James Bond 007: Roleplaying In Her Majesty’s Secret Service was designed by Gerard Christopher Klug (known as Chris Klug these days) with development by Greg Gordon and Neil Randall, and was released by Victory Games between 1983 and 1987, selling over 100,000 copies. It is long out of print but available on the second-hand market at reasonable prices (as I write Noble Knight lists it at under $15 for the core rules) though the supplements are usually 200-500% more.
This episode was made possible by our patron and friend Christian Bickle, who chose the game for us to cover. Huge thanks go out to him for letting us create a really fun episode.
Click here to see the James Bond 007 RPG on Wikipedia
Click here to check out the James Bond 007 RPG on Noble Knight Games
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Show Notes
These are the show notes for our James Bond 007 RPG episode, where we delve a bit further into things that we don’t have time to explore in detail in the podcast itself, with links where relevant. Often, clicking on the links helps to support the podcast.
The Bond franchise is well known, but in case you’ve somehow avoided it: the books and movies cover the increasingly improbable stories of a self-hating though well dressed psychopath employed as an assassin, fixer and gigolo by the British Secret Service. He does no spying and uses very little tradecraft. Catchphrases include “I’m James, James Bond” and “Shaken, not scared”.
In the original Bond novels and films, SPECTRE (“Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion”) is an international crime syndicate with fingers in every nasty pie it can find. SPECTRE was co-created by screenwriter Kevin McClory for the screenplay that eventually became Thunderball, which Fleming then adapted into the book of the same name. After some legal action McClory retained some rights to elements of the Bond universe, including SPECTRE and its leader Blofeld, which resulted in the non-canon Bond movie Never Say Never Again in 1983.
Top Secret was TSR’s 1980 cinematic-espionage RPG, designed by Merle Rasmussen and based on a d10 system that has no name and I don’t think was ever reused. It used ‘Areas of Knowledge’ as skills, and ‘Fame and Fortune’ points, a precurser to Hero/Fate points. The revised edition, Top Secret/SI (1987) by Doug Niles and Warren Spector is a better game, obviously influenced by the success of James Bond 007 RPG.
There’s a 100-minute video on the history of Victory Games with an extensive interview with former head of the company Mark Herman. Meanwhile the history of SPI Games is covered pretty well by the Wikipedia entry on the subject.
Ross did an Actual Play of the legendary 1980 Dallas RPG, which will tell you everything you need to know about the workings of the game and possibly more.
It wasn’t James Dunnigan who said that the 80,000 copies of Dallas “was about 79,999 more than anyone wanted”, it was Redmond Simonsen the SPI sales director, and James Wallis was wrong on the print run by ten thousand. We apologise for the error.
SPI’s two other RPGs, Universe and DragonQuest, were not well treated by TSR. Universe, which had been conceived as a better version of Traveller, was pushed out of print almost immediately so it wouldn’t compete with TSR’s new SF game Star Frontiers. DragonQuest, a fantasy game with mechanics based around skills rather than attributes, did get a third edition from TSR along with a single adventure, but despite warm reviews it wasn’t promoted or supported. The trademark is now owned by Square Enix for its unrelated CRPG series, so a revival seems unlikely.
Doctor Ruth’s Game of Good Sex is pretty much what you’d expect when a bunch of 1980s wargames guys design a trivia game about sex. Too long and rulesy, it has a lousy 4.6 rating on BoardGameGeek.
Evolution may not seem to be an easily linked topic for RPGs but designer Jonathan Tweet (Ars Magica, Over the Edge, D&D3e, 13th Age) wrote a successful book on evolutionary theory for 3-5 year olds, Grandmother Fish (2015), which is delightful.
Metacurrencies, the use of game tokens to give the players control over narrative elements of the game, was a subject we discussed in season 2, episode 4.
The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG was another TSR title, designed by John Byrne (not that John Byrne) and Zeb Cook and released in 1984. Hampered by restrictions imposed by Lucasfilm, the base game had no character generation and the core character could not die. It’s also the source of the ‘Nazi (TM)’ story. When the licence expired all the remaining inventory had to be destroyed, and charred parts of the last copy were encased in Perspex and became the Diana Jones trophy, of the eponymous award. The IJ game was unloved but it wasn’t alone: there was a wave of pulp and espionage games in the early 1980s, of which very few survived more than a handful of years.
Ian Fleming’s sadism is well chronicled. He was a flagellant who had multiple affairs (as did his wife), and he enjoyed hurting women, as Bond does in the books. He also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Pub quiz trivia: the screenplay for the movie was written by Roald Dahl.)
