BattleLords of the 23rd Century!

What a great name for an RPG! Back in the early 90s, when I was in high school, a friend of mine went to Gen Con. He was the only person I knew who had gone, so when he got back I made him tell me all about it. He was so excited about this game that he got there. He told me about how he had actually met the designer and that the game had just been released. He had bought one of the first few copies and had it signed!
Now that doesn't sound like such a big deal now that I've been to five Gen Cons and seen a lot of games come and go, but at the time it was a pretty big deal for us. I remember him showing me the book. It was obviously someone's self published labor of love--the art and writing were nowhere close to professional. But the passion and imagination shone through. These guys loved their game and they wanted to share it.

We never played the game and I pretty much forgot about it until I saw a copy sitting in a closeout bin at a game store. It was pretty cheap and it wasn't the same edition my friend bought, but I picked it out of nostalgia. At least it would be a good read, right?

BattleLords of the 23rd Century is the Sci-Fi RPG you would have written in high school. It's loud, it's crude, it's inconsistent as hell and it's pretty much all about kicking alien ass with high tech weapons and powered armor. It's also pretty fun to read and has a great sci-fi equipment chapter. The gear pr0n is so excessive, that I actually went out and bought the Lock and Load supplement for more sweet implements of destruction.

I've still never played this game and I'm pretty sure this is the first character I've made. I can't see that I ever would play, accept maybe as a drunken pick-up game at Gen Con. I would definitely rip off the setting and use the rules from some other RPG (D20 Modern, Savage Worlds, maybe even SpaceMaster), though. How many sci-fi games have wars that span multiple galaxies? And you have to love the fact that the author has a list of all the art work in the book along with a couple of sentences explaining what's going on in the picture.

Ok, so lets get on with the PC.

I almost always pick race first in these types of games. There are some great choices here: asparagus-headed telepaths, alien samurai, blob guys, two species of big honkin' lizards, even a race that looks like a mind flayer crossed with the Predator! But the one I'm picking is the tiger-sized sapient felines that like to strap automated plasma cannons on their backs: the Cizerack!

Stats are percentile-based. There are three methods for rolling and I picked #2: roll ten times, drop the two lowest and place the rest where you like. This cat's gonna specialize in pouncing and slashing, so I weight my stats appropriately. By the way, one of the primary stats is Aggression. If your Aggression is too low, you may run away when the space-crap hits the space-fan; if it's too high, you might go berserkers and kill everyone. After adjustments from my racial choice (and the misfortune of being nuked, see below), I discover that my Charisma is -10. According to the chart, this means my character is "Gruesome". Good thing it's not -21 or lower, then she'd be "fuggly". That's right, fuggly is in the Charisma chart.

So after figuring a bunch of other stuff out like height, weight, how far away I can smell stuff and so on, I come to the optional "I was just growing up" table. It's actually two tables: you must roll on table one before rolling on table two, if you roll three times on table one you can roll twice on table two. Ok, I love this random event stuff. I take all five rolls. I learn that my cat is: schizophrenic (and the text makes the common mistake of thinking this is split personality disorder), organized (+5% to clerical skills!), a "bone head", at home in a freefall environment, and inherited her grandmother's PC-6 pulse cannon.

Sweet.

If that's not enough, there's the Fickle Finger of Fate table. I roll three more times and get: 1000 credits, a business partnership that yields 500 credits/month, and the fact that my character suffered from radiation fallout from a nuclear strike, lowering her stats grievously.

Now on to skills. Just as in Powers & Perils, skills are arbitrary, have varying usefulness, and have varying costs. I have 50 points to spend. I pick some stealthy, scouty skills and move on to equipment.

As cool as the equipment list is, I only have a couple thousand credits to spend. No multi-million credit power armor for this cat! I'm lucky to get glorified body armor and a cell phone. Luckily, I have my trusty PC-6 and my lethal fangs. My merc unit will have to supply me with mission specific gear.

So that's it for Saberfang the ill-tempered, radiation scarred cizerack scout.