The EBSIS

[slade the sniper]

Question, is the EBSIS a creation of Palladium, or is it/was it from some source material? Also, same question for the Anti-Unification League(?).

-STS

[ShadowLogan]

AFAIK the EBSIS is a creation of Palladium when they did the 1E RPG. Their Battloids (at least the original 3 in BK4) are repurposed line art from SDC:SC that in 2E was more correctly identified, otherwise they used recondition RDF/Zen. mecha (unless you had Lancer's Rockers where they get some new hardware from pre-Invid).

The Anti-Unification League is from the series proper (EP15, the Council placed the destruction at Macross Island on them), though it was never fleshed out in the show. Post 2001-reset material involves them in the FTS comic series.

[ESalter]

Question, is the EBSIS a creation of Palladium, or is it/was it from some source material?

I've never seen it mentioned anywhere but the old RPG.

Also, same question for the Anti-Unification League(?).

The High-Ranking Dudes mention it as part of their cover story in "Homecoming." The way they say it implies it's a real organization. IIRC, the equivalent Macross scene refers to the anti-UN forces that are part of Macross' backstory.

[Jefffar]

The EBSIS are not mentioned by name in 2E RPG, but there are indications of a non-aligned polity in Russia in the Shadow Chronicles book and mentions if multiple non-aligned states that had to be subdued in the Masters Saga book.

[Seto Kaiba]

Question, is the EBSIS a creation of Palladium, or is it/was it from some source material?

The "Eastern Bloc Soviet Independent States" are Palladium's creation. They were invented to pad the 1st Edition RPG, being a fairly unimaginative generic "evil Russians" faction... a fruit so low-hanging it was practically subterranean at the time the game was made.

Also, same question for the Anti-Unification League(?).

The "Anti-Unification League" is Robotech's dub rename of the Anti-Unification Alliance faction that first appeared in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and would be the main antagonist in Macross Zero.

In Robotech, the Anti-Unification League is never fleshed out. Their one and only proper appearance was in From the Stars, where they were just cackling evil mooks who wanted to destroy the United Earth Government for no stated reason. The only identified members were spies who infiltrated the UEDF to sabotage its defense programs, T.R. Edwards and E.A. Leonard. The ending of the comic implies that there may not actually be any such organization, and that the whole thing may just be a false flag to justify the continued military buildup for Earth's defense.

In Macross, the Anti-Unification Alliance was a loose confederation of various militant nationalist groups, militias, terrorists, and other partisans who'd aligned against the newly-formed Earth Unification Government shortly after it was formed in 2001. The organization suffered from just as much cognitive dissonance as you'd expect from a name like "Anti-Unification Alliance", with its individual member groups having wildly different motivations ranging from simple opposition to the idea of a world government to more specific grievances like dissatisfaction with how the UN Government had forced resolution of various regional, national, or international disputes, or a belief that the UN Government was dominated by a particular pre-Unification faction. They were a major fixture of the period known as the Unification Wars, a period where innumerable small armed conflicts broke out around the world in the wake of the world's decision to form the Unification Government that lasted from 2000 to 2008. The Anti-Unification Alliance was responsible for a number of heinous terrorist acts including the hijacking of the Oberth-class destroyer Tsiolkovsky and using it to destroy the returning Mars evacuation fleet (killing Misa's lover Riber Fruhling), destroying Grand Cannon II in Australia, multiple attacks on South Ataria Island, and the destruction of St. Petersburg, Russia using a thermonuclear reaction weapon. The events of Macross Zero are basically the Alliance's last gasp before dissolving in late 2008. (Barring a pair of suicidal offensives in Africa and the South Pacific where they petulantly threw the last of their troops at the UN Forces rather than surrender, and ended up being wiped out by newly-introduced weapons like the VF-0+ Phoenix Plus, VF-1 Valkyrie, and the TV series Destroids.) The UN Government later used the Alliance as their cover story for the sudden disappearance (and apparent destruction of) the SDF-1 Macross and South Ataria Island.

Robotech didn't really leave anything for the "Anti-Unification League" to do, since the rewrite presented the scenes that had previously belonged to the Unification Wars as a pre-1999 world war instead.

[slade the sniper]

Thanks!!!

-STS

[Sambot]

Question, is the EBSIS a creation of Palladium, or is it/was it from some source material?

The "Eastern Bloc Soviet Independent States" are Palladium's creation. They were invented to pad the 1st Edition RPG, being a fairly unimaginative generic "evil Russians" faction... a fruit so low-hanging it was practically subterranean at the time the game was made.

At the time though the Russians were the "evil bad guys". It doesn't quite hold up now but I still like the idea of them.

[Seto Kaiba]

At the time though the Russians were the "evil bad guys". It doesn't quite hold up now but I still like the idea of them.

The Russians were demonized at the time, yeah... but it was painfully unimaginative, even counterproductive, for a sci-fi setting where the Cold War was explicitly over.

It also, yes, loses a certain je ne sais quoi once you know what the real Soviet Union was like at the time the books were written. Less "evil superpower bent on world domination" and more barely functional society tearing out its own hair over the paranoid madness of its leadership and its inability to feed its own people.

[Warshield73]

At the time though the Russians were the "evil bad guys". It doesn't quite hold up now but I still like the idea of them.

The Russians were demonized at the time, yeah... but it was painfully unimaginative, even counterproductive, for a sci-fi setting where the Cold War was explicitly over.

It also, yes, loses a certain je ne sais quoi once you know what the real Soviet Union was like at the time the books were written. Less "evil superpower bent on world domination" and more barely functional society tearing out its own hair over the paranoid madness of its leadership and its inability to feed its own people.

No matter which group of humans you choose for a human type enemy is going to be something of reflection of real world or history. The 1e books had African Warlords and I believe in South American dictators of one type or another so it wasn't just EBSIS. I for one liked all of these as it gave some variety to the scenarios I ran that wasn't just driving big robots and shooting up battle pods. The characters could hunt for an EBSIS spy or stop an arms shipment to the ZCZ by human smugglers. Great chance to use those Espionage and other skills.

My 5 cents.

[ESalter]

No matter which group of humans you choose for a human type enemy is going to be something of reflection of real world or history. The 1e books had African Warlords and I believe in South American dictators of one type or another so it wasn't just EBSIS.

That's not really accurate to either the real world or the contents of those books.

I for one liked all of these as it gave some variety to the scenarios I ran that wasn't just driving big robots and shooting up battle pods. The characters could hunt for an EBSIS spy or stop an arms shipment to the ZCZ by human smugglers. Great chance to use those Espionage and other skills.

At the time though the Russians were the "evil bad guys".

According to who? Siembieda's job was imagining a future United Earth Government; instead he created this.

[Seto Kaiba]

No matter which group of humans you choose for a human type enemy is going to be something of reflection of real world or history.

When the writer's being lazy or trying to demonize a specific group, sure... but a writer who puts in actual effort can at least make an antagonist faction that isn't an obvious reflection of a contemporary nation or ethnic group.

Macross's creators went to the trouble of ensuring the Anti-Unification Alliance wasn't going to come off as a stand-in for contemporary hostilities or be some blatant ethnic stereotype villain. That can't be said for Palladium and EBSIS, a lazy, hackneyed, incredibly cliched late Cold War jab at the "dirty commies" haphazardly thrown into a setting that patently had no place for it.

(I get that canon Robotech is not a setting that's conducive to a wide variety of adventures, but at the same time there's a lot that can be done without resorting to a xenophobe's version of Boblin the Goblin that's only slightly less subtle than the average Saturday morning cartoon villain.)

[drewkitty ~..~]

Then there is that the anti-Unification Opponents didn't really make the screen even a antagonist role until the Macross Zero series.

M+ was also about an ''internal power struggle"" (in the macro) to, but mostly about the relationship between the three friends getting reacquainted with each other.

Every other macross series has been about external threats.
(For the MF series the Galaxy Colony counts as an external threat because it is not the Frontier Colony.)
[I have not seen the MΔ. So someone else will have to make an informed statement about how to look as that story set up.]

[Seto Kaiba]

Then there is that the anti-Unification Opponents didn't really make the screen even a antagonist role until the Macross Zero series.

They are covered in reasonable detail in the official setting materials, but their first onscreen appearance in an antagonist role (however minor) was in original series episode 33 "Rainy Night". That's the Roy-Claudia flashback episode. There are also a few short stories and so on that peripherally feature them like the Global-Hayase short story "The Plundering Fleet". Macross Zero was the Alliance landing a starring role.

Every other macross series has been about external threats.

Remember, the Anti-Unification Alliance dissolved the year before the First Space War began after a series of disastrous offensives caused its backers to withdraw their support.

It's also wise to remember that, unlike Robotech, Macross's story has been expanded in many different media formats beyond just animation. There are short stories, light novels, video game titles, manga, etc. that are also a part of Macross's official setting. Quite a few of them feature "internal" conflicts as well.

Spoiler:

Macross Digital Mission VF-X (1997) featured a New UN Spacy Special Forces team being dispatched on a rescue mission to recover the idol group Milky Dolls, who were kidnapped from the venue of a ceremony commemorating the founding of the New UN Forces by an anti-government group in 2047.

Macross VF-X2 (1999) featured a story about the New UN Spacy Special Forces 727th Independent Squadron "Ravens" being dispatched to suppress various anti-government uprisings on a number of different emigrant planets, learning that there was a low-key civil war going on in the New UN Government over emigrant governing autonomy, and then learning that their leaders were part of a fascist conspiracy to foster and use this conflict as a pretext to launch a coup and seize power. (The coup is foiled in the good/true end, with the assistance of one of the anti-government - actually anti-fascist - groups led by a woman implied to be one of Max's daughters.)

Macross M3 (2001) prominently featured the return of Maximilian and Milia Jenius as the leaders of the New UN Spacy's Dancing Skulls special forces team, a specialist unit that was formed to deal with internal conflicts, revolts, and terrorist activity in the late 2010s and 2020s.

Macross Zero (2002), of course, flashes back to right before the end of the Unification Wars with the conflict over Mayan Island and the Protoculture artifacts there.

Macross Frontier (2008) deals with one emigrant government foiling a conspiracy by another to invade and seize control of an insectoid species called the Vajra in the name of creating a cybernetic human hive mind. (They are both New UN Government member governments, so it's an internal conflict.)

Macross the Ride (2011) is a light novel prequel/side story to Macross Frontier that featured the remnants of the fascist group from Macross VF-X2 launching terrorist attacks on the Frontier and Galaxy fleets, and planning to use some leftover Protodeviln technology for an arms build-up to go to war with the New UN Government.

Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy (2012) featured a story involving a rogue New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces unit (the 815th Independent Squadron "Havamal") illegally operating on the isolated backwater world Uroboros in an attempt to acquire an ancient Protoculture temporal weapon, overthrowing the local government and partnering with the local crime syndicate/space pirates to do so. Their traumatized leader, a survivor of the First Space War, plans to use the temporal weapon to rewrite history and make the First Space War un-happen. They're foiled by the local SMS branch and temporally-displaced characters from previous Macross stories.

Macross Delta Gaiden: the White Knight of the Black Wing (2016) deals with backstory events of the Macross Delta TV series. Specifically, the runup to (and great atrocity of) the war in which the New UN Government member world Windermere IV seceded from the New UN Government over its dissatisfaction with aspects of interstellar law and trade restrictions.

Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E (2016) also deals with backstory events of the Macross Delta TV series. In its story, the Xaos Corp PMC unit Echo Platoon foils a plan by the local megacorp Zelgaar Heavy Industries and its parent company the Epsilon Foundation to weaponize Var Syndrome for creating bio-weapons.

You could also argue that Macross Delta nominally is an internal conflict since it's localized to the worlds in the Brisingr globular cluster and is an act of aggression by a former New UN Government member world against the current New UN Government member worlds in that region.

[Sambot]

At the time though the Russians were the "evil bad guys". It doesn't quite hold up now but I still like the idea of them.

The Russians were demonized at the time, yeah... but it was painfully unimaginative, even counterproductive, for a sci-fi setting where the Cold War was explicitly over.

It also, yes, loses a certain je ne sais quoi once you know what the real Soviet Union was like at the time the books were written. Less "evil superpower bent on world domination" and more barely functional society tearing out its own hair over the paranoid madness of its leadership and its inability to feed its own people.

At the time though the Russians were still fighting in Afghanistan. Plus the Cold War didn't end until 1991. Robotech came out in the mid 80's. It's a future based on that starting point. Real Life went a different direction. So Soviets as bad guys still works.

When the writer's being lazy or trying to demonize a specific group, sure... but a writer who puts in actual effort can at least make an antagonist faction that isn't an obvious reflection of a contemporary nation or ethnic group.

Macross's creators went to the trouble of ensuring the Anti-Unification Alliance wasn't going to come off as a stand-in for contemporary hostilities or be some blatant ethnic stereotype villain. That can't be said for Palladium and EBSIS, a lazy, hackneyed, incredibly cliched late Cold War jab at the "dirty commies" haphazardly thrown into a setting that patently had no place for it.

I don't know about lazy. Sure Macross had the Anti-Unification Alliance but they still felt Russian to me. Especially in Macross Zero. After Space War I there's only one nation of clones except for the Anti-UN Boogey Man.
Robotech had people around the world struggling to recover and forming governments that were familiar to them. The UEG recognized those groups sovereignty.

Having a variety of nations with their own ideas and concerns doesn't seem lazy to me. Also the EBSIS isn't really a bad guy. They're a potential bad guy. In their early days the A.S.C. is as much if not more a bad guy than the EBSIS The EBSIS is more an alternative to the RDF and ASC. It's just unfortunate that they weren't fleshed out more.

(I get that canon Robotech is not a setting that's conducive to a wide variety of adventures, but at the same time there's a lot that can be done without resorting to a xenophobe's version of Boblin the Goblin that's only slightly less subtle than the average Saturday morning cartoon villain.)

Um...what? I think Robotech just as conductive if not more so than Macross. Earth has multiple nations with their own concerns and struggles. It's invaded by multiple aliens. A large number go into space and meet more aliens. Really, I think Robotech is full of untapped potential.

There was a time when I imagined being revised and being laid out more like Rifts. The Main Book and sourcebooks would cover the different eras. World Books would cover individual nations/militaries in more detail. So at least 5-6 books for eras and another who knows how many covering each of Earth's militaries, each of the invading militaries, and each of the planets the REF goes to. With the possibility of adventure books. That's without getting into later colony missions. Which I had as a thing long before I ever heard about any Macross sequels.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

[Seto Kaiba]

At the time though the Russians were still fighting in Afghanistan. Plus the Cold War didn't end until 1991. Robotech came out in the mid 80's.

But none of that is remotely relevant to the point being made... except in that it demonstrates how utterly unimaginative the EBSIS concept was.

It's a future based on that starting point. Real Life went a different direction. So Soviets as bad guys still works.

Well, yes and no... it's not actually clear when the Robotech timeline branches from our own. Circumstantial evidence from the canon comics could be used to suggest that it branched as far back as the 1940's. That too, is beside the point, though.

In Robotech, there was a worldwide cessation of hostilities in 1999 and world peace was effectively secured in 2005 when the United Earth Gov't was formed. Soviets as bad guys doesn't work in Robotech after 2005 because 1. the Soviet Union or Russian Federation is part of the UEG so they aren't hostile and 2. there aren't enough people left to have multiple states cropping up after the First Robotech War when the entire human population fits into a handful of lowrise towns in what used to be the Northwestern United States.

I don't know about lazy. Sure Macross had the Anti-Unification Alliance but they still felt Russian to me. Especially in Macross Zero.

Eh... it's pretty explicitly and heavily mixed in the OVA. Sure, two of the named characters have Slavic names, but their nationality is never discussed and in D.D.'s case he may be Russian-American given that he mentored the explicitly-American Roy Focker during the Unification Wars. The leader of their ground forces was Arabic (his name's Hassan), and the mission's director was British (Dr. Hasford). Their rifles are a kludge of French and Russian, their VF is one codeveloped between (West) Germany, Israel, and Russia, their destroid is (West) German, their cannons are mainly Swedish, their optical weapons (West) German, Swedish missiles, etc. etc.

After Space War I there's only one nation of clones except for the Anti-UN Boogey Man

In Macross, after the First Space War there's a population of ~1 million humans and ~8 million Zentradi, a bunch of undamaged space colonies at the lagrange points, an undamaged colony on the moon, and then emigrant fleets by the dozen leading to a robust interstellar civilization representing (by the 2040s) at least six humanoid species including humanity.

Robotech had people around the world struggling to recover and forming governments that were familiar to them. The UEG recognized those groups sovereignty.

No, it didn't... that's the point we're getting at here. No such thing ever happens in the Robotech TV series. There are no other governments on Earth after the First Robotech War. The UEG is the only show in town, and the series isn't even shy about why. After the First Robotech War, the UEG has a very literal monopoly on the essentials of life like food, potable water, medical commodities, etc. If you want to leave and start your own country with blackjack and hookers you have two options: "Starve to death" or "Reconsider".

Having a variety of nations with their own ideas and concerns doesn't seem lazy to me.

Having a variety of nations isn't lazy in that sense... it's lazy in the sense that they couldn't come up with any way to add options that didn't break the show's setting. It's also lazy in the sense you meant because the only idea they could come up with was the kind of moustache-twirling evil Russians who haunted the McCarthyist Red Scare-era nightmares of baby boomers... barely a half-step up from literal Nazis or fictive options like Cobra.

Um...what? I think Robotech just as conductive if not more so than Macross. Earth has multiple nations with their own concerns and struggles.

Well, no... as noted above it actually doesn't. None of that is part of the actual Robotech story. It's "throw it in" page count padding Palladium came up with that has no real basis in the series. There's the United Earth Government and then the Invid occupation and that's it.

It's invaded by multiple aliens. A large number go into space and meet more aliens.

I mean, yeah... but alien invasion is basically all the story has to offer.

