Robomeck RPG Adventure Settings Ideas: Macross and Southern Cross

Robomeck RPG Index

Intro
These are some ideas for adventuring in a Robotech setting.  You could use these ideas with the old Palladium rules (why?), the new Strange Machines’ version (whenever it comes out), or some cheesy fan-produced version (like mine).  Long ago, I did post a setting of sorts and some maps (including Macross city aboard the SDF-1). 

The setting was after the war with the Invid.  The Palladium game books postulated that earth would be invaded a second time by the Invid (why not?).  I worked in some Zentraedi and the SDF-1 wreck.  If I’d thought about it a little more at the time, I probably would have put in some Bioroids led by a hidden enclave of the Robotech Elders, likely in orbit.  Obviously, an all-inclusive setting is the ultimate goal of any Robotech RPG player. 

After all the time I spent writing semi-canonical background stuff for the mecha, this document is mostly going to explore alternate ideas on the setting.  To be very honest, Robotech doesn’t lend itself well as an RPG environment if you’re planning on playing out the series.  You’re setting up situations where the Characters have no control over the outcome of events or, worse, change them drastically, forcing a total rewrite or a complete hand-wave of anything they do.

The original Palladium rules were no real help.  Everything was set as a combat scenario.  They only recommended only using Macross in a Reconstruction setting.  There was virtually no setting help for the Masters.  The Invid Invasion did do a fairly good decent job with the setting, albeit using tables borrowed from a post-apocalyptic game.  The Sentinels book just had a few WWII-ish scenario ideas.  They wanted you to buy their sourcebooks and adventure modules (which I didn’t get), but I’m doubting they expanded the canvas much beyond combat theaters.   

D&D and Traveller can give you open-ended play and allow you to enhance your Character.  This setting can’t give you that without complete alteration, which would nearly negate its purpose.  To get a real Robotech feel, you’re going to have to room for personal Character development and relationships.  Game play here can’t just be mission objectives to achieve and foes to overcome every game session.  Combat for the Characters needs to be personal and poignant experiences for them for this setting to be meaningful.  More than treasure or XP, there should be emotional stakes in Robotech combat.  Why are you fighting?  Is a question that should be asked all the time.

With that in mind, my suggestions here will be oriented towards giving the Players space to develop their Characters in a dramatic environment.   

Macross Era

Replaying Macross is a bit of a stretch.  I wrote elsewhere that the original series was conceived as a parody and it still shows in the final product.  That’s going to make a coherent RPG setting a challenge if you’re trying to recreate it.  You were warned.    It’s not unthinkable to recast the Characters as the main characters in a derivative of the original series.  Events could follow along in the same fashion, with twists and changes of course, but this will require a high-level of Player buy-in for the concept. 

The Palladium gamebooks focused on the Reconstruction Era.  The RDF was fighting rebellious Zentraedi stranded on earth.  That’s fine for a combat-oriented campaign and would be more logical and less silly than the series.  But if you really want to capture a Macross feel to your game, what happens outside the cockpit is going to have to be more important than what happens in it.  That should be your focus.  The Characters will need plenty of relationships, definitely strong ones outside of the military.  Combat becomes far more poignant with NPC’s waiting at home for your Character.  There should be a homebase, either a ship or city with civilians, for the Characters to fully interact with. 

The Zentraedi themselves are a problematical villain.  They’re huge, but can be shrunk down.  (“I want you to make me bigger, then shrink me down, but leave my wiener the same size.”  If you get that reference, please tell me the context of the joke.  I truly don’t know.)  They have absurdly large fleets, which were completely impotent against the SDF-1.  (“Heh, heh, impotent, heh, heh.”  See, Macross was a joke.)  They’re mighty warriors, who can be felled by a kiss or a song.  Changing their personalities, motivations, or scaling down their forces could be a useful in making them serious.       

The setting could be changed in a more fundamental manner.  What if the SDF-1 jumps from earth during the initial invasion and ends up much further away than Pluto.  They could be lost in deep space trying to get back home, or looking for the Zentraedi homeworld to stop the war.  They could find another world to colonize with refugees aboard their ship or even find and take over a Zentraedi factory satellite.  (That whole jumping-an-island-with-people-on-it-into-space is a bit of a plot hole.  Perhaps get them onboard the ship before the fold.)

