TSR's Top Secret - Deep Dive 1

[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this mission of Go Bag a convention dedicated RPG set in the modern era. One way spy museum.org can enhance your espionage game. Comments from mission support and the intricacies of building an agent in TSR's top secret as we take a deep dive analysis of the 1980s RPG. Hit it. [00:00:23] Speaker B: Strap in operatives. This is go back your all access pass to modern day RPGs loaded with bullets, backstories and all. Whole lot of bad decisions. And here are your mission leaders. Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:39] Speaker A: Welcome to Go Bag. I'm Sean. [00:00:41] Speaker B: And I'm Harrigan. [00:00:43] Speaker A: How you doing, Harrigan? [00:00:45] Speaker B: I Sean, I'm fantastic today. Fantastic even feeling good. How about you? [00:00:51] Speaker A: Doing well, thanks for asking. I figured we'd start off the show to find out what we're doing in the world of espionage, covert ops, if we have any missions that we are currently on, engaged in, [00:01:09] Speaker B: any agents in the field, so to speak. [00:01:11] Speaker A: Thinking maybe we haven't. We have an appendix N on the website. Books, movies, tv. And I thought well I'll just put a list there and then we'll put check marks after you're in my name. Yep, I did that one. Okay. And then I thought well that might be too constraining, but it would be maybe good to have it regardless. But it would be just based on what we're watching, seeing, reading, whatever. [00:01:43] Speaker B: Right, got it, got it. And currently there's a spot for it on the site, but it's not filled out yet. Is that correct? [00:01:50] Speaker A: There is one that is kind of under construction. I think it's the TV or movie one or books. One of the. We have three books, movies, TV. And I started out with the books one that was like a list of 20 novels. But I don't know if we would be interested in reading just the ones that I put on there. And I think I googled like top 20 espionage based books. Tinker Taylor, Soldier Spy, James Bond, I think. I don't know if it was. Diamonds Are Forever is one of the ones that they had on there. I guess it's one of his better books, I guess. [00:02:31] Speaker B: Interesting. Because it's one of the worst movies. [00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And then I thought, well, why don't we just do it as we are? Because I'm at some time I wouldn't mind doing a watch party. Right. With fans. [00:02:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that'd be cool. [00:02:46] Speaker A: Or a book club maybe, potentially. But anyways, are you watching anything, reading anything that is enhancing your ability to do this podcast? [00:03:00] Speaker B: So I forget if I mentioned last week, but I have finished Casino Royale. And I think I did mention it. And I have moved on to Live and Let Die, which is the second E.M. fleming book. So I'm going to try to read them in order. So we'll do our Appendix N. But I have a mission already in front of me, which is I want to get through as much of Fleming's work as makes sense. I might get tired of it. I might discover that I don't love them. But I'm on the second one and I'm going to keep going. But beyond that, I think you and I have talked offline a little bit. I've got a couple of things that I've either recently been through on Netflix, either recently been through or just finished up. I am terrible, Sean, at binging series. I don't like to watch six episodes in a row, eight episodes in a row. I don't like it at all. So it sometimes takes me a while and I get distracted. So I'll watch the first four and then I'll forget that I was watching it and then I'll come back like, oh, yeah, I never, I never finished this one. So recently I have, I finished Black Swans. Black Swans is something I started a month or two ago. And honestly, there are parts of that show that I really, really like. And they're, whenever they get to a big set piece, action scene, they're awful. This big, they're awful. So it was, the one of them was so bad that I was like, I. And maybe I won't keep watching this. And then I tuned back in. I'm like, oh, no, it's good again when they, when they kind of dial the action back, make it a little bit more, you know, close to the ground, a little more around intrigue and whatnot. They did it really well and it ended on another kind of dumb shootout that was super unrealistic. But overall, I think the series is pretty cool. It's about, it's about agents who are groomed and put into places of power over time. So this is particular specifically about, about young women who get recruited and married off to, you know, political officials, military guys, et cetera, who as they move through their career, they become more and more powerful in the grand scheme of things. And that means that it's a for top dollar kind of agency. So it's not tied to any government and they sell the information to the top bidder type of thing. So it's very, it's, I mean, it is a bullseye for what we're talking about here. And it's, it's really, you know, Kieran Knightley's in it. It's got some. A good cast. Some of the action scenes are not so great, but I'll. I'll be quicker here. There's also a show called Hostage on Netflix, which is actually pretty darn good. That's about the British Prime Minister who has her husband kidnapped by a terrorist organization as some key political decisions are having to be made. It's a very political intrigue, espionage kind of thriller. So Hostage is pretty decent. And then finally there's a show on Netflix right now called Spy Ops. [00:05:41] Speaker A: And. [00:05:41] Speaker B: And I've got to say, I would give it a pass. It is. I'm two episodes in. The first episode was okay. It was about the Afghanistan stuff we talked about with the CIA last week or two weeks ago. The second episode is about Noriega and in Panama. And it is not good. So I think I'm. I think I'm done with that one. What about you? What have you been consuming? [00:06:04] Speaker A: I don't think I've gotten the Spy Ops one, but I thought I started watching Spycraft on Netflix, which was okay, right? They were talking about, I think, like, I can't remember an instance of it. It's been a while. It's been a while on that one. Recently. I literally watched the first episode of Spooks on Amazon. I find Amazon prime to have more of these types of shows, I think, maybe. So I. And Spooks is British, so BBC. It was, I think a bafta, which I think is their Emmys, if I'm not mistaken. Mistaken. Oh, yeah, Yeah. I think it was a bafta, either a nominee or award winner. But I think there's also, I want to say like eight seasons. Maybe it's a while. So starting at one. Wow. Yeah. MI5, specifically, the first one is about a spoilers, but an American woman that is very pro life that comes to the UK to wreak havoc as a terrorist. So she's taught. You know, it's funny, when I watch these shows, I'm like, oh, everybody's British like slow horses. Everybody's English. And then I get this woman who's got a Southern drawl in a room with four other, you know, native British speakers. And it's like, hold on, timeout. You should be looking at Ben. Big Ben. What are you doing there? As a terrorist, like leader? [00:07:37] Speaker B: That actress is probably also English and just as good at doing American acts. [00:07:41] Speaker A: That'd be very fair. Yes, that's probably the case. And then I got into many of the German released Kind of documentaries, which I thought, I didn't anticipate them being focused in on what we talk about in the podcast, but I thought, well, I might wanna. One I specifically did because there was mention of the Stasi and I'm like, whoa, wait, hold on a second. So first one was Cyberbunker. Not overly impressed. It's interesting because some of these shows took place while I was there. Like in real life. The documentary in the 90s. Yeah, early 90s cyber bunker came I think when I was over there briefly, the Billion Dollar Code. So the Billion Dollar Code is the documentary of. I can't remember what they called the app, but basically Google stole it and became Google Earth. [00:08:34] Speaker B: Oh, no kidding. [00:08:35] Speaker A: Yes. [00:08:36] Speaker B: I don't know that story. [00:08:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, neither did I. And then the last one was A Perfect Crime, which is the one I recently watched, which is a like a miniseries of four I think episodes and, and it was the Assassination murder of. And his name escapes me but he was in charge of a multi conglomerate, like a huge corporation that was involved with not unifying east and West Germany, but turning East Germany from socialism into capitalism. So the premise was that East Germany's economy was on