• Spycraft: Agency
• A Spycraft Source Book
• Alderac Entertainment Group
• 128 pages
• MSRP: $24.95
• Web: www.spycraftrpg.com
• Buy it from Amazon.com

The Agency is a cornerstone of the Spycraft role-playing game. It's the clandestine organization that serves as home base for the player characters, supplying them with essential personnel, training, and -- of course -- lots of gadgets. It's also a labyrinthine behemoth, filled with dozens if not hundreds of agents each with their own passions, hatreds, and agendas.

The Agency source book attempts to provide players and game masters with tools to create an agency of their own imagining ... or to randomly throw out cogs that assemble themselves into an unpredictable machine.

The book is divided into five chapters, one for each level of the agency (or, to look at it another way, one for each phase of a character's life within the organization). These chapters are "Specialist", "Recruit", "Operative", "Handler" and the pinnacle of spydom, "Control". Chapters begin with an overview of that level of the organization, describing who works at that level, and how they relate to their superiors and the organization at large.

This introduction is supported by several pages of player-friendly content, including new departments (the Spycraft equivalent of races), prestige classes and feats. There are also new training programs, which allow player characters to gain temporary skills or feats in a given area. An example is "Covert Operations Training", which grants the benefits of the Credible feat and two temporary skill ranks in Bluff, Slight of Hand and Surveillance.

New resources -- Agency pull that players can call upon during missions -- are also available, such "diversions" (which can be used to knock out a telecommunications grid or blow up a building) and "smuggling", which allows players to move illegal equipment into a country or location. Players looking to provide their characters with greater depth can make use of new backgrounds (role-playing hooks bought with experience points) like "Compulsion", which requires a character to resist an overwhelming urge of some kind.

The second half of each chapter is given over to the creation of each level of the Agency. In the "Specialist" chapter, which is given over to the phase of an agent's life before they've been formally recruited, there are tables for randomly generating an agency name, determining what the public knows about the agency, the organization's parameters for recruiting specialists, training preparation and the number of specialists employed. It then goes on to determine what the agency's global pull is, including its relative strength and influence in 10 different areas of the globe, and provides GMs with a tool for randomly generating adventure hooks. New tools are presented at each agency level, as well as more adventure hooks.

An Essential Spycraft Tool

Agency is the sort of utility book that Alderac should have published in the first months after launching the Spycraft line. The player content is good -- new prestige classes and feats are always welcome, and the resources and background round out the game nicely -- but what's really useful are the Agency generation tools.

As a game keeper, I always prefer to build my own agencies and organizations, even if I'm playing in someone else's sandbox. I can feel myself chomping at the bit when forced to work within the confines of someone else's creation. The Agency source book provides me with all manner of tools for throwing together an agency of my own design. I could use this book to create a totally random organization for my players, or -- as is more often the case -- use the dice rolls as a spring board for my own ideas. It's like one big 128-page GM jam session ... and that's very cool.

But in truth, Agency doesn't necessarily want Game Controls to generate the Agency -- it wants the players to do that. That's right -- this book could be used as a player tool for growing their own agency independent of the Game Control's schemes. My knee-jerk, GM dictator reaction was "hmm, I don't think I want to lose that kind of control. I must keep this from my players at all costs." But after giving it more thought, I like the idea. While the thought of giving up control over an essential part of the spy game still bothers me, the idea of being as surprised as the players by the twists and turns of agency generation is intriguing. It's certainly something I've never done before nor seen done before, and that's reason enough to want to try it.

As far as negatives go, the biggest frustration I had with the book was its reliance on previously published Spycraft material. Time and again it references the various Spycraft class source books for feats, backgrounds and specialized rules. For diehard Spycraft fans though, who have all the source books, this won't be a problem -- it only leapt out at me because this is the first Spycraft book I've purchased since Shadowforce Archer (the original Spycraft campaign book) These references aren't so common or essential as to render Agency useless to those who don't have the earlier books, but I'd rather have seen wholly new content that didn't draw upon those earlier books. Better yet, I'd rather this information have been included in a supplemental PDF on Alderac's Web site.

All this having been said, the myriad references have inspired me to pick up the 1960s Decade Book, which looks to be loaded with the sorts of feats and rules I'd find useful. On an editing note, I found a few mistakes -- mostly improperly formatted text -- but nothing crippling or overly troubling.

Final Analysis

Agency isn't perfect, but it's a solid resource for anyone running a modern espionage game. While it's best used for Spycraft, there's plenty in this book that could be used in a d20 Modern or perhaps even a near-future d20 Future game.