TSR's Top Secret - Overview

[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode of Go Bag, we go over death in Berlin, a solo RPG shotgun scenario, generator for Delta Green, and a website that has a special place in my heart. Stay tuned for our first shot at an overview at TSR's top secret. Hit it. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Strap in, operatives. This is Go Bag, your all access pass to modern day RPGs loaded with bullets, backstories, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And here are your mission leaders, Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:36] Speaker A: Welcome to Go Bag Tabletop RPG podcast. I'm Sean. [00:00:42] Speaker B: And I'm Harrigan. Hey, everybody. [00:00:46] Speaker A: Today we talk about Top Secret, the role playing game [00:00:53] Speaker B: classic from tsr. [00:00:54] Speaker A: You're excited. I could tell. [00:00:57] Speaker B: Well, yes, I am. We'll get into it. We'll get into it. I do have some comments. I also think right up the top, Sean, incredible achievement in role playing games because of when it happened. Like, there was nothing like it beforehand. But we'll get into all that. So, yeah, let's. Well, in fact, you'll probably get into this, and we haven't even talked about what each other have been up to yet, but this may result in multiple episodes of a little bit of a dive on this game, right? Yeah. [00:01:27] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Should we get into it? Should we start getting into the segments? Should we get into Sit Rep? Let's get into Sit Rep, right? Give me the Sit Rep. Sit Rep. I'm, like, wondering if I need to change the title of the segment very early, but I'm finding, like, not as many quote unquote events as much as links and help for resources. So maybe I. Who knows? I don't know. [00:01:58] Speaker B: I mean, situational report is pretty broad. It can cover a variety of different things. True. [00:02:04] Speaker A: I have a few this week that I wanted to bring to people's attentions. One first one, Death in Berlin, which is a solo RPG rulebook. I find that there are. There's a few solo RPGs, obviously. We featured one on our first episode, so this one is not to be mistaken. From Critical Hit llc. Immerse yourself in the largest nest of spies of the 20th century in the middle of the Cold War. Unravel conspiracies on behalf of the intelligence service you work for out of patriotism or just personal ambition in this solo RPG game. All you need is a deck of cards, a set of polyhedral dice in your imagination, and I got to say, it looks pretty cool. It's from Drum. I can't say you're. It's a Mioso from. From Neoludis. [00:03:10] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I would call him Jerome Mioso. [00:03:13] Speaker A: I would say, in America. That's the spelling in the reference. [00:03:17] Speaker B: Yes, but there's a few accents going on in it. [00:03:19] Speaker A: Yes, there are. So I love the picture of him wearing a Chicago Cubs, and that's hilarious. [00:03:23] Speaker B: Jerome. Yeah. [00:03:25] Speaker A: Yes. But I wanted to bring that up and. And thought that was worthy to put out there. We'll have a link. [00:03:30] Speaker B: Looks cool. [00:03:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I thought the production was pretty interesting. Like, there's a layout of the cards, like in a pyramid. And again, solo RPGs. I am intrigued, but it's not. [00:03:42] Speaker B: I. You know what? I think if I had enough time in my life, I'd be all over them, but I just. Oh, man. I gotta prioritize what I do in my hobby, you know, my cycles that are available for. For me, so I don't know. All right, I gotta. I got a test for you. If you're looking at that. That web page to per Death in Berlin. What kind of pistol is that, Sean? This is a. Spies have to be able to recognize the equipment, and in this case, it's the equipment of the opposing side. I'll give you a hint. What is that? [00:04:11] Speaker A: Was that a Ruger? [00:04:13] Speaker B: That is a Makarov. [00:04:14] Speaker A: A Makarov? [00:04:15] Speaker B: That is a small Russian automatic. Yeah. [00:04:18] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Would not have guessed Russian. [00:04:21] Speaker B: Yep. [00:04:21] Speaker A: I'm bad at guns. [00:04:23] Speaker B: We'll fix that. [00:04:24] Speaker A: Okay. [00:04:24] Speaker B: It's okay. Got a whole. We got a whole podcast ahead of us. We'll fix that. I'll never stop. [00:04:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:30] Speaker B: I will never stop harping on it. Oh, do you know what that is [00:04:35] Speaker A: something to look forward to, I'm sure, for. [00:04:38] Speaker B: For me. [00:04:39] Speaker A: Not for you. Yes. [00:04:40] Speaker B: Not for anybody. Look at Harry. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Gonna have so much fun talking about this. [00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:45] Speaker A: Yes. [00:04:46] Speaker B: Yes. I will admit that as far as solo games goes, this one interests me a lot more than, like, a dungeon Delver. Like, I'm. I may try to roll this out. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it does look interesting. And, I mean, the cards are always used for prompts. Not always, but a lot of them are used with, you know, the cards that. For prompts. But the way I think just a. There was a screenshot of how we had a, you know, piece of paper with a diagram of where to lay the cards out. I have to imagine it's just maybe more than suits and numbers to generate journaling prompts, if you will, which is pretty common in the solo RPG space, is my understanding, so. [00:05:22] Speaker B: Yep. Yep. At the risk of taking too much time on this particular game, I have a thought as well on solo games. I have discovered recently, I just Played like a, like a day long, you know, board game day with some old friends. And we used to do this regularly. And one of the games we played was. It was a two player, like a duet style game, cooperative. And there's three of us. And we had pretty good. A pretty good time with three of us playing the two player game in a way. And to link it to this, I wonder if you could. If a couple of people could sit with a solo game and discuss it as it goes and have a pretty good time actually following the prompts and capturing it all. It doesn't necessarily have to be just the one person doing it, I guess, is what I would say. [00:06:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I would agree. I would hope that it would be. That would be kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So go and check it out if you're. If you're so inclined. The next one I have is the Delta Green shotgun Shotgun scenario generator, which I did not know existed. Something I would have waited until we got into more on Delta Green, which would probably be in a later season, which will probably like Delta Green to death. But I couldn't help myself. But maybe pull this up and let people know a little bit about it. [00:06:38] Speaker B: So I'll tell you what, when we're, when we're. When we're successful enough, Sean, to hire like a note taker during our little podcast here, they should take notes around stuff like this. Like I want to remember. Let's revisit this when we get it to Delta Green because I had no idea this existed. [00:06:53] Speaker A: I know. Same here. [00:06:56] Speaker B: So is it a. Does it choose from existing shotgun scenarios or does it allow you to generate like lightweight Delta Green missions, Operas. [00:07:04] Speaker A: It's tables, obviously. And it says table to generate a shotgun. Yeah. So you can just literally hit a roll and it does at Mad Lib style, where it falls in the blue. [00:07:20] Speaker B: It's Mad Libs. I see it now. Yeah. [00:07:22] Speaker A: And literally in the field that you would ask somebody the Mad Lib. Right. Give me a ver. Give me a known. You know, it has buttons where you could click the button to roll location, target type objective. [00:07:35] Speaker B: Agents have been ordered to roll on town type to roll on objective, a target roll on target type, the only way they can, etc. Yeah, I like it. [00:07:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I did a search for specifically top secret resources and I gotta say there's not a lot. [00:07:53] Speaker B: And you failed and found this. [00:07:55] Speaker A: And found this one. I think might have been the same search. I don't know. But yeah, it was. So I thought it was interesting I [00:08:02] Speaker B: have a really slow moving Delta Green duet, like a one player play by post game that we've been at. We've been trying to start for like months and years kind of thing. This one other guy that I like to write with, like to play with. I might use this to, to see what I can come up with. Something simple. I think you know my perspective. When we get to Delta Green it'll come out more. But I also like like lightweight Delta Green scenarios that don't have too much packed into them. So the opposite of the impossible landscapes thing where like your mission is to go to the trunk of a parked car in an airport and remove whatever's there and put it in a green box and that's the entire mission and you can kind of spin off of it from there. This would play really well into that I think. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it would definitely lend itself more to that style of running a scenario. But for sure. And I like. Yeah, I've talked about that too in in other areas and streams. Like part of me is, you know, when you prep too much versus not and then doing it from something of a reference being a third party published scenario. I have, I don't know why, but I gravitate to those published adventures. But I also also know that if I just had something like this or a shotgun scenario that's minimalistic and slim down I would probably it cut the chains that I have that binds me to that third party. But I gotta look it up. [00:09:28] Speaker B: They are chains brother. They really are. [00:09:30] Speaker A: They are. They are really. It's a, it's a habit. It's a weird habit thing. It's like a dependency man. I don't know what it is. [00:09:37] Speaker B: I don't want to poo poo it too much because those are classic like you know, masks of Nair, Laphotep and Orient Express and like you know, all those massive multi session campaigns. Many multi session are classics for me. It's like you like I don't want to be looking up these specific names of people that came from session two and it's session 20 and when you get to the new city there's 20 different NPCs that are now available to interact with. I've always been just more of a slightly lighter weight guy. You know, we could look at maybe could even maybe have him on the show at some point or something. I know that digital hobbit Mirko Froehlich on in his travels for taking like outgunned and outgunned adventures type sessions and settings. He's gone from like the published stuff that is lots of detail to read and lots of like pathways to follow to more of a Miro board kind of thing where who are the main players, what are the locations I'm interested in, what's happening, what are the or some set pieces that might occur and you're able to do a bit more mixing and matching in real time. And I think the same thing is true for spy games, covert action type things. It might be a cool conversation we could have with him because I know he's had kind of a journey around it and has landed on kind of a workflow but that he likes for that kind of thing. [00:10:52] Speaker A: It's interesting. I, I it I want to do that yet I get pulled back into bat. Like I don't. It's not a bad habit, it's just, it's comfort for me but I don't think I run a better game. [00:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah. I've also noticed as I you know as we have started this podcast and I've looked at different games and like the adventures that are available for them like covert ops and those sorts of things. They're all pretty traditional. These are pretty traditional approaches to writing adventures. Right. [00:11:22] Speaker A: For sure. [00:11:23] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll get, we'll get to some of that. Maybe we'll get to like adventure design in one of these. One of the future podcasts. [00:11:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I know it's on the, on the list. [00:11:31] Speaker B: Yep. [00:11:33] Speaker A: The last one I wanted to bring up Modus Operandi, the website. This thing has been around for years. I have a special place in my heart for this website. I came across it years and years and years ago because they used the same web software portal, PHP based portal that I used at one time. Now it's since evolved and, and it happened to be spycraft oriented like RPG espionage, covert ops based game. And I had followed Dave McAllister as the webmaster and owner of it and had been nominated for like five any awards because it was like the go to website for anything espionage or covert ops RPG related. And I've lost touch with Dave. I think I'm actually connected to him on LinkedIn of all places honestly. Yeah. So in the Google plus days very tuned into that because I would bounce things off of him as far as how the website was laid out and customized. Well he has changed things and he's been very is a big obviously an espionage fan and RPG fan. I just hit him up on Mastodon of all places because I couldn't find a way to contact him on Modus Operandi but if you've played an espionage tabletop role playing game in a long time, my guess is you might have stumbled across Modus Operandi. He has the different. [00:13:09] Speaker B: So hang on, let me, let me interrupt you. [00:13:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:11] Speaker B: So you had, you had to use a little known dusty old network that no one's on to find the guy who's behind the modus operandis. It's very apropos. It's right in there, man. Right over the plate, I suppose. [00:13:24] Speaker A: I mean, kinda, I guess. [00:13:27] Speaker B: Mastodon. Yeah. [00:13:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I mean, how do I drop this person? How do I drop Dave a link and say, hey man, we're doing this one, this cool podcast. Thinking of bonus, you know, thinking of Mo. Right. [00:13:37] Speaker B: Just an FYI, is there nothing on his. On the page itself, which I'm looking at right now and which looks really cool. [00:13:43] Speaker A: At the bottom there is links to some socials which include Mastodon. [00:13:48] Speaker B: Okay. [00:13:49] Speaker A: It's all coming together. Yep. So I put it out there because he did create his own game as well called Modus Operandi, which we have on the list to talk about it, which is OSC based espionage game. [00:14:05] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:14:06] Speaker A: That he did himself. Yeah. [00:14:07] Speaker B: So. [00:14:08] Speaker A: But he comes from, you know, James Bond and Top Secret himself. You know, he's not much, much younger or older than the two of us, but he has also done other things [00:14:19] Speaker B: like D and D. All the classics are here. I'm looking at the site. Yeah. James Bond, 007, mercenary spies, private eyes, spycraft. Top secret. Top secret. Si. Covered ops. Nice. Black Agents, the Savage Worlds, Agents of Oblivion. Leia. He's got it all here. I have never seen this site. I'm going to dig into it. [00:14:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's. He hasn't touched it in a while. I think some of the posts that are out there that, you know, they're dated 2019 and he's. He's gone on to create his own kind of game company and publishing company and he has a presence on Drive Thru and he probably has some things for modus out there, but I'm guessing that much of. I think he used to like blog pretty frequently and talk about. Put out blog entries and different weapons tables and all kinds of things that you do when you are blogging and have a website that is about a particular topic like espionage, RPGs and it was. I think it's been out there. I don't want to say before podcasting, but it's been out there a long time. So. [00:15:18] Speaker B: Nice. Nice find. [00:15:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. So we'll have that. That wraps up sit rep. Let's get into encrypted comms, which I don't think we have anything this week, so I don't know if we need to get into that. Actually, I'm still trying to get down the workflow a little bit, so all is quiet. [00:15:37] Speaker B: I've been wondering if my wireless. That's still working, if things are encrypted too. [00:15:42] Speaker A: Well, just not seeing them being intercepted. That's the problem. [00:15:46] Speaker B: That's right. A little bit worried. What Sean's getting at is that we're still kind of in pre release mode largely, so we haven't got a lot [00:15:53] Speaker A: of listener calls and feedback as of this recording. To Harrigan's point, like, the first episode of the podcast has not dropped to the public yet. [00:16:04] Speaker B: So. Yep. So. So shocker. No one has contacted us. [00:16:08] Speaker A: Once it does, we'll be inundated with emails and voicemails. It'll be crazy. We'll have to turn people away. [00:16:16] Speaker B: We should maybe have a nice quiet moment of silence right now to appreciate how quiet it is. [00:16:22] Speaker A: The calm. The. Before the storm. [00:16:24] Speaker B: Yes, it's wonderful. You're right. We don't have anything this week. So let's keep moving. [00:16:29] Speaker A: Let's get into mission brief. [00:16:32] Speaker B: Have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:16:36] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. [00:16:39] Speaker B: Top secret. [00:16:40] Speaker A: The one that kicked it