Earth is invaded and destroyed by the Zentradi. Then by the Robotech Masters. Then by the Invid. Inbetween those first two, some of the characters go into space and... fight against the Invid invasions of a bunch of other planets. It's gotten to the point where that, in the official canon, there aren't even any actual civilians after the Second Robotech War. Everyone on Earth is either a subject-collaborator or nominal slave under the Invid and the humans living in space explicitly have one and only one career path open to them: military service. The Zentradi are wiped out fighting Earth's wars for it, the Robotech Masters on Earth are just never mentioned again and probably were exterminated. None of the alien races the UEEF goes to such lengths to save ever contribute to the wars Earth is fighting directly unless you count the one that was secretly backstabbing them all along and became the fourth alien race to attempt a human genocide.

Robotech, as a setting, doesn't really offer a lot of alternatives to the war campaign for RPG players unless you add content that isn't in the series. The non-military character classes are largely decorative or for NPCs. There's nothing for players to do aside from fight the war until the New Generation era... and then, the only real options are "fight the war" or "play off-brand Mad Max". Even non-canon additions like EBSIS in 1e are nothing but another party to be at war with.

That's what I mean when I say it's not conducive to a wide variety of adventures.

Spoiler:

Macross, on the other hand, very much IS conducive to a wide variety of adventures because its official setting is so much more diverse both in terms of places to go and people to meet (or be). Six sentient races, dozens of inhabitable planets that've been colonized, ancient ruins full of Sufficiently Advanced technology, and a thriving postwar culture to explore. You can have whole plots that don't involve war at all, and there are official examples that prove that it works. There's politican and philosophical dramas like Macross the Musiculture, which was the story of a wannabe professional dancer who abandoned his ambitions to pursue a career in politics as an advocate for government reform after a riot. There's sports dramas like Macross 7 Trash or Macross the Ride about athletes chasing fame and victory in high-stakes bouts. There's government conspiracy thrillers about sinister plans to brainwash people. There's dramas about musicians chasing fame as they launch their careers. Stories about space conservationists seeking to protect xenofauna from poaching. Ghost in the Shell-style ruminations about the nature of consciousness, whether being a cyborg makes you less of a "real" human, or whether artificial lifeforms should have a right to life. Tales of muck-raking journalists chasing the next big scoop and taking on the government propaganda machine. Adventurous archaeologists exploring ancient ruins full of near-magical lost technology and the occasional forbidden treasure or bit of knowledge man was not meant to know. Romances! School dramas! Gang violence! Super-hackers going toe-to-to with megacorps in cyberspace.

It covers a LOT of ground without stepping one toe outside the official setting.

[ShadowLogan]

There are no other governments on Earth after the First Robotech War. The UEG is the only show in town, and the series isn't even shy about why. After the First Robotech War, the UEG has a very literal monopoly on the essentials of life like food, potable water, medical commodities, etc. If you want to leave and start your own country with blackjack and hookers you have two options: "Starve to death" or "Reconsider".

Except by 2014 we know that the UEG is starting to fracture, Monument City was granted autonomy that is in the series itseslf (though by 2029 its the Capital location of the UEG). While the show itself doesn't go into detail, there is the Feudalistic Society that is said to have developed (again this is from the series). Theoretically a GMZ could construct a campaign around restructuring.

the Robotech Masters on Earth are just never mentioned again and probably were exterminated.

The Robotech Masters as a political entity are gone (aside from maybe the Elders), but the Tirolians as a species are not exterminated. I will agree there may not be any Earth, but they are out there (Rem and Cabell being Tirolians). The fact the UEEF acquired Bioroid Invid Fighters (which in the show are late model introduction) means the UEEF had to have acquired the stockpile from the RM fleet at Earth, which opens up the possibility that the UEEF transported not just Bioroids back to Tirol but also survivors (especially ones with technical knowledge to assist in R&D on their recovered technology).

None of the alien races the UEEF goes to such lengths to save ever contribute to the wars Earth is fighting directly unless you count the one that was secretly backstabbing them all along and became the fourth alien race to attempt a human genocide.

These aliens though could not contribute to the war against the Zentreadi, the UEEF wasn't even around then. We do not know when contact was made, so they might not be around to help against the Masters at Earth. They did contribute to the war against the Invid (Prelude).

The Sentinels did pledge support in Prelude, there was the Haydonites of course, but also the Kabarens (production capacity). Tirolians and Praxians superficially blend in with humans, so short of an outright statement that so-so is non-human, its possible they contributed manpower and we'd never notice. What contributions the other 3 races make isn't clear, but they could take up some slack locally as the UEEF was apparently weakened when Edwards escaped Tirol and fled to Optera.

Robotech, as a setting, doesn't really offer a lot of alternatives to the war campaign for RPG players unless you add content that isn't in the series

War doesn't have to be the focus, especially depending on the setting/era. You have espionage (internally, and likely on non-allied entities that could breakaway or attempt to breakaway), law enforcement (which might have some overlap with espionage), and exploration (space, ocean, derelicts). This might require adding content not in the series (espionage will require spy gear, exploration new creatures and hardware, etc) or fleshing out something in the series that gets mentioned but never elaborated on (Space Pirates, Zentreadi offshoots scattered across the universe, Disciples of Zor) or suggested (Gloval says the Zentreadi "evolved" to their current state, which IMHO means there could be other evolutionary offshoots which is supported somewhat by Leonard's statement about micronized Zentreadi being scattered throughout the universe).

You could do an Entertainment orientated campaign (Mecha-Su-Dai-esque, traditional sports, battle of the bands) being the focus. We know musician/performers are still around (Bowie, Lancer, Lancer's pickup bands, dancers, G. Sullivan) in all 3 post TMS settings. Pre-Invid also can be shown to have Movie productions still around (Dana did take Angelo to the movies), and some form of stage craft survived (Simon's troupe in NYC). Sports (including 1E's underground MSD) likely also exist in some form on Earth (out in space maybe not) if other forms of entertainment have survived then it stands to reason these did to (or new ones evolved like 1E's MSD). From a morale standpoint one would think the UEEF would also have some type of Entertainment setup (formally as informally would seem to be a given due to Lancer's guitar playing in Invasion Comic).

[glitterboy2098]

As far as the sentinels races go..
Tirolian and praxians as mentioned can generally "blend in" with humans and thus could be present in the recovery fleets as background chars.

The karbarrans are the industrial powerhouse building all the ueef ships and gear.
The spherians are likely a main source of all the metals and non-metallic minerals being used to make the ueef ships and hardware.
The perytonians would seem to have a low population density, so might not contribute much manpower wise (though probably did in small numbers) but they and the garudans (who have serious logistics issues due to their special atmosphere requirements) likely took over part of the patrol and aid of the worlds of the former tirolian empire, thus freeing up human and tirolian manpower to staff and support sending such large fleets the long way back to earth.

[Seto Kaiba]

War doesn't have to be the focus, especially depending on the setting/era. [...] This might require adding content not in the series [...] or fleshing out something in the series that gets mentioned but never elaborated on [...]

OK, this one actually threw me a bit... this started out phrased like an objection, but barely two sentences in you've effectively conceded the point. Are you objecting or agreeing with me?

The point you were replying to was me stating that, in Robotech, the official setting has little-to-nothing to offer a GM or RPG player outside of playing a soldier in one or more of the wars. If you want to do something else, you're basically stuck having to come up with all of it yourself. That absence of narrative options being what gave rise to nonsense padding inclusions like EBSIS.

Spoiler:

Espionage against who? The United Earth Government is the only show in town from 2005 to the Invid Invasion. Police work involving what? There's no evidence of organized crime in the TV series and the only disorganized criminals ever depicted are the ATAC 15th squad which means you're playing as the GMP and therefore the war campaign. Exploration means you're again just playing the war campaign because civilian spacecraft don't exist in Robotech. Given the number of acknowledged dialog errors in the series, building on something mentioned once in passing but never elaborated upon is not appreciably different from making something up whole cloth. Civilian-owned mecha aren't a thing at any point in Robotech either, nor are mecha martial arts. The music scene doesn't seem to be anything like the modern day one, just lounge singers and the like. I could go on but I think I've beaten my point to death by now.

Confining the side discussion to a Spoiler tag for ease of reading:

Spoiler:

Except by 2014 we know that the UEG is starting to fracture, Monument City was granted autonomy that is in the series itseslf (though by 2029 its the Capital location of the UEG).

Or... we could take the simplest and most obvious explanation that the autonomy Monument City was granted was them being allowed to manage their own affairs under the UEG instead of having the UEG govern them directly. This isn't Monument City leaving the UEG, but the UEG telling Monument City that it has its act together enough that the UEG thinks it's ready to manage its own local affairs.

While the show itself doesn't go into detail, there is the Feudalistic Society that is said to have developed (again this is from the series).

Per HG, the show's dialog should not be taken as an infallible source of information as it contains a lot of errors... this being one of the most obvious ones, as there is very clearly nothing at all feudal about the society in the series. It's right up there for ridiculousness with the narrator's assertion the Invid are unicellular organisms.

The fact the UEEF acquired Bioroid Invid Fighters (which in the show are late model introduction) means the UEEF had to have acquired the stockpile from the RM fleet at Earth, which opens up the possibility that the UEEF transported not just Bioroids back to Tirol but also survivors (especially ones with technical knowledge to assist in R&D on their recovered technology). [...]

Or... simplest explanation... the Invid Fighter is a variant of a pre-existing design the Masters already had and the Bioroid Interceptors were based on that source design by the Tirolians the UEEF saved.

They did contribute to the war against the Invid (Prelude).

Allegedly. And only in ways that were either unnecessary or irrelevant... like manufacturing support when the UEEF had at least one (allegedly multiple) factory satellites at their disposal.

None of them actually join the UEEF, pick up a gun, and fight. They cower behind the humans and offer token logistical support, if that.

Tirolians and Praxians superficially blend in with humans, so short of an outright statement that so-so is non-human, its possible they contributed manpower and we'd never notice.

With a few exceptions, the Tirolians have a ghastly inhuman pallor. The Praxians are a race of nine foot tall space amazons. Neither of those is blending in invisibly, and it's worth remembering that the UEEF has some evident organizational xenophobia going on in Prelude so it's unlikely that they would consider aliens trustworthy enough to include in their forces. Even if they could pass for human, all the cultural differences would give them away as inhuman immediately... and we got a goooood look at how the UEEF's base attitude is "the only good alien is a dead alien" in RTSC proper. I doubt that any Tirolians or Praxians want to put up with that open bigotry.

[drewkitty ~..~]

Rainy Night....What I remember is that they don't show any air battle in this episode. (thou it's been a long time since I've watched it...) If I am incorrect in this so be it. But I speificly worded what Said to reflect what I remember.

snip...
You could also argue that Macross Delta nominally is an internal conflict since it's localized to the worlds in the Brisingr globular cluster and is an act of aggression by a former New UN Government member world against the current New UN Government member worlds in that region.

Actually I didn't comment about what sort of conflict was depicted in MΔ .

[I have not seen the MΔ. So someone else will have to make an informed statement about how to look as that story set up.]

But thank you for adding some content about MΔ that I couldn't.

While the macross games & novels are nice and fine. They were not anime series. As such they where not what I covered.

[ESalter]

At the time though the Russians were still fighting in Afghanistan. Plus the Cold War didn't end until 1991. Robotech came out in the mid 80's. It's a future based on that starting point. Real Life went a different direction. So Soviets as bad guys still works.

Only if you think the politics of a United Earth Government should be the same as United States government policy. You might as well say, "So Americans as bad guys still works."

Also the EBSIS isn't really a bad guy. They're a potential bad guy.

The EBSIS was engaged in open warfare against the RDF since their introduction in Book Two. (Admittedly, later books backed off from that.)

In their early days the A.S.C. is as much if not more a bad guy than the EBSIS.

That's from the novels. In the first edition of the RPG, the ASC is just another good-guy organization, just like the RDF or REF.

The EBSIS is more an alternative to the RDF and ASC.

The EBSIS starts wars of conquest and arms mass murderers. It not so evil as to be unplayable, but it's definitely a bad-guy organization.

[Seto Kaiba]

Rainy Night....What I remember is that they don't show any air battle in this episode. (thou it's been a long time since I've watched it...) If I am incorrect in this so be it. But I speificly worded what Said to reflect what I remember.

The episode shows an Anti-Unification Alliance aerial attack on the base where Roy and Claudia were stationed at around 11 minutes in. It's the only appearance of the MiM-31 in animation.

While the macross games & novels are nice and fine. They were not anime series. As such they where not what I covered.

Yes, but for the reasons I identified and the fact that several later Macross TV shows directly reference them, it would be remiss of me not to mention them. Especially as they were examples of the kind of "internal conflict" story you were talking about.

Spoiler:

The events of Macross VF-X2 are particularly important, being the reason for the military and government reforms seen in Frontier and a few characters on both sides of Delta are veterans of the Second Unification War and know each other specifically because of it. Another one quit the New UN Forces because of disquiet over fighting former New UN Forces troops who'd become anti-government rebels as a result of that conflict.

One of the game's antagonists - Manfred Brando - is also one of the prime movers behind Macross Galaxy's conspiracy AND his company were the ones who originally discovered fold quartz, the veritable gold rush for which drives one of Frontier's subplots and drove Windermere IV to secede from the New UN Government in Macross Delta's backstory. EDIT: I almost forgot, a device invented by Brando's company to apply fold quartz to fold communications systems forms the core of the massive fold wave amplifier that is the cornerstone of Windermere IV's military strategy in the Macross Delta series as well.

Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy is also rather important, partly because of what it established about the ancient Protoculture and partly because the YF-30 that was the game's all-new VF was developed into the VF-31 that the protagonists in Macross Delta use.

[xunk16]

I have hesitated a bit prior to taking the time to post this... but since this conversation tries to judge Robotech, prior to its reboot full of missing pieces, with arguments using mostly the post-missing pieces 2nd edition canon; I felt I had to add my grain of salt. Take it as a What If scenario if you will. While most of what is here might never be put forward again, it is still a possible interpretation of the no-longer-canon but once-canon material.

Question, is the EBSIS a creation of Palladium, or is it/was it from some source material?

The "Eastern Bloc Soviet Independent States" are Palladium's creation. They were invented to pad the 1st Edition RPG, being a fairly unimaginative generic "evil Russians" faction... a fruit so low-hanging it was practically subterranean at the time the game was made.

It might have been at the time of creation, but it is interesting to note what are exactly the "Soviets", into the Robotech context of old. According to the old comics, as much as can be understood, the Berlin wall didn't fell in 1989. The august plot of 1991, against Gorbatchev, didn't fail, and the communists remained in power. This led to the Russian civil war against the Neo-Tsarists (inspired by the Russian monarchist party, a real thing), one of the many conflicts hinted at by Return to Macross.
This is especially relevant, when considering that this would have freed most of the SSRs, which might have wanted to keep their own socialism under their own reforms. In other words, when in the robotech context, "soviet" or "soviet bloc", mostly refers to the remainder of the COMECON, mostly excluding Russia, which would have lost most of its power. This "Soviet Bloc" continued its evolution through the mexican conflict with the Zapatist faction, and the ba'athist in the middle-east. With mostly Cuba and Ukraine at its head, amongst many many other small conflicts "having festered toward the boiling point". (Africa was a terrible place to be at the time.)
By the end of the GCW, according to Return to Macross #13, the internationalist put the end to the Neo-Tsarist rebellion, indicating that Russia never quite came back as the USSR giant it was. Instead, the Russian communist faction remaining, would have by then become a special economic zone under the "Neo-Marxist Bloc". Which I can only guess to be the Chinese, into this context. (They are after all contacted separately, when the seeds of the first UEG decides to implement their cease fire.)
So what you have, prior to the stabilization of the world by the happening of the ASS-1, is actually two globalist powers, trying to make sense of a plethora of proxy war gone wrong. The twist being that the Russian are no longer really a part of this, and their country would have been occupied forcefully by the late Internationalist forces.

Spoiler:

It's fun to note that, this precise comic series, uses a lot of historical references to justify the GCW. I've learned a few things, trying to piece a timeline for our own game. According to Return to Macross, amongst the groups that will later be source of terrorist concerns during the Aanti-UN War, we have :

• The Neo-Marxist, centred around the Chinese ideal of communism. Mostly peaceful during that era, the bloc nonetheless encourages people's war in foreign territories for the betterment of their populations. This would eventually aim for a confederate globalist government, instead of a federated one. In the face of the ASS-1, the petty differences between the Internationalist and Neo-Marxist movement were however forgotten.
  
• The Soviet Bloc, mostly a loosing side trying to push the original Soviet Revolution into a better economical situation, requiring thus victory over the west for the control of the IMF. As the conflicts of the GCW multiplied, they became less and less relevant, instead trying to defend what they had and train troops in new member nations. This implies a lot of Russian soldiers being stuck, away from home, when the Internationalists and Neo-Tsarists finally clashed.
  
• France : Is implied to no longer be a part of the European Commonwealth, by being invited directly and separately at the meeting for the formation of the UEG. For gaming purpose, our group chose that this meant a possible socialist uprising in the region, based on possible real-world conflicts at the time. No true winner is ever stated by an "official" source.
  
• The Emergency Action Coalition : is, as far as we can tell, a socialist party from northern Ireland and with ties to some Scottish allies. As being one of the few places that wasn't in a real-world conflict, at the time of the GCW, it is possible that the authors wanted to imply a separatist / terrorist tendency.
  
• Manchukuo is still a thing / reborn as a thing, in the comics. This can be tied back to Mongolian revolutionaries from this era, but it is mostly made possible by the NEASIAN agitation in the pacific.
  
• Miller's Militia and The Sons of the Constitutions : are clearly inventions of the comics, but they at least give a name to major group of white nationalist and other retro-nationalist, wanting to keep the USA as a separate entity. Groups, like these, are supposed to have maintained the Trans-American states as a perpetual front for civil unrest during the secession of the US at the start of the GCW. Eventually, the Trans-American states will rejoin the Western Alliance and thus the Internationalist cause. This doesn't totally deter these groups, which will remain as a possible source for anti-UN propaganda / recruitment. However false-flag, or not, all of this might be.
  
