At some point, I picked up a Humble Bundle of licensed RPGs: G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Power Rangers (all Renegade’s Essence20 line). This was not because I had a burning need to run a Power Rangers campaign, but because the price-to-page-count ratio made the lizard part of my brain clap its little hands.
They now take space on my Dropbox and in some fit of masochistic self-justification, I decided to read them. Now I’ve read enough of them to ask the obvious question: what on earth am I doing, and what are these games actually for?
What’s Actually in This Pile?
The Renegade games all run on the Essence20 system. You get four core stats – the “four S’s”: Strength, Speed, Smarts, and Social – plus skills and specialisations. When you roll, it’s a d20 plus a “skill die” that grows from d2 up to d12 as you invest points.
The system has a little dice-ladder mini-game where bonuses and penalties can shift that skill die up and down past the usual range, into things like “roll 3d6 instead of a single die” or “auto-success if you want”. There’s also a shared meta-currency called Story Points to fudge rolls, get clues, and generally nudge the story when the dice are being unhelpful.
Each line then wears a different costume over that chassis:
- G.I. Joe overlays it with military training, origins in the different services, and roles like Commando, Officer, Vanguard, all wrapped in “Real American Hero” bombast. Character creation runs through Influences, Origins (Army, Navy, Air Force, plus non-military support), and Roles, leading to a squad of highly competent specialists with a pile of gear, perks, and vehicles, all requisitioned from the Pit and beyond.
- Power Rangers is about teen heroes bounded by colour. You choose your Ranger colour as a Role, influenced by your Origin and your pre-Ranger background, then eventually bolt Zords and Combiner Zords onto the whole affair. The text is very clear it’s about fun storytelling and epic combat, Zordon-era nostalgia first, granular physics a distant second.
- Transformers gives you an Autobot with Bot Mode and Alt Mode, chassis, and Role (Scout, Warrior, Scientist, etc.). It leans hard into size classes, vehicle combat, and the social awkwardness of being a giant alien robot trying to “fit in” on Earth, again using the same Essence20 backbone.
At a mechanical level, then one big unified Hasbro house engine designed to flex across multiple toy lines.
Do They Capture the IP?
Short answer: yes, mostly. Longer answer: they capture some facets very well and quietly ignore others.
G.I. Joe feels like G.I. Joe in the way it handles squads, kit, and villainy. You are absolutely kitted out like an action figure: weapon upgrades, battle dress with modular upgrades, personal gear, vehicles, pets, and mission-issued prototypes all live in a lovingly detailed equipment chapter.gijoeroleplayinggamecorerulebook You requisition gear instead of buying it with money, which is nicely on theme for an elite black-ops outfit. The threat chapter reads like a Cobra toy catalogue with stats. If your childhood joy was “a team of specialists in colour-coded fatigues rappelling out of jets to punch terrorists with ridiculous names,” this nails the fantasy.
Power Rangers very clearly wants you to play Power Rangers, not “generic super sentai with serial numbers filed off”. The structure assumes Angel Grove as home base, Zordon-era villains, and Zords straight from the show. Your Role is your colour, you combine weapons into bigger guns, you form a megazord. The whole game leans into teamwork, teen melodrama, and the rhythm of monster-of-the-week escalating into “make my monster grow”. It’s honestly one of the more faithful TV-tone emulations I’ve seen.
Transformers hits that “giant robots being weird on Earth” vibe. Origin choices like Seeker, Champion, and Outrider map nicely to the different body types, there’s a whole section on Bot vs Alt mode stats and hardpoints, and the threats chapter is full of Decepticons with personalities as well as guns. You can absolutely have a session that feels like an extended lost episode of the cartoon or a side-arc from the comics.
What Do They All Have in Common?
Beyond the licences and the glossy art, there’s a shared DNA here.
First, they’re all trad, campaign-engine games. These aren’t lean little story games you can read at lunch and run that evening. They are fat corebooks, multi-chapter affairs with character creation processes, gear catalogues, combat systems, GM advice, and at least one introductory adventure per line. You can see the expectation: this is meant to be someone’s main game for a while. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you acquire three of them at once it does start to look like fantasy football for virtual shelf space.
Second, they’re all emulation engines rather than experiments. Essence20 leans into “cinematic but crunchy” with its d20 + skill die approach, dice shift ladder, and Story Points to push things a bit more narratively when needed. None of these is trying to reinvent story structure; they’re trying to recreate “the show/game, but with you in it”.
Third, they are all quite a lot of work. Not impossibly so, but enough that “I’ll just run a quick Power Rangers mini-campaign” quietly blooms into session prep, statting threats, parsing situational modifiers and remembering exactly how Zords, vehicles, and multi-form enemies are supposed to operate. In an age where my group already struggles to meet regularly, anything that smells like homework is at an immediate disadvantage.
Why Would Anyone Play These?
The cynical answer is “because they haven’t read all the other games I have.” The less cynical, and probably fairer, answer is that licensed RPGs are comfort food.
If you’re a lapsed Power Ranger kid or you’ve had Transformers rattling around your brain since the 80s, the idea that you can be there, not in a generic space opera, but actually in Angel Grove or fighting Decepticons, is compelling. These games don’t ask you to learn a new aesthetic; you already know how a session “should” feel. You know what a good Joe mission looks like. That’s a powerful shortcut when you’re trying to sell an RPG night to friends whose free time is finite.
