#xxvc

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.

Welcome to the first installment of Elder Abominations, a look at old RPG books where they should have known better.

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.

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.

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.