I love Robotech, plain and simple, but there is certainly a special place in my heart for the 2nd Robotech War, or Southern Cross. Now certainly this isn’t because it is the ‘best’ of the Robotech series, and arguably it is the weakest of the three [or four if you count Sentinels] but I love Southern Cross because it was my first Robotech campaign that I got to run as Gamemaster.
My old DM Mark ran both Macross and Invid Invasion, but this one was all for me, and I took great pride in making it something special. In fact, I loved it so much, I ran the full 2nd Robotech War in college again with my new core of players just so I could experience another view of that setting. Also, as an added bonus, I attach a bit of music nostalgia to it with Crosby, Stills, and Nash as song ‘Southern Cross’ is one of my favorite songs from the 1970s.
The game itself, produced by Kevin Siembieda and his Palladium Books mechanic in 1987, is actually where the M.D.C. system begins to break down with the addition of mega-damage body armor and hand weapons. However, once you tweak the rules concerning this a bit, you should be good to go on having a great time playing this war out to its entirety.
Artistically, Siembieda goes with Kevin Long for the color cover and Peter Simon for the interior black and white illustrations.
Long’s cover is a nice shot, however it leaves something to be desired in my mind, the simplicity of the landscape and the less than well rendered exploding Bioroid just don’t inspire like I think it could have considering the source material any artist had to work with.
The interiors, however, do ‘sing’ with some great dot rendering and shading from Simon. I have to say, of the four initial volumes of this series, Simon’s work is by far the best.
In all, I highly recommend this game and hope people are still out there playing in this universe.
Artistic Rating: 3 [out of 5]
Nice, glad someone else gets the Robotech/CSN connection :)
Agreed regarding both Robotech and CSN!