I forgot to mention one thing during my review that I really appreciated in the new TS:NWO, and that is the rules for interrogation. A classic, standard, spycraftian story trope to be sure, but NWO puts little factual spin on…
Here we go! Some 33 years after I bought my first RPG, Top Secret, the newly minted (and Kickstartered) Top Secret NWO arrived on my doorstep! Written by the same author it promised a return to super sweet spycraftian action. …
I was all set to post about reading through Top Secret/SI tonight when I learned of some very exciting news: TOP SECRET IS BACK! The original creator of Top Secret, Merle Rasmussen, has teamed up with a few others to…
A trip down memory lane tonight, back to the first RPG I bought, and played: Top Secret. I first spied (ha!) the game across an atrium at the World’s Largest Bookstore in Toronto, sporting the same photo (albeit in colour)…
A very cool little bit of RPG history explored here, with the delving into the idea of Fate/Fortune/Fame/Luck/Inspiration mechanics: http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-history-of-hero-points-fame-fortune.html Extra cool in that the first RPG I ever played – Top Secret – is the first RPG to include…
Postscript – Breaking the Core Mechanic (In a Good Way) Sometimes, hooking a sub-system onto the core isn’t quite enough to model the intricacies of a particular genre. Sometimes you just gotta directly hack the core. Here’s one example of…
Creating the Base Pool After going through nearly the entirety of the resolution system and outlining the bits that happen once the base pool has been gathered, it’s well past time to cover how that base pool, and its baseline…
I played my first RPG when I was 11 years old.* It was the Top Secret RPG, and I was instantly hooked. Since then there’s nary been a time when I haven’t been playing one RPG or another, and I’ve…
Let me continue stalling for time from choosing the dice mechanic for my system by talking about success. No, not the wild success I expect in completing this system, but how the system itself could handle the outcomes of skill…
D&D celebrated its 40th anniversary on the weekend… which makes it pretty easy for me to remember how long the game has been around. I, of course, didn’t start playing until much later, which was in Grade 10 (though I’d…