• The NEACPS, in retrospect, is widely less developed than the EBSIS. We have to jump, trough quite a few historical hoops, for the Pan Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to have a second chance at it. We know it's a dictatorship of some kind, but also that it is supposed to use some sort of puppet government to legitimate its actions. The most plausible cause for this, at the time, would probably be to form some kind of defensive coalition, against incursion by proxy war and people's war. The few information we have, and the monologues of T.R. Edwards, however point to an hostile nation; trying to create and isolate its own empire from the rising globalist movements.
  
• The Exclusionnists : believe it or not, is inspired from a party claiming a kind of "Oceania comes first policy". What we can get, from the comics, is mostly that they came to power in order to keep Australia, New-Zealand, Tasmania, and a few other small places out of the Western Alliance and NEACPS conflicts. This could have been due, in part, to Lemurian operations in the Pacific.
  
• Nova Roma is an Italian organization that operates as a kind of recreation of the Roman government. As per the real-world, it mostly tries to keep its regional historical sites from capitalist and outside interference. In Robotech, they are one of the few public faces of the Anti-UN. The comics implies that they have crossed the line from activism into warfare, somewhere at the end of the GCW.
  
• Celtic Thunder is possibly just a mercenary company, it however represent the growing Neo-celtic movement of the time... gone overboard. The most that can be found is that they had power bases in southern Ireland and Wales. Thus, they are most certainly an addition from the authors, in a gambit to make conflicts in the few places that hadn't. It is unknown if they would have grassroots terrorists cells elsewhere, but since the IRA is never mentioned... One can only guess that it would be possible, for the party / Merc group, to operate internationally as organized crime.
  
• Eastern United States; the secession of the US is described as being mostly political. Basically, one can conclude that this part of the US was tired of the war effort, and didn't want to take part into the "one government" proposed by the Internationalists. Retrospectively, that might be one of the places less touched by the GCW and anti-UN conflicts.
  
• Lemuria : A nation of ex-soldiers, defectors leaving the conflict to live mostly under the sea... Some submarine habitat were commandeered, possibly created in the fear of nuclear winter. Still trying to get their survival away from mankind's mistake, during the Anti-UN War.
  
• Neo-Tsarists : As previously stated, a second Russian revolution, in favour or recreating the monarchy and the Russian guild system. Inspired by the very real Monarchist Party, which never quite enjoyed such a following IRL.
  
• Pacifica : That one was hard to track back. The Comics lists this as being a new nation... that always gets the bad end of deals and the butt of jokes. With a bit of research, this just happens to be a part of California; where once there was a plan for the creation of a native American independent nation. In Robotech, this place also ended giving asylum to a lot of refugees, from the US civil unrest, after the formation of the Western Alliance.
  
• The European Commonwealth is mostly what you'd expect. On the side of the Internationalist during the GCW, Return to Macross show them turning to be the "NEW" European Commonwealth, in protest of the major military expanses ordered by the newly formed UEG. This is one of the few public faces of the Anti-UN. Those who prefer, that this all be a flase-flag operation, will obviously point out that old allies could be playing into the script. Of course, the European Commonwealth publicly coming out lets other claim their will to oppose the new order.
  
• The Western Alliance, as far as we know at the head of the Internationalist movement, can actually be related to a historical Canadian movement. (Which still exists, though very much more inoffensive to this day.) To be fair to the authors, it might have looked like something more credible at the time. This is more or less a group that wants to get the western provinces out of Canada. (Basically leaving Ontario and Québec, plus the few more eastern territories out). Which does echoes the Macross theme, of having the Ontario quadrant defying the UEG much later. By the historical variant, we can imply that this western Canada finally seceded under political accords for fusion, with the western united states, which lunched the forceful pacification of the world soon turned a conflict against a soviet beachhead in Mexico.

In that light, I don't think it is fair to state that the EBSIS would be a cartoon variant of "Evil Russians". Not only this context gives us plenty to base off some Anti-UN activities, but it paint a very different portrait of the Russians than, let's say, James Bond.
By the time the UEG first came to power, it was money and scientist hungry for Macross Island. If most governing bodies of the time would have known why, canon material tells us that the people were kept in the dark. And so, people trying to get back their economies, after a myriad of conflicts, were oppressed into paying taxes to a not always recognized victor. (Some comics tells us, that the Western Alliance thought itself on the verge of defeat, when the SDF-1 came.) This means that Russia, which fell hard to the Neo-Tsarists using bio-weapons and liberating political dissident from gulags, ended-up oppressed into a new space race, instead of tending to its wounded and its failing behind agricultural sector...

Thus, the "communist" part, of the "Evil Russians", would be mostly out of the way. Even before the end of the Anti-UN war. Probably not, however, the strong anti-fascist roots of the Russian people. And considering the wide alliances with Zentraedi, otherwise mistreated by the A.S.C.; one might even be tempted to state that the EBSIS would be "good Russians / eastern Europeans", thus breaking the stereotype. (Yes, of course they are still pilling weapons and organizing expansion... but they have to entertain the Troodis and reconquer wasteland, like their competitors.) The fact that, by this point, other SSR would indeed be standing on equal terms with the once giant, is also a good way toward the confederate ideal of most of that part of the world, prior to the victory of the federated UEG. Nothing really forces the EBSIS to be oppressive, or riddled with the defects of the perestroika and glassnot. Nor do we know if the Vories are still making everyday like a black market festival. There is no longer any five years plans.
Furthermore, the generation starting this healing cultural process, would not really know of what came before. They, at most, would see it from the eyes of nostalgic old survivors, while still being a product of the UEG educational system themselves.

I personally think that, the cleansing and restauration of an otherwise tarnished political entity, is refreshing. It also plays a lot in the context of "historical oblivion", seen through much of the old comics. This all culminate into a Zentraedi historian, eventually trying to piece back the impossible, after the invid invasion. The EBSIS is a people without a past, it has been thorn from them, and they try to manufacture it from the broken dreams of their ancestors. Down-playing it, to "Evil Russians", is certainly missing a great opportunity to see them inside their own context.

Also, same question for the Anti-Unification League(?).

The "Anti-Unification League" is Robotech's dub rename of the Anti-Unification Alliance faction that first appeared in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and would be the main antagonist in Macross Zero.

In Robotech, the Anti-Unification League is never fleshed out. Their one and only proper appearance was in From the Stars, where they were just cackling evil mooks who wanted to destroy the United Earth Government for no stated reason. The only identified members were spies who infiltrated the UEDF to sabotage its defense programs, T.R. Edwards and E.A. Leonard. The ending of the comic implies that there may not actually be any such organization, and that the whole thing may just be a false flag to justify the continued military buildup for Earth's defense.

I'm not going through the whole comic collection only for names... but Return to Macross alone had a bunch of these agents. While it was never truly shown from their standpoint, there seem to be a lot of individuals getting inspired to commit various acts, in the name of restored border lines. The gal from the dinner also supports some form of understanding for the movement, being mostly a strong desire for independence and the return of border giving the freedom of cultural identity. The biggest reason given though, why some of the anti-UN wouldn't be false flag, is that some people might have difficulties paying the increased taxes enforced by the new government. (Which might or might not add up... the economical context is left unexplored on purpose. We have no real idea of the damages caused to society in general, or the difficulties coming with this first reconstruction. A few flashbacks informs us of cities reduced to rubble, and orphans running the streets... but this is mostly used to imply a general idea of distress, rather than quantify it. A "Cyber-blitz" also happened, giving us a hint toward some economical crash, which might in turn put a shared weight once the world would be placed under one "restored" economy / industrial complex.)

In Macross, [...] The Anti-Unification Alliance was responsible for a number of heinous terrorist acts including the hijacking of the Oberth-class destroyer Tsiolkovsky and using it to destroy the returning Mars evacuation fleet (killing Misa's lover Riber Fruhling), destroying Grand Cannon II in Australia, multiple attacks on South Ataria Island, and the destruction of St. Petersburg, Russia using a thermonuclear reaction weapon. [...]

Robotech didn't really leave anything for the "Anti-Unification League" to do, since the rewrite presented the scenes that had previously belonged to the Unification Wars as a pre-1999 world war instead.

Then again, there is an attempt post 1999 of piracy onboard Armor 1, under the command of Captain Mayhew at the time. Said attempt to recuperate a lost Neo-Tsarist "chemical biological warfare agent", launched into a Pegasus shuttle. (Quite different from the master era one.) I think I remember also a sabotaged Grand Cannon, and a nuke somewhere in Africa or the middle east... (Could have been the RNU though.) But I am most certain of a few attacks on Macross Island, during the run of that particular series.

So while the Anti-UN war never was quite as fleshed out as the background for it, one does get the feeling it is way more police and counter-terrorism operations, rather than true warfare.
Interestingly enough, the taking over of Armor 1, is also issue 13, from September 1994. But I am at a loss to find a source, other than the Macross Chronicle (2008-2014), for the Tsiolkovsky incident. If it was inspired by a Macross source, this could mean the crew for Return to Macross had access to previously unpublished production material. Or... Like the use of Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and others by Star Trek, this could simply be a coincidental parallel evolution.

The point you were replying to was me stating that, in Robotech, the official setting has little-to-nothing to offer a GM or RPG player outside of playing a soldier in one or more of the wars. If you want to do something else, you're basically stuck having to come up with all of it yourself. That absence of narrative options being what gave rise to nonsense padding inclusions like EBSIS.

Or you can use some Civilian OCCs, and use the war just as a backdrop to something else. Unless you are travelling in space for a long duration, which opens an unused field of the setting, but the tech would at least remain. True though, that there is no real going around the "in time of war", or "space travelling", of the setting. In extreme cases, you could use it as survival and reconstruction, but that is still post-war. Much like Macross might I add.
Both settings are very turbulent for the rights of minorities too. "Activism" could also be considered a background theme, if one must.
But I also find that, for some reason, all RPGs are very good at staging criminally flavoured campaigns. (And this can bring you to a lot of civilian spots.)

With a bit of imagination, and using a nearby genesis pit, one could even design a weird west scenario about supernatural monsters.
Or a hospital drama with aliens, if you are into that kind of stuff.
Forcing "only war", unto a campaign, is not necessarily the most Robotech thing to do.

While the show itself doesn't go into detail, there is the Feudalistic Society that is said to have developed (again this is from the series).

Per HG, the show's dialog should not be taken as an infallible source of information as it contains a lot of errors... this being one of the most obvious ones, as there is very clearly nothing at all feudal about the society in the series. It's right up there for ridiculousness with the narrator's assertion the Invid are unicellular organisms.

The 1st edition RPG mentions a few "baronies" that begins to get out of the ASC's / RDF's control. And though that's not a lot, we can at least imply that non-military personnel are treated as second class citizens, under the ASC. The poor folks are kept in the dark about as much as the brass can get away with, which could be taken as a sign that the civilians are now more akin to a Neo-peasantry. We have no indication that the EBSIS would treat its people in the same way. In fact, if history is any indication by this point, the "Socialist" part of the EBSIS might well means that they get to be more socially egalitarians than the UEG (1st or 2nd of the name).
Sadly though, both points are too underdeveloped for much more than assumptions.

[Seto Kaiba]

[...] it is still a possible interpretation of the no-longer-canon but once-canon material.

In all honesty, what you have here is an interpretation of never-was-canon material that Harmony Gold freely admits was made without their oversight, involvement, or any kind of quality control over the contents.

It might have been at the time of creation, but it is interesting to note what are exactly the "Soviets", into the Robotech context of old.

Really, the question that should be asked is if Robotech updated its official timeline to remove references to the Soviet Union after its dissolution in 1991 the way the OSM did.

However, it's still pretty much immaterial because the [Russian Federation / Soviet Union] was a founding member of the UEG and its territories and people were utterly annihilated in the First Robotech War. There was nobody to found, never mind populate, one new Soviet republic let alone a set of them. Or any other nation/group opposed to the United Earth Government.

In that light, I don't think it is fair to state that the EBSIS would be a cartoon variant of "Evil Russians".

It's perfectly fair, because that's pretty much exactly how they're presented.

I'm not going through the whole comic collection only for names...

Which is fine, because they wouldn't be relevant anyway... source citations from material that's officially considered "Robotech in name only" carry no weight.

Officially, the "Anti-Unification League" in Robotech was left high and dry by Robotech adapting Macross's Unification Wars as the "Global War", save for the From the Stars canon comic depicting them attempting to sabotage UEG defense programs in what may have been a false flag operation based on hints at the end of the comic, implying the organization itself may not exist at all except as a false flag operation by the UEDF to justify its continued arms buildup without revealing it was preparing for an alien invasion.

Then again, there is an attempt post 1999 of piracy onboard Armor 1, [...]

This is a perfect example of how poorly written those old comics were. An act of piracy in 1999 aboard a ship that construction didn't even start on until 2003.

Interestingly enough, the taking over of Armor 1, is also issue 13, from September 1994. But I am at a loss to find a source, other than the Macross Chronicle (2008-2014), for the Tsiolkovsky incident. If it was inspired by a Macross source, this could mean the crew for Return to Macross had access to previously unpublished production material. Or... Like the use of Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and others by Star Trek, this could simply be a coincidental parallel evolution.

Plagiarism and copyright infringement do number among other reasons like "generally terrible quality" and "no creative oversight or coordination" in Harmony Gold's justification for disowning the old comics... so it wouldn't be surprising.

The Tsiolkovsky Incident has been a part of Macross's timeline from its earliest iterations, and can be found in series-contemporary publications. The most accessible internationally was the Macross: Perfect Memory book that came out a full decade before that comic. It's a big part of Bruno J. Global's backstory, since he was the commander of the destroyer Goddard that was responsible for hunting down and sinking the Tsiolkovsky after its hijacking. That infamous victory landed him in the captain's chair aboard the Macross.

Or you can use some Civilian OCCs, and use the war just as a backdrop to something else.

But that requires you to invent the "something else" from scratch because the Robotech setting is so narrowly defined... and even then your options are pretty damned limited.

There's really nothing for civilians to do in the Macross Saga except try to live normally aboard the SDF-1 or live normally on Earth until the Zentradi roll up and kill them. In the Masters Saga, there's even less since there's only a few cities on the entire planet and they're all on lockdown with military protection details because of the war. In the New Generation, there aren't any civilians... there are Invid slaves/subjects on Earth and everyone in space is a soldier.

Both settings are very turbulent for the rights of minorities too. "Activism" could also be considered a background theme, if one must.

... I'd question where you got THAT idea. The only time any kind of bigotry is ever on display, except Kaifun/Kyle's irrational hatred of soldiers, is towards aliens and that's mainly in Robotech as Macross strongly emphasized the "not so different" aspect of the Zentradi with the reveal of their common ancestry with humans. However, in Robotech, aliens living among humans tend to do a lot of dying-out offscreen too so it's not something that can really be explored.

Forcing "only war", unto a campaign, is not necessarily the most Robotech thing to do.

It's the MOST Robotech thing to do. The franchise's installments are literally defined EXCLUSIVELY by which war they're depicting.

Even the most recent comics by Titan make it really REALLY obvious that Robotech is defined almost exclusively by its wars... so much so that Titan effectively classified all Robotech timelines prior to theirs as "bad future" timelines and theirs was defined by having an ending that didn't involve a genocide and jump straight into the next war.

[ShadowLogan]

Seto I am disagreeing with you. I do not think that just because because characters are military they have to be run in a war campaign as the focus of the story, sure war could be the back drop but the focus could be elsewhere.

EDIT: Then again what you might consider a war campaign might be different than myself or others.

Spoiler:

Espionage against who? The United Earth Government is the only show in town from 2005 to the Invid Invasion. Police work involving what? There's no evidence of organized crime in the TV series and the only disorganized criminals ever depicted are the ATAC 15th squad which means you're playing as the GMP and therefore the war campaign. Exploration means you're again just playing the war campaign because civilian spacecraft don't exist in Robotech. Given the number of acknowledged dialog errors in the series, building on something mentioned once in passing but never elaborated upon is not appreciably different from making something up whole cloth. Civilian-owned mecha aren't a thing at any point in Robotech either, nor are mecha martial arts. The music scene doesn't seem to be anything like the modern day one, just lounge singers and the like. I could go on but I think I've beaten my point to death by now.

Police Work is the easiest to define since it seems unlikely that Crime would be stamped out of existince in the civilian world.

Espionage really depends on how the GM has the world setup and when. In the Reconstruction period you could have loyal Zentreadi spying on rogue factions (or the reverse Zentreadi double agents in the RDF). More generally you could have politicians engaging in espionage to get dirt/leverage on another politician. "Splinter/Rogue Groups" (ex. Edwards rogue group w/n the UEEF). Are all City-States of the UEG on friendly terms with each other. Could there be Freedom Fighters or Terrorist Organizations out there opposed to the UEG that they would want to spy on?

Entertainment scene doesn't really get covered I would agree, but it is highly likely new stuff does come out (Yellow Dancer doesn't just rehash Minmei songs, Dana/Angelo's movie was new). While civilian owned mecha aren't a thing, I was thinking more of an underground fighting scene (using recovered/stolen mecha like the mecha martial art in 1E) in the pre-Invid era.

Or... simplest explanation... the Invid Fighter is a variant of a pre-existing design the Masters already had and the Bioroid Interceptors were based on that source design by the Tirolians the UEEF saved.

Actually no that is not the simplest explanation. The Invid Fighter variant was NEW when it was introduced in 2029-30 (Masters tested it before moving to production), and the Masters had been away from Tirol for 15 years (if not more) at this point. The only way the UEEF could get a hold of surplus Invid Fighter parts from this design is at Earth among the City Ships.

The simplest explanation is that the UEEF did not use BIF model Bioroid developed by the Masters in 2029-30, but rather the regular model(s) and they are mistakenly called "Invid Fighters".

Re: Sentinels.
Their displayed support or lack of it, it's what we have. We know the Kabarens offered industrial assistance, and its flat out stated that without it the UEEF would not be in the shape they where when they went after Edwards at Optera. Tirolians/Praxians can be explained away for not being noticeable (with workable, possibly flimsy, excuses). For all we know due to general UEEF xenophobia the aliens could not offer direct assistance like you are looking for and had to settle for supporting roles outside the organization.

