Lancer's Rockers holds the dubious title as the least liked book of the Robotech RPG line, fans cringing and hanging their heads in shame at the mere mention of it, Palladium Books going so far as making it freely available to download on their website instead or reprinting it. What went wrong?
Well let's see. Standard Palladium two column layout, not that interesting, but it works. Adventure involving existing characters from the series. No, nothing really major there. Two new OCCs and two new skills, that's not it. It couldn't be one of the main selling points of the book, the Instrumecha (Protoculture powered musical instruments) could it? Whichever way you look at it, the image of Robotech soldiers welding musical instruments is silly to say the least; it just doesn’t really fit with the somewhat serious action of Robotech and fans still shake their heads in disbelief. Unfortunately the actual adventure is dependent on the fact that the main characters have to use the Instrumecha to succeed. While another series partially related to Robotech, Macross 7, also uses musical instruments in a similar fashion, they don’t seem so overridingly cheesy compared to the Instrumecha, though opinions vary greatly on this point.
Starting in the ruins of New Detroit, the players are main members of the Detroit Rockers, freedom fighters trying to keep hope alive by reviving the spirit of Minmei and Yellow Dancer. Armed with Instrumecha, the Rockers/Player get drawn into a plan of traitorous EBSIS troops and the Invid to develop sound based weapons and crush the resistance. Along the way they search for famed freedom fighter Lancer to help defeat the new threat. Apart from the inherent silliness of the Instrumecha, the adventure itself is a fairly solid romp across the Invid controlled ruins of North America. Many of the set pieces are useful and could be borrowed by GMs for totally different adventures. It even expands slightly upon the E.B.S.I.S. equipment, previously given scant attention.
Lancer’s Rockers has little to recommend its purchase to non-Robotech gamers, and has a big question mark over buying it even for Robotech fans. Of course now it is available for free on Palladium Book’s official site, so people have little excuse to look it over themselves.
Check out http://www.palladiumbooks.com/lancers/lancers.htm
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