Top Secret Role Playing Game – A Little Background
Welcome to the newly re-designed website for the “Top Secret Espionage Role Playing Game™”. Write-this-down.com is our homage to the role-playing game.
The “Top Secret Espionage Role Playing Game™” by Merle M. Rasmussen was published by TSR Hobbies, Inc. in the early 1980’s. The game was designed as a way to enter into the espionage world populated by such characters as James Bond. In the mid to late 1980’s the game was redesigned and then renamed “Top Secret/S.I.™”. Our group of players didn’t care much for these revised rules, although there was some good module/source material that came from the TSSI (as it came to be known) game. The information presented within this web site is based almost entirely on the original set of rules as well as the Top Secret Companion® which was published in 1984, also by TSR Hobbies, Inc. We have added some revisions to some rules as well as devised our own set of rules to deal with certain subjects. We utilized articles about the Top Secret (TS) game that were published in Dragon® magazine. We also prepared our own gun list as well as expanded the originally printed material by utilizing the gun design rules that came with the game. Hereafter I will generally use acronyms when referring to the different games. For example: Top Secret will be TS, Top Secret/S.I.™ will be TSSI, and the Top Secret Companion® will either be TSC or just “the Companion”.
Write-this-down.com is our repository of information that we can use for our own gameplay. In addition to the above, this site will contain information about our missions and timelines which can be found in the calendar section.
In addition, I have added a feature to the calendar page that I hope our group can enjoy. I have added a Google Map of where in the world all of our missions have taken place.
UPDATE (2/21/23) – The calendar section of the site is expanding! Several player characters have brought me some items to go over and post where possible. I have been provided an update to “The Plot” document that I didn’t know existed! I also discovered that there are dates of missions listed on those documents that can not only flesh out the calendar info from 1991 to 1993 in spots where I had nothing, but also allows for me to begin working backward from October 1991 to before the calendar started. I will be posting mission info when I have dates to assign them. Exciting stuff for our players!
UPDATE (11/30/21) Due to a recent file sharing security update, many links on this site were broken. I believe that I have now fixed this issue. However, if you find any broken links, please report them to me at email address at the bottom of this page. Also, be aware that when you click on the links, this new “security protocol” is may be a delay of several seconds in successfully reaching the links to the document, image, etc.
NEW Top Secret: New World Order®
It is hard to believe but back on June 27, 2017, TSR Games began a Kickstarter campaign to finance a new Top Secret game. Update #1 posted on June 28, 2017, on the Top Secret: New World Order Kickstarter website informed folks that the game was funded in the first half hour! Several in our group participated in the Kickstarter for Top Secret: New World Order® (TSNWO). As with most Kickstarter campaign’s, it took a while for all the logistics to fall in place. But fall in place they did and the author of this site got his materials around April of 2018. Our group generally is a little slow in adopting new rules for games. (Guilty as charged!) However, in 2020, our group officially began attempting to get a game up and running. See the Web Links page on this site for more links about the new Top Secret: New World Order® game.
This new, revised site has been created using WordPress since the old options for me to maintain the site are now obsolete. For those that might be interested in this kind of thing, I originally created the site using the software Dreamweaver. I then switched OS platforms to Linux and had to find another type of web authoring program and ended up using KompoZer. KompoZer is apparently no longer in development since the last stable release was back in 2007. KompoZer did work on other previous versions of Ubuntu but does not work on Ubuntu 18.04LTS. There are very limited choices for other options, especially free for a fan/hobby site. I then finally broke down and began moving all of this site info to WordPress and re-building from the ground up.
Page/Site Author: David Sell
Email: David Sell
Site Last Updated: 4/17/24
New WP Site Posted: 09/02/19
Project Began: 11/1/04
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