James Bond 007 (role-playing game)

James Bond 007

Cover of James Bond 007 role-playing game rules
Designer(s)	Gerard Christopher Klug
Publisher(s)	Victory Games
Publication date	1983
Genre(s)	Spy fiction
System(s)	Custom (based on result quality ratings)

James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty's Secret Service is a spy fiction role-playing game based on the James Bond books and films. The game was designed by Gerard Christopher Klug and published by Victory Games (a branch of Avalon Hill). The game and its supplements were published from 1983 until 1987, when the license lapsed. At that time, it was the most popular espionage role-playing game.James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty's Secret Service won an Origins Award in 1983 and a Strategists' Club Award as Outstanding Role-Playing Game in 1984.

The game is set in the world of the James Bond books and movies. The characters take the role of secret agents, either James Bond himself or his allies, other agents of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, or allied agencies (usually the American CIA), and thwart plots of world domination from foreign dictators, megalomaniacal mad scientists, and arch-criminals.

Unlike many role-playing games, where the player characters are, or at least start, relatively unimportant to the universe, and much less powerful than the non-player characters, the James Bond setting is much more centered on the player characters. The PCs are usually more competent than the NPCs, better outfitted with gadgets (from Q branch), have more Hero Points (see System, below) to perform cinematic feats, and in general have a lot of influence on their surroundings.

Following the setting, the game is focused on just a few leading roles, not large groups, and is intended to play well with just one gamemaster and as few as one player.

The game was licensed from both Danjaq/Eon Productions, which holds the film rights, and Glidrose Publications (now Ian Fleming Publications), which holds the literary rights, and tried to be as faithful as possible to both the books and the films as circumstances permitted. However, to challenge the players appropriately, key plot elements in the modules based on the films were changed with the open warning to players that exactly imitating Bond's choices and actions in the film's original story would be dangerous. For instance, in the module for Live and Let Die, the players learn that Mr. Big and Doctor Kanaga are definitely two separate people rather than Kanaga playing the New York gangster in disguise. In addition, the module for You Only Live Twice is largely rewritten to change the outdated space hijacking scheme to a plot to investigate the crash of a Soviet space station that crashes near Japan and deal with the reported bioweapons being researched on board.