OK, I have very little in terms of qualifications to talk about Robotech, but I got a bunch of Robotech books and Robotech continues to be one of the most requested things folks want to see on the feed (along with Battletech, the weird Robotech cousin), so here we go, I guess!

Robotech: The RPG (1986) is based on Robotech the cartoon (and, I guess, the aborted Robotech II series, which was converted into a movie), which is a weird American collage of three separate, unconnected mecha anime series. The series chronicles three successive wars, one against the alien Zentraedi, one against the Robotech Masters who…I guess…came up with Robotech originally, and the last one against the Invid, another alien culture. That’s basically my understanding of Robotech. There are mecha that transform between three forms — robot, jet and ro-jets — and they fight aliens, usually against a backdrop of lots of people from Earth dying. This baseline incoherence, thematically, makes Robotech feel like a perfect fit for Palladium and a sort of formative trial run for Rifts.

The system is a modified version of the Palladium Fantasy RPG. Layout-wise, these feel like Rifts books. Giant robots and mayhem-wise too. It’s all tech porn and schematics and gigantic guns. Whatever the merits of the system — who am I to judge, honestly? — it makes great fodder for tons of goodly Kevin Long art!