Strike Legion

"This makes Strike Legion probably the only game where you can legitimately have an underbarrel mount that risks destroying the planet you are standing on." —MJ12 Commando regarding this game

Strike Legion is a sci-fi Space Opera tabletop pen-and-paper roleplaying game set in a distant future of highly-advanced technology and vast, galactic war. The aggressive and tyrannical Imperium is waging an endless war with the Star Republic, a democratic society of intermixed human, alien, and genetically-engineered species. The Imperium possesses great numbers and cheap troops and warships while the Star Republic possesses highly-advanced technology, expert warriors, and a powerful navy. However, the Republic's Fleet can barely hold the line against the constant, tireless onslaught of the Imperium's endless numbers and ever-expanding arsenal of supersoldiers, robots, genetically-constructed bioweapons, and reality-bending archmagi. The Republic is forced to turn to their greatest weapon: the Legion, a small, elite force of the very best operatives in the entire Republic, subjected to a grueling and often-lethal process that turns them from mere mortals into nearly-godlike supersoldiers. These Legionaires are outfitted with the most advanced weapons and technology in the Republic and sent on the most insane and dangerous missions in an effort to destroy the Imperium's military infrastructure from within. Whether destroying shipyards, fomenting rebellion, assassinating aspiring admirals, or disrupting research, the Legion's missions are vital and often perilous, pitting them against the most dangerous enemies the Imperium can muster. But that's fine, as the Legion can handle that.

Strike Legion is best described as the ultimate end result of X Meets Y, Up to Eleven, and Cool Versus Awesome. The setting draws directly from countless other sci-fi and fantasy works, combining them together into a single amalgam and then turning everything up to an extreme degree. Pick a franchise, and it likely gets refenced somewhere. Everything from Halo to Warhammer 40000 to Tolkein to Evangelion to Prototype to Highlander to The Culture to World of Darkness gets referenced. Technology and firepower are absurdly scaled up in the setting; as the page quote notes, it is entirely possible to have a grenade launcher that can destroy the planet you stand on. Mixed in with this is a schlocky sort of Black and White Morality, with the Imperium being unquestionably evil and the Republic being the last bastion of freedom. The setting in many ways Crosses the Line Twice, with the Imperium being so classically over-the-top in its ruthless villainy that it loops right back around to being awesome. (Seriously, they have a DOOM LEGION, which includes DOOM TROOPS who deploy from the DOOM BLADE, and commanded by a Doctor Doom Expy.)

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Tropes used in Strike Legion include:

• Ace Pilot:
  • The Ination, an aquatic species for whom combat in the ocean is so natural that it almost perfectly translates into space combat, resulting a species-wide natural affinity for precision flight and space warfare. This species is essentially dogfighting with multi-kilometer-long warships like they are fighter jets. Serrans possess similar flight capabilities, supported by extremely advanced AI.
  • Though not as naturally gifted, there are "Imperial Ace" archetype characters who serve as squadron commanders for the Imperial Fleet.
• Asskicking Equals Authority: The Kafrin have institutionalized this. Leaders are determined by duels to the death, but savvy Kafrin leaders arrange for assassinations, intimidation, and political intrigue to deal with those with rising ambitions. As a result, any Kafrin leader is required to be strong, cunning, adaptable, and treacherous.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The higher-ranking an Imperial soldier is, the more capable they become. Imperial officers and generals are almost literally an order of magnitude more powerful and deadly than regular enlisted soldiers.
• BFG: Just about any firearm that isn't designed to be concealable, and a significant number that are. Weaponry scales up from anti-personnel laser weapons to laser sniper rifles that have a literally unlimited range (you could theoretically snipe someone on another planet using this thing) to high-powered laser and plasma weapons that can destroy buildings in a single shot.
• Blood Knight: Fermorian Dark Warriors, who have given in to their natural bloodlust and don suits of powered armor or pilot battle frames and compete to see who can be the most brutal killing machine on the battlefield.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The Imperium. Aside from the DOOM LEGION, there's the Death Troopers, the Imperial Death Factory, Imperial Space Marine Legions covered in Spikes of Villainy, and a paranormal division whose sole job is to harness demonic extradimensional entities as weapons of war.
• Cast From Hit Points: The Inner Gates advantage allows you to sacrifice points of Life to gain additional actions.
• Cool Starship: The Legion Strike Cruiser, one of the most powerful warships in existence. Most of the Republic's other warships count. Imperial ships are of inferior quality, but their Empress-class dreadnoughts are extremely powerful.