the verge of collapse and he was the person delegated to take over this huge. I don't know if it's a holding company or whatever, but it's a big corporation and they were going to sell all of these companies in East Germany for just a. For nothing, like next to nothing. And of course it, you know, I think East Germany got up to close to 20% unemployment rate and it was a really big bad thing. And he got killed back in the early 90s and he was probably the most hated person at least in East Germany, if not all of Germany. And there was the Red army faction took credit for it, but there's also talks of the Stasi having been involved. So it was an interesting. I was there like when this was occurring and I didn't even realize that this was a big huge news issue. And I guess, you know, 20 some 19 year old Sean was not plugged in to the German political movements of the time. Time, if you will. So nice. Yeah, nice to reflect on that. I'm like, oh my God, I think I was right at that wall, right. Two months watching Roger Waters perform the Wall at Potsdammer Platts and you know. Yeah, anyways, Sweet. Yeah, that's me. [00:10:31] Speaker B: One final comment on the, on the Spooks show. Yes, my, you know, whether you use Britbox or Prime or whatever, like the. There's A proliferation of really high quality British television these days. Yeah, I think, I think the acting and the scripting and the stories have always been really good for a lot of British tv. But if you, you. And when you and I grew up, like, the production values were freaking low, like really low now they're pretty good. So it's. Oh, man, I would, I prefer it to almost all American television, whether it's Slow Horses or, you know, you name it. My, my wife does a lot of police procedural stuff that's either British or Scandinavian, you know, like we talked about before, that kind of Nordic noir stuff. There's, there's also a fair bit of crossover between the two where the same production houses, the same actors and the same writers kind of go back and forth. But anyway, just in general, I think that's some pretty high quality television right now. But yeah. On to, on to Sit rep. [00:11:31] Speaker A: Give me the sit rep. All right, sitrep, where we talk about what's going on, share some links with you in the community. I've got one. Harrigan's got one. You want to, want to start, sir? Yes. [00:11:44] Speaker B: So recently on Analytic Dice, Kevin has his, like Analytic Dice, After Dark or whatever, whatever that series is where he, he talks to creators. So it's not he and he and Gabe dibbing talking about the games that they've played. Kevin gets creators on and interviews them. He has kind of a set format that he uses and he interviewed. Speaking of Top Secret, which we're going to get into in this show, he interviewed the author of the most recent version of Top Secret, which is the new World Order edition. I think his name is Jason Elliot. Is that right? [00:12:15] Speaker A: From Solarian Games. [00:12:17] Speaker B: So there you go. Thank you. Jason mentioned during that podcast there's a convention coming up that focuses on modern games. And I think when he says that, he really means sort of the espionage, modern action, you know, action adventure, those kinds of things. So it won't be only Top secret style games, it'll be a variety of them. But it's called Mod Con. It's coming up on the 30th of May in 2026 at the Smith College center in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had no idea this thing existed. I can only find a Facebook page about it after I did a little bit of Googling after the, after the After Dark episode. So maybe there's more to come. But if people are in that region and are interested in playing these kinds of games or checking them out, it sounds like there's going to be a one day opportunity to do that if you're in the. The mass area next spring. [00:13:07] Speaker A: Interesting. Interesting. It's funny because I think. Who did I talk to? I don't know if it was Kevin that commented, but he. He had said that. I was just talking to Jason Elliott about modern podcasts. Like, modern RPG podcasts. Like, literally, after we dropped the trailer, he had commented on it. [00:13:24] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Then it's not a surprise that modcon is now on the radar somewhere as well, so. [00:13:31] Speaker B: Yep. [00:13:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, interesting. The one I have is terminology from the Spy Museum, which is. You know, the Spy Museum's got a lot of different resources that you can take a look at, but this had, like, an index of different espionage terminology and terms, which. Excuse me, will have. Will typically be found in many of the RPGs that we talk about. There'll be a glossary of terms, but. But I thought this would be a good reference point for individuals that want to keep that in their back pocket for their RPG game, and they can gank terminology from there and point their players to it if they need to, to kind of immerse themselves. [00:14:13] Speaker B: Yeah. At some point it might be fun to compare and contrast some of these lists. I think I've run across three or four of these now. Top Secret, in fact, has one in the back. We mentioned Gurps Espionage already has a significant glossary and set of. And then there's this. One thing I'm interested in is to see how the language has changed over time from the old. Even from the older games of the 80s to now. [00:14:36] Speaker A: It's funny because Dwayne, Mr. White, 20, had mentioned on a comment from our last episode, I think about the term mole and how Jean La Carre was the one that coined that term. [00:14:53] Speaker B: Ah, there you go. [00:14:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And I did not realize it would have came from an author. And then they just kind of used it in tradecraft and it was just adopted by what we know, as it is today, and some of the agencies that we work for. Like, you know, I work for the FBI when I'm not doing this podcast and we use that term. No, but I think before it was called what, Enemy agent or. No, enemy agent, Sleeper agent. I can't remember. There was a different term that they used instead of mole. [00:15:24] Speaker B: Sleeper's different. Right. But yeah, Insider, double agent. Oh, it's all kinds of. Right, yeah. Although I think. I think those are. There's subtle differences in some of those terms. Right. Double agent isn't quite a mole, you know, so I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating stuff. [00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get into encrypted comms. Sir, we have an incoming encrypted transmission this week. I've taken a few comments from episode one of the pilot that some of our patrons actually left for us as far as feedback goes, and I thought it'd be interesting because sometimes they touch on talking about the episode itself and then what they might like to see or kind of what their interest is. So I have a few of those that have that I collected. Looks like five of them. Starting out with Chad Glamen. I'll just read it quick. So Chad says, well done fellas. Just listen to the pilot and color me interested. I'll definitely be checking out the season. I've played quite a few espionage games over the years and can't wait to see if you cover them. I'm sure you'll have an episode dedicated to the 90s gem millennium's end. [00:16:39] Speaker B: Maybe I have to find out what it is. [00:16:42] Speaker A: Right, of course. [00:16:45] Speaker B: So I play games with Chad. Full disclosure here. You know, I've got two kind of bi weekly groups fortnightly, as I like to say. Chad is just about to actually run Call of Cthulhu and the in one of the groups with a few other a few other ne' er do wells that many listeners who are this early into the podcast will would recognize. I yeah, thank you Chad, for writing. First of all, he talked to me very briefly about Millenniums and it's basically millennium, the TV show. So there's a lot of like Y2K and you know, end of the end of the millennia kind of angst wrapped up around this. So I don't, I don't know even who published it or anything. I haven't looked it up yet, but we'll take a peek at it. [00:17:26] Speaker A: Yeah, Chad probably played the snot out of it as my guess. [00:17:31] Speaker B: He, he, he spoke glowingly of it, so. [00:17:34] Speaker A: Well, there you go. [00:17:36] Speaker B: Yep. [00:17:37] Speaker A: You want to read the next one? [00:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah. This comes from HUSE out on the west coast in Seattle. Hello Hoos. Just finished listening and I am intrigued. I have zero experience with espionage type games and I'm keen to learn. I would think I would be more interested in Heisti or