Retrospective: Invasion: Earth

By now, I scarcely need to remind people that roleplaying games are an outgrowth of wargaming, specifically miniatures wargaming. More than a half-century after the appearance of Dungeons & Dragons, this is a well-known and indisputable fact. Nevertheless, it's a fact worth mentioning from time to time, if only to provide context for how many early and influential RPGs were created and designed. It's also a reminder that, even though roleplaying games would eventually eclipse their predecessors, wargames remained an important component of the wider hobby for many years (and arguably still are, though I'm far from the best person to make that claim).

Game Designers' Workshop, best known nowadays as the original publisher of Traveller, began its existence in 1973 as a publisher of hex-and-chit wargames. Its first foray into what might be called roleplaying was in 1975 with En Garde!, though the game is closer to a dueling simulator with light character-driven elements than a "true" RPG (similar, in some ways, to Boot Hill in this respect). But, by and large, GDW's output during the first few years of its existence was tabletop wargames – nearly twenty by the release of Traveller in 1977.

Marc Miller, one of the founders of GDW, had long been a science fiction fan and among his first designs at the company (along with John Harshman) was Triplanetary, whose vector-based movement system inspired Traveller's own (and that of Mayday, itself an offshoot of Traveller). He also designed Imperium, a simulation of a series of interstellar wars between the vast, alien Imperium and the plucky, upstart Terran Confederation. Devotees of the Third Imperium setting may recognize this scenario as part of its historical background, but, at the time of its release, Imperium had no connection to Traveller – which hadn't yet been published and, when it was, later the same year, it was devoid of any kind of example setting. 

I bring all this up to emphasize that, at GDW, there was a great deal of interplay between its wargames and the roleplaying games it would eventually publish, with one influencing the other and then in turn influencing other games (or even the same ones in later editions). Thus, for example, Traveller incorporates into its official setting the scenario of Imperium, whose second edition in 1990 would then add details from Traveller. I consider this sort of cross-pollination a hallmark of Games Designers' Workshop, a company that, until the very end, was marked by fervid creativity.

1981 is a good example of what I mean. Traveller had, by that point, already been out for four years and had established itself as the hobby's premier science fiction roleplaying game (sorry, Space Opera!). GDW sought to support the game on multiple fronts, revising and clarifying the rulebooks, as well as releasing new ways to play the game, whether large scale interstellar naval battles (Trillion Credit Squadron), miniatures wargaming (Striker), or strategic wargames, like Fifth Frontier War and Invasion: Earth. GDW clearly had big plans for Traveller and its releases that year demonstrate that, I believe.

Unlike Fifth Frontier War, whose scope covers several subsectors of the Spinward Marches during a "current" war within the timeline of the Third Imperium, Invasion: Earth is both much smaller and "historical," which is to say, taking place in the past of the setting. Set about a century before the "present day," Invasion: Earth focuses on the final stages of the Solomani Rim War (or the War for Solomani Liberation, if your sympathies lie in that direction), as Imperial forces attempt to conquer Terra, a major bastion of the Solomani Cause. As the homeworld of humanity (or humaniti, according to Traveller's unique orthography), Terra holds great symbolic importance to the Solomani, who see themselves as its true children, in contrast to the Imperium, whose culture and very blood have been corrupted by contact with non-Terran aliens. 

Invasion: Earth, as its title suggests, is very narrowly focused on the attack and defense of the solar system, culminating in the planetary invasion of Terra. There's thus both space combat and ground combat, each reflecting a different theater of the ongoing Imperial invasion and Solomani counterattack. Rules-wise, it's fairly similar, both in terms of its specifics and its overall complexity, to Fifth Frontier War, which is ti say, it's a proper wargame for hex-and-chit aficionados, not something simplified for casual players like myself. Consequently, I never played Invasion: Earth, even as I admired the copy I saw in the collection of my friend's father – a common theme in my early encounters with wargames.

As I said above, GDW clearly had big plans for Traveller at the time of this game's release. Though intended primarily as a historical game, which, in the setting's timeline, the Solomani lost, there are notes in the back of the rules about how to use the game to simulate invasions of other planets within the Traveller universe. There are also suggestions on how to use the events of the war as fodder for adventures, either in the past or in the present of the Third Imperium setting. I wonder whether anyone ever took up these options for their own Traveller campaigns.

Invasion: Earth, like Fifth Frontier War, has long fascinated me. I love the idea of wargames or simulations intended to flesh out or expand upon some aspect of a roleplaying game's setting, but I've rarely had the opportunity to make use of it myself. For instance, I long wanted to find a way to play out a war in my House of Worms campaign, but I never had the opportunity to do so – or indeed a clear sense of how I'd make it work, but I keep thinking about it nonetheless.