• Cool Versus Awesome: The Game. It is entirely possible to have a Legion strike team made up of Commander Shepard, Master Chief, Spider-Man, Gandalf, Kenshiro, and a xenomorph wearing Powered Armor and driving Evangelions which wield Reflex Cannons, who take on legions of Immortals, vampires, Godzilla, Space Marines, Alex Mercer clones, and Dark Jedi.
• Crapsack World: The Imperium in general consists of countless worlds covered in vast cities that have nearly lawless anarchy, where conscription and brainwiping are commonplace and the Imperial Fleet can legally come by and take anything they want. On the flip side, while the Republic is relatively pristine, everyone ther elives in fear of the Imperium breaking through the defense lines and obliterating their planets without warning.
• Cyborg: Runs the whole gamut of possibilities, from implants and augmentations to body-mounted weaponry to full-body conversions.
  • Arm Cannon
  • Blade Below the Shoulder
  • Combat Tentacles
  • Eye Beams (also a possible mutation for Imperial supersoldiers)
• Dark Messiah: The Empress of Man. She has built up a cult around her demanding that the Imperium's citizenry worship her as a goddess, promising them salvation in excange for mindless devotion.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Once again: The DOOM LEGION.
• Doom Troops: Aside from the literal DOOM TROOPS of the DOOM LEGION, most Imperial soldiers count.
• Drop the Hammer: There's regular hammers, gravity hammers ripped straight from Halo, and even rocket-propelled warhammers.
• Earthshattering Kaboom: Warship engagements regulalry throw around blasts that can destroy worlds. Also: singularity grenades and singularity missiles.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Ancients, and other cross-dimensional monstrosities.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: The entire point behind the Legion.
• Energy Weapon
  • Laser Blade: Multiple types, including energy swords, plasma gun-swords, lightning swords, and ancient laser blades that deal sufficient damage to destroy starships.
  • Frickin' Laser Beams: Lasers are a very common and versitale weapon in the setting, generally designed to be rapid-fire and low damage, making them suitable for anti-personnel work or destroying smaller warships.
  • Wave Motion Gun: Many suits fo power armor, mecha, and warships can mount massive superweapons; the warship-scale ones can destroy planets with ease, and ships generally are able to take multiple hits from these weapons.
• Evil Overlord/Galactic Conqueror: The Empress in general.
• Expy: Everyone. Its easier to list the characters, organizations, and technologies that aren't expies of something else.
• Fantastic Racism: The Empress hates the Gens, which is the primary reason why she is trying to destroy the Republic. Or at least, the public one, beyond the running desire to Take Over The Universe.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke:
  • The Imperial Death Factory and the Imperial Weavers specialize in this.
  • According to the background, many of the "Gens" (genetically engineered species) were created as specialist soldiers or laborers.
  • The Empress is trying to use genetic engineering to turn the entire population of the Imperium into Mastery-capable supersoldiers. Most of the Imperium's populace already has nearly fifty percent of her genetic material to start with thanks to massive genetic tampering at birth. As a result, the Imperium has a huge number of people with limited Mastery abilities.
• Genius Bruiser: Fermorians and Quateren. The former are an orc-like warrior species that have modified their own genes to become a species of scientists and philosophers, while the latter are massive rhino-like slabs of muscle and bone who have instead immersed themselves in scientific study and virtual reality in order to more readily understand the universe.
  • Ironically, one of the Asylum's "product," the Clown, is a psychopathically violent murder machine who also happens to have an Intelligence score of 1, which effectively makes it smarter than most of modern humanity.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Most of the warships in the game are actually comparatively fragile. ("Comparatively" being the operative words, considering they routinely trade and survive shots that kill planets) Instead of seeing slugging matches with huge ponderous vessels, engagements between fleets are more like fighter dogfights, but with multi-kilometer-long ships.
  • One of the "products" of the Asylum is a soldier known as the "Harlequin," who is an extremely mobile and capable soldier with the ability to plan out thousands of possible scenarios at once (so, essentially Midnighter) and deal a surprising amount of damage, but has no armor and dies very quickly once you catch him/her.
• Go Mad From the Revelation: Delving too deep into Mastery, and thus understanding the fundamental nature of reality, can drive weak minds completely insane. Similarly, using a Time Circuit can drive its user further and further out of touch with reality.
• Government Conspiracy: The Imperial Pyramid, whose purpose is to direct the social development of the Imperium to better control and grow the society to the Empress' end.
