A reliable source can be wrong, and an unreliable source can report something true. Treating those as the same question makes intelligence too easy to flatten into a single die roll or a single label.
Source Reliability uses two ratings. Reliability describes the source's record, access, and incentives. Information Confidence describes how well the specific report is supported. Rate both, then tell the players what their agents can reasonably conclude. The procedure creates uncertainty the group can investigate instead of hiding the answer behind the screen.
An operation gets easier to design once its purpose can be stated in one sentence. Surveillance, liaison, recovery, verification, protection, and disruption create different pressures even when they use the same characters, locations, and opposition.
Mission Types gives the Game Master 20 operational frames with a clear objective, a useful source of pressure, and a concrete success condition. Pick one frame, add a target and setting, then decide what changes if the agents succeed or fail. The result is enough to turn a vague assignment into a playable mission.
A useful mission seed creates a question, a deadline, and a reason the agents have to become involved. It leaves the method open. The same problem can support research, surveillance, liaison, protection, recovery, or counterintelligence depending on who assigns it and what the group discovers.
These 20 seeds use fictional organizations, locations, and events so they can drop into government, military, police, corporate, journalistic, or independent campaigns. Pick the premise, choose a Mission Type, and decide which fact in the opening brief is incomplete. The rest can emerge through play.
A mission can be sound and still go wrong in ways nobody planned for. The useful complication is the one that changes a decision: time becomes scarce, access narrows, a source becomes uncertain, or the team learns that the original intelligence picture was incomplete.
Mission Complications supplies 20 pressures that can enter before play or appear after a setback. Roll once, choose the result that fits, or combine two when a mission needs a harder turn. Each complication changes the situation without dictating how the agents must solve it.
A good mission brief tells the agents what result is required while leaving room for them to decide how to achieve it. Too little information creates guessing. Too much instruction turns planning into compliance with a script.
The Mission Brief provides a compact set of fields for objective, intelligence, authorities, constraints, support, timing, consequences, and exit conditions. Fill only what the sponsoring organization knows at the start. Unknowns stay unknown, assumptions stay visible, and the players get a document they can plan against.
“Find out what’s happening” sounds like an assignment, but it gives the team no way to know when the work is complete. Intelligence requirements convert a broad concern into specific questions that can be researched, observed, tested, compared, and reported.
Use this brief before an investigation, surveillance operation, research task, or mission-planning session. Start with one decision the intelligence must support, choose the questions that matter, then record what would count as enough information. The mission becomes easier to run because every lead can be judged against a known requirement.
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