Commandroids Part 3: Beast Wars

Since That Was Kind Of The Third Phase

After G1 And G2? Remember The First Trial Releases?

Where Megatron Was An Alligator?

Robots In Disguise! (Not, As My College Roommate Thought “Robots In Da Skies”)

OK, six weeks or so since last update. Not great, not terrible, as they said in Chernobyl. (Spoiler: It was, actually, terrible.) Once again, being stuck at a plot point in my novella, where the two plots converged in a wood and then diverged again, two groups of characters are on the verge of major revelations, but I’m not sure how to actually end it. I suspect there’s going to be a third factor involved, I kind of set that up earlier, so I think I should use it. But while I’m thinking, I’m going to shift gears (see, I’m writing about robots) and work on something else, just for a little while.

So, Commandroids. I created the human half of the character in Part I, and spent Part II looking at the background information for creating the robot half. I wasn’t expecting to spend that much time on that, but, hey, when you do extemporanea (that’s a fancy-ass word for “making shit up as you go along”) you never know at the start of the page where you’ll end up by the bottom.

And not speaking of that at all, I just learned something cool. There was a completely different backstory and cartoon planned for the Transformers toyline, with scripts and concept art, written as a rival to Marvel’s setting, that ended up not being used. While this would be cool enough to mention for its own sake, it is particularly relevant because in that setting, the Transformers came to Earth as “energy orbs” and took over pre-existing Earth vehicles, and the human characters (A trucker and a teenage girl) were the former owners of those vehicles. 

Which is, if you’ve read Part I of this, very close to the premise of Commandroids! I do not know if the writers of Commandroids knew of this alternate take, or if it’s simply a case of spontaneous creation, which happens a lot more than some people think. (And by “some people”, I mean, ‘idiots who do not grasp how creativity works and think X ‘ripped off’ Y because there are some common plot elements or themes”. Even setting aside the Big Universal Stories, creators in a field often have similar personalities, read similar books, watch similar movies, get involved in similar debates. Given roughly-equivalent inputs into brains that have a lot of things in common in terms of how they perceive, interpret, and value information leads to a lot of roughly-equivalent outputs. You see sudden floods of works in the same genres (be it film, games, or books) not because of ‘copying’ or ‘imitation’, but because they creators are all plugged into the same zeitgeist, which is a fancy-ass word for (gestures at everything). But I digress. Of course.

Behold… Erm, I’ll Think Of A Name In A Bit

As I recall, I started with the idea of our hero… did I name him? Lemme check… ‘All Posts’… ‘Open In New Tab’… Yes, I did. Clayton (“Clay”) Hammond… would have an ATV or motorcycle. This is a type of motomecha, as explained in Part 2, and I also picked the role of “Infiltron”, which include spies and scouts. I see the partner as more ‘scout/explorer’ than ‘spy’, but she (I’m not sure when I decided she was a she, but I did, so, there you go) prefers finding cool hidden spots in the Terran wilderness to skulking through Evil Corporate Factories looking for USB drives… er.. floppy disks… full of Nemesite schemes.

The Mechform, Function, and Matrix, described in Part II, are like the Type, Training, and Talent for the human pilot. Once again, I have 8, 6, and 4 dice to assign to each, with the dice split between Active and Passive.

Mechform: Motomecha. Specifically, a Kawasaki Ninja, for which the stats are provided. She likes this form, perhaps too much, as she’s forever attempting cool tricks and daring maneuvers. Because of that, she’s 3/1. She also gets a dyaclone chip from this; she picks “Turbo Actuator”, which grants 2 bonus dice to movement-related abilities and lets her take two Maneuvers in a combat round.

Function: Infiltron Scout. As discussed, she’s an explorer. And she’s good at it, so let’s make that her primary stat, with 3/5. Her “Primary Chip” is a Smuggler’s Hatch, a hidden compartment in which she can store a “standard size’ item, implied to mostly be used to sneak weapons into secure areas. However, if not “on mission”, it’s likely to be camping gear. (Many of the other Primary Chips for infiltrons are focused on spy work, such as being able to mimic the form of a recently defeated Commandroid, or partition your mind to maintain a cover identity against intrusive software.)

Matrix: Trinary. I’ve decided she’s a triple-changer, with her other alt-form being a sort of semi-powered hang-glider. Not quite a plane, but also not entirely dependent on air currents. There’s no stat block for this in the core book, but one of the bonuses of rule-lite (really, this game is close to rules-weightless) is that you can just “make shit up” using finger-in-the-air balancing for the handful of stats. So I will.

