You might enjoy listening to this NJ punk rarity before diving into the posts today.

Military RPG are weird. They emerged in the ‘80s, initially with light sci-fi/post-apocalyptic theming (Aftermath, Morrow Project), then as just straight-up warfare RPGs (Merc was probably the first of these, focused of soldiers of fortune and is basically one big racist dogwhistle; Recon came out a year later and is similarly polluted, with a heaping side of revisionist history of how the U.S. won Vietnam, actually). The genre wasn’t particularly successful in a commercial sense until  GDW’s Twilight: 2000 (1984). To be clear up front: I do not understand the appeal of these games, but I find them endlessly fascinating, in the same way I find myself compelled to watch reels of car accidents when the algorithm serves them to me. If you are big on military RPGs, well, this is going to be a disappointing week for you.

Twilight shares two of the main Traveller designers (Frank Chadwick and Loren K. Wiseman) and I think it’s at least partially informed by the complexity of the unified Classic Traveller rules that appeared in 1983. It’s mechanically complex and primarily interested in detailed simulations of small arms combat (It is more complicated than my tolerances, but I do think it is far more playable than most gunporn RPGs before or since).

The game imagines a world putting itself back together after a small-scale nuclear war in Europe. Play takes place in the destabilized European countries, but players are essentially mercenaries or something like roaming ronin, free for chain of command and forced to deal with the realities on the ground without guidance or support. I can sort of see the appeal of this, coming out during the last years of the cold war (and I believe the starting world-state of the game was determined through GDW staff playing a grand strategy game rooted in contemporary events). It is certainly an interesting artifact of its time. T2K proved popular (and even has a less complex modern incarnation from Free League), but GDW’s increasing preoccupation with these sorts of heavy simulations likely contributed to grown problems that eventually led to the company’s closure.

Phoenix Command (1986) isn’t technically an RPG. Rather, it is a small arms (and later, through expansion, all sorts of arms) combat system intended to replace existing systems for such in your favorite game. Why you would do such a disservice to your favorite game like that is beyond me, but hey, who am I to judge?

This thing is painfully complex. There are an eye-watering 35 different hit locations tied to a percentile table (Rolled a 30? That’s a hit to the stomach/spleen!). Weapons all have an aim time that impacts accuracy. There is an alphabet soup of abbreviations. There are tables galore, not a one of which I can parse. It’s gotta be one of the most complicated RPG systems ever conceived.

I love it. It’s so unapologetic. I will never play it or take it seriously, but I will forever appreciate its utter hostility to fast and smooth gameplay. That clip-art Rambo on the cover, covered with so many guns he probably can’t move, is the best possible mascot. He sums it all up perfectly.

Even better: the designers couldn’t even deal with this shit. When Leading Edge produced Living Steel and the various licensed games (Dracula, Aliens, Lawnmower Man lol), they used a simplified version of the Phoenix Command combat system. Humbled by their own creation. Beautiful.

OK, here’s another one. This is Freedom Fighters (1986), one of the last games released by Fantasy Games Unlimited. It was designed by the Keith brothers, who had previously produced a mountain of Traveller material for GDW, FASA, Gamelords and Digest. The introduction states an intention for complexity and realism. Eesh.

The root is pretty obviously Traveller, with character creation focusing on a randomly generated lifepath made of background terms, from which skills are derived. I can’t be bothered to dig too deeply into the 44 or so pages of combat rules, but they don’t actually seem egregious. They’re more than I want to deal with, but seem logical and don’t have any obvious spots where they might bog down. There are only five hit locations (less than RuneQuest!). On the other hand, there is a whole system that manages the simulation of verbal communication in place of just roleplaying it out, so I dunno. The verbal combat system is actually kind of entertaining, with a bunch of rhetorical maneuvers? I can’t imagine anyone actually using it though.

As with most of these types of games, I’m more interested in them as cultural objects. The campaign frame is scant (2.5 pages out of 208!) — the US has been conquered either by the Soviets and their allies (sort of like Red Dawn), an all-out alien invasion (a-la War of the Worlds) or a quiet alien invasion (like V or, later, They Live). In the face of this, players are tasked with fighting against tyranny to preserve the American way of life. This sort of thing seems to have been a cultural preoccupation in the ‘80s, but aside of some broad assumptions about the “American Way of Life,” the box set is weirdly free of the sort of Red Scare fear-mongering I expected. Rather, this seems to be an earnest attempt at taking a set of wargaming conditions the authors found interesting (they list many, many other occupations that could be used as a setting or could inform the main ones) and building an RPG out of them, without much concern for the political implications — it actually reminds me a bit of the COIN series of asymmetrical wargames from GMT in this regard.

