Troll Lord Games

Does anyone have the second edition of Top Secret? I don't mean S.I.; I was listening to Dead Games Society and they had Merle Rasmussen on, and he said the Hand to Hand stuff was simplified in the second printing. I am wondering if that is more like what I played when I was a kid. Right noow I have the 1980 printing and it looks more complicated than I recall. The second edition is 1981 and 1983 I think.

It's also simplified in the Top Secret Companion, but that is pretty expensive used right now.

If you have BOTH printings maybe you can tell me what differences there are?

p.s. Tell me someone is on top of making a spy game or "modern" supplement for Amazing Adventures.

Merle said in the podcast he is investigating doing a new spy game with TSR, Inc. I thought they said they were strictly in the magazine business, but that would be neat.

Oh, and has anyone played:

- Covert Ops
- Spycraft
- Agents of S.W.I.N.G.

Have the PDFs but haven't tried them yet.

I also reacquired the core book for James Bond 007. That was awesome.

I know Joseph Browning of XRP released a "clone" of TSR's old spy game a couple of months ago, but I don't own any edition of them. I never got into straight up "spy" RPG's. Only reason I own Spycraft is because it was part of a bundle deal I bought.

Oh, that's cool, I didn't know about that one.

The clone is of James Bond 007, which was by Victory Games, which was a spinoff/imprint of Avalon Hill, and had employees who were hired away from SPI when TSR acquired them. TSR's spy game was Top Secret.

It's a very playable system, with particularly good chase mechanics. I think it's one of the first games to use a sort of difficulty band system, where you had a Quality Rating of Excellent through Acceptable cross referenced with your roll within a specific success range (requiring a table to look up results.) It played nice and fast as I recall.

Of course, now Wizards owns Avalon Hill's stuff so it all comes back.

Amazingly enough, I never got to play Top Secret. I think one of my friends had it. We did get in some James Bond, however. I have a good deal of that material. Still need the For Your Information boxed set, and most of the movie modules. I think there were also some stand-a-lone games based off of the movies as well.

I owned Top Secret back when it first came out, but couldn't never get my RPG buddies to try it out. All they wanted to play was Fantasy.

Aergraith wrote: Oh, and has anyone played:

- Covert Ops
- Spycraft
- Agents of S.W.I.N.G.

Have the PDFs but haven't tried them yet.

I also reacquired the core book for James Bond 007. That was awesome.

Got all the Spycraft Silver line stuff in hardback and few of the line in digits. Along with Shadow Force Archer - their home setting and the dark inheritance setting. Have 2nd Edition as well.

I like the 1st Edition and have played a few sessions of it. Basically d20.

Top Secret (& Top Secret S.I.) was the second-most played game for our group in the 80's. I loved it. It made for a nice break away from Fantasy & Gamma World games so those games would be made even fresher somehow when we came back to them. AD&D, TS, GW, & Twilight:2000 were our most-played games from 1980-90.

TS 1st ed. was probably our third most popular game "back in the day," right after AD&D (of course) and MSHRPG. I recall several fun adventures with a team of agents from the assassination bureau ...

Nothing to add about 2nd ed., though - sorry.

I only played TS 1st ed (it was our 3rd favorite game after AD&D and Traveller) - so no help here on 2nd ed either, sorry.

Like most of the others who have posted, I logged in many hours with TS but never the second printing. (Or TS/SI for that matter.) A great game with some pretty decent support through Dragon magazine. Maybe the hand-to-hand rules hit Dragon before they appeared in a second printing? Might be worth a look...

Aergraith wrote:Does anyone have the second edition of Top Secret? I don't mean S.I.; I was listening to Dead Games Society and they had Merle Rasmussen on, and he said the Hand to Hand stuff was simplified in the second printing. I am wondering if that is more like what I played when I was a kid. Right noow I have the 1980 printing and it looks more complicated than I recall. The second edition is 1981 and 1983 I think.

It's also simplified in the Top Secret Companion, but that is pretty expensive used right now.

If you have BOTH printings maybe you can tell me what differences there are?

After looking through my stuff at home, it appears my old TS stuff is still at my parents or in their storage. Sorry I can't help you, Aergraith. I'll see what notes I might have at home in my gaming folders, etc. Maybe I will have an answer there.

No worries, I found a 2nd edition copy and it's on its way.

Maybe you can post the changes to the HtH rules when it arrives, in case any of us get the urge to run a TS game again.

finarvyn wrote:Maybe you can post the changes to the HtH rules when it arrives, in case any of us get the urge to run a TS game again.

*cough*
Seconded.

I just got the 2nd Edition today.

The first edition editing and layout was done by Alan Hammack. The second edition by Stephen D. Sullivan.

The 2nd edition cover has a darker photo and a lighter red border and "TOP SECRET" lettering.

Inside, you can see that Mr. Sullivan probably had the better understanding of typography. He uses simpler fonts and this is the major improvement over 1st edition. 1st edition has a more B/X style which is not good for the dense information blocks in Top Secret.

The HtH section is shorter in 2nd Edition, owing mostly to the omission of many HtH results. 1st edition has 32, 2nd edition has 8 (a subset of the original: S1, S2, S3, V, W, X, Y, and Z.) The first section in the HtH section has been reworded and a table has been added to show how many actions of each type the attacker gets.

Boxing and swordplay are in separate tables in 2e. Judo throws and holds are combined in one table in 2e. A knife-fighting table has been added to 2e. Because of the fewer result types and slightly smaller and less typewriter-like font, the tables take up less room in 2e. Some artwork in 2e has been changed. The rules for grenades have been moved closer to explosives (in 1e they came after Underwater Combat).

I'll probably do a more thorough pass later, but I think those are the big ones.

The TSR-6601 Administrator's Screen reflects the 2nd edition rules.
The Accelerated HtH system in Top Secret Companion is simpler still, and includes rules for when one of you has a gun and the other is doing HtH (first thing to come up in the last game I played, and no rule for it...)

I think one reason I played so much Top Secret as a kid was you don't need many players, and often it was me and a friend, without enough people to play Star Frontiers or D&D.

Was just thinking, you know, not to snipe Merle from TSR, Inc. if they are doing something, but maybe the Trolls and they could work something else. I think Merle's next game should be for SIEGE. That would be all kinds of awesome.

Aergraith wrote:The TSR-6601 Administrator's Screen reflects the 2nd edition rules.

That's interesting. I bought a copy of the Administrator's Screen years after we quit playing TS, with the thought that I'd play it again someday. Hasn't happened and I never got around to looking at the screen much.

Heck, I didn't even know (before this thread) that there was a 2nd printing.