Gentlemans Agreement

For years, wealth and power have been indelibly linked, and those with fortunes greater than some Third World countries have guided history with a confident hand. Back room deals and secretive bargains determine the fate of men and nations. Now, a gentleman

I just picked this up this weekend and read it straight through. I thought others may be interested.

Gentlemens Agreement is a "season" sourcebook for Spycraft d20, and is published by AEG. The book is written by B.D. Flory. A season book is a collection of short adventures that may be connected and played as a campaign or played individually.

Gentlemens Agreement is a 96-page perfect bound softcover book and costs approximately $25 retail. It's cover features the silver monocrom cover that typifies Spycraft products. Central to the cover is an elegant woman with a hidden dagger.

Margins and font are fairly average. Page space appears to be well used and there are plenty of maps to support the adventures of the various buildings, ships, and space station mentioned in the text. None of the maps are full page affairs and a GM may want to use a photocopier to enlarge these before play. The art is reminiscent of some of the Top Secret RPG First Edition (which fits the realistic/James Bond setting that the book supports. Writing style is good and keeps the readers interest and there is flavor text spread throughout.

***Spoiler Alert***

As I said above, Gentlemens Agreement is a collection of four possibly interrelated adventures for the Spycraft game. Before I go any further I (personally) feel that product reviewers should make clear some of their different bias towards RPG products - so readers of the review can tell where the reviewer is coming from.

I like the more realistic-fantastic RPG settings (such as the original Top Secret) and I like prepublished adventures (if for idea material if nothing else). Also, when AEG published the Spycraft game and made a big push of the Shadowforce Archer I was concerned that they would develop this core setting (which has no appeal to me) to the exclusion of the traditional espionage settings. Further, I am not a game mechanics guru - nor do I go in for "crunchy bits" (which I take to mean new rules, prestige classes, etc.).

Gentleman's Agreement is based in a James Bond-esque version of our world and embraces the evil mastermind concept in four related adventures. The evil organization, called the "Board", consists of powerful men who play at the dangerous game of bringing the world to the brink of destruction and then pulling it back. The current winner in the game is Nero Kingsley, who was the mastermind behind the 1962 Cuban Missle crisis. The players, as members of the genericly named "Agency", find themselves running afoul of the different Board members schemes. If played as a campaign, the players can collect clues as to what the Board's game is all about with hopes of stopping them. However, because the four different adventures are written without any "real" requirement to have played an earlier or later adventure, a GM can easily run all four as completely unrelated. In other words, most of James Bond's opponents were members of SMERSH, but you didn't need to see Thunderball to understand Goldfinger. Also, the adventures are all written with a scaled system that allows the GM to quickly run the each adventure for low/medium/high level characters.

The first adventure deals with an inventor who plans on setting off volcanoes around the Pacific Rim in order to sell a new anti-volcano device to threatened countries. Initially,this adventure just didn't interest me...maybe it was images of Dr. Evil threatening to bore into the earth's magma, but volcanos have just never done it for me. But I guess they do for AEG, since there is a five page appendix about new volcano rules and gear at the end of the book. At any rate, after reading it through, I was intregued by the corporate espionage feel that this adventure has (I will probably run as a new invention snatch dropping the magma bit).

The second adventure is, IMO the prize of the lot. Basically a great post-cold war espionage case of an investment meglomaniac planning to crash all of the world's stock exchanges, in different ways (computer virus, bombing, etc) on the same day.

The third installment has an added twist. Where the other three adventures take place in the present, the third takes place in 1962, with the Agents seeking to avert the Cuban Missile Crisis. Having seen Thirteen Days before reading the adventure, IMO this is one of the most seemlessly placed fantastic (RPG) adventures in a historical context that I have seen.

The fourth adventure leans a little too heavily on the James Bond-Austin Powers cliche' and is in my opinion the weakest of the bunch. Basically, the wingnut from 1962 (Nero) is still alive, but not for long - he's dying and wants the world to go with him, using - you guessed it, a super nuclear bomb. To stop him, the agents must track him to his evil lair which is, you guessed it again, in space.