[drewkitty ~..~]

Rainy Night....What I remember is that they don't show any air battle in this episode. (thou it's been a long time since I've watched it...) If I am incorrect in this so be it. But I speificly worded what Said to reflect what I remember.

The episode shows an Anti-Unification Alliance aerial attack on the base where Roy and Claudia were stationed at around 11 minutes in. It's the only appearance of the MiM-31 in animation.

Nice of you to explain to the new people the basic idea of the episode that was being talking about.

And the plane seamed to be familiar to me. It got int the RT2 macross book era book. But before that it was in the RT1 book 2, RDF Manual as the UF-14 Supersonic Interceptor.

[Seto Kaiba]

Seto I am disagreeing with you. I do not think that just because because characters are military they have to be run in a war campaign as the focus of the story, sure war could be the back drop but the focus could be elsewhere.

But at the end of the day, the war still dominates the story... which just validates my point, hence why I had to ask if you were disagreeing or not since your answer boiled down to "No, except yes".

Spoiler:

Police Work is the easiest to define since it seems unlikely that Crime would be stamped out of existince in the civilian world.

Given the circumstances, crime should be somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. It's also questionable whether a civilian police force would even exist.

Earth after the First Robotech War is a sparsely populated world where the entire planetary population could fit into a large-ish football stadium and lives in a handful of medium-sized towns. Basics of living like housing and food seem to be provided-for, and there's an obvious labor shortage with the military snapping up young people meaning that unemployment isn't going to drive people to crime. The ingredients for practically all illicit drugs no longer exist and the military has a monopoly on medical supplies, so the drug trade and substance abuse likely don't exist anymore except for alcohol in certain cases. The basis causes for crime - the ones defined by criminologists, anyway - are largely absent from this picture. So yes, we would expect crime would be stamped out or nearly so. There is also the lack of a need for a civilian police force when the planetary government is a de facto military dictatorship and every town is also a military garrison. It's likely the GMP are the planet's only actual police force. The GMP have sophisticated facial recognition software running on robotic law enforcement units, so criminals are likely identified pretty quick either that way or by DNA tests (which were shown to be pretty damned quick in the Macross Saga).

(And given how sparsely populated the planet is, that kind of implies that Nova took a significant portion of Monument City's law enforcement just to flex on Dana when she went AWOL... which says a lot about how peaceful the place is.)

Espionage really depends on how the GM has the world setup and when. In the Reconstruction period you could have loyal Zentreadi spying on rogue factions (or the reverse Zentreadi double agents in the RDF).

But the surviving Zentradi were effectively drafted into the UEEF and left the solar system in 2022.

Also, the idea of a 10 meter tall man (or even just an eight foot tall bright blue man) being in any way inconspicuous is pretty damned silly in and of itself.

More generally you could have politicians engaging in espionage to get dirt/leverage on another politician.

... but the government, officially, is largely just for show and the military are the ones who actually run things.

Helping one powerless figurehead get one over on another equally powerless figurehead lacks so much of the razzle-dazzle that makes espionage interesting.

"Splinter/Rogue Groups" (ex. Edwards rogue group w/n the UEEF). Are all City-States of the UEG on friendly terms with each other. Could there be Freedom Fighters or Terrorist Organizations out there opposed to the UEG that they would want to spy on?

Edwards didn't have a rogue group until the 2040s... and that's playing the war campaign!

Are there even city-states? It doesn't seem like it. There are cities, and then the UEG which is the state. Not like they can beef with each other either, since they're all home to UEDF garrisons that'd put down any fighting in short order.

Could there be freedom fighters or terrorist organizations? When all weaponry, food, medicine, potable water, etc. flows from the UEG... running an anti-government group is pretty implausible.

Entertainment scene doesn't really get covered I would agree, but it is highly likely new stuff does come out (Yellow Dancer doesn't just rehash Minmei songs, Dana/Angelo's movie was new). While civilian owned mecha aren't a thing, I was thinking more of an underground fighting scene (using recovered/stolen mecha like the mecha martial art in 1E) in the pre-Invid era.

Yeah, but these are largely lounge singers and so on... some might write original songs, but there doesn't seem to be a real industry behind it anymore. (I remember one of the dreadful old comics had Minmei's manager reacting to the discovery that she'd stowed away on a shuttle meant for the SDF-3 not by informing the authorities... but by calling the label to announce her next album was going to be a Best-of.) There's no cutthroat industry to succeed in. You're just warbling in front of a succession of small, slightly inebriated crowds. Movies... well... playing a movie actor in a sci-fi RPG is a bit close to RPG recursion at which point you have to ask why you're not just playing a different game based on the plot of whatever the movie was.

As for the giant robot fighting thing, the military has a monopoly on that hardware and its fuel. It'd be impossible in the Macross Saga due to lack of availability. In the Masters Saga it'd be extremely unlikely because of the military not wanting dangerous and highly conspicuous giant robots in civilian hands... and once the Invid show up it's an invitation to being stomped on by space crabs, so that leads to either imminent splatter-death or playing the war campaign.

Actually no that is not the simplest explanation. The Invid Fighter variant was NEW when it was introduced in 2029-30 [...]

Just like the Shadow Fighter was NEW when it was introduced in 2044... it was still 90%+ the same damn plane that'd been in service for twenty years by that point, but it was a "new" model because they slightly redesigned it and added one or two features.

(Masters tested it before moving to production), and the Masters had been away from Tirol for 15 years (if not more) at this point.

... and the Masters technology and empire was stagnant for how long again? There were a LOT of zeroes in that date, if memory serves. Don't they cite half a million years at one point?

Their displayed support or lack of it, it's what we have. We know the Kabarens offered industrial assistance, and its flat out stated that without it the UEEF would not be in the shape they where when they went after Edwards at Optera.

But is that the reality of it, or a diplomatic platitude? We can't say.

[Sambot]

At the time though the Russians were still fighting in Afghanistan. Plus the Cold War didn't end until 1991. Robotech came out in the mid 80's.

But none of that is remotely relevant to the point being made... except in that it demonstrates how utterly unimaginative the EBSIS concept was.

The same could be said about any other power though.

Well, yes and no... it's not actually clear when the Robotech timeline branches from our own. Circumstantial evidence from the canon comics could be used to suggest that it branched as far back as the 1940's. That too, is beside the point, though.

In Robotech, there was a worldwide cessation of hostilities in 1999 and world peace was effectively secured in 2005 when the United Earth Gov't was formed. Soviets as bad guys doesn't work in Robotech after 2005 because 1. the Soviet Union or Russian Federation is part of the UEG so they aren't hostile and 2. there aren't enough people left to have multiple states cropping up after the First Robotech War when the entire human population fits into a handful of lowrise towns in what used to be the Northwestern United States.

They weren't the old Soviets though. They were people returning to what was familiar. Soviets were familiar so they went with that. Plus in Robotech, Earths surviving population wasn't limited to lowrise towns in the Northwest United States. We just don't see it because the characters don't go there.

Eh... it's pretty explicitly and heavily mixed in the OVA. Sure, two of the named characters have Slavic names, but their nationality is never discussed and in D.D.'s case he may be Russian-American given that he mentored the explicitly-American Roy Focker during the Unification Wars. The leader of their ground forces was Arabic (his name's Hassan), and the mission's director was British (Dr. Hasford). Their rifles are a kludge of French and Russian, their VF is one codeveloped between (West) Germany, Israel, and Russia, their destroid is (West) German, their cannons are mainly Swedish, their optical weapons (West) German, Swedish missiles, etc. etc.

I didn't say they were Russian. I said they felt Russian. That the Ant-UN group could even get such high tech and such big equipment shows that not every country was 100% behind the UN.

In Macross, after the First Space War there's a population of ~1 million humans and ~8 million Zentradi, a bunch of undamaged space colonies at the lagrange points, an undamaged colony on the moon, and then emigrant fleets by the dozen leading to a robust interstellar civilization representing (by the 2040s) at least six humanoid species including humanity.

Yes, and they cloned everyone to put them in those fleets. And yes later humanoid species were discovered. Same as in Robotech but until that time it was just the Humans and Zentraedi who are genetically identical so just one.

No, it didn't... that's the point we're getting at here. No such thing ever happens in the Robotech TV series. There are no other governments on Earth after the First Robotech War. The UEG is the only show in town, and the series isn't even shy about why. After the First Robotech War, the UEG has a very literal monopoly on the essentials of life like food, potable water, medical commodities, etc. If you want to leave and start your own country with blackjack and hookers you have two options: "Starve to death" or "Reconsider".

If things were strictly limited to what was in TV there wouldn't be an Army of the Southern Cross because we didn't see any of it during the Macross Saga. Our view of what was going on Earth and even in space was limited to what the main characters were doing. And they were forced out of one city that didn't want their presence there.

Having a variety of nations isn't lazy in that sense... it's lazy in the sense that they couldn't come up with any way to add options that didn't break the show's setting. It's also lazy in the sense you meant because the only idea they could come up with was the kind of moustache-twirling evil Russians who haunted the McCarthyist Red Scare-era nightmares of baby boomers... barely a half-step up from literal Nazis or fictive options like Cobra.

I never got that the Russians were like that. They were just people who decided that joining the UN wasn't for them. It also wasn't just the Russians. There's also Argentina. There were African nations.

Well, no... as noted above it actually doesn't. None of that is part of the actual Robotech story. It's "throw it in" page count padding Palladium came up with that has no real basis in the series. There's the United Earth Government and then the Invid occupation and that's it.

You're referring to the official canon. Canon which has changed over time. In the old Robotech RPG canon the EBISIS was their own nation. Was it page padding? Sure but that doesn't make it less official as far as the RPG goes.

I mean, yeah... but alien invasion is basically all the story has to offer.

Earth is invaded and destroyed by the Zentradi. Then by the Robotech Masters. Then by the Invid. Inbetween those first two, some of the characters go into space and... fight against the Invid invasions of a bunch of other planets. It's gotten to the point where that, in the official canon, there aren't even any actual civilians after the Second Robotech War. Everyone on Earth is either a subject-collaborator or nominal slave under the Invid and the humans living in space explicitly have one and only one career path open to them: military service. The Zentradi are wiped out fighting Earth's wars for it, the Robotech Masters on Earth are just never mentioned again and probably were exterminated. None of the alien races the UEEF goes to such lengths to save ever contribute to the wars Earth is fighting directly unless you count the one that was secretly backstabbing them all along and became the fourth alien race to attempt a human genocide.

Robotech, as a setting, doesn't really offer a lot of alternatives to the war campaign for RPG players unless you add content that isn't in the series. The non-military character classes are largely decorative or for NPCs. There's nothing for players to do aside from fight the war until the New Generation era... and then, the only real options are "fight the war" or "play off-brand Mad Max". Even non-canon additions like EBSIS in 1e are nothing but another party to be at war with.

That's what I mean when I say it's not conducive to a wide variety of adventures.

Like I said, canon has changed. Even with current canon things outside the series have been added. Under the old canon there were still nations (mostly city states I'd guess) and plenty of civilians. I also thought that the reason non of the Sentinels races went to Earth was because there was a fear that those on Earth would see them as additional invaders. Not allies.

There's also lots of things one can do. Rescue missions. Exploratory missions. Salvage and Recovery missions. Humanitarian Missions. R&D Testing. All kinds of drama. It's just that war makes for more interesting games.

Spoiler:

Macross, on the other hand, very much IS conducive to a wide variety of adventures because its official setting is so much more diverse both in terms of places to go and people to meet (or be). Six sentient races, dozens of inhabitable planets that've been colonized, ancient ruins full of Sufficiently Advanced technology, and a thriving postwar culture to explore. You can have whole plots that don't involve war at all, and there are official examples that prove that it works. There's politican and philosophical dramas like Macross the Musiculture, which was the story of a wannabe professional dancer who abandoned his ambitions to pursue a career in politics as an advocate for government reform after a riot. There's sports dramas like Macross 7 Trash or Macross the Ride about athletes chasing fame and victory in high-stakes bouts. There's government conspiracy thrillers about sinister plans to brainwash people. There's dramas about musicians chasing fame as they launch their careers. Stories about space conservationists seeking to protect xenofauna from poaching. Ghost in the Shell-style ruminations about the nature of consciousness, whether being a cyborg makes you less of a "real" human, or whether artificial lifeforms should have a right to life. Tales of muck-raking journalists chasing the next big scoop and taking on the government propaganda machine. Adventurous archaeologists exploring ancient ruins full of near-magical lost technology and the occasional forbidden treasure or bit of knowledge man was not meant to know. Romances! School dramas! Gang violence! Super-hackers going toe-to-to with megacorps in cyberspace.

It covers a LOT of ground without stepping one toe outside the official setting.

That's all true. It also all happened after the original series ended. Going without additional sources, Robotech could cover all those things that Macross does. Many of those things did happen in Robotech. At least in the old canon. Others could have. Robotech really had so much untapped potential. Unfortunately it didn't happen. Which is a shame.

Making everyone a soldier was lazy.

[Sambot]

OK, this one actually threw me a bit... this started out phrased like an objection, but barely two sentences in you've effectively conceded the point. Are you objecting or agreeing with me?

The point you were replying to was me stating that, in Robotech, the official setting has little-to-nothing to offer a GM or RPG player outside of playing a soldier in one or more of the wars. If you want to do something else, you're basically stuck having to come up with all of it yourself. That absence of narrative options being what gave rise to nonsense padding inclusions like EBSIS.

Are you talking about creating adventures for players to play? Isn't that what GMs do for all games, unless following a game already lade out?
Most of the games I've played were like that. Some printed adventure hooks or adventure books but mostly what ever the GM thought up.

Spoiler:

Espionage against who? The United Earth Government is the only show in town from 2005 to the Invid Invasion. Police work involving what? There's no evidence of organized crime in the TV series and the only disorganized criminals ever depicted are the ATAC 15th squad which means you're playing as the GMP and therefore the war campaign. Exploration means you're again just playing the war campaign because civilian spacecraft don't exist in Robotech. Given the number of acknowledged dialog errors in the series, building on something mentioned once in passing but never elaborated upon is not appreciably different from making something up whole cloth. Civilian-owned mecha aren't a thing at any point in Robotech either, nor are mecha martial arts. The music scene doesn't seem to be anything like the modern day one, just lounge singers and the like. I could go on but I think I've beaten my point to death by now.

The UEG being the show doesn't mean petty theft doesn't exist. It doesn't mean corporate espionage doesn't happen. And what about the Zentraedi workers who rebelled? Sure you call out the destroids when they're full size but the micron ones? Call the MPs or the Police.

You're also limiting yourself to the series. If we did that, nothing that doesn't happen inside the 36 episodes of Macross happen either. Since they are included, Why couldn't Mecha Su Dai be a thing in Robotect? There's full size Zentradi wrestling in Macross. There's also what Breetai did to Hikaru's/Rick's VF in hand to hand combat. Why can't the two be combined as a sport in Robotech?

And how can you say that there aren't any civilian owned mecha in Robotech? Most of Scott's band are civilians. None of them had their Cyclones taken away when they finally got to Reflex Point. There's also that one city guy with the Ghost Alphas. Nor do we know who all those wrecked mecha belong to when the group met Annie. And those are ones we know about in the show. There's still the rest of the world. So yeah, civilians own mecha.

As for exploration, how do we know there aren't civilian ships? We only see the military side of things. Just because the show is focused on the military doesn't mean that civilians aren't doing things.



Confining the side discussion to a Spoiler tag for ease of reading:

Spoiler:

Except by 2014 we know that the UEG is starting to fracture, Monument City was granted autonomy that is in the series itseslf (though by 2029 its the Capital location of the UEG).

Or... we could take the simplest and most obvious explanation that the autonomy Monument City was granted was them being allowed to manage their own affairs under the UEG instead of having the UEG govern them directly. This isn't Monument City leaving the UEG, but the UEG telling Monument City that it has its act together enough that the UEG thinks it's ready to manage its own local affairs.

That is one explanation. The other is they're independent.

While the show itself doesn't go into detail, there is the Feudalistic Society that is said to have developed (again this is from the series).

Per HG, the show's dialog should not be taken as an infallible source of information as it contains a lot of errors... this being one of the most obvious ones, as there is very clearly nothing at all feudal about the society in the series. It's right up there for ridiculousness with the narrator's assertion the Invid are unicellular organisms.

We do know that various nations formed though. Otherwise there wouldn't be an ASC. At least not in the old canon.

The fact the UEEF acquired Bioroid Invid Fighters (which in the show are late model introduction) means the UEEF had to have acquired the stockpile from the RM fleet at Earth, which opens up the possibility that the UEEF transported not just Bioroids back to Tirol but also survivors (especially ones with technical knowledge to assist in R&D on their recovered technology). [...]

Or... simplest explanation... the Invid Fighter is a variant of a pre-existing design the Masters already had and the Bioroid Interceptors were based on that source design by the Tirolians the UEEF saved.

That would be my guess. The bioroid pilots in the Sentinels sure didn't act like the Master's bioroid pilots. Old canon I know but so it the EBSIS.

They did contribute to the war against the Invid (Prelude).

Allegedly. And only in ways that were either unnecessary or irrelevant... like manufacturing support when the UEEF had at least one (allegedly multiple) factory satellites at their disposal.

None of them actually join the UEEF, pick up a gun, and fight. They cower behind the humans and offer token logistical support, if that.

I remember the factory falling apart and they were having trouble just keeping the Battle Pod lines working. I'm not sure they could completely refurbish a moon sized factory without a lot of help. I also remember a lot of sentinels aliens fighting in the comic books and novels. More than that would have required repairing their own infrastructures after the Invid's occupation. I also thought the reason most Sentinels didn't go to Earth was fear they'd be seen as invaders.

Tirolians and Praxians superficially blend in with humans, so short of an outright statement that so-so is non-human, its possible they contributed manpower and we'd never notice.

With a few exceptions, the Tirolians have a ghastly inhuman pallor. The Praxians are a race of nine foot tall space amazons. Neither of those is blending in invisibly, and it's worth remembering that the UEEF has some evident organizational xenophobia going on in Prelude so it's unlikely that they would consider aliens trustworthy enough to include in their forces. Even if they could pass for human, all the cultural differences would give them away as inhuman immediately... and we got a goooood look at how the UEEF's base attitude is "the only good alien is a dead alien" in RTSC proper. I doubt that any Tirolians or Praxians want to put up with that open bigotry.

