All right, I'll admit it. I'm the person who can't keep all the versions of Renegade straight. Is Corruption the expanded ruleset or is it the Advanced version? All I know is that it has more pages than one of the Renegades and not as many as another. Or is it the other way around?

What you have here is Original something-and-something with better editing (even self-editing beats no editing) and a "voice" in the text which speaks to someone who is not familiar with miniatures rules and jargon. Yes, when I read that Original game, I was utterly lost and made almost everything up on the fly. In a way, I liked that. Yet I also wanted to know what the actual nuts & bolts were, what made things tie together into a cohesive system. In short, I wanted to know what the script was that I was ad-libbing to.

So it helps - a lot - that I can understand what Renegade is saying to me, and demonstrating to me how to play and run it. I really like the fact that it still allows me to ad-lib and house rule to my heart's content. There's almost a console-type of structure to it, where I can pull one unit out, replace it with a house rule, and the odds are that they'll all work together.

Renegade ~ Corruption adds a sense of dirt and sweat to basic Renegade. Imagine a "good" junky Steve Reeves Hercules movie of 1959 or 1960. Now add a good episode of Baretta and the smell of a high school gym's locker room. And - something - or someone - which is in the gameworld just to get you, personally.

So imagine Original x&x with a touch of Call of Cthulhu - not the Old Ones coming to get you (usually) but the claustrophobic, paranoid sense of things. Or compare a 1950s "the Gorilla Boss of Gotham" to "the Dark Knight Returns." Each are entertaining (and the former is my favorite Batman story of that era) but one is just - dirtier - than the other. Heroes aren't just flawed here. Sometimes, it seems everyone carries a bit of corruption in them.