Hey gang, remember this? Posts where I talk about every RPG/Wargame/Boardgame I’ve played? Well it’s back.

And what better place to pick it up again, than R Talsorian Game’s mecha-themed roleplaying game, Mekton. Running on the same system as their Cyberpunk RPG, I picked up Mekton II second hand while at university. Then never got round to playing it. This is a recurring theme in my RPG purchases.

That didn’t stop me purchasing their next edition of the game Mekton Zeta, and its supplement Mekton Zeta Plus. While Mekton II, like earlier editions of Teenagers From Outer Space, didn’t really wear its influences on it’s sleeves, Zeta was clearly shouting I AM AN ANIME RPG. The cover had upgraded from Ben Dunn’s pastiche on Mekton II, to having the real thing in a painted Yuji Kaida cover. Inside you had a chapter called “Running Anime” that addressed how to get an anime tone to your games.

As good as the basic game was, once you added the Mekton Zeta Plus supplement, it really became the anally retentive mecha fan gamer’s dream. Not only would it let you create stats for pretty much any mecha you might want to imagine, the level of detail meant if had “official stats” for mecha (like weight/height etc) you could effectively reverse engineer a mecha into the game stats.

RTG eventually were involved in the second volume of the anime magazine V-Max, leading to anime gaming articles where you could see the power of that reverse engineering in practice. Do you want to pilot Giant Robo in a RPG? Well volume 2 issue 2 of V-Max gave you that chance.

Not that I did. Instead I ran a couple of heavily derivative campaigns of the my own design. The first was MYSTERY HUNTER ROBO. Which was basically X-Files with giant robots. Including one based on Ninjzz from The Bots Master. This is what happens when you players make their own robots. The problem I ran into was that only about half my RPG group liked anime. So after I put that on hold, we formed a splinter rpg & anime watching group and ran a sequel campaign called HADES EXPLORER Q. Or HEQ for short.

In that campaign the heroes travelled in the titular ship to another dimension called Hades where the villains of Mystery Hunter Robo (a terrorist organisation made up of dragons) had come from. They then got mixed up in the politics of that world while trying to prevent an invasion of Earth.

A third campaign, BONE MACHINE, never got off the ground and instead I returned to the campaign years later using a different anime themed RPG, but that’s another post.

Other campaigns I had sketched out but never ran included GIGA INFINITUS: THE BIGGEST ROBOT IN THE UNIVERSE and I.D.O.L. FORCE. The latter involved David Bowie forming a team of new robot piloting pop stars to battle his former team mates, the now evil Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. In the 70s the three had piloted a Getter Robo style combining mecha together.

If you are interested in finding out more about the game, check out MektonZeta.com

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

A little out of sequence, but I’ve not done one of these in ages and this particular game has some relation to the bulk of what I’ve spent 2009 writing about on here.

You see, in everything but name, Teenagers From Outer Space is “Urusei Yatsura: The Role-playing Game”. I first picked it up around the time I was getting into anime, and I think I knew where its influences lay back then. Not that you’d have known it from the 2nd edition I found in a second hand book bin in Hull. That was printed in 1988 and had a cover that was more reminiscent of Galaxy High (coincidentally a show Japanese studio Telecom had worked on). I now see that the very first edition had had a more obviously anime inspired cover, so maybe it’s failure to set the world of fire led to this more traditional approach (interior art edges perhaps closer to Archie Comics house style than US Takahashi-clone).

But the actual contents were clearly inspired by Urusei Yatsura. The rules allowed you to play either humans or varying degrees of alien. Aliens had super powers such as flight, shooting electricity (Lum!), breathing fire (Ten!) and the like. Humans also had more powers like being incredibly endurable (Ataru), filthy rich (Mendou) or super strength (Shinobu).

Where the influence really shown through though was in the 20 mini-adventures, some of which you can see direct parallels with specific UY episodes, and in the some of the “goodies” (equipment) which included duplicating guns, mind swapping earmuffs and boy/girl guns.

In 1997, R Talsorian Games didn’t hide their anime influences under a bushel, and had released the Bubblegum Crisis, DBZ and Votoms games at this point. So they put Mekton Zeta and a re-release of TFOS under their ANimechaniX banner (inexplicable capitlisation RTG’s own).

