#202 – Revisiting RECON

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You're listening to the Glitter Boys.

Good morning, Vietnam. Welcome to Glitter Boys. Today we're talking about my personal favorite game out of the Palladium Books lineup, and that's Recon. All of Recon.

All of it.

All of it.

All of it.

Which is interesting because it is nothing like any of the other games in the Palladium line.

Why is that, Jacob?

Well, that's interesting because first of all, uh, Recon was not originally Done by Palladium. A small company called RPG Inc. published it originally in 1982 as a, one of those wargaming plus games where you were bridging from pure wargaming into a more role-playing-esque sort of experience.

Oh, sweet. You have this book right here too.

Yeah, I do.

The Role-Playing Game of the Vietnam War. On the back it says snooping and pooping. I'm just gonna open this up.

A gag will hurt you.

The bag is in the sleeve.

It's in a bag. It's a small comic book form factor. It looks really nice. That looks like font that you would see on some of the early cyberpunk books.

Yes.

Interesting.

Okay. It's very similar to that. I have with here at the table, the first edition of the original Recon by, um, RPG Inc.

The company, which I will say has a very clever logo.

Yes.

It's an RPG.

It's 44 pages. You cannot get it online unless you are going to Yarharit, but it's not really available anywhere. You're actually really hard-pressed to find a physical copy of it. It's either its first edition or second edition or any of the 5 supplements that RPG Inc. published for it. However, that was in '82. In '86, Palladium came out with the revised Recon. It was taking the wargames-centric version of Recon and making it far more a true role-playing game. Eric, Kevin, Matthew Ballant, and Marianne all had their hands on this revision and it expansion. We went from a 42-page base book and they rolled in a lot of the things that RPG Inc. had done as supplements into the original, but not completely into the revised Recon. It works. Its mechanics are completely different. You open this book, you are in for an entire different world than what you would expect. It is one of the 2 games that does not use the mega-versal system. However, you see what would become Palladium and what was then echoed in certain other games down the road. After the original release in '86, they came out with Advanced Recon, a supplement with far more adventures, an expansion of character types, was in— to a certain extent adding in some of the supplements they hadn't got to when they expanded RPG Inc.'s offerings. And then in '99, we got Deluxe Revised Recon, which is in many ways a compilation of the original Revised Recon and Advanced Recon. And that is Recon. This is a game about the Vietnam War. This is a game about being in the field. It— the original game was based around long-range reconnaissance patrols. And similar activities in Vietnam. The original game, when Palladium got their hands on it, was depoliticized to a great degree. And it is, as I have said, a game system that's near and dear to my heart. It's a setting that's near and dear to my heart. Instead of the array of attributes you're dealing with in Palladium, you're dealing with only 3.

Yeah.

Strength, alertness, agility. If you're a smart dude, that's reflected by your skills.

And, you know, being a good player.

Yeah. Yeah. When I— so I've read this book a couple of times and it's always baffled me. And it wasn't until yesterday or 2 days ago that I reread the initial paragraph of major characteristics 7 times and found the one way you roll up your characters. And it's, you make 3 percentile rolls. That's it.

That's it.

That's it. And those, each of those percentile rolls equate to, you know, what you just said, your strength, your alertness, and your agility. And I, and it dawned on me why I missed it is because it's one sentence on how you roll your character up. I've never seen a system, especially when this was originally done. It's, you have 3 attributes. You roll those attributes by rolling a percentile. Wait, what? That's it?

That's it.

That's it. Okay, cool. On you go.

Far, far more. And the next thing you get to is there's no classes.

Nope, no classes.

No classes at all. What holds the place of what you'd see as classes are MOSs, military occupational specialties, and you can either roll those random or choose them. There's primaries and secondaries. And you— that is how you derive skills, your rolls, and many other things.

I want to give a shout out to something that I found fantastic about the way that it is presented, at least in my copy of Revised Recon, when it goes into the MOSs. This is— okay, is this a Woojik book?

It is in part a Woojik book.

Okay, well, this is a Woojik trait, this way that this right here is presented. And that is he lists, he gives you the details on each MOS in a couple of paragraphs. And that last paragraph is always entitled, Why I Love Being Blank.

Yep.

So it's not just like, oh, this class does this, this, this, and this. And here you're going to have this and here you're going to have this next. It's words actually from the writer with a little bit of like flavor text in it telling you not just what it does, but why it's cool. And I really appreciate that. That Wojcik was really good at that.

