May Day Parade

It’s May Day…. the day unions, socialists, communists and leftists demonstrate and celebrate the toils of the laborer. It also means that the Victory Day Parade is just over a week away… the time when the Soviet Union used to show its military might to mark the anniversary of German capitulation and the end of the Great Patriotic War.
Ah, Soviets… I miss the Soviet Union.
Round about 1992, I bought a copy of West End Games Star Trek: The Adventure Game, which included in the box a WEG catalog. Many WEG games interested me, they had the Star Wars RPG and Ghostbusters. But what caught my eye 19 years ago was The Price of Freedom (TPoF) – what sounded like a Red Dawn roleplaying game.

“In The Price of Freedom, you play an American who chooses to resist the Communist occupiers. You must find the weapons and leadership to resist effectively. The invaders have absolute nuclear supremacy; regular military opposition is impossible. The only way they can be defeated is to make the occupation of America so costly that they must withdraw. But remember; no occupied nation has ever liberated itself without outside help. And we have no one to help us. The fate of America is in your hands.”

It’s now nearly two decades later and I have secured myself not one but two copies of the main box, the supplement Your Own Private Idaho as well as a PDF edition of the Gamemasters Pack.  The first set is in good repair and only seems to be missing some of the data files, notably Data File A, my hopes are that the second set will fill these missing holes – but it is still in transit. I’m still happy with the original purchase from a Canadian seller – oddly the second copy is also on its way from Canada…
Last fall I stumbled over out the blog Cold War Hot Hot Hot, and the work there inspired me to look into this type of gaming.  I initially thought of using some of the 1/72 scale military models I’ve collected over the years, and began repainting several Bravo Team vehicles I snagged at Target last year. However the idea of 15-20mm gaming doesn’t appeal to me as much as larger scale gaming.  I have some Ameri-Towne buildings, a number of larger diecast cars from a superheroes campaign (run using Heroclix), and have ordered a few HLBS 40mm UltraModern Russians and some Russian diecasts.  Maybe some of these will get here in time for a mini Victory Day Parade.
Things Cold War have begun to appeal to me again recently – and with no campaigns panning out since my 3 year Deadlands campaign ended, I hope a TPoF avatar campaign might pan out.
Fingers crossed.
Campaigns and I have not been agreeing lately – I tend to go for big-idea games that I never really get off the ground. I had very much wanted to do a Crimson Skies RPG using the Savage Worlds system, but several attempts at simulating air combat with those rules were not fulfilling. Indeed constant running of Savage Worlds powered systems over the past few years has got me looking for something else.  An initial game of TPoF back in October played well enough – though the arch-conservative wing-nuttiness (more on this later) of the presented campaign was tiresome.
My hopes are that the games will be mindless fun – and keep me focused on modern gaming to get the collection of cars and buildings I have collected into something pretty.