Apropos of nothing, here is former CIA Director William Colby's 1981 list of the Ten Greatest Spies of All Time (meaning "Ten Greatest Intelligence Professionals and Also Some Spies of the Twentieth Century"):

William Donovan (founder of the OSS)

Reginald V. Jones (British Air Ministry Intelligence, father of scientific-technical intelligence)

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Yes, the ENnie Awards voting is open, and I've (hopefully) waited long enough for the traditional ENnie-voting-software glitch to get fixed but not so long that you've rushed off to cast your ENnie Awards ballots just yet. Because I appear (albeit sometimes glancingly) in five -count'em- five categories! And almost invariably, up against Dungeons ( Read more... )

For whatever reason (intellectual sloth, most likely) I hadn't read the Ashenden stories by W. Somerset Maugham until ratmmjess essentially shamed me into it. Really terrific prose style, winning character, unsentimental but adult examination of responsibility and espionage (taken from his own wartime experience in the secret service), all coupled with an ( Read more... )

For those of you who have somehow been occupying yourselves with other pursuits than my game design career, perhaps I should mention that a pre-order edition of my vampire spy thriller RPG Night's Black Agents is available now from Pelgrane Press. More on that below, where the horrid, horrid stench of commercialism belongs ( Read more... )

Call me! Specifically, call me a six-time 2011 ENnie Award nominee. Or, if you want to be ridiculous, call me an eleven-time 2011 ENnie Award nominee, but five of those nominations, while for products with my name in them, are for aspects of those products to which my contributions were, not to put too fine a point on it, minimal. "Best Rules" and ( Read more... )

It is, specifically, in the pages of Jonathan Maberry's The Dragon Factory. I know what you're saying right now: "Sure, Ken. Maberry's novel has Nazis, deadly killer clones, savage ape-human hybrids, weird sex, albinos, a secret government agency, loving descriptions of weapons and hand-to-hand combat, a pell-mell pace, globetrotting for the sake ( Read more... )

Alan Furst evokes the past. He evokes it, meaning he calls it by its true secret name and summons it up from death. His espionage novels orbit (some dizzyingly fast, some implacably slow, some tight and hot, some wide and cool) the Paris demimonde hangout Brasserie Heininger in June of 1937, where a shooting happens that echoes (loud or soft) ( Read more... )

Although it hasn't been officially announced, I can hint broadly that my Vampire Spy Thriller game (called Night's Black Agents) now has legs. Legs that wear the kinds of shoes that private eyes wear.

So the premise of the Vampire Spy Thriller game, in a nutshell, is this:

"Imagine the movie Ronin. All the shadowy figures you never see, the ones ( Read more... )