hit team had taken their place and ‘escaped’ Russia.
 
‘Olga’ poisoned Reggie so he could be killed elsewhere and dumped. She was searching his room when he shook off the effects of the poisoned vodka. So she threw a knife at him which just missed. He pulled it from the wall and thrust the blade through her eyeball and into her brain, before she could use his own Luger against him.
 
A quick phone call to Sheila, his Protocol control in Paris saw a body disposed of and a trap laid for the false Olga’s husband and servant. They duly turned up in  a car outside Reggie’s apartment to find out where Olga was. A gunfight in the street saw the villain’s car and the villains shot to pieces. Reggie’s cover was safe as they had not yet informed Moscow that he was a British agent. Of course, Reggie and Sheila were out drinking with friends when the gunfight took place, or at least that was what they told the police when they tried to get through the police cordon later.
 
“Seems I missed all the fun,” said Reggie to the police officer.