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Spycraft: D20 System Espionage Role-Playing Game
SPYCRAFT is a role playing game set in a world of dark secrets and high espionage, where players become larger-than-life super spies poised to take on threats of global scale -power-mad dictators, eccentric billionaire industrialists and much more!
Fully d20 Compatible! Action-packed mechanics bring the feeling of the spy genre to vibrant life -using a system everyone knows.
The Only Espionage Role-Playing Game You'll Ever Need! Everything required to play any spy movie, television series or novel!
288 pages, stunning 2-color interior, chock-filled with great art, hard cover.
- GenresRole Playing GamesGaming
Hardcover
Published January 1, 2002
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June 25, 2021Part of my Father's Day self-given haul/pandemic need for something -- anything -- different.
So I went on something of a shopping spree over the last few months, for a few reasons, with most of my purchases aimed at rounding out odd items in my collection. For instance, this Spycraft book I had, from 2003. Why did I, in grad school, pick up a book on playing spies, which is not a genre I have a particular interest in? Where did I get it? I have no idea, but I remembered (vaguely) that I had very warm feelings towards this book, thinking it a capacious guide to spy stories. So I picked up several books on the (relatively) cheap (keeping in mind I think there's a definite RPG bubble right now, though mostly focused on D&D stuff from the 70s/80s, i.e., this is a nostalgia boom for people my age).
I have now paged through the following books:
Spycraft (main rules)
Modern Arms Guide (more stuff, more rules for stuff)
Shadowforce Archer setting and several chapter books: Archer Conspiracy, Pan-Asian Collective, European Commonwealth, Hand of Glory, African Alliance -- in fact, all the books but The Shop)
I want to emphasize "paged" because the idea that I might sell these books at some point has really infected me. Like, there's folks on the auction sites I go to who have shrink-wrapped books from the 90s, which I cannot even fathom -- people buy several copies, some to read, some to just put in cases. (Does that smell like a tulip mania?)
So I may have missed some nuance and also again, my general modus here is to skim and think about what I would like to see more of. With that in mind:
Based on the D20 OGL (when Wizards of the Coast made some of the Dungeons & Dragons rules an open source venture), Spycraft is a framework for playing a superspy game: this was 3rd edition D&D, and a lot of stuff will be similar.
* Instead of races, you have the idea of departments (i.e., if you’re from SIGINT, you get a bonus to intelligence, if you’re from Wetworks, you get a bonus to some combat);
* there are classes, though geared towards spy work, or particularly, spy work in movies — the fixer, the the pointman/face, the soldier, the wheelman, etc.
* There’s a lot of crunchy rules — most of 3rd edition D&D was basically “here’s the rules — and now this character can break this rule, and if you take this set of feats, you can break these others”
Spycraft includes some innovative and specific rules for emulating spy movies and keeping things balanced, with special emphasis on car chases (a little mini-game of its own) and designing villainous masterminds (where the GM has points to buy henchmen and gears, etc.). In fact, each villain is set up as a series of obstacles, presented in the text (oddly to me) with the boss fight first, and going down to the lowest henchman -- that is, if you played through these, you would have to flip backwards as the PCs got closer to the main villain. It makes sense in some regards -- in order to run the conspiracy meaningfully, the GM needs to know the big bad behind it all -- but it just feels odd as an organizational principle.
The first book is setting agnostic, other than being based in modern-day espionage movies, though there are very minimal notes about running technothriller or paranormal or historical games.
Their first setting was called Shadowforce Archer and it’s a little bit of everything and overall too much, even if there are some fun ideas in the setting. So, there’s a whole secret history where someone finds a serum in an archeological dig, etc., unlocking psionic abilities that either manifest as physical powers or mental powers. Which is to say that your superspies are more like low-level superheroes.
There’s also magic and some otherworldly stuff, which they bring in through my two least favorite tropes: non-white super-mystics (in this case, a Middle Eastern group called the Guardians of the Whispering Knife, though thankfully they are dedicated to good rather than being your “Arab terrorist” trope) and “demons caused the Holocaust” (in this case, some powerful entity crossed the veil and took over Eva Braun, who is still alive today and running a dangerous organization).
The good conspiracy that the PCs probably work for is a non-governmental organization that covers the whole world, which is separated into different spheres of influence, and if you think they want to sell you a book for each different org, congratulations, you know roleplaying game companies and probably wasted your youth. There is a note about how each sub-organization is supposed to showcase some different flavor of spy fiction, but it all seems the same to me: superspy psychics and mystics with high tech gear.
Each of those chapter books gives a bunch of setting info, plot hooks, and new rules and character options (which we don’t need! but which always sells books, I guess). But they also nicely add a few pages on what a chase might look like in some iconic spot in that area, which is a fun idea and very in keeping with the tropes of globetrotting superspy movies.
The most interesting thing, to me, in the setting is the idea that the R&D department of the good guys recently discovered something that made them defect and become bad, which is mostly fun to me because I like to imagine old Q finally turning on James Bond after all the shit 007 has pulled. (However, the book covering this bad organization was one of the few that I did not buy.)
Also interesting, and very of it’s time in the 2000s when this came out, is that the company tried an interactive portion of the game, which I haven’t found a good description of: it sounds like a game, but then also it sounds like maybe a set of plot hooks (moving the story of the Shadowforce Archer world forward).
