Robot Fighting Cassettes! 

This game is about memory and music, community and sadness in a particular time when the best way to express your feelings was still to record a cassette tape. Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes is an instant battle TTRPG about exchanging mixtapes that turn into robots and making them fight, in and around a community radio station in the mid 2000s.

"This song was a brief commercial hit when I was a kid and I'd stay up late, listening to the local commercial station in my bedroom, alone in the dark. I was so cool, obviously."—Achebe George Henry, Thursday Night Operator

There’s two competing themes in Metal Position; the crashing hearts of over-feeling community radio programmers, and robot fights.

All the Features

Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes is all this and more...

• Fighting fun for 2 to 5 players. No GM necessary.
• This game prints on a J-sleeve to fit in a cassette tape jewel case. Stuff the case full of dice to represent the different robots. Take it where ever you go!
• Play with frequency! Metal Position is made for one-off sessions without a set group, just as easy with few players as with many, to make it pick-up-and-go.
• Fighting isn't the only thing, there's relationships to be had and expanded between PCs—there's a heart to the community station. Radio, someone still loves you.

Are you an audiophile? A sound artist, or a garden-variety music snob? Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes is the fulfillment of your radio dreams. 

Be Radio Active

The goal of the game is to get more time on air than your opponent, a fellow programmer at community radio station Trout Radio 99.9 FM, CXXX. Before coming to the station you forgot to write down the track listing for each of your tapes, and you can’t go to air without that. What would you write on the programme logs?

By your robots fighting you are remembering the name of the tracks on their cassette tapes. Complete the track listing to get the airtime. Losing means your programmer goes around the station making dramatic confessions and having emotional confrontations, on and off the air—the heart of radio. 

"This song can’t be on without me thinking of how it used to play on the turntable in my ex's basement apartment as we did it. He wouldn’t tell anyone we were dating. All we ever did was fool around, in his room, listening to records. Now every time I hear the song it makes me feel as unsatisfied and temporary as I did then."—Dyna St. Clair, Monday afternoon Operator

Be emotional, be weird, be oddly personal, be passionate on the airwaves, and battle your cassette tapes in a fight for airtime in Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes!

Foreground Format

This is how it's all going down. Trout Radio, CXXX, 99.9 FM. CXXX is a community-designated Type-B broadcast undertaking that serves the local university, college, and the greater Electric City community at large. More accurately, Trout Radio is a raging soup of artistic weirdoes, students, and community oddballs, all united under the not-for-profit radio waves. 

"This track used to be really meaningful to me but now I'm absolutely sick of it. Anybody who likes this is a loser. But hey, it's CANCON, so here you go."—Allegra Baek, Operator at Large

There are about 100 volunteer programmers at CXXX annually, but there's only ever a handful in the broadcast facility at any one time. Someone is always in the broadcast studio, Studio A, and the rest are chatting in the kitchen, which is the main hang-out spot. What can I say, community grows?

Robot Battles

You are but one of Trout Radio's programmers—a warrior in the fight for airtime, except the fight has become real and the mixtapes and home recordings you bring in to play are actually transforming into robots to fight each other, as they do.  What they do in the fight fills in the track titles, and leads you all to emotional outbursts.

"My spiky barbarian robot attacks yours by first jumping off the soundboard (so the track starts with "The") and the soundboard is fine (some kind of odd colour) and then the faders are all wacky so the monitors explode with noise! (Which means some kind of place destination), and it attacks. My Tack is called "The Neon Motel."—Nenita Magsaysay, Studio B Trainer

Flip out, be strange, and battle tapes around the station in Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes!

Amplified Emotions

Stitching together the robot fights is some cheap low-brow drama. The broadcast must never stop, and so too the programmers never stop arguing, bearing their souls in traumatic self-revealing stories, bitching, breaking up, and falling in love.

"This song was a favourite of my ex. I told her I didn't like it, but really I just didn't like dating her and was too ashamed and embarrassed to do anything about it. Turns out now it's one of my favourite songs, I was just too much of a jerk at the time to appreciate it, or her. Turns out I was a big fat coward."—Simon Pond, Coffee Queen

The fact that the author, James Kerr, was the programme director at a not-for-profit community-based radio station for 8 years has no influence at all on this game. The fact that he watched a lot of cartoons as a kid where cassettes tapes turned into alien warrior robots is also unrelated. What is undeniably real and related to this content are his many failed interpersonal relationships. His heart is broadcasting, but no one is tuned in to the frequency.

For more from Radio James Games, please visit out website at www.radiojamesgames.com.