Wojcik was really good at that. And I do believe you're absolutely right. I have no confirmation on it, but I suspect that a lot of those are Wojcik's handiwork.

For the deluxe revised, because I don't have one of the older copies, I have the deluxe revised. It has written by Eric Wojcik with additional text and concepts from Kevin Matthew Ballant and Marianne Semita. And then of course they call out to Joe F. Martin, who wrote the original concepts and rules. So I could— this felt very much like Eric, you know, incarnate with some tweaks.

You're absolutely right. However, since Valley of the Pharaohs has come out and I've read that very recently, when I've been going through here, there's sections that have jumped out at me and goes— I've gone, That's got to be Matt Ballot.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see that.

If you've been reading these books for purposes such as what we do, you start to get familiar with writing styles and such, and you'll be reading along and go like, Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric. Oh, that's a Kevin. Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric. Oh, that's definitely Matthew. And one of the other big things is how skills work in here. Expansion— advancement is done by grades, which are earned by experience, and there's kind of a general set of +5 per grade in any given skill. Have either of you bothered to look at the experience table?

No, I did not.

I did, and it is an interesting table. It is almost point buy for expending it, and the part that I couldn't figure out is is the experience table is very low values. You can spend your experience points to increase your skills and such, but there's still an experience table for everybody, the same one, for leveling.

Yep.

So the part that I didn't see was how do you reconcile those 2 items, spending of experience points and the pool? Or is it an overall total that you've ever acquired and you spend those as you go? Okay, interesting.

Yep, it is similar to what earlier editions of Shadowrun did. Where you have your running total and then your actual total.

Got it. Got it. Okay.

Did you also notice on the experience table how there's minuses to experience?

I did. And that it's, there's a part in me that that's the evil GM that really likes that. But there's a part of me as a player who would hate for a GM to hand out penalties because if I die, that's the biggest penalty I can have, you know? But yeah.

XP penalties make no sense to me whatsoever. Instead, wounds, suffering, loss of limb. That to me is a much better punishment.

So here's the thing. The penalties are -10. Now understand, for those who haven't read this, a really big handout for experience is 40 points for a self-sacrifice life and death situation. Okay. You don't get a lot. Minus 10 for needless contact. In other words, you didn't actually have to have that firefight. You could have avoided it. You're going to get penalized. Rash or selfish action jeopardizes the group, minus 20. Minus 35, inferior teamwork penalty. The team, the players just didn't, the team just didn't work well together. I could see why, but yeah.

All of that undermines the concept of learning through failure. All of that undermines the concept of like, we were in this terrible situation and we did not work well together. That is an experience. Like that, that is the subject of so many military training movies. That's the subject. That is the entire plot of Tropic Thunder. The whole, the idea of losing experience-wise now. No. If it were instead presented as a, this adventure is worth 500 XP. And at the end, we go through the list of things that you could have earned. I mean, I can— checking things off. Okay, you didn't earn that, so you don't get that. You didn't earn that, so you don't get that. Then I could see that. But if that experience penalty is coming out of your actual XP, Yeah.

Well, I have a feeling that it's mechanically speaking, and correct us if we're wrong, it would come out at the end when the GM adds up all the experience points you're going to get for the session. He would hit you with a penalty and everyone would just— I mean, it's not like taking off the experience points you have actively, but it's— I could also, you know, I could totally see it in a role-playing environment. Your CO is basically dressing you down like, you were supposed to— it was a recon mission. Why the hell did you have 3 running firefights and require medevac?

Yeah.

Right.

So you've— so the reason I especially brought up the experience table and how experience is calculated in this game is in the deep corners of the internet where recon heads like myself gather, this is the most contentious point you'll find discussed about the game system. Generally, the thoughts tend to run something like this. This XP system is dead on for establishing the motivations for play for what the game is trying to portray. However, people still don't sometimes like it. And, and that's just a real thing. A couple other interesting things about Palladium Recon. Hand-to-hand combat works completely differently. Firearms combat, if you've played Palladium before, there's some different math, there's some different modifiers, but you, you can see it as an earlier version of what would become Palladium firefight rules.

Roll a d20, hit a target.

Roll a d20, hit a target. With your hand-to-hand combat skills, there's none of that bi-level improvements in anything, and How weapons work is based a lot on the form of the weapon. There is a bayonet combat skill, which is as applicable to using a spear as if you have a bayonet mounted on your rifle. There is a garrote skill. Doesn't matter whether it's a piece of piano wire or a shirt or even a table leg. You know, you can do all of that.

