Category: Spy-Fi

Posted in: Character Creation Challenge, No One Lives Forever, Role Playing Games, Spy-Fi

Character Creation Challenge Day 20: Spycraft

Written by TardisCaptain
Character Creation Challenge Day 20

I own both version 1.0 and 2.0 of the Spycraft Roleplaying Game. I even remember going to a friends house and playing in a massive session. It may have been a Living Spycraft game or it may have been part of the Game Control (GC is the Game Master) created world. I remember we had to make a raid on a stronghouse and we spent most of the game planning our way to infiltrate and obtain the goal before we had to shoot our way out.

Being a big James Bond fan I had always been interested in espionage RPGs. This fandom was expanded by the video game series No One Lives Forever. Someday I’m going to create a sourcebook for the NOLF characters and events and I’ve always thought that Spycraft would be the system I would use for it. NOLF is where UNITY originated from that is need of new agents. Agents I am creating with this Character Creation Challenge. Today we are creating Oliver Chamberlain, who’s name I pulled from [REDACTED]. So far no one has guessed where I’m pulling these names from.

Spycraft v2.0 is a modified D20 system. The publisher added a few spins to the game to make it fit into the world of super spies and blazing guns. The first step is to create the concept. Originally I was going to make Chamberlain a Hacker since that is one of the classes in Spycraft, but then it hit me, in 1968 they didn’t really have hackers like those listed in the book. So I changed the concept to Intruder. Basically an infiltration expert that is also good at getting equipment by any means necessary.

As a D20 system, it has the standard attributes. STR, DEX, CON INT, WIS and CHA. However you don’t roll the 3d6 to generate the scores. Like the EverQuest RPG, you start out with a base score of 8 and then you have so many points to increase the attributes you want to use. For Spycraft you have 36 points and a chart with a rising score cost (slightly different than the EQRPG) Chamberlain needed a good DEX and WIS score so I concentrated there. Next you selected your Origin which consisted of Talents and Specialties. These would almost make up a background history to build upon, but they would also adjust your ability scores amongst other things. Chamberlain is an Orphaned Criminal. After adjusting the stats he ended up with the following. STR: 10, DEX: 17, CON: 11, INT: 10, WIS: 15, CHA: 10.

I wrote down the information for the Intruder class. The skills were very detailed with sub-skills that are automatically gained underneath and result caps. It was all very crunchy. But I selected the skills I thought that an Intruder would need to be successful. I also selected Burglar for his level 1 feat. I noticed that the feats are just as detailed as the skills are. Very crunchy, which isn’t a bad thing for detailed play. Next you selected interests (hobbies basically) which may add bonuses to certain checks if the GC agrees. Now we are up to step 7 which his selecting a sub-plot. Chamberlain has a nemesis (which I won’t create now) that may pop up every once in a while.

Next step is filling in the missing blanks like Vitality Points (i.e. hit points) and the like. I’m glad that the RAW has the 1st level characters starting out at max VP. I filled in the rest of the items as instructed. Then we got to the gearing up. Again the game had a lot of details here. If I was just starting a campaign, I’d ask the GC for a few items appropriate for my class (lock picks, rope) a weapon (pistol with a silencer) and a motorcycle and I called it good. I’m sure the excess detail will make sense if I was actually playing, but for this challenge, I’m done. Here is the character sheet.

Character sheet for Oliver Chamberlain
Character sheet for Oliver Chamberlain

Afterthoughts:

I love it when a RPG book contains a quick guide for character creation in one location so you can see all of the steps at once. The Spycraft 2.0 book did this very well with some sections color coded. However even with this helpful section, there were still sections that I would have relied on a GC to answer any questions. I know that there are sections of the sheet that are blanks.

Overall though I could see myself playing this system like I had before. I think the GC at the time was someone connected with the publisher of the game so he explained it very easily. Plus, as I mentioned above, we did more role-playing than dice rolling. But as I was assembling this character and reading the rules, my mind started homebrewing stats for agents I had seen in video games and other media.