off. [00:16:43] Speaker B: The first crazy. [00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. I had mentioned in the pilot first episode how it was one of my first RPGs I ever played. Aside from d. D. Advanced. Advanced DND when he. I don't know. To sum up this. I don't know how we played it. [00:17:11] Speaker B: Cut to the chase, man. [00:17:13] Speaker A: Spoilers. Yeah, I have it right here. I have it right here. [00:17:17] Speaker B: I have a theory. I have a. He's holding it up, folks. I have a theory as to how you played it, I'm sure. Let me ask you this. Who ran it for you? [00:17:26] Speaker A: I think it started with a friend of mine. I think it was. That is a really good question. I don't remember the first administrator. [00:17:37] Speaker B: So I asked for a reason. Whoever the administrator was went through some pain and suffering to get this to the table. Like, there may have been four or five people around the table that are like, this is great. What a fantastic spy game. It's different than D and D. The administrator across the table is like twitching. You know what I had to go through to actually be able to run this? All right, I digress and I'm jumping ahead here. Let's talk about the history, the year and the author. Because I think you know a little bit more about that than I do. And in general, you're going to run point here. I think you played this game, you've done a bit more research on the history. So dive in. Sean, tell us more about like the background and how it came to TSR and all that stuff. [00:18:25] Speaker A: I take you back back to 1980, the height of the Cold War. Espionage everywhere in pop culture. Bond, Ludlam. We mentioned. I don't even think we mentioned Robert Ludlum, John Le Carre. And then TSR is looking to expand beyond just fantasy. And so the origins of Top Secret come about by an individual. So that's Merle Rasmussen. It's not Rasmussen. It's Rasmussen. [00:18:59] Speaker B: Hold it up. I see it. And that is. We'll get to this. That is the second edition of the game from 81, right? [00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:08] Speaker B: That you're holding up. Yeah, yeah. Pretty cool. [00:19:12] Speaker A: I've met Merle and very friendly gentleman and he'll often find him. He's been game at gamehole Con. And Gary Con still lives in Iowa. That's where he was when he came up with Top Secret. He mailed his manuscript in 1977. In 1978, that early. And Gygax handed it to the editor, Alan Hammock. And Alan is often, you can often find him at Gamehole Con and Gary Khan as well, who shepherded it into print. And Alan was the editor. And he's actually in the front of this, the rule book as a forward in the inside cover. You know, he has a forward, talks about it. It says editor of Top Secret role playing game. January 14th, 1980. It was dated. [00:20:03] Speaker B: So one thing that that means since it came out in 80, it's really all this work. You mentioned already that the first manuscript went in 77. 78. All the work is actually in the late 70s by the time, you know, it debuted in 80. But all the art, all the design work was all happening in 78, 79, I think. Right, right. Yeah. [00:20:23] Speaker A: Now for some reason I came across a reference where he was working or did the original draft in a classified environment while doing security work. But I don't know if that's actually accurate. [00:20:34] Speaker B: I've not heard that. [00:20:35] Speaker A: Yeah, because I think he was actually a student at the a university in Iowa. Alan recalled in interviews that the original manuscript was huge. It needed major editing and certainly described it as a. A labor of love and, and, but very raw in its content and approach. So the original just, you know, to kind of give You a context around it. It's a 62 page rule book. It's not very thick but as Harrigan and I will touch on, it's dense. [00:21:08] Speaker B: Don't be fooled everyone. These are 62 powerful pages. [00:21:13] Speaker A: Lots of text, lots of tables. [00:21:15] Speaker B: Yes, yeah, yeah. In fact in 1981 there was no text left for the rest of the industry. So nothing was published. It was all used in this one book. [00:21:25] Speaker A: They had to bank a lot of it for getting into D and D. But continuing on TSR at the time just to give everybody a context that some of you might know about the history and maybe not be aware. So and D started to start it exploding. TSR was experimenting with genres like Boot Hill for westerns and Gamma World for science fiction. So they were, you know, why espionage and so TSR thought spies and assassins was a hot genre and wanted in to that space. [00:21:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually they were first to the table with this stuff. You know, we're not going to have time to get into the deep history of the 70s, you know, RPG scene. But Traveler being one of, not the first, but one of the first main sci fi games games. The western games are coming like there's a variety of games that are popping up in the 70s. But as far as I know, this is the very first espionage cover op style game that would not last very long. And one of the things I want to talk about today, Sean, is the incredible evolution of publishing and of the sophistication of the way that the games are portrayed. Like look at that book we're talking about right now, the 62 page. And this is the second edition that I think we both have. Right. I just have the PDF, you have the real deal. You know, it'll be no surprise this is some sort of like copy that we were able to get a hold of because the game is not available in PDF for you can't purchase it anywhere. So we've got a, we've got somebody made a copy by taking pictures or scans type of thing. Long story short, it goes rapidly from the 1980 version of Top Secret to the 81 second edition. Like you know, they're making corrections and I, I suspect they're fixing typos and all sorts of stuff. Probably it's practically guerrilla publishing. But as soon as 1983 you've got two big competitors in the market. You got James Bond 007 from Victory Games and then you have the Flying Buffalo game, Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes, both of which are more, in my opinion, a lot more sophisticated. In terms of the layout, the system design, the thinking around it. So credit to Merle for taking the first crack at this. It's a bit of a mess, frankly, in terms of how it's portrayed, how it's laid out. There's loads of good ideas, and the part that's most impressive to me is that these ideas were like. Like he's not relying on any other game to pull this stuff together. James Bond clearly takes big chunks of Top Secret and reworks them. I think it does a better job with them. But Rasmussen is the one who came up with the ideas. Right. So it's. It's a pretty impressive piece of work, really. [00:23:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. I mean, give credit where credit's due, even though we may sound like we're gonna start to. To bash it, but it does. It did set the tone. And frankly, even with just modern game design, much of it has been built upon prior additions, prior releases of things, and it's just gotten better over time as people better understand the landscape and what makes sense and what they're trying to convey in role playing game design. But I gotta tell you, before we get even further beyond this, in my humble opinion, I will die on this hill. Best cover of any role playing game for tone and what you are wanting to get into. Like when you see the COVID of Top Secret, the original, this is it. I don't even. James Bond, Mercenary spies, private eyes, opera, like, maybe Operators is pretty cool, but this is the best. And remember, they didn't have like desktop publishing really well in the 80s. Like, a lot of the stuff was if you're gonna put a picture in a publication and you finally, you got the picture and you cut it out and pasted it into some weird typed document of some kind. Like, I don't know if that's how they did it or not, but it was pretty rudimentary. And dude, you see this thing on the shelf and you're like, yeah, man, that's. I want a gun with foreign currencies, different passports, airline tickets to crazy exotic places. Yeah, I want to be that player character. [00:25:31] Speaker B: I agree. And there's an awful lot of games that pull from it for the COVID or like the, you know, the. The face of whatever espionage game they've done, which includes the passports and the money and the. All right, Sean, you know, I'm going to ask what kind of pistols on the front of Top Secret, 1981, second edition. [00:25:50] Speaker A: Well, it says on it, so I could actually read it right off the gun. It's a Beretta. [00:25:54] Speaker B: Yes, it is, [00:25:57] Speaker A: but a small caliber. [00:25:58] Speaker B: I think it's an 80 series, like a cheetah or something like that. So it's like a. Either a.32 or a.381 or the