Renegade Legion
Encyclopedia
Renegade Legion is a series of science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 games that were designed by Sam Lewis
Sam Lewis (game designer)
Sam Lewis is an American designer of board games and former line developer of the Renegade Legion line in FASA Corporation. He was also president of FASA for a time.He holds an MBA in economics from Northwestern University, which he obtained in 1983....

, produced by FASA, and published from 1989 to 1993. 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
Fanzine
A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...

-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, and the "Commonwealth", an alliance of humans and aliens. The focus of the plot, like with many strategy games, is to present a long term conflict to enable as many individual situations and environments as possible. Most of Renegade Legion deals with large, military battles to be played on hexagonal grid mapsheets in a turn-based rules system.

The Plotline

The setting can best fit into the space opera
Space opera
Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The term has no relation to music and it is analogous to "soap...

 category. The themes involve large scale military operations as the Terran Overlord Government (TOG for short) tries to completely conquer the Milky Way Galaxy. Many alien races are involved, and plots usually use trends such as royal bloodlines, betrayal, and little room for a peaceful solution.

The back story to the setting has the human race exploring and colonizing many worlds in the galaxy, and coming into contact with several important alien races. After the Snow Plague that weakens most of the human race, Earth is invaded and conquered by the Kess Rith, a reptilian alien race that can best be described as half iguana and half centaur.

Later the humans on Earth successfully rebel and drive off the Kess Rith by emulating the ancient Roman civilization. Over the span of centuries of time this new human movement, which started out as only a noble liberation of Earth and humans turns into a military dictatorship after a terrorist bomb kills most of the senate. The new government is then lead by a Ceaser (dictator for life), and appoints a number of personal representatives called Overlords who wield nearly unlimited legal power. It is at this time that a significant portion of the TOG military defects to the Commonwealth. TOG becomes increasingly militant, engages in bloodsports, legalizes slavery, and reduces women to property of their father or husband in order to remove their right to vote. After defeating the Kess Rith, the new Terran Overlord Government continues their military conquest and attacks other nations who were neutral during their time spent under Kess Rith rule.

The Commonwealth is based primarily on old Earth culture of Britain. While still maintaining it's own royal family, is far more democratic than the TOG, accepts women and aliens as equals, and even includes refugees from both the former Kess Rith empire, exiled or disgusted TOG military legions, and large numbers of TOG women who defect to the Commonwealth. Those women often join all female Commonwealth units called Minerva legions. It is from these rogue TOG units the setting derives the name of Renegade Legion as they form half of the professional army of the Commonwealth. Their symbol continues to include the original TOG symbol of the planet Earth on a inverted pyramid background, however a hastily painted letter "R" made of four straight brush strokes in red paint is used to deface that original TOG symbol.

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
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...

 license. Since the license was awarded to West End Games
West End Games
West End Games was a company that made board, role-playing, and war games. It was founded by Daniel Scott Palter in 1974 in New York, but later moved to Honesdale, Pennsylvania...

, FASA chose to use the systems with their own setting.

The Renegade Legion series was made up of five board games, a role-playing game
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...

, a war game
Wargaming
A wargame is a strategy game that deals with military operations of various types, real or fictional. Wargaming is the hobby dedicated to the play of such games, which can also be called conflict simulations, or consims for short. When used professionally to study warfare, it is generally known as...

, two computer games, with another board game and computer game announced but never published. With the exception of one of the board games and the two computer games, the Renegade Legion series was compatible on all levels.

Board games

Each of the boxed boardgames in the Renegade Legion series used a template-based mechanic to determine weapon damage. When a unit was hit by a weapon, an additional die roll was used to determine the hit location; a geometric template was placed on the ship diagram at that location, and the armor boxes beneath that template were marked as destroyed. Each weapon had a unique template; more- or less-powerful weapons would use larger or smaller versions of a standard template. The intent was to add depth to the game system beyond simply counting up damage points (as in FASA's BattleTech
BattleTech
BattleTech is a wargaming and science fiction franchise launched by FASA Corporation in 1984, acquired by WizKids in 2000, and owned since 2003 by Topps. The series began with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech by Jordan Weisman and L...

), as weapon type and hit location would now be important to game resolution.

Another key aspect of the Renegade Legion series was interoperability. All of the games in the system included rules for simultaneous play with the other games, for example using the starfighters from Interceptor as support for the action in a game of Centurion.

Renegade Legion games first shipped with die-cut cardboard boxes as the playing pieces; each side of the box depicted the unit from the appropriate angle (front, back, side, top, or bottom.) The second edition of Centurion replaced these with plastic miniatures.