In the Do You Remember Love? movie, the earth was devastated while the SDF-1 was trying to get back home.  That would be an interesting twist if you’re recreating the series.  It seemed like the city was actually integrated into the movie ship’s design.  Perhaps, you could recast the SDF-1 as a colony ship about to head out into space when the Zentraedi show up. 

Southern Cross Era

This feels like a very limited setting.  Canonically, the conflict with the Masters was only a year-long war (as per the Shadow Chronicles art book).  The Masters were desperate and running out of Protoculture.  The Southern Cross was unprepared and badly overmatched.  The apprehension of the Masters and the determination of the troops of the Southern Cross were the only reasons the war lasted as long as it did.  As arrogant as the Masters were, you could usually count on them running away from a stiff fight.  The war nearly reduces itself to both sides making probing attacks on each other with some specific objective.  This might be a good guideline for adventures.

There were really only two theaters of action: the Monument City area and earth orbit.  These are very different environments.  The premier mecha unit of the ASC is a land-based tank, which the Players will want to use, but will obviously not thrive in space combat.  This creates a challenge in setting up the Player Character group.  As said in the Character Creation section, Players could have dual-skilled Characters, who can use tanks and planes, or perhaps have two Characters and use whichever is appropriate for the situation.  What’s probably not going to work is a mixed group.  You’re going to end up splitting the party too often.   

The other challenge is that this is probably the least liked part of the series.  This seemed mainly due to the Characters.  (Worse than “Mint?”  Really?)  An RPG campaign can at least correct this, as the Players can create main Characters more to their liking.  This section of the show was also pretty badly disjointed in story and setting.  The producers had to jump through a lot of hoops to make this part of the story work with the other two.  There were enough questionable issues with the original material without grafting another storyline on top of them.  The original show got cut short on episodes.  That downer, winsome ending actually worked out better for its incorporation into the Robotech series.

While Macross was borderline parody, it looked mostly good and had a strong emotional element.  The Invid Invasion was very straight-forward in story (somewhat simplistic) with the cool-looking Alpha Fighters and fearsome Invid.  The Masters segment started with near comedy and somewhat nonsensical battles.  Only about halfway through, when the ASC was able to take the fight into space, did the show finally start clicking and make sense, but then the ending became a somewhat confused, melodramatic mess.  (Though I did like Zor giving Dana a good romantic kiss before sending her off.)

To work with this setting, you need to rehabilitate it to make it coherent.  It’s worth the effort, because that home base in Monument City could be quite interesting for Character development.  What wasn’t really fully touched on in the series was that large civilian population.  There’s no reason why most of the Characters’ relationships have to be with their comrades.  Not to mention, while the Zentraedi had big ships, those Masters’ motherships actually had a city on board with even more interaction opportunities.

 

Also, politics were alluded to, but certainly could have been more prominent in an earthbound setting.  One of the Robotech novels actually had an internal conflict (not an actual battle) between the RDF on earth and the Southern Cross before the war.  The RDF lost a lot of prestige with the departure of the REF.  The Southern Cross seemed more earth-centric in their defensive posture.  This resulted in the ASC being put in charge by the UEG and the RDF becoming the Global Military Police (GMP) to watchdog them.  If you accept this possibility, you could see where these two groups would be sniping at each other constantly.  This could be a definite inter-service rivalry for the Characters to deal with.       

On a larger scale, the United Earth Government was just a name, as the world had collapsed into petty squabbling nation states seven years after the Pioneer mission and the SDF-3 were launched.  Without an immediate threat of invasion and the end of the galvanizing purpose that had created the Expeditionary Fleet, the domestic situation fell apart quickly.  A united planetary defense was about all they agreed on, but even then the Southern Cross was subjected to severe budgetary constraints.  Everyone wanted to survive the Masters’ attack, but there could be some jockeying factions looking towards supremacy after the war.  The Characters’ loyalties may be divided and tested by agents of various powers. 

Again in the novels, there was palatable rivalry between the REF and ASC.  The Expeditionary Force planned to return to earth to put their people back in charge as they disapproved of the Southern Cross’ leadership.  On the other side, certainly the UEG couldn’t have been happy with the results of the REF’s actions.  They failed to find the Masters, they started a war with the Invid, and drained earth’s resources, leaving them vulnerable when the Masters did come.  If the second war hadn’t ended with government leadership being devastated, relations between earth and REF might have gotten real testy.  (Feel free to explore that possibility in play.)

