I must admit that my first exposure to Robotech: The Role Playing Game was from a Junior named John Mark. I was a Freshman. My friend Rob had an elective with JM and the two had met and shared their interest in Robotech while in class one day. JM had already been playing the RPG and he had invited Rob over to his house to play a scenario. Rob had kept me in mind and asked if I could also join the group. JM had accepted and on a nice Saturday afternoon, we journeyed to JM's house. I had not played a RPG since Craig had bought a D&D bundle from some dude back in the early days of 1982. It was now spring 1988. I was anxious but not at all nervous. Arriving around noon, we had the rest of the day. The plan was to play about 6+ hours. The dining room table was turned into our battlefield and JM had given both Rob and I a crash course on rules and game play. We used characters created by JM and JM was the game master. Additional players was Chris P (JM's best friend) and Matt (JM's future step dad). Even though Matt was like really old (something like 37, the age I'm today), he was really cool and didn't look on us as a bunch of kids but peers.
We commanded our Veritechs and fought Zentraedi Battlepods. We were on a rescue mission. Destroids were cannon fodder. Hand to Hand combat was raged by Battleloids and 50-foot alien giants. Damage points. Missile counts. Attack bonuses. We played for hours. To create a mood JM put the Robotech soundtrack on his parent's stereo as we ventured through the scenario. The nostalgia of that soundtrack was that it was released only on vinyl and he had dubbed it down to Memorex cassette tape. I would beg him for a copy which he gladly gave both Rob and I. Outside of a couple breaks, we didn't stop. We were having too much fun. Even Matt got into the game.
JM's mother was very generous and had left a plethora of snacks and New York Seltzers. I think it was the most content I had ever been while enjoying Robotech. Here we were playing the coolest cartoon I had known in the form of a role playing game, I was enjoying awesome creme sodas and root beers in tiny glass bottles of New York Seltzers and the outside world had been forgotten.
When the warm evening rays of sunshine had disappeared and the table was lit by the artificial tungsten bulb of the overhead lamp, we knew that our adventure had to come to a close. Overall we had not completed our task. We still had not recovered the protoculture matrix nor the abducted doctors. But JM had said not to worry. We'd pick it up the next Saturday.
In reality, we didn't get back to our game for another 4 weeks and when we did, we had to play in JM's room and it just didn't have the magic of our first session. At least we had some New York Seltzers as refreshments. Boy do I miss those little drinks. Yet, while scanning JM's room and bookshelves, I would see something I hadn't seen before. It was a large picture book called Robotech Art I...
