Corey Marsh

Game: Conspiracy X (New Millennium Entertainment, 1996)

My Experience: Conspiracy X was one of the forerunners of what now feels like a late ’90s market saturation of X-Files-inspired TTRPGs. I grabbed it soon after it released, ran a campaign that lasted two to three sessions, and never did anything with it again. I own the later edition that runs on Eden Studios’ Unisystem engine, but, as is generally the case with this challenge, I’m using the original here.


Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset

In retrospect, the signs were there well before Tijuana. Corey figured the memory lapses and weird bruises were just stress – too much work, too much coffee, too many nasty divorce proceedings. He still blames himself for not going in for a physical, despite everything else happening in his life. That might have kept him out of the field. When a formerly-reliable and once-healthy agent loses his shit in the middle of a joint operation with Mexican authorities, starts screaming about the cartel members under surveillance being lizards, and opens fire, well… that’s kind of hard for the Drug Enforcement Agency to ignore.

Corey was pulled out of the task force so fast the paperwork didn’t have time to catch up. Three days later, he was sitting in a cheap plastic chair, wearing a cheap paper gown, listening to a doctor who clearly didn’t understand what he was seeing try to conjure and misdirect the medical imagery into a bullshit explanation for the… mass… in his head.

Corey wasn’t an M.D. himself, but he knew enough to know that brain cancer wasn’t faceted and metallic.

He got himself home, somehow, and got to the liquor cabinet. An indeterminate amount of time later, a knock at the door roused him from his drunken stupor. Corey answered it with his hand on the drop piece in his pocket, half-expecting that the cartel had already identified and traced him. He was not prepared for a woman with FBI credentials and a man who looked like a bunch of cats taped together.

“Special Agent Corey Marsh?” the woman said, in a tone that made it a question only in the most technical sense.

“We hear you have a something in your head,” the man interjected, twirling a finger at his own temple. “You want some help getting that out?”

The extraction procedure was painful beyond explanation. They did it on Corey’s couch, with his hands duct-taped behind his back and a ball gag in his mouth. But after they’d folded up the dropcloths and hauled Corey into the shower, his brain felt unclouded for the first time in a long while. Then they showed him the test tube containing the thing that had been in his brain – still sparking and twitching as it tried to find tissue to burrow into.

“So,” the woman said, facing Corey at his kitchen table. “Do you want a shot at the parties responsible for implanting that in you?”

Corey doesn’t inquire too closely into the bureaucratic black magic that his new employers can leverage. Whatever they did, as far as the DEA is concerned, Tijuana never happened. He’s working at a new field office far away from anyone who was personally involved, and he’s as much at the top of his game as he was before. But every so often, his new beeper twitters softly, alerting him that Aegis needs his services in dealing with something that shouldn’t exist on Earth.


Traits

Recruitment: DEA Agent

Attributes

Strength 3
Size 3
Agility 3
Reflexes 3

Intelligence 3
Willpower 3
Perception 3
Influence 2

Good Luck 12
Bad Luck 2

Skills

Autofire (Str) 1
Brawling (Str) 2
Drive (Ref) 2
First Aid (Int) 1
Language: Spanish (Int) 2
Lockpicking (Agl) 2
Photography (Per) 2
Science: Chemistry (Int) 2
Shadow (Per) 3
Small Arms: Pistol (Agl) 3
Small Arms: Rifle (Agl) 2
Stealth (Agl) 2
UFOlogy (Int) 1

Training

Awareness (Crime Scene Analysis): Reduce the difficulty of Perception attribute checks by 1.

Surveillance: Familiar with bugs, wiretaps, and other surveillance gear, as well as their countermeasures.

Traits

Combat Experience: Corey has seen his share of gunfights and doesn’t need to make a Willpower test when exposed to explosions or automatic weapons fire.

Flashbacks: Corey occasionally has debilitating flashbacks of tasks he undertook while under the control of his alien implant.

Watched: The Greys know Corey’s implant has been removed. They aren’t actively surveilling him, but anything he does that might threaten their inscrutable interests has a 1 in 6 chance of drawing their attention.


Equipment

As needed per mission, drawn from the cell’s pool of deniable assets (see following).


Notes and Afterthoughts

I’ve always appreciated Conspiracy X. One of the things it did very well was to present a grand unified theory of all things supernatural that was both internally consistent and a playable setting. Even today, in the absence of the cultural touchpoints that spawned it, it holds up pretty darn well.

It also introduced a cooperative element to team creation – after all PCs are created, their Influence stats and parent agencies determine the type and number of resource points they contribute. The group then collectively uses these points to assemble a pool of off-books equipment, vehicles, and facilities, representing U.S. government assets that they’ve diverted for their own conspiratorial use.

Furthermore, I think Conspiracy X was the first game I saw that elegantly differentiated between skills (how good you are at something) and training (expanding the range of tasks you can perform with a given skill). I attempted to integrate this into my design of the Twilight: 2013 character model, with muddled success at best. ConX just did it better and cleaner.

As far as such things go, Corey is a fairly standard ConX PC. The range of playable specialties includes psychics, astronauts, parapsychologists, and experimental subjects implanted with human-alien hybrid technology that enables them to do things like change their facial features or interface with Aurora aircraft control systems.

One of Conspiracy X‘s conceits is that most PCs retain the ability to pull strings within their parent organizations. In Corey’s case, his DEA credentials provide No Questions Asked, a string which enables him to make an Influence attribute check to warn off other law enforcement agencies from anything in which he’s involved.