HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
Recon (or Revised Recon) was the only Palladium RPG we ever played (or read) that did not use the Palladium D&D-like house system. Recon is also the only Vietnam War oriented RPG that I’ve ever seen. Sure, there are other games that allowed you to play games in the same setting, but none were designed from the ground up to be exclusively for use with the Vietnam War.
A large part of my RPG collection focuses on modern military simulationist games such as Recon, MERC, Twilight 2000, Phoenix Command, Delta Force and so on. Recon was the first of these that I ever actually ran, however. The game itself was licensed from another company, who had released the original game several years before, although the version by Palladium simplified a lot of the combat modifiers from matrices of bonuses and penalties into base situational bonuses based on the circumstances of a firefight.
The game system was all d% based, and a character had very few stats. The simple system and the few stats resulted in some characters being incredibly better than others, but the high lethality of the system tended to balance things out, with guns routinely doing 30-50 points of damage to characters that had typically 50-80 hit points. Explosives were particularly deadly, with each having a variety of ranges where they caused instant death, or just damage, or a chance of taking damage from flying fragments.
The book made a decent effort of explaining special forces operations, team composition and so on as well as the environment where they operated in Vietnam – although the material was definitely written with an “us versus them” attitude regarding U.S. Special Forces and the opposition, the Viet Cong. The adventures in the book were a nice starting point for GMs that didn’t have a strong knowledge of the setting, before taking the book out for a spin in homebrew situations. Again, this is something I miss from a lot of older RPGs – a variety of adventures included in each book that helps set the tone of the game as well as showcasing the systems used in the game.
However, we only actually played Revised Recon one time. One very long time, but only the once. We were playing in the small camping trailer, on the farm, in the middle of summer. The group was my older High School gaming group – the same group from my Top Secret and Villains and Vigilantes campaigns – Gabe and Luc, Kristin, Steve, Shawn and myself. The game started out pretty good, running through the modules and scenarios provided in the book, and inserting some additional scenes out of various movies. We had an average of one dead character per two missions, and some gruesome injuries that involved humping the wounded soldiers through miles of jungles and swamps to get to an evac...
The game got pretty intense after a while. We ended up going to sleep at 6am, after sunrise. We woke up around 9:30, and it was HOT and HUMID and the air was thick with bugs. It was perfect. We started again. By the time midnight rolled around on the second day, we were all wired on caffeine and sleep deprivation, and the scenes had gotten quite intense. Not just the characters, but the players started losing their cool when things got weird. By three AM, we had some serious problems. One player was hiding under the bed in the trailer, we all had cammo face paint on, and the crickets were very loud.
The scene was right out of Apocalypse Now, we were getting too uptight, and shooting at anything, but were desperately low on ammo. The acting C.O. is whispering to everyone to hold fire, and confirm all targets before firing (we had just shot one of our own team about an hour earlier). Then the sniper player started firing at anything that moved. Not a "I shoot everything that moves" thing, but a "the tree down by the river sways in the breeze, the shadows are looking weird underneath it, could be someone moving from tree to tree" "I shoot"... "someone comes running out of the hut on the far side of the river at the sound of the shot" "I shoot". Then the acting C.O is trying to get the sniper under control, without getting shot, and that's when they finally make contact with the Viet Cong.
Suddenly Shawn jumps up from under the bed, with a marker in hand, is suddenly behind the player playing the sniper, draws a black line across his throat, and then runs away into the night. Not in the game, but for real. And everyone goes into full panic, with random gunfire, screaming and all the good stuff that spells the end of a jungle mission.
We never played the game again. I'm sure it could never actually compare to playing the games wired up on caffeine with only three hours and change of sleep. The most intense game of my life. Talk about role-playing.
I'm just glad Shawn didn't decide to slit my throat instead of Kristin's. It was a permanent marker.
A large part of my RPG collection focuses on modern military simulationist games such as Recon, MERC, Twilight 2000, Phoenix Command, Delta Force and so on. Recon was the first of these that I ever actually ran, however. The game itself was licensed from another company, who had released the original game several years before, although the version by Palladium simplified a lot of the combat modifiers from matrices of bonuses and penalties into base situational bonuses based on the circumstances of a firefight.
The game system was all d% based, and a character had very few stats. The simple system and the few stats resulted in some characters being incredibly better than others, but the high lethality of the system tended to balance things out, with guns routinely doing 30-50 points of damage to characters that had typically 50-80 hit points. Explosives were particularly deadly, with each having a variety of ranges where they caused instant death, or just damage, or a chance of taking damage from flying fragments.
The book made a decent effort of explaining special forces operations, team composition and so on as well as the environment where they operated in Vietnam – although the material was definitely written with an “us versus them” attitude regarding U.S. Special Forces and the opposition, the Viet Cong. The adventures in the book were a nice starting point for GMs that didn’t have a strong knowledge of the setting, before taking the book out for a spin in homebrew situations. Again, this is something I miss from a lot of older RPGs – a variety of adventures included in each book that helps set the tone of the game as well as showcasing the systems used in the game.
However, we only actually played Revised Recon one time. One very long time, but only the once. We were playing in the small camping trailer, on the farm, in the middle of summer. The group was my older High School gaming group – the same group from my Top Secret and Villains and Vigilantes campaigns – Gabe and Luc, Kristin, Steve, Shawn and myself. The game started out pretty good, running through the modules and scenarios provided in the book, and inserting some additional scenes out of various movies. We had an average of one dead character per two missions, and some gruesome injuries that involved humping the wounded soldiers through miles of jungles and swamps to get to an evac...
The game got pretty intense after a while. We ended up going to sleep at 6am, after sunrise. We woke up around 9:30, and it was HOT and HUMID and the air was thick with bugs. It was perfect. We started again. By the time midnight rolled around on the second day, we were all wired on caffeine and sleep deprivation, and the scenes had gotten quite intense. Not just the characters, but the players started losing their cool when things got weird. By three AM, we had some serious problems. One player was hiding under the bed in the trailer, we all had cammo face paint on, and the crickets were very loud.
The scene was right out of Apocalypse Now, we were getting too uptight, and shooting at anything, but were desperately low on ammo. The acting C.O. is whispering to everyone to hold fire, and confirm all targets before firing (we had just shot one of our own team about an hour earlier). Then the sniper player started firing at anything that moved. Not a "I shoot everything that moves" thing, but a "the tree down by the river sways in the breeze, the shadows are looking weird underneath it, could be someone moving from tree to tree" "I shoot"... "someone comes running out of the hut on the far side of the river at the sound of the shot" "I shoot". Then the acting C.O is trying to get the sniper under control, without getting shot, and that's when they finally make contact with the Viet Cong.
Suddenly Shawn jumps up from under the bed, with a marker in hand, is suddenly behind the player playing the sniper, draws a black line across his throat, and then runs away into the night. Not in the game, but for real. And everyone goes into full panic, with random gunfire, screaming and all the good stuff that spells the end of a jungle mission.
We never played the game again. I'm sure it could never actually compare to playing the games wired up on caffeine with only three hours and change of sleep. The most intense game of my life. Talk about role-playing.
I'm just glad Shawn didn't decide to slit my throat instead of Kristin's. It was a permanent marker.
