Spies, Detectives and amazing villains!
AGENCY is a FASERIPopedia sourcebook giving you everything about spies, be they James Bond movie type spies, serious and real spies or anything inbetween. This book has a gruesome grisly list of death-traps, which may sound morbid but is really great fun and makes the players really really want to beat the countdown to save their friends - especially when you can read out how many seconds or minutes they have based on type of horrifying death! I never expected such a thing in a game, let alone lovingly detailed with rules to apply - that is genius right there!
There are also many types of character to play, almost like character classes. Insurance Investigators, Meddling Busy-Bodies, Police Detectives and so on - so many- and with our group of four players we had four completely different sleuths cooperating in different ways.
The thing that really puts Agency over the top though for me is unreliable contacts. Contacts in FASERIP games are like Commissioner Gordon for Batman or like that, and they just help your superhero no questions asked. In Agency your contacts are like real people and they can stand up to you, give you lip or refuse to help! So you have to be nice to them, bribe them or threaten them! And they can still end up betraying you or ratting you out and setting you up to be killed! Because this is a spy game, after all. That is a brilliant addition I mean that really livens it up.
There's also a rule for antiheroes which means a lot of Agency characters who go around shooting people like James Bond can still be "heroes" but not fully heroic like superheroes with their no kill rule, instead they're real life type heroes who if they have to shoot, will shoot. Makes perfect sense and still fits in the same rules system which is a first for FASERIP games. They always had this cringe about exceptions during World War 2 and stuff like that which is nonsense. Agency just lays it out. Antiheroes. Perfect.
This game is so much fun and quick to start. There's adventure charts and charts for rumors sort of like D&D tavern rumors but set in modern day terms.
The NPCs provided and rules for henchmen and masterminds is excellent and you'll love generating stories using this book. Very easy to use. Add the weapons and vehicles from FASERIPopedia to this and you could run a long campaign.
My first impression, was of shock and awe. Like the FASERIPodedia, there is a staggering amount of content with a mind-boggling range. And it varied from great charts and frameworks upon which to hang an adventure (or series of adventures) to settings and 'denizens of the deep' that ranged from "cool, I recognise those", to "what the act f&%, the author must be high"... until a few minutes of internet research confirmed that, yes, ALL of the content is grounded in what has come before; comics and fiction sources that fans of the "worlds below" genre (or anyone willing to do internet research) will recognise. Yes, it is playable, adhering to the author's principles of creating a game structure that is simple enough to be easily picked up and robust enough to support complex themes and situtations. Yes, it is entertaining in allowing a flowing rollicking story for players with an enormous amount of genre specific content. But what blew me away on this was the hidden gems of hidden history. Do yourself a favour and do a few internet searches on the content; more than once, entries I assumed were from old comics or fiction turned out to be references to history or events from our own cultural past. Sprinkling a few of these Easter Eggs into the game will give a great flavour of realism to a game of monsters, dangers and heroes.
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]
