Players’ Handbook
The Players’ Quick Start gets you ready to play in a few minutes: which chair, what you do on a turn, and what to keep open.
Welcome, player
Department of Vigilance, internal dispatch: your remote position awaits.
A new hire starts Monday. Three people applied, one of them may not be who the file says. You play on a team, with an Incident Master (IM) leading, and you work out what that hire can reach before they reach it. Learning over winning.
This handbook is for the people at the table. It tells you what you do, what you roll, what you may say, and how the session ends. It never tells you anything the IM keeps sealed, and neither should you ask.
About this handbook
Comrades & Chollimas is a collaborative incident-response tabletop on DPRK IT-worker hiring fraud. It is a game about risk: what can they reach, what do we know, and what does it cost to be wrong. It is a sister game of Malware & Monsters, an OWASP project, and it borrows that game’s habits: a safe table, shared discovery, and a debrief that matters more than the score.
You sit in one of two chairs:
- The Comrades’ chair (Persona, Ground Crew, Tooling, Money): the operator cell. Get hired, stay hired, reach what you came for: wages, data or IP, or keys the hire can reach.
- The Company’s chair (HR, Engineering, SecOps, Finance & Legal): weigh the evidence. A wrong cut costs you; so does waiting.
The IM plays the other side, or you play both chairs at once at two tables with one IM and one debrief. Chairs and Roles explains both modes.
How to use this handbook
If it is your first session
- Read the Players’ Quick Start (one page).
- Read Preparing for Your Session, five minutes of mindset, nothing to study.
- When the IM assigns your role, open its page in the role cards.
If you want the rules in order
| Chapter | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Introduction | What kind of game is this, and what is it for? |
| Preparing for Your Session | What do I bring, and what if I am nervous? |
| Chairs and Roles | Which chair, which role, which verbs? |
| How a Round Works | What happens on my turn, and what does the d20 do? |
| Tracks, Evidence and the Bench | What do Payoff, Exposure and the clue tier mean? |
| Stop the Line | How do we accuse a hire, and what does it cost? |
| Endings and Debrief | How does it end, and what happens in the last 20 minutes? |
| Playing Well | How do I be a good teammate and keep it fair? |
If you want a quick lookup
- Quick Reference: numbers, verbs, the vote, endings on one page.
- Role cards: all eight roles, each with its three verbs.
- FAQ: the eleven things everyone asks in the first five minutes.
What you will practice
- Verifying before trusting: checking an ID, a device and a payee before a start date, not after.
- Cross-team communication: HR, Engineering, SecOps and Finance & Legal each see a different slice of one hire.
- Naming the control: saying which control would have stopped a move, instead of “that person seems off”.
- Judging process, not people: an accusation is only as good as the reason you can state.
- Thinking like the other chair: the Comrades learn what the Company sees, and the Company learns what the cell tries to blur.
Judge the process, not the person. Nobody is a suspect because of an accent, a passport or a face. The satire is the propaganda voice, never the people.
Comrades & Chollimas is designed for education. Cases rest on public reporting, and the game contains no working malware and no instructions that could be misused. The IM can pause the game at any time for any player (see the safety page).
What next
Start with the Players’ Quick Start. If you will run the session, go to the Incident Master’s Handbook instead.