Additional Notes:

I’ve noticed that Twitter’s hashtag search is much more efficent and user-friendly than Facebook’s. I haven’t come across any new blogs or message boards yet. But I am very impressed with some of the blog entries. While I’m reading them, I feel like I’m sitting down at the table with the writer as they explain the character. Plus I’m seeing some very interesting insights on some of the different games out there. Keep it up.

Coming Up Next:

The Prime Directive D20 RPG

Posted in: Character Creation Challenge, James Bond, No One Lives Forever, Role Playing Games, Spy-Fi

Character Creation Challenge Day 16: James Bond 007

Written by TardisCaptain
Character Creation Challenge Day 16

I have been a huge fan of the James Bond franchise ever since I saw my first movie in the 80’s. Besides the movies I’ve read the books and the comics. Roger Moore was the first Bond I saw in the theater, but I love all of the actors who have played the part. So when Victory Games released the James Bond 007: Role Playing In Her Majesty’s Secret Service Basic Game, I as immediately interested. Unfortunately I never found a group to play with when this game was widely available. So in order to get a taste of the game, I decided to use this game as one of my entries for the Character Creation Challenge. While the original game is no longer being printed, Expeditious Retreat Press did release a retro-clone game called Classified.

As I did with Top Secret and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, the character that will be created for the James Bond 007 RPG will be another new UNITY field agent. This is to replace the depleted ranks in UNITY after the events of the video game series No One Lives Forever. And in keeping with the common source for names, today I will be creating Steven Prince (has anyone guessed the movie I’m taking the names from?)

Agents in the James Bond RPG have Characteristics (primary attributes) with scores ranging from 1-15. At a minimum, agents need a score in 5 for each category. The five Characteristics are Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Willpower (WIL), Perception (PER) and Intelligence (INT). Characters are created by Generation Points. The higher the rank of the character (Rookie, Agent or “00”) the more Generation Points are needed at the time of creation. As Agent Prince is a new agent, I will be going with the Rookie rank with 3,000 GP. One of the first things that the RAW has you spending your points on is your character’s height and weight. The more common the size, the higher the GP, but you also start out with less Fame Points. Fame Points is the likelihood that someone may have heard of your character (or did some digging on your character’s background and history). As much as I didn’t want to spend too much on just the Height, I didn’t feel like the character would be greatly known. So I ended up going with a height 6’2” which cost me 120 GP and earned 10 FP. For the weight I spent 160 GP for a weight of 200 and 5 more Fame Points. For Appearance, I selected Attractive (I wanted the agent to look good, but not too good) for a cost of 120 GP and 20 more Fame Points.

Now we can finally start spending Generation Points on the Characteristics. I wanted Agent Prince to be a driver. So I spent the points and selected the following stats. STR: 7, DEX: 11, WIL: 7, PER: 10, INT: 6. After determining these, they also gave the results to some secondary characteristics which I then wrote down on the character sheet.

Agent Prince was a person who grew up getting in trouble with the law before he turned straight, so he was aware of how the law worked and forensics. His cover story is that he is a race car driver. I selected the appropriate Fields of Experience and Skills and calculated their statistics. For his primary weapon, I selected the HK VP-70 and wrote down the stats. Here is the charcter sheet.

Character sheet for Steven Prince.

Afterthoughts:

Usually the characteristics of appearance, weight an height come at the end of a character creation process. It was interesting seeing it at the start. But in the world of James Bond you’ve got a lot of attractive people running around saving the world. So it makes a little bit of sense that you would want to get that out of the way before all of the GP was spent.

I think that if this was a regular game I could create characters more easily. But the walk through for character creation was mostly straight forward.

Additional Notes:

Thanks to a Facebook post in one of the many gaming groups, I’ve found another participant in the Character Creation Challenge. I have added a link to the blog on the CCC page.

Coming Up Next:

The Last Unicorn Games entry into the Star Trek universe.

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