Day 23 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’ll be using the single player espionage roleplaying game called No Day To Die. I picked up this game because I liked the name. It sounds like No One Lives Forever video game or the title of the James Bond film Die Another Day. The book says you need is pen, paper and a deck of playing cards and some imagination. I’ve never been big on solo RPGs, but let’s make a character for this game.
OK, character creation is presented on page 5. Step one- pick a name. Since this is a British secret agent, I went to the random name generator and selected Daniel Knight. Step two is create a prior history. It gave some information on what options could be available, but it provided a random history that could be selected by drawing a card. I’m going to test this out with my 20-in-One Card Deck. The Seven of Clubs gave me the Special Air Service (aka the special forces of the British Army).
Attributes are the next step. These are GRIT (Strength, action, energy and physical skill), WIT (awareness, cleverness, education, social and technical abilities) and HITS (the health of the character). Both WIT and GRIT start out at 5 and I am instructed to draw four cards for both of them. Which ever suite has the most number of drawn cards gets that many additions to the attribute. For GRIT I drew an Ace of Spades, Six of Clubs, Three of Spades and Ten of Spades. Since there are three cards from one suite, GRIT gets +3 points. I drew the Eight of Diamonds, Six of Hearts, Nine of Clubs and Eight of Clubs. So +2 gets added to WIT. Interesting way to do this.
Now we determine the expertise of Agent Knight. Each character has four of them that you can pick from the list or do a random draw (yep, I’m drawing). First is Two of Diamonds, a two is Stunt Driving. The five of Spades selects Seduction (Hey baby….). Seven of Diamonds points to Stealth (sneaky, sneaky). And finally the expertise of Piloting is provided by the Jack of Spades.
Each character has a Flaw. I can pick (heh, no) or randomly pull. The Ace of Hearts says that Agent Knight is addicted to gambling.
Decide Appearance is the next step. I hate coming up with appearances. But I could pull a picture down from the internet. Let’s be inspired by a famous spy song.
Next the book tells me that the agent will be assigned a Concealable Pistol. Then there is a list of standard items that an agent would typically carry (12 items). Then there is a list of possible gadgets, but it says gadgets are whipped up on the spot if you pull a Joker from the deck. So why list it here? The part that confuses me the most is that the character sheet says you only carry a maximum of 4 items. Is this both regular equipment and gadgets? I’m skipping this for now.
Well the next chapter goes into Resolving Situations. It is broken down by the draw of a playing card and looks pretty interesting. I may have to run a solo session later and blog about it. But let’s see if there is anything else left in the character creation. But scanning through the rest of the book there’s nothing left. So I guess he’s done. I transferred everything from my notes to the sheet and put it in the scanner.
Afterthoughts:
For a small publisher, I like how the graphics were done on the character sheet. The paperclip and the fingerprints on the dossier stood out to me.
I thought it was interesting that on the random Expertise list, Stunt Driving was listed twice. I wonder if this was a mistake or intentional. One of the Flaws had “Sick of always handing in his resignation”. I understood all of the other Flaws, but this one confused me (insert Data and Lore meme here).
I am going to run this later for myself. I’ll let you all know how it goes.
Additional Notes:
OK, I fully admit it, I’m bad at math. Stark Maximum on BlueSky pointed out that I had misread the step for starting gold in my Old School Essentials entry. It is 3d6x10 not 3d6x100. That slapped me like someone was hitting me with a trout in a Monty Python sketch. I could have sworn I went back and re-read that when I was confused. I don’t know what I was thinking.
On another note, reading the entries that others have posted on the various blogs, message boards and social media will introduce me to a game that I’ve never heard of. There is an RPG out there called “Teddy Bear Holding a Freaking Machine Gun“????
Coming Up Next:
Metamorphosis Alpha 1e
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