Interceptor was the first game of the Renegade Legion series, and was based on single- or two-crewmember starfighter combat. A second Edition of the game was announced but not published. Interceptor used a complex diagram of ship systems to track internal damage; this feature proved difficult for players to use and was not carried into the other games of the series.

Centurion, the second in the Renegade Legion series, covered ground combat. The primary units were high-speed antigravity tanks; the game also included ground vehicles, artillery, and infantry.

Leviathan covered capital ship combat. The starfighters from Interceptor were represented not as individual units, but as whole squadrons launched from massive starships. While Leviathan used the same template-based damage resolution mechanic as the other games, the templates were much less complex.

Prefect was a more traditional wargame
Wargaming
A wargame is a strategy game that deals with military operations of various types, real or fictional. Wargaming is the hobby dedicated to the play of such games, which can also be called conflict simulations, or consims for short. When used professionally to study warfare, it is generally known as...

 with large fold-out maps and hundreds of small cardboard counters
Counter (board wargames)
Boardgame counters are usually small cardboard squares moved around on the map of a wargame to represent armies, military units or individual military personnel. The first modern mass-market wargame, based on cardboard counters and hex-board maps, was Tactics, invented by Charles S. Roberts in 1952...

, 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.

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
Chariot
The chariot is a type of horse carriage used in both peace and war as the chief vehicle of many ancient peoples. Ox carts, proto-chariots, were built by the Proto-Indo-Europeans and also built in Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC. The original horse chariot was a fast, light, open, two wheeled...

 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 Identifiers have changed. There were 3 variants under the old Ral Partha banner dependent on country of purchase.

Grav vehicles

One of the most common technologies of the setting are anti-gravity devices that allow vehicles and other machines to fly. The largest vehicles are corvette class starships used as scouts, couriers, and landing craft. The main unit of the armies of Renegade Legion are grav tanks, grav APC's for transporting infantry, and Bounce Infantry that use grav belts to enable them to jump long distances even while fully loaded. Gravity control is even used for nuclear devices in the form of a device known as a Hell bomb. The bomb instantaneously increases the local gravity to such an extent that nearby matter undergoes nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier nucleus. This is usually accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy...

 and explodes.

Because of the use of Grav vehicles, roads are not nearly as important to armies of the Renegade Leegion setting. Rivers often become major routes of travel as they are clear of obstructions. Tank battles can also occur far out at sea, as grav tanks fly above the surface of the ocean, popping up from the troughs of large waves and exchanging fire with the enemy forces. However, the altitude limit of anti-gravity is usually several hundred feet, and the top speed is 500 miles per hour at that altitude. Flying a few feet above the ground is safer as grav vehicles are vulnerable to hits from below, and this also slows their top speed as they avoid crashing into terrain.

The visual art style of Renegade legion most often depicts grav vehicles as having a box shaped hull with two downward sloping prong bow section with upturned tips. Frequently a large cannon is fitted into the hull between the bow prongs, as well as a turret with secondary weapons on top of the box hull.

Lasers

Another common weapon, but best known in the Renegade Legion setting for being a source of misery. The crystals used to make the lasers are mined on various planets, but the crystals are toxic and mining them is used as a form of punishment for slaves.

Other Weapons

Military forces in the Renegade Legion setting make extensive use of electromagnetic projectile weapons, variously referred to as "mass drivers" or "gauss cannons". These weapons range in size from infantry small arms to the main armament of starships.

Military forces in the Renegade Legion setting also commonly use guided missiles of various types.

Ground combat in the Renegade Legion setting has a number of types of long-range fire support, including both indirect-fire artillery munitions and orbital kinetic-bombardment weapons (referred to as Thor satellites.)

T-space

Faster than light travel is possible in Renegade legion by spaceships that enter Tachyon-space, also known as T-space. T-Space travel requires a ship to accelerate under computer control along a precise flight path before activating the T-space drive. Once inside T-space the ship cannot turn in any direction as T-space does not follow the normal laws of physics. In addition the energies involved will build up within the solid matter of the ship and crews, requiring no more than a month of travel in T-space before becoming dangerous. An equal amount of time must be spent in the real space to dissipate the energy, known as Shimmer Heat, so named for the visual shimmering effect crews can see when entering and leaving T-space. The ships of the Leviathan board game feature large fins on their hulls, and these are used to dissipate Shimmer Heat.

Exceeding the recommended maximum of one month in T-space will result in the over-charged solid mater exploding.

P-Comm

The faster than light communication related to T-space travel. The range is limited, but it is possible to communicate with nearby star systems. The devices are small enough to fit onto small spaceships. However, the P-comm cannot be used while actually traveling in T-space.

