# Renegade Legion tags: #game/wargame/renegade-legion ![[Renegade Legion - Legionnaire (cover).jpg|600]] **Renegade Legion** is FASA's science-fiction wargame line from the late eighties, and it's one I hold a deep, enduring affection for — because it makes no bones about who you're playing. You're not merely allowed to fight for the bad guys; you're invited to, encouraged to — the whole line built to fit you for the empire's jackboots.[^1] It started life as a proposed **Star Wars** game — FASA designed its systems for the license, lost it to **West End Games**, and built its own setting instead. Stripping all the goofiness out of a galaxy far, far away is what turned it into the hobby's most committed attempt at running the Roman Empire literally: a corrupt galactic imperium fighting a doomed, egalitarian alliance of humans and aliens, all of it built around grav tanks, bounce infantry, and the kind of hardware register that reads like a recruitment poster for a war nobody should want. It's space opera wearing a parade-ground uniform, and it doesn't care that you think the fit is odd. ## Setting Set in the **69th Century**, the galaxy is ruled by the **Terran Overlord Government (TOG)** — a corrupt, expansionist empire deliberately modeled on Imperial Rome, down to the Praetorian Guard, the Senate, and the self-declared claim of being the fifth incarnation of the Roman Empire. Terra is its throneworld, and it commands millions of Legions. Arrayed against it is the **Commonwealth**, an egalitarian alliance of humans and aliens (notably the **Baufrin**) spanning the far end of the Orion arm. The Commonwealth's professional army is partly made up of the **Renegade Legions** — TOG legions that defected rather than serve a regime they found monstrous, and who give the entire line its name. The war between them is the backdrop for every game in the series. The factions run the same Roman military ladder: a **Legion** (commanded by a Prefect of the Legion) breaks into **Cohorts** (Centurion Maximus) and then **Centuries** (Centurion) — a Century of grav armor being the cleanest named fighting unit there is. ## The games - **[[Renegade Legion - Centurion|Centurion]]** — grav-tank ground combat, the signature of the line. - **[[Renegade Legion - Interceptor|Interceptor]]** — starfighter duels. - **[[Renegade Legion - Leviathan|Leviathan]]** — capital-ship fleet combat. - **[[Renegade Legion - Prefect|Prefect]]** — planetary and operational command, the strategic scale. - **[[Renegade Legion - Legionnaire|Legionnaire]]** — the role-playing game set in the same universe. ## Tech and flavor The main war machines are **grav tanks** — antigravity armor that skims the ground at hundreds of kilometers an hour — supported by grav APCs and **bounce infantry** (who wear grav belts to leap across the battlefield). Nuclear weapons come in the form of **HELL bombs**. Ships move through **T-space**, a hyperspace with its own hazards. It's hard, dense, late-eighties military science fiction: stats, record sheets, and a worldview where "your life expectancy is less than two minutes" is printed on the box where a blurb used to be. ## Editions The line is FASA's, released from **1987** onward; the individual games went through multiple editions (Centurion 2nd ed, Interceptor 2nd ed, Leviathan 3.0). The line effectively ended when FASA closed its doors in 2001, and the books are long out of print — but the setting is small enough to carry, and that's a large part of what keeps it alive in the hobby's memory. ## References - [Renegade Legion — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_Legion) - [Renegade Legion — The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/renegade_legion) - [Setting: Renegade Legion — BoardGameGeek](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/6896/setting-renegade-legion) [^1]: Sure, you're allowed to play the filthy **Commonwealth** and their alien puppet masters — but what kind of a person would make a decision like that?