Renegade Legion
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Renegade Legion is a series of science fiction games that were designed by Sam Lewis, produced by FASA, and published from 1987 to 1995. The line was then licensed to Nightshift games, a spin-off of the garage company Crunchy Frog Enterprises by Paul Arden Lidberg, which published one scenario book, a gaming aid, and three issues of a fanzine-quality periodical before reverting the license.
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 five board games, a role-playing game, a war game, two computer games, with another board game and computer game announced but never published.[citation needed] With the exception of one of the board games and the two computer games, the Renegade Legion series was compatible on all levels.
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[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. A second Edition of the game was announced, but never saw publishing. Interceptor is famed for its method for determining internal damage[citation needed]: every vessel has a flow chart diagram that leads to the damaged systems, thus making it difficult to use as well as adding the flavor of having a complex system where it is difficult to anticipate what will crash. This feature was persiflaged in Renegade Nuns on Wheels, a book for the Macho Women with Guns satirical RPG by Blacksburg Tactical Research Center (BTRC); it was dropped in the proposed 2nd Edition of Interceptor.
Centurion, the second in the Renegade Legion series, covered ground combat between companies of individual (anti-)grav Tanks, with support from conventional vehicles and "bounce" infantry (soldiers with anti-gravity propulsion backpacks) platoons. 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 wargame with large fold-out maps and hundreds of small cardboard counters, that shifted the action from the tactical level to the operational 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. There were 3 variants under the old Ral Partha banner dependent on country of purchase.
[edit] Other games
[edit] Role-playing Game
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.
[edit] Computer Game
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 fight 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 WCIII (similar in nature to a movie marketing campaign), it was very poorly advertised.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
[edit] Games development
Nightshift games had given Don Gallagher the task of evolving the background as well as revising Interceptor into the long-announced 2nd Edition and creating the announced Phalanx board game.
In his proposal for the background, TOG collapsed and a new human ./. Kess Rith-conflict ensued. In Fan circles, this was received with mixed emotions, and many fans continue to play in the old storyline.
Interceptor, 2nd Edition abolished the flow chart-like internal damage system, in effect making it to "Centurion in Space". The rules are published and have a certain following.
Phalanx was to be the game of individual combat, like Battletroops in Battletech or DMZ in Shadowrun. Luc Nadon and Dallen Masters did a playtest version that differed heavily from the Battletroops rules, in effect making Phalanx a tabletop game. No more than a HTML-ed playtest version exists. There is talk on the fanbase to merge the existing Phalanx and Sam Lewis' Battletroops into a Centurion-compatible game;[citation needed] the realisation status of this is unknown.
[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 Renegade Legion setting: Renegade's Honor by William H. Keith, Jr.; and Damned If We Do …, Frost Death, and Monsoon, all by Peter L. Rice.
[edit] Notes
Renegade Legion's Leviathan module was used as the base for FASA's Battletech new aerospace rules known at the time as BattleSpace. Much of Leviathan's movement & damage system rules were used to make it. The Leviathan rules have continued to be used, updated and revised for Battletech's newer aerospace rules known as Aerotech.
2006 Catalyst Game Labs revised & enhance the Aerotech rules. They were split up between Total Warfare/Techmanual. Large naval ships, spacestation rule are included 2008 rulebook known as Strategic Operations.