Spy for Hire sub genre over government agency spies in line with the Saint from 1997 or the Mission Impossible TV series from the 1960s. By the way, Harrigan the Troubleshooters looks pretty cool. And love Get Smart and Flint the Professional. So some of the things that we mentioned, I think a couple weeks ago or Maybe in the first episode and then he finishes with didn't know the Saint was a TV show. We'll check it out. Let me, let me just answer immediately, Sean, by saying what Roger Moore was [00:18:24] Speaker A: the Saint right before he was James Bond. [00:18:27] Speaker B: Before he was Bond. [00:18:28] Speaker A: Come on. [00:18:29] Speaker B: That's why he was selected in fact, is because he was a popular, beloved spy, you know, hero on, on a British TV show. But overall, thank you for the, for the feedback. Who's, you know, you know, we will take, we'll take in all this stuff, you know, when we get into the heisty spy stuff. Yes. I personally prefer more of the true sort of spook operations type stuff but you know, we said in the outset we're going to have a slightly wider lens than just pure espionage. Covert action heists, action adventure, all that good stuff. I guess the last thing I would say is the Troubleshooters is really cool. And for those who don't know it, it's actually a Swedish game as part of that Swedish wave when Free League started up, started up shortly after that. It's a different publisher. I think Modiphius actually picked it up and published it in the end. But it is, think of this, think of it like Tintin or like the Belgian comic style action adventure stuff from the 60s, 70s, etc. So very colorful, colorful, incredible art throughout those books. And Shauna is one that we should look at because it has a pretty interesting percentile system in it which treats modifications to your skill roles differently than any game I've ever seen. So in other words, you've got your rating in something and when the situation makes it harder or when you're training or you're equipment or assistance makes it easier. The way they modify this percentile skill rolls is like nothing I've ever seen in any other game. It's pretty neat. It also I been over this game a couple of times. I kind of threatened myself to run it. I don't know if it's particularly well suited for a light hearted romp kind of espionage. It looks like the system would play way more gritty than that, but I'm not convinced of that. So it's one that we, it's a book that I think we should definitely look at for sure. Do you, are, are you aware of that book? [00:20:29] Speaker A: I own it. I went on a shopping spree for Science in the show. So yeah, I bought like I brought, I bought the Troubleshooters, Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes combo. There's two and then they did both in one. I don't know if you knew that. We'll talk about like the, like the [00:20:49] Speaker B: old version and the new version. [00:20:50] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Yeah, they did one that is like kind of a bit of both. See, what else did I grab? [00:20:58] Speaker B: That's the only one I have, by the way. This is the one where they kind of. It's kind of a combined edition, the White Wolf one. [00:21:03] Speaker A: What is it? Dogs of War, I think I don't have that one. I think I have that one. It was, you mentioned it. I think it's in our list. So I picked it up. [00:21:11] Speaker B: Dogs of War is not White Wolf. That's beyond belief games. That's Simon Washburn, the guy. [00:21:15] Speaker A: Oh, maybe I got the wrong one. [00:21:17] Speaker B: Barbarians of Lemuria. What did you buy, Sean? [00:21:19] Speaker A: I have to. They're right here. But they're facing the wrong way. Why do I have my spine? [00:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah, don't sweat it. [00:21:24] Speaker A: Don't tip over. Anyways, I bought a few, got a few. [00:21:29] Speaker B: Anything else you want to say to who's. [00:21:30] Speaker A: Hi. Who's. [00:21:33] Speaker B: All right, moving on. Larry's up next. Why don't you do that one, Larry? [00:21:37] Speaker A: So my spy game of choice, as we kind of wanted to know, was always spycraft and I could, and if I could manage it, the Shadow Force Archer setting. These games were always high action, James Bond esque games. I'm really looking forward to what other game systems are out there. Well, you came to the right place, Larry. We're gonna square you away. Shadow Force Archer, I had for a while. Man, I shouldn't have gotten rid of all my spy craft stuff. Now I'm gonna kick myself in the ass for it. [00:22:05] Speaker B: Oh yeah, Was that part of your purge from like three years ago or whatever? [00:22:09] Speaker A: I had it for a long time and then I'm like, I'm never gonna play any of these. I think I had most of the Shadow Force Archer, although that game did not appeal to me due to the mysticism that was centric to it. Yeah. [00:22:22] Speaker B: Oh yeah, this. So this, this is a realm I know little about because it's associated in my head at least with all of the modern D20 roll 20 D20, early 2000s, when you know, all that shit took over the industry and made me so angry. So I out of hand, I dismissed it, right? Like, no, I'm not playing that. What's that stupid thing? And subsequent to those initial thoughts, I had a play by post game where someone ran the first edition of spycraft. And I think I had to admit at the time, all right, pretty cool. It's got a lot of love in this game. Then the person who ran that game recommended Dirigible. If you're out there listening, and you might be, he recommended I buy Spycraft 2.0. And I'm gonna punch this guy to this day for making me buy that game. Like you, who I have. I have rid myself of my Spycraft books. But Larry, don't worry. We'll get back into it. Sean and I will have a fresh take on stuff, and he'll build his collection back up and we'll do what we need to do. We will cover Spycraft. [00:23:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. You want to tackle Kristen? [00:23:33] Speaker B: Sure. Great stuff, guys. I'm really excited for this podcast. So are we. I was look really looking for something like this. Like this years ago when I was just getting into Knights Black Agents. I'm sure there's plenty of people now in a similar situation with the popularity of Andor and Slow Horses. So maybe, maybe this is timely. Sean, we were worried that we were too late to the. [00:23:57] Speaker A: To. [00:23:58] Speaker B: To the game a couple of weeks ago where I had a bunch of people saying, spy games. Why would you want to play spy games? I don't want to work for the government. I. I agree with. With Kristen. There's all kinds of current properties out there that just plug right into this stuff. I need to see andor. I'll be honest, I haven't seen it yet. People rave about it. I need to see it. [00:24:17] Speaker A: Well, an opportune time to subscribe to Disney, if you will, as everybody is bailing. [00:24:26] Speaker B: Oh, indeed. Maybe I can get a so you're [00:24:29] Speaker A: aware, you know, [00:24:32] Speaker B: way to timestamp our podcast. [00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah, we have impeccable timing, obviously. Like, oh, I haven't subscribed to Disney plus. Sounds like a good time to do that right now. [00:24:42] Speaker B: I support everything those guys stand for. Wait a minute. [00:24:46] Speaker A: You can reach [email protected]. [00:24:50] Speaker B: so what's even worse is that I'm actually not that big of a Disney guy, even before this happened. So I have resisted. That's why I haven't seen it. I have resisted for years. I'm like, nope, not gonna do it. Well, my freaking wife recently found some show on Disney she wanted to watch, so we now have Disney. So I have no excuse to not watch andor and then cancel the damn thing. [00:25:14] Speaker A: But to. To Kristen's point, I mean, and even what Harrigan said, you don't have to run an espionage game for the government. You could be the counter to the government. [00:25:23] Speaker B: Totally. [00:25:24] Speaker A: There's tons of spy and espionage and covert ops in the Rebellion. I think even Kev Kevin that we play with every Thursday had mentioned like Age of Rebellion. Totally. Like espionage all day. Right. Those types of things. And Age of Rebellion for Star wars. So. [00:25:42] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. [00:25:44] Speaker A: Last one, salt heart. Speaking of which, looking forward to hearing what you've got to say about MSPE or mercenary spies and private eyes for those in the know and top secret. Not into Delta Green, but love those others. I prefer more realistic spy game a la Slow Horses. [00:26:05] Speaker B: Sean, we have to talk to Kevin about this Delta Green thing we do [00:26:09] Speaker A: and I'm not sure if he is just brushing it off because of the mythos component, which I find is usually the hot take. [00:26:17] Speaker B: If I look at his sentence construction and I see that immediately following he's not into DG and he prefers a more realistic spy game. Yeah. Kevin needs to understand that 90% of DG is like hardcore realism and then. And modern day. And then there's all the. The sanity wrecking cosmic horror stuff as well. [00:26:41] Speaker A: Right. Hey, I think my take, I will speak on behalf of him since he is not here. It sounds to me like he is more of a what I would call a purist. [00:26:52] Speaker B: A traditionalist. A purist, sure. Agreed. [00:26:55] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. Hey man. And I get it. Hey man, don't put any of that peanut butter in my jelly. Put my. Don't put any of that chocolate in my peanut butter. But it's so good. Thanks guys. [00:27:08] Speaker B: I normally. Actually both of us don't normally like a lot of crossover. [00:27:12] Speaker A: We don't. [00:27:12] Speaker B: We are, we are of a similar mind. But sometimes it's awfully good. [00:27:16] Speaker A: I empathize with them because I would have probably said the same thing years ago until I bought it and read it and was like, whoa. