Ninjas & Superspies

Overall score:

There is a world beneath the surface the nobody knows about--and those who do are very good at keeping secrets. All the people we think hold authority--presidents and prime ministers, kings and generals--are nothing but pawns in the great game of power. A game played by...Ninjas and Superspies.

Sounds cool, huh? In paraphrase, that's about the extent of the world info included in Palladium's classic supplement Ninjas & Superspies, and it's also the only rationale you'll ever get for why Ninjas and Superspies are in the same book together. The two types of characters rarely cross, though presumably a campaign modeled after the annals of Hong Kong cinema would find plenty of opportunities to merge them. In fact, it's just that kind of adaptability that makes N&S such a cool book--you can use it to recreate everything from Drunken Master to Mission: Impossible, hitting James Bond and Chow Yun Fat along the way.

N&S is a Palladium book, using the Palldium system, so you're not going to get the kind of cinematic combat that you'd get with, say, Feng Shui. What you will get is an almost gruesome attention to detail, with 41 different martial arts (each with a comprehensive list of attacks, defenses, and other sundry information) as well as an enormous selection of martial art powers, cybernetic enhancements, secret organization options, and sundry spy paraphernalia. There are 30 descriptions of deep cover/alternate identity occupations alone, so you can tell there's a lot of info in here.

The OCCs (Occupational Character Classes) are split into 5 groups, of which only one deals with martial artists--the rest are all spies. These include the Espionage Agents (James Bond), the Free Agents (Thieves, P.I.s), the Gizmoteers (Bond's friend Q), and the Mercenaries (commandos and other ex-military). Each category has three or four OCCs, so there's something for everyone, and they all manage to stay pretty unique. Superspies also have access to cybernetics, trick vehicles, and secret organizations, all of which come with simple rules so you an customize them to your needs. The game's best idea might actually be the skills--instead of picking them one at a time, the way most Palladium games do, you choose a couple of skill packages (such as Telephone Hacking, Microship Technology, and Spy Network Administration) that let you focus your character a little more directly.

The Ninjas are represented by only two OCCs, but that's fine because the real definition of your character comes not in the skills but in the martial art that you choose. These are not the kinds of martial arts that you study for an hour every Thursday with a soccer mom who makes you call her sensei--these you study for years in hidden monasteries, training your body into the lethal weapon it is destined to become. Each martial art description, in fact, is generally much longer than that of the OCCs, and details each type of move your character knows; there is very little room for flexibility in the attacks, but each one lets you choose a handful of special powers--everything from Ninja-like Arts of Invisibility to the mystic power of chi. Depending on your taste, you can be a hard-edge berserker who leaps into the fray with a devastating array of kicks, or a mysterious sage who can kill with a touch.

This copious amount of detail can be a lot of fun when making characters, but it can very easily get in the way of a good play experience. Having so many resources at your spies' fingertips can make a lot of adventures way too easy, and the GM will have to work extra hard to make the bad guys challenging enough for your troupe of jazzed-up cybernaughts and their fleet of flying cars and omnipresent contacts. For the Ninja half of the equation, combat can get weighed down to the point of unbearability by the complexity of the martial art forms. Most people who play Palladium games do so with house rules and a lot of hip-shooting, and that applies doubly to N&S--it doesn't have as many of the hack-n-slash problems that some of the games can fall into, but it's a beast to try and balance properly.

In the end, the skill of your GM is really going to make or break this game. It's not easy to work both James Bond and Drunken Master into a single adventure, and when some of the characters take tricky paths like Telephone Hacking it only makes it harder to appeal to their strengths--Q was always in the background, for example, and making such a construction-oriented character into a headline PC takes a lot of GM magic and player genius. Even so, it's hard for me to recommend this as an "experienced players only" game, since it was the second RPG I ever bought as a kid and I loved it. So why don't I just say this: the game lends itself to over-the-top adventure but can easily mire itself in minutae; if you know what you're doing you can expand the scope, but if you're new to RPGs it's mostly just a way to kick some trash as a Ninja.

Written by Fellfrosch on December 04th, 2003