A Tale of Two Covers

When I think of Space Opera, I think of this cover by Bob Charrette, because it's the cover I remember seeing back in the early 80s when I first encountered the game:

There's a lot to be said about this cover, not the least being that I tend to forget that Bob Charrette, much like Paul Jaquays, frequently did illustrations as well as writing and design. There's also the fact that this cover likely represents the first and only time anyone has ever ripped off Battle Beyond the Stars in SF RPG art, as you can see if you compare the alien next to "Chewbacca" with the ones in this image from that Roger Corman film:

Despite that -- or maybe because of it -- I have a great fondness for this cover. It's an unashamedly gleeful cover that amply demonstrates Space Opera's "kitchen sink" approach to sci-fi gaming. It's the polar opposite of the way Traveller portrayed itself and the way many of its most vocal proponents (including myself) presented it to others.

Anyway, looking more carefully at the cover, I noticed something that had somehow eluded me all these years. Charrette's signature on the illustration reads "©82 Charrette after Gene Day." Now, Space Opera was first published in 1980 and lots of the interior artwork of its two rulebooks, not to mention those of its early supplements is by Gene Day (and Jeff Dee). But the only cover I'd ever seen was Bob Charrette's.

Or was it? As it turns out, I probably had seen Gene Day's original 1980 cover before, but hadn't been paying close enough attention to notice. Here's what it looks like:

As is obvious -- except to me, apparently -- the two covers are not identical and quite obviously so. The space girl in Day's original is much less conservatively dressed than Charrette's and her hair color is different (as is her pose). Day's bug alien is replaced with a T-Rex with a blaster and his robot companion and the Boris Karloff lookalike in the bottom left is replaced with a Kzinti wearing more or less the same getup. There are lots of other differences too, if you look carefully, which, as I said, I didn't.

I did some quick digging to find out just why the cover image was changed and I found a link to an interview with Charrette, where he explains the change:

It was a technical issue as I recall. There needed to be a new printing and the original artwork was unavailable, so a new painting needed to be made. Scott liked Gene's piece and I wanted to follow it closely as an homage.

Though Charrette doesn't say so, it's possible that the unavailability of Day's original had to do with the artist's unexpected death in 1982 from a heart attack.

Retrospective: Aftermath!

If you've been in the hobby long enough, one of the things you eventually learn is that there are some games around which have sprung up, weed-like, a number of "facts" that nearly everyone accepts as true, except for those gamers who've actually bothered to play the game in question. FGU's 1981 post-apocalyptic RPG Aftermath! is one such game. In my youth, Aftermath!, like most FGU games, was generally held to be an unplayable, complicated mess compared to other post-apocalyptic games like Gamma World or even The Morrow Project. Like all such conventional wisdom, there is some truth to it, but there's also much that this common impression gets wrong and frustratingly so, as, beneath it all, Aftermath! is actually a pretty good game -- or rather, it provides the framework for a pretty good game.

Like many FGU games, Aftermath! came in a boxed set, with three rulebooks (a basic rulebook, a player's book, and a referee's guide), along with an introductory scenario. The rulebooks range in length for 48-64 pages each and, taken together, include everything you'd need to play. Indeed, they contain more than most people would need to play, as Aftermath! was quite exhaustive in its treatment of topics pertaining to post-apocalyptic gaming. Everything, from diseases to mass battles to mutations to the effects, physical and social, of cannibalism are discussed, along with many more topics of potential interest. The referee could thus pick and choose precisely how much detail he wanted in his campaign and run with it.

And that was the real beauty of Aftermath!, the thing that a lot of gamers overlooked while staring wide-eyed at the lengthy combat and movement rules: the tool kit approach it took to the post-apocalyptic genre. Whereas both Gamma World and The Morrow Project presented coherent (I use the term loosely) settings to use with your campaign, Aftermath! did no such thing. It leaves open the question of how the world ended. Indeed, it leaves open the question of what the post-fall world is like as well, not to mention how long after the fall the campaign begins and what the conditions of the ruined Earth might be.

Instead of presenting a campaign setting ready to use, Aftermath! offers lots of options, trusting the referee to build the world he and his players will most enjoy. Thus, the world might be brought low by World War III, an alien invasion, a comet impact, an epidemic, or even the return of magic. Obviously, the game doesn't include full support for all these options in terms of rules, but many of them are given a solid treatment and the game provides the rules necessary for the referee to adjudicate the most common situations relating to each possible scenario. Consequently, an Aftermath! campaign might be a gritty, realistic one in which humanity destroyed itself in a nuclear holocaust or it could be a more gonzo one in which a genetically engineered virus wiped out much of the species but gave many of the survivors bizarre mutations. The game even supports -- with stats -- playing in the world of Planet of the Apes, if that's the kind of thing you enjoy.

Rules-wise, Aftermath! is definitely in line with most of FGU's other games. It's complex, involving some math and a fair number of charts. I found it a bit more complicated than Daredevils, whose rules are similar (no surprise, as both games share the same designers), but, with the exception of the overly fiddly movement rules, I don't think they're any more complex than many games produced nowadays. That's not to say they're to my taste; I prefer my games a fair bit simpler, generally speaking. But I don't think that Aftermath! quite deserves the reputation it had in my younger days of being "unplayable." Like all RPGs, particularly early ones, it demands a creative and mentally agile referee to be fun, one who knows when to use and when to ignore rules. So, perhaps it's truer to say that, as an "out-of-the-box" game, Aftermath! leaves a lot to be desired.

