A Brief Review Of Droids - A Cybernetic Role-Playing Game

During the RPG boom between the '70s and the '80s of the last century the 'role playing game' moniker was often used for games that were not RPGs, in an attempt to ride interest and so enhance sales. This time we will talk about Droids - A Cybernetic Role-Playing Game, the first (and it seems the only) game ever produced by Integral Games. Droids is set in an undefined future where robots (droids, perhaps in a wink to Star Wars...) have exterminated the human race after serving it (from menial work to government to scientific research) and being fed up with being a slave race. Unfortunately, mankind's annihilation did not bring a new and shining droid paradise but droid wars  of supremacy that led to the droid world destruction. Now droids wander a devastated Earth to fight other droids and hopefully survive...

The game is a 80 pages, small sized booklet. There is almost no artwork and the art we do see is awfully poor. Graphics are essential, but readable. Droids is virtually a combat game because, apart from two pages of introduction where the background is explained, all pages are devoted to building a droid (or a group of droids) and sending it/them wandering and fighting. There is no world description, the game master should do everything by himself (helpfully, the designer writes that the GM could limit himself to detailing "only a continent"), the intriguing section "Robot Societies" is just a meagre page. There is no attempt to introduce rules about something like AI or programming: a droid is fundamentally a human mind with a robotic body. 

It seems quite sure that this game plunged in obscurity very quickly, an interesting idea poorly executed (for a RPG).