Have you guys had aMacross esque campaign where the antagonists are a red herring and the real villains are defeatd by...

The idol was an evil vocaloid

It sure was.

Robotech was three different shows shoved together and the creators completely missed the point of Macross so it's no surprise.

Maybe put some singing in it but then bards would be top tier in the story.

Pic looks more like Yuki Mori's from Space Battleship Yamato 2199, a cool show everyone oughta check out.

Time to enlighten you as to some Macross. Its legitimately weird but kind of cool the progression these shows have managed to keep up without going back to the same well.

First things first, Robotech diverges heavily from Macross at some points in order to tell its own story. So while some of what happened in Robotech carries over, its honestly better to assume that you just don't know the plot of Macross when it comes to later shows in the Macross timeline, because some of those details that got changed end up having massive fallout later on.

> SDF Macross

An alien ship crashlands on Earth, with no aliens onboard but signs of heavy battle damage. Earth, now faced with the realization that aliens exist AND they are fighting up there, forces a bloody worldwide unification in order to get our shit together under a world government and uses human technology to restore the ship as best as we can, calling it the SDF-1 Macross.

We don't have any alien bodies to study, but the inside of the Macross is HUGE. Everything is scaled for giants. We install new floors to cut a bunch of the 'decks' of the ship in half for human use, and have to build a whole new bridge that is actually human sized. Since its clear that giant aliens are a thing, we use alien tech to build Variable Fighters: multi-purpose fightercraft that can operate in space, fly in the air, and transform into humanoid robots roughly the same size as the giants for ground wars and boarding actions.

Unfortunately, aliens FTL into the system after detecting the Macross booting up for its maiden voyage. The moment their scout fleet gets close to the planet, the Macross targeting computers turn on of their own accord and fire a shot into space, wiping out a bunch of Zentradi ships before the human crew even knew they were there.

This begins Space War One, in which our broken down shitty alien ship picks a fight with an enemy that can throw 400 million capital ships at a problem and call it solved

The only reason we win the war at all is because the Zentradi are trying to capture the Macross instead of blowing it up. You see, the Zentradi are a genetically engineered warrior race made by the now long extinct 'Protoculture' civilization. They served as a galaxy spanning military fore, their numbers and supplies maintained by automated factory stations, until a civil war among the protoculture (more on that in M7) resulted in the extermination of the Protoculture, but not the Zentradi.

For millions of years now, Zentradi have been cranked out of cloning vats by the billions, and then mass trained to serve aboard starships mass produced in the millions, and sent off to fight... literally everything that wasn't also built at the same factory as them for lack of any other targets. So its just zentradi clones fighting zentradi clones for reasons no one remembers or questions.

But all of the Zentradi are trained as military roles. Their technology is largely automated. Once it breaks down, they don't know how to fix it.

A big example of this is their approach to nukes (sorry, 'Reaction Bombs'). Basically, tons of Zentradi ships are build to fire nukes as part of their armament. There are Zentradi trained to fire nukes. Zentradi grown and stationed aboard ships to guard and inventory the nukes.

But there are no nukes. They haven't actually had nukes in tens of thousands of years. Whatever logistical operation supplied them with the bombs was destroyed ages ago. But they still keep getting supplied with ships that are meant to fire them, with no idea how to actually get the bombs themselves or how they function.

So the Zentradi that find us see that we repair a ship back to functional status, and we can fire nukes. If they can steal that knowledge from us somehow, they will have a massive advantage over the other Zentradi.

In their many attempts to take the Macross, they start tapping our communications and eventually send in spies. Which proves to be their downfall, because they are totally unprepared for our culture. Or any culture, really. They come out of the vats, get trained by computers, get sent off to die, and eventually die. They have no concept of civilian life or activities, they simply haven't been exposed to the idea before because they usually shoot first and ask questions later.

Human culture, such as fashion and music and personal items, spreads through the Zentradi fleet like an infection. They love this shit. And, bit by bit, it makes the common soldiers not want to attack because 'if I kill these people, where will I get my shitty J-pop?'

It gets so bad that the Zentradi command back at the main base for their fleet declares any Zentradi already involved in the Earth war to be a lost cause, and throws his fleet at Earth to destroy all traces of human civilization and any Zentradi that has been exposed to it, lest this plague spread further.

