The answers to those questions were, in order: to a new company; make a series of terrible games; no; and yes. That new company, formed along with Frank Mentzer (who had previously revised the Basic and Expert Sets and expanded the line with Companion, Master, and Immortals Sets) and Kim Mohan (then the editor of Dragon Magazine), was New Infinities Productions. Having made their names and fortunes as designers of cheap and cheerful hack-and-slash fantasy adventure, they naturally decided that their first project would be to design a sci-fi action game that did not so much rip off Robert Heinlein as dance around his corpse wearing a Heinlein suit like motherfvcking Jame Gumb. (Yes, Heinlein was still alive in 1987. Picky, picky.)
According to Gygax, the game was actually written by Mentzer and Mohan "based on my outline", as he was busy writing novels at the time. So you should feel free to blame as much or as little of the result on Gygax as your own personal biases dictate, although I do detect a certain Mentzerian feel to some of the game that will remind diligent readers of the Companion and Immortals sets.
PRESENTATION
Cyborg Commando comes in the then-standard accordion box format for RPGs. The cover painting, depicting cyborged humans fighting cyborged giant arachnids while the ruins of the U.S. Capitol smolder in the background, is by Dave Dorman, who would later become substantially more famous for his Star Wars based art. The box is also subtitled "Set 1: The Battle For Earth", demonstrating a commendable if ultimately ill-judged optimism about the game's future prospects. In case the cover and the name have somehow failed to clue you in as to what this is all about, the back of the box helpfully provides the following blurb:
At this point certain questions might begin to be raised, like "if the Earth's resources at their peak weren't able to do squat against an invading alien empire, why should a gang of jury-rigged cyborgs be expected to do better?" and, perhaps more importantly, "are highly-polished metal bodies filled with complex electronics really the best choice against aliens with superior technology and orbital supremacy?" or "why the fuck is Michael Biehn on the cover wearing a Ring of Shooting Stars?" But it was the 80s, and shit like this was so endemic at the time that if you took the same basic theme and made it a satire of that era instead, you would basically end up with Far Cry: Blood Dragon.CYBORG MOTHERFUCKING COMMANDO wrote: INVASION! (huge red letters)
In the year 2035, Earth is attacked by aliens -- hostile Xenoborgs (somehow not trademarked) who selected our planet as the next addition to their galactic empire. In mere days, man's conventional forces are destroyed, and the earth (sic) is overrun by alien troops.
Now, Earth's (note inconsistent capitalization) only hope lies with the CYBORG COMMANDO (TM) Force (CCF) -- a cadre of super-soldiers who are part human and part machine. With their state-of-the-art defenses and built-in weaponry, the CCs may yet be a match for the invaders. But time is running short!"
Inside the box are a 64-page "Campaign Book", a 16-page "Adventure Notes" booklet, a 48-page "CCF Manual", and two ten-sided dice. The Campaign Book and CCF Manual have color covers (both reproducing the same Dorman painting used on the box -- which makes it harder to tell them apart), and are printed with headings, maps, emphasized words, etc., in a unique color -- blue for the campaign book, red for the CCF Manual.
The internal art is not inspiring, and the layout is standard three-column format. It puts me in mind of nothing so much as the way the Marc Miller's Traveller books were printed, which is to say, giving the impression of being low-budget and done with more attention to speed than beauty.
This might seem like nitpicking, but one of the dice is black and colored in a very dim red, making it difficult to read quickly. Of course, the game is now 25 years old, so it may have been more more vivid when originally manufactured. Not that it matters, the odds of anyone buying this game without already having a handful of 10-sided dice are somewhere between slim and none.
CAMPAIGN BOOK
The book has a table of contents on the very first page, which is already a demerit in its search for "WORST GAME EVAR" status. No overwrought fan fiction, no wistful full-page art of broken cyborgs lying among the wreckage of the Earth, just information. This is kind of refreshing, actually.
There are a total of four credited interior artists, only one of whom I recognize (Valerie Valusek, who did art for AD&D1). There's also a "Special thanks to Jennings Capellan, Rare Earth Information Center," which I feel certain is going to be used Chekov's Gun style later on in the game.
We open with a one-paragraph recap of the game premise, and then, believe it or not, we start out with some White Wolf-ish passive-aggressive bullshit:
So, last things first, let's look at the back cover and see what it tell us about the game. First, alien cyborgs apparently use Earth military ranks, as they are graded from Private up to General. Second, there are a total of eight different types of monster on the chart that the game insists is "all we need" for the combat portion of the game. (We're not counting different weapon loadouts as different monsters, because that way madness lies.) Third, this is a game that can't decide whether it wants to be abstract or not: characters can mostly be defined with three stats (Mental, Neural, Physical), movement rate, number of attacks, and Integrity Points, but then mysteriously have five different defense ratings (Laser, Impact, Thermal, E-M, and Sonic). And fourth, the alien empire apparently does not depend overmuch on brains, because a "General" ranked Xenoborg has a Mental stat of a mere 70 compared to the "Private" with 20, and a Physical stat of 500 versus 80. So apparently this is like the old "Beachhead" game where one Japanese commander had four times the firepower of a 10-man rifle platoon?CYBORG COMMANDO wrote: "If your 'role-playing games' consist mostly of combat, you will need little more than the charts on the back cover of this booklet. The outside gives the game data most frequently used, for alien troops of the lowest ranks. The inside back cover gives the details for higher-ranked invaders, with modified Defense Values. {...}
But the CC game as a campaign demands much more than simple combat. It is impossible to give all the game details needed for such a campaign, for several reasons. First, this is a new game, and the specific needs have yet to be discovered -- though the general ones can be anticipated, and are addressed. Second, this is Set #1 of a series of three (or even more) rule sets; much remains to be covered in subsequent products. And third, this one set is very limited in size; a comprehensive treatment of the subject would be large, and the resulting product would be much more expensive than this one. {...}"
Mind you, at this point we have fuck-all idea what any of these stats actually mean, because we're reading the fucking Campaign Book and the rules aren't fucking in here. So why put the monster stats here? Fucked if I know.
