Commandos Archive.org

[Kody Chavva]

CloneCommandos (CC), also known as Republic Commandos and later as Imperial Commandos, were elite Clone Troopers of the Grand Army of the Republic and later the Stormtrooper Corps. Cloned from the genetic template of the famous Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett, clones selected for the commando program were trained by Mandalorian drill sergeants that were recruited by Fett himself to train them to become the deadliest soldiers in the Clone Army. Often working in Squads of four, clone commandos were assigned to carry out special operations that the average clone trooper couldn't handle. These missions included covert infiltration, sabotage, demolition and assassination, all of which were standard tasks for the clone commandos.

When Order 66 was issued by the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious near the conclusion of the Clone Wars, the Old Jedi Order became targeted for extermination while Sidious brought a swift end to the Old Republic by declaring himself Emperor of the First Galactic Empire. The remaining Republic commandos were rechristened as Imperial commandos and incorporated into a special forces unit attached to the 501st Legion, under the command of the Sith Lord Darth Vader.

However, a minority of commandos refused to comply with Order 66, either out of sympathy for the Jedi or due to other personal reasons. For instance, Ion Team did not carry out the command to kill their Jedi officers, viewing it as an invalid order and not believing that the Jedi would betray the Republic, and instead opted to ensure the survival of General Roan Shryne. Other commandos fled to Mandalore, choosing to go into hiding rather than serve as the enforcers of the Emperor's New Order.

Goto [ Index ]In the recent past the role-playing website ran an article on the game Cyborg Commando asking if it was the worst role-playing game ever written. Would I spoil this review if I claimed that it wasn't? After all, Racial Holy War and FATAL were both written and are certainly worse. Cyborg Commandos isn't even the worst game ever published, as Spawn of Fashan saw a limited print run. Cyborg Commando is not, therefore, the worst game written or published. The casual reader might, however, be mistaken in thinking that this was the writers intention.

A little context is required to understand what went wrong. Cyborg Commando was published in 1987, a time at which the themes of role-playing games were developing towards darker themes. This was, after all, the period which produced the apocalyptic Twilight 2000, the darkly humorous Paranoia and the grim fantasy world of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that, when veterans of game design Gary Gygax, Frank Mentzer and Kim Mohan decided to create Cyborg Commando, they picked up on themes that were popular at the time. Unfortunately they applied the design sensibilities of the 1970s to the gaming themes of the 1980s, an unholy union that could only produce something like Cyborg Commando.

The games background is set in 2035, a time at which earth is invaded by evil aliens known as the Xenoborgs. Fortunately, in the years between our present and the game timeline the world has developed a new kind of soldier, capable of fighting off these foes, the Cyborg Commando!

As befitting a game of its period Cyborg Commando was a boxed game, coming with two books, a booklet and a set of dice. The dice, at least in my edition, are nicely pre-inked and polished, meaning that the purchaser got at least one quality component.

The CCF manual is the players book and introduces many of the basic concepts of the game, including the d10x system. This is a dice rolling system in which a result is generated by rolling two ten-sided dice and multiplying the numbers generated to produce a result between 1 and 100. In itself it is not a bad system. Rather than producing a bell curve or a linear number range, results are clustered around the lower end of the possible number range. There are many positive things to be said for this system; it rewards gains at low skill levels more than at high skill levels and is relatively simple.

On the other hand it does produce some oddities. The range is very granular and at times uneven. As the CCF manual helpfully points out on its third dice-rolling table, increasing a skill rating from 32 to 35 will mean that you are only 2/3% more likely to succeed at an action, whilst increasing a skill rating from 35 to 36 means that you are 3% more likely to succeed at an action.

On its third dice-rolling table? The tables in question arent actually part of the rules, but are part of a three page section of the rulebook, which includes three tables and five graphs, showing the reader how the d10x system is the best possible dice system for a game. This tone is symptomatic of the rules. At several times the reader is lectured on how they should use the metric system in play, rather than the archaic and unwieldy English [sic] system. The rules, of course, go on to tell you that the standard units of measurement can be either miles or kilometres; they are, apparently so similar as to be interchangeable. Rather than using a single system of measurements, the rules lecturer the reader on what they should be using, but provide poorly matching approximates in both systems and end the GMs book with a useful reference table of weights and measures, including conversion equations of troy grains to troy ounces because were apparently playing the game of cyborg fucking jewellers or something.

