RPGaDay 2023, Day 21

Taking License

The first licensed RPG I bought was FASA’s Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game. It was its own game. FASA was developing games for Traveller at the time, and would later go on to produce Shadowrun, that big, gaudy cyberpunk-with-magic game which would eventually eclipse R Talsorian’s Cyberpunk (the original and best cyberpunk game, which felt like a pirated hacker’s manual or some illegal samizdat, and which was set in 2007 (!)).

I kind of enjoyed Call of Cthulhu, Sandy Petersen’s wonderful foray into gaming, and the first game produced by Chaosium based on someone else’s intellectual property - in this case, H P Lovecraft’s works (which are now in the public domain, so everybody can release a game based on the Mythos kaiju if they like).

By the way, the same Sandy Petersen gave us the 1995 FPS Doom.

Beyond that, I don’t think I’ve ever played anybody else’s IP. There have been plenty - Elric, DC Heroes, Marvel Heroes, Doctor Who (the original by FASA, yes them again, was far superior to the modern reboot), Stargate SG-1, MERP, and The Design Mechanism’s Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels, its sanitised take on the gonzo weirdness of Bryan Talbot’s three graphic novels.

And then there was one game I never got a chance to buy, and which perhaps I could have put into Day 16’s entry of “game I wish I had” along with “favourite game you never get to play” for Day 6.

But I don’t do regret.

There is a game, whose intellectual property (based on late 20th century tradecraft glamourised by a series of books published by a British author, turned into a bunch of highly successful MGM movies) is … protected. You can’t say the words of the game, or the three digit number associated with its main character, without IP lawyers descending upon you with C & D orders.

These IP lawyers hunt in packs. They train with Disney IP lawyers in the Disney training camps in the Namib Desert.

And practically every other tradecraft game in existence riffs off of this one property, the source of many a meme and catch phrase. Something about the way the hero likes to have his Martini vodkas, and the tiny peewee little pistol he always carries.

And the car. Chicks dig the car with the ejector seat.

At this point, I’m going to turn back to the steadfast Lightspress Media, a single-person operation run by a prolific publisher, and the game which was created as an homage to this movie series and genre. A series which was created originally with a game mechanic loosely based on that other, earlier, game, but which has seen modifications.

This series (due to be released soon as v3) goes by the umbrella title DoubleZero. This is a game system which is so versatile, you can use it to run Westerns, Tom Clancy-style novels, Len Deighton spy thrillers a la Harry Palmer, grim spy novels a la John LeCarre, political dramas from I, Claudius to Billions and Succession, and even take on themes such as cosy detective dramas, noir thrillers, Captain Scarlet and UFO pastiches of Gerry Anderson, X-Files-style supernatural investigations, and even the heady, steamy world of pro wrestling (or Lucha Libre or sumo, if you like).

And, while it isn’t exactly an authorised product, there is a singular setting for DoubleZero, heavy on tradecraft, more along the lines of “Our Man Bashir” from Deep Space Nine, you could say, emphasising the glam and the gadgets, the car chases and casinos, the insane villains with their world-threatening plots and slow death traps, and the seemingly endless parade of young women eager to use the movies as a platform to get out of modelling and launch their movie careers.

That setting for DoubleZero is, tip of the hat for the pun here, called Licensed.