[Sambot]

Only if you think the politics of a United Earth Government should be the same as United States government policy. You might as well say, "So Americans as bad guys still works."

That could work too.

The EBSIS was engaged in open warfare against the RDF since their introduction in Book Two. (Admittedly, later books backed off from that.)

So was the ASC. And while here were conflicts, they didn't escalate to declarations of war. If they had, well, there's Breetai and his ship. A few rounds of ortillery would end the war pretty quick.

In their early days the A.S.C. is as much if not more a bad guy than the EBSIS.

That's from the novels. In the first edition of the RPG, the ASC is just another good-guy organization, just like the RDF or REF.

That doesn't mean that they got along well. Lenard for one didn't like what the REF was doing. I doubt he was the only one to share such sentiments.

The EBSIS is more an alternative to the RDF and ASC.

The EBSIS starts wars of conquest and arms mass murderers. It not so evil as to be unplayable, but it's definitely a bad-guy organization.

And the others didn't? The RDF continued to hunt down Zentraedi as did the ASC. The ASC also tried to fight a war of genocide against the Masters.
Any power can be made bad. As for the EBSIS's war against the Zentraedi, it's still playable. The character group doesn't have to be assigned to that theatre. If they are they don't have to be as enthusiastic and even try to talk their leaders out of continuing the war.

[Sambot]

(sigh)
I didn't finish reading but I did notice two things kept popping up. New canon and what sources could be included. Why?

As we're talking about the EBSIS why does new canon keep coming into this? New canon didn't exist at the time. If it did, the EBSIS wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

And why is it okay for Macross to have sources beyond the TV show but Robotech can't? They each have a lot of things in common and a few things that make them unique. What Macross has going for it is that it's much better fleshed out. That doesn't make what Robotech less valid, yet it's being limited.

Between new canon only and limited Robotech's sources, it's like trying to arm wrestle with both arms behind your back.

The other thing I've noticed is war having to be involved. Why? Why does war have to be involved in story? Many people served in the military and never went to war. They were deployed on humanitarian missions though. They're deployed on Search & Rescue missions all the time. Interdiction missions. Border patrol. R&D Testing. Exploration. All of those missions and probably more all happen outside of war. They can all be played and that's just with military characters. There could be USO tours or just activity in a city. Could be a body guard protecting a celebrity from a stalker. Could be a Paranormal Researcher looking for ghosts in a wrecked ship or the ruins of a city. Could be a Rancher trying to get her cattle to market. Any game that can be played in Macross could be played in Robotech. Some would require a few leaps of creativity but they could be done.
The only thing limiting how you play is imagination.

[Seto Kaiba]

They weren't the old Soviets though.

True... they were much worse. They were written like a Best Hits collection of the Soviet boogeymen tales from the Red Scare.

There's a reason Harmony Gold put its foot down and banned Palladium from including EBSIS in RT2E. It was a blatantly terrible idea and it contradicted the series outright.

Plus in Robotech, Earths surviving population wasn't limited to lowrise towns in the Northwest United States. We just don't see it because the characters don't go there.

They're a bit more spread out after the Invid invasion, but no... there were only a handful of towns in the entire world after the Zentradi got done with the planet, and those were explicitly built near the SDF-1's landing site.

If things were strictly limited to what was in TV there wouldn't be an Army of the Southern Cross because we didn't see any of it during the Macross Saga. Our view of what was going on Earth and even in space was limited to what the main characters were doing. And they were forced out of one city that didn't want their presence there.

It feels like you're trying to demand that I prove a negative here... the existence of these rival powers is ruled-out in the Robotech series proper.

I never got that the Russians were like that. They were just people who decided that joining the UN wasn't for them. It also wasn't just the Russians. There's also Argentina. There were African nations.

None of which should exist at all... partly because they're written as mildly xenophobic cliches at best, but mainly because the actual Robotech series is pretty clear that those regions were wiped clean off the face of the Earth by the Zentradi.

You're referring to the official canon. Canon which has changed over time. In the old Robotech RPG canon the EBISIS was their own nation. Was it page padding? Sure but that doesn't make it less official as far as the RPG goes.

Harmony Gold has been very clear that the old comics, the novels, the "1st Edition" RPG, etc. were never canon.

What you're arguing here is "fanon", or "headcanon".

There's also lots of things one can do. Rescue missions. Exploratory missions. Salvage and Recovery missions. Humanitarian Missions. R&D Testing. All kinds of drama. It's just that war makes for more interesting games.

... but everything you listed is essentially wartime activity. The point I'm making is that the Robotech RPG is basically only useful for gaming in the war story as soldiers and your list of counter-examples are all non-combat military operations.

Are you talking about creating adventures for players to play? Isn't that what GMs do for all games, unless following a game already lade out?
Most of the games I've played were like that. Some printed adventure hooks or adventure books but mostly what ever the GM thought up.

Generally, one aspires not to break the setting in doing so... which is the main criticism leveled at EBSIS and the other Palladium page-fillers.

Spoiler:

The UEG being the show doesn't mean petty theft doesn't exist. It doesn't mean corporate espionage doesn't happen. And what about the Zentraedi workers who rebelled? Sure you call out the destroids when they're full size but the micron ones? Call the MPs or the Police.

Petty theft might exist, but are players really going to derive much excitement out of a campaign entirely focused on arresting shoplifters?

Corporate espionage? That's debatable, given that all advanced technology seems to be single-source from the United Earth Government's armed forces as well as the advanced fuel to power it. All of the UEDF/UEEF equipment is, in a weird cliche, made by "military scientists" ala Star Trek's Starfleet engineers rather than developed by defense contractors.

... and the MPs are soldiers, and the window of possible Zentradi worker rebellions is brief since the UEEF basically deported them all back into space before 2022.

You're also limiting yourself to the series. If we did that, nothing that doesn't happen inside the 36 episodes of Macross happen either. Since they are included, Why couldn't Mecha Su Dai be a thing in Robotect? There's full size Zentradi wrestling in Macross. There's also what Breetai did to Hikaru's/Rick's VF in hand to hand combat. Why can't the two be combined as a sport in Robotech?

I'm limiting myself to the official setting materials for both franchises. That's more than just the TV series. So your strawman here needs to go see a wizard quite urgently.

Anyway... putting aside the silliness of giant robot martial arts because the mecha aren't controlled that way, the main sticking point there is the non-availability of mecha to civilians. In general, giant robots are expensive as all get-out. The original VF-1 tech manual put the flyaway cost of a pre-war VF-1A at a whopping $126 million. That's not the sort of thing a civilian can afford to buy and then smash up for fun. In Macross, time and improvements in automated manufacturing technology (like 20 repo'd factory satellites) brought the cost down and improved reliability to the point that a reasonably well-to-do civilian with a sizable nest egg could afford a disarmed VF-1 at a military disposal sale and peacetime or a stripped-down purpose-built VF meant for civilian use. Robotech's setting never got that period of postwar peace or the massive boost in manufacturing, with the military having exclusive control over postwar development and production and being ever-focused on its next war effort like preparing the UEEF or bolstering Earth's defenses. No mecha were ever sold off to civilians. The remaining VF-1s and Destroids were, depending on the version of the story you're looking at, either sent into space with the UEEF and used until they fell apart or scrapped in structural analyses to help refine future generations of mecha and recycle their raw materials.

And how can you say that there aren't any civilian owned mecha in Robotech? Most of Scott's band are civilians. None of them had their Cyclones taken away when they finally got to Reflex Point. There's also that one city guy with the Ghost Alphas. Nor do we know who all those wrecked mecha belong to when the group met Annie. And those are ones we know about in the show. There's still the rest of the world. So yeah, civilians own mecha.

Ah... you've got a false equivalency here. Half of Scott's band are trained soldiers, and the ones who aren't didn't acquire their Cyclones through legitimate channels. They were salvaged, in extremis, from wrecked military transport craft and they were allowed to keep them when they finally linked up with the surviving armed forces because by that point they were resistance fighters being led by a trained soldier (Scott), making them irregulars (volunteer soldiers). It's a very safe bet that, as they were civilians, the military would've confiscated their cyclones once they started cleaning up all the mess left behind by the Invid war. Either that or drafted them.

Donald Maxwell's definitely an unusual case since it's never explained where or how he acquired those unmanned fighters from... it's very unlikely that it was through legitimate channels though, even though he's fabulously wealthy. Even in the original story it's a complete and unexplored mystery where or how he got them. Given the circumstances, he likely acquired them through salvage too... but they were also just display pieces to him that he never intended to actually operate.

As for the wrecked mecha when the group met Annie, it's established pretty clearly that the town she was in had been trapping soldiers and selling them out to the Invid for quite some time.

As for exploration, how do we know there aren't civilian ships?

There's no evidence that there are, and the military has a monopoly on the manufacturing and the essential fuel for space travel.

We do know that various nations formed though. Otherwise there wouldn't be an ASC.

The "ASC" is just a fanciful name for the United Earth Defense Force after the First Robotech War. Its existence does not imply anything about the existence of other nations that the show rules out.

Spoiler:

I didn't say they were Russian. I said they felt Russian. That the Ant-UN group could even get such high tech and such big equipment shows that not every country was 100% behind the UN.

Feelings don't determine reality. Facts do.

Also, why are you trying to argue that "not every country was 100% behind the UN" like it's a revelation? There's a whole period called the UNIFICATION WARS devoted to that fact. Mind you, that the Anti-Unification Alliance obtained advanced weaponry was not so much indicative of national support as amoral defense contractors in various countries being willing to arm militants and terrorists for a price or using them to conduct illicit testing of their new weapons in live combat. Especially since some of those defense contractors were benefitting directly from development data the Alliance agents stole from the UN Forces at various points. (The SV-51's development by Dornier, IAI, and Sukhoi was only possible because D.D. Ivanov stole a large amount of VF-0 development data when he went and defected.)

Yes, and they cloned everyone to put them in those fleets. And yes later humanoid species were discovered. Same as in Robotech but until that time it was just the Humans and Zentraedi who are genetically identical so just one.

But in the context of those remarks, we're looking at the scope of the setting as a whole... so six. Seven if you count bio-androids. Maybe eight if you count the virtuoids. Or nine if you consider the cyborgs and bodiless cyber-intelligences a distinct category.

That's all true. It also all happened after the original series ended. Going without additional sources, Robotech could cover all those things that Macross does. Many of those things did happen in Robotech. At least in the old canon. Others could have. Robotech really had so much untapped potential. Unfortunately it didn't happen. Which is a shame.

No... it can't. Even with the few canon or "broad strokes" canon expansions of the story that were produced after the TV series ended, Robotech is still entirely war-focused. Much of what I listed simply isn't possible if you're playing the Robotech setting anything like accurately. (Plus a lot of it just flat out doesn't exist in Robotech.)

This "old canon" you keep referring to... well... isn't. And never was. It was basically a for-profit fan-fiction free-for-all.

[Seto Kaiba]

I didn't finish reading but I did notice two things kept popping up. New canon and what sources could be included. Why?

Because if you're going to discuss a topic, you should stick to sources that are actually relevant and applicable to the topic.

Citing from comics or novels that were never a part of Robotech's official setting materials, that weren't source material for the game, and were so poorly and inconsistently written that Harmony Gold considers them Robotech in name only is not really conducive to discussing the topic. It's little different to citing fan fiction.

As we're talking about the EBSIS why does new canon keep coming into this? New canon didn't exist at the time. If it did, the EBSIS wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Uh... that one's on you, I'm afraid.

The point we've been making about EBSIS not fitting the setting is based on the TV series itself.

And why is it okay for Macross to have sources beyond the TV show but Robotech can't?

That's also a distortion of your own making, to be honest.

The only distinction in sourcing being made here is materials that were considered part of their respective official settings. Where this runs into problems is attempting to force Robotech material that was never part of its official setting, and in many cases blatantly contradicts it, into the discussion of why EBSIS is a blatant contradiction of the official setting. (Two wrongs don't make a right.)

The other thing I've noticed is war having to be involved. Why?

That is the very point I posed as the origin of these problems, thank you.

Both Robotech and the Robotech RPG are so narrowly written that the focus is effectively EXCLUSIVELY on the wars. That's why, when the time came to expand upon Robotech to pad out a couple books, all Palladium came up with was more baddies to fight even if it meant breaking with the actual Robotech setting by adding cliched rival powers like EBSIS in a period not only weren't there any... there wasn't any opportunity for them to emerge.

So unless you go completely nuts with inventing your own original material, you're kinda stuck either in the war or in its immediate proximity.

[mech798]

Plus in Robotech, Earths surviving population wasn't limited to lowrise towns in the Northwest United States. We just don't see it because the characters don't go there.

They're a bit more spread out after the Invid invasion, but no... there were only a handful of towns in the entire world after the Zentradi got done with the planet, and those were explicitly built near the SDF-1's landing site.

Well, there was NYC, which evidently the Zentraedi managed to totally miss, as well as all the cities Scott & crew managed to go through.
Most notably, the existence of the Amazon jungle area shows that huge parts of the earth weren't hit. So I think we can say that the Macross TV series, gives ample reason to believe that the zentraedi bombardment was spotty in the extreme--and given the Russian mania for deep shelters, if you want, you can quite reasonable argue lots of people may have survived. (And yes, I know that NYC is one of those weird things you're just going to get when you're jamming three series together--in Macross it was pretty much zorch, zorch, zorch.)

Also, unless something's been added to Robotech since I stopped keeping track of it, they never did the MAcross cloning project, so all those people had to be coming from somewhere.

Are you talking about creating adventures for players to play? Isn't that what GMs do for all games, unless following a game already lade out?
Most of the games I've played were like that. Some printed adventure hooks or adventure books but mostly what ever the GM thought up.

Generally, one aspires not to break the setting in doing so... which is the main criticism leveled at EBSIS and the other Palladium page-fillers.

Buit should that be a criticism? Harmony Gold's story telling capabilities make the Syfy "sharknado" series look like Oscar material. You could honestly write a supplement about proto-culture powered robot-flying sharks that go nuts and you'd still be well above Shadow Chronicles. I think turning the EBSIS into a stereotypical evil empire was a bad choice, but OTH, at least a lot of the Palladium products between the Macross and Southern Cross eras, did give the players stuff to do that wasn't solely "shoot up renegade zentradi. Shoot up more renegade zentraedi, etc."

IE for all of its problems, it still gave the GM and players more breadth of action then HG's take on affairs.
If it broke the setting, it was because the setting as is, was completely incompatible with any kind of RPG--because as you've mentioned there wasn't anything for players to do except a very narrowly focused war story where the only characters who can do anything are the main characters in the series.

Granted, this is why I don't expect much in the way of more robotech RPGs, and why anyone who is smart should be trying to take advantage of the Japanese focus on computer gaming to see if they could grab the rights to the TTRPG for Macross on the cheap. Unlike Robotech, Macross does let you play around with all kinds of stories, including ones where nary a giant robot shows up, like a detective trying to figure out why someone was murdered on a colony fleet, or the struggles to set up shop on a new world that has just been settled.

You quite simply can't do that with Robotech, so unless you are willing to bring in stuff that is outside canon, you're stuck... being a soldier. And that's pretty much it.

[xunk16]

Officially, the "Anti-Unification League" in Robotech was left high and dry by Robotech adapting Macross's Unification Wars as the "Global War", save for the From the Stars canon comic depicting them attempting to sabotage UEG defense programs in what may have been a false flag operation based on hints at the end of the comic, implying the organization itself may not exist at all except as a false flag operation by the UEDF to justify its continued arms buildup without revealing it was preparing for an alien invasion.

Except, even the 2nd edition mentions a Global Civil War as per the core book (Gold edition - might be in others, but that's what I have), and that it was dragged-on as "the global war" by the Anti-Unification League (as per the Macross saga Sourcebook). Now, one can limit oneself to very sparse information, to the frontier of being too little to plan a campaign, or one can also accept that published material that can be shared by the fans but not modified by it does represent more than fanon or headcanon non-published as a licensed product. Contrary to more literal unofficial sources, such as Tim Wing's timeline, or the URRG 2066, that despite being widely circulated, are definitely fanon.
Especially while put into chronological context of publication, where the question is concerned.
The EBSIS, having disappeared between editions, doesn't mean it hasn't left a hole. And since the dates weren't changed that much by the second edition, the shape of most of what was done still can be considered to be retro-compatible in case of need. At least that's what I think, but then again, every campaign is "officially" very marginal fanon, from the moment the character sheets are made...

However you spin it, prior to cancelling it, HG has profited from these comics and gave them the OK to happen in the first place. At one time, they were what the Robotech fandom had access to. So they can be culturally relevant when writing an RPG book about the setting, or planning a campaign in need of explanations for scarce reference in the manuals.
While their status, as contested sources, can be seen as freedom for the GMs, their existence is still better than nothing... until HG finally profit from their truce with Big West; to retcon everything into oblivion, possibly pushing the whole calendar by half a century or more.

Then again, there is an attempt post 1999 of piracy onboard Armor 1, [...]

This is a perfect example of how poorly written those old comics were. An act of piracy in 1999 aboard a ship that construction didn't even start on until 2003.

In your haste to laugh it all away, it would seem you missed the meaning of "post" as "after" or "subsequent to". My English is not perfect, but I still think I used this comprehensively enough. Return to Macross starts in 2004, issue #12 is 2005. Issue #13, which I used as source for my precedent post, is clearly dated as March of 2005, which still puts it more or less 2 years after 2003. I'll admit I was lazy with the way I wrote it, but I still stand by the argument... however tenuous it is.

Plagiarism and copyright infringement do number among other reasons like "generally terrible quality" and "no creative oversight or coordination" in Harmony Gold's justification for disowning the old comics... so it wouldn't be surprising.

You are way more familiar with the legal issues that I'll ever care to be. So I'm not surprised this would be your stance. But in light of the recent truce between Big West and HG, one can dream that this "plagiarism" might mean that, at some point, the Anti-UN league will be as fleshed out from one setting to the next. However, considering that both sotry arcs were created from the same source... and are considerably divergent, I'd put the similarities on the same scale as those of the Transformer original anime Vs the Marvel comics : different stories.