The first Casino Royale movie came out in 1967, two months before You Only Live Twice. It stars David Niven as a retired Sir James Bond, who recruits a number of people to pose as ‘James Bond’ including Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Joanna Pettet and Woody Allen. Orson Welles plays Le Chiffre. Billy Wilder, Terry Southern and Joseph Heller contributed to the script, Burt Bacharach did the theme, and the best thing about it is the poster. It’s supposed to be a comedy but mostly it’s a mess.
THAC0 (‘To Hit Armour Class 0’) replaced the extensive combat tables of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with a single number that let players calculate what they needed to roll in combat, as long as they knew their opponents’ armour rating. Originally developed for RPGA tournament games, it started appearing in Dragon magazine in 1984 and was adopted by Jeff Grubb for AD&D 2e. It streamlined the game’s combat greatly, and is unfairly maligned.
Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes was Mike ‘Rogue Squadron’ Stackpole’s espionage and investigation RPG for Blade, part of Flying Buffalo, which came out in 1983. Fun at the time, it has not aged well, though there’s still some charm and interesting ideas in it.
The ‘Name that Tune’ bidding mechanic comes from the 1950s TV show of the same name. Contestants bid to name popular melodies in as few notes as possible, so the bidding goes down, not up.
The Night’s Black Agents ‘Conspyramid’ was discussed in the Nights Black Agents episode (season 1, episode 4), and revisited in our recent episode on the NBA book Double Tap (series 3, episode 4).
The Harry Palmer novels were written by Len Deighton between 1962 and 1976 as an anti-James Bond secret agent in a world where MI-6 has a realistic civil service budget. The ones you probably know are the first four: The Ipcress File; Horse Under Water; Funeral in Berlin; and Billion Dollar Brain. Three of them were filmed with Michael Caine in the title role. The central character is not named in the books; ‘Harry Palmer’ was chosen by Deighton for the movies for the same reason Fleming chose ‘James Bond’: it was a nondescript, unremarkable name. Funeral in Berlin is one of the tightest cold-war espionage movies ever made, helped by the fact that director Guy Hamilton had been in military intelligence in WWII.
Scars and recurring foes in video games: the game James was thinking of was 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, set between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. In the game NPCs remember their interactions with the player, plus the game tracks Uruk NPCs who do notable actions and promotes them, so as thing go on the player recognises an NPC as a recurring foe of increasing importance, who hates them. It’s called the Nemesis System and it’s very cool.
The heater in the bath scene in Goldfinger – watch James Bond spend a hero point!
The Man Between is James Ernest’s short film of a low-level secret agent who idolises James Bond. It does not appear to be online, and Ernest is not answering my emails about it.
Ro-sham-bo is another name for Jan-Ken-Po or Rock-Paper-Scissors.
The Falklands Skirmish (1982) was fought over a cluster of small, rocky islands off the coast of Argentina, between the UK which has claimed the islands since 1832, and Argentina, which ditto. 907 lives were lost to protect the British citizenship of the 1800 islanders and Margaret Thatcher’s position as Prime Minister.
The Rocky & Bullwinkle Role-Playing Party Game was a folly designed by Dave Cook and Warren Spector, released by TSR in 1988. It includes ten glove puppets, cardboard stand-ups and spinners. Due to licensing restrictions it was never released outside North America. Mechanically it was way ahead of its time, but commercially it was only slightly more successful than the Dallas RPG.
Lorraine Williams was hired to run TSR by Gary Gygax in 1984, gained control of the company in 1985 and stayed there until the Wizards of the Coast buy-out in 1997. She ran TSR for longer than any other person, but was a not a gamer herself. However she was a member of the Dille family that owned the rights to Buck Rogers, and which gained royalties on any Buck Rogers products sold, which may explain TSR’s decision to publish Buck Rogers board games, RPGs, comic books, novels, non-fiction books and computer games during Williams’ tenure.
Dogs in the Vineyard (2004) is an early narrativist RPG by Vincent ‘PbtA‘ Baker. Players are ‘God’s Watchdogs’ who travel the Old West administering justice. Baker withdrew the game from sale about ten years ago. We will be covering it in a future episode this season.
Classified is a 2014 reworking of the setting and mechanics of the James Bond 007 RPG, with all the trademarks scrubbed off. It has strong reviews on DriveThruRPG.
As always the episode hosts were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross, and show notes by James. If anything in this episode has spurred your interest then come and discuss it on our Discord.
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