Your vehicle is the ultimate product of 4,000 years of armored warfare.
Your life expectancy is less than two minutes.
Renegade Legion was a series of tabletop games by FASA. Set in the 69th Century, they cover battles between the Terran Overlord Government and the Commonwealth.
Five interrelated games were published in the series:
- Interceptor: The First Line of Defense covers battles between space fighters.
- Centurion: Blood and Steel covers ground battles between grav tanks, artillery, and infantry. Two editions were put out, with minor improvements.
- Leviathan: Ships of the Line covers space battles between larger ships than fighters.
- Prefect: Assault from the Stars was a strategic wargame covering the invasion of a star system, letting commanders deploy units that could then fight using the earlier games.
- Legionnaire: The Roleplaying Game was a role-playing game set in the same universe, with rules connecting it to the other games in the series.
In the 64th century, humanity was rebounding from the Snow Plague that had killed over 80% of humanity. Alien races had begun settling worlds that humans had abandoned; two, the KessRith and Ssora, had just reached a truce that divided up some of those worlds.
Humanity attempted to reclaim its former worlds, only to be conquered by the KessRith and Ssora and treated as a slave race. A cult arose around Earth's glorious histories, especially the Roman Empire. Alexander Trajan used historical legion pageants as the core of a rebellion, taking several Ssora worlds and ships, then using the ships in a False Flag Operation against the KessRith, pitting the two historic enemies against each other again.
Out on the Orion Arm, a Human-Baufrin rebellion was able to reclaim the territory formerly known as the Commonwealth, and reinstated their old government. The Commonwealth signed a separate peace treaty with the KessRith, earning the ire of Trajan.
Trajan's government shifted toward fascism, creating harsh citizenship laws that reinstituted slavery for those such as pacifists and free-thinkers. After wavering back and forth several times in the 66th and 67th centuries, in 6680 First Consul Kershaw's assassination led to the creation of the Terran Overlord Government, led by Caesar Ivanolo Buntari.
300,000 Legions and 3,800 Battleship groups chose to rebel against this, becoming the Renegade Legions. They fought their way to the Commonwealth to join forces against TOG. More Legions followed after Caesar Buntari issued the "Patria Potestas", which removed all rights from women and relegated them to possessions of their fathers or husbands. After Buntari's assassination by the women in his Praetorian Guard, many women chose to defect and join all-women units named for Athena or Minerva.
The Commonwealth has been getting pushed back, world by world, district by district. Now 8 of the 21 Grand Dukedoms lie under TOG control, and the Alaric dukedom is slowly being added to that list. 300,000 Renegade Legions and 200,000 Commonwealth Legions stand against the 8,000,000 Legions of TOG, fighting a last-ditch battle in defense of freedom.
The tactical tabletop games (Interceptor, Centurion, and Leviathan) used an innovative armor system where each armor side was viewed as a grid, and each weapon had a template to show how it would affect the armor. Lasers penetrate straight through one column, while electron particle cannons strip layers off, and APDS rounds penetrate and then blow out armor from beneath. Interceptor uses a flowchart system to track internal damage, while Centurion and Leviathan extend the grid from the armor down into the vehicle's internal systems.
As with FASA's BattleTech, supplements were released describing the setting, adding new types of combat vehicles, and describing specific units on both sides, such as the 2nd ACR (Commonwealth) and the Harbingers of Death (TOG). Four novels were published, one by William H. Keith, Jr. and three by Peter L. Rice.
In addition to the primary five games, one additional tabletop game and two video games were released in the setting.
- Circus Imperium was a separate game covering antigrav chariot racing; it shared the setting but did not tie in closely to the other games, and has more of a humorous feel.
- Renegade Legion: Interceptor by Strategic Simulations, Inc. was a 1990 MS-DOS and Amiga implementation of the Interceptor tabletop game.
- Renegade: Battle for Jacob's Star was a 1995 MS-DOS Space Fighter Simulation Game based on the Interceptor tabletop game. It was developed by Midnight Software and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc.
FASA licensed the rights to Nightshift Games in 1993; Nightshift published a few items before reverting the license.
Several other games were left uncompleted; some of them were released on the Internet.
- Phalanx was a game of individual combat, akin to Battletroops in the Battletech setting. The rules have been made available and some groups have attempted to turn them into a complete game.
- Renegade II: Return to Jacob's Star was the sequel to the Renegade video game. It was completed enough that review copies were given to game magazines, but it was never shipped.
- Interceptor Second Edition replaced the flowcharts with something more like Centurion. It is widely available on the Internet.
In 2020, Budgie Smuggler Games started releasing betas of an updated version of Centurion with significant changes to the backstory; TOG is now called the Tellun Empire, and the group attempting to fend them off is the Union. The game system has also been completely overhauled, using a movement-template system akin to Gaslands, custom d12 dice, and cards for internal damage.
Tropes found in Renegade Legion include:
- Aliens Steal Cable: The Naram watched Earth closely, and argued about intervening in World War II.
- Ancient Astronauts: The Naram visited Earth; the Mayans were a Naram colony.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range: Laser weapons attenuate at range. Although all weapons have an absolute maximum range of 30 hexes regardless of type, this is more of a game balancing factor than a realism issue.
- Artificial Gravity: Gravity control allows grav tanks to fly at speeds approaching 500mph, and gravity control is also used to generate Deflector Shields.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Grav tanks can fly at 500mph...but to do so they have to be high enough off the ground that they become easy targets for everything. Most tanks end up creeping slowly along at nap-of-the-earth levels.