The Tsiolkovsky Incident has been a part of Macross's timeline from its earliest iterations, and can be found in series-contemporary publications. The most accessible internationally was the Macross: Perfect Memory book that came out a full decade before that comic. It's a big part of Bruno J. Global's backstory, since he was the commander of the destroyer Goddard that was responsible for hunting down and sinking the Tsiolkovsky after its hijacking. That infamous victory landed him in the captain's chair aboard the Macross.

Thanks for the source.
But in other words, this also mean that the authors from the comics specifically chose to create a new occurrence rather than rehash their possible Macross source. It might have been adapted / "plagiarized" in order to keep the flavor intact, but that would still be development available on the subject. Both occurrences teaches us that infiltration and hijacking were part of the Anti-UN M.O. None of them specifically implies that only one hijacking would have ever taken place.

There's really nothing for civilians to do in the Macross Saga except try to live normally aboard the SDF-1 or live normally on Earth until the Zentradi roll up and kill them. In the Masters Saga, there's even less since there's only a few cities on the entire planet and they're all on lockdown with military protection details because of the war. In the New Generation, there aren't any civilians... there are Invid slaves/subjects on Earth and everyone in space is a soldier.

You'd be surprised what you can do with civilians being lied to about the destruction of Macross Island, civilians trying to flee / live with the military lock-down of the ASC, or "Invid Slaves"* that just happens to hold a civilian skill set but still hope for the survival of their communities. We have two players wilfully keeping their civilian OCCs right now, albeit still in 1998. Now, given they might eventually use the 1st ed rule for switching classes, but that part of their lives will live on.
This mainstream approach for a campaign is, however, very different than most tables I've been at. (Having to write an eulogy for my deceased father, an ex-cadre from the Chinese revolution succumbed to Alzheimer during play, was a... different experience. Still playing a mechanized infantry character myself though.)

*I still consider "Invid slaves" to refer more clearly to the ones interned in camps, as per the 2nd ed RPG. Their described lives are considerably more miserable than that of those who just pay tributes to the invaders as collaborators... Nonetheless, either characters shouldn't be necessarily forced to be played with military OCCs. Especially young ones. Now you might feel pity for the GM that has such weird players, but they do exist.

Movies... well... playing a movie actor in a sci-fi RPG is a bit close to RPG recursion at which point you have to ask why you're not just playing a different game based on the plot of whatever the movie was.

I'd say running a reconstruction of the industry, having to plea trough red tape with aliens and the military for supplies and screenplay approval... Would still be pretty much Robotech. Silly as Exedore's singing, but nonetheless... And if it ever fell flat, you could always throw in some troodi hooligans, coming in to crash the studio. Any civilian games though, must comes from the will of the players to get it rough, considering all that will be happening around them.
Or... One could be lucky on the rolls and end-up with a reconstruction era Johnny Cage.

[ShadowLogan]

But at the end of the day, the war still dominates the story... which just validates my point, hence why I had to ask if you were disagreeing or not since your answer boiled down to "No, except yes".

I do not know if I would say that War has to dominate the story. Casablanca is hardly considered a war movie, even though it takes place in WWII.

It's why I said what one considers a war story may not hold for others.

Spoiler:

Given the circumstances, crime should be somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. It's also questionable whether a civilian police force would even exist.

A Civilian Police Force might not exist or be covered by the Civil Defense Corps (in terms of mission), but the point is that crime would still exist and would need some method of response.

Re: Population Size
While the show establishes the population post RoD at under 100k humans, Shadow Chronicles also establishes there are millions of people on the planet by 2044. The only way for Shadow Chronicles population to be accurate is if A. More survivors than what Leonard stated or B. Population Growth Rate was unlike anything seen in human history. The RPG (1E and 2E) along with the Novels (and presumably the old comics) favor A over B.

But the surviving Zentradi were effectively drafted into the UEEF and left the solar system in 2022.

Also, the idea of a 10 meter tall man (or even just an eight foot tall bright blue man) being in any way inconspicuous is pretty damned silly in and of itself.

Presumably when it comes to spying you would send the Zentreadi to infiltrate other Zentreadi groups where they are less likely to attract attention (Gloval did that, Khyron did the reverse). I would also point out that not all Zentreadi are 8ft micronized either (and skin tone could be altered, though it probably helps to know what is causing the blue-skin tone)

While they might all have been drafted in 2022, there is still that 8 year gap between Khyron's rebellion being ended and the departure in 2022 ("Battlecry" video game and FTS comic both establish the continuation of Zentreadi rebellion). Not to mention groups during the 2012-3 period that where not affiliated with Khyron (who was in hiding).

... but the government, officially, is largely just for show and the military are the ones who actually run things.

The Military may run things at the "National" level, but is that still true at the "Local" level. Civilian Mayors are known to exist.

Edwards didn't have a rogue group until the 2040s... and that's playing the war campaign!

Are there even city-states? It doesn't seem like it. There are cities, and then the UEG which is the state. Not like they can beef with each other either, since they're all home to UEDF garrisons that'd put down any fighting in short order.

Could there be freedom fighters or terrorist organizations? When all weaponry, food, medicine, potable water, etc. flows from the UEG... running an anti-government group is pretty implausible.

Edwards is a 2040s thing I agree, but Edwards was just an example of a UEEF/UEDF military group going rogue. Campaign wise you could create others (1E RPG did this IIRC x2 in campaign modules).

I use the term City-Sates since we only hear about "City XYZ", nothing about political sub-divisions (like "county" or "state/province") in the post ROD Earth.

FF/T organizations certainly are possible, the Zentreadi rebels certainly showed that it could be done, which means humans can do it to.

Yeah, but these are largely lounge singers and so on... some might write original songs, but there doesn't seem to be a real industry behind it anymore

Its hard to say really. It seems unlikely that the industries are wiped out (for the entire 2012-2030 period), Bowie was listening to a Minmei CD which seems like an unsupportable product without new material over the long run. The focus of the show (and production variables) would mean it would not get as much emphasis. You could also have entities competing for recovered pre-Rain media.

As for the giant robot fighting thing, the military has a monopoly on that hardware and its fuel.

The Zentreadi Rebellion shows that this is not the case. Khyron's forces had ample mecha supplies, PC was in short supply (that's for military action, hosting underground fight league probably doesn't take as much), but it was shown to not be exclusive to the UEDF. The UEDF could also provide fuel and surplus out-dated mecha if it was above ground.

Just like the Shadow Fighter was NEW when it was introduced in 2044... it was still 90%+ the same damn plane that'd been in service for twenty years by that point, but it was a "new" model because they slightly redesigned it and added one or two features.

It's those added features that make it a BIF, just like a Shadow Fighter really isn't a Shadow Fighter without its Protoculture Cloaking Device.

... and the Masters technology and empire was stagnant for how long again? There were a LOT of zeroes in that date, if memory serves. Don't they cite half a million years at one point?

Technically is "over" 1/2 million years by the dialogue (in actual practice it has issues but that is a topic for another time), at least in terms of Protoculture discovery (Ep31) per Gloval.

But is that the reality of it, or a diplomatic platitude? We can't say.

I agree we can not say what the actual reality of the Sentinels support actually means, we only have what the dialogue states, which suggests Kabarren/Haydonite assistance was what allowed the UEEF to recover as quickly as it did.

If things were strictly limited to what was in TV there wouldn't be an Army of the Southern Cross because we didn't see any of it during the Macross Saga. Our view of what was going on Earth and even in space was limited to what the main characters were doing. And they were forced out of one city that didn't want their presence there.

Actually the Army of the Southern Cross does get a mention in background dialogue by a TV announcer in one of the last episodes of Macross Saga (IIRC Ep35).

[Seto Kaiba]

I do not know if I would say that War has to dominate the story. Casablanca is hardly considered a war movie, even though it takes place in WWII.

At the time it was made, Casablanca was set in the real world's present day... that's rather different from being set in a fictional future that has Warhammer 40,000-esque commitment to a future of ONLY WAR. (Something even Titan poked fun of.)

Spoiler:

A Civilian Police Force might not exist or be covered by the Civil Defense Corps (in terms of mission), but the point is that crime would still exist and would need some method of response.

Yes, but we're talking about game-worthy material here... I can't for the life of me imagine players queuing up to play the GMP on an high-stakes, pulse-pounding, anti-littering campaign.

Re: Population Size
While the show establishes the population post RoD at under 100k humans, Shadow Chronicles also establishes there are millions of people on the planet by 2044.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not), but isn't HG's usual position that the TV series trumps later works in the event of a contradiction?

The only way for Shadow Chronicles population to be accurate is if A. More survivors than what Leonard stated or B. Population Growth Rate was unlike anything seen in human history. The RPG (1E and 2E) along with the Novels (and presumably the old comics) favor A over B.

Realistically, it should be B since the Robotech TV series explicitly establishes that the destruction of Earth's surface was total and no survivors beyond those who were with the SDF-1.

While they might all have been drafted in 2022, there is still that 8 year gap between Khyron's rebellion being ended and the departure in 2022 ("Battlecry" video game and FTS comic both establish the continuation of Zentreadi rebellion). Not to mention groups during the 2012-3 period that where not affiliated with Khyron (who was in hiding).

Granted, there is that 8 year period where nothing of interest happens... though it's worth noting most of the Zentradi were canonically already dead by that point.

In the 2012-2013 period, you're effectively running in the midst of the First Robotech War story and it was the military policing the Zentradi at that point not the police... if the police even exist.

The Military may run things at the "National" level, but is that still true at the "Local" level. Civilian Mayors are known to exist.

But, as you yourself established earlier, they lack governmental autonomy... they're just referring matters up the chain of command and taking orders from above. (Which is sensible given that matters of resources were the exclusive domain of the military anyway.)

Edwards is a 2040s thing I agree, but Edwards was just an example of a UEEF/UEDF military group going rogue.

Something that was only possible because Edwards and his goon squad were isolated from the rest of the UEEF and therefore able to prevent their plans from being detected, and dealing with incredibly lax oversight from the heavily distracted and INCREDIBLY naive UEEF top brass under the Hunters.

It's not the kind of thing that would be plausible back on Earth in peacetime, where the UEDF is policing itself (literally and figuratively) and there's nothing like a war to keep the brass distracted from a potential armed uprising in the works. The closest thing to a UEDF/UEEF military unit "going rogue' is the 15th squad repeatedly going AWOL, and the GMP is on their arse within minutes of them acting out and rolls out whole platoons of MPs to arrest their leaders.

I use the term City-Sates since we only hear about "City XYZ", nothing about political sub-divisions (like "county" or "state/province") in the post ROD Earth.

Considering the scale, it's unlikely such divisions would exist... there aren't enough people.

FF/T organizations certainly are possible, the Zentreadi rebels certainly showed that it could be done, which means humans can do it to.

Zentradi rebels were only able to pull it off right after the First Robotech War when the UEDF was stretched so thin you could see daylight through 'em, and they still mainly just got curbstomped by the military repeatedly.

Its hard to say really. It seems unlikely that the industries are wiped out (for the entire 2012-2030 period), Bowie was listening to a Minmei CD which seems like an unsupportable product without new material over the long run.

Considering that, even in 2044 in RTSC, Minmei still seems to be the only act in town musically... I think a pretty good argument could be made that the industry was wiped out. Reprinting the physical media doesn't require labels, studios, etc. Bowie could, for all we know, be listening to a copy of a copy of a bootleg tape.

The Zentreadi Rebellion shows that this is not the case. Khyron's forces had ample mecha supplies, PC was in short supply (that's for military action, hosting underground fight league probably doesn't take as much), but it was shown to not be exclusive to the UEDF. The UEDF could also provide fuel and surplus out-dated mecha if it was above ground.

Khyron's forces were Zentradi operating what little Zentradi mecha they could salvage from the wrecked ships that crashed on Earth and between what they could salvage and steal could barely keep their handful of mecha going... and that was lost when the UEDF blew it up. Fuel supplies were noted to be short in the postwar era, rationed by the military. Mecha were not available to civilians by legitimate means and human tech requires maintenance, so keeping a salvaged mecha going would only tip the authorities off to the fact that someone was illegally operating one.

It's those added features that make it a BIF, just like a Shadow Fighter really isn't a Shadow Fighter without its Protoculture Cloaking Device.

Yes, that is the distinction we're drawing here... my point being that the Bioroid Interceptor is most likely another "new" model independently developed from an existing one with mild changes, and that the Bioroid Invid Fighter was the same.

Technically is "over" 1/2 million years by the dialogue (in actual practice it has issues but that is a topic for another time), at least in terms of Protoculture discovery (Ep31) per Gloval.

OK, so that's still 500 millennia since their technology peaked and stagnated...

I agree we can not say what the actual reality of the Sentinels support actually means, we only have what the dialogue states, which suggests Kabarren/Haydonite assistance was what allowed the UEEF to recover as quickly as it did.

Which doesn't make any sense considering the UEEF has at least one (allegedly multiple) factory satellites whose production capabilities dwarf that of any civilization.

Well, there was NYC, which evidently the Zentraedi managed to totally miss, as well as all the cities Scott & crew managed to go through.

You assume...

Even if the cities were not destroyed by direct hits, the destruction of infrastructure would still be every bit as fatal. Instead of instant death by vaporization there's a slop, lingering demise from water contamination, exposure, and starvation because cities depend on food shipped in from elsewhere and elsewhere just became a parking lot.

Buit should that be a criticism? Harmony Gold's story telling capabilities make the Syfy "sharknado" series look like Oscar material. You could honestly write a supplement about proto-culture powered robot-flying sharks that go nuts and you'd still be well above Shadow Chronicles.

... yeah, even I'm not going to dispute that one. The writing is admittedly terrible. Not that Palladium's is any better. If anything, it just compounds the same sins repeatedly.

Mind you, we are still talking about people VOLUNTARILY playing the Robotech RPG out of some affection for the source material.

I think turning the EBSIS into a stereotypical evil empire was a bad choice, but OTH, at least a lot of the Palladium products between the Macross and Southern Cross eras, did give the players stuff to do that wasn't solely "shoot up renegade zentradi. Shoot up more renegade zentraedi, etc."

And the reason we're dragging them for it is because it was "Shoot the Russians. Shoot the ...". OK WOAH. When you step back and look it, Palladium's "original" additions are more than a little bit racist aren't they? I guess they ARE the standard American xenophobic boogeymen... South American banana republic dictators, African warlords, and Dirty Commies.

You quite simply can't do that with Robotech, so unless you are willing to bring in stuff that is outside canon, you're stuck... being a soldier. And that's pretty much it.

I'm heartened that someone understands where I'm going with this...

Spoiler:

[...] or one can also accept that published material that can be shared by the fans but not modified by it does represent more than fanon or headcanon non-published as a licensed product.

Not in any sense that matters here. Non-canon is non-canon.

In terms of its reliability and applicability, there is no appreciable difference between the old Robotech-in-name-only comics and fan fiction.

Harmony Gold never considered that material canon... which is unsurprising to say the least, given that most TV and Movie franchises don't consider licensed comics, games, etc. to be canon. It wasn't until Harmony Gold rebooted the Robotech franchise and started copying from the anime industry's best practices that we started to see the inclusion of comics and such in the official setting.

The EBSIS, having disappeared between editions, doesn't mean it hasn't left a hole.

More a ditch... a sort of shallow grave for a terrible concept that would never have seen the light of day if Harmony Gold hadn't been asleep at the switch.

You are way more familiar with the legal issues that I'll ever care to be. So I'm not surprised this would be your stance. But in light of the recent truce between Big West and HG, one can dream that this "plagiarism" might mean that, at some point, the Anti-UN league will be as fleshed out from one setting to the next.

Unlikely, to say the least.

But in other words, this also mean that the authors from the comics specifically chose to create a new occurrence rather than rehash their possible Macross source.

Knowing what we know about how these comics came to be... I wouldn't jump to ascribe any kind of coherent authorial intent to anything they wrote. The standard creative process for most of the pre-reboot comics seems to have been "plagiarize the flavor of the month" and "write whatever first comes into our heads", which no doubt contributed to the incredibly high cancellation rate.

[ESalter]

At the time though the Russians were still fighting in Afghanistan. Plus the Cold War didn't end until 1991. Robotech came out in the mid 80's. It's a future based on that starting point. Real Life went a different direction. So Soviets as bad guys still works.

Only if you think the politics of a United Earth Government should be the same as United States government policy. You might as well say, "So Americans as bad guys still works."

That could work too.

You wrote that Siembieda was justified in making the EBSIS evil because the USSR was politically opposed to the US government in the '80s. My point was that a future political history should be more thoughtful than "my government=the world government."

The EBSIS was engaged in open warfare against the RDF since their introduction in Book Two. (Admittedly, later books backed off from that.)

So was the ASC.

No, that's from the novels. In the first edition RPG, the ASC is an autonomous good-guy military organization, just like the RDF or REF.

And while here were conflicts, they didn't escalate to declarations of war.

I assume you're talking about the EBSIS here.

If they had, well, there's Breetai and his ship. A few rounds of ortillery would end the war pretty quick.

It's true Siembieda didn't think through the good guys' overwhelming space superiority, but that doesn't change the open warfare in book two's first random encounter table.

In their early days the A.S.C. is as much if not more a bad guy than the EBSIS.

That's from the novels. In the first edition of the RPG, the ASC is just another good-guy organization, just like the RDF or REF.

That doesn't mean that they got along well. Lenard for one didn't like what the REF was doing. I doubt he was the only one to share such sentiments.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make here.

The EBSIS is more an alternative to the RDF and ASC.

The EBSIS starts wars of conquest and arms mass murderers. It not so evil as to be unplayable, but it's definitely a bad-guy organization.

And the others didn't? The RDF continued to hunt down Zentraedi as did the ASC.

Zentraedi remnants are devoted to motiveless slaughter. Hunting them down is self-defense, not conquest.

The ASC also tried to fight a war of genocide against the Masters.

