There are some good things coming out of the whole OGL mess. White Lies 2nd Edition is one of them.

White Lies is a game of espionage action. I have to honest this is one of my favorite genres and one that I haven’t had a chance to play in a very long time. My longest running campaign ever started with the original Top Secret then the Jame Bond RPG and it finally with Danger International.

The first edition of White Lies as fully compatible and a genre reskin of White Box. Then we had the threat of the revocation of the OGL. So White Lies got a complete make over. It still has strong roots in White Box mechanics but much of the game has been redone to better reflect the genre. Instead of classes, you have Divisions (Confiscation, Elimination, Engineering, Infiltration, Investigation, Recon, and Transportation). Instead of Levels, you have Ranks and nice Random Progression method for characters.

Unlike White Box with -1 to +1 Modifier Range, White Lies 2E uses -2 to +5. You don’t use the die roll after that just the ‘modifier”. While damage and the like deviate from the only d6’s model, it’s still what you would expect from a d20 system. But it still keeps things simple. And you know how I like simple.

So what else do we have in the book? Lot’s of random charts to make up your shadow world. And throwing in what’s in the Enemies section, you can have a campaign that’s like James Bond. Or you could go all crazy and have something like Conspiracy X. You’re the GM. It’s up to you. It might be a more difficult to convert other material into White Lies 2E like it was before but it could be done.

I really like this game and it’s going on my to run stack. But based on what I have learned over the years, it takes a special kind of player and group to buy into the genre. Sort of like super hero RPG’s. If you don’t buy into the genre or dislike it then you might not have that much fun or, as some do, ruin everyone else’s fun.

Go ahead and check out White Lies 2e on DrivethruRPG and it’s PWYW.

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