-ROCKETMAN-

-ROCKETMAN- is a skirmish style, table top war game, designed for four players, using role playing as a means to generate an ambience. Each game takes one afternoon to play. Previous campaigns have so far resulted in a total of seven games.

I am fond of role playing and enjoy the mental creativity required to make up new characters. I have a weakness for story telling, though I don’t know if I’m actually very good at it. I’ll certainly never be a famous author! The reason why I make these games is because I like the ambience of the 1930’s period and since I shall never be a film director with buckets of money at my disposal, I must work with the means at my disposal. There is also the social element of course. Its very funny to sit around a table and adopt archane accents that refer to favourite films and TV programmes.

Originally, I wanted to recreate something which had the classic ’pulp feel’. I was thinking of Bulldog Drummond, Tin Tin, Rocketeer and Indiana Jones, but also Dan Dare, Dr Who and Flash Gordon. There had to be death rays, outlandish machinery and evil, cardboard-cut-out villains threatening world destruction or invasion. I played with the idea of a super hero, but I don’t like the notion of ’super talents’ as seen in US comics. I prefer dark machines and weird science.

The first game featured a Prusssian baron and his blonde teutonic side kick as the bad guys and these will be returning in RM4 (if I live long enough to write it). Baron Schönberg was a great advisory, modelled on Bulldog Drummond’s arch enemy, Carl Peterson. Cool and calculating with nerves of steel, he uses the Nazi government in Berlin as helpless pawns in his ambitions to create a race of angelic super men but is aloof of the Third Reich’s bumbling racial misunderstandngs. A devout Christian, he believes he is on a sacred and holy mission to save mankind, at any cost! His men are all bretheren in a secret order called Die Schwartze Pfele (the Black Arrows), a splinter group of the ancient Teutonic Knights. A reference to the many conspiracy theories surrounding the holy orders. The first fallschirsmjäger, they are deployed from the Graf Frederich, a secret and hitherto unknown Zeppelin.

The blonde at his side is Helga Van Sant. Silent, cold and beautiful. Helga is the cutting edge of the Baron’s will. A favoured sharp tool he employs with surgical skill to further his ambitions. A deadly assain, modelled on countless femme fatale’s but none more so than the character also named Helga from the Disney film ’Atlantis’.
Among his sordid retinue is Doctor Alfred Metzger. The third of the three recurring villains. An evil, psychopathic genius, a biologist whose exploits in the service of his master have rendered him utterly mad, Metzger has survived falling down a bottomless pit (he was caught by a giant spiders web), being lost for weeks in an underground cavern filled with giant insects, and being buried alive in the ice of the North Pole in a secret Nazi base full of the flesh eating zombie’s his own diabolic experiements had mistakenly created.

The new games feature new bad guys: The Iron Czar is a Russian bolshevik general called Viktor Korsakov (all my leading bad guys are named after classical composers), from the frozen wastes of Archangel. Having kidnapped a brilliant scientist and stolen various secret plans he is plotting to take over the whole of the Soviet Union, and there after the world. Having taken the Soviet leadership by complete surprise, the only man who can now stop Korsakov, and thus save the world again, is Rocketman and to do that he must find and penetrate Korsakov’s secret base in the wilderness of eastern Khazakstan. Korsakov’s side kick is a mysterious Asian woman named Olga. Short and dark and sensual she leads a band of cut throat bandits in league with Korsakov for unknown reasons.

On the side of good, clean living and fair play, is Dan Mansfield. A former British pilot in the Royal Flying Corps he is suitably upper class without being a toff. He is loosely based on a cross between Bulldog Drummond and Biggles, but there is a bit of every other British hero of the pulp genre in his make up. Like most hero’s of the period he is never more happy than when in the thick of the fun killing Johnny foreigner and saving the world.

At his side is his loyal life long friend, George Macarthur. A Welsh engineer of uncertain sexuality, he is the arcetype side kick for the pulp hero. The friend who apparently has no life of his own and despite constant complaints is ever ready to travel off on some outrageous adventure, face hideous and inhuman perils and ultimately watch his friend reap all the glory.

Aside from these two, there is also Rocketman’s ’girl’, the ever breezy Audrey Summers, to whom every death defying adventure is really just a great lark, around whom countless flunkies die horribly but whose greatest fear is that her hair might be untidy, and his typical gung ho American friend, a former Marine named ’Mad Dog’ Mitchell who always carries the biggest gun.
Audrey Summer’s father is also the inventor and creator of the rocketpack.