For a game with such attention to detail, character creation is remarkably simple. The player selects their characters stats and skills and then apply the modifiers imposed by the cybernetic body. There are games which elegant in their simple execution. This is one of the other games.

A starting character has 60 character points, of which 20 to 50 must be used for stats and the remaining 10 to 40 for skills. There are no guidelines to what particular stat scores mean, though a character must spend at least five points in each of the three stats, mental, neural and physical. Human averages are given, with, for instance women having an average of 15 in their neural stat, with men having 10. Since neural represents, amongst other things, the ability to recover from being drugged, we learn, indirectly, that women have an 8% better chance of recovering from being stunned.

A characters mental stat is particularly important as it determines how many skill fields a character may purchase. Since this number is ones mental stat divided by three and the average human has a mental stat of ten, it means that the average human can purchase three skill fields. Thus, a policeman might have Movement: Vehicles, Combat: Unarmed Combat and Law: Enforcement, but would be unable to fire a pistol, since they would lack the ability to purchase Combat: Personal Weapons. Let us hope that the police employ exceptionally intelligent individuals.

The skill system of Cyborg Commando is confused by the use of a numeric system of skill designation which resembles that of a library. For instance, the categories of combat is 200, whilst the skill fields of unarmed combat and personal weapons are 210 and 220 respectively. The writers helpfully change the numeric system between its introduction on page 12 and the rest of the book, starting with different designations on page 13.

The final part of character creation involves applying the modifications of the cyborg body, which mostly include adding extra skills and 100 points to the characters physical stat. This means that, despite having a robot body, a characters cyborg strength is influenced by their biological strength before their brain was sucked from their body.

The book also helpfully includes an advanced character generation system. The user may wish to adopt this for its additional stats, such as mental integrity and neural recovery, which have obvious game-enriching properties. The advanced rules also include stat based data, such as speed (derived from neural capacity the average woman runs 50% faster than the average man). The advanced rules also include an increased skills list which is more encyclopaedic than useful.

The highlights of the skill table include Domestic Arts I: Cooking, Domestic Arts II: Entertaining Guests, Simple Communication Devices: Flag Signals and Veterinary Medicine: Marine. This is evidence of the game breaking the new ground that the authors intended; never before has marine biology figured so highly in a role-playing game. Of course, skills are fairly useless, since you may only gain a very small number and, even then, one is likely to fail most of the time. Why? Well, to gain a skill rating beyond ten, one must be educated at a top secret military base. The average man or woman on the street must be content with a skill rating of ten, giving them a mere 27% chance of success. Do you want to cook a meal? Roll that d10x and try to get a result equal or less than ten. Thats if you have Domestic Arts I: Cooking in the first place. It is fortunate that Cyborg Commandos dont need to eat.

The remainder of the CCF manual covers combat and the construction and intrinsic abilities of a cyborg commando. These sections go naturally together as the only weapons the game describes are those built into the bodies of the cyborgs. A commando can fire electrostatic shocks or lasers out of their fingers and microwaves or sonic blasts out of the palms of their hands. All this costs power. A cyborg commando has 200 power units (PU) contained in internal batteries. As a rough guide, it costs 5 PU to fire a laser and 1 PU to function for the 8.6 seconds of each combat turn. The reader may wish to note that a cyborg commando will run out of power after half an hour of combat. If they fire their laser once every 8.6 second combat round they will run down in less than five minutes. One wonders why the cyborgs designers didnt fit in bigger batteries or, more simply, give the cyborgs guns. The pictures in the rulebook give the cyborgs guns but, the designers vision was that cyborgs should fire lasers out of their fingers, so guns appear nowhere in the main rulebooks.

3a8082e126