• Hidden Elf Village: The Guardians as a whole, whose society exists largely within hidden pocket-universes created by their control of Mastery. The normally hyper-aggressive Imperium actually makes a point to leave them alone because attempting to target the Guardians' pocket realities has always resulted in the entire fleet being destroyed.
• Hopeless War: For the Republic, unless the Legions can stop the Imperium's war machine.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Battle Heralds and the Hive, both of which are out to destroy everything that isn't them, eat it, and use their conquered planets to make more of themselves like vast Von Neumann machines.
• Humongous Mecha: Ubiquitous. "Frames" have actually replaced traditional fighter craft due to superior mobility and firepower. Everyone, from the Imperium and Republic to corporate security and police forces use them.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Nullspace, the alternate dimension used for FTL travel, will quickly disintegrate any ship that lingers in it for too long, meaning that faster-than-light travel involves a large number of short jumps through nullspace.
• Invisibility Cloak: A common piece of gear for stealth-oriented agents and Legionaires. Theans also use these on their massive Frames in space combat.
• Kaiju: The Death Factory produces tactical kaiju in anti-vehicle, anti-frame, and anti-starship models.
• Killer Rabbit: The Theans, a species of humanoid rabbits with precognition and immense space-capable Frames with stealth systems that let them sneak inside entire Imperial fleets to destroy them from within.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Legionaires as a whole. All Legionaires start with the Fleet ability, allowing them to move twice as fast as unmodified humans, and the speed only goes up from there. The typical Legionaire also has a high enough initiative that they can often engage and gun/cut down entire squads at the start of an engagement before they can even move, and this is before we take into account their movement and evasive abilities.
• Long Lived: The Hetochi, which can live for more than four thousand years at a time, due to being engineered for terraforming work. Their extremely long lifespans make it difficult for them to relate to shorter-lived species.
• Lost Technology: The previous Imperium was even more technologically advanced than the current one, and countless other alien empires existed before the Empress enforced the Eternal Night that destroyed most interstellar civilizations. Both the Imperium and the Republic actively seek out technology from these old civilizations.
• Mad Scientist: You don't get institutions like the Imperial Death Factory or the Asylum without these.
• Mighty Glacier: Chedan warships have such incredibly powerful shields that they're virtually impervious to regular Imperial naval weapons. The Imperium responds by ramming them.
• Mooks: It says something when the genetically-engineered, extremely-well-trained, power-armor-wearing supersoldiers wielding fully automatic rocket grenade launchers are regular mooks who get slaughtered in droves fighting the Legion.
  • Elite Mooks: You generally need the supersoldiers who are substantially more powerful than the generic Imperial Space Marine Legions to even draw close to the kind of firepower and skill of the Legionaires.
  • Giant Mook: Clowns, one of the "products" of the Imperial Asylum.
  • Heavily Armored Mook: The upper-tier Imperial supersoldiers in heavy power armor or piloting powerful Frames.
  • Superpowered Mooks: Countless varieties, generally mixed with one of the other types listed above.
• The Night That Never Ends: Operation Eternal Night, which the Empress initiated to prevent the Imperium from losing the first war with their own rebelling Gens. It involved using a titanic Mastery project to isolate every star system in the galaxy for thousands of years.
• One-Man Army: Individual Legionaires. A strike team of Legionaires is expressly described as being more dangerous than an entire Republic battlefleet, and can do the same job with far fewer losses.
• Our Monsters Are Different
  • Our Angels Are Different: Serrans, a hyperintelligent Gen species resembling angels. They specialize in highly-advanced AI technolgy and are masters of spaceflight, and bear a more-than-passing resemblance to The Culture.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Drakens, a Sparta-style Proud Warrior Race dedicated to defending the Republic.
  • Our Elves Are Better: The Lamerians, who are for all intents and purposes the Eldar.
  • Our Orcs Are Different: The Fermorin. These particular orc-like creatures are actually an entire species of highly-intelligent pacifists, focused on art, science, and literature. They were once a species of savage brutes, but through careful genetic engineering turned themselves into pacifists, though they can succumb to their own violent urges once again and become one of the most terrifying enemies on the battlefield.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Aside from real vampires (which are badasses comparable to Legionaires) there are actual vampire warships, complete with giant metallic fangs, that latch onto other ships.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Superpowerful techno-zombies more comparable to The Terminator than the shambling brain-eaters common in fiction.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: The Gens are a massive example of this, as they were all created to serve humanity in one fashion or another, until the Imperium started making Gens that were truly self-aware. Once this happened, the Imperium started making warrior species due to the need to wage extradimensional war against alien civilizations, but the enslaved warriors and noncombatant Gens eventually turned on the Imperium. The Star Republic was eventually created from that rebellion.
