Crossing

It is 1946, and the war ended the way it always does — except the peace went to the wrong side. The homegrown fascist and Christian-nationalist movements of the 1930s never got discredited by the war. They went quiet, rebranded, and rode a "never forget, never surrender" mandate straight into the White House. Communism is illegal now. HUAC didn't stay a hearing room — it became the actual machinery of government. And Mexico, across a border that used to just be a border, is the official story about where the next threat is coming from.

Here's the part the regime isn't lying about: Fourth Reich cells are real. Unreconciled sympathizers, smuggled war criminals, an actual ongoing threat. Here's the part they are lying about: a senior official in the Steward administration has known where one of those cells is hiding for the better part of a year, and left it alone, because breaking it up would mean admitting the whole border narrative is a controlled fiction.

Tonight, a courier is bringing the proof north across the El Paso–Juárez checkpoint. Two people are getting her there.

CROSSING is the first title in OUTFIT — a series about five golden-age public-domain superheroes who gave up their public stage names when staying public stopped being survivable. This session follows two of them: Ticker, once The Clock, the brains of the outfit, whose lifetime of managing what people see of him is now read by the state as evidence of duplicity — and Panther, once Miss Fury, whose body and history were coded as foreign menace long before she did anything to earn it.

Two resources, in direct tension rather than parallel. COVER is Ticker's — the papers, the story, the fiction that's supposed to carry all three of you through the checkpoint. It spends down and does not restore mid-mission. EXPOSURE is Panther's — not injury, not abstract suspicion, but the specific, cumulative cost of being read as confirmation of what the state already says about her. It climbs, and it does not go back down tonight. Protecting one routinely costs the other — the session is built around deciding, table by table, whether the fiction or the truth is the safer thing to spend.

Six 2d6 tables carry the crossing in sequence: The Approach, The Papers, The Signal, The Line, The Break, and The Crossing. The wild card — The Tell — fires on double-2: a searchlight that sweeps past a second too early, an informant who doesn't report what he saw. Always in your favor. The night can call it luck. Your journal can call it something else.

Every regime detail in this game is traceable to something that actually happened in the mid-century authoritarian playbook — the real 1938 formation of HUAC, the real Lavender Scare "security risk" language used to purge gay men from government service, the real machinery of engineered border bureaucracy. Nothing here asks you to imagine an atrocity that wasn't already real somewhere. This isn't a story about a fictional threat. It's a story about a real one, weaponized past all proportion.

You need: Two six-sided dice, a journal, a pencil, one to two hours.

Format: Print-and-play PDF. Two pages, six panels. Fold, play, keep the journal.

Price: PWYW — $1 suggested.

Further OUTFIT titles are in development, following the other four members of the squad — Monk, Colt, and Sam — across other nights and other fronts of the same fight. A gamebook expansion for CROSSING is under consideration pending playtest.