#mekton

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played MEKTON ?

By Mike Pondsmith / R.Talsorian Games

Anime Mecha The TTRPG

purple-haired pilots of gigantic humanoid robots fighting for humanity and living...complicated romances.

#ttrpg #tabletop rpg #poll #poll time #usa #1980s #Mekton

[yodawgiheardyoulikemecha]

Belated Anniversaries:

Mecha Press 1991 through 1993

Mecha Press was a sister publication to Protoculture Addicts, focusing on mecha anime after PA had become a general anime magazine (it had started as a Robotech fanzine).

The magazine was a wonderful resource for mecha anima fans (a large portion of western anime fandom in the '80s & '90s) with synopses and in-depth episode guides of various mecha anime series' (that could still be hard to come by in those days) as well as articles on related materials such as manga, novels, models, toys, and mecha-themed tabletop games like Mekton, BattleTech & Mecha!. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Mecha Press had excellent technical drawings & illustrations, by artists like Dominique Durocher, John Moscato, Alexandre Racine and Ghislain Barbe (@qosmiq).

The tabletop gaming material in Mecha Press stood out to me in particular, as I was just getting interested in gaming again after a hiatus during my teens. I credit Mecha Press with making me the mecha anime fan and mecha gaming fan that I am today.

Mecha gaming was obviously of great interest to the publishers of Mecha Press (IANVS Publications, later Dream Pod 9) as well, as they began creating their own mecha tabletop RPGs, card games and wargames (first Jovian Chronicles and then Heavy Gear). This interest in games eventually led to the undoing of Mecha Press, as it was discontinued when Dream Pod 9 decided to concentrate on producing tabletop games full time.

(Making this post now because, while looking back at old Dream Pod 9/IANVS Publications material in anticipation of the 30th anniversaries of Jovian Chronicles and Heavy Gear, I realized that I had missed commemorating the 30th anniversary of the publication of Mecha Press, the magazine that led to the creation of Dream Pod 9 and their games.)

#Mecha Press #Mecha #Mecha Gaming #Heavy Gear #Jovian Chronicles #Mekton #BattleTech #Mecha!™ #IANVS Publications #Dream Pod 9

[grrlmusic]

SGI IRIX – Mekton (1995, multiplayer game)

#youtube #color #1995 #SGI IRIX #Mekton #Silicon Graphics #UNIX

[morebeanthanman]

Look. Maximum Mike Pondsmith, I love your games, but my little brain can’t keep up with all of this. Well, I guess it’s like that old saying. “Born to play Mekton Zeta, cursed to not really feel like rereading the rule book.”

#mekton zeta #mekton #r talsorian games #mike pondsmith #maximum mike pondsmith #help I’m so lost #ttrpg #ttrpg memes #tabletop roleplaying #like I know this is probably my fault #but why try to fix a problem if I can make memes on it?

[zoredaichaso]

Character (and her sister) for a Gundam rpg using Mekton Z, or at least them as kids. Because there's nothing more Gundam than traumatized children i guess.

#Gundam #rpg #mekton

[twilightovervenus]

Some characters I made in the Mekton Zeta system for my homebrew setting; members of the Götterdämmerung mercenary mek company. Created with Heroforge! 😊

#mekton #mekton zeta #hero forge #ttrpg

[danisgaycorner]

I don't think we can handle this - Tamir Cardelia

Stardust Ghosts - Episode 5

(AnimatedPizza is my twitter @!)

#NeonLightsRoleplay #mekton zeta #actual play #ttrpg #art #manga #manga art #commisions open #mecha anime #mecha #this is my first time drawing a mech be nice #was truly fighting for my life working on this #ttrpg community

[t-wanderer]

Any fave ttrpgs?

Oh. Yeah, that's a lot. I love obscure rpgs. Um....here hold on.

This is my collection, minus anything I acquired in the last year. My top five are: 1. Psychosis: Ship of Fools 2. Amber Diceless/Lords of Gossamer and Shadow 3. Mage: The Ascension 4. Unknown Armies 5. Abberant Other faves include Deadlands: Hell of Earth, Legend of the Five Rings, Mechanical Dream, Old World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Alternity, Everlasting, Torg, Rifts, Armegeddon, Talislanta, In Nomine, Sorcerer, Mekton Zeta and Cyberpunk 2020, The Strange/Numenara, Kult, Nobilis, Exalted, Mutants and Masterminds and Mystic Empyrean, I do still enjoy DnD, but still haven't really tried 5th edition. I've been resistant to learning it and a while back realized that the resistance is because if I do learn it it will be the 9th version of DnD I've had to learn. I love making custom settings and I love drawing maps. Here are a few of the maps I've used in games I ran.

I ran my first game in 1989. Role playing is my longest and strongest obsession. Thank you so much for asking!

[cloudshoregames]

Your Mech is Different: Inspirations Behind BTE

Hi everyone, Dan here!

I've always been a fan of mechs. As a kid I would dream of growing up to be a mech pilot. I would enjoy shows like Gundam Wing, Zoids New Century, Escaflowne, and Big O while also playing PS1 classics like Armored Core and Xenogears. I remember one time explaining to my older brother that I thought I had figured out how Roger Smith piloted the Big O, pantomiming the movements with my hands and feet, only to be teased for being a nerd.  While there was no mech pilot's academy to join, some people could inevitably point out, "Well you could have learned to fly a jet or drive a tank. That's the next best thing." This notion, I have found permeates the mech subgenre of science fiction/fantasy. Mechs are certainly a power fantasy, but one that is very flexible. What they represent in fiction are different for each person and franchise.

What kicked off my journey into developing Beneath Twisted Earth was actually a YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes, Armored Core - Was It Any Good? This took me on a nostalgia trip to my childhood playing Armored Core, and the various franchises I had enjoyed over the year. It got me thinking about if I were to make a mech setting what core elements would I include for it to be my quintessential mech game?  (I've Game Mastered for a long time, so this is an exercise I entertain often, seeing a thing I like as seeing how I would apply it to TTRPGs.) Most mech tabletop games in my experience were very crunchy, (Mekton & Battletech were first to mind). This is because fans of mechs like the idea of customization, and making their mech. Having that control over building your machine, but I've never been a fan of crunchy systems. I've always found them cumbersome and tedious. "I just want to play the game!", I would say. 

The next day I threw together a three page mech construction system, and jotted down some notes for a dystopian setting that I could use with my house system someday. I was really happy with what I came up with. The mech construction was highly customizable, but not overly complicated (no number sheets needed). The setting was suitably bleak for a game about war machines, but had lots of potential to be tweaked to tell many different stories'. As I excitedly went over it with my wife, she encouraged me to put it out there. After all, when combined with my house system which I used to run games in any assorted setting that there wasn't a game for, it could be fleshed out into a full game. So I did.

Over the next six months, I began fleshing out that write-up and combining it with my house system. At the same time, I immersed myself in mech fiction to draw as much inspiration as possible. I played any mech video game I could get my hands on, I watched lots of anime, I researched every TTRPG I could find record of, I watched lots of YouTube retrospectives/reviews, and for the first time I dove head first into the world of Battletech, reading through several of the core novels.

This encouraged my design of the game to be more diverse. I wanted to any players who sat down at the table to play BTE to think of a mech and to be able to build it. Not in the number crunching, twelve volume, 30 hours of work sort of way. There are players who like that, and there are games that catered to it. I wanted a game that an experienced player could create their pilot/mech in 10 minutes without sacrificing customization or growth for the people who just wanted to get in their big, stompy robot and start living that life.

Something I found compelling about this deep dive is what mechs meant to different people. When it came down to it, in stories, mechs were always analogous to other archetypes. Mechs can represent many things, but I most often found them taking the role of the following:

Tanks

Jets

Suits of Armor

Horses

Cars

Swords (or other weapons)

Depending on what archetype the mech filled, determined things like how important the pilot was to the combat, what sort of stories were told, and what the capabilities of the mech would be. Because there was so much variation, I also found a lot of conflict in the fanbase over what they should be. This only reinforced to me the importance of customization, not because all fans are gearheads, but because mechs represented a flexible archetype. That meant the mech should allow for each player to express themselves/their pilot. While one player might want an oversized gun on crab legs with armor a mile thick, another player wants an angelic suit of armor that allows them to have sword fights in the sky, and still others want a custom grown symbiotes with bone claws and mouth lasers that fire when it roars in anger at their enemies. All have a place at the table as mech pilots in Beneath Twisted Earth. 

Tangented a little there, but allow me leave it there to you followers and future readers. What do mechs represent to you? What is your ideal version of a mech?

TL;DR - BTE's main inspirations are Armored Core, Battletech, and Gundam. Also, mechs mean different things to each franchise/fan so individuality is at the core of the subgenre. Because of this customization and player agency at the two core principles behind the game.

Art by JGD

Preview Book now available at https://cloudshore.itch.io/beneath-twisted-earth

#mechs #armored core #battletech #gundam #xenogears #indie ttrpg #devlog #game development #Beneath Twisted Earth #BTE #Cloudshore Games

[breadpilled-tradwife-femboy]

Not sure if this is an unpopular opinion but I sorta fw the second season of IBO. Like, the structure could've been handled way way better and a lot of the characterization feels off, but the pure mecha bullshit makes up for it to me.

Season one is genuinely really great in its themes and character development so I can see why a lot of people see season two as a step down, but the mech designs are just so amazing and stupid that it makes it up for me. Like yeah give that robot a tail, that's exactly what it needs. High heels too. Big garden shears? Yeah don't mind if I do.

Plus the soundtrack is really really good. Definitely a good one to put on if you're ever running a mecha TTRPG like Mekton or Lancer.

#gundam #gundam ibo #iron blooded orphans

[miyanagateru]

i would like to try lancer some time. or mekton zeta

#machine dreams

[yodawgiheardyoulikemecha]

Belated Anniversary: Mecha Press 11

Feb/Mar 1994

Here (3 months late) is a look at issue 11 of Mecha Press magazine.

The main article in this issue is devoted to Fang of the Sun Dougram, including write-ups of the Combat Armours seen in that anime.

Most of the rest of this issue is devoted to mecha gaming, with minitures reviews and material written for use with Mekton, BattleTech and Mecha!™.

A solid issue that I think most mecha nerds in the '90s would have enjoyed.

#Mecha Press #Fang of the Sun Dougram #Mekton #BattleTech #Mecha!™ #Jovian Chronicles #IANVS Publications #Dream Pod 9 #Mecha #Mecha Gaming

[fnlrpa]

Thank you @actuallyannesart ! I love it so much!

This is my OC, Christina Ibrahim, for a friends Mekton game! She’s ready to get out there and prove herself as a skilled knight and make her own legend!

#OC #I love it so much #can’t wait to play!

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction - Resources: The Licensed Bubblegum Crisis RPG Books

No. Not my own RPG. That's... in a state of transition. I broke a bunch of stuff in it and will probably need to get back to it someday to fix it. Not high on my priority list.

And no, not the Shadowrun Second Edition Partial Conversion drafted up by Neo No Armor Against Fate's Shawn Hagen. Apparently Shawn maintains that his RPG conversion is better, said he was able to dissect the combat easily on Usenet back in the day. And he might very well be right in terms of mechanics, except, oh, wait, probably not, because it's Shadowrun, amirite folks?

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

No, I don't claim to make any defenses for the BGC RPG as an RPG book, and I'll explain what I mean in a bit. I will, however, argue that these sterling little books, published in the two years before R. Talsorian went dormant for nearly two decades (cyberpunk 3.0 notwithstanding), are hands-down the best 'guides' to Crisis 2032 you could ever want. If you're writing fiction in 2032, and maybe you're pressed for ideas, I say give these three books, each shorter than the last, a read...

Which you can do electronically, for free, right here.

This is going to take awhile, isn't it? Well, yeah, we're talking a few hundred pages of small-font text and some really good settei (concept art) serving as the pictures, some of which saw no reproduction outside Japan at all. So, like the multi-part epic rant I've had brewing in my drafts folder for the past half a year, let's break it down into sections. We'll start with

DON'T ACTUALLY PLAY BUBBLEGUM CRISIS: MEGATOKYO 2033 THE ROLEPLAYING GAME: ARU PEE GEE NO DENSETSU

For context, and this is kind of an interesting story: R.Talsorian Games, the primary publisher behind the OGBGCRPG (OG for short) made its fame on two big product lines.

