Secrets & Lies: A Biased Review

Earlier today I received my comp copy of Daniel Bayn's new print edition of Secrets & Lies: Hardboiled Triple Feature. I want to be up front in saying that A) Dan and I are longtime friends and B) I did some editing and layout for this book. That said, it's a great book and I'm extremely excited to yap about it. If it seems like I'm straight up pimping here, that's because I am.

This edition of the game collects three of Dan's previously published pdf products: Secrets & Lies, Urbanimus, and Covenant (the rules and two settings). The physical product is a sleek, 110 page paperback with a classy cover illustration by Rodolfo Reyes. The black and white interior pages are well adorned with additional pieces by Mr. Reyes, as well as two full-page pieces by George Cotronis (I'm pretty sure he never sleeps), and a selection of thematically appropriate stock photography.


The game itself is Dan's best to date (which is quite an accomplishment if you're familiar with his oeuvre). The back cover copy describes it thusly:

"The core rulebook gives you all the rules-lite, player-facing game mechanics you need to run hardboiled games of any stripe, from murder mysteries to heist capers to revenge flicks."

It's a clever film noir rpg executed with Dan's signature minimalism. Player characters are defined by their Means (what they do), Motive (why they do it), and five attributes (Savvy, Moxy, Nerve, Guts, and Mojo). Finally, each character has a Crutch, which represents a relationship or vice that gets the character into trouble. All of the relevant information for your character easily fits onto one side of an index card.

Throughout the game, your character accomplishes his goals by taking "hits" to his attributes and relationships. When the shit hits the fan, the GM calls for you to "boil" the relevant attribute, which means that you roll a pool of six-siders equal to the number of hits that attribute has taken. If you roll any matches, bad things happen. This mechanic is extremely effective at ratcheting up tension over the course of the session and often seems to result in wonderfully tragic noir climaxes.


So, the rules are great, but the real value in this book comes from the rest of the material. It includes a heap of pregenerated relationship maps, which are essentially this game's equivalent of adventure modules. Each one provides more than enough intrigue for a satisfying night of gaming. Dan is a master of no-prep, pick-up gaming and the book is a very practical tool box for just that. It provides your game group with the knowhow to turn a stack of innocuous index cards into your own noir masterpiece without doing any prep-work beforehand.

Finally, we have the settings. Again, I'll go to the back cover for the overview:

"Urbanimus: A tech-noir world where medicine mechanics make deals with the spirits that inhabit everything from cellphones to storm drains.

Covenant: The inhabitants of an isolated town believe the world ended on October 31st, 1969. Proving otherwise will be a challenge. Leaving town alive may be impossible."

Both settings are very evocative. They possess a level of "I couldn't have thought of this myself" genre-blending that adds a great deal of value to the book. Covenant is my favorite of the two. The fog-shrouded Appalachian town of Covenant is a thick onion and each layer conceals more wonderfully fucked up secrets. I haven't yet used it for a game, but I plan to.


Overall, I'm very impressed by the Hardboiled Triple Feature. I like game books that have a lot of practical, gameable, "this-book-will-be-dogeared" material and this one delivers in spades. It manages to stand out even in the presence of other great, small press noir games (such as Greg Stolze's A Dirty World and Seth Ben-Ezra's Dirty Secrets). All in all, it's a steal for $15.

The book is available for purchase here, and you can find some freebies and additional (less biased) reviews over here.