Feng Shui Action-Espionage

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I’ve been thinking about what system to use for my high-action espionage campaign that I’m planning to run. Last week, I talked about the core elements that I wanted to focus on in the game, and was looking at different systems so that I could choose one that would work best for what how I want this game to feel.

One game I mentioned was Feng Shui Second Edition (which I’ll refer to as FS2 in the rest of this post), published by Atlas Games. I’m a big fan of FS2, and I’ve run some very fun sessions with it in the past. This time, I want to use the FS2 engine, but I’m not planning to incorporate any elements of the Chi War from the core FS2 setting.

Rather, my plan is still to use the excellent Shadowforce Archer setting for the first edition of the Spycraft RPG, originally published by AEG. These days, Crafty Games has the license for Spycraft, but the second edition was an overly-complicated beast, and the third edition has been vaporware for many years now.

While I enjoyed the first edition of Spycraft, I never felt a level-based game was appropriate for the espionage—and especially the action-espionage—genre. However, the basic classes were fairly well designed in identifying some key archetypes that appear in these kinds of movies.

So, I’m taking inspiration from Spycraft and using their core ideas in developing a handful of archetypes for FS2.

The plan is put together seven archetypes from which the players may choose:

• Face
• Hacker
• Intruder
• Squad Leader
• Snoop
• Soldier
• Wheel Artist

The Archetypes

This week, I’m going to show off the stats for the first three of these archetypes. My plan is put together full archetypes like in the core FS2 rulebook, and then toss them in a downloadable PDF for others to use (under the Atlas Games fan policy on their website).

So here is the first draft of the Face:

Here is the Hacker:

And here is the Intruder:

One thing that FS2 players will note is that I’ve modified the schticks a bit. In my action-espionage game, all the characters are going to use Fortune, so I’m ignoring Chi, Genome, and Magic. This means that any Fu schticks the characters have will be modified to use Fortune instead of Chi.

I’ve picked schticks that match what I want the characters to do, so each has a mix of Core schticks, Gun schticks, Fu schticks, Driving schticks, and even a couple of Scroungetech schticks. But the idea is that none of these are supernatural powers in any way—they are all just the result of specialized training and cool spy gear (like the Interceptor Drone that the Hacker uses).

Conclusion

I hope you find these interesting, and I’m certainly open to any feedback on how to make these even better. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Feng Shui © 1996, 1999, 2011, 2015 Robin D. Laws, published under license by
Trident Inc., d/b/a Atlas Games. Feng Shui is a trademark of Robin D. Laws, used
under license. Use of these copyrights and trademarks is done here without permission, and does not constitute a challenge to their ownership.