First there was wargame / RPG hybrid Mekton, pioneered by Mike Pondsmith back in the eighties as a mecha fighting game, in the halycon days when most anime watchers got fansubbed tapes from conventions or were watching rebranded Voltronesques on Saturday mornings. Anime fandom as we know it, or even knew it in the nineties, just did not exist, and here's Pondsmith drawing up a whole fucking wargame to do it. The most recent edition circa the nineties was Mekton Zeta, which also had the mecha-building sourcebook Mekton Zeta Plus.

The other was Cyberpunk 2013, released in 1988, which was essentially a street level adaptation of Mekton's mechanics (called 'Interlock' 'cause all the systems could, e-hem, interlock), that got a cool sourcebook or two (including one inspired by cyberpunk classic Hardwired that was written by the novel's author) before getting a second edition in like '89 or '90. That's Cyberpunk 2020 - that's what put R.TAL on the map, that's what I wrote a shitty fanfic crossing with BGC about (It wasn't hard to do), that's what became Cyberpunk 2077, and that's also what became Cyberpunk RED once R.Tal got money from CDPR to make a new edition.

With me so far? I bet you're thinking, Kyle, "gosh and golly gee wilikers so they put their anime system together with their cyberpunk system, because all those parts interlocked just like you said, and they made Bubblegum Crisis!"

And oh, my sweet summer child, how your eyes are shut.

Yeah... So, the OG is actually run on a system called Fuzion, which blends R.Tal's loose network of systems with that of the HERO System, which is... one of those really complicated universal systems that they say can build anything and everything, was designed with a variety of advantages and disadvantages for characters to use to represent their character, and isn't GURPS. No, it was made more for a superhero RPG, I guess?

Anyway, somehow the two companies met, decided to make a joint universal system for all their work going forward, and called it Fuzion. Many other licensed games used it for awhile, people made universal themed supplements for it, but it's not in wide use anymore as far as I know.

Why? Let me see if I can explain by way of picture.

Champions used 3d6. Interlock used a d10. The devs argued and argued and argued over which type the game should be balanced around, then gave the fuck up. Does that fill you with confidence, readers?

So there's this sort of... highly elaborate mishing and mashing of various elements of two very different systems such that neither comes out the better for wear. Here's R.Talsorian's Lifepath, a character-backstory generator where you roll dice to build a character (setting-agnostic, because they were trying to sell a universal system); then here's Champions's Perks and Complications, bought using those same precious campaign points you're using to buy civilian gear (but aren't your players playing as Knight Sabers? Who needs real shit to be marked when you're building hardsuits with separate points entirely?), and complications must be activated x amount of times a session even if it diverts from the fun of playing the game. And so on and so forth. Shit, even crossing Cyberpunk with Mekton doesn't always work, since blocks of damage from Mekton (Kills) scale unsteadily with the more dice-driven combat of CP. Worse still is that the mecha system and the hacking system are off in MZ+ and CP2020 respectively, so if you want to custom-build hardsuits beyond the small pool of tools you're given on the last fucking page of the book, or you want your Nene equivalent to do something useful, nyah-nyah, go buy more books.

And then I'm sure Shawn Hagen has plenty of reasons why the combat doesn't work, but we're not paying attention to him. Whatever. Let's talk about what does work, which is a mix of worldbuilding lore, stuff the R.Tal writers seemed to just sort of come up with, and a great gallery across all three books of Fucking Cool Mecha (especially BGC EX).

LORE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS FOLKS

I mean that earnestly. It's hard to get right, especially when said lore reflects upon the tone of the actual content, the plot, the franchise, whatever. But when telling stories with a licensed game, some degree of lore is, to my mind at least, incredibly mandatory. Maybe not so much for games where the story ought to be made up as one goes along (see RPG's like The Sprawl), but in the case of BGCrisis, an anime which at the time had a pretty loyal fanbase chomping at the bit for answers for their questions about the wider universe the Sabers operated in, R.TAL had to do a mix of cribbing from untranslated material, the B-Club special and all that, and making their own shit up without looking like they'd cribbed from their own work (CP2020) overmuch. The result is very uneven, but charmingly so. I almost want to say it feels more grounded than CP2020 or Shadowrun, but is that just because it's comparatively light on the ground? Perhaps. The mandatory universe timeline is one page, and focuses more on putting years to events that were already canon instead of adding extraneous stuff in.

