I am sure my adaptions may evolve over time. I like your suggestion for swapping out Ranged (light) for melee with the faceman. I like Ranged split though. Better in my mind for a modern game. It is not terribly difficult to pick up non-career skills in game, so I am not too concerned to have every skill that is thought needed by each career. Good feedback.

21 hours ago, mouthymerc said:

...It is not terribly difficult to pick up non-career skills in game...

This is a good point, too. With that in mind, I actually like the Soldier lacking pistols because if he's going to be a Ranged guy, he's going to have good Agility and it's only extra 5-10xp to grab a rank or two in Ranged (Light), but he's going to focus on the bigger guns naturally. I'm also taking an additional moment to disconnect myself from the d20 roots of all these and Star Wars background for this system and remember that taking a career is just a package of cheaper skills, and not connected to talent build at all.

That all being said, I think I still like dropping Ranged (Light) from Snoop. I'll take a closer look later and see if I have a proper recommendation on a replacement instead of just half a note.

On ‎6‎/‎03‎/‎2018 at 4:31 AM, Foghorn said:

I agree with Daeglan, but looking at the list, I'm hesitant to take anything away. Looking at the whole list, it also raises the question, "Should everyone have a Ranged skill?" I know the pistol wielding superspy is pretty deeply entrenched in the genre, but I could see an argument for removing Ranged (Light) from Fixer and Snoop, and possibly replace Ranged (Light) with Melee for Faceman (the femme fatale with knives or the disguise master who injects poisons vibe). Going back to the "what do you lose?" question for Soldier, I also wonder if it's too much to keep Ranged as a singular skill. That opens characters back up to the massively competent superspy, and by removing Ranged from a couple of the Careers, but still makes it harder for your hacker to walk around with a giant machine gun laying waste to everything.

You want to avoid the trap the Snoop had in Spycraft, which was that it was pre-smart phones, drones, and ubiquitous internet and consider the way in which they could be engaged as all seeing tech gods now. To that end, the video game Watch_Dogs 2, with its drone, is a good insight and was the basis for my "greyhat" career having Operation, to control drones. A simple quadcopter can provide a team with intel, access, and oversight that just hacking CCTV cannot.

Food for thought.

Just got my copy of Realms of Terrinoth. Will be mining it for talents and the heroic abilities. A quick look has given me some good ideas.

And now that we've had a summer to work with this... how well did it work out for you? My son has expressed an interest in doing an espionage-style campaign, and is looking through various systems. What I've seen of the system seems like it could fit reasonably without too much adaption needed, but wanted to get opinions from people who have been there.

Haven't run anything as yet. My group wanted to dive back into Star Wars so I have been working on that.

Most things I have been collecting are drag and drop. I have been combing through my Star Wars books for relevant talents and then double checking with the Genesys talents for duplication. Some specialization specific talents have been condensed into individual genetic talents. I have also been waiting on the last SW career book on spies.

I may throw something together to run as a one shot at my FLGS.

There's a couple of good video games recently that you can mine for inspiration for this setting:

Hitman 2 - I'm a Hitman fan from the very first title back in the day, so when the rebooted series came along in 2016 and did away with Absolution 's bitter aftertaste, I was delighted. 2018's Hitman 2 is basically Season 2 of the original, and that's worthy of zero complaints.

What does this offer GMs? Each mission, each assassination or set of assassinations, is its own sandbox. The demo level takes place at a-WEC style race in Miami, in which the target is a team owner and billionaire, and his LMP-1 racing daughter. You need to infiltrate the event and dispose of your targets, and there are scores of ways in which you can do this. It shows GMs the way to sandbox a modern adventure so that the adventure objective isn't tied to a written adventure path by the GMs but rather, with the narrative dice, an evolving story that creates side quests and unexpected turns.

Phantom Doctrine - An X-Com esque turn based Cold War adventure, Phantom Doctrine sees you as a KGB or CIA officer who, with the help of his/her fellow agents, tackles a shadowy conspiracy launched by the Beholder Initiative. Turn based infiltration and combat missions sit side by side with a cork-bork clue analysis game and world map strategy game. And let's face it, if giving your spy a nice suit and a Walther PPK, silenced, is an option you'll always take it.

What does it offer GMs? To me at least, shadow organisations are a bit silly and belong in an earlier decade of spy fiction, which is good for PD as it's set in the 1980s. The only exception, to me at least, is Quantum from the first two Daniel Craig 007 films. But this offers you a way to show a shadow organisation, different types of missions for players, and a hub/base type setup. It's also just good atmospherics - offices with big desktop terminals with small screens, Mk I Volkswagen Golfs and W116 Mercedes Benz models parked in streets - it really helps set the scene. But the idea of seeding out clues to your PCs and having them pin them to a board and draw a line between them to unlock new intel isn't something I thought of, in this digital age, and it's a fun activity to immerse the players in the pre-digital intelligence world.