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, thanks everybody for commenting. We really appreciate it. If you've got something to, you know, comment right into gobagpod.com grenade gobagpod.com or you can leave us a voicemail at 929-big dice and we would be more than happy to hear about your feedback, what you think of the show, what you'd like us to cover. You know, even just correcting us or elaborating, that would be fine as well. So. [00:27:51] Speaker B: Well, when you open it up to. That might be a lot of emails, Sean. [00:27:56] Speaker A: Well, right now, I mean a lot of emails would be two. Yeah, true this point, so. [00:28:01] Speaker B: Very true. [00:28:02] Speaker A: Let's get into the mission brief. [00:28:05] Speaker B: Have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:28:09] Speaker A: Oh boy. Here we Are part two, Top Secret. [00:28:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:28:16] Speaker A: Deep dive. Stop. You don't drown. Are you excited? [00:28:24] Speaker B: You know I'm excited. [00:28:26] Speaker A: Look at that. [00:28:27] Speaker B: You know I am. [00:28:28] Speaker A: Roll bluff. [00:28:29] Speaker B: I. Yeah, that's right. We need some social mechanics to determine whether I'm being deceptive or not. Yes, I am unchanged. Having read parts of this book more carefully now and you know, Sean and I poured through, especially character generation and like the sort of action mechanics, the combat side of things, my overall opinions are unchanged. It is a. It's a work of RPG art in terms of like what it. For what it was at the time, what it represents and it's unplayable, but you can also decide to eliminate certain things and it makes it infinitely playable because there's just some core mechanics in there that are just percentile dice. Right. I am excited to go through this. There's some. There is some really inspired stuff in here and there is some hilarious stuff in here which we're going to talk about. [00:29:20] Speaker A: So if you are just tuning into this episode because Top Secret was on there and you wanted to have a deep dive, make sure you tune into season one, episode four, where we did the general overview, where we just kind of talked about it as a, you know, at the hundred foot level. And then get into the mechanics in this one. We're going to get into some of the mechanics of the game. So noted. I have the second edition, 198081 in print right here. As I hold it up in front of me for those watching the audio, Arrogant has a scanned copy of a previous version. [00:29:58] Speaker B: So I have first edition, second printing, April 1980. And from what I can gather there aren't that many differences other than the art and one particular secondary or tertiary trait. I forget which one it is. I think that's about it. Yeah. Wrestling. [00:30:15] Speaker A: Wrestling. Ain't no wrestling. His game in my game. [00:30:20] Speaker B: Correct. [00:30:21] Speaker A: So starting off dice, it comes with 2D 20s that are numbered 0 to 9 twice. I think I still have mine. I know I do. I wouldn't have gotten rid of them, but I don't. I think also Star Trek had that as well. [00:30:42] Speaker B: Did it? Did Star Trek have those? [00:30:44] Speaker A: I think so. Pretty sure. Pretty sure. [00:30:48] Speaker B: Interesting. For as. For as long as I've been gaming, I think long, long time. I don't think I have any D10. D20s, like 1010, you know, D20s that are numbered 0 to 9 twice. Maybe I got a couple because I have that Fossa Star Trek game. Although I wouldn't have bought mine until 1983. [00:31:10] Speaker A: That the deluxe version [00:31:13] Speaker B: it is with the Tactical Starship Combat Simulator and all that sort of stuff bundled in, I think. I think it had that. [00:31:19] Speaker A: They were separate. [00:31:21] Speaker B: Maybe they were separate. I don't remember anymore, man. Okay. He says they're separate. I'll trust you on that. That I. Oh. In fact, the Tactical Combat. Tactical Starship Combat Simulator was a separate box, wasn't it? [00:31:34] Speaker A: Yes, it was. [00:31:35] Speaker B: Yeah. There you go. So my point is, I think my. By the time I got my edition in 83, maybe they had switched out the D20 D10s for actual pale blue D10s, because that's what I remember it having. They may be wrong, though. [00:31:48] Speaker A: They may have. [00:31:49] Speaker B: All of which is to say, I see I've seen people at Cons recently, old grogs, right? They show up and they've got their D10s that are actually D20s. And I'm just like, why? Why? So I think because of the fact that I never played with them. I don't have any love for them. I don't have any particular affinity for them. So when I see people roll them out and they're those pale blue. Looks like it's made out of crayon. Someone's been chewing on it. And you can't read it because the numbers are the same color as the. As the. You know, as the rest of the dye. Like, what are you doing? But I think people just have that nostalgia thing going on with those. [00:32:25] Speaker A: I have a yellow one, a red one, a beige one, and I can't remember that fourth one. And they were never used and never colored, so they are edged sharp still to this day. Nice. Yeah. Anyways, there's five minutes of Dice Talk. Dice Talk? Yes, Dice Talk with Sean and Harrigan. [00:32:44] Speaker B: Welcome to Dice Talk. Yeah, we're gonna talk about all the Paulies. The D10 is not actually a shape that occurs in nature, so no one likes the D10. [00:32:54] Speaker A: Let's give the D12 some love. Anyways, character generation is a big one for every rpg, so I figured why not start at Chargen or Character generation? So you start off with the personal traits. Not name, not class, not any of that. And it's usually the abilities. So that's what the personal traits are. So in some games, they're called abilities. In top secret, they're called personal traits. And there are six of them. Physical strength, charm. Charm. [00:33:35] Speaker B: We'll get to that. [00:33:36] Speaker A: Get to that. Willpower, courage, knowledge, and coordination. [00:33:44] Speaker B: So right off the bat, I appreciate the fact that they are different than the six that come in. D&D True. [00:33:50] Speaker A: It's not five. E the spy game. [00:33:55] Speaker B: Or at the time AD&D the spy game. [00:33:57] Speaker A: Right. Second edition, whatever. Well, at this point it was first edition. [00:34:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it just come out, man. Yeah, I guess all I would say about that is I do think it's a little funky that we have charm, courage and willpower. A lot of those can be kind of blended together and a more modern sensibility would at least put willpower and courage together. But there are, there are reasons. [00:34:22] Speaker A: There are reasons. [00:34:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, tell us about what the range of scores is, because I think this is. And how to generate it. Because I think this is actually one of my favorite parts of this game. [00:34:32] Speaker A: Really? [00:34:33] Speaker B: Yep. [00:34:34] Speaker A: So you, you roll a percentile for the score and you. The minimum that you can get is a 26. The maximum you can get is a hundred. [00:34:45] Speaker B: How's that, Sean? [00:34:46] Speaker A: Well, I'm glad you asked, Harrigan. When you roll your percentage, whatever that die roll is, you cross reference that with a table and it will give you a bonus. And the minimum bonus is 25 