Can you give an example of how one works?

Certainly. I tend to go with the bayonet just because it's the one that is most transferable to other weapons. Bayonet is not about knife fighting. Knife fighting is its own special hand-to-hand combat skill. Bayonet combat is attaching a knife to the barrel of your rifle and stabbing someone, beating them over the head with the stock of the rifle, basically using a bayonet per bayonet combat. However, under that, you can attempt to slash, you can attempt to stab, you can attempt to parry, riposte, butt stroke, evade. And that combat skill has its own grades and advancement separate from other hand-to-hand combat skills.

Okay.

So it's kind of in more in line with the weapon proficiencies you would eventually see in Palladium Fantasy.

It sounds a lot to me, actually, like Valley of the Pharaohs.

Yeah, you'd almost say that. So it's actually a lot like that, to be honest. There's unarmed combat. Rather than having to spend, you know, a skill slot to get wrestling, if you got unarmed combat, you got grapple. It's right there and there. There's evade, there's stabbing, there's slashing, there's parrying, you know. A lot of it comes down to taking a look at the weapon. If you are going after someone with a bayonet mounted on your rifle or a spear or a sharpened shovel, it's bayonet combat. Look at the shape and style of weapon you're using. Find the one that matches, rock on.

Is it still d20 versus target?

Uh, yeah, to a certain extent. There— it is more percentile-based by and large, uh, and the dodge works differently. Uh, you— it's really, really kind of hard to describe verbally without a combat actually taking place. how it works. But by and large, yeah, it's a traditional d20.

So the way that you're describing things kind of reminds me in a weird way of, uh, early editions of D&D had an unarmed combat system, but that unarmed combat system was not the standard combat system. It was instead like a d percentile roll. And depending upon what you rolled on that percentile table, You're— you didn't say, I'm going to run up and punch that guy. You said, I'm going to run up and unarmed combat that person. Right. And that could be a wrestling move, or it could be a haymaker, or it could be something depending upon how you rolled.

As someone who loved inflicting that on GMs over the years, yes, yes, it was.

I admit I was that player who did the same. I, I love to inflict them, and I'm really sorry, GMs. Because I both love to inflict it on you, but I also never read it. So I would inflict this system upon you without even knowing the system I was inflicting because I, I, I was a dick.

That was a lot like the Psionics add-on in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons that didn't fit anywhere else in the system. And you're like, what? Yeah, no, this is interesting. This Recon is an interesting game. It is very setting and time specific. Although in the—

Initially.

Initially, in the Deluxe Revised, uh, the final version of it at this point, it definitely has a section where they're like, we're going to try to anonymize this a little bit and kind of pull it out of the setting that it was set in. They don't do a great job at that, to be honest. They keep going back and they make up these made-up countries, but they aren't really made-up countries. They pretty much are the same countries.

Oh, wow. I see what you mean now, Jacob. I did not have this book handy before I, before we did this episode. So I did not get the full details of the hand-to-hand combat.

Oh yeah.

It is very different.

It is incredibly different.

Like, just dear listener, if you do not have this handy, just so you know, like, okay, there's a gun system. And the gun system is actually fairly simple.

Very simple. Very reminiscent of Palladium.

Yeah. The combat system for hand-to-hand is like, okay, you have hand-to-hand combat. You have a whole separate process for bayonet combat, a whole separate process for garrote combat. Like, and then unarmed combat and then knife fighting and then knife throwing. And then, by the way, are you under what separate process? Wow.

Yeah, so much so that as a GM, I would not want my players to ever get into hand-to-hand combat so I didn't have to do all these things.

Yeah. So fascinating.

As something that echoes more modern Rifts books, I will say that an important thing to keep in mind is when you're reading that combat section, that is also where you find what those unarmed combat skills do.

Right.

So it's, it's much like having to look up the damage of my shotgun under the shotgun skill in Rifts in so many ways. I will say that in actuality, once you've run it once or twice, the flow is actually really, really intuitive.

I imagine so. I feel that's the same about Palladium in general. Like once you have run it a few times and you get your flow down, it actually goes pretty pretty quickly.