other. [00:26:04] Speaker A: It's a Pietro Beretta, to be exact. That's what it says. You're gonna ask me every gun question. Yes, you are. Maybe. [00:26:16] Speaker B: I, I agree with you. Like, I think it's a seminal like land, landmark, watershed moment kind of product. It birthed a whole part of the genre that didn't exist before. And the way the information is packaged and conveyed is, you know, needs work and got and quite frankly, gut work over the course of its history. One of the. I think the issues it has that is that even though they took Merle's gigantic document and they cut it down to size, it just. It's stream of consciousness. It doesn't read very well. And that's why like 81, there's a second edition and then there's a compendium that comes out later. Then they revamp it in Top Secret Si later. So it's, it's continually getting work. And I think a big part of that is that the other games that came on the market applied a lot of pressure. And in fact the James Bond game took the mantle of the most popular spy game away from it. And it sold like gangbusters for the. It was only published for I think, three or three and a half years, something like that. 83 to like 86 or seven. [00:27:13] Speaker A: By victory games. [00:27:14] Speaker B: By Victory Games, which is. Was formed out of SPI's demise. So same. Some of the same designers, so hardcore game designers designed that game, which is why it reads better and is just more cohesive than Top secret is where I think Merle was more of a labor of love kind of thing. Right. Like nothing like this exists. So let's create it out of whole cloth. And that's really hard to do. Really hard to do. [00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I think what. What would happen and as we will probably see maybe in part two of this is where do you stop certain things or. [00:27:49] Speaker B: Oh yeah, oh yeah, right, right. [00:27:52] Speaker A: It's. You got to do this. Well then if you do that, then you got to do this. [00:27:57] Speaker B: And then if I, If I have wrestling hand to hand rules, maybe I should have wrestling rules. And if I have wrestling rules, maybe there should be some rules that are specific to who has possession of an object we are fighting over. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Yes, possession, hand to hand, possession, combat. [00:28:12] Speaker B: And they're all separate tables. [00:28:13] Speaker A: It is A. [00:28:14] Speaker B: It is a kind of a riot. Yes, it's kind of a riot. [00:28:16] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:17] Speaker B: You just spilled some beans though. We are going to have like a second, I guess we said we might cover. Did we say that we're going to cover this over multiple sessions? [00:28:24] Speaker A: I think we have to. [00:28:25] Speaker B: In episode two, we'll get much deeper into the mechanics themselves. We're not going to go page by page or anything like that because it would take us. These are dense pages as we met, as you mentioned, but today we're going to try to keep it short. Right. [00:28:36] Speaker A: I know you're going to love this. For reference. For reference, how many pages did I say this was? 62. [00:28:43] Speaker B: 62, I think is what you said. [00:28:45] Speaker A: 62. And I think a couple are rip. You can rip out in the back. Just. I didn't know. You didn't know this. Oh, there are some perforated ones in the back and one that is yanked out of mind probably is the character sheet and there are a couple others. One, two back to back. That is the weapons chart that are. That is perforated in the back. So you can pull out and 101 tables. [00:29:14] Speaker B: Oh, they're referenced back there. [00:29:16] Speaker A: No, no, I mean 101 tables in this entire book and it's 62 pages long. [00:29:22] Speaker B: I'm asking if you counted them or is there an index in the back that had like a table? [00:29:26] Speaker A: I counted them. [00:29:27] Speaker B: You counted them? You poor vestard. [00:29:30] Speaker A: I counted them. I counted them. [00:29:32] Speaker B: So I think Even though it's 62 pages, there's some sort of hypergeometry or non Euclidean geometry at work to pack more information into those 62 pages than is usually possible. Something's going on because there's so much in the 62 pages, it's rare. You're right. I mean, I mean it's the size of like a magazine or a. You know what I mean? It's not that big. And it's rare to sit down and open that and go, oh, whoa, I'll never get through this in one sitting. [00:30:00] Speaker A: Art. The art in the book. There is art in the book, but the art is black and white and it's, you know, they're, you know, in modern pixel day, maybe 400 by 400 or like a couple inches by an [00:30:14] Speaker B: inch, relatively small art pieces. You know what, let's do this. Let's. Let's dive into the art just for a second. It's, you know, so we can kind of COVID check that box. Because I do want to talk about the art in These various games. This is the TSR house engine. You know, it's all those artists that people know and. And many love. Jeff D, Greg Fleming, David laforce, Errol Otis, Jim Roslov, Davis Owen iii. And while she's not credited as an artist, she's got art in here. Darlene is also in here, and in fact, her pieces are, like, the best. So for anybody who has this 81 version of the game, check out the scuba scene on page 35. Check out the woman on page 55. She looks like she's based on, like, Diana Rigg to me. And, man, they're like really good pieces of art. Otherwise, I would describe it as kind of a mix. Sean. A lot of it's kind of spot art, and it's smaller on the page. Like you mentioned, there's some great pieces and there's some pieces that look a lot like 1980 TSR house engine art, which some people really like and some people don't love so much. All right, do we. Do we want to do the game itself? At a glance, I think the next section we wanted to dive into was the actual, you know, without going into the gory detail, the. The engine mechanics. [00:31:27] Speaker A: I think so. I think we can. Yes. [00:31:31] Speaker B: At its heart, it's a percentile dice system. It's very much look up. You roll the dice and look up the result in a table, and it's usually leading you to, like, a code, and then you have to go to a list to determine what the code means, which might then send you to another table. So, you know, again, without getting way into it. But there. There is that level. It's a game of its time, like, for sure, right? It has. It has kind of some not quite traditional attributes. It changes up the. The DND attributes a little bit. And again, we'll get to this maybe in the next episode, but I will say that. Does it need charm, courage and willpower? Like, there's some significant overlap in courage and willpower? Maybe. And I don't. I don't know. [00:32:14] Speaker A: We'll. [00:32:14] Speaker B: We'll unpack some of that. It's one of the. One of these games as well in the 80s where they get deep into what I would call derived statistics or attributes, what are called in this game, secondary personal traits, offense, defense or offense, deception, evasion, etc. But there's also tertiary personal traits that are based on both the primary and the secondary. So there's multiple levels packed in here. This is fascinating stuff that as we go through our podcast, you'll see that this thinking pervades the 80s and in the 90s it continues to a degree. But the 90s starts to see some games that specifically rail against this. Fudge being the one that's foremost in my mind, where it basically says, stop, stop, stop. The way you are putting all these attributes together, you are creating dump stats and you are creating overpowered stats. So if you dump something into. If you, if you jack your dexterity, your dexterity factors into eight different formulas and your health doesn't factor into any or your charm or whatever. Right. So what Fudge does is it unhooks everything and says if you want to be good at something, you just have to put points in it. I don't care if it's based on anything or something should influence it. If you think being tall and strong should influence how good you are at hand to hand combat, then give yourself a good hand to hand combat score. You're not going to get anything free from being tall and strong. Top Secret is the opposite of that. These initial attributes drive tons throughout the game. How good you are, it's your skills. There's a whole skill section. What do you want to add about sort of the, the basics of this? He's flipping through right now, folks. I can hear the pages going. [00:33:54] Speaker A: Yes to all those. I mean there's, there's literally math like formulas in here. It's like algebra. If you look at payment on page 18, payment equals a times H times [00:34:09] Speaker B: D. I love this 1. [00:34:10] Speaker A: P +B in order of operation. [00:34:15] Speaker B: And one of those is the amount