How many agents fit in one head? - a Mephisto review
The Agency
The Agency is a mysterious and extremely efficient secret government organization whose agents have saved their country and the world from great harm. The Agency's problem is that its opponents have neutralized all of its field agents in a surprise strike - back in the late 1970s. However, the Agency had an artificial intelligence named Alice that stored the personalities of the agents and has now single-handedly found a way to upload those personality profiles into human bodies. One catch is that the personality profiles will have to get used to their new role. Even more serious might be the problem that several agent personalities have to share a civilian's body - who is also present and has his own opinion...
The Agency is a Fate setting that once again starts with an extremely unusual background. On the one hand, the game is designed to play agent stories in the style of James Bond, where the agents have to stop the insane plans of dangerous enemies. On the other hand, with the artificial intelligence and the approach that the initially quite incomplete player characters have to share a body, there is a comedy element, as The Agency presents its setting with a good dose of humor.
Of course, The Agency needs new rules because several personalities - both the agents and the civilian - share one body, so character creation goes very much its own way. The rules regarding who has control over the body at which time also play a crucial role. At the same time, The Agency provides simple concepts to map the hierarchy levels of evil organizations, their head villains, and their subordinates. In many cases, they are handled as simple aspects. Of course, a short adventure about saving the world is not to be missed.
The idea of The Agency is very strange but quite funny and provides some exciting approaches, at least for a one-shot or a short campaign. Whether one actually wants to play in this bizarre world for a longer period of time seems questionable to me. But an agent story, in which specialists with unusual abilities and the handicap of sharing a body have to stop typical James-Bond-style villain's plans, seems at least to be an exciting approach for one or two game nights to me.
(Björn Lippold)
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