So we team up with our enemies in order to try and stave off the larger alien offensive. The final battle for Earth in voles a massive fleet battle, betrayal among the Zentradi, and playing the music of a girl called Lynn Minmay on all channels, along with a televised kiss, to confuse and stun the larger Zentradi fleet for the few crucial seconds needed to break their ranks and take out their leadership, forcing their fleet to scatter.

Space War One is lost, but not before the Zentradi reduce 98% of Earths landmass into wasteland. Only something like 150,000 humans survive the war, most of those were the crew of the Macross itself or civilian refugees that were taken aboard earlier in the conflict and never got a chance to leave.

The human race is force to live alongside, and rebuild their civilization, with the same Zentradi defectors they were once fighting. This is not a happily ever after ending.

> Macross Plus

Set 30 years after the events of SDF, Humanity has used cloning technology to rebolster the numbers of the human race, and have started to colonize other planets beyond Earth. Culture shock tactics continue to be effective against the numerically superior Zentradi, to the point that they are usually no longer a threat and can often be brought into the folder, expanding human territory even further.

On the first extrasolar colony, Planet Eden, two rival companies test competing variable fighters for government contracts, each of which ends up being flown by former friends turned rivals Isamu and Guld.

Meanwhile, a popular celebrity by the name of Sharon Apple is visiting the planet before returning to earth. Sharon Apple is a computer system designed to make music, and boy does she. Her music is all gibberish and nonsense words electronica that is intentionally designed to trigger changes in the brain chemistry of people that hear it. It is, effectively, an audio-drug.

Sharon's producer takes steps to make Sharon finally be 'real' and self aware rather than being just a machine, which backfires because Sharon was largely based on the brainwaves of a real person, a person whose inferiority complex and personal failings end up running out of control as the computer takes those contradictory wants and desires to their logical and amoral conclusion.

Back on Earth, Sharon ends up going full mind control on the population, and the two test pilots have to stop trying to kill each other just long enough to stop it.

This incident is labled as a 'terrorist attack' by history and AI technology gets the shaft going forward in the macross timeline.

> Macross 7

The Macross 7 fleet is a colonization fleet out in space, still looking for a world to settle. On it, a rock band called Fire Bomber is lead by the incredibly autistic and eccentric Basara, who has some pretty weird views on the nature and power of music.

Basically, Basara looks at the end of Space War One, using music against the Zentradi to end the fight, and convinces himself that with the RIGHT music, this could work again on anyone. So he has a nasty habit of flying out into the middle of space battles and singing at both sides trying to make them stop fighting.

This goes about as well as you would imagine it would, until the fleet comes under attack by psychic vampires called Protodevlin that use special harvesting machines to suck the emotional energy out of people and leave them as braindead vegetables. Basar himself, while he is singing, turns out to be not just immune but fairly toxic to them. He rocks so hard that his brainwaves become indigestible.

An effect that he can somewhat imprint on others that are listening to his song, an effect which can even slowly rekindle the brains of people who have already been drained as a form of treatment.

No one has any goddamn idea why this works, but over time they manage to detect, isolate, and expand upon this resonance using the same kinds of technology used by the Protodevlin for harvesting purposed to make equipment to amplify this effect. Equipment that only Basara and a few others can actually use to any effect. Still, they slowly turn this poorly understood magic into poorly understood science, a bit at a time.

It turns out that the Protodevlin are actually energy beings from some other dimension, pulled into our universe for study by Protoculture scientists, which once here were forced to feed off of mental energy and bodyjack people to survive. Using their bodyjacking powers, they took control over the protoculture leadership and turned the Zentradi against themselves and their masters by giving contradictory orders, resulting in the civil war that ended up destroying the Protoculture.

Basara ends the war with song, eventually teaching the Protodevlin ow to rock out themselves and create their own sources of energy without feeding off of others. At which point the Protodevlin decide that the galaxy is for chumps and leave since they don't need us anymore.

History eventually classifies this weird song energy that Basara was manipulating as the first detectable kind of 'Fold Wave', a distortion in the fabric of subspace which ends up becoming the cornerstone of multiple future technologies. Though it still remains a mystery why Basar was able to emit them, and just how common this ability.