- The Caligula: Caesar Buntari was bloodthirsty and likely mad, and singlehandedly turned the New Roman Republic into the current Terran Overlord Government. He murdered an entire planet with billions of people on a whim, ordered his troops to execute anyone protesting his rule, and then ordered his troops to execute any troops who refused to execute protestors.
- Defector from Decadence: The Renegade Legions are this en masse, soldiers who left their homes behind to fight for freedom.
- Deflector Shields: Pressure-gravity fields are used to create shields; however, due to power drain issues, shields cannot be run continuously, instead 'flickering'.
- Didn't Think This Through: Buntari relegated women to the status of property...while 20% of his bodyguards were women. After he went on a trip, his body was found floating in space as the bodyguards took his ship to join the Renegade Legions.
- The Empire: TOG plays this extremely straight, deliberately modeling itself on The Roman Empire.
- Fantastic Rank System: TOG uses Roman ranks for ground forces and Greek ranks for naval forces. The Greek ranks are claimed to be from ancient Greece, but are the ones used by the modern Greek navy...which, almost 5000 years in the future, is ancient.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: Via T-Space, a tachyon realm where the speed of light is a minimum speed, not a maximum. The faster a ship is going when it transitions into T-Space, the faster it travels in T-Space, up to a maximum of about half the speed of light, which gives a travel speed of 100,000 light years per month. Spending time in T-Space gives one "Tau Shimmer", an energy field that bleeds off over time. Humans can remain in T-Space for about 725 hours before Tau Shimmer causes problems.
- The Federation: The Commonwealth, unlike TOG, insists that all its citizens are equal. It governs using a parliamentary system, and has had Regents of multiple species.
- Genghis Gambit: One of the Commonwealth's greatest fears is that this is why they still exist. By providing TOG with an enemy to fight, they help the Emperor maintain control.
- Graffiti of the Resistance: A red R made of a straight line and a zig-zag one is the symbol of the Renegades, and of the Renegade Legions.
- Hover Tank: Grav tanks can hover and fly up to 500mph.
- Human Aliens: Naram are close enough to humans that the two species can interbreed. The Mayans were a Naram colony.
- In Name Only: The Budgie Smuggler version of Centurion shares the basic concept of grav tanks and some names with the original FASA version, but almost nothing else.
- Insectoid Aliens: Baufrin are described as looking like spider centaurs.
- Just the First Citizen: Until Buntari's coup that created TOG, the New Roman Republic was led by the First Consul.
- La Résistance: Renegade organizations proliferate throughout TOG, using the graffiti R as their logo. The Renegade Legions now use it as well, in solidarity.
- Lizard Folk: The Ssora are lizard aliens, possibly descended from Earth dinosaurs.
- Magnetic Weapons: Ubiquitous. Mass Driver Cannons are one of the primary weapons in Interceptor. The primary weapon of a Centurion tank is generally a Gauss cannon, and the primary weapon of a capital ship in Leviathan is a spinal-mount mass accelerator.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: TOG claims to be the fifth incarnation of the Roman Empire. While the fourth occurred sometime between the modern day and the 7th millennium, the third is the Third Reich. The symbol of the Lictor is the 'fascio', the axe-and-sticks that is the source of the word 'fascist'.
- No Woman's Land: Women are property in TOG. They're property that's allowed to join the military, although they are limited in rank to Centurion Maximus.
- Our Centaurs Are Different: The KessRith are like rhinoceros centaurs with large numbers of very sharp teeth.
- Planet Terra: Ruled by the Terran Overlord Government.
- Pretentious Latin Motto: Interceptor and Centurion give some of these for units, especially TOG and Renegade units. (Commonwealth units also have mottos, but they're typically in English or a nonhuman language.) Examples include:
- TOG Interceptor Wing the "Blood Eagles": Malus avibus.note
- Renegade Minerva (women-only) Pursuit Wing "The Witches of Defiance": Audemus jura nostra defendere.note
- Recycled In Space: TOG is the Roman Empire IN SPACE. The Commonwealth is the United Kingdom IN SPACE.
- The Roleplaying Game: Legionnaire
- Secret Police: TOG's Lictor are a dreaded, terrifying secret police.
- Space Fighter: Interceptor is all about space fighters, mostly one- and two-man but also including smaller FTL-capable ships like gunboats and corvettes.
- Space Navy: Both sides use naval ranks for their space forces.
- Subspace Ansible: Two different ones.
- The P-Comm sends messages at approximately 0.46 light-years per minute - good enough for close-range communications but taking a month to traverse 20,000 light-years.
- The VLCA (Very Large Communication Array) requires a much larger array, but communication between two VLCA arrays is orders of magnitude faster than P-Comm.
- Synthetic Plague: The Snow Plague is rumored to have been deliberately created by an alien race, with the KessRith and Vauvusar being the most frequently named candidates.
- Theme Naming: TOG one-man fighters are named for Roman missile weapons, with the ship's weight roughly corresponding to the weapon's weight, in general. Two-man fighters are named for Roman melee weapons.
- Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: An amusing version for the Martiobarbulus fighter. It was an attempt by a committee to design a light fighter. The end result was a capable heavy fighter. This caused problems for the Commonwealth after intelligence, assuming from the Theme Naming that it was a light fighter, sent in a force to destroy the test units, only to find that it was a much tougher combatant than they expected.