• Planet of Hats: Played with. While many species have hats, i.e. the Draken being a Proud Warrior Race, the character creation section makes a point that just because a species has a predilection toward a particular mindset, the player shouldn't feel limited to that. Some species actively subvert it as well. For example, the Granks were genetically engineered to be extremely resistant to change in their society, so they established a practice known as the Exchange where they routinely shuffle their population around to new cities and worlds in order to actively foster growth and adaptation in their people, turning them into a hyper-dynamic society. Another example is the Fermorians, who deliberately altered their genome and society to push them away from being mindless warriors and instead turning themselves into scholars and scientists.
• Playing with Syringes: Just about every Imperial supersoldier program or other weapons development program involves this.
• Powered Armor: Ubiquitous. All Legionaires wear highly advanced "Spartan" armor, while other, less-powerful armor types are available across the board for Imperial, Republic, and unaffiliated troops. One type of armor even resembles the Crysis nanosuit, and is able to switch between combat modes.
  • There's also a number of bodysuits that fit under clothes or armor that confer various combat or skill bonuses.
• Power Born of Madness: The Imperial Asylum, whose job is to take the still-living but horribly broken rejects of the rest of the Imperium's supersoldier programs and try to make something useful out of them. The common results are extremely powerful and mentally unstable living weapons.
• Proud Warrior Race: Several species most notably the Draken. The Fermorin were this until they engineered it out of them.
• Ramming Always Works: Imperial ships have a special ability called "Devotion" which allows them to suicide-ram enemy ships. The larger Imperial ships' shields are strong enough that they can ram planets and win. In fact, ramming is so powerful that it is the recommended method of taking out Chedan warships.
• Reality Warper: Mastery, pretty much ripped straight from Mage: The Ascension. The Imperium has their own Mastery corps and countless supersoldiers capable of using it, while the Republic relies on their Guild of Masters (an expy of the Jedi Order). Mastery is also used by the Ancients, and is incredibly powerful.
• Ret-Gone: Time Mastery allows for the retroactive removal of a person from time, if the Master is powerful enough.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: A number of Kafrin planets have been destroyed by the Imperium, and as a result the surviving defense fleets from these worlds are on constant crusades of vengeance that send them deep into Imperial territory where they invade, raze, or outright destroy Imperial worlds. More than a few of these epically-pissed-off Kafrin fleets have actually made it far enough that they had to be destroyed by the Empress' own personal fleet.
• Robot War: Thanks to the Battle Heralds, a race of extremely hostile sentiet robots that are invading the Imperium and Republic, and are somewhere between the Reapers and the Tyranids.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted by and large. This is a setting that fully acknowledges the kind of advanced technology and scale involved when operating on the galactic stage.
• Seers:
  • Theans in general, but a small, select group known as the Order of the Eye has extremely advanced precognitive powers to the point that they can precisely predict when Imperial fleets are going to invade. How important are these seers? Each of them has a Legionaire assigned to guard them full time. Since there are only about a hundred Legionaires at any one time, this should give a good idea of how important the Order is to the war effort.
  • The Imperial Psi Corps produces "Prophet" supersoldiers that possess precognitive powers. They are powerful enough to a serious threat to the Legion.
• Stealth in Space: Thean Frames and Legion Strike Cruisers, along with some other ships. A common part of Thean doctrine involves using their stealth abilities to sneak into Imperial fleets and wreak havoc within their formations.
• Space Clothes: Suitskin, an ubiquitous form of color-changing, shape-changing clothing that protects from falls, fire, blades, etc. So commonplace that even the poverty-stricken Imperium populace has it as common clothing.
• Space Elves: Lamerians, which were literally designed to look like elves. They're a fairly transparent Expy of the Eldar from Warhammer 40000, with massive "worldships" interconnected by a "transit web" and who use stealth, evasion, and large numbers of robots in combat. The one thing that separates them from the Eldar is the lack of massive racial prejudice and arrogance.
• Super Soldier:
  • The Legion is the epitome of this.
  • The Imperium produces them by the bucketload, and they come in a mind-boggling array of types. Everything from dual-wielding wire-fu Gun Kata warrior priests in powered armor to hosts for extradimensional demonic entities to X-Men-style mutants to shapechanging cannibalistic viral warriors and more.