> Macross Zero

Prequel to SDF. Humanity, and other races across the galaxy (such as a minor race introduced very late into M7) are all creations of the Protoculture made during the fall of their civilization once they realized that they couldn't stop the Zentradi.

Simply put, we were made as a sort of 'throwing a light into the future' plan to have galactic civilization return to the galaxy once day, after the Zentradi eventually exterminated themselves (spoiler: they never did).

The Protoculture wasn't going to just leave things to chance, though. Sort of miffed about the whole death by spacewar thing, the life seeding project was run by goddamn hippies who wanted to make sure they wouldn't create a problem worse than the Zentradi. So they left an automated war-machine behind on the planet that an island culture worships as the 'Bird-Human', which is designed to activate once mankind develops the technology for space travel.

It runs on this logic:

If(Mankind can travel to other worlds && mankind still wages war){
Wipe out the human species and reseed the planet for the evolution of life again.
} else {
Do nothing.
}

To repeat as many times as necessary until a peaceful race can inherit the stars.

We trigger the Bird-Human to wake up and wound it with a bunch of nukes, but we only survive because some of the members of that island culture were intentionally bred to be fold-sensitive and interface with the Bird-Human to keep it aware of the state of the world, and one of them forces it to leave the planet instead of wiping us out.

A lot of people don't like Zero. Too mystical. But its themes and imagery has been a recurring Macross staple ever since.

> Macross Frontier

The farflung Frontier colony fleet gets caught up in the aftereffects of human experiments into foldwave based FTL communication, a technology that apparently the Protoculture never developed.

The reason for this becomes clear as the fleet comes under attack by space bugs known as the Vajra. Bugs that are capable of FTL, can fire space-destroying blasts that sink capital ships, are rather hard to kill, and (as it is eventually revealed) communicate as a hive mind using FTL communication.

One of the people on the fleet was involved in a Vajra attack when she was young, was exposed to the Vajra parasites that connect them to the hive network, and now whenever she gets too emotional (which happens any time she takes the stage to pursue her dream career as a singer) she starts dumping all sorts of information into the hive network that comes out as gibberish.

She dumps so much information, in fact, that the hive mind can only contextualize her as a Queen in distress. So the Vajra think we have kidnapped a queen and are torturing the shit out of it.

This means every time she has a concert, a space battle happens alongside it. A fact that people pretty quickly notice the pattern to.

Meanwhile, a shadowy organization working in fold-tech is planning to use fold technology to hijack the hive network by creating their own interface to the hive mind and turning the Vajra into what amount to slaves. An army they can rule the galaxy with, because all of the best technology used by the protoculture? Including FTL and energy weapons and shit? Yeah, they reverse engineered all of that from Vajra biology. They basically worshiped the damn things.

Which turns into using idol girl to jam the technology that is hijacking control of the hive mind, in a massive musical tug of war for the fate of the galaxy.

Which results in a hype as shit final episode, actually.

> Macross Delta

FINALLY I can explain what is going on in for you, .

In the Brisinger Cluster, a globular cluster in orbit around the milky way galaxy, there is a dense population of planets seeded with life by the Protoculture. All signs point to this being the last holdout of the protoculture prior to their final extermination, and the latest worlds seeded with life.

Ragnans (Mer people), Volden (Cat people), and Windemerens (Look like humans but with these weird things handing from their hair called a Rune).

Windemere is super, super salty that Humans are taking over the galaxy, because we caught them in an expansionist manifest destiny period and just sort of blew their shit out of the water by existing. We have better tech, better ships, better weapons, a galaxy-spanning alliance of alien races and we even live longer than they do (Windemerens die soon after age 30, their biology just craps out on them).

So they play ball with us just long enough to get access to some of our military tech, activate some protoculture ruins on their world, and fight a war for independence that pushes us off their planet.

Years later, a disease known as Var Syndrome starts raging across the galaxy: signified by people totally at random going into bursts of super-rage and just murdering the fuck out of anything near them. No one know what causes this to happen, but its becoming more frequent, affecting more people at a time, and the attacks are getting more severe.