You also, because that section looks like the love child of Matthew and Eric in so many ways, it's a nod to what came out of The Valley of the Pharaohs and what Eric did in Ninjas and Super Spies in so many ways. You, you can see that. You, you, you see the seeds right there. And as you were talking about how they moved away from pure Vietnam, Yeah. Yeah, you have— they introduced mercenaries. They introduced, like I said, the game was originally predicated around, around long-range reconnaissance patrols. They added Navy SEALs. They added Marine Force Recon, more Vietnam-esque things. They never ever did any treatment of the last supplement that RPG Inc. released, which was the Arab-Israeli War.

Oh, interesting.

Um, and, but what you have here, you can do the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, you can do the, uh, Opium Triangle Wars, you can do the Falklands War, you know, any of those genres. Like, you can run an SAS crew taking down terrorists in Europe with this rule set.

I get it now, Jacob. I get it. So folks, last week we recorded session 8 of our Rifts game. And after that session, me, Jacob, and Alex were having a conversation about our, about video games, specifically video games that were so good that you wish you could find a way to forget it. So you could then go and replay and experience it for the first time anew. So you could, you could relive that experience. And well, Jacobs was, Jacobs did not surprise me, but I'm now putting 2 and 2 together. And Jacob, what was that game?

That game is Jagged Alliance 2.

Yeah, I get it.

I get it now.

Okay.

Because Jagged Alliance 2 is essentially this.

It is 100% this. I am unabashed in my love for this game. If you want a detailed analysis of its warts, I'm also the person to talk to about it. The Vietnam War was such a key point in American and, interestingly enough, Australian experience. Uh, you can roll it back to the French Indochina War, and which shaped so much of French modern political system. It was a hallmark of my family experience. It shaped our country in so many ways. It shaped many other countries in so many ways. Uh, you know, for those of you who like, wait, Australia was involved? Yeah. Uh, go listen to the song I Was Only 18 and drop me a line in Discord on your thoughts of it. Or if you have trouble finding it, drop me a line in Discord and I will give you some of the best versions of it. This book in so many ways is an unheroic, without leaning into the darker portrayals of the Vietnam War that you'll ever find. You're playing characters that simultaneously feel heroic, but also feel like someone who got, you know, did the right thing and walked into the draft office. Um, before, before their draft notice came. So you're still playing a sort of everyman, but an everyman who rises to greatness in the experience.

And I don't think that the book requires, there's no need for it to illustrate those deeper horrors. The group should be able to make that decision on their own. And you don't need a game mechanic. You don't need a horror of war mechanic, but simply by playing these characters and being in these situations, you're going to face the horrors of war.

Yeah, absolutely. And they even touch on it to certain extents, like when Advanced Recon came out. And it also appears in Deluxe Revised Recon. There's an adventure completely— like so much of Advanced Recon deals with the situation in Laos. That's where we start to see MACV-SOG being introduced and those character types. But there's an entire adventure about trying to convince a village to not grow opium and convert over to another product. So much of that adventure is predicated not only on hearts and minds, but how complicated it was to get that to happen.

It doesn't require you to be really political at all. This book says, hey, we're going to take an era, we're going to take a time, And you are 6 to 8 dudes who are in the jungle and you're just trying to get home at the end of your tour and you have some missions to work through and you got to go do it. And you don't get much of a choice because you're grunts. You're, you know, you, you're enlisted and you have a job to do and your job is to go out into the jungle and not get dead and then come home. And it's not much more complicated than that. The, the, so much of the book sets you up and the GM isn't called a GM. which I found really interesting and very— allows you to get into the game, that you're not a game master, you're the mission director.

Mission director.

You're the mission director, and your unit is more than the players because it's supposed to be 9 to 12 individuals going out into the jungle. So you may play a couple each, or those might be NPCs or whatever, But you aren't alone by definition.

Yep.

Now I've run games, not recon games, but I've run games where players were part of a military unit. Getting buy-in from the players that there is a commander and there is a chain of command is hard.

I don't think it's that hard anymore. I think in my youth, in my youth as a teenager and even in my 20s, the idea of somebody having authority over the group, I would get a lot more pushback on that. But I think now, honestly, more groups that I've encountered these days and more players, they want that. They want someone to tell them what to do. They want someone to give them the direction. And then they also really like it if they know that they're not alone. So they know that if they die, they don't have to spend 3 hours creating a new character or coming up with a new concept. You know, when, you know, they've got Juice and Bagel in the back who just help put them, backing them up. And they're like, all right, cool. Well, I'm dead. I'm going to go play Juice.

Yeah.

I mean, granted with this game, you can make a new character in about 3 sentences. Yeah. Literally.

