Retrospective: Cyborg Commando

Catching lightning in a bottle is a wildly improbable thing to do once, so I don't think reflects poorly on a creator not to be able to do it a second time. Consequently, I find it difficult to judge the post-TSR career of Gary Gygax as harshly as some, even though his achievements after his October 1985 departure from the company he founded more than a decade prior could, at best, be described as uneven. Still, there's something genuinely admirable about the naive optimism Gygax must have possessed in thinking that his new business venture, New Infinities Productions, had a snowball's chance of lasting longer than the barely three years it actually did. 

Of course, the company's likelihood of success might have been greater had its inaugural first (and only) original roleplaying game hadn't been Cyborg Commando. Published in 1987, Cyborg Commando is a near-future science fiction RPG written by Gygax, Frank Mentzer, and Kim Mohan. Its premise is that, in the year 2035, Earth is invaded by extraterrestrial beings called Xenoborgs. In order to combat them, mankind turns to the nascent technology of cybernetics to create the titular cyborg commandos – human brains placed inside advanced robotic bodies arrayed with the most advanced weaponry available. Players assume the roles of these commandos as they attempt to rid Earth of the Xenoborgs and drive them back into space. (Since the initial boxed set is subtitled "Set 1: The Battle for Earth," I can only assume there were plans to expand the game's scope beyond this planet.)

Cyborg Commando consisted of a 48-page player's book (CCF Manual), a 64-page referee's book (Campaign Book), a 16-page booklet of introductory scenarios, and ten-sided dice in a box. This arrangement closely mimics TSR's own products at the time, but that should come as no surprise since New Infinities seems to have been staffed almost entirely by ex-TSR employees. That said, the game materials are noticeably less attractive and professionally done than those of TSR of the same era, particularly when it comes to the artwork. I wouldn't describe anything as awful, only a bit less "slick," no doubt due to the smaller production budget of the company.

The CCF Manual provides a brief overview of the game's setting and history, as well as the purpose of the Cyborg Commando Force to which all the player characters belong. The bulk of the book is devoted to the game's rules, which are a bit of a mess. The game uses ten-sided dice in a variety of ways: simple (1d10), added (1d10 + 1d10), and multiplied (1d10 × 1d10). The last use is particularly interesting to me, because I would have expected the game to use a straight percentile roll, but, perhaps in an attempt to "innovate," the designers opted to go another route. Helpfully(?), the CCF Manual includes several probability graphs to show the likelihood of results of each type of die roll. Though I am sure some players would find information of this sort useful, the inclusion of these tables is sadly representative of the game as a whole: too much detail about some things and not enough about others.

Character generation and combat both come in "basic" and "advanced" versions, with the latter building on the former. In principle, Cyborg Commando is completely playable using either version of the rules. However, much of the game's text and presentation seems to favor the advanced version, if only because of the additional detail it offers. A good example of this can be seen in the skill lists, where the advanced rules included many, many more skills than the basic version. Of course, the advanced version includes such skills as "general creativity," "domestic arts I," "domestic arts II," "obstetrics & gynecology," and "error avoidance," so I'm not entirely sure much of value would be lost by sticking to the basic versions. I mention all of this not mock Cyborg Commando. Rather, I hope it gives you some sense of the game system's strange obsession with minutiae that I can hardly imagine would ever come up in play at the table.

Of course, this obsession is not limited merely to the rules. The Campaign Book abounds in this level of useless detail as well. For example, nearly half of that volume consists of information on the populations of the countries of the world, along with their latitude and longitude coordinates, major cities, and CCF bases. Yet, for all that, this information consists of little more than tables and maps. It's a lot of heat but not much light for the referee hoping to get a sense of what the Earth of 2035 is actually like for the purposes of running adventures and campaigns in Cyborg Commando. 

The other half of the Campaign Book is more genuinely useful. It details the Xenoborgs, including their biology, society, and culture. In addition, this section delves more deeply into the aliens' polymorphism, revealing that their leaders, the so-called Masters, are a type of Xenoborg not yet seen on Earth. The Masters are directing the invasion of the planet for its resources, hoping to make use of them to further the expansion of its star-spanning empire, which consists of hundreds of worlds across the galaxy. There are also sections about the FTL Q-drive the Xenoborgs use, which, as I noted earlier, seems to suggest that New Infinities hoped that Cyborg Commando would eventually expand beyond Earth.

That was not to be and it's not hard to see why. Cyborg Commando contains a handful of genuinely interesting ideas but the vast majority of it is muddled, half-baked, or silly. Judged even by the standards of 1987, it's not a good game and I suspect that even the folks at New Infinities knew this. The game received a small amount of support in the form of three adventure modules and some novels, but, by 1988, the company seems to have pinned its hopes on doing knock-off D&D support material – the Fantasy Master line – that might garner attention due to the names attached to them (Gygax, Mentzer, etc.). When that didn't happen, the company, along with Cyborg Commando, was largely forgotten. I wish I could say that was a shame.