Year of the Phoenix (1986, no relation to Phoenix Command) was the last RPG published by Fantasy Games Unlimited before they shuttered. It represents one of the stranger military RPGs to come out in the ‘80s. Actually, in all honesty, this is basically a percentile skill-based system and not deeply preoccupied with the minutia of tactical small arms combat, so I dunno if it is technically a military RPG. On the other hand, combat is still annoyingly complicated and features ten hit locations (four more than RuneQuest), so, pretty heavy. Again, though, I don’t really care about these as games, I am interested in how they are weird jingoisticly infected artifacts of Cold War-era gaming. And boy, is Year of the Phoenix that.

There’s an elaborate set-up here. Players make their characters as members of a near-future space program. They go up in the rocket to deal with a hostage situation on a space station and the Libyans (of course) detonate a bomb, after which they come down in the year 2197. Guess what? While they were gone, the USSR won World War III and took over North America. Their grip isn’t tight, and there are plenty of resistance groups to join, which the players presumably do, and the game goes from there. The vision of the future is…naive. It could maybe be fun if you got rid of stuff like the fact that resistance in the southern states is a reborn Confederacy and the implication that all this happened because of “godlessness.” For instance: it is revealed at the end of the introductory adventure that some folks on Staten Island have the Statue of Liberty hidden in a secret underground bunker?

I dunno, its hard to take it all seriously and is sort of baffling it exists at all. And it is a pretty elaborate product, especially for an FGU game, with cardstock counters and a color map. What a one for a company to go out on.

This is The Price of Freedom (1986). The game begins as Soviet forces begin their occupation of America. I don’t know why so much of this stuff came out in 1986, but they did (I mean, obviously they draw from Red Dawn, but it’s weird to have all of them in one grouping like this).

I do not know who this game is for. On the surface, it seems aimed at the same conservative-minded, Red Scare-fearing folks that Year of the Phoenix was aimed at. Certainly it was marketed toward them. The designer, Greg Cosikyan, though, was a liberal New Yorker (he considered himself a left libertarian at the time). I’ve seen him claim it was an experiment, I’ve also seen him express embarrassment over it. But this is also the guy who wrote Violence, Paranoia and Toon. I can’t help but see this as a send-up, or perhaps a Trojan horse.

The cover art is perhaps a good Rorschach test. I can see how that image would both unnerve and appeal someone under the spell of the Red Scare. But to me, the looming Lenin, the headbands and the lady (wrongly) carrying the massive RPG scream farce. The liberal use of “commie” in the text similarly undercuts the seriousness for me (Paranoia, which does something similar, came out two years prior).

The game is D20 and skill based. Its tightly designed, veers towards wargames for its action and is fairly unremarkable mechanically. There isn’t much in the rules about roleplaying, really, but the pre-gens have a lot of roleplay cues that support the idea that this is meant to subvert the conservatism the game appeals to. Maria is a Trotskyite Marxist, Billy’s hero is Bruce (no last name given, but of course it means Springsteen). Jake idolizes Bernie Goetz (keep an eye on Jake, jeeze), Johnson’s passion is money. Its a big spectrum of American personalities united against the commies, including some commies!

Added bonus: the intro scenario takes place on the Communipaw bridge connecting Kearny to Jersey City, making it the only RPG I know of that takes place in my good old hometown.

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May as well keep on with the kooky, albeit in a slightly different vein. With the exception of the original "Witchcraft Suicide Violence" pamphlet by Pat Pulling, I thought I owned all the evangelical anti-D&D tracts out there, but I had never seen A Christian Response to D&D (1987) before.

It's pretty part for the course. The only real differentiator is how little real zeal is in the text. Despite the back cover breathlessly declaring, "They want our children. They want our future," the prose reads like a weary cash-in. I do like how the cover art lists Jeff Easley's dragon-style, though. Eat them kids!