DIVISION 5: CLASSIFIED

A Spy-Thriller Universe for Exodus NDS

"Nobody knows you are here. That is the only thing keeping you alive."

You were not hired. You were not briefed in a room that officially exists. Your passport is clean, your orders are deniable, and the person across the border knows enough to get people killed.

Division 5: Classified is a complete spy-thriller Universe for the Exodus Narrative Dice System. Deniable. Multinational. Built for the jobs no public agency can acknowledge. It puts your table on the far side of the headlines, where the real work happens: dead drops and burned covers, honey traps and mole hunts, the file you spent eight years building and the one bad night that ends a career.

One engine. Three full eras of covert operations. The tools to run an entire intelligence career.

Three Eras, One Engine

The Division has been running since 1939. Each era is a complete sub-setting with its own theaters, doctrine, weapons, vehicles, signature missions, and pressures. Run a campaign in one era for a season, or let a career rhyme across all three.

• SHADOW WAR (1939–1945) — Occupied Europe. Resistance circuits, parachute drops, silenced pistols, forged ration cards, and the radio operator who knows she has three weeks.
• THE LONG DARK (1946–1989) — Moscow Rules. Vienna stations, walk-ins, dead drops, surveillance details, code phrases, and the long game of turning an asset who may already belong to someone else.
• NIGHTSCREEN (1990–Present) — Attribution warfare. CCTV, biometrics, signal intelligence, deep legends, and the only question that matters: who can prove what.

Build an Operative

• Six Archetypes — Operative, Handler, Analyst, Face, Wetworker, and Quartermaster, each with its own six-talent Tradecraft Tree that turns the role into mechanical signature.
• Six Dispositions — Patriot, Professional, Cynic, Idealist, Mercenary, and Ghost. Why you still do this work, and how you handle compromise and betrayal when it comes.
• A nine-step creation flow, a fully worked example character, and consolidated grids to get a team to the table fast.

The Rules That Make Spy Fiction Work

• Cover & Legends — Thin, Standard, and Deep Legends with individual Burn Tracks. A cover that survives scrutiny is a resource. A cover that burns is a story.
• The Tradecraft Pool — the Intel Phase builds a shared preparation resource; surveillance, dossiers, route work, and asset checks all feed the operation.
• Assets & Networks — recruit, run, protect, and risk sources using Trust, Exposure, Access, and Capability. A source is a person, not a button.
• Compromise & Attribution — a 0–5 personal track for how known you are, plus a post-operation procedure for what hostile services can actually prove.
• The Tonal Slider — the same engine runs both ends of the genre. Slide toward le Carré for moral attrition and betrayal, or toward Fleming for action, glamour, and the operative who walks out smiling. The GM Advice chapter gives you the dials.

Inside the Case File

• Seven setting-unique Tradecraft Skills tuned per era: Tradecraft, Cryptography, Forgery, Disguise, Surveillance, Demolitions, and Cyber.
• Equipment by era — weapon profiles, specialist kits, armor, and signature items, with full Requisition rules.
• Vehicles & the Pursuit Clock — cover vehicles and an attribution overlay for every chase.
• Adversaries & Threats — Minions, Elites, and named Nemeses, opposing services, threat-environment rules, and an optional Anomalous Files module for stranger play.
• Operation Playbooks — tasking, intel, execution, exfiltration, and fallout, plus mission briefs, blowback guidance, and downtime between cases.
• The full starter operation Concrete and Ashes, reskinnable across all three eras.
• The "Who Do You Trust?" framework, operation hooks, random tables, and a Quick Reference chapter for everything the GM needs at the screen.

Requires the Exodus NDS Core Rules (free)

Division 5: Classified is a Universe sourcebook. The Exodus NDS Core Rules run the dice, pools, structured play, talents, and advancement. This book adds the setting, the character options, and the subsystems that make covert operations sing.

First Edition. Digital sourcebook (PDF).

Open the case. Protect the cover. Leave nothing they can prove.

The file exists. The operation happened. Nobody signed the order.