points. So if you roll a one, boom, you're at 26. And it's broken down to like I think four increments. I don't have five increments. [00:35:12] Speaker B: He's going to correct me. [00:35:13] Speaker A: But if you roll like a 91 to 100, you get zero modification to add. So you can't go over 100 from start. [00:35:25] Speaker B: So it's like a, it's like a self leveling mechanic because frankly anybody who knows statistics knows that if you've got attributes and you're rolling percentile dice six times, your numbers could be all over the freaking map. You could easily roll less than 50 for all of them or roll way above 50 for. You know, there's. You can come up with significantly unbalanced characters. Right. In terms of person rolls versus someone else rolls. Well, this mechanic levels all that because for the people who are rolling crappy, they're rolling either with a plus 25 bonus or a plus 15 bonus if it's 26 to 50. So what it means is it kind of draws everything up a little bit. But the better you roll, you get less of a. Less of a benefit. So the only way you can get into the 90s is by rolling it flat. That's not, that's not quite true. If you roll 89, you get like a plus 5, you can hit 94. But long story short, there's some, there's a nod towards the fact that the spread of the percental dice is all over the Map. So they've got a mechanic in to kind of correct that, which I really like. It's cool. [00:36:31] Speaker A: It will become a theme, I think, in this game where you have something and then you reference another table, even though it's got a table, you'll go to another table to determine any modifier or special thing that attaches to it. [00:36:50] Speaker B: Yeah. In fact. In fact, let me just jut in here. I checked. [00:36:53] Speaker A: I checked. [00:36:53] Speaker B: And in 1980, there were no tables left anywhere in the industry because they were all used. And they're all used up. [00:36:58] Speaker A: Yep. [00:36:58] Speaker B: They were all gone. [00:36:59] Speaker A: I heard that. Tragic time hard, like, through the roof table. The cost of tables. Right up through the roof. [00:37:08] Speaker B: That's right. Table inflation. All right, enough. [00:37:12] Speaker A: Might have led to the downfall of TSR eventually. Just saying. [00:37:14] Speaker B: Yes, it's the unknown secret table allotment. [00:37:19] Speaker A: Hey, Ben Robbins. I think you got something wrong in your book. Just saying. [00:37:22] Speaker B: So you missed that part. [00:37:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:25] Speaker B: Tell us about secondary personal traits, Sean. [00:37:28] Speaker A: So these are derived stats. And I love how this is noted in the book because in the book you have. And some of those derived stats include offense, deception, evasion, deactivation, life level, and movement value. Those are the derived personal traits. And the way that they are noted in the book is it's not the average of this and that. It is coordination plus courage fraction divided by 2, which I thought was like. Dude, seriously, all you had to do is say the average of this and that instead of like. And they draw. They draw out. Merle draws out the. [00:38:17] Speaker B: For each one in proper division, like notation. [00:38:21] Speaker A: Division notation. [00:38:23] Speaker B: A numerator and a denominator. [00:38:24] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:38:25] Speaker B: The denominator always being 2, except for life level where it's 10. So I. Ah. So instead of average, it times 10. [00:38:33] Speaker A: That's true. [00:38:34] Speaker B: He uses the same methodology. [00:38:35] Speaker A: There is the exception for life level as well as movement value. They're different. But offense is the average of coordination. Yeah. Offense is the average of coordination and courage. Deception is the average of courage and charm. [00:38:55] Speaker B: Makes sense. [00:38:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Makes sense, Right? So far we're on the same page. Evasion. That's where it gets weird. Is the average of charm and coordination. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Stop right there. [00:39:09] Speaker A: Stopping. [00:39:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:11] Speaker A: What charm? Let me reframe that. Okay. So charm. What you might think of what charm is allows you to be a better evader. Are you putting up with. Sure. You picking up what they're putting down, Harrigan? [00:39:26] Speaker B: Sure. No, I'm not. And nor will I. I'm not picking it up. I'm leaving it on the floor where it belongs. So let's keep going. I want to revisit this more broadly in terms of their decisions about how to, like, pile the primary characteristics into the secondary characteristics. [00:39:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Life level is. [00:39:49] Speaker B: Wait, you missed deactivation? [00:39:51] Speaker A: Oh, I did. I'm sorry. I kept, like, why? I kept looking at it three times and didn't see deactivation, so. Deactivation. [00:39:57] Speaker B: It's okay, folks. It's his first podcast. [00:40:00] Speaker A: It's my first time ever reading notes on a podcast. Deactivation is average of knowledge and coordination. [00:40:10] Speaker B: Sure. [00:40:10] Speaker A: Got to know it. [00:40:11] Speaker B: Don't buy that. [00:40:11] Speaker A: And you got to be agile. Don't cut the green wire and touch the blue wire at the same time now. So we got all those knocked out. Life level is and will be equivalent to what hit points are, and it's your physical strength plus will willpower divided by 10. So if you have a max of each of those at 100, it's 200 divided by 10. The max you can have is 20. [00:40:43] Speaker B: Yep. With your average being about 10, 11. [00:40:46] Speaker A: So, I mean, almost kind of like delta green, where you don't get a whole ton of hit points. Like, this is not a big hit point bag game. [00:40:54] Speaker B: I. I would even say not only is it not a big hit point bagging, which is really cool. Right. So it keeps it so that you don't. One of the. At the end of the show, we might return to the whole idea of, like, what's in a good spy game, right? And one of those things was like, no, no bags of hit points, no, you know, combat that lasts forever, et cetera. This nails that. But it also nails, I think, a more modern sensibility of factoring willpower into your hit points and your staying power. Right. It's not just physical. I love that. It's kind of old hat. It's. Yeah, drive. [00:41:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:41:29] Speaker B: It's old hat these days. But it was not in 1980. [00:41:32] Speaker A: That's right. And then the last one is the movement value, which is awesome because it's your physical strength plus your willpower plus your coordination. Again, remember, all the primary traits are scores up to 100. So if you max these out, your movement is 300. What I love about this game is right now, when you're doing this movement value, you don't know what 300 is. [00:41:59] Speaker B: Not sure what it means. [00:42:00] Speaker A: You don't know if it's feet, inches, miles. Like, what is 300? It'll eventually get into it, but I thought it was, like, super hilarious. And we may get to it or not, but there is Another table shocker down the road that breaks down your movement value into a bracket. So if you are very low movement value, then you are considered weakling, which that just triggers my dodgeball. Last chosen picked days weekly, I'm on the playground getting picked on, weighing a hot, you know, soaking wet 40 pounds at 5, 6. [00:42:51] Speaker B: What are you, Kelly? A weakling. [00:42:52] Speaker A: Weakling. I can't even remember the last time I heard that term. Like, fantastic. It's now on this podcast. In the game. It's in the game. Weakling. [00:43:02] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. [00:43:03] Speaker A: If you have a 301 or greater. 