However, I'm not sure it's fair to judge Aftermath! on the same standards as RPGs written for mass market of newcomers to the hobby. Aftermath! is most definitely an "advanced" game, which is to say, it's not written for novice gamers. The game assumes that players are already familiar with what a roleplaying game is and how such a game works. Likewise, it assumes that the referee and players alike have a desire to create their own setting rather than use one that's been pre-packaged and presented to them for their use. It's the gaming equivalent of being given a large cookbook and told to make dinner for one's friends rather than being given a take-out menu from which to order a dinner for them. There's nothing wrong with take-out food, but, sometimes, one wants to make a meal from scratch. So it is with RPGs and Aftermath! is a game written for those who want to make their own post-apocalyptic RPG, using the many "recipes" it provides within its pages.

If you're interested, you can still get copies of Aftermath!, along with some newer supplements direct from FGU here.

Retrospective: Daredevils

Released in 1982, FGU's Daredevils (written by Bob Charrette and Paul Hume, the duo who had previously created the well-regarded Bushido and would later go on to create Shadowrun) was the first "pulp" game I ever remember seeing, let alone playing. In RPG-speak, "pulp" is treated as if it were a genre, usually exemplified by anything from genuine pulp fiction featuring characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage to those inspired by them (or their imitators) in other media, such as Indiana Jones. The pedant in me recoils at this, as pulp magazines covered a wide range of genres and what gamers nowadays call "pulp" is actually only one type of "hero pulp," focusing on what the subtitle of Daredevils calls "action and adventure in the two-fisted Thirties," that is, over-the-top adventure tales between the two World Wars. Alas for nitpickers everywhere, the terminology ship sailed long ago and, accurate or not, "pulp" now means something very specific in a RPG context and, though Daredevils was written before this semantic neologism took had taken hold, it was nevertheless written to give players the chance to explore the Amazon for lost cities, take down flamboyant gangsters in a mob war, and, of course, fight Nazis as they seek out occult artifacts in the world's hidden places.

Daredevils came in a boxed set, consisting of two volumes -- a 64-page rulebook and a 32-page adventure booklet with four sample adventures, along with some charts and dice. FGU games have a reputation for being very long and complex, but the reality is that most of them were both shorter in length and no more complicated than the three volumes of AD&D. Daredevils in particular puts this myth to rest, as its rules, while certainly more complex than, say, OD&D or Traveller, are nevertheless quite concise and straightforward. Characters have six attributes -- Wit, Will, Strength, Deftness, Speed, and Health -- and players may allocate 75 points amongst them on a one-for-one basis over a possible range of 1-40. Higher attribute scores than 40 are possible with training and experience.

Ranges of attribute scores are grouped, with each group having an "effect die," which was used mechanically in cases where that attribute mattered. Thus, a character with a Strength of 30, which is in the "25-34" attribute group, had an effect die of 2D6 for determining hand-to-hand damage and so forth. Daredevils also had "saving throws," which were really just a type of ability check -- two types, actually, as there were "attribute saving throws" and "critical saving throws." The difference was whether one divided the relevant attribute by 2 or by 3, with the latter being used in cases of extreme difficulty. Players must roll equal to or under the saving throw number on 1D20 to succeed, with 1 being a critical success and 20 being a critical failure.

Daredevils had no character classes, but instead had skills. Skills were ranked on 1-100 scale, but skill rolls were made on 1D20, after dividing a skills rank by 5. Sometimes, the difference between the number needed and the result of the dice roll was used to generate an "effect number." It's a game mechanic I'm very fond of myself and I wonder if it was from Daredevils that I got the idea. The number of skills one could purchase (and their ranks) was based on "development points" that were themselves a function of a character's age. Age was determined randomly by a 4D10+12 roll, with the age also being the number of development points a character received. Each development point could be exchanged for a particular game mechanical benefit, such as acquiring a new skill, 2D6 points in an existing skill, or 1D3 points in an attribute. Character generation obviously favored older characters, but characters older than 44 suffered penalties to their physical attributes that limited their effectiveness in some aspects of game play.

Daredevils showed that, even in 1982, the hobby's wargames roots were still very close to the surface. Its movement and combat rules were very persnickety, with an emphasis on using miniatures (or markers of some sort) to adjudicate many of their rules. There are many modifiers and optional rules, dealing with critical hits, hit locations, and the like. However, most of them could easily be dispensed with or used only in specific circumstances when the referee felt that the added detail was warranted. Much like D&D, the precise rules could be easily dispensed without too much trouble. On the pother hand, the extra detail is useful. I know my friends and I found the automatic fire rules quite helpful when running a mass battle against hordes of enemy soldiers in a desert scenario.

Daredevils includes optional rules for "special powers" -- low-level super powers -- and luck, the latter of which is a limited type of "hero point" system. Also included are details on the 1930s world, lists of animals, weaponry, generic NPCs, and some solid advice on building adventures. Advanced rules of various sorts are present as well, for players and referees who want them. What's interesting to me is that the rules include a wide variety options for character improvement, many of them time-consuming. As befits an older RPG, Daredevils is clearly designed with long-term campaign play rather than one-shots in mind, although I think Daredevils could be used quite creditably for short campaigns as well.

Daredevils is a very fun game, not without its flaws, but I think it holds up rather well after nearly 30 years. The rules are a nice mix of randomness and player choice and support a range of options. It's also a game from a time before "genre emulation" meant heavy-handed rules designed to enforce a particular mode of play. It's a wide-open game that can be used to handle a wide variety of action and adventure campaigns, a fact FGU built upon with its several follow-up products that each presented scenarios focused on a particular sub-type of hero pulp. If you're interested, the game and its supplements are still available from FGU at very reasonable prices. I recommend them highly.