The Robotech Masters attacked Earth and the ASC defended it. That's not genocide.

Any power can be made bad.

But any power wasn't made bad.
The RDF wasn't made bad.
The ASC wasn't made bad.
The REF wasn't made bad.
The EBSIS was made bad.

As for the EBSIS's war against the Zentraedi, it's still playable. The character group doesn't have to be assigned to that theatre. If they are they don't have to be as enthusiastic and even try to talk their leaders out of continuing the war.

I don't understand what you're talking about here.

[mech798]

I think turning the EBSIS into a stereotypical evil empire was a bad choice, but OTH, at least a lot of the Palladium products between the Macross and Southern Cross eras, did give the players stuff to do that wasn't solely "shoot up renegade zentradi. Shoot up more renegade zentraedi, etc."

And the reason we're dragging them for it is because it was "Shoot the Russians. Shoot the ...". OK WOAH. When you step back and look it, Palladium's "original" additions are more than a little bit racist aren't they? I guess they ARE the standard American xenophobic boogeymen... South American banana republic dictators, African warlords, and Dirty Commies.

The first RPG was published in 1986 and I think that the EBSIS was mentioned there, so that's not surprising. I mean, it was the same year Top Gun was the highest grossing movie, and it was pretty much the height of "RUSSIA IS THE EVIL EMPIRE!"

Which was unfortunate, because if you assume survivors, you really don't have to assume "EVIL RUSSIANS" to have them be very upset with the UEG which sort of walked earth into a war that zorched 90 percent of the world, especially since the "New UEG" is more or less a military dictatorship without any pretensions of voting among the people.

[ShadowLogan]

At the time it was made, Casablanca was set in the real world's present day... that's rather different from being set in a fictional future that has Warhammer 40,000-esque commitment to a future of ONLY WAR. (Something even Titan poked fun of.)

Contemporary to when it was made or not, Casablanca really is not considered a war story, which is what I am driving at even though war is the back drop. It's not the focus.

Spoiler:

Yes, but we're talking about game-worthy material here... I can't for the life of me imagine players queuing up to play the GMP on an high-stakes, pulse-pounding, anti-littering campaign

So Murder, Kidnapping, Theft, Rape, Illegal Drugs, Domestic Disputes have all magically gone away?

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not), but isn't HG's usual position that the TV series trumps later works in the event of a contradiction?

Yes that is HG's usual position, but in this case it's not a trump issue. No one in TRM or NG technically gives a population count of Earth so TSC really can not be trumped by the 85ep series. That really isn't the issue, its where all the people came from getting from Ep37's statement to what TSC's statement for the population at Earth is. Even if we toss out TSC, it is still questionable if 70k humans can produce the implied numbers in TRM/NG.

Realistically, it should be B since the Robotech TV series explicitly establishes that the destruction of Earth's surface was total and no survivors beyond those who were with the SDF-1.

Realistically a case could also be made for A based on the series itself since we still have a population growth to explain in later arcs.

But, as you yourself established earlier, they lack governmental autonomy... they're just referring matters up the chain of command and taking orders from above. (Which is sensible given that matters of resources were the exclusive domain of the military anyway.)

So no one is going to be looking for leverage to get "promoted" or other favors?

Zentradi rebels were only able to pull it off right after the First Robotech War when the UEDF was stretched so thin you could see daylight through 'em, and they still mainly just got curbstomped by the military repeatedly.

I think one of the problems with a topic like this is we are looking at a 20+year time span, and things change in that time span. While the Zentreadi rebels where curb stomped for the most part, for the most part those incidents are not exactly well organized actions either. Most of the actions seemed to be more acting out frustrations rather than some over arching goal (Khyron related actions weren't exactly curb stomped for the most part, not saying he didn't receive setbacks but overall he was largely successful.)

Considering that, even in 2044 in RTSC, Minmei still seems to be the only act in town musically... I think a pretty good argument could be made that the industry was wiped out. Reprinting the physical media doesn't require labels, studios, etc. Bowie could, for all we know, be listening to a copy of a copy of a bootleg tape.

But we do not exactly have a large data set to pull from, and we have to remember it really isn't the focus of the story really and that somethings are not elaborated upon. I agree they could be reprinting old media, at least the stuff that survived (or could be later recovered), but what is the given % of musically talented people in a population normally?

I would say the UEEF is likely a special case (restricted society), but Earth's general population before the Invid arrival is a different matter given we have civilians and we know there are musically talented people, to say there aren't professionals or new material seems like a really big stretch. Then we have examples on Earth that show entertainers are still around. Maybe no one has achieved "Minmei" level popularity, but it seems unlikely that there is only one genre of music around.

Yes, that is the distinction we're drawing here... my point being that the Bioroid Interceptor is most likely another "new" model independently developed from an existing one with mild changes, and that the Bioroid Invid Fighter was the same.

I am fine with the UEEF using generic Bioroid stockpiles and remanufacturing them to create the BI. My issue is that the UEEF is using as the starting point Bioroid type (BIF) they should not have access to because everything we have suggests it was NEW in 2029-30, and only came from a certain location(s) that end up getting destroyed.

OK, so that's still 500 millennia since their technology peaked and stagnated.

I'm not sure the dialogue equates to this. We do not know when the technology peak/stagnated, we only know when they developed the technology initially, going off Gloval statement (nor does he establish when the Zentreadi rebel and evolve into their current form). The Tirolians in TRM saga do not exactly elaborate on defined timeframes (# of years) concerning the past and leave it vague.

Which doesn't make any sense considering the UEEF has at least one (allegedly multiple) factory satellites whose production capabilities dwarf that of any civilization.

This assumes the Factory Satellites are fully functional (or could be restored to some capacity). One interpretation of Prelude might be that Kabarens provided the labor force to make it happen, and the Haydonites expedited the engineering design process.

[Seto Kaiba]

At the time though the Russians were still fighting in Afghanistan. Plus the Cold War didn't end until 1991. Robotech came out in the mid 80's. It's a future based on that starting point. Real Life went a different direction. So Soviets as bad guys still works.

Only if you think the politics of a United Earth Government should be the same as United States government policy. You might as well say, "So Americans as bad guys still works."

That could work too.

You wrote that Siembieda was justified in making the EBSIS evil because the USSR was politically opposed to the US government in the '80s. My point was that a future political history should be more thoughtful than "my government=the world government."

In all fairness, that kind of projection in fictional alternate reality and/or future histories is a very common trope in works by American writers.

A cynic could argue that it's thematically on-brand for Robotech, which rewrote virtually every character in the original shows to be American except for a handful who either had silly accents (e.g. Gloval, Lang) to indicate their foreignness or who simply couldn't be rewritten for one reason or another like Minmei.

The first RPG was published in 1986 and I think that the EBSIS was mentioned there, so that's not surprising. I mean, it was the same year Top Gun was the highest grossing movie, and it was pretty much the height of "RUSSIA IS THE EVIL EMPIRE!"

Or thereabouts... yeah.

Real world circumstances don't excuse EBSIS though. Robotech's future history was/is one where Cold War-era tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact are a thing of the past and the world peacefully united under a supranational government. For the game's writers to throw a Red Menace 2.0 faction into a setting like that both setting-breaking and stupid. Doing it in a time period where it would've been categorically impossible for rival governments to emerge under any circumstances took it past setting-breaking and stupid to being richly deserving of ridicule and entirely justified HG forbidding future editions of the game to contain anything like it.

Which was unfortunate, because if you assume survivors, you really don't have to assume "EVIL RUSSIANS" to have them be very upset with the UEG which sort of walked earth into a war that zorched 90 percent of the world, especially since the "New UEG" is more or less a military dictatorship without any pretensions of voting among the people.

Yeah, you'd expect a fair number of people to be upset simply because they're now living on handouts from the military on a planet that bears no resemblance to the one they grew up on and can only barely support life at all.

The post-war United Earth Government being effectively just a puppet government run by the United Earth Defense Forces doesn't seem to have any real opposition, though. One can surmise that the priorities of the survivors shifted somewhat now that everyone's living with the knowledge that an alien fleet could roll up and flatten the planet on a moment's notice. The jaundiced eye view of UEDF military governance would be that the survivors on Earth know that the UEDF is made up entirely of the officers and enlisted personnel that the real military - the Expeditionary Forces - decided would be the soldiers least-missed on the front lines of an actual battle and concluded the path of least resistance was to trust the UEDF to be as incompetent at tyranny as they are everything else. (Maybe with the unspoken addendum that if the UEDF really did lose the plot the UEEF could always come back and roll them up like a cheap carpet.)

Contemporary to when it was made or not, Casablanca really is not considered a war story, which is what I am driving at even though war is the back drop. It's not the focus.

It's still a false parallel though. Casablanca is set during a war that was much smaller in scope than any of the Robotech Wars, well away from the actual conflict, and wasn't part of a series of war stories.

Spoiler:

So Murder, Kidnapping, Theft, Rape, Illegal Drugs, Domestic Disputes have all magically gone away?

As noted previously, the root causes of crime are mainly nonexistent after the First Robotech War... partly due to the fact that the population has declined so much, and the Zentradi labor force ended up dying out or being drafted.

No magic involved, we're talking about a radically different society from ours. The only societal causes of crime that aren't directly or indirectly solved are substance abuse and mental illness, and the former is much-reduced since the sources of most illicit drugs went extinct and abuse of medical commodities would be difficult or impossible with the military sourcing and rationing them.

The most that can be realistically expected is the occasional drunk or rowdy group getting into trouble, and we've seen how the GMP sorts that out.

So no one is going to be looking for leverage to get "promoted" or other favors?

When most commodities are rationed or provided, the only motive for seeking promotion in a figurehead government is fancy titles and fake authority.

I would say the UEEF is likely a special case (restricted society), but Earth's general population before the Invid arrival is a different matter given we have civilians and we know there are musically talented people, to say there aren't professionals or new material seems like a really big stretch. Then we have examples on Earth that show entertainers are still around. Maybe no one has achieved "Minmei" level popularity, but it seems unlikely that there is only one genre of music around.

It's actually going the other way, though... they have access to multiple alien cultures and still the only thing they apparently listen to is Minmei.

I am fine with the UEEF using generic Bioroid stockpiles and remanufacturing them to create the BI. My issue is that the UEEF is using as the starting point Bioroid type (BIF) they should not have access to because everything we have suggests it was NEW in 2029-30, and only came from a certain location(s) that end up getting destroyed.

You're assuming the startnig point was the Invid Fighter, and not some common ancestor the Invid Fighter was developed from.

Again, go back to "New" vs New WRT the Shadow Fighter.

This assumes the Factory Satellites are fully functional (or could be restored to some capacity). One interpretation of Prelude might be that Kabarens provided the labor force to make it happen, and the Haydonites expedited the engineering design process.

They're actively shown building ships in Sentinels... so at least one is.

[ShadowLogan]

It's still a false parallel though. Casablanca is set during a war that was much smaller in scope than any of the Robotech Wars, well away from the actual conflict, and wasn't part of a series of war stories.

While I agree the scope of WWII is much smaller than any of the RT Wars, that really is irrelevant. I agree it wasn't part of a series of war stories, but that doesn't mean you can't have stories w/n said series that would not be considered war stories.

Spoiler:

As noted previously, the root causes of crime are mainly nonexistent after the First Robotech War... partly due to the fact that the population has declined so much, and the Zentradi labor force ended up dying out or being drafted.

I disagree that root causes of crime are nonexistent, some crimes certainly I can certainly see being rendered nonexistent, but others really don't have a reason to go away.

When most commodities are rationed or provided, the only motive for seeking promotion in a figurehead government is fancy titles and fake authority.

You are also assuming that promotion doesn't come with some practical perks and the rationing remained in place for 17years.

It's actually going the other way, though... they have access to multiple alien cultures and still the only thing they apparently listen to is Minmei.

With a sample size of 1 during TRM saga, though the pure instrumentals played do not appear to be Minmei. And we have no idea what if any alien music they would have access to (aside from the 15th after the 1st Recon into the ship).

Even in TSC, the sample size is 1 IINM and done live (and by the same character who at one point in time was Minmei's partner in RT2 OVA IINM). IIRC Prelude doesn't have anything to offer.

Invasion comics adds another sample point, but one for Lancer (in #1, Lancer is playing the guitar and it is identified as being NOT Minmei but something of Lancer's own).

NG proper aside from Yellow Dancer (who is practically a celebrity in SA, and known in NA), the UEEF doesn't offer any examples of what the crew listen to.

You're assuming the startnig point was the Invid Fighter, and not some common ancestor the Invid Fighter was developed from.

"The Interceptor was created from the last remaining stockpiles of the Robotech Mastes' Bioroid Invid Fighters,"-AotSC pg93.

Seems pretty clear that the Starting Point was the BIF and not some common ancestor. If it was a common ancestor they could have just left off "Invid Fighters" and all would be peachy.

They're actively shown building ships in Sentinels... so at least one is.

In the Sentinels OVA, the only ships we see being built is the SDF-3 and it wasn't a pure automated job. They had work crews in pods doing the work. That would suggest that even with all the Factory Satellites, the UEEF production capacity still requires some level of personnel investment. And Kabarren work crews in Prelude are described as having moved fast (in the time it took them to FINISH the SDF-3 restoration, sans Fold Drives, the UEEF would still only be laying down the keel stage).

[mech798]

The biggest problem is that in robotech a lot of what drove Casablanca doesn't exist, because 7you can't generally negotiate with the Aliens. The Masters? Wanted you dead. The Haydonites? Ditto. The only power that could be negotiated with was the zentraedi, and with no canon human-ruled nations other than the UEG, you don't even get interhuman issues.

That's the problem with trying to turn things like shadow chronicles into any kind of large rpg--who cares if you save a village? Teyh only thing that matters is getting the magic protoculture box, without which humanity, including the village, dies screaming.

[ShadowLogan]

because 7you can't generally negotiate with the Aliens. The Masters? Wanted you dead. The Haydonites? Ditto. The only power that could be negotiated with was the zentraedi, and with no canon human-ruled nations other than the UEG, you don't even get interhuman issues.

On the contrary Negations with aliens are certainly possible, the problem is the higher ups on all sides did not want to do it.

The Zentreadi did not attempt negation until the Imperial Fleet was considered infected and it was in their own interest to team up with the humans.

The Masters actually did not want humanity dead. However they did not try communication at all to find a solution amenable to everyone, but at the same time they where not "lets genocide the Earth" upon arrival or even in the end (they gave Leonard a warning to evacuate the Earth NOT because of THEM but the INVID, they also sent him a previous warning about interference).

The Invid (at least in NG) did not try communication, but some form of communication had to happen to setup deals like Wolfe or Norristown or the Lake City Trap. No real attempt was made to negotiate with humans higher up the ladder so to speak that is known.

Humans in positions of power did not favor negotiation. The UEDC wasn't going to do it until after the test firing of the Grand Cannon. The SDF-1 held negotiations anyway when the Zentreadi attempted it. The UEG and ASC high command did not authorize negotiations (even with Emerson pressing for them). The UEEF did not negotiate with the Invid, in fact no attempt was made at the higher levels AFAIK, it was only a lowly band of human RT Rebels that succeeded (w/assistance from Invid sympathizers).

The UEEF did negotiate with the various Sentinels Races and Tirolians, and some level of negotiation happens with the Regent (at least it did in the novel continuity, elsewhere I don't know). And Edwards certainly negotiated with the Invid Regent in secret. These though are form the Post-85Ep productions, from the 85ep production itself humans where just as slow to negotiate as any of the aliens, almost like it was a theme in RT that al ot of the issues could be resolved with better communications.

[Seto Kaiba]

While I agree the scope of WWII is much smaller than any of the RT Wars, that really is irrelevant. I agree it wasn't part of a series of war stories, but that doesn't mean you can't have stories w/n said series that would not be considered war stories.

Oh, it's very relevant... there are no safe harbors, peaceful-but-occupied territories, etc. Robotech is much closer to Warhammer 40,000 in that it's a grim future of utterly unrestricted and totally uncompromising war with extinction at stake. No matter what kind of story you try to set in the Robotech universe, there are very few periods in its history where there was anything like a genuine peace and the specter of imminent (or ongoing) alien invasion looms large over everything. The best you can hope for from gaming in the Robotech setting is to be in the direct proximity of the war without actually fighting it yourself.

Spoiler:

I disagree that root causes of crime are nonexistent, some crimes certainly I can certainly see being rendered nonexistent, but others really don't have a reason to go away.

Between the abolishment of most of the primary causes of crime and the small populace in general, you're looking at a scenario where crime may not be entirely nonexistent but it's so close to it as to make no odds.

You are also assuming that promotion doesn't come with some practical perks and the rationing remained in place for 17years.

Earth, as presented, is still visibly mostly a barren wasteland with little-to-nothing of interest or value outside of the handful of towns except deliberately-hidden things like the wreckage of the SDF-1.

It's unlikely in the extreme that Earth has reached the level of having a self-sufficient society in such a short time on such a barren planet, and we do know that offworld resource stations were set up too... with those becoming the military bases that the 3rd Robotech War was waged from.

With a sample size of 1 during TRM saga, though the pure instrumentals played do not appear to be Minmei. And we have no idea what if any alien music they would have access to (aside from the 15th after the 1st Recon into the ship).

Even in TSC, the sample size is 1 IINM and done live (and by the same character who at one point in time was Minmei's partner in RT2 OVA IINM). IIRC Prelude doesn't have anything to offer.

Invasion comics adds another sample point, but one for Lancer (in #1, Lancer is playing the guitar and it is identified as being NOT Minmei but something of Lancer's own).

Has it occurred to you at any point that the small sample size may in fact bear out my argument that the music industry's basically nonexistent?

"The Interceptor was created from the last remaining stockpiles of the Robotech Mastes' Bioroid Invid Fighters,"-AotSC pg93.

Granted, there's that... but AoTSC also takes a lot of post-facto liberties with the "movie" and Prelude as well.

Or alternatively, the Bioroid "Invid Fighter" - called the Armored Fighter on the Infopedia - isn't as new as previously advertised since we know the state of robotechnology itself is essentially stagnant ever since Zor snuffed it and sent the last protoculture matrix on a blind trip out of their empire.

