The Shop
The Shop is a "threat book" for AEG's Shodowforce Archer setting for their Spycraft d20-based espionage game. The book descbes the technologically advanced villain organaization that rebelled against the Archer Conspiracy. The book is written by Robert J. Defendi, Alex Flagg, Scott Gearin, James Malizewski, Clayton A. Oliver, and Michael Surber.
A First Look
The Shop is a 128 page perfect-bound softcover book available for $24.95 US.
The cover of the book is illustrated by Veronica V. Jones, who has become the artist of choice for that job. The picture illustrates a singular figure in some advanced, cowled body armor, against the black background of the Shadowforce Archer setting.
The interior is black-and-white and is illustrated by Chris Grun, Garry McKee, Klaus Scherwinski, Attila Adorjany, Eric Kim, Eric Vedder, and Omar Dogan, with cartography by Dave Agoston and Chris Dornaus. Many of these artists were brought on board via UDON Studios, whose representative I was fortunate to meet last Gen Con. I think that the larger number of artists gives the book a bit more varied look than some previous Spycraft books, and perhaps bring a bit more finished look as well.
A Deeper Look
(Spoiler Warning: this section contains some spoilers to secrets in the plot and metaplot details revealed in the book.)
The Shop is arranged in the same format as the prior threat book Hand of Glory (and not all too dissimilar from the chamber books for that matter): it is arranged into campaign, villain, new rules, and challenge sections.
The book kicks off with a short fiction section, which actually reveals a few campaign secrets and pushes forward the metaplot. In it we get to learn a few pressing questions that might have been on your mind for the last few SFA products.
As is the norm for threat and chamber book, after the fiction, the central edifice of the book is a simulated cover page to a newspaper, in which events are discussed that have significance in the SFA world. The headline in this episode of "World Today"? A US Carrier has suffered a serious munitions accident at sea, and is being towed to port.
Or at least that's what the headline says. Of course this has to do with the infamous organization known as The Shop. As those familiar with SFA know, the shop is an arm of the Company, the arm of the archer conspiracy that operates from within the US military and intelligence communities. And this little incident was nothing less than a dust-up between the Shop and the Company.
The campaign chapter presents this and other simulated articles along with the secret truth behind them and a number of possible plot hooks that the GC can use as the basis for a game, with variations for each. Beings that the Shop is primarily the company's enemy, it should be of little surprise that many of these missions are cast in the style of the Company's supposed subgenres in SFA, that of Clancyesque military technothrillers (though to be fair, I read a bit of early Brosnan era bond in some of these.) Some plots could also involve the European Commonwealth and African Alliance.
It's somewhat difficult to say too much about the Villain chapter without unveiling a lot of secrets about the Shop and the SFA campaign. The chapter covers the history of the shop (some elements of which can be traced back to the initial events of the Archer foundation in the early 1900's) as well as it's goals and structure, and statistics for major NPCs.
As alluded to in the SFA campaign book, the Shop seceded from the Company due to some sort of agenda. It turns out that the agenda is somewhat "X-men"-ish in scope: they aim to bring about a race of psions on the earth. Some factions within the shop are content to go about this relatively peacefully. Others espouse more genocidal methods...
The Shop has three major arms: "the Plan", the operations arm, and R&D. "The Plan" reminded me a bit of minority report: it is a council of precogs who make policy and while sometime disagreeing, eventually come to a consensus. The operations arm handles more mundane activities and is managed by Gray. Special resources and rules are described for each arm of the shop. For example, to simulate the precognition abilities of the Plan, the GC gains some bonus action dice and may spend some to invoke the "serendipity" benefit of the pointman.
The New Rules chapter introduces new character options and subsystems of special note when dealing with the Shop.
As is the case for all chamber and threat books to date, a new 20-level "core" character class is introduced. The new class here is the scientist. This one might be a worthy addition; the role springs up occasionally in heroic roles in genre films (such as Nichole Kidman's character in The Peacekeeper and Denise Richards' character in The World is Not Enough.) Still, the character type might be a little dubious a choice in an SFA campaign, where the creative mentalist option seems a bit more enticing.
One of the most significant item rules addition is that of Abrosia, a special material engineered by the Shop to help acheive their goal of psion domination. Ambrosia is very poisonous, but if you survive, it has great benefit in terms of psionic abilites. It makes it easier to enter many psion prestige classes, and some new classes are introduced herein that specifically require Ambrosia.
The new prestige classes introduced in the book are:
-Avatar: The avatar is a result of the Shop's efforts to enhancing physical adepts. In addition to a number of specialized boosts to physical powers, they also progress in the look feat tree as they become more perfect physical specimens.
-Dreadnought: Dreadnoughts are powered armor warriors and technicians; the class receives significant bonuses when using the Shop's trademark powered armor.
-Schemer: This represents the eerie members of the Shop's Plan think tank. The class is a precognitive psion type class and requires the character to have taken ambrosia.
-Technocrat: This is one of the strangest classes in the book. The idea here is sort of a "modern wired elite" that is good at manipulating both people and machinces.
-Weaver: Another precognitive, abrosia driven class, this class is more of a field agent than the schemer, whose ability to forsee the future in a field confrontation make them a force to be dealt with.
There are two new Shop-specific departments, R&D and Triumvir. Triumvir is one of the shop's super-psions considered to have taken Ambrosia. In addition to the benefits in terms of entering prestige classes, the triumvir can take levels in any or all of the psion classes.
The NPC classes in this book include the Bird of Prey (shop armored warrior), Gadgeteer, Geomancer (Feng Shui specialist), Mecha Pilot, Monkeywrench (saboteur), and Triplet (shop psion).
Other rules in this chapter include expansions to the gadget construction rules, a revision of the NPC class rules, plate armor rules, new threat agendas and resources, the psion plague (a malady caused by the shop's attempts to spread psion abilities), new skill uses, new psion skills (including the long missing "skin armor", so now you can do the classic shop villain "Strik-9" right) and feats (including wild talent which lets non-psions take psion skills), and rules on clones.
The last chapter, Challenge, presents some featured NPCs (though some, like Villain X, appear earlier in the book) and a few missions and opponents in "threat" format. Also another recurring feature of these books, we get a location map (the Shop's submarine headquarters, the leviathan), a hook sheet with a prop-picture depicting the aftermath of an explosion in a small town with GC information on the Shop involvement with it, and a Venice chase map.
Finally, what you would want to see in any book on a threat as technologically savvy as the Shop, there is a nice index of gadgets from all of the SC/SFA books to date.
Conclusions
This is, in my estimation, one of the more useful Chamber/Threat books. Many of the new rules herein are just the sort of thing you'd want to throw in a modern spy yarn like clones and powered armor. The action herein is probably most appropriate to Company style agents, though there is good material for both PCs and threats involved with the EC, PAC, and African Alliance.
Overall Grade: B
-Alan D. Kohler
