mercenaries, spies and private eyes ("mspe") is a tabletop role-playing game designed and written by michael a. stackpole and first published in april 1983 by blade, a division of flying buffalo, inc. a second edition was later published by sleuth publications in 1986, but flying buffalo continues to distribute the game. in 2019 a new revised combined edition of mspe was published by flying buffalo which brought the different material from the previous editions and included additional new rules and expansions to the original rpg.