"What ever happened to Renegade Legion?" Topic

Ive seen minis/rules here and there, but never played it. It seemed like a hot property why isnt it available?

AFAIK in the FASA's days of glory it was a smaller seller than the Battletech.

Griefbringer

Check RPGNow

Doesn't Froggod still own that line?

Much like the original Battletech it was slow to play, too slow for most folks now days.

The core book was reprinted by a new company a few months ago. Not sure if its still in print or not.

Crunchy Frog was a licensee while FASA was still around, but that license lapsed a long time ago. The remaining FASA stocks were retrieved from CF's storage and sold off.

Interceptor is a duel or RPG scale game. More than one or two fighters per player is too many, but taken as an RPG fighter game ("My character climbs in and takes off") its brilliant.

Leviathan had a bad case of FASA editing. Unusable rules and ship examples that did not match the ship building rules were just the beginning.

Centurion was the star of the show, when all was said and done.

Prefect also has its fans, as it is apparently a very good theater-scale planetary invasion game.

The RPG is… odd. Decent. But odd.

The RL setting came about after FASA failed to win the Star Wars license and wanted to do something with the rules they had from that effort. This is the reason the setting has some of the elements it does.

You can still by the miniatures from C-in-C if you are looking for them.

Some of the plastic minis show up on ebay, I know mine went there.

They were all pardoned by the Emperor?

Same thing that happened to Hupmobile, pretty much.
-Kle.

@Gypsycomet – surprised to hear you say Leviathan is unplayable. I recall several good games I played over the years where the rules held together and played well. Interceptor was the worst of the games with that convoluted flow chart.

Strangley I remember being at a convention and some of the guys from FASA was telling me that Battletech was only ever released as a stop gap while Centurion and Interceptor were being developed

Sad really as both of them along with Leviathen were some of the best Sci Fi I ever played

"surprised to hear you say Leviathan is unplayable."

Oh, the *game* isn't unplayable, but it has its tripping points. It's been too long for me to recall them at this point, though.

Centurion was pretty good, but it suffered from the paperwork – IIRC You needed a record sheet for each tank, which was a pain in the proverbial when you had large-unit actions.

Leviathan does have some rather nasty points – Resolution of fire in some weapons is the one I recall mostly.

Oh, the *game* isn't unplayable, but it has its tripping points. It's been too long for me to recall them at this point, though.

There were a couple of issues: the armor/damage template that worked so well in Interceptor and Centurion just didn't scale up to the capital ships. Like Car Wars, you almost had to strip all the armor from an entire side before you could do any internal damage -- and if that did happen a ship was done for and a player would wisk it off the board if they could.

The fatal flaw in Leviathan, however, was the way it handled missiles. The nukes the capital ships carried could easily strip all the armor off battleships and cruisers, and completely wipe out smaller classes. Ships *did* have a missile defense system, but there was only a 50% of it working -- and if it didn't, the nukes did full damage.

As one friend said -- after a game in which we mutually destroyed each others' fleets in a single round by both blowing our missle defense rolls -- we could have simply flipped a coin and avoided setting everything up in the first place.

That said, I *loved* the ship designs and setting. The rules just needed some serious tweaking.

Leviathan's missile problems were compounded by the ship design system, which made masses of smaller ships (with maxed-ot missiles) much more effective than a few larger ones that cost the same. The laser bay weapons also had a major glitch design-wise, in that taking shorter ranged guns never made sense. You could always get better performance out of the same space allocation by shifting to a thinner but longer-ranged crystal type, keeping the damage the same but adding a range band in the process.

You really needed to ignore the design system, play stock ships, and tinker with missiles/torps to get a good game out of that one – which puts it in fine company, since you can say exactly the thing about Silent Death. :)

Yeah. The way Leviathan handled fighters was a little silly too, IIRC. It was laughably easy to wipe out entire waves of starfighters, which undercut the 'importance' the series placed on them in Interceptor.

If you decided you wanted to play pilots as regular characters in Interceptor or the RPG, you'd never want to integrate them into a Leviathan game. PCs in Call of Cthulhu had a longer lifespan.

Still. In spite of its flaws, had a real fondness for the game. Be sweet to see it come back in a new form.

Still. In spite of its flaws, had a real fondness for the game. Be sweet to see it come back in a new form.

One that doesn't involve damage templates!

I dunno -- that was the most unique and clever part of the RL line (other than the lemons-into-lemonade story of how the game was born out of the failure to get the star wars license.)

Seriously, I think the damage templates are as much a part of Renegade Legion's identity as the whole Romans in Space, and removing that would make it like too many other titles out there.

As much as I loved the wiring chart in Interceptor, I can see where that would slow things down in a more modern design. Even though it does away with that, I REALLY like the updated and cohesive record sheets Oliver Bollmann came up with for both fighters and tanks. (You can find them here in Kannik's book, Continuous Conflict link .

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to create something similar for Leviathan -- a stat sheet where the interior components are layed out like an actual ship, and not a single clunkly block off to the side

(I'm also wondering if the nuclear missles couldn't also be updated with their own damage templates, and be more of shaped charge, instead of simply stripping off all armor.)

Ok, finally realized if I wanted to see it exist, I'd have to do it myself. There are now new, updated ship templates for Leviathan available for download over at BGG:

link

Also included are suggested rule changes for missiles.

Happy hunting