Very Large Communication Relays

Another faster than light communication system that only the TOG possess. The arrays are large space stations and can transmit and receive over far greater distances than the P-comm devices, even across the entire Milky Way galaxy. This allowed the Republic/TOG government to make use of smaller forces for maximum effect than their enemies using only P-comm system. However, they are quite large and must operate by line of sight to other known relay stations and cannot be fitted into starships.

Shields

Most military vehicles, ships, and fighters are equipped with invisible energy shields. They deflect incoming attacks, though their protection is based on their flicker rate. Shields cannot run continuously, so instead they cycle on and off many times a second. A fixed percentage of attacks are rendered harmless due to their flicker rates, and higher quality shields have a better ratio of on-cycles to off-cycles when compared to low quality shields. However, shields have limitations beyond this. In grav tank battles the solid metal rounds fired by main gun/Gauss cannon are not affected by shields, as well as Thor satellite attacks and nuclear detonations. Lasers, missiles, and infantry weapons are potentially stopped by shields, or hit with full impact depending if the shield was on or off at the moment of impact.

Shields are also directional. A ship or tank can have very powerful shields in one direction, but weak or even no shields in another direction. Grav vehicles usually have weak shield below them to save weight, and simply fly very close to the ground to avoid being hit in this weak spot.

Role-playing Game

Legionnaire was the name of the role-playing game
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...

 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.

Video games

In addition to the board games and the role-playing game, two computer games set in this universe where published by Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Strategic Simulations, Inc. was a video game developer and publisher with over 100 titles to its credit since its founding in 1979. It was especially noted for its numerous wargames, its official computer game adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons, and for the groundbreaking Panzer General...

 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
Wing Commander (franchise)
Wing Commander is a video game media franchise consisting of space combat simulation computer games from Origin Systems, Inc., an animated television series, a feature film, a collectible card game, a series of novels, and action figures...

. It was released around the same time as Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is the third main game in Chris Roberts' Wing Commander science fiction space combat simulation video game series, developed and released by Origin Systems...

. However, its graphics were originally designed in VGA
Video Graphics Array
Video Graphics Array refers specifically to the display hardware first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, but through its widespread adoption has also come to mean either an analog computer display standard, the 15-pin D-subminiature VGA connector or the 640×480 resolution...

 and hastily converted to higher-resolution Super VGA, and were decidedly inferior to Wing Commander IIIs (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. 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
Mindscape
Mindscape is an international software publishing company, previously part of The Learning Company. They are now affiliated with EA . As of 2004, the group has offices in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. It has an annual turnover of €38 million and employs 150 people. Mindscape...

 later in the year.

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 completed rules have been released freely onto the internet, and have a certain following, but never existed as a published work in book format.

Phalanx was to be the game of individual combat, like Battletroops
BattleTroops
BattleTroops is a FASA wargame set in the BattleTech universe, simulating infantry combat. It was expanded to include Clan Elementals with ClanTroops. It was published in 1989....

 in Battletech
BattleTech
BattleTech is a wargaming and science fiction franchise launched by FASA Corporation in 1984, acquired by WizKids in 2000, and owned since 2003 by Topps. The series began with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech by Jordan Weisman and L...

 or DMZ in Shadowrun
Shadowrun
Shadowrun is a role-playing game set in a near-future fictional universe in which cybernetics, magic and fantasy creatures co-exist. It combines genres of cyberpunk, urban fantasy and crime, with occasional elements of conspiracy fiction, horror, and detective fiction.The original game has spawned...

. Luc Nadon and Dallen Masters did a playtest version that differed heavily from the Battletroops rules, in effect making Phalanx a tabletop game
Tabletop game
Tabletop game is a general term used to refer to board games, card games, dice games, miniatures wargames, tile-based games and other games that are normally played on a table or other flat surface...

. No more than a HTML-ed playtest version exists. There is talk on the fanbase to merge the existing Phalanx and Sam Lewis
Sam Lewis (game designer)
Sam Lewis is an American designer of board games and former line developer of the Renegade Legion line in FASA Corporation. He was also president of FASA for a time.He holds an MBA in economics from Northwestern University, which he obtained in 1983....

' Battletroops into a Centurion-compatible game; the realisation status of this is unknown.

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.
William H. Keith, Jr.
William H. Keith is an American author. He served during the Vietnam War in the United States Navy as a hospital corpsman. He became a professional artist, working in the game industry with his brother Andrew, before becoming a full-time author...

; and Damned If We Do …, Frost Death, and Monsoon, all by Peter L. Rice.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK