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My First Ten RPGs: 6

1 Jun, 2020

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number six is TSR’s espionage RPG, Top Secret. As I recall, the designers compensated for the potential lethality of their system by giving PCs luck points they could use to deflect potentially fatal wounds, and that their very detailed hand to hand combat system was a bit like a table-based version of Ace of Aces.


Opponents each picked a moved and cross referenced them on a chart to see what happened. It was possible for combatants to knock each other out simultaneously,

I didn’t play it much but I do recall one session vividly. For reasons that escape me, the group decided it would be more convenient if the other side didn’t have a yacht to which they could retreat, so a PC was dispatched to sink the boat. Unfortunately, there were a number of ships anchored near each other, and the PC got confused whether the one he wanted was the Nth from the left or the right. And that’s how a yacht belonging to Beatrix of the Netherlands got blown up and sunk.