Using the same brain-chemistry altering techniques established in previous Macross shows, the government gets together what fold-sensitive people they can find and turns them into a tactical idol group whose job is to shut down the Var Syndrome and restore these people to normal, under the policy that these people are not in control of their actions and they are just as much a victim of what is happening as the people they are trying to harm.

Macross delta is unfinished.

I love how batshit crazy this universe is

It's beautiful, I know.

Its batshit crazy, but approaches that batshit crazy with a weirdly logical method. Everything gets explained eventually. Not just explained, but utilized for technological advancement and eventually just sort of taken for granted. Nothing is really magical, just weird and new for a while.

>FINALLY I can explain what is going on in for you, (You) .
I'll be honest, I didn't read any of that and I probably won't.

:(

Don't feel sad, user! Feel the wind!

Sorry. It's a lot to take in about a show I won't watch. I'm sure someone will appreciate it.

Tell you what, I feel bad, so I'll read it anyway.

>Human culture, such as fashion and music and personal items, spreads through the Zentradi fleet like an infection. They love this shit. And, bit by bit, it makes the common soldiers not want to attack because 'if I kill these people, where will I get my shitty J-pop?'
Oh my god this is real.
I still probably won't watch, but I was at least inspired to google around enough to make this.

Here! I'll help!

soundcloud.com/truelucidity/when-the-rune-sparkles-in-september-earth-windermere-and-fire

>the government gets together what fold-sensitive people they can find and turns them into a tactical idol group whose job is to shut down the Var Syndrome and restore these people to normal
This series sounds ridiculous.

I honestly just thought this show was about space battles and giant robots, but apparently its' about the power of song.

Okay then, Explain Spess Elves for me, as in pic related. Where did they come from? Why are they here? Why can't I get enough of them?

Why did Spess Half-elf bro have to die so horribly in Frontier?

Delta is mostly dogfights with song power in the background. Also potential explanations for what the protoculture was.

Not that user but, micronized Zentradi. Zentradi originally sent spies to the humans in SDF by shrinking themselves. Later on it allowed them to more easily interact with humans. The one in your picture however is the grandchild of a human/zentradi pair.

So half-zentradi basically become space elves?

No, micronized Zentradi just ended up looking like space elves. Well, some of them. It's inconsistent.

Also, Klan Klang.

One thing about the Macross universe that I really wish they would have touched on is the fact that humanity was basically saved by the Zentradi's cloning tech, which is how they went from something like 100,000 humans after SW1 to billions of humans aboard massive colony fleets sent across every arm of the Galaxy, which means that an entire generation of humans are clones raised in group homes, and an entire generation of humans are raised by humans that were raised in group homes.

That's gotta have fucked up the social dynamics of humanity something fierce.

I actually really like all the world building in Delta, be it subtle or overt. Like how there are potentially numerous different protoculture races, and colonies have a high degree of autonomy, it's also implied they might war with one-another occasionally (NUNS high command refuses to get involved with the Windermerian war calling it 'a minor conflict between settlements'), and that rebellions are not uncommon. That kind of stuff.

Honestly, to bring this thread back to Veeky Forums, it makes the Macross setting even more potential as an RPG setting.

Well, if you make a Macross RPG, then I think there'd be only a few main classes with sub-classes:

Idols and Pilots

>classes
No.

To elaborate, classes systems are way better at everyone with the same job not being the mechanically same. Honestly I think this is something a game in the same vein as Fate Accelerated would work well with. FAE uses "approaches" instead of skills, essentially what matters isn't WHAT your character can do, but HOW they do things. What they're capable of is left up to what makes sense given the characters aspects.

So instead of having 5 characters with +3 in Mecha piloting, you have 5 Mecha pilots who are better at being either sneaky, clever, flashy, forceful, quick, ect and do and describe actions based on their preferred method.

ClassLESS systems, not classes systems.

There's a Robotech RPG by palladium, which is... ok.

It's sorta-class-based by using Occupations (i.e Jobs) which basically unlock specific skills that could only realistically be known by someone who went to school for a while in the subject.