• Stock Super Powers: Runs the gamut, as usual.
  • Awesomeness By Analysis: The Command skill, which uses the Intelligence stat to analyze a situation and the Presence stat to control the rest of the team, allowing them both faster reaction times and additional actions. There's a number of other advantages that allow for rapid analysis for further benefits.
  • Born Lucky: Several advantages allow this, enabling you to reroll dice that go below a certain threshold. One advantage, Blessed, lets you reroll any die, even if you roll a 1, which is otherwise unable to be changed.
  • Bullet Time: A wide range of abilities that let you go super-fast and react with extreme speed.
  • Charm Person: Many of the Presence-related abilities, including specific powers that let you sense what people are thinking through contact.
  • Flight: Either through innate abilities or technology.
  • Healing Factor: The appropriately named Healing Factor advantage.
  • Implausible Fencing Powers
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: A whole slew of abilities relating to hitting targets.
  • Invisibility: Multiple advantages and equipment allow for this.
  • Lovecraftian Superpower: Available to certain Imperial supersoldiers and other organics who have bio-augmentations.
  • Make Me Wanna Shout: Either through cybernetic implants or advantages coupled with Mastery.
  • Photographic Memory
  • Psychic Powers: Pick one from the list on that particular page, and you've got something like it available to a Legionaire.
  • Super Speed: Legionaires start with the Fleet advantage (allowing them to move two range bands in one action) and it just goes up from there.
  • Super Strength: Simply having more than one point in Strength grants you this, before you start putting more points into it and picking advantages to further enhance the ability to lift, break, and throw things.
  • Super Toughness: Rolled in with Super Strength above.
  • Wall Crawl: Again, there's an advantage that allows you to climb walls or other objects without technological support. Mastery makes everything easier!
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Ancients. The only real way to fight them is through Mastery.
• Time Travel: Time Mastery allows for the Master in question to go back and alter the timeline, or even just rewrite time with their mind. Legionaires also carry a Time Circuit device that lets them go back in time to fix mistakes or Imerpial time-muckery.
• Token Evil Teammate: the Veraxin are a xenomorph-style matriarchail species of religious fanatics who fight much like the Imperium (huge numbers or low-grade troops, brutal aggression and violence, raw fanatical devotion to their Queens, etc.) but are on the Republic's side. They're so vicious that the Republic has considered withdrawing the Fleet assets away from the Veraxin section of the front lines and let the Imperium beat up on them until they change their ways.
• Transhuman: Everyone. Even the average Imperial citizen has genetic material from the Empress in them, making them smarter, stronger, and more beautiful than modern-day humanity. Nanotech, cybernetics, genetic engineering, bio-augmentation; if its listed on the Transhuman page, they've got it. The Gear section of the sourcebook also details the immense range of options available to the Republic and Imperium: everything from unobtrusive implants to full-body conversions, implanted weapons, mechanical endoskeletons, designer organ arrangements, distributed circulatory systems, and even seamless editing of your own memories.
• The Virus: Multiple types. One type of virus, courtesy of the Death Factory, is an anti-tank beast capable of infecting other living creatures and turning them into more of itself. There's also a viral fleet, much like the Beast from Homeworld, along with vampires and zombies.
• We Have Reserves:
  • The core Imperial doctrine. No matter how many soldiers and ships they lose, they have countless trillions of the former and millions more of the latter.
  • The Imperium even applies this to their domestic policy. Planet starts revolting against Imperial rule? Dispatch legions of Imperial Marines who systematically kill the entire planet's population and then repopulate it from other, more overcrowded worlds.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Delving too deeply into Mastery can drive one past the breaking point and make an aspiring Master go completely insane.
• World of Badass: By design. Having a 1 in any stat or skill, you are automatically comparable to the very best that a modern human can potentially be in that area, and you only go up from there. I.e. Strike (martial arts) of 1 makes you comparable to Bruce Lee. Most Imperial troops (the cannon-fodder mooks) have stats of 1 across the board minimum, making the faceless hordes of poor-trained conscripts that the Legionaires will shred more capable than the best special forces in the modern world.
• Zerg Rush: The Imperium's tried-and-true tactic. They're wearing the Republic down through pure attrition. This is best shown in their fleet tactics: it is not uncommon for the Imperium to deploy literally ten times as many ships and battle frames in combat with the Republic.
• Zombie Apocalypse: One of the viral threats is a spreading techno-zombie disease. However, these zombies are superhumanly fast and strong, able to chuck cars are run as fast as the same.