Renegade Legion

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Renegade Legion was a series of science fiction games that were produced by FASA, and published from 1987 to 1995. Set in the 69th Century, the series allowed gamers to play out the battles between the Terran Overlord Government (TOG), a corrupt galactic empire (which had patterned itself after the Roman Empire on ancient earth), and the Commonwealth, a "rebel alliance" of humans and aliens making a valiant last stand at the edge of the galaxy. The Renegade Legion of the title was the name of a defecting TOG military unit that joins the Commonwealth forces and helps spark the rebellion.

During a panel at RedCon95, FASA President Sam Lewis stated that the Renegade Legion series of games were originally designed for use with the Star Wars license. Since the license was awarded to West End Games, FASA chose to use the systems with their own setting.^{[citation needed]}

The Renegade Legion series was made up of four board games, a roleplaying game, a war game, and two computer games. With the exception of one of the board games and the two computer games, the Renegade Legion series was compatible on all levels.

[edit] Board games

Interceptor was the first game of the Renegade Legion series, and covered ship-to-ship starfighter combat. Playing pieces were boxes that showed the fighter ships from front, back, sides and top. Lead miniatures of the most popular ships from the game were produced by CinC Soft Metal Casting.

Centurion, the second in the Renegade Legion series, covered ground combat between companies of deadly anti-grav tanks, with support from conventional vehicles and "bounce" infantry (soldiers with anti-gravity propulsion backpacks. The spacefighters from Interceptor could also be used as air support.) Like Interceptor, the first edition of Centurion used boxes that showed all sides of the vehicles for playing pieces. As with Interceptor, lead miniatures were produced by CinC. The 2nd edition of the game replaced these with detailed plastic miniatures of the tanks.

Both Interceptor and Centurion used a unique game mechanic to determine combat damage. Players used different templates to simulate different weapon effects, allowing for differentiation between weapons beyond simple numbers; an armor-piercing weapon might do less total damage but penetrate more deeply into the armor than a high-explosive warhead. Depending on where shots landed and how the templates overlapped, a vehicle could sometimes be taken out with a single volley, and other times absorb large amounts of damage and continue fighting.

Leviathan covered capital ship combat in deep space, and each player could command a fleet of a dozen ships or more. The Interceptor spacefighters were represented not as individual units, but as whole squadrons launched from massive starships. Again, as with the other board games in the series, Leviathan 's playing pieces were 3-D boxes which showed the starships from front, back, top and profile.

Prefect was a more traditional war game with large fold-out maps and hundreds of small cardboard chits, that shifted the action from the tactical level to the strategic and involved the invasion of an entire star system. The player of Prefect was a high-level commander in either the TOG or Commonwealth forces and controlled thousands of ships, tanks and soldiers fighting over multiple worlds and millions of miles of space. Prefect also provided a setting (and conversion rules) for integrating the other titles in the series into an ongoing campaign game.

Circus Imperium was the fifth of the Renegade Legion board games published by FASA, but unlike the others in the series, this tongue-in-cheek game of chariot racing was played strictly for laughs. The game involved anti-grav chariots being pulled by carnivorous beasts, with the object of the game to defeat the other racers, usually by knocking them out of the race or getting them eaten by the monsters. Outcomes of player actions were often random and unpredictable, and players could get points for eliciting laughs or the loudest cheers from other gamers. Ral Partha produced a series of lead figures for the game, including chariots, senators and imperial guards. Older catalogs have had these figures present as items available to order but in the exchange of BattleTech figures the Identifers have changed. IronWind Metals Also worth note there were 3 variants under the old Ral Partha banner dependent on country of purchase.

[edit] Other games

Legionnaire was the name of the role-playing game set in the Renegade Legion universe. While designed primarily as a stand-alone game, it could be integrated into the board games in the series, with stat conversions and guidelines for players who wished to do so.

In addition to the board games and the role-playing game, two computer games set in this universe where published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. Renegade Legion: Interceptor was a straight translation of the turned-based board game of the same name, and allowed two players to go up against each other with a squadron of starfighters. The Interceptor computer game also contained a ship creation generator, providing players the ability to produce custom ships.

The second game was called Renegade: the Battle for Jacob's Star. This game deviated from the Interceptor game system by becoming a space dogfighting simulator, very similar to Wing Commander. It was released around the same time as Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. However, its graphics were originally designed in VGA and hastily converted to higher-resolution Super VGA, and were decidedly inferior to Wing Commander III's (which were designed for SVGA from the beginning), and compared to the marketing blitz for WC3 (similar in nature to a movie marketing campaign), it was very poorly advertised. Renegade, therefore, along with a number of other relatively hastily-programmed space simulators marketed at the time hoping to catch Wing Commander's coattails, performed very poorly in the market. Part of its failure in the market can also be attributed to the perilous finances of SSI at the time, and the company was absorbed by MindScape later in the year.

[edit] Novels and modules

FASA published a number of titles in support of their Renegade Legion games. Interceptor, Centurion and Leviathan each had a number of modules that provided interlinking scenarios for gamers, and each had one technical sourcebook that provided additional ship and vehicle designs. In addition, FASA published Shannedam County, a sourcebook which profiled dozen of planets and star systems where adventures and battles could be set.

There were several paperback novels that used the RL setting: Renegade's Honor by William H. Keith, Jr.; and Damned If We Do …, Frost Death, and Monsoon, all by Peter L. Rice.