of money. Like. Yeah. [00:34:19] Speaker A: So. Yep. Yeah. [00:34:20] Speaker B: Do you have the references on the page for what those letters mean? [00:34:24] Speaker A: Yes, I do. [00:34:25] Speaker B: Go ahead and give us a couple because this is what I was talking about. [00:34:27] Speaker A: So A is the agents level. [00:34:29] Speaker B: Yep. [00:34:29] Speaker A: D is the human targets level. Notice it says human because there's animals too. [00:34:36] Speaker B: And the animals are actually treated quite differently in this game. [00:34:38] Speaker A: That's right. I forgot about animals. Silly me. D is the result of a ten sided die roll and then P is the base mission payment and b is the $25 Bureau bonus if applicable. Dude, I'm telling you, it's this. [00:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah. This logic, if you can call it that, this logic pervades. Right. [00:35:06] Speaker A: The other thing that I also wanted to mention was when we did the first episode, like, hey, these are some of the mechanics that we want to see in a tabletop role playing game that does espionage. And one of the things that you had specifically asked about was hero fortune or fame points. [00:35:23] Speaker B: Yep. [00:35:24] Speaker A: And in Top Secret it Does have Fortune. [00:35:27] Speaker B: They're optional. [00:35:28] Speaker A: Is it optional? [00:35:30] Speaker B: They're optional at the back. [00:35:31] Speaker A: I thought it was a part of the deal. We. I. But are you sure it was optional? [00:35:38] Speaker B: It is in the book version that I have. [00:35:40] Speaker A: Okay. The reason I bring that up because I remember distinctly. Harrigan. This is something of a bit of a callback, if you will. [00:35:47] Speaker B: Okay. [00:35:48] Speaker A: I remember specific times that we as a character, as players would get together to determine who had. It is Fortune points. Right. I'm pretty sure it's. [00:35:59] Speaker B: So you want to take a minute and kind of go into it. Page. Look at page 45. [00:36:02] Speaker A: Okay. [00:36:03] Speaker B: And you will see optional rules. The very first one is Fame and Fortune. They're. [00:36:07] Speaker A: They're really neat. [00:36:08] Speaker B: And it's one of the first times I think this kind of metacurrency appears in RPGs. Right. [00:36:13] Speaker A: Different in my book. [00:36:14] Speaker B: No kidding. [00:36:16] Speaker A: Different in my book. But on page 45 is sneak attack, and 44 is like multiple targets. [00:36:22] Speaker B: We've read different versions of the rules, man. [00:36:25] Speaker A: I'm looking at second edition. February of 81. That's the edition I have. And I'm pretty. I thought you had the same. [00:36:32] Speaker B: So did I. Oh. Oh, I have the first. I'm looking at even more rough stuff than you are. Oh, I have the 1980 second printing in April of 80. You have the 81 second edition. Right. I have the second printing. [00:36:49] Speaker A: I have the second edition. [00:36:51] Speaker B: Interesting. We should. We need to do. You know, we'll revisit after the podcast, Sean. We'll do a bit of a comparo. Yeah, for sure. [00:36:59] Speaker A: So that may have been something that was altered. [00:37:02] Speaker B: So maybe they. Yeah, they moved them from. There you go. This is kind of cool. Kind of a cool design. Note, they moved the Fame and Fortune points from being optional into the main area. Tell me if they've changed. Here's how they work in the 1980. 1980 second printing. They're really cool. There are two different meta currencies, Fame and Fortune. They both work the same way. When you take enough damage to kill your agent, you can spend a point, and it will keep you from being killed. The GM goes through about 30 minutes of math and charts to look up what the level is to not require. Like, what's the. What's the maximum level that won't kill your agent? And that is the effect you suffer instead of dying. So in other words, you get hurt pretty badly. The cool part is that you roll a D10 for your fortune points. Only the administrator knows what it is. And when they tick down they never come back. Ever. So you are. You are literally just draining that. And on the fame side of things, tell me if it works the same way. It is tied to your level. Every time you level up, you get one fame point. So that one you do know about. Does that sound right? [00:38:07] Speaker A: It is very close. [00:38:09] Speaker B: Okay. [00:38:09] Speaker A: But I think the players know in my edition. [00:38:13] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:38:14] Speaker A: Yes. Has the D10. Oh, I'm sorry. No, I apologize. When a character is generated, the admin will secretly roll a D10. A ten sided. [00:38:22] Speaker B: Yep. I think that's so cool. [00:38:25] Speaker A: Yes. And so I remember. But see, we did shocker. We didn't play it that way. We knew the amount of maybe Fortune points is known. [00:38:35] Speaker B: I'm so disappointed by that. Fortune points is known because it's tied to your level. Right. So if you're level three, you. If you haven't burned any, you've got three. [00:38:44] Speaker A: Yes. Each agent knows how many fame points are available to him or her. So. [00:38:49] Speaker B: Because the level. [00:38:50] Speaker A: Case in point. Yeah. And you're right. And I think I remember to bring this up is we would use that to determine whether we could bring a character back or prevent them from dying. [00:39:05] Speaker B: I think rules is written. It prevents them from dying. [00:39:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:08] Speaker B: And that's the only thing it does. There's no rerolls. There's no like. You get better effects on your own attacks. It is to keep you alive. And I love that you don't know how many times you can do it. I love that. I'm saddened by the fact that your admin didn't play it that way. [00:39:24] Speaker A: I think. I mean, I ran it too, so I probably just grandfathered their way of doing things. Right. [00:39:30] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:39:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:31] Speaker B: Yeah. If we're big suckers for punishment. It's. I. I have found two different listings. I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet. I think the compendium comes out in like 85 and I. And from what I know, it changes a whole ton of rules in. In the set from the second edition. Like different ways of doing combat. All kinds of stuff. Do you have it? [00:39:53] Speaker A: The companion you speak of, sir. [00:39:54] Speaker B: Not Compendium. It's the Companion. That's right. I misspoke. [00:39:57] Speaker A: So. Yes. [00:39:58] Speaker B: What year is that? [00:39:59] Speaker A: I do have it right here, actually. [00:40:01] Speaker B: This box. It's in the box he loves. Give me a year on that. [00:40:04] Speaker A: The year was. And it was edited by Steve Winter at this point. I don't know if Alan had moved on at this point or not, but 83 or 85. 84. [00:40:15] Speaker B: Oh, in between That's a third year that I. Oh, how about that? So largely called out as a response to James Bond and Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes, both of which did this better job of like conveying the system and the system design part of it. So there's, there's. That is like what you're holding in your hands is like a rework of many core systems in the book. Changes the mechanics dramatically. From what I've read, we may want to do a revisit on that, Sean. I don't know who want to get a depth on that next week because we want to go into the depth on the, you know, the, the core game, the early game, but there's a lot in there. [00:40:50] Speaker A: You're gonna love this. You know how I harp on three column layout? [00:40:54] Speaker B: Oh, boy. Yes. [00:40:56] Speaker A: Can you believe. Can you believe this thing has a three column layout in 1984? Hey, Bellgren Press. Now I know where. Now you know. Now I know where you're coming from. [00:41:07] Speaker B: You know, you're the source of it. Yeah. That's unfortunate. All right, let's. Let's do this. Sean, unless you have more specific things you want, you want to call out. I think in short, the combat is like lethal, very detailed. The melee combat is absurdly detailed. And we'll talk about this next week or next. Yeah, next week. But there's, there's rule. All the rules you want for like tradecraft, like in terms of skills and areas of knowledge for lock picking, disguise, surveillance. That's all in there. Right? And that's all, that's all new. These are again, these are the things that like Raspussen is picking up. Am I pronouncing his name correctly? [00:41:42] Speaker A: Yes. [00:41:42] Speaker B: Good. And then there's like, there's different bureaus and this is where what we want to get into next, John, is like our impressions of this game on a little more, a little deeper than just like mechanics and