I have not forgotten about this blog, it is just the nature of it that I generate content for it slowly. But I have some early '90s goodness for you this week.



For the last few weeks I have been running TSR's High Adventure Cliffhangers: Buck Rogers. As I understand it this game came about due to the fact that the family of the woman running TSR held the rights to the Buck Rogers IP. There are several different versions of the story floating around the internet, feel free to look them up.

However, I did not come here to bury TSR I came here to praise it so here we go. High Adventure Cliffhangers seems to have been originally developed to be a generic pulp action RPG system. The only things ever released for it were the core Buck Rogers box set and the expansion set War Against the Han.

There are a few things to note about the Buck Rogers game. As I mentioned before it is based on the comic strip from the 1930's. It is very true to the source material and all the prejudices of the time are intact. As Orgzone freedom fighters you will be facing down a horribly stereotypical Yellow Menace.

When I ran the game I was faced with a choice; I could downplay the blatent racism and change the source material or I could go with the fact that it was campy to start with and make fun of the racism. I chose option 2. To accomplish this I went completely over the top and used the most horribly stereotypical Saturday morning cartoon voices I could for the villians. My gaming group (and I) have very strong feelings about racism (my wife is Asian) and this approach went over pretty well and everyone had fun poking fun at old time stereotypes.

The game system itself is very simple and takes about 5 minutes to learn. Each stat has a rating between OK and BEST indicating that you roll between 2 and 5 six sided dice to resolve actions using that stat. If you have a skill in an action you get one additional die.

There are no hitpoints. You make an opposed roll to determine if you hit someone. If you do they save against the weapons damage and either are wounded or die. Thats it, there really is not much more to it. This really helped keep the game moving quickly and resulted in almost no rules disputes.

The basic box set comes with an adventure arc in 5 chapters. I just ran the this adventure arc for my player and while it is campy, and not really deep they enjoyed it. The game sessions were fast, light, and full of over the top roleplaying. This was probably aided by the fact that we were coming off several months of hard sci-fi gaming and it was a good break.

Overall, I have to rate HAC:BR 4/5. This is not a game you want to run long campaigns in, it has almost no real room for character development. The game rules are really designed around the adventures presented in the box set making it actually fall somewhere between something like Hero Quest and D+D. You can get it pretty cheap. I say it is worth a play through.



So what's next? I am about to start running an Everquest RPG campaign. This is not really classic gaming so I don't know if there will be much about it in here. However I plan on running Gamma World following that which qualifies for sure.