Has anyone else bought this or played it?  I bought a copy and have been incredibly impressed by the quality of the adventures therein and how it puts into focus a lot of the advice in the core rulebook in a practical way.  Not to badmouth (S)entries, the adventure in the rulebook, but I feel like I finally "get" what NBA is capable of now that I've read it.  And the four adventures vary in content and style enough that it's a good value.

The big "wake-up" for me is that the entire quartet could take up as few as 1 entry on a conspyramid under the heading "Lisky Bratva."  (Or it could take up more, obviously, depending on how you broke it out.)

First things first, why is this in Other Games? I'm hoping it's caution on the OP's part because if Gumshoe is a "storygame" now, the label has become completely meaningless.

One guy in our group has bought Night's Black Agents and it's looking pretty damned good. I don't think we're playing it anytime soon, though; still having fun with the Vampire: The Requiem game he's running, and when that's done we'll probably want something mostly vampire-free.

No, I haven't seen The Zha... Zar... Zalozhniy Quartet, but I sympathize with the feeling of reading an adventure and really grokking what the game is all about. More games need this. Ye olde D&D had Keep on the Borderlands which featured an introduction that went on about Law and civilization and Chaos and barbarism and really laid bare a theme within D&D and resonates with Robert E. Howard and post-WWII decolonization-era historians like Spengler or Toynbee and still makes me smile when I read it. CoC has a bunch of great adventures and I'd be hard-pressed to say which one is the "killer app". Not familiar with Traveller's but I hear good stuff about it. WFRP had The Enemy Within which, more than just demonstrated, shaped the game irreversibly into the D&D plus CoC plus Terry Gilliam plus mangled German thing we've grown accostumed to. Vampire: The Masquerade had Chicago By Night which wasn't an adventure per se but showed you how an urban fantasy sandbox works.

Do tell us more about The [strike]Zardoz[/strike] [strike]Zaxxon[/strike] Zalozhniy Quartet and how it plays to the game's strengths.

The Quartet is basically four linked adventures.  One is a basic "escape from peril" adventure a la the Bourne films where the PCs are chased over portions of Europe by the Lisky Bratva; another is a heist;  a third is a fairly straight-forward assault, and the fourth is different still.  Each one ties together the Liska Bratva, a Russian mafia crew, and its rise to prominence since allying with the Conspiracy, whatever that conspiracy is in your game.  It also ties together the Lisky Bratva with the story of St. John and Kim Philby, two famous British double-agents, linking that with whatever conspiracy you've got going on.

It's vampire agnostic, so whatever you've decided the vampires are in your game, the game provides options on how to make it work.  It also includes the eponymous Zhalozhniy, a new form of undead killer, and provides setpieces that really show off how creepy those guys are.  (I predict that the sounds of cellphones ringing and watches beeping will eventually make my players paranoid...)

In addition, you can fit the adventure into your own conspyramid however you want, and it provides a good guide of how to turn your own ideas into practical adventures.  I'll probably review the whole thing once my game gets up and running and I've played it out.

At this point, given the grist for the mill that NBA provides in conjunction with this release, I'm really starting to get my creative juices flowing.

After reading your comments a couple of months ago about Hillfolk, FVB, I got curious about what other Pelgrane products were out there. I missed the cutoff for the Hillfolk Kickstarter, alas, but in the meantime I seem to be buying out the rest of their damn catalog. ;-)

I'm reading Hamlet's Hit Points at the moment. I'd thought I would get to the Dying Earth book next, but this thread's gotten me pretty curious about Gumshoe and NBA.

Quote from: Dana;614954After reading your comments a couple of months ago about Hillfolk, FVB, I got curious about what other Pelgrane products were out there. I missed the cutoff for the Hillfolk Kickstarter, alas, but in the meantime I seem to be buying out the rest of their damn catalog. ;-)

I'm reading Hamlet's Hit Points at the moment. I'd thought I would get to the Dying Earth book next, but this thread's gotten me pretty curious about Gumshoe and NBA.

Gumshoe's pretty cool, but NBA is simply marvelous.  Like I said, the few misgivings I had about "how" to run it were assuaged by the Zhalozhniy quartet.  I'm involved in playing in an NBA game right now and having a blast.  Plus, NBA gives rules for how to play it as a mundane spy-game or escalating it to something like Delta Green (and from every indication, the next sourcebook, Double Tap, looks like it's going to add even more options for turning it into a go-to espionage setting.)

Let me know what you think of Hamlet's Hitpoints.  I enjoyed it, but felt like it comes into its own when you see it applied in Hillfolk.

I don't often write reviews, but I actually might do one for HHP. I mostly play D&D and GURPS, but I mine a bunch of other subgenres and systems for content and ideas all the time.

Quote from: Dana;615163I don't often write reviews, but I actually might do one for HHP. I mostly play D&D and GURPS, but I mine a bunch of other subgenres and systems for content and ideas all the time.

If you do one for H's HP, let me know -- I'll be interested in reading it.