Iron Curtain

3–5 players
Difficulty 3 of 3
Not recommended under 14
Available in: Français, English, Español, Deutsch, Italiano

Berlin, November 1961. A physicist to get across to the West before dawn, a network of five agents who know each other only by their cover names, and the Stasi waiting for one mistake. A single night.

The rulebook at a glance

d20 + attribute
4 attributes
Loyalties

Read the rules

Choose an adventure

One-shot
The Extraction
1 session · betrayal, tension, a locked room under the open sky
Cost: 1 Die for the whole table
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By the Icotale team

The world

PlaceBerlin, November 1961The Wall is three months old: barbed wire, searchlights, and families cut in two. The city is holding its breath.
PlaceCafé AdlerOn the West side, at Checkpoint Charlie, the café where every agent in Berlin drinks the same bad coffee while keeping an eye on each other.
PlaceThe Pankow Institute of PhysicsOn the East side: laboratories, archives, and Dr. Weiss's office, watched day and night.
PlaceThe Bernauer Strasse tunnelsCellars, sewers and a half-dug tunnel under the Wall, known to far too many people.
FactionThe StasiThe Ministry for State Security: ears everywhere, a file on everyone, and Colonel Richter waiting for a mistake.
CharacterDr. Irina WeissA physicist from Pankow, fifty years old, round glasses: she wants to cross to the West with her notebook of calculations and her twelve-year-old daughter.
CharacterColonel RichterA Stasi section chief, patient and courteous, who knows the network better than the network knows itself — thanks to someone.

The rulebook

Resolving actions

Roll 1d20 and add the attribute modifier: 11 or more succeeds, 14 in front of a patrol, 17 against a Stasi officer.
A natural 20 goes completely unnoticed; a natural 1 succeeds but leaves a trace — a witness, a piece of paper, a fingerprint.

Initiative : 1d20 + Stealth modifier

Attributes

Composure COM: Lie at a checkpoint, hold out under interrogation, not run.
Stealth STL: Tail someone, blend in, get through a checkpoint with fake papers.
Tech TEC: Radios, microfilm, locks, engines that start in winter.
Network NET: Contacts, favors, safe houses, a door that opens in Kreuzberg as well as in Pankow.

Special rules

Loyalties: In a network, you never know everything about the person next to you. Once per session, a player can publicly accuse a teammate of working for the other side: if the accusation is right, the Storyteller confirms it and the agent is neutralized; if it is wrong, the accuser loses the network's trust (−2 to their Network rolls until the end). Accusing is never free.
Cover: Every agent has a cover (name, job, papers). A failure in front of an authority "burns" the cover one notch: at two notches, the agent is wanted and must change identity — if they have a contact for that.
Whispers: Whispering to the Storyteller is how agents normally work: coded messages, suspicions, quiet sabotage. The Storyteller answers in private and plays out the consequences without saying who did what.

Character creation

Roll 4 dice with 6 faces per attribute, keep the 3 best · 2 rerolls allowed4d6kh3

Origins

East Berliner: Knows every courtyard and every tunnel; +1 to Network.
Western officer: Trained in London or Langley, too clean for this city; +1 to Composure.
Defector: Has already crossed once, the other way; +1 to Stealth.

Vocations

Radio operator: Airwaves, codes, and a suitcase that weighs a ton.
Forger: Papers, stamps, visas: nothing is real, everything gets through.
Smuggler: Knows the way out of East Berlin this week.
Society agent: Embassies, cocktail parties, pillow talk.

Derived values

Hit points: 8 + Composure modifier
Defense: 10 + Stealth modifier
Initiative: 1d20 + Stealth modifier

Starting equipment

Fake papers in your cover name
A Minox camera
A wad of East German marks

Veils

Topics kept off screen: the Narrator never shows or describes them.

sexual violence
torture
executions