Ninjas and Superspies

Palladium Megaverse

by Erick Wujcik

Forty-one (41) forms of martial arts combat as you have never seen them in any other role-playing game.

Oriental combat skills accurately portrayed, each with its own unique fighting style, methods of attack and defense presented on an epic scale, complete with legendary mystic powers. But that's not all! The superspy section includes spies of all kinds, cyber agents, gadgeteers, secret organizations, secret identities, gimmick weapons and clothing, cyber-disguises, cybernetic implants, and more. Plus don't miss Mystic China, an action packed sourcebook of ancient magic and mystery.

Completely compatible with Heroes Unlimited™, Villains Unlimited™, Ninja Turtles®, Rifts®, and the entire Palladium Megaverse®!
Highlights Include:

17 Occupational Character Classes for spies, mercenaries, martial artists and special operatives.

40 types of hand to hand combat - effectively offering 40 types of martial arts character classes!

48 mystic martial art super-powers.

Dim Mak, Chi Mastery, the Arts of Invisibility and more.

Bionic implants, disguises and attachments.

Weapons, equipment, gimmicks and creating super-vehicles.

Secret identities and spy agencies.

Rules for creating Secret Organizations.

Compatible with Heroes Unlimited, TMNT, and the entire megaverse.

Adaptable to high powered RECON campaigns too.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Games, Gaming, Dungeons and Dragons

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Erick Wujcik (January 26, 1951 – June 7, 2008) was an American designer of both role-playing games and computer role-playing games, and co-founder of Palladium Books.

Wujcik started off as head of the gaming society at Wayne State University, and then as a computer columnist for The Detroit News from 1979 to 1981, where he wrote their weekly Computer Column. That served to be a springboard for him to co-found Palladium Books and work on developing numerous role-playing games and supplements for such gaming settings as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, Paranoia, Robotech, Rifts, and many others.

Wujcik was also the director of the Detroit Gaming Center, and founder of the gaming conventions known as Ambercon. In 1997 he went to work for Sierra Studios, and was lead game designer on the game Return to Krondor. He also served as a game designer at Outrage Entertainment for the game Alter Echo.

Wujcik served as Chief Editor of Amberzine, a fanzine for the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which has published the work of such notables as Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, and Roger Zelazny, and which published its last issue in 2005. He has also been an editorial contractor for the Detroit Historical Museum, and gives seminars on a wide range of topics related to the writing, design and development of role-playing games.

From 2004 to 2006, Wujcik was Game Design Studio Manager for UbiSoft China, in Shanghai.

Until his death, in June 2008, Wujcik was Senior Game Designer / Writer for Totally Games, north of San Francisco.

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's more fun than being a superspy or Ninja? With this reference book your players can realize all their covert adventure dreams. Great layout and nice art. Recommended

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprisingly fun, if slightly incomplete, game. You get exactly what the title says - rules for playing martial artists and James Bond style superspies. Which means that there are rules for a wide variety of martial art forms, as well as various gadgets, including super vehicles and cybernetics in addition to the classic big list of guns and neat devices. The book does suffer from some organization issues, such as having the combat section that defines all the special terms used in the martial arts rules after the martial arts rules. This made the list of forms and katas kinda boring to read, since I didn't know what most of the mechanics actually did. Still, the few paragraphs each martial art gets did manage to make many of them sound pretty cool, and I actually feel like I find the idea of making a ninja equally as appealing as making a superspy. Of course, this being the Palladium system, the mechanics are a bit clunky, and I have no idea how well the two big character types are balanced with each other. Still, the use of skill packages and the lack of mega damage (a ridiculous system that worsens the already bad balance of other Palladium games like Rifts) make this seem like it would actually be fairly playable. There are a few missing rules, such as in the vehicle stuff, which clearly was copied from another book without checking to see that everything made it properly. The tendency for copy and paste of rules also means there's a lot of weird editing errors, which is frustrating since this book is listed as having three editors. Still, the game seems like a fair bit of fun, and has some neat things like rules for making your own spy agency. I wish it had more adventures and a bit more setting, but I imagine that's down to a mix of Palladium's goal of reasonably priced books and the fact that this feels like it's as much meant to be a supplement for some of their other games as it is a full game. I'm not sure that I'm likely to get a chance to play this, but if I do, I'll probably take it. Goofy though it is at times, Ninjas and Superspies seems like a relatively fun old school system that lacks the worst of the clunkiness of other Palladium games.

[Troy-David Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently received the Hardcover edition, which has much additional material taken from The Rifter.
Additional martial arts, supplemental combat rules, new skills and expanded Skill Programs.
It’s a good presentation of this material; I only wish it featured (A) Updated technology, and (B) some slight editting from the previous publishing.
The technology is still very heavily 1980s, while it is still not possible for a Dedicated Martial Artist to take Haw-Rang Do and Moo Gi Gong despite their descriptions expressly encouraging the combination.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martial arts are definitely fun. I have gotten lots of ninjas and swordsmen from this book. Great material!