The current turmoil in Libya has brought that country and Gaddafi back onto my radar in a way it hasn't been since the Reagan era, when we used to bomb them mysteriously and they used to bomb everybody else mysteriously. This was back when I was in junior high, and most of my friends were gaming. I remember shortly after one of the raids on Libya that involved F-14 Tomcats (my favorite fighter at the time, because the wings could move ... pretty awesome to a 12 year-old ), that one of my friends had the FASA Star Trek game (I think ... could have been something else spacey) and there was a section that had a bunch of 1 paragraph scenarios or skirmishes or maybe it was a chronology of battles.
One of these was called some thing like "Tomcats over Leeb-yah" or similar, and we totally flipped out. I think it referred to some other incidents back in the 70s, not the then-current events. But there were more and more of these little scenarios that had barely disguised references to Soviet leaders, the PLO, Arab leaders, Iran, etc.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? What was this game supplement or whatever it was?
It was Star Fleet Battles.
ReplyDeleteAh yes! Thanks for the catch. So what is the context for those blurbs? Was it a chronology or something?
ReplyDeleteJagatai is correct - it was SFB.
ReplyDeleteIt was a 'scenario' in one of the sets (was it Advanced Missions?)
I think it involved 'fighters' and carrier operations, so it was probably the Advanced Missions set.
Thanks to both of you! I may have to track that down and look at it more closely. This also reminded me a scenario or group of NPCs in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rule book that were all mutated birds (maybe crows) that all had variations of Soviet premieres ... Gorbachirp and Chirpyenko are the only ones I can still remember.
ReplyDeleteIt was Starfleet Battles, Expansion 2, which I remember because I worked on that one. The same scenario occurred in later updates, such as the Commanders, Captains and Doomsday editions.
ReplyDeleteBasically it was a kind of target practice scenario, where Federation Tomcat fighters would buzz Leebyah and take out whatever pathetic resistance rose to meet them (you'd roll a die, and five of the choices were dead meat, but if you rolled a six, you'd face a Klingon frigate, which was a challenge).
The description to the scenario was based on early 80's politics. Leebyah was ruled over by a warlord named Moon 'em More Klodhoppy, and bought second rate war material from some of the other powers. I remember asking Steve Cole if it would cause any trouble, and he thought no, we couldn't be that lucky. Because having the Libyan ambassador get up in the UN waving a copy of Expansion 2 and saying "this game is offensive to our culture!" would have been the best advertising we could possibly have gotten. You remember, there was some game in the late 80's that was hawked as 'The Game That Predicted the Coup' (I'm drawing a blank on the title now. Spycraft?) But having the Libyans complain about the game would have been much bigger.