301 or greater, which, because I guess, you know, you can have these go higher than 100 each, then you are super in the fitness rating. So those are fitness ratings. They have weakling to super and then a couple in between. I can't remember. [00:43:21] Speaker B: Average. Average and strong. [00:43:22] Speaker A: Average and strong. Thank you. So, yeah, there you go. Movement value. And since we're on it, because I don't think we're going to get to movement value, but on the movement value chart that Harrigan has just mentioned where you are weakling average, strong, super. Depending on what you're doing. Crawling, walking, running, dodging and running, depending on if you are weakling average. [00:43:52] Speaker B: I'm afraid you. I'm afraid you forgot waiting, Sean. [00:43:55] Speaker A: Wait. [00:43:55] Speaker B: My favorite. There's a movement chart for waiting. [00:43:59] Speaker A: For waiting. Waiting with a D, folks. Not waiting as in just hanging around. [00:44:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, let's. Let's keep this moving along. [00:44:09] Speaker A: The. [00:44:10] Speaker B: There are also, because there's a fair bit to cover, there are also tertiary personal traits, hand to hand combat value. And I'm not going to get into all the guts. We'll return to that one in a minute. Though there's a surprise value. My version of the game, which is the first edition, has a wrestling value as well as hand to hand. Merle in his infinite wisdom, removed that from the second edition in 1981 that Sean has. [00:44:34] Speaker A: Merle or Alan or somebody might want to. Merle might have fought to keep that in there. Just saying. We don't know. [00:44:40] Speaker B: In fact, remember how big the manuscript was supposed to be? Merle probably had more. [00:44:45] Speaker A: I'll have to ask him at gameoldcon. [00:44:47] Speaker B: But long story short, there's two things I want to talk about with this. The first one is a moment ago we both chuckled at the idea of charm being included in the evasion calculation. So evasion being charm and coordination together, right? Well, guess what? Evasion shows up as a building block in hand to hand combat. So being charming helps you punch the crap out of people. So there's just some general jank in all of this. And what it really reminds me of is the 80s obsession with what I would call sort of derived stats. So a core set of abilities which flow into and are combined to make a second set and in this game a third set. All of which takes the industry down the path of dump stats and like power stats. I don't know what you would call it other than power stat. There's probably a better name for it in GURPs. That was decks and IQ. So if you loaded up on decks and IQ, you could actually go really, really light on your skill points. You could drop a half point into a bunch of skills because you had bought a 14 or a 15 decks and you were going to be freaking awesome at virtually everything. And. But that's a point by game. So you just had to sort of, you know, budget things appropriately and you could, you could buy things down that were worth less. Same thing is true for all the randomly generated games as well. The games where you're allowed to move stats around after the fact. It, it becomes this monstrosity that people start to obsess over optimizing with the, the dump stats and all that sort of stuff. So this is the beginning of that, I think. And I, I don't love that. What do you think, Sean? [00:46:30] Speaker A: I just love that charm as part of hand to hand. [00:46:34] Speaker B: It's just so ridiculous because it's charm. [00:46:37] Speaker A: For a second I thought, well, that's what I think about this era where a lot of people were very focused in on looks and panache. And so therefore they rolled it into charm and then into hand in hand, hand to hand. [00:46:53] Speaker B: I don't know, like, is there some weird connection to like, hey, not in the face, not in the face. If the guy's got like good looks and is charming and that can not [00:47:03] Speaker A: to hit him, that that person looks pretty charismatic and. And I bet you they can hold their, their own in a fight. [00:47:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and there's other ways to handle it for like, we haven't talked about these yet. There are a whole bunch of movies that have come out in the last like 15 years, maybe 20 years about usually young women who are either raised by, raised in seclusion by somebody or raised by an agency to become like a super assassin. Right. There's just tons of these moves, La Fem, Nikita being the kicker that started it all off. Right. But there's a bunch of them. So I get like the Charm thing. Like, maybe the person can ingratiate themselves to you. Maybe they're good looking, maybe they make you disarm with their methods of speech. But that's not what hand to hand combat value is. Hand to hand combat value is, you know, like punching people. [00:47:59] Speaker A: You have to know how they define charm. [00:48:02] Speaker B: Go on. [00:48:03] Speaker A: Charm is. This trait embodies the character's ability to relate to other humans in the game. [00:48:14] Speaker B: Well, thinking that through, then maybe you can read body language. [00:48:21] Speaker A: Right? But I probably wouldn't have coined it charm. [00:48:26] Speaker B: I know. [00:48:26] Speaker A: It's just me. [00:48:28] Speaker B: I know. All right, let's. Let's not drill too deep on this. It's an amusing footnote. Why don't you tell us about the next part of character generation, which I will tell you changes dramatically when the compendium comes out. So tell us how the first and second edition do it. And I think it starts with your height, correct? [00:48:49] Speaker A: Yes. So roll for height. In my edition, you roll a D10 and then there's a base. And it depends on whether you are your sex, because it's. It's sex in this game, not gender, which is, of course, we grew up with sex on all our forms. [00:49:14] Speaker B: We did. But as. As young idiots, did you often write like, yes, please do something like that or something? Right? [00:49:20] Speaker A: Yes, of course. Because I was 13. Yeah, yeah. [00:49:24] Speaker B: I remember doing the same thing. The same thing. [00:49:27] Speaker A: I probably would still do it today if it were sex on a form. But anyways, I don't know. But five, ten. Five foot ten inches for men. So it's not meters, you know, it's not metric. So it's 5 foot 10 inches for men. Go figures. It's the 80s in America. And then of course, it's 5 foot 5 inches for the ladies. Male and female. I think they actually refer to them as male and female in the game. [00:49:51] Speaker B: What are you talking about? It's the 80s. It would be 5, 10 and 55 in 2025 in America as well, my friend. It's not like the metric system has taken hold. [00:50:00] Speaker A: No, no, no. But I'm saying that. Where was I going with this? The fact that they are splitting him out. [00:50:09] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's. You know, there's a. Let's not get into it. There's a whole dnd thing around men and women is. [00:50:14] Speaker A: Yes. In there. Yes. [00:50:17] Speaker B: Limits on attributes and blah, blah, blah. [00:50:18] Speaker A: Right. So you roll a D10, it's of that time. Yes. And if you roll a 1 or a 10, you roll on another table for each. And then I can't remember what the table says. [00:50:30] Speaker B: Like basically it's nested tables to see how tall or short you happen to be. Right. They do something similar for age. The one that about age is kind of, kind of interesting where they do this whole thing where if you're, if you're of a certain, certain age, I know that your. Some of your main traits can go down. [00:50:49] Speaker A: Yes. [00:50:50] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:50] Speaker A: Yes. [00:50:51] Speaker B: Physical strength and coordination. Do you also get more areas of knowledge? I forget. [00:50:56] Speaker A: I don't remember. I thought I made a note of that, but I guess I did not because I specifically read that and then I must have like, oh, let's get on to the next one and I totally forgot it. But yeah, as you age you can decrease. So it wasn't uncommon back in those days in some games that the older you got, you would. Your constitution may dip and then your strength dips, but your intelligence and wisdom goes up. So with age, roll a 3D 10 and you add 12 because 12 is a good number. Like 12. So you can. Your agent is going to start at age 15 or 42. [00:51:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:40] Speaker A: Oh, here it is. For every five over 50. Right. So 50 years old. This is. I did write it down. 50. So when you are 50 years old, every increment of five past 50 you lose 1d 10 points in both. [00:51:58] Speaker B: Jesus. [00:51:59] Speaker A: Physical strength. Physical strength and core. [00:52:03] Speaker B: This explains why I feel the way I do today. For real. [00:52:07] Speaker A: Right. Well, start rolling, buddy. [00:52:09] Speaker B: I've lost a couple of D10s, man. [00:52:11] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. And you know, so you could literally go from say, you know, your agent is trucking along at 80 and then 80 points in physical strength and then you get to be 55. Hey, admin steps up, says hey, happy birthday. You want to give me a 1d10 roll. Roll a 10. Overnight you are 10 points weaker. And sometimes, you know, this game seems vaguely familiar now that I am starting to relate more and more to it as every day goes by for me. [00:52:47] Speaker B: Sad but