It's not perfect (I fucking hate the palladium system, mechanically, even tho I sorta like it conceptually) but overall, it's one of the few games that makes good use of the system (which was designed for super-hero games, which mechas kinda are)

It's "ok" but to be completely honest it kind of (read: completely) misses the point of Macross. It focuses way too much on realism (as far as super tech transforming fighter jets are concerned...) and, well, not much else really. It's a gritty war simulation game trying to emulate a show about where music and emotions have effects akin to literal magic depending on how in tune you are with the Not-Force. Using Palladium's system to play Macross is like trying to use Phoenix Command to play a game of Gurren Lagan. It doesn't fit at all.

Now don't get me wrong, Macross has lots of tech porn for you inner /m/an to beat off to. I fucking loved the small details in Delta (dat wing flap movement, dem delta-V zero g maneuvers, HNNNNG) and the VF Master Files are like porn, but the show itself is by no means focused on these things, not by any means. All the technobabble is just there to hand wave away how all the crazy shit happens.
Macross is like the Star Wars of Mecha shows. Sure there's plenty of technobabble and schematics for your viewing pleasure, but they're nowhere even close to the show's focus.

What a proper Macross RPG needs is something cinematic but internally consistent.

I'm brewing up a game that will probably never go anywhere using Fate Accelerated. It lets me allow plays to do anything at all you see or could see happen on screen without needing to brew up extraneous rules for every fucking thing they could attempt. It lets idols pacify Var syndrome, pilots make their mecha dance, and whatever other crazy shit happens in the franchise all with the same consistent rules.

>Macross
Fucking Slaaneshi war-singers.

Don't forget that the MC is a madman who only joined a military squadron because he wanted to fly, and nearly every time he sorties he does something crazy. Also refuses to wear a helmet, so they had to modify his VF-31 just for him.

Shit gets intense, mang.

youtube.com/watch?v=gwMYLzePzgk

Daily reminder that Freyja is a traitor to her people for big fat terran musical cocks.

I thought the guys were ninja turtles from the thumbnail.
That is all, carry on.

STOP FIGHTING AND LISTEN TO MY SONG

youtube.com/watch?v=DVi3C8_6HyE

Better dogfight, also a lesson on what happens when you neglect your magical space idol waifu until the last minute (spoiler: it isn't good).

LISTEN TO MY SONG!

youtube.com/watch?v=9bzmKrP1cmk

Isn't this what that race created by the Mi-Gos in Cthulhutech is? Which also fits OP's description, btw.

Yes. It's a well known fact the Cthulhutech space elves are just an homage of the Zentradi from Macross.

Haven't heard anything about Macross in ~20 years so lernin sumfink every day.

Considering Harmony Gold's efforts to make sure no one outside of Japan knows anything but Robotech, I can forgive you.

RIP Messer, he never scored

At least he got to go down in a fight.

>This series sounds ridiculous.
It is, in a good way.

The idols are like Bards, in space, and their meatshields use fighter jets that transform into giant robots. How is that not awesome?

So just a vocoloid

Mirage has the best shock face. Meanwhile Mikumo is too busy being stoned out of her mind 24/7 to muster more than mild consternation.

I haven't actually seen Macross 7, but Basara seems totally insane even by the standards of the Macross universe.

youtube.com/watch?v=AYHGDEl-zIc

It's interesting how Sharon Apple's stuff from Macross Plus sounds different from everything else in the series (that I'm aware of).

youtube.com/watch?v=y0rxpQI0ZbY
(Superior version here: vimeo.com/93089722 )

IIRC, the SDF Macross escapes that first battle by folding without quite taking off first, meaning that a large chunk of the city that had grown up around the Macross came with it to Pluto; this was followed by a lot of hasty modifications as the crew of the Macross tried to figure out how to accommodate an unplanned influx of civilians aboard their refurbished alien military vessel. I've always loved that particular detail and would use it in a campaign if it weren't so obviously Macross.

So select your character race
Human
Zentradi
Half-Zentradi
Zolan
Windermerian
Voldoran
Ragnan

>Half-Zentradi
The best, spess-elves but not faggy. Humans are cool too.

>Windermerian
A SHIT. Though we may just have a poor sample to look at, given that we've got a bunch of "MUH WIND, KILL ALL HUMANS SPACE WAR NOW" and Orange Ranka as the only representatives of their race that get screen time.

