Here it is, the RPG no one asked for: Buck Rogers XXVc (1990).
If you’ve read about TSR’s largely idiotic history, you probably know at least some of the back story. The woman who ousted Gygax was the granddaughter of John F. Dille, the publisher of the Buck Rogers comic strip (not even the damn creator, Philip Francis Nowlan, just the guy who owned the strips), and in some egregious self-dealing, she had TSR develop a board game (1988) and this RPG out of the IP. She initially stuck her brother, Flint Dille, on it (he who was responsible for the Dragonstrike video and all those D&D products with audio CDs inside), but he couldn’t deliver, so it fell to more capable hands.
Again, no one wanted this. The main touchstone for Buck at that point was the corny two-season TV series (1979), and that was primarily a cheap knock-off of Star Wars. But the boss wants what the boss wants (I should note, however, that the popular theory that Star Frontiers was killed so that Buck could live doesn’t hold water — the dates don’t line up). The thing is, though — being unwanted doesn’t mean bad. Buck Roger XXVc…is not bad. Believe it or not.
It’s basically 2E D&D with a sci-fi skin. It isn’t elegant and there is no thematic unity between the setting and the mechanics and the ranged combat is a mess, but it hangs together all right. And there is a lot of fantastic setting stuff in here, supported by excellent art (the art is legit far better than your average 2E Forgotten Realms book). Hostile AI’s, billionaire’s downloading their consciousnesses, evil megacorporations, corrupt governments, freedom fighters, pirates. There’s a lot of good stuff that was basically smothered at birth because it was Buck Rogers and no one cared.
What I’m saying is that maybe we should be so quick to dismiss a game designed by Mike Pondsmith, even if it was for a DOA property.
As a certified Elder Geek, I have been exposed to gaming products over a lot of years. Many of them haven't aged well. But there is a special place in my heart for roasting things that someone, somewhere, should have asked some hard questions about before they ever saw print.
Welcome to the first installment of Elder Abominations, a look at old RPG books where they should have known better.
Our first contestant comes from fallen industry titan TSR, and comes with a little backstory. But first:. The cover!
Fuck yeah! Scary dude floating in space and smashing bubble helmets! And that other guy looks like a budget wolfman! I'm fuckin' sold!
So, the origins of the Buck Rogers XXVc roleplaying game are amazingly mercenary. To assist me, I shall call upon the credits to the book. Also, keep in mind that the people below worked on this book, and maybe could have thought things through. I'm not trying to divine their intentions behind the book, and make no claims about that. All I know is what's on the page.
That's 1990, which can only have been about fifteen years ago, right?
Oh, right, I forgot. Never do the math about how old you are.
In 1990, Gary Gygax had been forced out of TSR and Lorraine Williams was the new boss. There's a lot of backstory I'm eliding here because it's not germane to the issue at hand. (Also, there are books you can read! I'm currently reading The Game Wizards.)
Williams is relevant here because of something buried there in the credits. "Buck Rogers and XXVC are trademarks used under license from The Dille Family Trust." The Dille Family Trust owned the rights to Buck Rogers. And you know who one of the major beneficiaries of that trust was?
That's right, Lorraine Williams. She had TSR try to create a franchise so she could double dip on the profits. It was not a smashing success, but Younger Elder Geek me didn't know or care about any of that.
The franchise did spawn an RPG boxed set, a handful of sourcebooks and adventures, and a couple of Gold Box style computer games by SSI. Loved those.
I did (and still do, somewhere) have a copy of the box set, as well as today's victim. Pictures are from a PDF, because it's just easier.
The elevator pitch is great. "What if we did a kinda hard sci-fi version of Rayguns and Rocketships? The aesthetic is all fishbowl helmets and Cadillac fins on spaceships!" Fuckin' rad. And they just lifted the mechanics wholesale from AD&D, with THAC0, descending armor class and all.
But. This book.
Perhaps my fascist sense is a bit overdeveloped, but this book bothered even the Tiny Elder Geek. Let us just say that someone on the design team had opinions.
I will grab our examples from one small section of the book, because synecdoche. Here's a bunch of NPC groups your heroes can interact with!
Huh. The super-virtuous good guys are called the Libertarians. I'm sure that's just a bit of fluff. Let's take a look at this Green Earth group?
Oh, cool. Ecoterrorists. And, no. There is not a group of good guy environmentalists to work with. And these guys don't get along with...
Wait, what? The Sixth Fucking Reich? Okay, so they absolutely have to be bad guys, right? Everyone loves punching or shooting Nazis, right?
Um. "Realm of Earth to come?" They're... Space pirates? Known for... being good at pirating? No acknowledgement in any way that the name might raise eyebrows anywhere, ever? I am utterly baffled as to why anyone would choose to do that, ever, in a published product.
