Freedom Fighters & Price of Freedom (1986): Red Dawn Roleplaying

Red Dawn (1984) was the perfect movie for 14-year-old Wayne. Teenagers fighting a guerilla resistance against the Soviet occupation of America, the film had me from the opening crawl.

Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years… Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade… Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall… The Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil… Mexico plunged into revolution… NATO dissolves. The United States stands alone.

Original Red Dawn movie poster in my game room. On the right are reproductions of Soviet schematics of the AKMS assault rifle and RPG-7D rocket launcher (“Desantnii Variant”).

Twilight 2000 (Game Designers Workshop GDW) – already in production before the movie released – arrived at the perfect time. While the game wasn’t exactly a Red Dawn scenario, it was close enough, and frankly better in a number of ways. We played the heck out of the 1st edition set.

TWILIGHT 2000 Box Set (1984): The classic 1e Post Apocalypse RPG – A Photo Gallery

I wasn’t alone. By 1986, Twilight 2000 sales were on fire, and the roleplaying game dominated the tiny “military RPG” subgenre.

That year, two more military RPGs arrived: Freedom Fighters (Fantasy Games Unlimited) & Price of Freedom (West End Games).

FREEDOM!!

Freedom Fighters

Freedom Fighters was created by two T2000 alumni, the Keith Brothers, and published by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Over at my City State Chicago post, about midway, I go into the Keith Brothers’ foundational contributions to early T2000.

CITY STATE: A drop-in Chicago Sourcebook for your T2000 campaign

Freedom Fighters (which I’ll call FF going forward) was designed primarily for the Red Dawn scenario, but really any invasion of America is within the scope of the game. Back of the box suggests:

Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces with Latin American allies.
The Martians written about by H.G. Wells in a return visit – this time better prepared for Earth’s bacteria.
A more silent and secret alien invasion where the invaders pretend friendship and gain control of governments, while most citizens are unaware of the true state of affairs.

That last scenario sounds a lot like the V miniseries from back then, another old favorite of mine!

FF is almost entirely rules, with only a couple of pages devoted to campaign background. This was typical of old school RPGs, the assumption being that GMs would handle all their own world-building.

The game uses lifepath character generation, something that wouldn’t show up in T2000 until 2nd edition (1990). Chargen in FF is intricately detailed, and occupies the first 31 pages, and looks time-consuming but fascinating. Given the high mortality rate of PCs in contemporary-setting military games, a shorthand chargen method would be handy.

Most aspects of a character are randomly generated. Primary characteristics and skills are first generated in a 0-25 range, but then combined with the governing attribute into a percentile score, with the original score seldom used. An odd design choice, and needlessly complicated in my opinion.

The remainder of the game flows as you’d expect from a military RPG with crunchy rules. A novel aspect of FF is the Verbal Interaction rules, which treat discussions with NPCs as de facto combat.

Freedom Fighters role playing game [BOX SET]

1986 … J. Andrew Keith & William H. Keith (art) … Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU) 2401

CONTENTS: Book 1: The Character (80 pages). Book 2: The Resistance (96 pages). charts booklet. The Errant Knight Gambit: 8 page Introductory Adventure. 3-panel referee’s screen. blank character sheet.

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Box

Book 1: The Character

Character creation is very thorough. You roll up your PC’s ethnic background, family, social class. The example character is a Puerto Rican kid, and his life unfolds in a series of text boxes that illustrate various stages of chargen rules.

These images are all inked by William H. Keith. In those early years, he and Andrew were incredibly prolific, often crediting each other’s work to each other, or to various pen names. Much of what you’ve seen in early Traveller, Twilight 2000, and other RPGs goes back to the Keith Brothers.

MegaTraveller Journal 3 (1992): The Keith Brothers Reflect on their Vast Body of Work in the Traveller RPG

Book 2: The Resistance

Book 2 expands on combat, equipment, vehicles, and large scale combat. A few pages are given over to campaign types, and what type of player they’ll appeal to.

The Errant Knight Gambit

Character Sheet & GM Screen

Character Creation Charts & Tables

A 32-page supplemental booklet that collects (repeats) all the chargen from the 1st book. It’s all very intricate, several dozen steps, several hundred skills. I’m only half-knocking the crunch; the other half of me regards all this with fascinated admiration. These are some of the most detailed and plausible PCs I’ve seen in an RPG. Tons of hooks for roleplay.

But as I mentioned earlier, it’s all overkill for a military RPG, where PCs have no expectation of a long life.

2d6 & 2d20 (that act as percentile dice)

Freedom Fighters also comes with a button pin (just not the set I profiled today).

Price of Freedom: Roleplaying in Occupied America [BOX SET]

Of the two sets, Price of Freedom is more polished, and more in the league of Red Dawn. West End Games was shifting its focus away from wargames in the mid-Eighties, and its production values kept getting better and better.

Author Greg Costikyan had previously created the hit Paranoia RPG. Here with Price of Freedom (PF), Costikyan goes after the theme of resisting the Soviet invasion with gusto. Almost cartoonishly so, much in the vein of how the movie Starship Troopers would treat its source material. But the bombast can be compelling and attractive in its own way, appeasing either camp. GMs I’ve read noted that they played PF straight and had a blast. There’s even a note in the back for “Liberals”, suggesting the game be framed as an exaggerated “fantasy”, and to enjoy it on its own terms.

The books are filled with these patriotic quotes.

And a fantasy PF is, along with the movie Red Dawn. Even in the Eighties, the Soviets invading North America required an elaborate set of conditions to lay America so low. In Red Dawn, it was a combination of isolation and a surprise attack involving saboteurs, a small flurry of nukes, and simultaneous invasion from Latin America. With PF, it was much the same, with the addition of an effective missile shield deployed in orbit leading to nuclear blackmail.

What on earth is this? This reminds me of the old movie posters, where Hollywood cops walk around with their finger curled around the trigger. Nobody competent would brandish their weapons like that.

Wolverines!! OK, I can see what the artist was going after, but the PF cover doesn’t earn it, alas.

PF’s rules are much simpler than FF. PF uses a D20 “roll under” mechanic and other systems that echo Costikyan’s Paranoia RPG. West End Games would very soon introduce what would become its popular D6 System, but not here.

PF came with a small sheet of counters for use in play.

This was common with the wargame companies switching to RPGs. SPI did the same with Dragonquest.

The reverse side of the counters were used when the character was prone.

Red Dawn is mentioned exactly once in PF, and the game goes out of its way to name other sources of inspiration. T2000 is specifically praised.

Frank Chadwick deserves more credit than anyone can give him, for breaking the path. Twilight 2000 tells the stories of a post-nuclear holocaust world in which the players are the survivors of a disintegrating U.S. Army Europe; THE PRICE OF FREEDOM, of course, has the players as guerrillas seeking to free America from Soviet oppression. Both games have near-future settings and a modem weapons orientation in common, but they create two very different roleplaying experiences.

The Gamemaster Book notes upcoming releases for PF: Your Own Private Idaho adventure, GM Screen (These were actually published, see my Classic RPG Reference site page). Also mentioned were miniatures; I don’t know if these happened or not.