She can’t go very fast (maybe 20-30 mph), or hover, and needs a high place to start from (a running start and a leap will provide short-term flight, but starting from a cliff can let her go for hours, losing altitude only slowly), but can stay aloft for a long time, circling and descending at a leisurely pace. In this form, her pilot is partially enclosed by what would look like a high-tech, lightly-armored plastic suit around his torso and legs, with his arms, hands, and head exposed. (If she goes from cycle to glider mode directly, her rider stays ‘attached’, the cycle parts wrapping around to form the harness.)

This becomes her secondary stat, with a 4/2. Any tasks she attempts in glider form would be handled by this stat. 

Chips And Dip

Gonna take a quick sidestep into Dyaclone Chips. These are the “k3wl pow3rz” you get, which can reinforce your theme (such as the “Turbo Actuator”, an example of a “Dynamic Diode”, a class of chips which enhance maneuverability) or which can grant unusual powers, such as the Transform Override Ray which can force an enemy to transform, apparently in either direction (from robot to alt, or vice-versa). Some are limited to Commandroids below a certain size (you cannot install the Cloaking Device (max Size Class 4) on a car carrier (Size Class 5). Sorry, Ultra Magnus. Some require “protovoltage” to operate.

The categories are:

Acuity Inductors: These improve mental skills or perception, such as a Holographic Pilot (useful if you need to travel in vehicle form but don’t have your human with you) or the ethically-dubious Neural Override (temporarily control another being).
Dynamic Diodes: Chips which enhance speed, mobility, and reactions, such as Jump Jets (granting short-range flight) or a Reflex Tuner that enhances your dodge.
Combat Circuits: Pretty self-explanatory, these improve your combat abilities. Examples include Electro Tendrils, energized metal tentacles which can strike distant foes or demonstrate your knowledge of hentai, and  Techno Venom, a mechanical ‘poison’ that breaks down machinery.
Utility Oscillators: General-purpose functionality, for example, you can have a Reinforced Frame to give bonuses to Strength or Endurance rolls, or an Integrated Repair Toolkit to patch up non-sapient machines.

There’s a nice long list in each section, ensuring characters will be unique. None seem overwhelmingly unbalanced or ‘must have’.

Guns And Gear

Last, but most certainly not least, weapons! There’s a decent list, clearly inspired by the cool weapons described in Transformers Tech Specs but almost never actually shown in the associated media, where everyone just shot generic beams that never did any damage or even hit a target (until the movie….). A few require a special dyaclone chip to take, while others are considered so basic you get a bonus piece of equipment. I’ve decided to give her a slightly nastier edge than you might expect — she doesn’t like to fight, but if she has to, she’d going to go full “No Mercy!” and use a Thermal Blade, which is like a Warhammer 40K chainsword, except, it’s also on fire. Other weapons are the Glasser (which turns metal brittle and fragile), and the Ion Blaster, which is one of the few weapons with a “stun” setting. For wimps.

Behold… Skycycle!

Not To Be Confused With The Hyundai Pirate or the Honda Zombie

Yeah, there’s the name. I am going with a more traditional Transformers-style name, rather than the Commandroids-style Vaguely Latin Stuff. I suspect they went with that to create another point of Being Legally Distinct, or maybe to help reinforce that while it is utterly obvious where the serial numbers were filed off when the design started, the setting clearly evolved in its own way to become something that is not a mere search-and-replace on the IP it was inspired by. I know this pattern, I’ve been there often. It’s a nice feeling when you start out ripping off homaging an existing IP or concept, but, step by step, each small thing you change becomes part of a larger pattern of creation, and you begin building your own ideas on top of the inspired ones. (This can be a great vehicle to take a setting you like, but “do it better”, fixing all those little things that have always bugged you. All creation builds on prior creation, sometimes by imitation+mutation, sometimes by reply/deconstruction, what high-falutin’ types describe as “in conversation with”.)

Skycycle and Clay will, sadly, never be played, but at least they now exist. Even though I am very much on the “M0AR R000LZ!” side of design preferences, I would be willing to be in a Commandroids campaign. I should note it would not be hard to use the official Transformers rules to play in this setting; it’s not very far from the {Head/Target/Power}masters, mechanically. You’d want to make the partners a bit weaker, overall, to emphasize the fact they’re kids.

Until Next Time…

No idea when that will be! I’m at about 70K words on this novella, so, it will probably be done soon, one way or another. I think I let my reach exceed my grasp here, in terms of plot complexity. I am tempted, when I’m done, to really bite the bullet and do “Imagine”, as I keep threatening, but I got a bunch of new games at GenCon… we’ll see.