whatnot. Right. Like where it came from. And I think as soon as you get into like the bureaus, which are. There's three of them. I'm going to forget what they are. It's essentially infiltration, assassination and confiscation. Confiscation. There you go. [00:42:06] Speaker A: And then of course, the titles for each level. [00:42:10] Speaker B: Yes. [00:42:10] Speaker A: And the different experience levels. [00:42:12] Speaker B: This is where I'm going. Which is. It's. It ties so much to D D and TSR's other system thinking those are classes, those bureaus. Yes. Because they are tied to, you know, there's levels, there's experience points and there are titles. And I. I dislike the titles here as much as I like them. In AD and D and other. Other TSR products, where a thief and a con man are, you know, a con man's better than the thief or the other way. Is a burglar better than a second story man? Like, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. [00:42:43] Speaker A: Confiscation, I think, is one. One of them is like thug, then burglar, then Thief. Yeah. [00:42:48] Speaker B: I mean, it's neat, but the fact that it changes per level and you go from thug to confiscator or whatever is just a little. I don't know. Like, what do you. What's that doing for you in the game? I'm not sure. Not sure. So there is. Even though it's a percentile system and it's very different from AD&D, which is the, you know, the main game of the time, there's lots of DNA that is flowing between the two and lots of decisions that were informed by the prior game. Anything else you want to say about the sort of the game at a glance, the system part of it. [00:43:18] Speaker A: One of the things I found hilarious was that you would think that the maximum of an ability would be in a percentile system, 100, but you can actually get up to 150 to it, which I thought was interesting because, man, that's. [00:43:34] Speaker B: That is par for the course for percentile Systems in the 80s, whether it's roll Master or. Or anything else. Because they love to have modifiers on things. [00:43:44] Speaker A: Yes. [00:43:45] Speaker B: Love. Are you. Are you walking down the street? Minus 20 to your roll? Is it cloudy? [00:43:52] Speaker A: Yep. Minus 30 down the street? [00:43:54] Speaker B: Yep. Is it cloudy? Minus 10? Is your. Is your target across, you know, two lanes of traffic or one minus 15. It's just. It piles out. There are long lists of those things. So. [00:44:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So having 110. Well, you still, you know, have a 90 chance after a few modifiers. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Yep. And I'll. I'll be honest, I haven't really unpacked deeply, like the. You know, because it's so arcane as to how you create your character. I haven't deeply unpacked. Like, what does a starting character look like in terms of their success chances? Right. And how often will the admin be applying these positive and negative modifiers? But bottom line is, you mentioned a minute ago, does this game check the boxes for. I think it was episode two when I covered in, in some detail what I want in an espionage game. We talked about it. I think next episode we should get into that. And part of, like, the number One thing, if I remember correctly, was like, spies who are competent, who are not bumbling idiots, people who can or good at their damn jobs. And I don't have a perspective on whether this game does that or not. Or like, are these skills going to be rounding out at 40%, sometimes 30%, 60%. And if the admin's coming in over top with all kinds of modifiers, things can feel pretty bad pretty quickly. But we'll get into that, I think, as we unpack it. [00:45:11] Speaker A: Now, at the beginning, I mentioned how I don't know how we played this. It's been so long. I've read some of it and started diving into it. And Harrigan and I were going back and forth and going, wow, this thing. There's a lot. There's dense here. And I said, yeah, and usually if I start reading an old edition of a game, like a B&B, first edition or second, and I go, oh, that's how he did initiative. Interesting. Okay. It comes back to me, right, with this one, I'm like, I don't even remember any of this because I think we would reference like certain tables that we needed that we always used and we'd go to like the agency lists of agencies in the back and fill in those things. And then if we wanted to foreign languages, we'd go through the foreign language list. But typically we just kind of check off these boxes. [00:45:59] Speaker B: So earlier in the show I mentioned that I had like a theory about really, when it gets down to it, like, how was this played? Because if I pair it all away, I am left with a system that I think, like, I love this game. Like, I love that it exists. I love the care that was poured into it, the detail in these crazy tables. Like, it is a artifact that brings joy to anyone who like, especially appreciates the early part of the hobby's history. I also think it's bloody unplayable like it is. If you were to try to run this rules as written, good freaking luck. Like, man, if you can do it, I salute you. So there's parts of AD&D that are like this too, right? [00:46:38] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. [00:46:40] Speaker B: Weapon speed factor and like armor or a weapon versus certain armor class, you know, modifiers and on and on. When, you know, when Gary got to the DMG and they went hog wild, and I know that some other folks helped them with some pieces of it. So there's some tables that we don't even know if they came from gary or not, etc. Long story short, people took that game, they loved it to death. And they ran it at the table in a way that they were comfortable with. They trimmed off the pieces they didn't like and they either invented their own or they streamlined. And I am 100% sure the administrators running this game in 1980 through 80 whatever were doing the exact same thing. They were. They were simply picking and choosing the pieces that they thought were super cool. They were probably grabbing initiative systems from other places, damage systems from other places. There's all sorts of pieces where I think you can make it work. But if you're following the flowchart, for every opportunity to follow the flowchart and look up the tables, there's no way you get anything done. Like the. It would take the administrator minutes and minutes to resolve each action without knowing any better. I'm convinced that people took this and made did the best they could with it. And it's why at the beginning of the show, Sean, what I said was, the players are like, sweet, this is awesome. The administrators get like a temple throbbing in the side of their head. They're like, like, you know what I had to do to make this thing palatable for everybody. So I don't know, what do you think you. And you were part of this generation who played in it, right? So what do you think of that? [00:48:12] Speaker A: 100% or in top secret terms? 123%, 150%. And I think that's the case. I mean, I mentioned in one of the episodes that Chad Parrish from Dead Game Society ran a top secret game at gamehole Con. And I signed up and I'm like, I haven't played Top Secret in years. And he had a character sheet. And it's funny because the character sheet was very. I find that era of character sheets to be. I'm going to get it on a word processor, put a bunch of tabs and then that's your sheet. Like, they're like, it's not, you know, there's no forms, there's no lines, there's a header and maybe it's bold and underlined and anything underneath it. I found that to be a common theme when I've played older games at Gary Kahn with some of the older guard, if you will. You know, the same thing he did was here's your attributes, its percentile, and then here's some of the skills. And it may be listed right out of the book and it may not. That was kind of it and, and a weapon and damage and that's kind of finished. I remember distinctly, like, if we had to do a check. It was a percentile die roll. Okay, great. And I remember. I remember, like, Initiative was very much more pared down than what it is written because initiative is weapon speed, the speed of the character and the modification. And then like the. I think it's like, if they're prone, if they're standing, if they're like. All that takes into consideration what you [00:49:44] Speaker B: had for dinner, the name of your pet, etc. That's all. That's all in there. [00:49:47] Speaker A: So that's. That all goes into Initiative. [00:49:49] Speaker B: Yep, Yep. [00:49:50] Speaker A: But we didn't roll to hit percentile. Maybe with a few modifiers, but because we also came from AD&D, we probably stole quite a few things from the there as well. That just kind of. This is how we're going to do it. And then maybe a hit location table to see where we would get hit. But you're right, there was a lot of trim