No, I'm sorry. That is a lie. I know pre-fucking-cisely why someone would choose to do that.
Also, behold the art. Good enough, except for the fact that it definitely previously appeared in the core set. You know, the books you would absolutely need to have in order to use this book for your game? And, also, definitely not in line with that raygun aesthetic.
Last picture, I promise. We need a moustache-twirling villain. Dude needs a name. I'm sure it's a very subtle reference that...
Oh.
All of that in a mere ten pages of this book. Commies and hippies bad, rugged Libertarians good, and Nazis? Meh, they're okay.
I highlight this because this shit is pernicious. Unlike RPGs of today, this shit was squarely aimed at kids. This is stuff that gets in your head to help form your politics before you have a grasp of what politics even is.
And, while it's among the worst I've seen from TSR, it's not the worst I've ever seen. Perhaps that will be another day.
This is Hardware (1992), a tech sourcebook for XXVc. It is the last of the XXVc books I own and I don’t really have much to say about it. There’s a bunch of tech, mostly weapons.
I like the cover though, and the interior art is weirdly high quality for what is a pretty low effort book coming out at the end of the line’s lifespan. TSR was often content to use any old crap to illustrate its Forgotten Realms sourcebooks, and those were generally marquee releases.
The reason for this level of quality is because here, and in most of the XXVc books I own, the art was produced by Continuity Studios (no doubt thanks to Flint Dille’s connection to the comic book and animation scenes). Continuity was founded by the late, great Neal Adams and the equally late, great Dick Giordano as a way for comic artists to ply their trade in other fields, like film storyboards or, in this case, RPG illustrations (I imagine that outfits like this got comic artists money far more commensurate with their skills than the funny books). The list of associate artists who’ve worked for Continuity is long, and includes folks like Larry Hama, Howard Chaykin and Al Milgrom. I kind of wish TSR gave clear credit, as I am just shy of being able to identify the artists.
Mars in the 25th Century (1990), the first supplement for XXVc, was written by Ray Winninger. In a couple years, he’d write Undergound for Mayfair.
So, yea, Mars. Mars sucks. Its the seat of power for a totalitarian government run by the solar system’s richest mainframe, by which I mean a rich jerk who had is brain downloaded into a computer (truly amazing that in our modern world, some real live rich jerks think this is the way to go). The civilized regions are ruthlessly oppressed into an efficient work force kept pacified by the promise of fiscal security, blood sport and the threat of imprisonment, conscription or worse. The wilderness, meanwhile, is full of “monsters.” It’s hard to figure out which is worse. Winninger paints this portrait with zero subtlety: Buck and his rebels need a machine to rage against. Here is that machine.
It is tempting to read the whole thing as a satire of TSR’s c-suite. You’re probably expecting me to be like “but nah,” when really, go ahead: read the whole thing as a satire of TSR’s c-suite.
This is the character sheet booklet for Buck Rogers XXVc (1991). I don’t have a lot of XXVc stuff, so this is what you call a filler post. However, worth noting that this is essentially the “after” of the cover of No Humans Allowed, though it came first (and, for what it is worth, captures some of the critical Frankenstein themes that later book glosses over)
No Humans Allowed (1992) is the genetic manipulation sourcebook for XXVc. The concept of genetically modified people and animals is introduced in the core rules, primarily in a mechanical sense. It’s pretty obvious that large scale genetic manipulation has made exploring and inhabiting space possible, but the core box doesn’t really dig into the greater moral and social conundrums that are introduced by creating new species of human (there is a passing mentions that bigots view gene-altered species as lesser than human, but that’s about it). This book acknowledges that those questions exist, but doesn’t attempt to answer them either. Rather, this is a mix between a powers book and a monster book.
A monster book? Yeaaaaah. See, advantageous genetic manipulation in humans is pretty commonplace in XXVc to allow, say, Martian humans to live comfortably in Mars’ less Earthly environment. They’re still recognizably human, though. More extreme modifications for more extreme environments or for particular tasks (like hard labor) tend to produce “monsters,” who are perfectly suited for the tasks they are designed for. Woof, not great! This sure sounds like boutique slave labor and, like Dark Sun’s slave races, rises from racist concepts of eugenics. Dark Sun at least confronts and attempts to break down those concepts. Here they are either glossed over or presented uncritically. You can kind of get the vibe from the cover — it should read as a Frankenstein-esque mad scientist tableau, but instead it has all the critique of a portrait of a former CEO hung in an office lobby.
This all seems like a missed opportunity: genetic manipulation is essentially identified as XXVc’s central question and then all the books I have seem to quietly avoid even attempted to answer it. Maybe this sort of stuff is tackled in the adventures or other sourcebooks (I’ll never know), but it seems a shame at best and (given the racism in the source material, which is also present in the Buck Rogers Adventure Game produced in 1993) sinister at worst.
