Reading this sordid tale of violence and depravity (in an RPG) brought back more than a few memories. Specifically, of TSR’s old Top Secret roleplaying game. Top Secret was a spy/espionage game in which players created secret agents and sent them on missions of dubious morality.
I did not own this game, but my friend Bill did, and he often loaned it to me since I generally filled the role of gamemaster in our little gaming group. I pored over the TS rulebook, reading through it again and again while I planned out missions and scenarios. The individual tables, charts, and illustrations in that book are burned permanently into my memory.
After reading the above-linked post, I hauled out the ol’ copy of Top Secret and flipped through it. (Bill, somehow it’s ended up in my possession. Should you desire its return, let me know.) Wow… the memories. And wow, does this game scream “I come from the 1980s!” For one thing, the book is absolutely jam-packed with charts and tables covering all manner of situations. There is actually a Random Execution Table you can use to determine how your spy meets his fate in the unfortunate event that he’s captured by the Bad Guys. I credit TS‘s massive weapons charts for giving me my first basic education in firearms and ammunition types. I could’ve sworn there was a Torture Chart as well, but I didn’t spot it in my brief skim through the book.
For all the fun we had flipping through that magical book, I only remember playing it once. It was actually one of my earliest attempts at roleplaying. Let me regale you with the tale:
I was the gamemaster. My friend Jason created a secret agent. I designed a mission for his character to undertake–something that would evoke the adventure and excitement of James Bond and Indiana Jones. The mission: break into a house (just a normal house) and steal some top secret documents from it. That was the entirety of the mission. The house was the best-defended house you could ever possibly imagine encountering in the suburbs: all sorts of redundant alarm systems, codes needed for getting through the front door, etc. So I got out my meticulous maps of the house, set up the GM screen, and we got to playing.
The adventure went like this: Jason’s character arrived at the house and managed to break in after snooping around for a bit. While breaking in, he unknowingly tripped one of the approximately 15,000 different invisible alarm systems I had installed in the house. The police showed up almost immediately. Jason decided to escape by jumping through a large window onto the lawn outside. Dice were rolled, charts were consulted… and the next thing we knew, Jason’s character was lying unconscious on the lawn, rapidly bleeding to death from massive wounds incurred while jumping through the glass window.
That was it. After months of daydreaming about high-speed chases, beautiful female spies, and nail-baitingly suspenseful action scenes, our first adventure had ended with the protagonist bleeding to death on somebody’s front lawn after jumping through a window.
Not the stuff of legend, you might say. But we had fun. And the next thing we knew, we had upgraded to the vastly superior Top Secret S.I., a “second edition” of sorts that took TS and turned it into a game that could actually emulate the spy-genre antics it was trying to portray. We loved it. We never really went back to the original TS, but played Top Secret S.I. for many many years.
I still look at the original TS with a funny sort of admiration and respect. It wasn’t my first exposure to RPGs, but it was one of the first, and even though it didn’t play out the way I imagined… well, I had done an awful lot of imagining in the course of reading and re-reading it, and that was something to be thankful for.
Top Secret, you rock. Random Execution Table and all.

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Gencon last month saw, among many other things, the release of a hardcover roleplaying game book that I had the privilege of editing. The book is Legends of the Samurai, and it’s the biggest single project that I’ve edited to date.
Editors and proofreaders generally only get mentioned in reviews of RPG books when they’ve screwed up. So it was with some nervousness that I read the first review of the book. I cannot describe the sense of relief that washed over me as I read these six blessed words: “I saw no major editorial gaffes.” Mr. Reviewer, you are an angel from heaven.
I’m actually afraid to look through the book myself; I know, I know with cold, absolute certainty that I’ll spot an overlooked typo on the very first page to which I turn. No–far better to leave the book closed and unread. And if you read the book and find a typo… please leave me in blessed ignorance.

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