So when, so fun fact, when I set out to run recon games that are set in Nam, Whether it's the original long-range reconnaissance patrols, which were 6-man teams, there were usually somewhere between, uh, 4 and 8 teams for each company. I'd actually have the entire company mapped out just because, and that actually allowed players— if a player dies, they could take someone else.

Yeah.

The other thing was a lot of the times if someone's down because they got a stomach bug, they'd sub in somebody. The other thing that I love about introducing people to recon, and especially combat in recon, is the concept of combat roles and what you do in combat. Suddenly the dude calling in an artillery strike The number of people who are suddenly going, oh God, I'm the radio man, I'm calling in fire support, whether it be a Skyhawk spotter trying to direct in F-4s to drop napalm on an enemy position, or an artillery strike—

Or the Missouri sitting out there. Or the Missouri, sure.

It suddenly changes people's approach to combat because suddenly they have a different role than how much DPS can I dish out per phase per round. Um, how can I use my skills to make sure we survive against what's inherently overwhelming odds? Because that's the other thing. Uh, recon is structurally designed where you are never going against equal force. Uh, if you're going against equal force, it's because you've done everything right. and you're sneaking up on one person.

Right.

If not, you're— it's usually at least a 4-to-1 overmatch against— not in your favor. So that makes the entire concept of the game, the combat roles— I mean, everybody has basic training, everybody knows how to use an M14 or M16, but you also have your combat roles. You have your grenadier, you have your pigman who's running your machine gun, you have all of these folks who have specialist roles and the tools to really tune to how they approach not only conflict and combat, but how they approach the concept. And it— the number of people who have really changed the way they approach combat and role-playing games is almost every single player.

Yeah.

Now, uh, one additional point I'd like to bring up is a lot of people look at this as a relic of the past. Uh, it's all about the Vietnam War through, you know, maybe you can push it into Gulf War I, but it doesn't work well there.

Maybe some of the small things we had in the '80s— Grenada, Panama, things like that— you could probably—

I've done a number where it's, uh, the, uh, unseen war in South America versus the drug cartels, that sort of thing.

And then you could reskin it and do, um, The Mujahideen in Afghanistan, as you mentioned, you could use these pretty—

Versus Soviets.

Yep. And then I would love to see the supplement you mentioned about the, uh, Arab-Israeli.

Yeah, I've done that one. Yeah, I've done that.

Interesting.

Uh, the one of my favorite series of games I've ever run for this was for a bunch of folks who had firsthand experience in GWOT, Global War on Terror, because So much of what's here can be reskinned and echoes that low-intensity conflict with 21st century weapons versus folks who are much more in tune with their environment and hearts and minds and all of that. And who actually are you fighting?

Are you—

on any given day is kind of a question mark. And while we've had to modernize the weapons for that, at the end of the day, there's not much difference between a Huey and a Black Hawk.

And I could totally see someone taking this and turning it into a use for the activity.

Oh yeah.

For a unit, for whatever you want, and modernize it and drop it in today's setting for, yeah, the Global War on Terror, as you were saying. You could do some interesting things with this. It wasn't The intent, I don't think, but you could reskin it and use it in a very simplified way.

I would say that you could probably do it up to like Persian Gulf era, maybe Three Kings kind of stuff.

Yeah, I could.

I think once we're bringing in like drone strikes and coordinated warfare and, you know, that's, that's why the GWOT is about the end of it, because with the Global War on Terror, we didn't see much in the way of tank battles, right? We didn't see much of You ended up segmenting off to small unit, light-skinned vehicles, which due to the environment in Vietnam was— there weren't many tanks running around doing much. The number of tank-on-tank battles in Vietnam were— I could count on my hands and feet.

Right.

The Global War on Terror with air combat, air mobility, small unit moving and encountering locals and your indigenous personnel and such. All works.

Could you—

how easily would it be to reskin this for something like Black Company?

Well, since you mentioned it, Buckley mentioned something, and I'm glad he only mentioned it in passing. Mercenaries. There's a complete section here on mercenaries. You can soldier the fortune up this thing so easily and be able to do a 20th century take on the Black Company so easily. You can also do it the other way. The difference between the rules for knife fighting and bayonets and such Primitive medieval weapons work just fine. You can run at the back or the opposite direction. Magic gets a little bit complicated, but we have Valley of the Pharaohs.

