Evgenia Volkov

To illustrate the flow, here is a worked example. The campaign is Long Dark (Vienna, mid-1970s). The player is building a mid-career D5 officer.

Step 1: Era

The table has chosen Long Dark. The player is building to that era.

Step 2: Archetype

The player picks Handler. They want to be the asset-runner, the relationship-builder, the social center of the team.

Step 3: Disposition

After reading through the six, the player picks Cynic. Evgenia has been in the field for fifteen years. She has seen too much. She stays because leaving is harder than staying. She is, underneath the cynicism, still quietly hoping each new asset is the one who justifies the career, but she would not say that aloud, not even to her handler.

Step 4: Characteristics

Handler baseline: Might 2, Agility 2, Intellect 2, Savvy 2, Willpower 3, Charisma 3.

The player reassigns one point from Might (down to 1) into Willpower (up to 4). Evgenia is not physically imposing; she is, however, unusually difficult to break. Final: Might 1, Agility 2, Intellect 2, Savvy 2, Willpower 4, Charisma 3.

Step 5: Skills

Handler Class Skills at Rating 2: Charm, Leadership, Negotiation.

The player chooses an Optional Signature Skill and elevates Leadership to Rating 3: Evgenia is the officer the team defers to in asset-management conversations.

Two Free Picks at Rating 1: Tradecraft, Surveillance. She traded the third Free Pick for the Optional Signature Skill above.

Final skills: Leadership 3; Charm 2, Negotiation 2; Tradecraft 1, Surveillance 1.

Step 6: Talents

Two General Talents: Iron Nerve (Tier 1) and Cold Closer (Tier 2).

One Tradecraft Tree Talent: Recruiter (Tier 1, Handler’s Long Dark Tradecraft Tree).

Step 7: Legends

Thin Legend: Lena Brandt, Austrian commercial translator, flat in the 9th district. Three boxes on the Burn Track. Light paper trail. Two supporting contacts (a fictional university classmate, a fictional former employer in Graz).

Standard Legend: Margareta Keller, Swiss-Austrian art historian specializing in early modernist prints, flat in the 4th district. Six boxes on the Burn Track. Full paper trail including a doctorate from Zurich (1961), a publication record, and employment at a small Viennese gallery that is partly D5-front, partly legitimate. Four supporting contacts, including one real D5 officer posing as a colleague. Quality: Networked (the gallery, the contacts, the routine are all reachable).

Deep Legend: Irina Vasilievna Markova, Soviet-émigré journalist operating out of Paris, residence rented in Paris on a rolling lease, maintained continuously since 1968. Nine boxes on the Burn Track. Exhaustive paper trail: birth in Leningrad 1937, emigration via the Netherlands in 1959, residency in Paris since 1965, publication record in three Russian-émigré journals, real (D5-cultivated) relationships with a dozen named Parisian figures. Quality: Aged (the paper trail predates Evgenia’s career as a D5 officer by four years, having been started by another officer who retired before Evgenia even knew D5 existed).

Step 8: Equipment

Long Dark base: 25 Requisition points. Handler modifier: +0. Final: 25 points.

Evgenia’s build:

• A well-tailored civilian wardrobe (cover infrastructure), 5 points.
• A small Makarov PM pistol with two magazines, kept in a drawer at the 4th district flat, rarely carried, 2 points.
• A Minox C microdot camera, 4 points.
• A pair of one-time pads, prepared by the D5 cryptographic workshop, 2 points.
• A concealment device (a hollowed-out copy of Kafka’s Das Schloss, her favorite joke at her own expense), 2 points.
• A small collection of reliable pens and notebooks, 1 point.
• Remaining 9 points left as flex for the first operation.

Step 9: Finishing Touches

Real name: Evgenia Petrovna Volkov (the player is keeping this from the table until the right session).

Service name: Evgenia Volkov, or “E.V.” in D5 internal shorthand.

Codename: Heron Grey Four. (Current rotation; was Compass Amber Two from 1964–69.)

Tell: Evgenia, when thinking, slowly turns a signet ring on her right third finger. Three rotations, always three, always the same direction. The ring is real gold; the seal on it is a fiction of her cover. She has been doing this for eleven years and has never once noticed she does it.

Secret: In 1969, Evgenia allowed an asset to be captured. The asset had gone bad, was feeding false intelligence to the Soviets under their control, and D5 had not yet authorized termination. Rather than report the problem and wait for sanction, Evgenia arranged for the asset to be in the wrong place when the Stasi swept his neighborhood. The asset was executed three weeks later. D5 has no record of Evgenia’s role. She has no record of it either, except in her own memory, which does not let it go.

Languages: Russian and German fluent; working French from the Vienna station circuit.

Personal History Skill: Knowledge (Geopolitics), tied to her pre-D5 academic work on postwar Eastern Europe.

The player shares this secret only with the GM.