I am not going to mock every stupid thing in this game, but I feel I have to give a special shout-out to the "Style" section, which informs us -- presumably with a straight face -- that "the emphasis ... is on hard science" and that "with respect to the setting and characters ... every detail may someday become reality" (their italics). So if you're still hoping to one day have your brain transplanted into a gleaming chrome cyborg super-body, take heart! To a degree I appreciate and even approve of the idea of making a game set on future Earth where pollution, nuclear war, and population growth are still problematic, but that is not a thing that a game about fighting cyborg spiders from outer space should be terribly worried about. More importantly, if you are a game about fighting cyborg spiders from outer space, then drawing out attention to the issue of "realism" is not a thing that is going to end well for you.
SETTING
The first thing the book tells us is that "international power is centralized in the United Earth Government." The fuck? So after the aliens completely destroyed Earth's conventional forces (as it says on the box), they decided to camp out somewhere and get high while the Earth governments got their act together? "Well, consider yourselves conquered, I gotta go." It's not a good sign when the first paragraph of your setting calls to mind a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, unless you are in fact writing a Mystery Science Theater game.
Anyway. The UEG seems to be kind of like the UN, except for the part where the UEG is effective and influential. Rather than having individual member nations, it has five power blocs made up of individual member nations -- so you have the Pan-Asian Union, Oceania, the Trans-American Union, the European Commonwealth, and United Afrika (sic). It goes into some detail about how the nations that make up each bloc retain their autonomy even though the bloc governments regulate "international dealings only." Of course, when the bloc governments control communications, monetary systems, trade, education, food and water distribution, law enforcement, and research, there's not a whole lot of meaningful autonomy left, but what the fuck -- it's their utopian world government, and I care just little enough to accept their assertions.
Immediately thereafter, we get to learn about the CYBORG COMMANDO(TM) Force (which I will not be capitalizing hereafter, because fuck you). Apparently we were supposed to read the CCF Book first, which leads to the awkward question of why it was packed at the bottom of the box. Fuck it, we'll keep going.
The CCF is a GLOBAL ORGANIZATION, and they have a fancy code identifying the location and function of their bases. I don't care, and neither do you. We also learn a little about aliens -- this is the first time we're told that there's more than one kind of alien. Besides the giant spiderborgs -- which, if the game is to be believed, are "very realistic aliens" -- there are two races which they use as tools, and one race using them as tools.
The Introduction closes with an admonition to pick either Metric or Imperial measurements, and strongly suggests Metric. This section takes up one full column, or 1/6 of the entire Introduction, roughly the same amount of space as the World Setting blurb. Just thought you'd like to know.
I would be seriously remiss if I did not add that the writing, oh sweet zombie Jesus the writing. It is not good. It's dry and dense and essentially reads like someone sucked all the charm out of Gygax's AD&D writing style. Fuck me, this is painful.
POPULATION
Section two of the Campaign Book is where it becomes undeniably clear that this mess was written with a wargaming sensibility, and even more undeniably clear that it was written in the pre-internet era. It devotes two pages to averaged growth rates for different parts of the world and earnest explanations of formulas you can use to calculate a realistic population for your home town or whatever in the year 2035. It does this after informing us that the invaders wiped out "all urban areas with population greater than five million" in the initial hours of the invasion, which certainly seems like it would put a damper on any world-wide government or cyborg super-soldier research projects. What the fuck ever, I have already given up on expecting this shit to make sense.
The next twenty eight pages are devoted to the five blocs of the UEG. These pages give us a great deal of information. They tell us where the CCF bases in each bloc, and in each nation making up that bloc, can be found. They tell us how many losses each base suffered in the initial invasion. They tell us the population, latitude, and longitude of each city (although they do not bother to tell us what year the population is supposed to be for). And they give us a brief (usually less than one column per bloc) blurb on the general makeup of each bloc and how it compares to the others.
I have seen some pretty egregious wastes of space in games before. The Malkavian Clanbook for Vampire printed pages backward so you had to get a mirror to read them, and that was pretty fucked up. But it is tempting to declare this the single worst waste of space in a role-playing game, just because it is a combination of egregious, useless and actively harmful. Seriously, who gives a fuck what the population of London is? Sure, before Google you couldn't find out the answer instantaneously, but if you really need to know for purposes of your game then there are fucking almanacs and encyclopedias even in 1987. To add insult to injury, a list of where the "canonical" CCF bases are is of very little use to anyone who doesn't already live in one of those places, because the odds are excellent that anyone who runs this game is going to put the characters in a base that's somewhere they know something about, and is going to put other bases where dramatic necessity says they should be. Which means 28 pages have been used to give us information that either we won't use, or will likely cause our campaigns to be worse if we do use it. In short: fuck this entire section in the ear. I need a fucking drink.
More later, if I don't decide I'd rather hang myself than continue trying to make sense of this.
WHY
