The Way Back Machine
About 20 years ago I amassed the entire Robotech RPG collection. I was a huge Robotech fan, and the RPG books from Palladium were absolutely wonderful. I never really played, but they were chock full of so much information and detail that they were pretty much must-haves if you were a fan. Then, I put them in storage when I went off to college. And–you can probably guess what’s coming–the parentals threw them out/sold them so they could turn my bedroom into a sewing room. Every now and then I get the urge to reform the collection for nostalgia’s sake, but complete sets rarely appear on eBay, and when they do the price isn’t worth it. You can’t even buy them from Palladium anymore because it ran out of stock in the early 90s and the books haven’t been reprinted since.
And then this week I found out that someone had scanned the books and turned them into PDFs. As soon as I discovered that I warmed up the bit torrent client and grabbed them. The quality is pretty good save for Book #1, which is a bit low-res but still totally readable. Ahhhh, 1989 here I come!
I played this game A LOT. Palladium puts out pretty broken RPGs in hindsight, but like any RPG the rules are just a basis for telling stories, and we basically just picked the biggest, most explody weapons and just made up adventures where we cruised the wastelands looking for Zentradi to blow up. Pretty fun, even if I realized the system itself wasn’t so hot
The mech profiles were great, too. You watch much of the TV show? That blew my mind back then, no parachuting at the last second allowed