true. Oh, it also has. You determine your handedness and you remember how that's done. [00:52:54] Speaker A: I do. [00:52:55] Speaker B: It's pretty funny. Yeah, I do. It is. What hand are you really player? So if you're right handed or left handed, same thing for your character. [00:53:04] Speaker A: I don't know why we would fight it. So we would say, hey, I have an. Can I be ambidextrous? We'd ask that we do ambidextrous. [00:53:13] Speaker B: That wasn't an option. [00:53:14] Speaker A: It wasn't an option but we would do it. And I think we would take a penalty or Something like we would. The admin would say, yes, it's not in the book. He would house rule it and say, yeah, that's fine, but you don't get this. And the sole reason we would want to be ambidextrous is I don't want my. My good hand to get damaged and then I'm screwed. [00:53:34] Speaker B: I was just gonna say list will come into play later in the book when we get into all the modifiers in combat and there's like an offhand shooting penalty. So if your good hand is hurt, you're not as. As effective in combat. Yeah, yeah. And then the. The classic that appears in virtually all role playing games since 1980 when it first debuted. You roll for glasses. Do you wear glasses or not? I love it. And you got a note here as well. I don't know if I caught this. There's something about. Oh, if you have a one. You can't even wear contacts. You have a certain kind of astigmatism or something where contacts won't work. Awesome. [00:54:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:21] Speaker B: So here's what I think is pretty interesting and forgive me if I'm wrong. After this, we move into languages. Right. And then some areas of knowledge. So all these, like, personal things. The. So the height, the age, the handedness, the glasses. There's a. Another section in the book that talks about how work with the GM to determine some other stuff like your gender, your national origin and that sort of thing. Your weight. You roll for your height, but you don't roll for your weight. [00:54:48] Speaker A: That's right. [00:54:49] Speaker B: So when. When the compendium comes out in 84, it changes all that. And there are random tables for all of that stuff and then some, from what I've read. Yeah, I know. Sean's. Sean's got some pretty excited thumbs up going, Right? [00:55:02] Speaker A: Yeah. More tables. [00:55:05] Speaker B: Yes, yes. So I think the compendium sort of patches. What. What I see is a nice bit of looseness around defining the character with the gm. Nope, nope. That all has to be random. All randomize. All of it. So. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Sean Albert White. [00:55:21] Speaker A: Yeah, no, go ahead, please. All right, languages, quick. You know, if you're going to be an international spy, you got to speak different languages. It's just inevitable. And so with languages, they score 1 to 100, so it's a percentile. One is unintelligible where 75 or greater is fluent. You can learn a language for every 25 points, plus your native. I don't know if I've worded that correctly. Yeah. [00:55:53] Speaker B: On top of your Native tongue. You can learn an additional one for every. [00:55:55] Speaker A: Yes, yes, that's right. So you have your native tongue, and then every 25 points you can get an additional language is what it happens. And there's a table for it because you can't calculate past 25. So it's 25, you know, 0 to 24 native. [00:56:15] Speaker B: We can drive deep on all of these if we want to. My takeaway from languages that I thought was actually kind of cool was that when you're trying to fool. Because there's this 75% fluency thing. Right. Which is meant in the spy world, you know, can someone detect that you're not from around here? Blah, blah, blah. [00:56:31] Speaker A: Right. [00:56:31] Speaker B: I think it's kind of cool that they model whether or not the listener is a native speaker or not. That's pretty cool. Yes, that they do that. So you have a hard, harder time fooling the Germans in East Germany than you would, you know, in France, perhaps if someone. Or Belgium, where, you know, or Switzerland, where you're speaking multiple languages kind of thing. [00:56:52] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's good. You can't have. Obviously this makes sense. You can't have a second language be higher than your native. So you could have a lower native. Like, I don't speak English very well, and therefore you're probably not going to speak German beyond how you speak English, for example. And as you look through the book and all through the book until this section, it's capitalized, everything. Boom, boom, boom. No character can ever have a non native fluency rating higher than his or her native fluency, which probably tells me some people have tried to do that. [00:57:39] Speaker B: It's almost like it's like a rule zero for this game. It's the most important thing. [00:57:43] Speaker A: It seems like it, but to Harrigan's point, like, if you have two non native speakers, you have to have a sum of 75 or greater for verbal communication, which I thought is crazy cool. [00:57:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:57:58] Speaker A: You know, if it's pretty cool, like I. Mine's low, but my. The other ones is really high. And it still comes together because the higher one can explain things slower, more, you know, use different vocabulary to relate to somebody who may not be as high in the rating, but if it's 75 together, they can make that happen. [00:58:19] Speaker B: There's some thought to put into the language rules. It's pretty neat. [00:58:23] Speaker A: Next one. Areas of knowledge. [00:58:26] Speaker B: All 37. [00:58:28] Speaker A: Right. So you get one per knowledge score in general one. Now, I'm sorry, you get one general field of knowledge that equals your knowledge score. And then you get a certain amount based on your knowledge score divided by 10. Those are specific areas of knowledge. So if you have a. [00:58:55] Speaker B: For those. For those who have lost the plot of what Sean's explaining, same thing happens to me when I try to read this in the book. I'm just like, oh, good, good. [00:59:04] Speaker A: If you are. If you're not picking up what I'm putting down, hey, no problem. [00:59:09] Speaker B: Here was my takeaway. And I'm conscious, Sean, that we're plowing through this, but it's going to take time. I know we're going to. My takeaway from areas of knowledge was that they are determined randomly. And one of the things that I'm pulling out of the character generation in general for a spy game, I generally want to have the ability to, like, build the character I want or have something cohesive that I'm putting together. This is more kind of very traditional role and see what you see, what you come up with. So you might come up with like, you know, certain kind of engineering and, like, has nothing to do with what you had in mind. So I don't know. The areas of knowledge are. [00:59:47] Speaker A: Okay, this is the 3D6 down the line, sir, of this game. [00:59:52] Speaker B: It is, it is, it is. [00:59:54] Speaker A: The roll and find out, sir, is totally the role, baby. [01:00:02] Speaker B: Including. You're rolling up your awesome agent and you come up with agriculture and political Science. Now, political science might work. I don't like it. Go on. [01:00:14] Speaker A: There's a value for each. They range from 51 to 130 if you do the math. So this goes into the first episode that we did on this where you'd have some things that were above 100 in a percentile system. [01:00:27] Speaker B: Oh, you're still talking about areas of knowledge. See, when I said move on, I meant like, move on. [01:00:31] Speaker A: Sorry. We will move on from a. Okay. [01:00:33] Speaker B: Good lord. [01:00:35] Speaker A: Get into the Bureau classification. This is the class. We finally get to the class A. Shocker. It's a class system, kind of. Yeah. [01:00:43] Speaker B: Under the covers. Yeah. [01:00:44] Speaker A: Do you want to go into classes? [01:00:47] Speaker B: I'll do it briefly. And we talked about this. We touched on it last week as well. Investigation, confiscation, assassination. Each of them have different experience points, levels that they're going after. There's different tables, different titles. I've never, never really liked the generic titles that go with these things. I don't know how you feel about those. How you know every. Like. Like, for example, when you're an investigator, you're level one, you're an informer, then you become a scout and you become a tail and you become an examiner. I think we may have touched on this last week as well. Just. I don't know. It's okay. This is clearly a DND style kind of, you know, level up sort of thing that comes