Retrospective: Top Secret/S.I.

After last week's Retrospective post on the Q Manual for James Bond 007, my thoughts were starting to turn towards espionage RPGs. This inevitably led me back to TSR's Top Secret, which I loved but didn't play as often as I'd have liked. That, in turn, reminded me of the existence of its offspring, Top Secret/S.I., released in 1987, just as I was preparing to go away to college. Consequently, I didn't get a chance to look at the game until a few years later, by which point it was mostly a dead letter, despite receiving a fair bit of support over the course of its five-year run.

It's a shame, because I think TS/S.I. had a fair bit of potential. Designed by Doug Niles and Warren Spector, the game took a somewhat different approach to its subject matter than did its predecessor. Gone was the procedural, often gritty tone of the Merle Rasmussen's 1980 version. In its place was something more colorful, kinetic, and cinematic. TS/S.I. doesn't aspire to be "realistic" so much as an emulation of the larger-than-life globetrotting adventurer-cum-"spies" we saw in the action movies of the time. It was, I think, a good call and probably a better fit for the realities of most roleplaying game campaigns.

Like most TSR RPGs, Top Secret/S.I. was released in a boxed set, packed with goodies. Say what you will about TSR, but one of its great strengths was the physical production of its games. I think they may have outdone themselves in the case of TS/S.I. The company clearly had high hopes for the game. The box contained:

• A Player's Guide (64 pages), clearly written and friendly to newcomers.
• An Administrator’s Guide (32 pages), providing the referee with tools and advice.
• Maps, cardstock character sheets, reference charts, and a sheet of cardboard stand-up figures.
• Dice, of course, because no boxed game would be complete without them.

The packaging alone made it clear that this was a game, not merely a rulebook, but one that presented itself as a fun, playable experience intended to evoke a wide range of modern adventures, not just the high-tech gadgets and dangerous glamour of Cold War espionage fiction. I suspect that TSR hoped that Top Secret/S.I. would do for the present day what Dungeons & Dragons had done for fantasy: provide a flexible, accessible rules framework that could serve as the foundation for a whole genre of modern action roleplaying, from spy thrillers and paramilitary missions to pulp conspiracies and even near-future techno-drama.

In this, the TS.I. boxed set feels like a kind of Rosetta Stone for late-‘80s genre media. The core materials obviously nod to James Bond, Mission: Impossible, and the like, but the open-ended system and grab-bag of equipment, skills, and professions suggest a broader ambition. You could just as easily run an adventure inspired by Miami Vice, Rambo, or even Romancing the Stone. The structure was modular and the tone elastic. The overall design of the game hinted at a future where the spy game might grow to encompass all contemporary genre play.

TSR probably wasn’t just trying to publish a game about spies. Instead, they were trying to stake a claim on the modern era. The original boxed set suggested that they hoped to build outwards from it, creating a game that could handle every kind of adventure that could be found on video store shelves or TV Guide listings circa 1987. At least, that's what it looked like to me when I first read the game's materials during its dying days. If I'm correct, it was a pretty ambitious project to have undertaken, even if the end result didn't prove quite as successful as TSR might have hoped.

The rules of TS/S.I. were straightforward, modular, and forgiving. Characters were generated with six attributes (rated 1–100), a profession (which granted skill access), and a suite of percentile-based skills. It was a clean system, a sort of midway point between the crunch of, say, Twilight: 2000 and the elegance of James Bond 007. Combat, though potentially lethal, was far more forgiving than was the original Top Secret. Weapons and gear were detailed, but not exhaustively. The goal seems to have been clarity and momentum rather than obsessive realism. This was a game that wanted you to just dive in and play, not calculate cover modifiers for twenty minutes.

The default setting concerned the struggle between ORION (a kind of freelance intelligence agency) and WEB (a global criminal conspiracy) and was both its strength and its weakness. On one hand, it gave the game immediate stakes, a Bond-like clarity: good versus evil, gadgets versus goons. It let players jump into the world without pages of history or faction briefings. On the other hand, it lacked subtlety. There was little room for ambiguity, betrayal, or the slow-burn paranoia that often defines great espionage fiction. But for players raised on reruns of Mission: Impossible or The A-Team, this clarity was probably a feature, not a bug. There’s also an undeniable charm in how Top Secret/S.I. embraces the genre’s clichés. For example, some of the stand-up cardboard figures are depicted with trench coats and sunglasses and it’s hard not to smile at the earnest theatricality of it all. TS/S.I. doesn’t wink at its inspirations; it celebrates them without irony. Like a well-worn VHS tape of Octopussy or Delta Force, it’s content to revel in genre tropes, trusting that players will fill in the gaps with imagination and energy.

That attitude might partly explain why the game, despite its potential, never quite caught on the way its creators hoped. By 1987, the Cold War was already beginning to lose its pop culture dominance. The Berlin Wall would fall just two years later. Espionage itself was becoming murkier, more bureaucratic, and less suited to clean narratives. Furthermore, TSR was already showing signs of overstretch and its dominance in the RPG market no longer unchallenged. Top Secret/S.I. was well-supported, with modules, expansions, and genre-bending supplements like F.R.E.E.Lancers, but it never seemed to take off. As I said, I never even saw a copy until well into its run and I never owned it myself.

Despite all this, I think there's real merit in what the game tried to do. The original boxed set is well done, a terrific artifact of TSR at its peak as a producer of tactile, inviting RPG products. Likewise, the rules hold up better than one might expect, especially for pick-up play or shorter campaigns. The setting might be broad-stroke and somewhat Saturday morning in tone, but it’s also an ideal launchpad for more creative groups to riff, remix, and reframe. You could run hardboiled noir, techno-thrillers, or even supernatural conspiracy stories with only a few tweaks, just as TSR seems to have hoped to do.

In the end, Top Secret/S.I. stands as a kind of forgotten experiment: TSR’s attempt to bring modern action-adventure under the same umbrella as elves and dragons. It didn’t succeed, but it did leave behind a beautifully made game full of obvious enthusiasm and potential. For those of us who like to celebrate messier, less polished relics of the RPG past, maybe that’s enough.