I mean, honestly, in Black Company, they're not up front and just swinging swords and armor. They're running up behind you and shanking you in the ribs.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, and that's, and that's, you know, that, that's one of the things about you were saying, like, if you drop this in contemporary now, a small unit is important. They do things, but you don't have the small unit versus 400 individuals. You have a small unit going in telling them where the drone goes, but the drone probably already there. So the unit just verifies the target, gets some eyes on ground, and then they leave, right? They, they don't engage at all. And so in your— what you're talking about with Black Company, yeah, like I could totally see it. You just take— there's no modern weapons, you know.

They got the artillery strike, replace it with a delayed blast mage, right?

Yep.

Or a janky fuse on a, on a big thing of rum.

Yeah.

Well, the other thing is, and Deluxe Revised Recon touches on it, not as much as I would have liked to, but it does touch on it, the importance of psyops. And if you can't tell me that most of the mages in the Black Company were there for psyops primarily—

Oh no.

Yeah, primarily.

That's all they did was, was they were just illusionists.

Right. Yeah.

Alcoholic illusionists with some crippling addictions and really interesting morals, which Uh, also fits Recon perfectly.

Well, you know, because in reality, when they went in to try to convince the, uh, the people in Laos not to grow opium, they really just wanted their cut, you know, and that's how that ended up.

Oh my God. South American insurgency games.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. My, I ran a series of adventures, uh, set up where you are a Green Beret team That has been snuck in, and you're going up against the Sandinistas and navigating between the Sandinistas and their, uh, the theoretical, uh, government-supported militias and government army and all of that. Oh, by the way, there's a drug cartel who's cutting sides, cutting deals with both sides. You know, corruption left, right, and center. Um, Much like Vietnam, totally incompetent intelligence agencies all over the place.

So a note on the mercenary side, very different from the Vietnam-era mercenary soldier of fortune and the mercenaries in the first Persian Gulf War, let alone what's going on now. Mercenaries get very different takes. And I don't know, That might be something you have to add or try to understand and how that would change things.

So the rise of the PMCs, private military contractors, which happened post-Gulf War I, right, is what changed that game a lot. There is still room nowadays where you see non-PMC mercenaries running around, especially Africa and to a lesser degree South America, and in Southeast Asia they're still going strong. But the rise of the PMCs changed how mercenaries work in a lot of ways. And honestly, I think there's some room to mine there. Like, if you're a US Army vet who is joined up with a PMC and you suddenly realize when you get to your posting, you're— you have one US Army vet, one Navy engineer who is now trying to be an infantryman, and a prison guard from Des Moines, Iowa, all trying to do your job. That is a completely different game that can be done in recon and is very interesting. Also, what's interesting is the CIA paramilitary forces from— that we see being used for security and special operations. They're not US military. They are independent contractors. That still happens. They still operate in usually less than 12-person groups.

Yeah.

It still happens.

How difficult would it be to take Recon and then to tweak, reskin the BioE system and apply mutant animals to the character templates and then use it as the foundation for a squad-based game such as In Australia.

Conveniently, mate, I have run the Vietnam War with mutant animals more than once, specifically after Mutants Down Under came out. I, I'm a little bit of an amateur historian on the Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. And when Mutants Down Under came out, the concept of a kangaroo with a bush hat in the jungle just was there for me.

Yeah.

And so I've done that tweak before. I still haven't quite set a base rule set that I'm happy with, but it, it can be done. It can be done very easily. The biggest challenge to that, like slapping Bio-E and Recon Very straightforward. That part's easy. What you often have to do is figure out how to convert around species attribute bonuses. How does that work? Most of the things like if you have horns or claws or whatever, a lot of the powers translate across perfectly fine. One of the nice things about BioE and especially the psionic system, that drops in real perfect because it's such a light and fast system to begin with.

Yeah.

And you're functionally dropping a light and fast system into another light and fast system that has some of the same conceits at its heart. So it meshes well together. Um, usually, like, if you have unarmed combat and you have claws or something, it just becomes another option on your optional moveset for that skill, you know, damage you have to fiddle around with a little bit just because there's some scaling issues, but it works pretty well. Yeah, the, the, the Australian anteater in Vietnam was still one of my favorites. Dug himself into a termite mound and turned it into a machine gun emplacement.

Yeah, the, uh, that definitely would be one of the things like damage-wise. But if you have claws, those could be just knives on the end of your fingers, right? You could almost use the same combat system. You could always use the same rules.

