The Robowars Roleplaying Game, or more informally known as Robo, has been a fairly long and strung out voyage through most of the years of public school of the creators. It has even followed some of us into college. It all began when I was introduced to two important things: role playing games, (namely Dungeons and Dragons), and Harmony Gold's Robotech series of cartoons on TV during my most formative years.
The change that Dungeons and Dragons(tm, all that) (D&D) makes in how people play games is fairly obvious...it's a remarkably intense and in-depth method of recreation. But the Robotech part of it might not be so obvious. Bloodshed, violence, and the romance of science fiction all in one! This was a cartoon where characters died, the good guys lost, and every step of the journey was a challenge. These (when I was in junior high school) were a very mature set of attributes for anything. I felt it was very appealing to the intelligent and sophisticated TV viewer. (It sure wasn't the Smurfs.)
Robo has been played since about 1987, starting off as a "What would it be like if it were after the end of the Robotech saga," and there were left-over bad-guys running around you still had to kill. What if you got to make up your own battle mechs? What if every character wore a walkman into battle?
After a few years, Robo decided to lose all trace of the Robotech items it was based on, but kept a few crucial ideas: hard core interplanetary battle, constant life risking, and large armored battle-machines. It gained a new nation to found it...the Triconians, a country formed after "the big one"... the earthquake to end all earthquakes which is supposed hit California. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was plunged into war. The Triconians sat it out, found new technology out in space, and then came to rule the Earth. Promptly thereafter, the Triconians started the first (recorded) intergalactic war in the Milky Way galaxy.
Following were many such wars that nearly crushed the Triconians, and decimated hundreds of worlds. Enemies so advanced and brutal were introduced into the game that finally the Triconians faded in the midst of expansion and battle, usurped by the vastness of the galaxy thinking that they had conquered most of it. They had decimated and genocided cultures, races, planets and species with and without names...everywhere. Their flag...everywhere.
Robo took a vacation. Everyone was burned out on it. There were no new ideas. No new threats. Our original characters now had great-great-great-great grandcharacters all arranged in family trees. There was nothing left to do. Just about everything had been done. All of our teenage angst was soaked up by this one great game. It sat. It festered.
It got lost, too. Most all of our notes for the game were destroyed in accidents and even a car collision. But Robowars wouldn't die.
We decided to start over. Why not try to build the Triconians back up to what they once were? As players, we had matured our playing, matured our game-mastering, and even went to the library and researched occasionally for our modules and adventures. We were confident that we could kick-start Robo back into at least what greatness it had been.
And we did. We even made it better than what we hoped. In fact, I'm glad we took this long to get this far. Our game has developed a depth and originality that many other science fiction games, even novels, will never attain. It has seven years of playing behind it, and has over 6,000 game years matured to it. Ancient empires are resurging, and new empires are sprouting up through the stars. Robo is finally at a point where it, I believe, will be accepted and liked by most anyone who likes science fiction and role playing.