First Bulletin
A Roleplaying Game of Propaganda and Espionage in Cold War Europe, 1948–1961
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What Is First Bulletin?
First Bulletin is a tabletop roleplaying game about Western influence operations in Cold War Europe. You are not a commando team. You are the people who keep a city leaning the right way: handlers, case officers, editors, couriers, fixers, and specialists attached to a covert broadcast and information apparatus.
Your work happens in the seams of ordinary life — cafés, train stations, city offices, border posts, newsrooms, union halls, churches, and the back corridors where the lights are always on and nobody asks questions unless they already know the answer.
First Bulletin is tense, plausible, and bureaucratic — the way a loaded pistol can be "bureaucratic" when it's sitting in a drawer behind a form marked ROUTINE. Power is hidden inside procedures. Violence is hidden inside power.
What to Expect
Cold rooms and warm lies.
Meetings in safe flats. Friendly conversations that are actually interrogations. The polite man who checks your documents twice, smiles once — and then you wake up on a train going east.
Institutions as terrain.
A clerk's stamp. A permit. A registry card. A committee minute. The right paper opens doors. The wrong paper opens graves. In First Bulletin, guns are rare. Consequences are not.
Pressure without fireworks.
Surveillance, shortages, party discipline, internal audits, public unrest. The city tightens like a belt. You may win the moment and still lose something you needed.
Compromise as a cost.
You'll do effective things that feel ugly, and you won't get a medal for any of them. This isn't a dungeon crawl. It's a pressure-cooker city where information, credibility, and paperwork are weapons — and where violence is the mistake you make when every other tool has failed or been taken away.
What You Do In Play
Your characters fight a Cold War the way it was often fought: indirectly, deniably, and with a face that never admits what your hands are doing.
Recruiting them, protecting them, paying them — and deciding what you're willing to sacrifice to keep them.
Obtaining documents, planting documents, altering records, and creating "official" truth.
Spreading rumors, correcting rumors, building narratives. Making the public believe the right version of events at the right time.
Disrupting, misdirecting, isolating, discrediting. Winning today without being traced back to it tomorrow.
You are not trying to "win the Cold War" in a night. You are trying to win today, in ways that won't be traced back to you tomorrow.
How a Session Works
A session of First Bulletin is usually one in-world day, or a tight slice of one. One person takes the role of the Gaffer — what other games call the Game Master — while the rest play operatives trying to change the world in their favor.
Most sessions follow a simple rhythm:
A bulletin sets the day. Something happened overnight. Pressure tightens. A few truths surface. A few leads become actionable.
You pick a line of effort. Which lead do you pursue first, and what do you risk by ignoring the others?
You push into institutions. Offices, checkpoints, newsrooms, hotels, depots, party meetings, back rooms. You don't "clear" locations. You gain access, extract value, and exit before the city notices.
You roll when it matters. When the outcome is uncertain and the stakes are real, you make a test. Success is rarely clean; failure is rarely the end. Either way, the world changes.
The day closes with consequences. Heat rises. A contact cools. A file goes missing. A lie becomes official.
A lorry overturned on the bridge this morning. The police call it an accident, but dockworkers who witnessed the incident claim to have seen suspicious activity in the area.
At the Rathaus, Office 3B is "temporarily closed." No explanation was given.
A pair of strangers at the Europäischer Hof are asking after "radio technicians," paying in crisp notes and refusing change.
That's enough to start a session. Everyone at the table knows what kind of day it is.
The Setting
The game draws from the documented realities of 1948–1961: covert operations, political warfare, intelligence rivalries, fragile governments, and the peculiar administrative machinery that held Europe together while quietly pulling it apart. The events, pressures, and structures are historical. The outcomes are not.
Operatives in play may alter the course of events in ways history did not record. A successful operation might prevent a coup that historically occurred. Entire governments may fall early, late, or not at all.
In short: The setting is historical. The pressures are real. The results are yours.
The Core Rulebook provides the method — how to run any contested Cold War city as operational terrain. City Modules follow, each containing a full adventure and everything you need to run key Cold War cities. Current plans include Vienna, Helsinki, Lisbon, and more.