I mean, it's— it most of the time I've handled it as you just have this other set of options under the hand-to-hand combat table. Got it. Yep. Um, there's no reason to complicate it more than that.

I will say that looking at this Combat has to be pretty lethal.

Oh, combat is very lethal.

Because the damage that your guns are doing and the damage that it talks about in the hand-to-hand section when you're doing a knife attack or a bayonet attack or a garrote or something like that, this damage is up there. Like, it's up there more than you would see using SDC weapons in other Palladium settings.

And then look at how much SDC the person, the players themselves have. This game's core conceit is you've done best when you've gotten in and out without a firefight.

Right.

Which, for those of, those of you who know me, I tend to bend towards that anyways in my games, where if it, if it ends up in a firefight, you've either been put in a position where you've decided this is a point where you need to stand, or Or you've screwed up so bad you have to stand.

I think it's best in games like this, or honestly, I think it's best in games like Palladium in general, to think combat is a failure state.

Right.

If your plan involves stabbing and fighting, you might want to reconsider that plan unless it's your only other option. Your plan should involve everybody staying alive. And combat is the failure state. Like if you are in a, if you now, if you have to fight, Something went wrong.

Yeah. And then the book talks about those types of scenarios, things that happens like standing up and fighting, ambushing, turkey shoots. Like you should want to be able— you want to ambush the opponent with a turkey shoot situation. So they have no chance of returning fire in any sort of way.

Yep.

Anything outside of that, don't engage.

Right, right. It—

for a game that has such a minimalist stealth system, stealth is so important in this game.

I was noticing that a lot of the mechanics, they're very loose and it's very much do this or consequences will hit you really, really hard. Okay, cool.

Yeah. And the game does a very good job of like spelling out what the core assumptions of the game you are playing are and mechanically The mechanics follow from those core assumptions. Yeah.

So when are you running this for us, Jacob?

Well, I mean, I could be persuaded to.

Did you actually run one of these games at WagonCon?

I have attempted to run it twice at WagonCon. The first time nobody signed up. The second time I was feeling— it was scheduled Friday night and I had to cancel it. I had only one person sign up. So I have not successfully run it at WagonCon. It's, it's one of my pipe dreams to actually do it. So—

We'll do some more advertising next year.

Yeah, we'll do some more advertising next year. I will leave on a couple recommendations for anyone who's interested in running this game. There is no good GM aids out there for this. There's not. And you— there are sections such as the hand-to-hand sections where you want them at your fingertips. Just print them out for yourself. Just do that. Secondly, despite the fact I tend to lean very hard into the Vietnam War experience when I'm running recon, uh, I'm a hard no G-word at the table GM. And if you need to know what the G-word is, well, go watch Platoon. That said, it's a great, great game. to start out with a couple light adventures of snooping and scooting and just gathering intel, and then down the road suddenly realize you're an agent— your player characters are adjuncts to the Phoenix Program, and what are they going to do with those moral choices? It's absolutely a great, great game with far, far more depth than you'd think when you look at the rules.

So my last question is, Can I do Megaforce with Recon?

That might be hard.

And if those of you don't know what Megaforce is, that is a throwback '80s movie that was horrible and wonderful all at the same time. And, uh, I don't think you could either because it just wasn't set up that way.

Right.

Yeah.

No, that's all vehicles on vehicles.

How would you set up a Predator?

Oh, a predator? Oh, that, that's actually super easy. Um, a predator, you, again, you only have 3 attributes and you know for a fact, like the wrist blades are basically just knives. The spear you have bayonet combat from. There's actually, um, entangling rules in that you can do for their net guns. And since we have it on record that their shoulder cannon can penetrate an M113 troop carrier armor, well, you just need to pull the gun off a Bradley.

Yeah, pretty much.

And you have your stats right there.

Do you even need to give the Predator stats though? Is the Predator actually a creature they can defeat, or is it a force of nature that must be overcome?

It depends. Are we talking Predator 1 or Predator 2?

Uh, both.

Well then, if you're doing Predator 2, yes, you have to stat them out. Otherwise, how do you take their hand?

In Predator 1, that is a recon scenario, right? Straight up. You have a group of fairly experienced recon, force recon individuals who are dropped into a dungeon to take out drug cartel. And it turns out they're the prey, right? I mean, I think that was actually the line of the movie. You could completely do that. And you should have some idea of how, because you got to have your glowing green blood trail. So you got to know how you're going to hurt the guy. And you can just do that narratively. You don't have to actually even just stat that out. I totally, but you only have 3 stats, so you might as well stat it out and they might get lucky, but all the ambushes are going to go badly. Everything you do is not going to go well. So it's going to get ugly.