This time the game had a firmly anime/manga aesthetic, drafting in US furry artists (that US furry/anime fandom connection raising it’s head again!) & Stratelibri (Italian gaming company) bods for the art (as well as a few left over bits of Scott Ruggles art from the 2nd edition). And it expressly mentioned anime in the actual text of the rulebook. Combined with extra material dealing with specifically Japanese bits and pieces, it finally felt like the product it always should have been.

So how does it play? Very well, if you like rules light, fast, silly games. Same basic mechanics as the bulk of RTG’s games (stat+skill+die roll vs. difficulty), but stripped down for speed. And unlike Cybergeneration (which I’ll get to later) I actually got my monies worth out of this game. The play style it lends itself to definitely fits more into my improv-tinged gaming ethos. The third edition may even be in my top ten favourite RPGs. We’ll see, if I ever get round to finishing this series of posts!

Possible bonus US RPG Scene/Anime Scene collision later tonight!

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

I picked this up from a RPG shop way out on the outskirts of Peterborough, the name of which I forget, but I remember it had a specialist doll shop round the back run by the owner of the RPG shop’s wife. It was pretty much the only place to get really indie RPGs in the immediate region. Even Boston and Lincoln wouldn’t have the sort of curios this shop had.

And that was what the 1st edition of R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk was. It came in a box with 2 six sided dice and two books. One which had the character generation, background and general rules. And the other was Friday Night Firefight, a standalone set of combat rules that Cyberpunk used. And it was quite the eye opener. Unlike other games I’d played this combat was short and nasty. Even more brutish than WFRP, which was always tempered by how hard it was to actually hit things. Here, hitting things was easy if you were close to the target. And getting hit by a bullet really hurt. And getting hit by lots killed you. This wasn’t a cinematic combat system, there was a definite sense that if your character got into a fight at any time, there was a chance you weren’t going to walk out.

And it felt very punk too (at least compared to later editions), the paper it was printed on was rough, the layout’s clear, but very ghetto in their design. The edge of the pages of my copy hadn’t been properly guillotined. It felt like a zine, especially compared to the slickness of a GW product or the strangely quaint TSR house style. It kicked off a trend for Cyberpunk-ish games, quickly being overshadowed by the luke-warm watered down Cyberpunk of FASA’s Shadowrun (ELVES? THEY AREN’T PUNK!), until the release of more professional Cyberpunk 2020, which is bone-fide classic tabletop RPG and was a deserved success (though it fell afoul of rule bloat through various supplements about 5-6 years into it’s life, which signified the end of it’s lifespan).

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of William Gibson, but I was a big fan of Repo Man and the sourcebook mentioned that as a cyberpunk film. And an article in Fantasia magazine argued that Cyberpunk was dead and that Repo Man was the only true cyberpunk film. And so my games tended to be influenced more by that film, the first Mad Max film and crime dramas than anything from Neuromancer. Indeed the world of the original Cyberpunk RPG was much closer to our own, than later editions which were closer to Gibson’s ouevre and more noticeably – Bubblegum Crisis (the book “Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads” admitted that the setting of Cyberpunk 2020 was animemetal, rather than cyberpunk. Good book btw, if you were to run Cyberpunk, that’s the one book you should get alongside the 2020 rulebook. My brief look at 3rd Edition gave me the impression of a poorly laid out, poorly illustrated Snow Crash influenced game. OK this long aside has finished, carry on).

R. Talsorian is still around today, but a shadow of it’s former self, in part due to the RPG market and in part due to head honcho Mike Pondsmith’s Xbox related job. I’ll get to some of their other games later on, as there’s some beauties in there.

Addendum: I also recall our teenage gaming group would on more than one occasion plan what we would do in the event of an apocalypse, and the ensuing collapse of civilization. This kind of thinking also made the dystopia of the Cyberpunk world appealing. I’d like to think this was because we’d grown up in the 80s and had seen things like the BBC’s adaptation of the Day of The Triffids at a young age. But I suspect it is just something all kids do at some point. After all Nostradamus, occult nonsense, being a goth, witchcraft and the like tend to popular among teenagers. Is thinking about doom and gloom entertaining at 14?

Be Sociable, Share!

•