The biggest problem is that in robotech a lot of what drove Casablanca doesn't exist, because 7you can't generally negotiate with the Aliens. The Masters? Wanted you dead. The Haydonites? Ditto. The only power that could be negotiated with was the zentraedi, and with no canon human-ruled nations other than the UEG, you don't even get interhuman issues.

That's the problem with trying to turn things like shadow chronicles into any kind of large rpg--who cares if you save a village? Teyh only thing that matters is getting the magic protoculture box, without which humanity, including the village, dies screaming.

Not to mention how narratively narrow the setting is.

Outside of the war, there's basically nothing going on in the world at any point in time except "preparations for more war" or "rebuilding after the previous war".

(Which makes it rather obvious why the RPG's writers felt the only way to expand the RPG was "more war".)

On the contrary Negations with aliens are certainly possible, the problem is the higher ups on all sides did not want to do it.

Uh... that's kind of a "no, except yes" answer you gave there. If one or both sides are unwilling to participate in negotiation, then by definition negotiation is not possible.

The discussions under extreme duress in the Macross Saga and New Generation can't exactly be called negotiation with a straight face since one or both parties were at the time facing the threat of an imminent annihilation by a third party.

The only time something like actual negotiation was done was off-screen (or rather, off-panel) in Prelude between Edwards and the Invid Regent and Edwards and the Haydonites. In both cases, those negotiations were in profoundly bad faith with one or both sides planning or successfully executing a double-cross (as in Edwards killing the Regent and the Haydonites selling Edwards out to the UEEF who killed him and allowed the weapons they gave him to fall into UEEF hands to be used unwittingly against the UEEF).

[xunk16]

While I agree the scope of WWII is much smaller than any of the RT Wars, that really is irrelevant. I agree it wasn't part of a series of war stories, but that doesn't mean you can't have stories w/n said series that would not be considered war stories.

Oh, it's very relevant... there are no safe harbors, peaceful-but-occupied territories, etc. Robotech is much closer to Warhammer 40,000 in that it's a grim future of utterly unrestricted and totally uncompromising war with extinction at stake. No matter what kind of story you try to set in the Robotech universe, there are very few periods in its history where there was anything like a genuine peace and the specter of imminent (or ongoing) alien invasion looms large over everything. The best you can hope for from gaming in the Robotech setting is to be in the direct proximity of the war without actually fighting it yourself.

I'm tempted to say yes, but on the other hand, while 40k pushes everything it can, to 11, to make you believe mankind has lost it to military functionalism... Robotech goes out of its way to show that despite war, there will still be culture, and feelings, and humanity under the bomb shells. Depending on which version of Protoculture you go by, one could even imply that this cycle of violence is something we must strive to get out of. And despite the tendency, of civilizations, to issue wars like carefully planned survival rations, even the Zentraedi couldn't be entirely robbed of desire and curiosity, empathy and passion.
So, basing a story on one of these seeds, that actually try to bring understanding instead of war... Would be as Robotech as Minmei, Bowie & Musica, or eventually Yellow Lancer and the NY dance troupe.
Which ended up doing a show under exploding buildings... But still. Their lives up until this point could still make a story of its own.
Could be, instead of Casablanca, akin to Pan's Labyrinth. With the Invid described as childhood terrors, this could work.

But any power wasn't made bad.
The RDF wasn't made bad.
The ASC wasn't made bad.
The REF wasn't made bad.
The EBSIS was made bad.

Yeah... except even then, the manuals are kinda written from the standpoint of the UEG's authorized history books, yes? So of course, even the xenophobia of the ASC, and the totalitarian military elitist regime of most of Earth, after the Reconstruction, would be shown as good. And of course, a nation trying to get back to more civil pursuit, than just preventing alien doom, would be shown as madness. It's one sided propaganda. I thought it added some part of humour to the manuals. A bit Starship Trooper like. Not that they were to be taken literally.
But let's just say, for a moment, that you actually believe in what the EBSIS stands for. An equal say for workers and not only soldiers. A capacity for self-determinism according to one's career choice, and the right to establish one's own production chain, outside of the taxes of the UEG that eventually lead to the first RT war....

Maybe for some, the Anti-UN League were the good guys. Maybe the EBSIS is.
They might be totally deluded in hindsight, but it would still reverse your whole statement for them.

[Seto Kaiba]

I'm tempted to say yes, but on the other hand, while 40k pushes everything it can, to 11, to make you believe mankind has lost it to military functionalism... Robotech goes out of its way to show that despite war, there will still be culture, and feelings, and humanity under the bomb shells.

Ironically, Warhammer 40,000 does a far better job of that than Robotech does... a result of its setting is developed enough and diverse enough that, despite the ONLY WAR memes, there's plenty of room for complex narratives about the parts of the Imperium and elsewhere that are at peace at any given period in history. (As demonstrated by a large number of its novels.)

Humanity in Robotech, however, canonically loses to military functionalism on a level even Warhammer 40,000 would consider extreme. Every adult human who isn't a slave is a soldier... and there is no career path for anyone born off of Earth except "become a soldier". That's right up there in Death Korps of Krieg territory, and they're considered extreme even by WH40K standards.

So, basing a story on one of these seeds, that actually try to bring understanding instead of war... Would be as Robotech as Minmei, Bowie & Musica, or eventually Yellow Lancer and the NY dance troupe.

But none of them actually succeed in Robotech's version of things. Minmei only manages to sort of temporarily confuse the Zentradi and most of them fall back on their violent tendencies in short order before being put down by the UEDF. Bowie only makes things worse for both sides by abducting Musica, robbing the Masters population of much-needed stability. Lancer's performances are very much inconsequential to the Invid, who don't care and aren't even aware of them, and ultimately all he does is deliver a secondhand ultimatum on the UEEF's part.

Which ended up doing a show under exploding buildings... But still. Their lives up until this point could still make a story of its own.

But that goes back to the "nothing but war" problem.

Minmei was an inconsequential waitress until the war and went back to being essentially inconsequential after it, to the point where she stowed away aboard the SDF-3 in Sentinels in the hopes of acquiring some kind of relevance again after being abandoned by her love interest and having her career stagnate... and that failed pretty epically too.

Bowie was a whiny, useless git before, during, and presumably after the war if he survived it.

Lancer was a career soldier in the UEEF and his music activities were only a cover for his continued military activity.

[ShadowLogan]

Oh, it's very relevant... there are no safe harbors, peaceful-but-occupied territories, etc. Robotech is much closer to Warhammer 40,000 in that it's a grim future of utterly unrestricted and totally uncompromising war with extinction at stake. No matter what kind of story you try to set in the Robotech universe, there are very few periods in its history where there was anything like a genuine peace and the specter of imminent (or ongoing) alien invasion looms large over everything. The best you can hope for from gaming in the Robotech setting is to be in the direct proximity of the war without actually fighting it yourself.

I agree that war or the specter of war is an on going thing in Robotech, but that doesn't mean other stories can not be told that render the war/specter of it to the back burner. It's really going to come down to the GM and how they have constructed their RT-campaign world, how close do they follow a given incarnation's canon (Yune, Mckinney, Siembia 1E or 2E, Comics, etc), etc.

Spoiler:

Granted, there's that... but AoTSC also takes a lot of post-facto liberties with the "movie" and Prelude as well.

Or alternatively, the Bioroid "Invid Fighter" - called the Armored Fighter on the Infopedia - isn't as new as previously advertised since we know the state of robotechnology itself is essentially stagnant ever since Zor snuffed it and sent the last protoculture matrix on a blind trip out of their empire.

Said description isn't just AotSC, its also in Prelude's background blurbs and carried over into the 2E PB RPG for the UEEF Bioroid. I know the Infopedia renamed them to something more blah, but even it does an "AKA Invid Fighter" mention in the entry.

The BIF's status comes from the show with nothing to suggest that it wasn't a recent innovation (Sentinels makes a mess of this, but it makes a mess of a lot of things). Even the Infopedia entry mentions "This Bioroid model was primarily developed to fight off the Invid swarm expected due to the presence of the Sensor Nebula in the Earth system;". This means the Masters developed the BIF in 2029-30 period since the ISN did not reach Earth until then.

Has it occurred to you at any point that the small sample size may in fact bear out my argument that the music industry's basically nonexistent?

Yes but I dismiss it because it doesn't seem very probable. The music industry would not be able to sustain itself if all they ever did was play Minmei. With the breakdown in musical taste in the realworld, you can't tell me that Minmei is the only game in town in a fictional world when we have how many different musical genres (and sub-genres) in the real world. How many people in a given population are musically inclined (though of this subset how many can make it professionally is another matter).

If the 15th ATAC is considered to be 12 people regularly, and 2 of them display musical ability (Bowie and Dana) and we extrapolate that to a larger population then 1/6 of the population should be at Bowie's level (semi-pro/high-end amature), if 1/6 (that is 2.7%) of that level can do pro at Minmei level or above. That means out of the initial 70,000 survivors (all numbers rounded to nearest thousands) there should be ~2,000 musicians in 2012, never mind in 2029 where there are more people (or TSC's several million people that means ~27,000 musicians per million in 2044 on Earth, at the rate to get 1,000,000 people on Earth in 2044 means in 2029 there would be ~8,000).

From a Production Standpoint of the show/story we both know that it would cost money to get new music into it. If we expand the criteria to include RT:UTS (from the 80s), we get several more songs that are not Minmei (it's been awhile since I last saw it, so I don't recall exactly what was played internal to the events and what was for the audience) in 2027, this though is non-canon production (though HG includes the music on the RT soundtrack CD sets, mostly likely included for historical prosperity).

Earth, as presented, is still visibly mostly a barren wasteland with little-to-nothing of interest or value outside of the handful of towns except deliberately-hidden things like the wreckage of the SDF-1.

It's unlikely in the extreme that Earth has reached the level of having a self-sufficient society in such a short time on such a barren planet, and we do know that offworld resource stations were set up too... with those becoming the military bases that the 3rd Robotech War was waged from.

I don't know if we can say that about the Earth being mostly a barren wasteland post TMS. That is in part because of the footage used to create the post TMS settings had no RoD style event for Mospeada or Southern Cross (technically all the visuals are for Glorie/its-moons but are presented to be Earth/Moon).

Off world resource stations though where not setup to support Earth, but rather a presence in space (ALUCE for lunar colonization, AotSC pg36). Indications are that Earth was self-sufficient by 2029 and possibly 2012-3.

[Seto Kaiba]

I agree that war or the specter of war is an on going thing in Robotech, but that doesn't mean other stories can not be told that render the war/specter of it to the back burner. It's really going to come down to the GM and how they have constructed their RT-campaign world, how close do they follow a given incarnation's canon (Yune, Mckinney, Siembia 1E or 2E, Comics, etc), etc.

The point, though, is that you can't effectively back-burner the war story in Robotech because the specter of imminent annihilation by alien invaders is ever-present.

The only period in Robotech's history where there wasn't at least one war going on is that brief period between the end of Khyron's revolt and the UEEF's departure... and that era is dominated by the United Earth Government's preparations to stage a preemptive strike on the Robotech Masters homeworld. In the Macross Saga you're either at risk of being killed in the bombardment of Earth, by Zentradi attacks on the SDF-1, or Zentradi rebels after the war. In the Masters Saga, it's the threat of the Robotech Masters either abducting you or killing you outright by shelling your city to rubble... and if you survive that the Invid are hot on their heels to kill you in their invasion or oppress you and kill you the minute you start acting out... and while all that is going on the UEEF is at war with the other Invid.

There's no place or time that's "away from the war".

Spoiler:

Yes but I dismiss it because it doesn't seem very probable. The music industry would not be able to sustain itself if all they ever did was play Minmei.

... that's the point, though. That the music industry doesn't appear to have sustained itself because Minmei seems to be the only player in pop culture in the Robotech universe even thirty years after her brief moment of relevance. You have, at best, a kid who likes to play piano at amateur night in bars and some bad lounge singers who (again) exclusively perform in bars.

With the breakdown in musical taste in the realworld, you can't tell me that Minmei is the only game in town in a fictional world when we have how many different musical genres (and sub-genres) in the real world. How many people in a given population are musically inclined (though of this subset how many can make it professionally is another matter).

How much of that survived the war, though? Not a lot, in Robotech.

I don't know if we can say that about the Earth being mostly a barren wasteland post TMS. That is in part because of the footage used to create the post TMS settings had no RoD style event for Mospeada or Southern Cross (technically all the visuals are for Glorie/its-moons but are presented to be Earth/Moon).

My good chap, that isn't a bug... that's a feature.

Glorie actually DID have a global holocaust in the original Southern Cross. When humanity found it, the planet was a mostly-barren, nearly uninhabitable rock that was just coming out of a mild ice age. A process the colonists accelerated somewhat using terraforming techniques. Said ice age was actually a nuclear winter triggered by a nuclear war the temporally-displaced human ancestors who mutated into the Zor fought there after settling the planet in the distant past, which resulted in the Zor reengineering their society into the trinity-based form seen in the series and also led to the evacuation of the Zor populace to wait out the nuclear winter in the Phi Eridani system. Post-war Earth in Macross and Glorie in Southern Cross are both fairly barren planets, which works reasonably well substituting one for the other as long as you ignore the shape of the landmasses on the world map in Southern Cross and rotoscope out the extra moons the way HG did.

It's only after they switch to MOSPEADA with the arrival of the Invid that the planet is suddenly and incongruously not an ugly, mostly barren rock. This is, of course, because despite at least one space war between Earth and colonies in the outer solar system the planet never suffered any real damage in the original MOSPEADA story and was arguably in better shape that the Earth of the present day due to the end of fossil fuel usage decades earlier with the advent of HBT. That and the Inbit took the human population down a few notches while preserving the planet's ecosystem since they wanted to use the environment in their research into evolution.

[ShadowLogan]

There's no place or time that's "away from the war".

Not true, thought it does depend a bit on what considers "away from the war". The UEEF and UEDF: ASC are military organizations, and they are going to always be prepping for the next war. Earth appears to be "away from the war" in that it was not on the front lines prior to the Masters arrival in 2029 and going as far back at minimum as 2022 (or when ever the Zentreadi Rebellion fizzled out and they all joined the UEEF).

Leoarnd in Ep37 does mention the society is unstable (his words not mine), though what form that instability takes we do not know (again it comes down to the GM). Which leaves room for some types of non-war orientated campaigns, even if war is in the background.

Spoiler:

. that's the point, though. That the music industry doesn't appear to have sustained itself because Minmei seems to be the only player in pop culture in the Robotech universe even thirty years after her brief moment of relevance. You have, at best, a kid who likes to play piano at amateur night in bars and some bad lounge singers who (again) exclusively perform in bars.

That doesn't seem very probable though. Either RT's musical scene is extremely stagnant from 2012-29 or more likely than not the reason is wanting to keep out of universe production costs down (IIRC there are not that many scenes of Terrans listening to vocal music).

The math alone suggests there should be a healthy music scene, unless the surviving population somehow skews it smaller than in the real world and the 15th's proportions are skewed to favor it (then again the 15th isn't much different than Scott's Group if we don't count Marlene, I'd consider Lancer's group in Invasion but there is no indication on how large his original squadron was IIRC as we only meet 2 other members).

Glorie actually DID have a global holocaust in the original Southern Cross. When humanity found it, the planet was a mostly-barren, nearly uninhabitable rock that was just coming out of a mild ice age. A process the colonists accelerated somewhat using terraforming techniques.

Glorie's stand-in for Earth's North America though looks to be in a lot better shape than SDF:M's Earth's stand-in was left when last we saw it 15 years prior. A large extensive forest surrounds the mounds. The only heavy forests we see in TMS during reconstruction arc was in South America (IINM the Mounds are New Macross/SDF-1 landing site). What "wasteland" we see in TRM might be "natural" wasteland and lets also not forget the action is primarily in and around Monument City and the Mounds (or in space), not large stretches of the planet (it'd be like assessing real Earth's status from visiting say the Trinity Test Site or Death Valley 15 years apart) like in NG/Mospeada.

[Warshield73]

I agree that war or the specter of war is an on going thing in Robotech, but that doesn't mean other stories can not be told that render the war/specter of it to the back burner. It's really going to come down to the GM and how they have constructed their RT-campaign world, how close do they follow a given incarnation's canon (Yune, Mckinney, Siembia 1E or 2E, Comics, etc), etc.

The point, though, is that you can't effectively back-burner the war story in Robotech because the specter of imminent annihilation by alien invaders is ever-present.

The only period in Robotech's history where there wasn't at least one war going on is that brief period between the end of Khyron's revolt and the UEEF's departure... and that era is dominated by the United Earth Government's preparations to stage a preemptive strike on the Robotech Masters homeworld. In the Macross Saga you're either at risk of being killed in the bombardment of Earth, by Zentradi attacks on the SDF-1, or Zentradi rebels after the war. In the Masters Saga, it's the threat of the Robotech Masters either abducting you or killing you outright by shelling your city to rubble... and if you survive that the Invid are hot on their heels to kill you in their invasion or oppress you and kill you the minute you start acting out... and while all that is going on the UEEF is at war with the other Invid.

There's no place or time that's "away from the war".

I have to disagree with this. You have to remember that an adventure can last just hours or days in universe. There are months or maybe even a year between the rain of death and Khyron's attack and death. When I ran 1e back in the '80's this was the second favorite campaign second only to Invid Invasion.

The players were often in the field helping survivors. EBSIS, warlords, tech thieves and even RDF deserters were great antagonists while Zentraedi holdouts were more of an add on.

The other thing to remember about the EBSIS is that they weren't strictly villains and weren't the enemy per se. The RDF gave them a prototype submersible carrier and they worked with them in Africa and Asia. My players got an EBSIS base to help them against a massive Zentraedi army.

The problem is that the antagonists in Robotech aren't great for anything but combat. You can't interact with them outside of combat (during the war itself, after the war they just get absorbed into the human forces) so if you want some role play like using espionage and rogue skills.

The same is true in Invid Invasion/New Generation where most of the role play is with humans and zentraedi while the invid are more of looming threat.

Again just my 5 cents.