down. I remember specifically coming up with, you know, what experience points did we get? And there is a table that's, you know, did you. [00:50:20] Speaker B: Oh, man, I love that table. I love that table. So it is a mission table. If we're talking about the same one that says you are responsible for like, stealing a data chip from whatever. Right. And the. What are the three classes? Remind me. [00:50:36] Speaker A: Confiscation, infiltration, and assassination. Assassination. [00:50:41] Speaker B: And if you steal the data chip, only the confiscator gets experience. And did you see this for the assassin at the bottom of that table? So it must have. It's a full page. It must have 50 mission types. Right. And it calls out who gets experience points for, like, putting a hit on somebody or assassinating a target or infiltrating somebody and like getting into their organization unknown, unseen. The infiltrator gets points for that. Right at the bottom, there's, like, killing civilians and civilians who don't know they were killed by, like a spy. And the assassin is getting points for those guys. They are literally incentivizing murder hoboism in the spy game. [00:51:21] Speaker A: To elaborate on what Harrigan is referencing, it's a table of missions, and it has the mission on the left, the farthest left column. As you go across the top columns, there is base experience points so that we would go through this. Okay, so let's see. Mission was kidnapping. So base experience points, 250. Write that down. 250. And then 100 points point Bureau bonus. Okay? So as part of that bureau, So I get 100 points. Base mission payment would be 2%. So whatever it was. And Then there's a column for $25 bureau bonus. And then if there's an A letter associated with that, if it applies. So X, Y or Z, those are the subtables you would go to to include. Oh, I'm sorry, not even a subtable. A footnote. So if it's X, it is only agents working from assassination. If it's Y confiscation, Z investigation. And then the next column is human involved. So that's right, that's in there. Yes, sometimes. Or it would just be blank. Then the next one would be briefing information is the next column. And the briefing information will be consistent. [00:52:40] Speaker B: You're. You're about to get to something that I absolutely love. Keep going. [00:52:44] Speaker A: So briefing information is a letter denoted by a letter or combination of letters. Not a combination, but multiple letters. So A, B, C, D, H or J. [00:52:59] Speaker B: Another key. [00:53:00] Speaker A: You have to look up any combo. Those. And those are all in the footnotes. So you go down to the bottom, which is the key. So A is identity of a human target. B is the latest location known of target. C is destination of target. D is identity of target. And then of course, there is no, you don't use E because there isn't one loaded in that table. So then you would jump to what I say. I think J, H and J. So H is amount of ransom to demand, and J would be how long to continue tailing the next column. Same breakdown, just using egif. And that is withheld information. [00:53:48] Speaker B: This is the one that blew my mind. So in the briefing, what is your handler not telling you? And it's systemized. It's so good. It's incredible. [00:54:00] Speaker A: So is going to his point to elaborate. So E in that column, withheld information. E would be number of persons present at target site. [00:54:10] Speaker B: And this is not like, I don't know, this is withheld, right? They're not telling you. [00:54:16] Speaker A: So for you to find out, their super agent G would be number of guards present at the target site. So in other, in other words, guards and persons are different. And then of course, there is I. Target has chance of being armed. I think that's it for that, that column. [00:54:38] Speaker B: So I sat and read this table for like, I don't know how many minutes because I was like, look, look at this. There's so much packed on here. I love it. Like, I, I don't like the way that you, you know, it's conveyed and the way you have to roll certain things. But what they're, what Merle is trying to do is like, next Level, like, super cool. And this is the kind of thing where, like, no one did this. Maybe there's some materials he was working from, but no one did a game like this previous to this. No one touched this. That's pretty cool. [00:55:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So we would go through that and then I'm not sure, like, what the significance of some of these are, though, because your base experience is a hundred, 500, 300, whatever, 75. The Bureau points bonus. Okay. And then the base mission payment. Okay. And then if your bureau bonus for dollars. Okay. Okay. So what if a human was involved or not? It doesn't, I don't think tell you. [00:55:35] Speaker B: I think it's many things in one or multiple things in one. I think it is a mission generator which has all the, like, what were you briefed? Where's the target? What do you not know, and where are they going? And what, you know, other. Other people involved, other guards, all that sort of stuff. But it's also the. What do you earn from it? And the earn from it is twofold. It's the experience piece that you just went into. But it's also the monetary part of it, which I'll. I'll do a little, little forecasting here. It's something that I think a lot of spy games are really awkward at. Many spy games turn that into some sort of economy where they're like, having to buy equipment and stuff. I am not a fan of that. Unless you are like, you're on the lam or you're out in the cold and you have to get your own gear. Otherwise the bureau looks after you, that whatever your organization is, provides you with the equipment you need. And many, many spy games get into this whole, like, spend these credits to get this gear or this vehicle or whatever, and this, this one's doing it too. There's this whole idea, some of them tie it to, like, your. Your fame or your like, reputation in the organization as to what you can actually commandeer or, or order that kind of thing. But I don't know. It's just something I think we're gonna. We're gonna examine in each of these games is this weird underlying economy part of it. I do think that in the end the game is playable. You just have to kind of right. Size it. You know Jason Connolly, right? [00:56:56] Speaker A: I do. Nerds Variety Podcast. [00:56:58] Speaker B: Podcast. So I've heard Jason say multiple times relatively recently that he thinks for spy games, one of the best is the original Top Secret. And I think I should go back and play that. I think what he's saying Is I don't. I don't love the new world order. The new one. I don't love Si. But the. But the original. Well, Jason, have you read the original recently? Because I want to know what changes you would make to run the thing, because it is not in a state without the GM doing some work that you could just bring it to the table, create characters, and get off and running. I was actually on Jason's podcast talking about this. The handling time, Sean, between when the player says, I have an idea, I want to do this, and when you fully resolve it. The handling time in this game is comical in terms of the charts you look up and whatnot. And it's one thing when the admin is building the mission and has the time on their own to go through the tables and put it all together and has all these cool results. It's another when you're trying to wrestle with somebody and they're. They're not allowed to use judo because their area of knowledge in military isn't high enough. [00:58:04] Speaker A: Yes. [00:58:05] Speaker B: But they can use boxing and they can use wrestling and they're not allowed to use martial arts strikes either. Like, it is ridiculous. Ridiculous how it all changed together. But again, you can. You can smooth so much of that over with just like, know how. Of how to run a cool game. It's just kind of funny that there's so much of it that I think would have to get tucked under the carpet, probably. [00:58:26] Speaker A: And system mastery. I mean, can you imagine? Just like, oh, yeah. Okay, this is what's going to happen. Have your GM screen. This is what your target. They have a 90. So you're gonna have to roll below that to be successful. And then depending on your role, because even the social tables. Do you remember the social table? [00:58:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:58:46] Speaker A: When you roll. [00:58:46] Speaker B: I do. [00:58:47] Speaker A: So I gotta hand it to your point. [00:58:50] Speaker B: And the. And the animal table, sometimes they bark and sometimes they don't. Like, it's like, it's all that, man. [00:58:56] Speaker A: Right. But many people will say, you know, there's no social rules, which was another thing that you had pointed out. And in here, it is literally like how you. When you talk to them, there is