kind of comes into the game the one way, the one thing I do like. And again, we don't have to go into it because we did cover it last week. The way that each class earns experience is different and it's tied to that mission table that we went into in some detail last week. So I like that part of it. I don't know. What do you think about the bureau classifications? [01:01:47] Speaker A: It was okay. I mean assassination or investigation eating 2,000 experience points where the other two classes are like 400 and 500. Like you could, you know, if you wanted to quote, unquote, level up quicker, you know, as long as the mission was based around some of those details, you would do that. So we'd always pick like an assassination. That sounds good because I'll get up and level quicker. Like I don't know. And also note that there's Section one, Section two, Section three, Section four. Right. Section two, investigation. Section three, confiscation. Mimicking like a bureau section. Section one is administration. And that is reserved because the GM is the administrator. [01:02:32] Speaker B: I'm just not noticing right now the nods to like Bond as well because the section for assassination is double O. So it goes section 12300. And I also hadn't picked up. I thought the Assassination Bureau was the one who required more experience. Investigation requires 2000 to hit the second level and it's 400. Yeah. If you're a confiscator to be a pilferer instead of a shoplifter. Not on board with that. If you want to be a pilferer instead of a shop lifter, you only need 400. Yeah. I don't know. It's messy. It's not ideal. It's not something I would use. [01:03:12] Speaker A: I guess what I would say starting money. Should we get to that? Are you good with bureaus? [01:03:19] Speaker B: I'll go. I'm totally good with bureau's on money. I mean, I'll say this. You'll hear us. There'll be a steady refrain as you go through these games. A lot of spy games turn gear and the ability to requisition it into a buying exercise with cash and I don't get it. I understand you want to have some of that for if you're playing the. The underbelly version of this where you are the. You know, you're fighting against the government or whatever, and you're the underground and you have to find your equipment. But if you are an agent working for the CIA or for a big agency, there's other ways to requisition the gear than, you know, they tie it to. Like in this game, they say until you're level four, you're not going to get good stuff. You have to pay for it. And it's just. It never strikes me the right way for. At least for like very traditional kinds of spy games. So, yep, there are gear tables, they have weights and they have costs and all that sort of stuff. I don't know what. What was your takeaway from the gear and the starting money and all that? [01:04:17] Speaker A: I thought it was funny about the level four. Like it. The. What Harrigan's talking about is if you get a special item, like a tie tack that shoots out a dart, that's a special gear item. Also with the gear in the book, it's not retail. Like there's a. Well, they're listed as retail, but the people working for the agency would get them at cheaper, reduced cost or something along those lines, like, I don't know. But anyways, if it's a special item or special equipment, like, you know, the special items Q section would give you. If there's a cost associated with it, you have to pick up the cost as an agent until you reach fourth level, and then they'll give it to you. [01:04:57] Speaker B: Man. Man. Hey, Agent. Oh, five. Get over here. I got one of them cigarette rocket launches. I got it at cost, but for you, 800 bucks. That's the best I can do. I don't. I. I don't love it. I just don't. [01:05:13] Speaker A: Yeah, moving on. [01:05:16] Speaker B: I think that's close to the end of character generation, right? [01:05:19] Speaker A: It is, that's. And then it's like. Then add your name, gender. You would have had to pick because your height. But name, age, or. I'm sorry, name, weight, country of origin. [01:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's the stuff that gets. Gets tables in the later book, all [01:05:38] Speaker A: that stuff and the agency that you actually work for, which is a. There's a list of them in Top Secret. You could. And they're pretty cool. You can go through and go, oh, shoot, I never even knew that existed. [01:05:48] Speaker B: I forget where I was reading it. But there was one neat thing that basically said, work with your GM on some of that sort of stuff. But it also mentioned the GM may determine it. In other words, the GM may Say you work for this agency, right? [01:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:00] Speaker B: Which is not that different than the GM just putting on the table, here's the game I want to run. Right. Not that different. Yeah. [01:06:06] Speaker A: Well, that wraps up character generation. [01:06:10] Speaker B: It does. And it took us maybe a little longer than we were planning to go through it. Right. Because. And people should understand, we could have gone on at length about some other things, but in the interest of, like, listeners, time of our time, maybe we wrap the show here, Sean. [01:06:30] Speaker A: That's right. If it's. If you're here and I'm here, that would make it our time, Mr. Hand. Yeah. This is a good place to wrap up. And then we'll go into combat on the next episode, as well as anything else that we want to cover. That would get to, like, that hour mark, I think would be good. [01:06:48] Speaker B: Yeah. I think one. One more show about the game itself, and then I think, Sean, you're going to run a little vignette. Right. [01:06:54] Speaker A: Which gives me another week to prep for that vignette and me a week [01:07:00] Speaker B: to prepare to play. [01:07:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Roll a character. [01:07:03] Speaker B: Oh, my God, I forgot about that. [01:07:05] Speaker A: I was going to do pre gens, and Harrigan's like, pre gens. What? You know, I said, well, yeah, I mean, we're gonna. I don't know if it'll be just you and I or if we need another player. [01:07:15] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no. Okay, hang on. You misunderstood me. [01:07:17] Speaker A: I did. [01:07:18] Speaker B: Hang on. [01:07:18] Speaker A: Maybe I did. [01:07:19] Speaker B: Hang on. So we have some show notes, folks. And in those future show notes, I read something where Sean was like, I'll run the vignette. I'll create pregens. And I was like, sean, you're gonna. You're gonna create all the pretends. Hopefully. Hopefully you might. You will go get some pregens, because I think there are dossiers of characters from the early 80s that are out there that TSR published. I think there are. He's looking at me like he doesn't believe me. My point is, I was not suggesting I'm going to make a character. [01:07:50] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [01:07:52] Speaker B: Not what I was suggesting. I mean, I kind of. I'll make a character. [01:07:57] Speaker A: It's fine. It's up to you. [01:08:00] Speaker B: I will totally make a character. Totally. So we got two weeks to do that instead of one, which is good. Right. So next. Next week, we'll return to finish off the rule part we want to talk about. And the combat. There's some stuff to talk about in the combat system for certain. Yeah. [01:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:18] Speaker B: All right. What else we got, Sean? [01:08:20] Speaker A: I think that's it. For this episode of Go Bag. So keep your Go bag packed, your cover story tight and your dice locked and loaded. This has been Go Bag. Want more of Sean and Harrigan? You can find Sean at YouTube.com PGShawn where he streams every Saturday at 8am Central Time. You can find more of Harrigan's RPG musings at harriganshearth.substack.com Links in the show Notes the following operatives have supported this mission Huskarl Vornak, Aaron Raila, Michael O', Holland, Mr. White 20 Joe Swick, Merkle Froehlich, Tony Sugarloaf, Baker, Laramie Wall, Orchis Dorcas, Larry Hollis, Jason Weitzel, Remy Billodeau, Phil McClory, Andy Hall, Ryan West, Nelson Bispo, Roger French, Eileen Barnes, Wayne Peacock Old School DM Jeff Walken, Yorkus Rex, Jason Hobbs, Crystal Egstad, Eric Avia, Chad Lehman, Jim Ingram, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Keneally, Salt Heart, Kelly Ness, Tad Lechman, Matthew Catron, Curtis Takahashi, Shannon Olson, Kristen McLean, Jake at FadedQuil Gaming Tess Trekkie, Kelly Ness, Glenn Seal, Brian Rumble Nubis, Christopher Lang, Heptalima, Brian Kurtz, Chris Shore, Nicholas Abruzzo, Angela Murray and Tim Jensen. Thank you operatives. Your support is greatly appreciated. [01:09:48] Speaker B: It.