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4 June, 2009

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

ROGUE FEED
ROGUE FEED
Rogue Games sneaks onto
Supplementitis
Kindle JUN 03, 2009 06:35P.M.
JUN 03, 2009 10:15P.M.
In addition to short rulebooks, the other thing that strikes me about
those early games were the relative lack of supplements aside from
adventures. Most RPGs back then never got a rules supplement of any
We have been busy. kind. There was never an expansion of Gamma World, for example, and
I can’t say I ever felt the need for one. Even AD&D was essentially
Working on new games (Shadow, Sword & Spell), getting a revised complete rules-wise after the publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide
book to press (Colonial Gothic Revised), getting a new supplement to in August 1979 and there were no significant additions/alterations to its
layout (Thousand Suns), updating a online resource (New World rules until the release of Unearthed Arcana in 1985.
Almanack), getting books not only up on Scribd (Rogue Games Scribd)
but getting up for sale (The Rogue’s eBook Store). Just looking at makes Part of the reason for this, I think, is that much of what would go into a
me tired, and that is not even the whole list. supplement nowadays was instead presented either as a small add-on at
the back of an adventure or in magazine articles. Back in the day, there
Starting today we add another thing to the list: Kindle. were lots of new options offered up in the pages of Dragon, often under
the byline of Gary Gygax, and we picked and chose which ones we
You read that right. Starting today you are able to purchase some of our wanted to use in our home games. My dislike of cavaliers, to cite one
books for the Kindle. Right now you can buy: example, was solidified years before the class officially appeared in a
D&D product, since I’d tested out the class in my campaigns after having
• Colonial Gothic: Poor Wizard’s Grimoire read the original presentation of it in Dragon. Those articles served the
purpose of keeping the game “fresh” through the introduction of new
• Colonial Gothic: Secrets ideas and concepts, but, because none of them were formally introduced
into the canon of the game, it was very easy to prevent their destabilizing
• Thousand Suns: Transmissions from Piper its core.

The list is small, but it will grow by the end of the month. The goal is to Again, I’m not quite sure when things started to change. I know by the
have these editions ready on the same day as the book releases. Once it mid-80s it was much more commonplace to see regular rules
goes up for sale, you will be able to buy any new title from any of the supplements for many games. Indeed, it seemed to be that publishers felt
various places our books are for sale. It might not be instant, but it will that nothing short of a rules addition warranted publication and so
be there. supplements became the bread and butter of game lines rather than
adventures as they once were. There are still a handful of games out
Anyway, both James and I are excited as hell about this, as well as the there nowadays — Call of Cthulhu springs immediately to mind — for
other cool things in the works. Like? Our games will be available on the which rules supplements are largely anathema. I can’t help but think the
Espresso Book Machine via On Demand Books, which is due in large shift away from adventures and toward regular rules expansions is
part of who we use for our printer. another bellwether of the end of the old school.

There are more surprises in store. 2009 is going to be a very fun year for

us, as well as for you.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net 4 June, 2009

ROGUE FEED contained everything I ever felt I needed to run an espionage game.
There were rules for combat (of course), including several very enjoyable
Retrospective: Top Secret hand-to-hand combat sub-systems, generating missions and
JUN 03, 2009 02:00P.M. complications, fame, gun design, special gadgets, and lots more. Many of
these rules were, as one might expect for the time, very cursory, laying
out the broad outlines and then letting the referee, known as the
Administrator, fill in the blanks. As a kid, that was just fine by me. The
only time I ever felt out of my depth in coming up with rules was when it
came to car chases, which Top Secret didn’t really touch on that I recall.
We eventually wound up using a modified version of the Car Wars rules
to handle such eventualities.

What I remember most vividly about Top Secret was that it existed in a
nice conceptual space halfway between the purely realistic spy novels of
the era and the over-the-top action of the James Bond films, which were
deep into the Roger Moore lunacy era at that time (Moonraker was
released in 1979, remember). The modules produced for it were, by and
large, semi-plausible in their conceptions, but each included enough
space for individual players and referees to add their own elements if
they preferred slightly more outlandish action in their games. My home
campaign assumed the characters were members of an U.N.C.L.E.-like
organization that drew on agents from every Western nation and fought
terrorists, Eastern bloc spies, and the occasional diabolical madman bent
on world domination. We had a lot of fun with the game and I still
remember some absolutely awesome fistfights aboard the Orient Express
as it barrelled on toward Istanbul.

Top Secret is also noteworthy because the cover image features yet
another appearance by Gary’s daughter, Elise, although you can’t see her
face in the photograph. Legend also has it that there was originally a
different cover that included US dollars on it, but that it was pulled and
replaced after it was realized that it was, at the time, illegal to
photograph US legal tender.
Along with Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller, another great love of my
early RPG career was TSR’s Top Secret. First released in 1980, it was
written by Merle M. Rasmussen, a writer of somewhat mysterious
pedigree. That is, he appears to have debuted on the RPG scene as the
creator of Top Secret and, with the exception of a couple of D&D
modules in the mid to late 80s, to have done little else in the field. I This issue contains posts from between
always wondered what became of him, but, after doing some digging and Jun 03, 2009 07:04a.m. and Jun 04, 2009 03:05a.m..
checking with my contacts, I’ve not been able to find out any more about Visit the Rogues on the Web:
the man behind one of my favorite early RPGs. http://www.rogue-games.net

Like a lot of games from that era, Top Secret was built on the class-and-
level model of D&D, with players being able to choose from among
Assassins, Confiscators, and Investigators as classes. Character classes
had little game mechanical effect, being used primarily to determine if
the PC received bonus XP for certain class-specific objectives. Otherwise,
character classes were fairly vestigial. The game used percentile dice for
everything, from attribute generation to skill use to combat. My set
included two twenty-sided dice of rather shoddy quality, but I
understand later printings of the game included the more-familiar TSR
“Dragon Dice” with the crayon.

Top Secret was brief — the whole book was only 64 pages long — but it

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