NUNsfags BTFO

What did NUNS do to kill their youthful innocence. What did they do that made a King who was willing to put up with the BS treatment of NUNs for the saftey of his people to suddenly change his mind and go to war? Tell me NUNs what did you dop

...

>Half-Zentradi
And disregard Queadluns, acquire VF.

I used to think that the Nazzadi were more interesting than the Zentradi simply because they weren't giants. But that was because they turned traitor over something reasonable, like the "gaining a conscience" and revealing they were all fake, instead of THE POWER OF SONG.

That squish is pretty gross

Learning about this show has certainly been a wild ride. I've got too much on my plate to watch it (I'm already rewatching Eva and I know old anime were like 50 episodes and this is some five shows, and none of it's dubbed), but it's crazy. Dogfights and pop music are not things I would have thought would go together.

>I've always loved that particular detail and would use it in a campaign if it weren't so obviously Macross.
I don't think you should worry about that.

Windemere was never really onboard with joining the NUN alliance, they just were low tech when we first met them and couldn't meaningfully resist so they were forced to go along with it.

But they remained a proud military culture, and the fact that their lives are so short actually makes them extremely dangerous to handle. Their culture and society can shift, from our perspective, on a fucking dime. Any amount of propagana against them is dangerous effective, because 30 years from now NO ONE WILL BE ALIVE WHO REMEMBERS ANY DIFFERENT.

They have managed to raise a generation of Windemerens who are all MUH WIND and FUCK YOU EARTH, many of which have never actually met a human and none of which were alive for the time period just 40 years ago when humans first made contact and started trading technology.

If you think Windemere are shits, then the hilarious fact is that for the first time you are seeing things from the perspective of the Elves. Windemere are the short lived, expansionist shits that ripped off your tech and are now trying to declare themselves the rightful owners of the world. The guys who you make a deal with, turn around for just a few years, and suddenly no one remembers it because all of the people you bargained with are dead and the new generation treats your first-person account of events as biased half-truths. This is what 'humanity, fuck yeah' looks like when you are not humanity.

If you want just a smattering of Macross, Macross Plus is available as a single 2-hour movie and its pretty accessible. You already know what the zentradi are, and everything else that's plot relevant gets explained in the movie.

Zentradi for sure. Physically powerful, born fighters, and as far as anyone can tell their natural lifespan is 'lives until someone kills them'. We have seen old as fuck Zentradi before, but have no indication that dying of old age is a thing they really do.

Zentran genes stronk.

Elzam, please go.

If you're really interested or desparate, the original Macross did get a dub about a decade or so ago by ADV. It was on Hulu at some point, don't know if it's there anymore. Macross Plus also has a dub, but none of the other series mentioned here have received a release (thanks Harmony Gold).

It should be warned that the Macross dub isn't great. There is a significant amount of singing in Macross, and attempting to work in the music (written and sung in Japanese) into a dub presents problems with no great solutions, especially on older anime dubbing budgets.

You are really better off watching it subs.

What's all this about Harmony Gold and their efforts to "make sure no one outside of the US has heard of Robotech"?

Dude, what?

Its a real mess of legal shennanigans.

Basically, the company that made Macross sold the overseas distribution rights for Macross to a company, that then sold those rights against to Harmony Gold. Except Harmony Gold didn't actually buy the distribution rights, they bought the copyright to everything included in SDF, but not the rights to make their own media using those characters and designs.

These used the footage that they paid for to hash together their own show called Robotech by splicing it together with two other shows (Southern Cross and Mospeda). But the thing is, from a legal standpoint, they get first dibs and can set any terms they want on the overseas distribution of anything Macross related, even beyond SDF itself, and Japan isn't allowed to go around them.

The weird thing is, Harmony Gold technically cannot have bought this authority because the company they bought the rights from never had that authority themselves, they only had distribution rights to SDF itself. But they won the legal battle, so they have the Macross franchise in a stranglehold as long as they take the absolute minimum effort every decade to keep the copyright alive. Otherwise the rights would eventually go back to Japan.

