Shadow Play

[aegis]

Communiqué from HQ: new Spycraft operational manual, Declassified: SHADOW PLAY, is available at friendly local gaming depots everywhere. Check your nearest handler for availability. Full dossier available here. End transmission.
 
(Plain English - Spycraft Declasified: Shadow Play is available at gaming stores everywhere this week! Pick yours up today!)

How come this doesn't appear on the front page of the website?

[Crafty_Alex]

This came through our Product Update blog - we probably should have posted it on the front page as well. Whoops!

[Pheonyx]

I got Shadow Play at Origins (as well as Odd Jobs, but that's neither here nor there ) ... I will let people know that Shadow Play is available now.

Ashes to ashes,
Pheonyx

[Nepenthe]

Mini-review:

Got the book today, so this is very initial impressions. I also found the published specs a bit lacking, so here's my take. (Suggestion for future: I skipped on the other declassified for the moment because the specs were vague and my grad student budget tight. Might be a good idea to give these print-only productsmore detailed specs, as they are apparently not going to get the same amount of reviews major releases/drivethrurpg stuff gets).

Soft-bound, 96 BW pages (includes 1 page OGL and 3 pages of Big Score sheets).

Includes 3 Agent X pdfs (Firebrand, One-Man Army and Runner), Back to Basics, 4 Bag Full of Guns (Dragon's Fury, Red Heat, This is My Rifle and This is my Gun - I was totally unaware the last one even existed. It must have been released during some major crunch time at work), The Big Score, Practice Makes Perfect and two articles from Signs & Portents: 'And... Action!" and 'I Didn't Realize that Violin Was Loaded'.

I don't have all the above pdfs, but I think that some new introductory stuff has been added to tie the material into neat articles, at least to the Bag Full of Guns article. Boosts the 'percieved value', as I guess they'd say. Very nice.

The articles make a very good (and seeming well thought out) whole, and the two Signs & Portents mini-articles seem like good choices to be included in said whole. Overall, a very nice print product and I hope to see similar stuff in the future.

Personal grade 5/5 (with the caveat that you might actually have all the crunch beforehand - I'd skipped a couple, so it was definitely worth my while. I might end up getting those missing PDFs now, as well, for the GCing laptop).

[Crafty_Pat]

Thanks for the review Nepenthe!

[Nepenthe]

I've now read enough to have a picture of the contents, as well.

It's very good, and the two S&P articles are great stuff... I think I read the Bond's Aston thing before, but it's an amazingly well thought-out little piece. They do a really good job of rounding the book of, here, as well.

The rest of course corresponds to the high quality standards we've become accustomed to from Crafty crunch. Certainly in this forum, most people will be familiar with the original pdf releases.

There's a lot more stuff in the Guns section than I remembered there being in the individual pdfs (and I'm pretty sure I have 3/4, somewhere), but my undying love for the FN SCAR sort of blinds me to the rest

If I really have to find something negative about the product, it's that Back to Basics is sort of the odd thing out - but that could just be personal bias, and probably reflects how well everything else fits together here

[jolt]

I bought both books at GenCon and would heartily recommend them.  Now, I freely admit that I don't care for pdf's (they're not bound so they take up more space, too much info gets spread out over too many sources, standard printer paper quality sucks and I don't like 3-ring binders).  So it's great to have all these pdf's in two books which also have the convinience of taking up less space on the bookshelf than the monster 3-ringer that I had all my pdf's in.  So just buy both - you know you want to.

jolt