[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 3)

James Bond 007 Roleplaying Game - Victory Games (1983)

Oh boy. Number three in my list of seven tabletop roleplaying games that had a massive impact on me and my gaming is another one of my favourite games of all time. Victory Games' James Bond 007 RPG. It's hard to know where to begin with this one.

My gaming group had diminished a little as a huge chunk of them had vanished off to university, and I was looking for a game I could run with fewer players. Couple that with me being a massive fan of James Bond, it was an ideal choice. Little did I know what I was getting into.

The game is simply stunning and presented some revolutionary game design that has inspired game systems for years since. It ran brilliantly, and tackled aspects that you'd expect from being a secret agent in Bond's world - chases, shootouts, gambling, seduction, torture, and being an expert in high class luxury.

The supplements are something I absolutely adore. Each supplement (well, most of them anyway) came as a boxed set with an envelope of props marked "For Your Eyes Only", along with a mini GM screen, maps, and more. The added genius of it was it took the plots of the movies/books and turned them completely on their heads. If you went into an adventure and you were familiar with the movie, you could assume the way the plot was going to head - but it wouldn't do you any good. It updated the plots, twisted them around, and kept the players on their toes.

The "A View to A Kill" adventure - so darned cool

I ran a lot of the adventures - I seem to remember running For Your Eyes Only two or three times with different players, each with very different outcomes.

I managed to complete the collection a couple of years ago (though I still haven't tracked down an affordable copy of Assault! The tabletop battles game based around the end of You Only Live Twice) when I finally tracked down a relatively cheap copy of Octopussy.

It's still an awesome game, and one I've longed to revive in a new edition for many, many years. Heck, I've written to, called and emailed EON a few times, and even started to put together a pitch for a new Bond RPG... but I wonder if it, like Harry Potter, is an impossible quest.

One day maybe.