For players who have only ever seen D&D, Essence20 in particular is a clever pitch. It’s “familiar but different”: still a d20 at the core, still classes/roles, still combat turns and hit-point-ish abstraction, but with enough tweaks to feel like it belongs to its show. If your group lives in the d20 comfort zone and absolutely loves these IPs, I can absolutely see any of the Renegade games being the perfect bridge product.
So: yes. There are real reasons to play them. They’re not scams. The question is less “why would anyone play this?” and more “when, given everything else already on the shelf, would I?”
Are There Too Many Games?
Yes. Obviously. There are too many games in precisely the same way there is too much television, too many podcasts, and far too many artisan gins. We are living in the Age of Infinite Niche.
Humble Bundles in particular are like RPG gacha machines. For the price of one hardcover you get a dozen complete games, some supplements, and probably a GM screen PDF you will never print. It’s incredible value in pure economic terms and a bit disastrous in psychological ones. The pile grows. The notional campaigns multiply. The actual played sessions… do not.
In that context, these licensed games suffer from a weird problem. They are too big to be toys and too small to be lifestyles. They want you to pick them as your main game for months, but they’re competing not just with each other, but with every other fantasy, sci-fi, horror and superhero game you already have. They’re not likely to replace your forever-game. They’re also not light enough to casually slot in for a one-shot between, say, your next chunk of Call of Cthulhu and whatever fantasy heartbreaker you’re currently reading.
So a lot of them are destined to live on hard drives and in the backs of bookcases. Not because they’re bad, but because they arrived in an ecosystem that is already overfull.
Why Do Publishers Keep Cranking These Out?
Because they’re not stupid.
A game line like “Generic Space Adventure With Feelings” has to fight for every eyeball. “Transformers Roleplaying Game” comes pre-loaded with recognition, nostalgia, and a built-in faction of people who will buy it just to see what Optimus Prime’s stats look like. The licence is a marketing engine.
From the publisher side, a decent but not spectacular RPG might sell okay on release, then get quietly bundled a couple of years later in a charity or promotional deal. That’s new life for a PDF that would otherwise just sit there. From the licensor’s perspective, every RPG is another line of merch: it keeps the brand in circulation, cross-promotes other products, and costs them very little relative to the rest of their media empire.
So they’re not irrational. Licensed RPGs are a sensible play in a crowded market: you borrow someone else’s signal in exchange for a cut. That doesn’t guarantee a game will get active, ongoing play, but it does almost guarantee that somebody like me will go, “Oh, that looks interesting,” and click buy.
Are We Suckers for Buying This Stuff?
Yes. And no. And yes.
On one hand, there is a very recognisable pattern: I obtain a digital crate of high-production RPGs in a sale, read them with interest, mentally schedule three hypothetical campaigns, and then go back to running Cthulhu or Dragonbane, because that’s what my players actually want. In purely rational “hours played per pound” terms, it’s indefensible. I could probably achieve a better ROI by setting fire to the money for warmth.
On the other hand, part of the hobby is reading games you will never play. It’s a design education. It’s a way of inhabiting fictional worlds you like from a different angle. I may never run G.I. Joe, but I might absolutely steal its approach to mission structure and requisitioning gear for another military-adjacent game. I might nick an Essence20 Story Point trick, or a Transformers-style approach to alt-modes in some homebrew. Lord knows, plenty of other RPGs have!
And there’s an emotional component: owning these books might let me imagine running that game, which is a little fantasy in its own right. “One day, when the stars align, I’ll run a short Power Rangers campaign with the right group” is a sort of comfort thought, even if it never eventuates.
Are the games themselves “shit”? No, that’s not being fair on them. They range from solidly competent to genuinely quite good at what they set out to do. Yes, they’re completely derivative. Their best ideas are found in better games. But they’re not shit.
More importantly though, they’re being released into a world where “quite good” isn’t really enough to guarantee table time. The danger isn’t that we’re all buying garbage; it’s that we’re buying perfectly decent things and then quietly drowning them in a tide of other perfectly decent things.
The Kind of Person Who Buys Bundles He Won’t Play
Which brings me to the real subject of this post: me.
What does it say about a person that he acquires three sizeable licensed RPGs in one click, fully aware that his current schedule can barely sustain the games he already runs? It says, I suspect, that he enjoys being an RPG librarian as much as being an RPG referee. There’s a pleasure in knowing these games exist, in having them to hand, in leafing through them, admiring the art and the clever bits of design, and then carefully returning them to the digital stacks.
It also says I am exactly the kind of mark that makes licensed RPGs viable. Someone invested enough in the hobby to buy more games than he can humanly play, and just nostalgic enough about giant robots and moody monster hunters to be drawn in by a logo and a reduced price.
Are we suckers? Possibly. Yes.
Are the games a waste? Not necessarily.
They are artefacts of a strange cultural moment where you can, if you so choose, be an Autobot on Tuesday, a Wizard on Wednesday, and a Power Ranger at the weekend, all without leaving your chair. That’s… kind of wonderful, even if most of it remains potential rather than practice.
Will I run any of these? No. But I have now actually read them. That ain’t nothing.
More than meets the shelf, indeed.
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