Look at the Love Song episode for some inspiration on Character interaction.  The group is at a classy swank party in a mansion.  Maybe the Characters have to find a way to get invited or crash the party.  Maybe a Character wants to meet a certain debutante at the ball to make a play at her.  Maybe some Characters want to schmooze some important people there or collect some political intelligence.  Maybe some political figures want to recruit some hero Characters to their cause.  Oh, there could be heartbreak at the ball too and some drunk and disorderly action that has to be cleaned up before it embarrasses the squad.

We should also look at the opposing forces.  Reducing the Masters’ fleet to one mothership and some escort ships might make more sense.  It only seemed like one ship was ever doing anything anyway.  Alternately, perhaps the other motherships were so low on Protoculture, they couldn’t do much.  While the matrix’s location was always known to the Masters and was their main objective, they might have been forced to divide up their fleet around the earth, trying to recover Protoculture reserves from crashed Zentraedi ships and other ASC installations to keep their war effort from grinding to a halt.  Stopping those incursions would be a major effort.

Then there’s the earth forces.  This series always seemed strategically backward.  While I postulated that the Southern Cross’ fleet was in mothballs for lack of funding, their ships should have been in orbit fighting the Masters right at the start.  And I do say that they already had a fleet.  It’s hard to imagine that the ASC built a whole fleet on the ground within a few months before the end of the war.  I’d say they were getting their existing ships ready to go back into space. 

The Factory Satellite was gone, perhaps sent to aid the REF as it was likely too costly to maintain in orbit by the UEG.  If you decide it was present for the war with the Masters, it would be one of the major battlegrounds and would have a significant civilian population.  The Masters would be hell-bent on jamming its communications with the REF, whom they were aware of, and shutting down its production facilities.  The Southern Cross would be desperate to hold it for the same reasons and to have a base to strike at the Masters from in space.  (ALUCE station served the same purpose in the series and was also a rallying point for reinforcements arriving from outside of the solar system.)

From there, the Masters either eventually shatter the earth forces in space or their mothership is brought down on earth.  Either way, a land campaign begins.  The Masters are trying to eliminate all resistance before recovering the Protoculture matrix.  It was portrayed as a delicate operation with the mothership and the matrix both exposed, so there couldn’t be any fighting going on around them.  The Southern Cross, while not really understanding what the Masters are after, can figure out where they’re centering their attacks and thus move to check them.  Not to mention, if the Masters are after something in the SDF-1 ruins, there must be something valuable in there worth protecting.  (The ASC really should have been investigating those ruins more after discerning that.)     

The Characters in this setting were left behind.  The first graduating class of the Robotech Military Academy were too young to join the REF for their glamorous adventure in deep space.  They want to prove themselves.  Older members of the Southern Cross couldn’t or didn’t want to leave earth.  The civilians preferred their war-torn target of a planet to going to the uncertainties of a new colony world.  This group of humans has a chip on their shoulder.  All of the Player Characters and human NPC’s should have a reason why they are on earth, which may be one of the main motivators for their Characters.                  

The little-seen Robotech theatrical movie featured a story set before the second war.  The Robotech Masters attempted to infiltrate the Southern Cross.  It might make sense that the Masters would try to gain intelligence on earth forces well before showing up in orbit.  It’s not even hard to imagine that if the Masters knew exactly where the Protoculture Matrix was, they might try to figure out a way of smuggling it out, rather than showing up in force.  If that plot is foiled and the Southern Cross starts protecting the SDF-1 ruins, then the Masters have to (carefully) use force.

Then there’s that one-year inter-war period before the Invid invaded.  Leadership on both sides of the second war was functionally decapitated.  The troops themselves would have nothing to fight over.  There’d be a large number of refugees and perhaps potentially salvageable high-technology from the Masters.  With the Flower of Life taking root and the Invid known to be coming, maybe the humans and Tirolians might try working together for mutual defense?  I remember one of the Robotech novels had this time period as a setting.  It was sort of a cyberpunk story with Jonathan Wolfe arriving and Dana’s Fifteenth Squadron then escaping earth. 

(I keep referencing the Robotech novels, which I no longer own.  I didn’t think much of them.  While they made every effort to reconcile inconsistencies in the show, they inserted a lot of questionable material and went to absurd lengths to keep an internal continuity, even at the expense of any logic.)