a formula on what happens. And the situation is they go into a restaurant and there's a chef in the back, and you're trying to distract the chef. [00:59:17] Speaker B: Yep. [00:59:18] Speaker A: And so depending on whether you have the skill that has anything to do with food preparation, that influences the role. And then based on that role, it'll tell you this is what the chef actually does. It's not Even been really open to interpretation by the administrator. [00:59:34] Speaker B: In fact, I think that those types of tables are actually pretty easy for the admin to just flip to and use. So I'm picturing either dog eared pages or notes about page 35 has this table and I'm going to use it all the time. It definitely has that what is now called osr but that emergent like the GM doesn't know either the GM is going to roll and find out how many dogs there are and how the dogs are behaving or what the chef, how the chef is feeling. It's kind of like exploding a reaction roll. Taking that 2d6 roll from a lot of the D and D side of things and making it much more elaborate because there's a lot more that's going on. One last point and I think we're at risk here of going too far into the mechanics and we should probably head to wrap up here. But the same thing is true for chases. There are no chase rules in this game at all, which is a little disappointing. There are obstacle in path tables which are kind of like chase rules a little bit. Yes, it's. They're a little bit like it the same way on the social side, like this game does not have detailed interrogation, seduction, those types of social things that like when we get to James Bond and classified there are sub mechanics, there are sub schemes set up to handle those. This game just has tables and tables and tables and some of those tables are aimed at the things that we talked about needing to have in an espionage game. Let me put a couple more things on the table as I head for wrap up. Then maybe you can have the final word here. Sean. Some things I really liked about this game because I don't want people to come away thinking, you know, we're trashing it. Right. This is an unbelievable piece of work if you. If you have the context of when it was written, what came before it, what didn't come before it, etc. I love the fact that the admin is called out as completely neutral. They're supposed to run the world. No adversarial stuff. There's a mix of he and she pronouns which I think is super cool for 1980. 1981. Really cool. It's meant to be played with fewer players than your average like DND game. In fact, they even call out one to two players is optimal, which is pretty sweet and does line up with people saying like I don't want to play in a spy game. Like what was. How can A spy game have six people on it, or Spy Team, I should say, that sort of thing, you know, so I can overlook all the, like, the fact that it kind of feels unfinished, it feels unplayable. But if you sit back from it and look at it, like, look at all the pieces and like, it's a toy box. It's a jumble of stuff you can work with. In the end, I'm not going to run this game ever. But I love that it exists and I love that it set off a whole part of the industry that I enjoy so much now. But what are your. What are your final impressions? [01:02:03] Speaker A: I guess I think that is accurate. I mean, it might be just a cop out for me to agree with Harrigan without elaborating, but it is really, truly that. And it has a special place in my heart because it was such a great game and a genre that I really appreciated when I was 13, 14 years old. I mean, if it wasn't D and D, this was the one. And sometimes we wanted to play this more than D and D. Like, I just want to play Top Secret, man. Let's play it. Can we get Top Secret to play? Can we get two more people? And sometimes, to your point, we would pick Top Secret because we only had two people. [01:02:38] Speaker B: Right. [01:02:39] Speaker A: It was like a part of the decision making process on what actual game we would play because we didn't need four people to play. We didn't have to cover all our classes and bases. So that's. That's Top Secret. [01:02:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So what are we covering next time? [01:02:54] Speaker A: I think we need to go into the rules, mechanics. I mean, I want to run it as a vignette, I think. I don't know if I can. [01:03:03] Speaker B: You're going to have to do what we already talked about. You're going to have to trim it, [01:03:06] Speaker A: but we wouldn't be doing it justice then, right? [01:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:03:10] Speaker A: Part of the challenge of running a game is like, not. I mean, if somebody were to listen to us and say, oh, these guys are going to run Top Secret as raw. [01:03:22] Speaker B: So we're trying to keep the vignette to like an hour or something, Right. [01:03:26] Speaker A: So you make it sound like that's impossible. [01:03:29] Speaker B: We'll have one wrestling match in Top Secret. We'll have. We'll have a briefcase, a guy on the street with a briefcase and someone else who wants it. And that will be the scene one tries to get it from the other. And that's the whole scene. [01:03:41] Speaker A: Could be exactly that, I think. But. But my point is that we want to run a vignette. But we also probably want to talk about some of the rules and maybe we need to just pick out how a combat works and the things that go into it or what goes into a character. [01:03:58] Speaker B: I agree. Like, we're not going to page turn this thing because it will take us like 10 episodes to do it if we keep our, our episodes to an hour, hour, 20, whatever. Right, right. But I think if we pick a few things that are either interesting or particularly absurd, we can, we can dive into them next week. And they include things like the movement rate table. I'm just remembering this now. The movement rate table has movements for waiting. If you are waist deep in something, your movement's this as opposed to crawling, sprinting, walking, running, you know, just. Oh it's, it's so good in some ways. My last comment about Top Secret Shawn, that we can close the show here in like 1990 something early 90s. I played in a top secret SI game. Dear friend of mine, dearly departed now a guy that I think you may know, Sean. I went to Maine for his like memorial a few years ago. Bunch of his old gaming buddies all gathered together. We went to the pay our respects and also game together kind of in his name. He ran Top Secret si. Oh my heavens, I hated that game. Like at the time I was in hardcore GURPS mode and even si, we'll get to si, I think. But even SI is kind of a scramble of ideas and mechanics and things compared to something as unified as some of the games I was preferring at the time. I have much more appreciation for it now, knowing where it came from, seeing just these ideas laid bare in these messy, glorious tables. I'm even looking forward to revisiting si and for a long time I was like, that is not for me. I've tried that. And not a fan. I don't have the same love for a lot of older TSR products other than D and D that people like yourself and a lot of others do like. I did not play Boothill, did not play Star Frontiers, did not play Top Secret. Quite frankly, growing up in Canada, I had a fair bit of influence from the UK for different games. And I just remember when I was on the scene in 83, 84, 85, when I was really just discovering everything. There were some good looking games. There was Judge Dredd, there was Marvel superheroes, there was James Bond. So when I open up those books like Top Secret and looked at the interior or in role Masters in the same category, I was just like, man the information conveyance is not like it is in these other games. It could be so much better. And it's I'm. I'm the poorer for it because I didn't take the time and look past sort of the formatting part of it. So I guess that's all I would say, like, I'm glad we're doing this. That's all I got. Man ON Top Secret the either the second printing or the second edition, both of which are pretty close together. But we'll do a little, a little bit of a comparison as well, make sure that we're not missing anything big. [01:06:28] Speaker A: Sounds like a plan. Can't wait for the next one. So thanks for tuning in. Keep your Go Bag packed, your cover story tight, and your dice locked and loaded. This has been Go Bag. Want more Harrigan? Check out his substack Harrigan's Hearth, where he writes about his observations, ruminations, contemplations and ramblings regarding the tabletop RPG hobby. If you'd like more of me, Sean, I live stream every Saturday morning at 8:00am Central Time on my YouTube channel. Links to both of these will be in the show. Notes this episode of Go Bag brought to you with help from the following agents, assets and directors. 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