This is the start of something very, very good. I'm so excited to see the post-feedback version!
First Impressions:
How the text is structured, and therefore how the game is structured, is so perfect for a le Carré novel it's chilling. Centering play around a relationship map / concept board is both functionally interesting and spot on for the genre.
The part where you write the secret part of your relationship, and, if there's nothing, you just rewrite it so that no one knows which relationships are obvious or not??? "...this is a duplicitous world, and everyone expects others to have secrets." CHILLS.
It feels like you might be able to get some mileage out of breaking the Roles & Motivations into separate files for both presentation and gameplay? So that the core of the games teaching-text only mentions them in broadstrokes?
Questions:
Like everyone else, i was unclear on what the cards were doing. On my later read-throughs it becomes clear they're just there to mark things, but my first impression made me think that marking your traces, etc. was setting up for some kind of ranking? or seeing which card is higher? Super excited to see where this mechanic ends up, after the contest.
What happens when the "Betrayal" Motivation is exposed in play? Does that mean, in the fiction, the player is revealed to be a double-agent right there? That feels like it would end the game, right?
I really wan to know how the Meta-Commentary Ritual Phrase Questions work in actual play. Right now they seem like a fantastic idea, but I worry that, in actual play, having these questions asked in-character might accidentally mask their real intentions. Someone might just answer the question in-character and forget they're being prompted to alter their play style or input.
Favorite Bits:
The first time I read through this, I listened to the OST for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by Alberto Inglesias. So that will stick with me forever.
The structure of the game, both as an in-fiction conversation and an out-of-game conversation is excellent. The beautiful prose setting the scene, coupled with the sparseness of the Hanging Room being something you can *easily* recreate in your home or at a con, is brilliant. You set this up so that having just little nub pencils, some scrap papers, and a beat up deck of cards puts you *right in that space.* So good! Part of me wants to see that taken to the next level. It wouldn't take much to have this whole game laid out as a series of papers that look like official documents, and are wrapped up in a manila folder.
The balanced way of executing the epilogues is clever, too. A story-heavy group can just assign what feels best for their character, where a more competitive group could angle their narratives so they don't have to pick last! :D they're also perfect descriptive without being prescriptive. So keep that, going into the next version. It's gold.
Very impressed, very excellent way of interpreting "maps." Super cool.