The Articles of Dragon: "Pysbots and Battle Mechs"

For good or for ill, my interest in the history of the hobby of roleplaying is intertwined with my interest in the history of the industry to which it gave birth. In particular, I find the history of The House That D&D Built – TSR Hobbies – to be endlessly fascinating, especially how dysfunctional it seems to have been as a business for most of its existence. To be fair, very few RPG companies have much to crow about in this regard, but TSR seems to be a prime example of a company succeeding in spite of itself. The more I learn about TSR's history, the more surprised I am that it managed to survive for nearly a quarter of a century.

I was reminded of this as I looked through the Ares Section of issue #99 of Dragon magazine (July 1985) and came across Mike Breault's article "Psybots and Battle Mechs." The article in question was intended as a preview of a then-upcoming science fiction roleplaying game, entitled Proton Fire. By "preview," I don't mean of the game's rules but mostly of its background, though there are a few snippets about the mechanics (characters can be warriors, rangers, or engineers and there are "talents"). 

Background-wise, it's pretty thin gruel. The humans of the Matri system descend from colonists who long ago arrived from Earth and settled on Coreworld, the fourth planet of the system. In the colony’s early centuries, power gradually fell into the hands of the Corporation and its ruling council, the Quintad. Originally five elected officials, over time they became increasingly authoritarian. Their corruption deepened after the developments in cybernetics allowed them to transform themselves into immortal cyborgs and rule indefinitely through violence and intimidation. 

The dominance of the Quintad collapsed when a laboratory accident released a devastating virus that killed 90% of Coreworld’s population and shattered the Corporation’s control. In the aftermath, the University, an academic colony hidden within a moon of the fifth planet, declared independence and began searching for a new home for the surviving humans of Matri. The central conflict of Proton Fire now pits the University and its agents, who explore and defend humanity’s future, against the Corporation and the immortal Quintad, who seek to restore their former domination using ruthless operatives known as Eliminators.

Characters can be humans, cyborgs, or psybots. Humans are similar to their ancestors on Earth and protect themselves through the use of armored battle suits called mechs. Cyborgs are more or less what you'd expect. Psybots, meanwhile, are advanced robots that possess emotions and experience pain, but lack the empathy and insight of human beings. The article suggests that the characters devote themselves to exploration of new star systems and foiling the plans of the Quintad, though they never really explain what those plans are now that most of humanity is dead.

Despite all this, I was very intrigued by Proton Fire and looked forward to its release. I was and am a science fiction guy at heart and was genuinely curious to see if the actual game was more fully realized and expansive than this article suggested. Alas, that was not to be. A couple of issues later, TSR posted a retraction, in which they explained that there "wasn't a big market for a stand-alone robot game," so it would be repackaged as a supplement to Star Frontiers. That never happened either and all we have to go on regarding the game's final fate is what Steve Winter posted in a comment to this blog back in 2011.

I suspect this kind of thing happens more often than we realize. Goodness knows that my own track record when it comes to unfinished projects is far from stellar, so I shouldn't point fingers. Still, I'm just one guy, not a multi-million dollar game publisher like TSR was at the time. One day, I'd love to know more about Proton Fire and its origins. I suspect, though, it'll probably be one of those mysteries that I'll never see solved to my satisfaction. Oh, well.

Retrospective: Sabre River

Despite my generally negative feelings toward Frank Mentzer's 1983–1986 revision of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, I have a special place in my heart for the Companion Rules. Indeed, I still consider it one of the best things ever produced for any edition of D&D, largely because it made a serious attempt to provide answers to the question of just what characters do when they reach the lofty heights of level 15 and beyond. While the Companion Rules themselves were only partially successful in this regard, TSR also intended to provide additional ideas and guidance for campaigns at this level of play in the form of the CM-series of adventure modules, of which there were ultimately nine.

Of course, as I mentioned in my Retrospective post about one of the modules in this series, this intention wasn't as easy to fulfill as TSR might have wished. Nearly all of the CM modules were flawed in one way or another, especially when it comes to providing a model for campaigns in which many, if not all, of the player characters have risen to rule their own domains. Despite that, many of them nevertheless include clever ideas and interesting concepts that could, if reworked, be useful to the harried Dungeon Master of a Companion-level campaign.

Take, for example, Sabre River, co-written by Douglas Niles and Bruce Nesmith and released in 1984. The module begins with the following:

Have all of your characters settled down and started dominions? Have you wondered if they'll ever get the chance to fight their way through an old-fashioned dungeon again? Yes, they will! 

The premise of Sabre River is that a group of four to six characters of levels 18–22 must venture into the Tower of Terror, a dungeon within a volcano, in order to deal with a curse that's been laid upon the land. The land in question is the domain of either an NPC ruler or – preferably – that of one of the player characters. In this respect at least, Sabre River is already an improvement over its immediate predecessor, Death's Ride, which more or less rejected the very idea that a player character's domain should be subjected to the undead invasion depicted in that module. 

The idea of a dungeon capable of challenging a party of 18th–22nd-level characters is intriguing. In the D&D circles with which I was familiar at the time, it was generally assumed that, as a character achieved double-digit levels, he would find his challenges in domain rulership and all that that entailed, like mass combats, power politics, and faction play. I suspect that explain why I so rarely saw anyone continue to play a D&D character at such exalted levels: the implied style of play wasn't very appealing to most players and indeed seemed to be a break from what Dungeons & Dragons was assumed to be about. What most players of my acquaintance wanted instead was more of the same, albeit at a great degree of challenge and, in principle, that's what Sabre River provided.

The Tower of Terror is indeed challenging. It's populated by powerful and deadly monsters, like a red dragon, elementals of various types, a beholder, and swarms or flocks of lesser creatures. There's also a commensurate level of treasure, some of it truly staggering, like a roomful of gold ingots worth 800,000gp in total. That only makes sense, of course, since high-level characters need huge amounts of experience points to advance and treasure is the surest source of such XP. Still, I was quite shocked to see these numbers as I re-read the module. For me, these astronomical sums have long been an impediment to my enjoyment of a D&D campaign of this level. Others may feel differently, of course.

Sabre River's challenges also include a handful of tricks, traps, and unusual tactical situations intended to test the players' skills in combat. There's also the central mystery of the curse, how it can be lifted, and what the characters must do to achieve that. It's all very serviceable but far from outstanding – certainly nothing on par with adventures like White Plume Mountain or The Ghost Tower of Inverness when it comes to imagination (and frustration). Mostly, Sabre River is about everything being BIG, from monsters (and their hit point totals) to treasures, which is a little disappointing, especially because I know that Doug Niles is a good designer who's penned some enjoyable stuff over the years.

Sabre River is not a terrible module; it simply doesn't stand out as anything special. Its worst sin, in my opinion, is that it doesn't deviate too much from the mediocre track record of the CM-series, almost none of which take full advantage of the new opportunities and vistas that the Companion Rules opened up to player characters of levels 15 to 25. A shame!