The espionage roleplaying game called Shadow Ops is what I’m using for Day 15 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge. I had backed this game on KickStarter and received both a PDF and physical copy of the game that I reviewed in a past blog post. I received some interesting questions from that post from people wanting to know more information including a map maker who’s live streams I watch several times a week. It made me feel good to hear feedback on my past writings. Since I had already talked about the physical book and RPG system in that past blog post, we will jump into the character creation process (aka Agent Recruitment) with the outline found on page 23 with an example of the steps on page 31.
We start with a concept for the character. Plucking an idea out of the air (especially since I don’t know what the other “players” at the table would have been taking) I’m going to go with one of the basics. This guy is a driving specialist that can handle any ground vehicle to get the mission completed.
OK, attributes. They are Insight, Intellect, Personality, Coordination, Endurance and Strength. Each attribute starts with a score of 5 and I have 30 points. I was trying to see if there was any minimums or recommendations for the different Skill Sets (aka class) but I couldn’t find anything, so I bumped up the attributes that I thought a Wheelman would have.
The book now says that as a level 1 agent the wheelman has 2 skill steps to spend on my skills (other choices had different skill steps). All skills start at d4 and the two I bump up will roll a d6. I picked the two I thought a good Wheelman would need which was Driving and Technology.
There are three combat skills. Unarmed Combat (using the body), Melee Combat (with hand held weapons) and Firearms Combat (with ranged weapons). The Wheelman has a 5 for the combat skills under that description (which is the same amount as a Solider), but I can’t seem to find out what I’m supposed to do with this score of 5. The character in the example creation only had 1 skill point and couldn’t raise anything. The Outline on page 23 fails to tell me how to spend these points. The additional description on 25-27 says that you can spend enough to get one of the combat skills from a d4 to a d6 at level 1, but still fails to give me a description on how to spend the points to get up to the higher dice step. Even the Combat Skills section on page 82 lacks an answer. It does tell me here that the combat skills are not advanced by skill steps, but rather by scores like attributes and resistances. OK, that helps a little bit since the score chart on page 8 has a breakdown of what the attributes have (Gods, I’m jumping all over this book trying to find answers). So if I’m understanding this correctly, I can dump all 5 combat points into one of the three skills to make it a d6 at level 1 but the other two would have a score of 0 (which only gives a d4). I’ve wasted enough time on this so I’m going to go with that assumption. Yes, I’m starting to get frustrated.
Deep breath. OK let’s continue. Choose one of 25 Fortes. These are described on page 86 and the book states “Fortes are intended to represent a significant element of an agent’s personality, previous life experience or additional career training.” OK these sound like the Feats we know in D&D. I looked over the list and picked one for Agent Unknown.
Next comes pick one Skill Set Ability choices. Looking at the description under the Wheelman these seem to be a special ability that only your class has (I really wish they had just stuck with the name “Class” in this book). Some can be taken more than once (I’m assuming when my character is improved in play) and one has a level 2 limitation. I picked Experienced and bumped the driving skill up to d8.
Pick two abilities. No not the Skill Set Ability picked in the previous step. These are General Feats… err Abilities that any agent can have. Looking at the list on page 87 there are a boatload of them (200 to be exact). A list of general feats broken down into smaller categories, I just found two and picked them.
Pick three knowledge. This is specialized stuff that Agent Unknown knows. The example seems to show that these are just general items the agent is really knowledgeable about, but not on a list. So from the air I plucked “Cars that Top Gear Has Tested” (where he got his interest in cars, he has the episodes practically memorized), “All organized automobile races in Europe” (like Le Mans, Formula 1, Monaco Grand Prix, etc.), and “Playing the Drums” (while growing up he through he was going to be the drummer in a rock band).
Selecting the Stress Die is the next step. Luckily there are three of them that are broken down by what type of agent your character can be. The book stated that d8/d10/d12 is a specialized approach that is good when the bullets fly. Sounds good to me. As for resistances all three of them (Speed, Spirit and Stamina) all start out as d4 for a level 1 character and the Combat Training and Defense was set by the Class… err… Skill Set as 1 and 0.
Equipment, there’s something in the Skill Set notes about Equipment .5 (vehicles) and a Resource score of 1. As you can probably tell I’m running out of energy here. Agent Unknown has a damn good car and I’m assuming he has a good handgun and perhaps a few other things. Who knows.
All agents start with a one d6 contact. The book says that it doesn’t need to be defined at the start of play and my mind says “Thank the heavens”.
Combat Modes? Smeg, I just want to make a character not write an wikipedia entry. These are actions a character can do in combat. I get 5 of these. Fine, randomly I picked Aid, Close Quarters, Aimed, Fight and Autofire. (and later when transferring information over to the character sheet, Fight was already filled in, I’m not going back and choosing another one)
Finally the last step. I found a name of English chaps from a random name generator which was Mason Gordon. Since he watched a lot of Top Gear and knew about European races he was born and raised in England. He was going to be a drummer in a rock band before he was ‘discovered’ and recruited to be a driver for an intelligence agency (MI-5? UNITY? GI Joe? Who knows). He’s good looking even when covered in grease and loves working on his car. I transferred everything over from my notes and scanned the character sheet because I wanted to be done. I didn’t scan the second page of the sheet since it was just ability descriptions.
Afterthoughts:
I was glad for the character creation example in the back. When I got stuck a few times I went back and read the example in order to make sure I was following the process right. However I really wish that page numbers had been provided when I wanted to look up additional information. I felt frustrated looking back and forth for information. I was using at least four bookmarks and could have been using more.
If I was going to use this in a campaign, I’d probably create a better step-by-step character creation guide or a worksheet. It started off well, then quickly became frustrating with all of the searching and page jumping. While I might use this game for a special series of blog posts that I have planned, I don’t know if I’ll be doing any homebrewing for this system.
The RPG system itself sounds pretty straight forward. But the deep dive in the character creation system made me not want to do a deep dive in the other systems provided for chases and combat. I’m sure I’ll take a closer look at them later, but I’m really not getting encouraged to run this as a one-shot at SaltCON.
I’m not disappointed that I backed this Kickstarter. The book is gorgeous. Hoping that the system will run well like GURPS even though the creation process was long and tedious. But I felt that things could have been written to make rule look up easier. Following the analogy of the pizza that I used in my Cowboy Bebop Kickstarter review, I got the right toppings, but the crust and sauce didn’t impress me much.
Additional Notes:
This was done at the end of a very long day, so forgive me if I got a little snippety toward the end. I may have to put this book on the “read later” list to see if just a simple read through would give me some 20/20 hindsight. I almost gave up on this character creation, which I haven’t done too often.
Coming Up Next:
Barbarians of the Ruined Earth
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