Oh, and: I'm not crazy about the art here. So, would I play this? Almost definitely not. Will I mine these books for ideas? Maybe, but the ideas here are just crazy enough to be odd (why do we need psychics and gadgets and magic) without being so gonzo as to be really exciting.
So I went on something of a shopping spree over the last few months, for a few reasons, with most of my purchases aimed at rounding out odd items in my collection. For instance, this Spycraft book I had, from 2003. Why did I, in grad school, pick up a book on playing spies, which is not a genre I have a particular interest in? Where did I get it? I have no idea, but I remembered (vaguely) that I had very warm feelings towards this book, thinking it a capacious guide to spy stories. So I picked up several books on the (relatively) cheap (keeping in mind I think there's a definite RPG bubble right now, though mostly focused on D&D stuff from the 70s/80s, i.e., this is a nostalgia boom for people my age).
I have now paged through the following books:
Spycraft (main rules)
Modern Arms Guide (more stuff, more rules for stuff)
Shadowforce Archer setting and several chapter books: Archer Conspiracy, Pan-Asian Collective, European Commonwealth, Hand of Glory, African Alliance -- in fact, all the books but The Shop)
I want to emphasize "paged" because the idea that I might sell these books at some point has really infected me. Like, there's folks on the auction sites I go to who have shrink-wrapped books from the 90s, which I cannot even fathom -- people buy several copies, some to read, some to just put in cases. (Does that smell like a tulip mania?)
So I may have missed some nuance and also again, my general modus here is to skim and think about what I would like to see more of. With that in mind:
Based on the D20 OGL (when Wizards of the Coast made some of the Dungeons & Dragons rules an open source venture), Spycraft is a framework for playing a superspy game: this was 3rd edition D&D, and a lot of stuff will be similar.
* Instead of races, you have the idea of departments (i.e., if you’re from SIGINT, you get a bonus to intelligence, if you’re from Wetworks, you get a bonus to some combat);
* there are classes, though geared towards spy work, or particularly, spy work in movies — the fixer, the the pointman/face, the soldier, the wheelman, etc.
* There’s a lot of crunchy rules — most of 3rd edition D&D was basically “here’s the rules — and now this character can break this rule, and if you take this set of feats, you can break these others”
Spycraft includes some innovative and specific rules for emulating spy movies and keeping things balanced, with special emphasis on car chases (a little mini-game of its own) and designing villainous masterminds (where the GM has points to buy henchmen and gears, etc.). In fact, each villain is set up as a series of obstacles, presented in the text (oddly to me) with the boss fight first, and going down to the lowest henchman -- that is, if you played through these, you would have to flip backwards as the PCs got closer to the main villain. It makes sense in some regards -- in order to run the conspiracy meaningfully, the GM needs to know the big bad behind it all -- but it just feels odd as an organizational principle.
The first book is setting agnostic, other than being based in modern-day espionage movies, though there are very minimal notes about running technothriller or paranormal or historical games.
Their first setting was called Shadowforce Archer and it’s a little bit of everything and overall too much, even if there are some fun ideas in the setting. So, there’s a whole secret history where someone finds a serum in an archeological dig, etc., unlocking psionic abilities that either manifest as physical powers or mental powers. Which is to say that your superspies are more like low-level superheroes.
There’s also magic and some otherworldly stuff, which they bring in through my two least favorite tropes: non-white super-mystics (in this case, a Middle Eastern group called the Guardians of the Whispering Knife, though thankfully they are dedicated to good rather than being your “Arab terrorist” trope) and “demons caused the Holocaust” (in this case, some powerful entity crossed the veil and took over Eva Braun, who is still alive today and running a dangerous organization).
The good conspiracy that the PCs probably work for is a non-governmental organization that covers the whole world, which is separated into different spheres of influence, and if you think they want to sell you a book for each different org, congratulations, you know roleplaying game companies and probably wasted your youth. There is a note about how each sub-organization is supposed to showcase some different flavor of spy fiction, but it all seems the same to me: superspy psychics and mystics with high tech gear.
Each of those chapter books gives a bunch of setting info, plot hooks, and new rules and character options (which we don’t need! but which always sells books, I guess). But they also nicely add a few pages on what a chase might look like in some iconic spot in that area, which is a fun idea and very in keeping with the tropes of globetrotting superspy movies.
The most interesting thing, to me, in the setting is the idea that the R&D department of the good guys recently discovered something that made them defect and become bad, which is mostly fun to me because I like to imagine old Q finally turning on James Bond after all the shit 007 has pulled. (However, the book covering this bad organization was one of the few that I did not buy.)
Also interesting, and very of it’s time in the 2000s when this came out, is that the company tried an interactive portion of the game, which I haven’t found a good description of: it sounds like a game, but then also it sounds like maybe a set of plot hooks (moving the story of the Shadowforce Archer world forward).
Oh, and: I'm not crazy about the art here. So, would I play this? Almost definitely not. Will I mine these books for ideas? Maybe, but the ideas here are just crazy enough to be odd (why do we need psychics and gadgets and magic) without being so gonzo as to be really exciting.
January 14, 2019
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14678157
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14678157
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews