Now: the second half of the twentieth century. The powers that be are locked in a tense nuclear standoff, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Away from the watchful eye of national intelligence, a cadre of exceptional misfits is assembled. These soldiers of fortune are uniquely equipped for covert and unusual operations.

In these uncertain times, the line between science and superstition has been broken, and the new arms race is only beginning. You, or your associates, may be faced with weapons, tactics, and actors unlike any you have ever seen. For a price, those exceptional misfits can help. 

When you’re all out of options, it’s time to call FIST.

Inspired by Metal Gear Solid, The A-Team, and Doom Patrol, FIST: ULTRA EDITION from CLAYMORE (they like their capitalization) sees its players taking on the roles of members of the legendary and eponymous rogue mercenary outfit called FIST (Freelance Infantry Strike Team). They’ll make their living (or sometimes act for the greater good, or just die) alongside their fellow misfits and guns for hire while trying to stop disastrous science experiments, infiltrate occult compounds, stop eldritch deities – you know, normal activities associated with the Cold War.

Getting Started

Said mercenaries can be put together in under a minute, easy, especially if you’re giving some choices over to the fickle dice gods.

Each character has four Attributes: FORCEFUL, TACTICAL, CREATIVE, and REFLEXIVE. Each starts off at zero. Next, you pick or randomly determine two Traits. Traits are “the building blocks of FIST characters [and] each trait grants you three things: a special skill or benefit, an item, and modification to your stats.”

A Janitor can clean up a mess in minutes and always has the supplies to do so (and gains bonus damage against anyone who interferes), has a Mop [3 DAMAGE[, and gets +1 Forceful.

If you’re Radioactive you have special Treated bandages; if you aren’t wearing them you deal damage to everyone around you, and can roll +FORCEFUL (which you’ve got -2 with, unfortunately) to direct it at someone specifically (although get those bandages back on quickly afterwards or you’re dead).

As a Wizard you can roll 1d6 to find out what kind of spell you’ll be casting this turn (turn someone into a small animal, completely heal the target, disintegrate both the target and yourself); as you advance, you’ll be able to replace spells on the list with new ones. You’ve got a magic missile launcher for 1D6 DAMAGE that will always hit someone (if not necessarily the intended target), and you get +2 CREATIVE.

Tacticians can explain an elaborate plan of action to the team, making all partial successes total successes until someone rolls a failure, at which point the plan fails catastrophically. You’ve night vision goggles, and get +2 TACTICAL.

You may have many Limbs, letting you roll twice whenever trying to catch something or grapple someone. You’ll be carrying Many Knives that altogether do 1d6+1 DAMAGE, and gain +1 REFLEXIVE.

Obviously, there’s a lot of variety here, and we’ll see more of it in a bit. Those attribute bonuses are of singular importance, however, as they’re the only improvements or downgrades you’ll be getting in character creation, and your task resolution is decidedly Powered by the Apocalypse: roll 2d6 and add/subtract an attribute, 6 or less sees things go wrong, 7-9 things go right but with a downside, 10+ things go right with no downside, and double 6s on the dice mean things go right with a bonus. 

Once you’ve settled the results of your Trait choices and such, you pick a Role, which is ‘something your character always wants to do’ and will be the main avenue for advancing a character. If an Abandoned contributed their part to the mission without anyone’s help, a Dealmaker ends a mission with significantly more wealth, influence, or capital than what they started it with, nobody dies on a Healer’s watch, a Partisan either proved that ultrahumans can and should stand on their own or made a new one, the Retired made progress towards returning home or proved an old dog can learn new tricks, or a Wretch somehow shares their misery or manages to experience poetically worse suffering than what they already have going on, they advance. When you advance you can pick a new Trait (!!!), gain more total HP, or gain a resource called a War Die that can be consumed to either add to a roll or in the use of certain abilities (someone with the Wizard trait from above, for example, can spend a War Die to reroll their spell check).

While gaining traits is the most dramatic way to advance and War Dice might be superb in clutch moments, don’t disregard the increased hit points, because you’re only starting with 6. Straight fights have the potential to be extremely lethal, so first of all remember that the name of the game is often espionage. The odds against FIST operatives are explicitly called out in the book as unfair, and you’re encouraged to lie to, cheat, steal from, and leverage allies against the opposition. Still, only 6 HP to start when most weapons deal 1d6 damage… someone is probably going to buy the farm. Probably several someones.

No worries, though, because the game has mechanics for an Emergency Insertion. After all, there’s always another mercenary willing to take on the job. Simply put together a new character, figure out how they’ll suddenly make their presence known (they’re already on site in disguise, they fast rope in from a helicopter, they use an experimental teleporter), and then roll 2d6 to see how their arrival goes from being better prepared than usual to something going terribly wrong.

It reminds me strongly of Disposable Heroes, actually, although DH unsurprisingly leans more into characters dying being Part Of The Plan. FIST characters are just as likely to buy it early on, but can gain a fair amount of increased durability and a lot more ability if they manage to stay alive long enough and keep advancing.

Here’s the thing, though: everything I’ve described above? Covered in the first ten pages. Technically it’s all covered across two pages with a handy summary-of-all-the-basic-information on 71-72. This is a 150+ page book, so what’s the rest of it? Well, 11-36 is Referee advice, and pretty good advice at that, but even then you’ve got more than a hundred pages to go.

Alright mercenaries, time to get some Supplies.

Supplies

This section of the book, easily the largest, can be broadly defined as ‘things for players and the Referee to use during play’. It starts, naturally, with the lists of Traits and Roles.

This is where the ‘Ultra’ part of ULTRA EDITION seems to have come into play the most, adding enough Traits that instead of the more familiar d66 table they’re gathered together into a d666 table. When combined with the d66 table for Roles, there are 23,220 possible starting character builds – it’s going to take a lot of characters dying before you get yourself a repeat, for sure. Here, let’s generate a few more right now.

31, 366, and 464? A Fugitive who’s a Mindreader and can Recruit captured enemies and then bring them along on future missions.

41, 323, and 523? A Mercenary who can Hijack vehicles without a roll and Seduce those who want to get with them (to gain access to help and/secrets).

61, 255, and 151? A Scholar with a treasure trove of Gadgets and who also happens to gain more hit points and scare foes by being a Cannibal.

I could roll up characters for this game forever, quite possibly literally, it’s practically a game in and of itself.

The rest of the Supplies section, with the exception of some maps and a character sheet at the very end of the book, is the Intelligence Matrix: ‘a collection of random tables, optional rules, and premade content’. It starts with the rules summary I mentioned earlier, then follows up on that with optional rules like ammo tracking, ways to modify dice rolls, additional ways to gain and mechanics for War Dice, and a sudden death mode for when someone rolls snake eyes.

Next up is a mission generator, a quartet of d66 tables and a 2d6 table for mission rewards. Perhaps the dossier says that the CIA is trying to take control of a city, which will unleash an eldritch anomaly, but capturing a player character is integral to the plan. Mission success will gain FIST an Enemy-type ally.  Maybe instead a network of CYCLOPS civilian plants are trying to deploy mass mind control which will let them conquer a small country, and a FIST agent gone MIA surfaces working for them. 1d6 CYCLOPS gadgets might be gained. The dossier might rather say that a group of visitors from the future are trying to execute a heist which will destabilize a powder-keg region, but they contacted FIST requesting non-involvement. A lot of 1d6 crates are on the line.

I can hear you asking, “CYCLOPS?” They’re “FIST seen through a dark mirror, working from the very top of the military industrial complex instead of the bottom. They are nearly omniscient, with moles in every national intelligence agency… put simply, CYCLOPS is The Man.” They’re the subject of the next section, describing how they operate, the CYCLOPS Recon Operatives (CROs) that will be a FIST team’s worst adversaries, and rumors of their origin and possible HQ ranging from the Marianas Trench to the dark side of the Moon.

Then we well and truly get into tables upon tables. There are six sections in the next part of the Matrix, each has six subsections, and each of those subsections has 4-6 tables (1d6, 2d6, and d66) to put together an example of their subject. The sections and subsections are: 

• Gear (Weapons/Armor, Weapon tags, Items, CYCLOPS gadgets, Vehicles, Bases)
• World (Enemies, NPCs, Hazards, Traps, Bosses, Collectibles)
• Characters (Celebrities, Civilians, Politicians, Scientists, Soldiers, Spies)
• Enemies (Animals, Anomalies, Experiments, Monsters, Robots, Squads)
• Factions (Aliens, Agencies, Corporations, Criminals, Cults, Insurgents)
• Locations (Battlefields, Cities, Nature, Rooms, Structures, Zones)
• Lore (Artifacts, Coverups, Diplomacy, Disasters, Legends, Spells)

The Intelligence Matrix wraps up with a Miscellaneous section, some of which is devoted to details for the characters that the tables above can result in, and the rest of which is for tables that don’t fit anywhere else – weapon skins, singular mission prompts, cassette tapes, operation code names, partial success complications…

Whew, that’s a lot of stuff. Functionally, while the Referee should by no means be phoning it in, they’re never going to have a shortage of inspiration or material right there, just a few die rolls away.

The Intelligence Matrix also, despite FIST being anti-canon as far as the details of your world (play to find out yourself, why don’t you), does a lot of worldbuilding work without even rolling for anything on it. When you read through the Intelligence Matrix’s many, many tables (and the Traits and Roles) they paint a vast and varied tapestry of the setting; while you may never encounter them all while playing the game, they’re all possible, so the world of FIST has to be one where they are possible.

Conclusions

A few words on the design of the book: by sheer coincidence, I happened to get a copy of Cyberpunk 2020 (filling out the ol’ personal library) on the exact same day I got my review copy of FIST. I flipped through 2020 for a little dopamine hit of nostalgia, then opened up FIST, and…

Huh. Black and white text and art, crisp no-nonsense fonts, bolded words to draw the eye, a certain emphasis of style (FIST’s unique contributions being typewritten-looking text in some key spots and schematics). If CLAYMORE had told me that FIST was first published in the 80s and ULTRA EDITION was a long-awaited update, I would have at least had to double check to confirm that they were just messing with me. What did come up when talking with them was that WEG’s Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was very much an inspiration for the look of the book, and yeah, I can see it.

It’s just really neat that a game focusing on Cold war mercenaries is using an aesthetic that’s in line with other games published during the Cold War.

Now, in terms of mechanical design and play, FIST is a bit of an odd duck that at first glance might seem like a frankenstein creation. It’s got an old school level of resource scarcity and lethality that encourages cunning plans and brutal action, but has Powered by the Apocalypse’s mechanical bones, but has seemingly stripped out most of the recognizable muscle – Roles can be interpreted as the narrative side of a PbtA playbook, and the Traits could be unique moves, but that’s about it. 

However, philosophically it all clicks together, and as it turns out the mechanical choices put into this game serve it well. You want to be playing FIST to find out. You want its story to be guided by player choices and character luck. You want cunning plans combined with good luck to be rewarded, and you want reckless plans combined with bad luck to end in someone getting blasted across the room (along with reckless yet lucky plans and cunning but cursed plans, respectively). I can see where there could be some dissonance. The rules lean more narrative than most old school outfits I have experience with and are much less binary re: success and failure. Those used to more, ironically, traditional PbtA games might balk at the distributed nature of a character’s narrative and mechanical makeup and at just how fast death can hit. For what it wants to do, however, FIST brings its disparate mechanical theories to build one heck of a strong foundation.

Oh yeah, and it also brings pallets upon pallets of building blocks to put onto that strong foundation. I don’t have a view of FIST pre ULTRA EDITION, but having read UE it’s hard to picture it without the vast swathe of material provided. As is, I think FIST: ULTRA EDITION manages to do something of particular use: it’s the perfect one shot game, and yet it offers a depth of content and character growth that could see a campaign go for the long haul.

You don’t have to take my word for it, though, or at least you won’t though September 29th. See, CLAYMORE is currently running a Kickstarter for a FIST: ULTRA EDITION box set (it got a mention in the most recent Crowdfunding Carnival), and for the duration of the campaign the pdf versions of the core book, fractal campaign kit MANDELBROT SET, and trifold pamphlet series RATIONS are available for free! So sign on with this mercenary outfit for a few missions, see what you think for yourself, and then make the paranormal secrets of the Cold War your bread and butter!

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Oh, and by the way, FIST includes advice on how to hack it, and the community answered with many interesting creations, so stay tuned because I’ll be taking a look at one from a familiar name real soon…

As soon as we close up this demon portal opened by some corporation, anyway, with a team consisting of an accountant fused into power armor, a gangster that can freeze time, a homeless bum who can manipulate the threads of fate, and a commando astronaut.

Ah, just another day with the Freelance Infantry Strike Team.

Thanks to CLAYMORE for sending us a copy to review!