But as far as Predator 1 goes, booby trap rules are already in recon. If you look at the breakdown of the team that Arnold is taking in there, Almost every single role, including the fucking intelligence officer, exists in Recon. Yeah, you know, it's all there.

It's all there.

Yep. You can do a swath of '80s movies using Recon real easily.

Yeah.

Cool. Okay, I'm down.

Yep.

I've even run A-Team using the Recon rules.

I was gonna say—

How'd you get them on the plane?

How'd you get them on the plane? Well, um, of course The 2 times I've run A-Team-themed recon games, there is someone who decides to go BA Baracus. And at that point, you just look at the corpsman and make him come up with the plan.

Fair, fair. Yeah.

All right. So do you need this book?

No. So this, over the years, I went from everyone should play this game and have dialed it back a lot. This is not a game about heroes. This is a game about ordinary people being heroic. And there's a difference there, and that doesn't appeal to everyone. This is a game about experiences that are far more close to real life, especially nowadays for a lot of people, than what most role-playing games are. You're not a super sexy spy or super martial artist or creature from another world or a knight in shining armor. It's far more Black Company. It's far more I Was 18. It was— it's far more that sort of game.

Well, it goes back, it goes back to the time when you're looking at Platoon, you're looking at Full Metal Jacket, You're looking at these films that were quintessential, political aside, about the Vietnam experience. And you're the guys on the ground doing the run and gunning, just trying to make it home.

It goes back to being around Vietnam veterans during my family reunions and my uncle threatening to run a concrete drill through my kneecaps if he saw me within 100 yards of a Marine recruiter's office. Yeah, it's that. It doesn't mean that it's this grimdark game. It doesn't have to be that. I've run everything from games where you're supporting the Peace Corps in Africa against warlords to many, many other things. It's a game with a lot of potential, but you have to buy into that core conceit.

Yeah.

It's a very simple game. It's not a game about heroic. It's a game about being heroic and making the choice to be heroic. It's about doing what you feel the right thing is when the right thing isn't always clear.

What, uh, there's a movie, um, Bruce Willis. There's a Bruce Willis movie that they go in to pull some aid people out. And it was based on one of the conflicts that— I can't remember the name of it, but it's very much— they showed up, they were there just to pull out the aid workers. And I think it was just the woman. It's like, no, your dad hired us to come get you. And they made the decision that in the process of getting her out, they were going to save the village from a pogrom.

You're thinking not A Walk in the Sun.

Fear in the Sun. Sun's in the title.

It's an amazing movie. Even so, it's an amazing movie. I wish I knew it off the top of my head. I think it's A Walk in the Sun, actually.

Now that I think Tactically, thematically, like the decision of the right and wrong of what's going on. And it's, it's really not political. It's, no, we're just going to do the right thing.

We're just going to do the right thing.

And by the way, it's probably going to cost a lot of us our lives to do it.

And more to the point, for those of you who, again, see that movie, even better, read about the making of that movie.

Okay.

Funnily enough, I have met someone who is a brother of someone who appeared in that movie who lived the experience that that movie was based on. So yeah, no, it's— this is not a game for everyone. But if it tickles your fancy, definitely pick it up. If you're just into role-playing mechanics that are simple but deal with complex combat, Pick it up, see what can be done. It's a less is more game in many, many ways.

And if you want, Jagged Alliance, the role-playing game.

Jagged Alliance, the role-playing game.

Pick it up.

Yep. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

Tears of the Sun. The movie's Tears of the Sun. Tears of the Sun. 2003.

Anyway.

Um, but yeah, this is definitely a game that if you bring it up in our Discord, uh, I will talk to you all day about and everyone else will be telling us to shut up, but you and I will have a great time.

NBC might make your own channel, sub-channel, so that you guys can talk about it.

it or, uh, yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Palladium channel works.

But I'd love to see you there.

Yep.

Cool. Drop by our Discord, folks. Tell us about your experiences playing Recon or similar games or ideas for how to skin it to other themes. We'll look forward to hearing from you.

Starships, magic, mystic martial arts, Romance. All of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher. You might have heard my name before. I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies, and I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback, and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies, and it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one.

You've been listening to The Glitterpawways, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys— that's B-O-I-S— and check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com/glitterboys. And also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time. Bye.