West End Games

So Paranoia RPG is a dystopian sci-fi comedy RPG, I guess is the best kind of description of it.

It's been around since the 1980s, published by West End Games.

Originally, it's been a whole bunch of editions, like six editions or something

like that over the years.

Yeah.

West End Game D6.

That would not be good for Strahd, I don't think.

Which one, Dan?

West End Games D6 system.

That was like the original Star Wars role-playing game.

Very simple, very easy to break, even inadvertently.

But I had cards that helped bring out a lot of the randomness to it.

The cards were kind of based loosely on the Masterbook series by West End Games, if anybody remembers that.

But the cards brought randomness.

They changed things up and kept things interesting.

Atlas Games and Dreepod9 both published third-party material for it.

And West End Games, the creators of Star Wars D6, which we have an episode on the Star Wars role-playing game.

Go check that out.

they made a crossover adventure called Alice through the mirror shades in 1989, which was compatible with both cyberpunk and paranoia, which I thought was fun.

There's a Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off setting in there, of course.

Yeah, so if you wanted to look into that West End Games D6 kind of engine, I think Mini 6 is probably your best option if you want a hard copy and you want something current.

I mean, I don't know how supported it is anymore, but I mean, you can get it in print and so your players can all buy it in print.

And I don't know how much support a generic system needs anyway.

you

know, West End Games, Star Wars anymore.

I mean, you know, above board we'll put it that way.

Although I think there are some generic serial numbers filed off type of thing that I could probably find and use.

but he's also an academic who's studying the relationship between post-apocalyptic RPGs and the Cold War in the 1980s.

Well, I invited him on because I wanted to talk to him about West End Games' 1986 game, The Price of Freedom.

If you were in the UK at the time, you probably knew the game more by its reputation than than actually playing it, because in the pages of White Dwarf, it created quite a controversy.

Now, I've subsequently played Price of Freedom, and we played it using the characters from The Breakfast Club, The Price of Breakfast, no less, where our detention was interrupted by the need to corral our neighbourhood to resist the invading commies.

So do you want to explain what actually happened with that? Right.

So, I think it's one of the famous moments in White Dwarf in the 1980s.

So, the game designer, Greg Costigan, in 1986, he had published through West End Games a game called Price of Freedom.

And Price of Freedom was, in many ways, like the film Red Dawn, the Soviets have invaded and a plucky band of Americans take to the hills to fight the Soviet invaders.

Yeah, this was fifth edition that, again, fan made Star Wars stuff.

But when I go online and I'm like, what's the best Star Wars RPG? I see a lot of people talk about this West End Games RPG from like years ago, 20 plus years ago.

Do you know anything about that one? Is it good? Is it easy to pick up?

So that's the one I believe.

I think.

So here's the thing.

West End Games, the D&D Star Wars and the Modiphius one and the D6 Star Wars game.

I think there has been four, if I'm remembering.