So right now, Harmony Gold just sits on the rights and demands a huge bribe any time anyone even thinks of doing something with Macross in the west, because without their permission it can't happen and they know it. But they always ask for too much money because they want their big payoff, so no one ever actually pays them for it.

Which, as far as they are concerned, is fine. They already made back their investment on Robotech over time, and they are not primarily a media company. They are a Real estate company that occasionally makes other investments.

It costs them nothing to strangle the Macross exports to death, and if anyone ever pays their ransom they get a bunch of free money for nothing but signing a piece of paper.

No, it's "make sure no one outside of Japan knows ANYTHING BUT Robotech."

Watched Frontier about 5 years ago, didn't even know the reason that the Vajra attacked due to FTL technology. Thanks for clearing that up with your concise synopsis.

Actually there's one part he left out. Ranka's song "aimo?" It's a Vajra mating call.

I did briefly consider trying to draw up a Macross F campaign some time ago, but since I can't create worth shit it went nowhere. It was to center around a Vajra offshoot nest, one that had been infected by something and severed from the collective.

The final showdown would have been at the same time as the final episode, mostly so if the PCs were outgunned, reinforcements would appear when the hacked Vajra start spreading anywhere, and then back up the party once O'Connell was deposed.

Zentradi. All the way. Just look at that.

I have often considered playing a bad inspired by Nekki Basara. And just saying the somatic components of my spells are songs, or rather, that my songs induce magical effects.

...God dammit, Totsugeki Love Heart's stuck in my head now.

At least it isn't Planet Dance.

Select your class
>Pilot
>Idol

Shit...

Part zentradi is pretty good too.

And that's why you use a classless system.

What about an pilot who gets turned into an idol?

But with Zentradi you can have huge or cute space-elf whenever you have the time to visit a shrinking station.

Well I suppose there could be sub-classes of pilot and idol, as well as a class for Scientists and bridge commanders.

It seems like Idols and bridge commanders might play like the OD from AdEva, with all the baggage that entails.

>Pick idol
>Shoot energy beams out of your mouth
>youtube.com/watch?v=eAc9X-F_j9U

The campaign-that-will-never-be that I've been toying with focuses around the colonization of a habitable system. The campaign would start with the PCs as part of an SMS-esque PMC in a young colony on a habitable world, with the events of the campaign revolving around dealing with Zentradi pirates/separatists, anti-NUN rebels, primitive locals, maybe a rival colony, and weird possibly-but-also-possibly-NOT Protoculture-related mysteries. The time period would actually be between Frontier and Delta, but in a far enough away branch of the galaxy to be largely detached from the events of either.

Delta has shown that there's actually a lot of room for RPG campaigns, seeing as it introduces several new races, that the New United Government gives the colonies a pretty big degree of autonomy, that wars and rebellions happen between colonies and/or alien planets, that private military contractors besides SMS not only exist but the colonial governments rely on them for some very important operations and give them a pretty high degree of operational freedom, and most of all that seemingly none of these things are in any way unusual.

See When all characters are going to come from only a handful of jobs, a classless system will give the players more freedom to make their characters mechanically unique, unless you give the classes so many options it might as well just be a classless system.

FAE or Battle Century G would be my top picks for a good Macross game.

I'm not a huge fan of the Palladium system and think it totally misses the mark (), though I guess if you wanted to do the "Macross as a gritty war drama" rout it might not be so bad, especially since Sketchly's Statistics has all the work done for you (and hell, I still reference the site even though I don't use the system) monkeybacon.mywebcommunity.org/Stats/Statistics.php

The campaign sounds cool but the Palladium system not so much.

I'd love to play a Macross RP
>Start as a team of cargo haulers in a converted, shitty old OYW era ARM ship retrofitted with a ripped off Zentradi fold engine and a random assortment of defensive fighters
>Visiting different colonies, both on the move and planetbound to pick up or deliver
>Listen to their various regional musics
>get caught up in a minor regional war
>find protoculture or early era Zentradi or Supervision army ruins and exploit them

>OYW
Wrong franchise.

Since I'm more likely to get useful answers here than in /a/ I gotta ask, how exactly is it that Walkure can un-Var people? I thought the whole fold waves thing was specific to the Vajra and their communication network