FASA

I wrote for a while in the 90s.

I wrote for FASA for the Shadowrun game, and most recently I'm working on a game called Mutant, which is a revision of a post-apocalyptic game sci-fi game that was originally created in the 1970s.

I have an amazing kick-ass panel today, so I'm going to let each one of them introduce themselves.

Mike,

yeah yeah we're just like oh wow i can like do whatever i want now you know what i mean it's not just yes rangers right

or or just all this tsr stuff right with the die 20 and the kind of the taco mechanics just being repeated over and over and over again Um, I think, you know, maybe Marvel superheroes is one of those games that kind of went in a different direction, but it's like kind of late TSR, you know, stuff where they did the FASA rip and all that kind of stuff, um, which got into gamma world as well, but.

It was a cookie cutter.

They were all kind of the same system.

And there's other games that I would put in this type of category.

Strangely enough, a lot of these games were made by FASA, like Shadowrun back in the day and stuff.

They were really good at having these kinds of systems at the upfront where you could have something you could play off the shelf.

There was just a thing you could take and play.

Right.

But anyway, so the game, where does this game come from, the line as it is? So it's first published in 1989 by FASA Games.

We all love FASA.

And perhaps if I picked up some of those older books, maybe that fictional element would...

It might palate better.

In principle, though, I keep looking at it, being like, "The, this seems cool.

This should be cool.

Why isn't it cool?" So it went through three editions with FASA.

Or, like, the, all the mechs that have lower arms, it, that seem to have lower arms that are technically flippy, it's like, why, why were they designed that way? I'm, I'm curious what exactly happened.

This is the point where we gotta reach out to old former FASA employees-

Oh, yeah

... and see if we can get an interview episode, Mr.

So for those of us of a certain age, when you went into a mall, this thing with lots and lots of shops that still exist in a few places I've heard, you go in and there were a lot of comic stores.

And I originally went in to buy magic cards, but there were all these great source books from FASA at the time with the Battletech license.

You know, 12, 13, 14 years old, you go in, you've got your giant robots, some good artwork up, you start opening stores.

Things like the technical readouts up and wow, there's all this great dense lore.

and units, and I do very much enjoy that.

Alpha Strike gives you that force command level when you want to play out a bigger engagement.

I've used it at our local conventions, playing up scenarios a lot of times based on, hey, in the old FASA book, they wrote this wonderful scenario that you could never play unless you had a week to just sit down and play Battletech.

So what if we redid it in Alpha Strike, just take the exact T-O-N-E scenario match up the skills to what they gave the pilots and just play the scenario and alpha strike with a little bit of fiddling for PV so that one side's not terrible and it works really well from my experience and you can play out those moments that you know 30 years ago someone made a great scenario but You just can't play it reasonably, you know, as an adult.