Pluses. Flexibility. This product was designed to give a GM the flexiblity to use the adventures in the book in the most possible ways. The scalable mechanic (again, I am no mechanic guru) stikes me as a good way to allow a GM to insert some or all of these adventures into a campaign (new or ongoing) for a party regardless of the level.

Play time. Each of these four adventures involves a good degree of globe-trotting (multiple locations). This is a good tool to pausing a gaming session and should appeal to groups that cannot work through a lengthy adventure in a single session.

Plot mining. Every one of these adventures has ideas that a GM can use, especially since they have a good number of various locals, at least three in each adventure (corporate labs, media headquarters, a mansion, and a freighter on the high seas to name a few) that can be exploited in parts, if not the whole.

Minuses. Depending on the preferences of the group. Simply, no psychics, no aliens, no gnoll pimps. I'd think the fantastic oriented should look to the Shadowforce Archer books or the sure to be published D20 Modern espionage handbooks. Also, if the group likes strict realism, the Blofeld/Dr. Evil motivations of the villans in these adventures may be a turn off.

Conclusions. Overall, I enjoyed this product and think that my group will as well. The weaknesses of some of the adventures was made up for by the strength of others. I was glad to see that AEG hadn't limited their support for Archer and hope that they will continue to support "traditional espionage", especially if the Archer line fails in competition with D20 Modern. Simply put, fans of the James Bond or original Top Secret RPG who were hoping for more of the same from Spycraft should be pleased.

So if these adventures are supposedly designed so that you can use them all together but the third one takes place in 1962, do they provide a method of time travel?

The structure of the season is such that the third adventure presents some of the Board's backstory, which revolves around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The serial is framed as an NPC reveals the details of the incident.

While the third adventure does feature a board member, its well before the agents' time. As such, its recommended the players run characters that are identical (stat wise) to their contemporary personas (and all XP awards are applied to the contemporary characters).

Time travel's a little outside the bounds of cinematic espionage, eh?

B.D. Flory

Yes, it is, hence my concern. Thanks for the answer, I'll be sure to pick this up soon.

By Steven Creech, Exec. Chairman d20 Magazine Rack

Sizing Up the Target
This review is for Gentlemen's Agreement, written by B. D. Flory and illustrated by Veronica Jones, Jonathan Hunt and Paul Way. Published by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), this 96-page book provides players of the Spycraft game with the first official season of scenarios. It carries a retail price of $24.95.

First Blood
Gentlemen's Agreement contains four serials (adventures) that may be used separately or combined together to form a long-term campaign utilizing characters ranging from first to twentieth level. Each serial is scaleable to three different levels of play (and all of the necessary stats are provided). As with any Spycraft book to date, you will find new rules, game mechanics and crunchy stuff. So as no to give away any spoilers, I will not comment much about the serials other than to say they are appropriately well-written in the style of the game.

Critical Hits
Finally, an official Spycraft adventure book. I’ve been waiting for this for some time now. Each serial is short and to the point making both playing and acting as Control easier. There are certainly some heavy Hollywood movie influences and undertones that run through the serials. The final one is a real barnburner.

The new volcano rules do a good job at giving GMs new hazard tools to use along with a fairly extensive set of definitions and descriptions regarding the anatomy and geology of a volcano. Imagine your players scrambling for their wits when you hit the with a volcanic eruption.

I especially like the collection of NPCs in one of the appendices. They are set up for low, mid and high level games.

Critical Misses
Very few. In two of the scenarios I found that successfully following the clue chain still required a brilliant flash of insight out of the blue in order to make a connection. But that could just as easily been me and a tired brain.

Coup de Grace
Gentlemen’s Agreement offers a good first step for any gamers looking to play in the Spycraft setting. If run properly, players will certainly walk away feeling as though they were part of a Mission:Impossible or James Bond 007 operation. It is a solid adventure book with enough rules tidbits scattered through it to make life interesting. The $24.95 pricetag is a bit steep but justified if you are in need of serials for Spycraft or even Shadowforce Archer.

To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to Fast Tracks at www.d20zines.com.