Likewise with what the politics look like worldwide. We get a few paragraphs about how the U.S. is recovering (not collapsed as in CP2020), Japan is doing pretty good for itself as GENOM's puppet-state, Russia successfully integrated into the EU even if Eastern Europe didn't (See? Wacky shit like that can only be called charming), and China's one big North Korea (which I think is a holdover from the CP2020 Pacific Rim Sourcebook, where Deng was assassinated by Maoist radicals.) We get another dry bit about the idea of a zaibatsu lifted straight from CP2020's Corpbook 1, where Arasaka is discussed... newspapers are now faxed (look it was in BGC OVA 1 what do you want me to tell you)... on and on it goes.

I suppose I like the lore independent of the actual characters because of a few clever predictions. One is using all the cybernetics-gone-bad in AD Police Files to explain why nobody has them in the 2032 OVA, a link I sense wasn't really made concrete until this RPG. It's one of the most interesting interpretations of the source material and of cyberpunk tropes I've seen, you know, where all the splicing and dicing of the body turns out to be a fad and a failure, leaving those who bought into the trend left with butchered and failing bodies - in light of the crypto crash that seems to be dragging the stock market down back into recession / stagflation, that seems pretty classic capitalism.

The other is tied to Before And After, covering the impact of the cheap and now even more ubiquitous Boomers of Crash:

I mean, what can I say? I like predictions of the future that actually consider the effects of hyper-futuristic technology in that sort of way.

That's what a lot of the RPG's lore is at its best, basically working overtime to paper in the gaps left ignored by the series' creators. So we get a nuanced look into how ADAMA is different than similarly-sentient Boomers from the ADPF OVA; we get the Largo = Mason + Boomer Messiah explanation theory that the internet came up with just a year or two prior to the RPG's publishing; we get conspiracy theory proposals about whether or not GENOM undermined the cybernetics market to replace the enhanced with Boomers; we get to see the ADP go from hotshot riot suppression force able to slaughter undesirables en masse to actively disdained by GENOM; a weird consideration of how recognizing Boomer rights could still serve GENOM's agenda... on and on and on. It's such a mishmash of ideas, beautiful because of it.

Obviously no sane RPG player would ever give a rat's ass about any of this, but again, this was a product also marketed towards fans who just wanted a good worldbuilding book. I'm not saying you should take every part of the RPG's world into your own fanfiction, but you can take a great deal of it in and things will hold up.

POWER CREEP? YEAH, I'VE GOT THE POWER, CREEP!

The actual sourcebook sections of the sourcebooks are a) the characters, and b) the mecha. That's it, that's all. Civilian gear is almost an afterthought shoved into the front of the book like it didn't need to be there, cybernetics don't show up until Before and After. For although there is a section in the corebook proposing non-Saber campaigns players can run, they're essentially permutations of the already-existing types from CP2020: Corporates, mercenaries, medias, etc. And why, I ask you, would you run anything else but your own fanmade Saber team in your home city, overgrown and under threat? Shit, RTAL even went out of their way to put a few pages in EX, the last book in the series, highlighting player campaigns with online presences (Geocities, email addresses, etc.) and describing them in brief. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for the play sessions of the guys who did Mega-Gotham...

Anyway, back on topic. Both character pages and mecha pages get a great deal of settei transposed onto these pages, concept art ripped straight from Artmic's design docs and provided, again, more as a nerd resource than anything super useful. This especially comes into play in BGC: EX, where all the concept art and mecha are instead from everything that wasn't animated. Rejected concepts for hardsuits with wheels for feet; Boomer sketches only found in old hobby magazines; scribbles one of the Crash! mecha designers tried to get in that were apparently labeled 'problematic' (I guess he was a toy designer before all this?). I unironically love all this shit, even the beam cannons mounted on a hardsuit right where the boobplates are. Shit, my Discord profile pic is a non-Boomer mecha supposedly used by the JSDF, a 'Battlemover' whose origin I have no idea about, but which looks cool as hell. That's the kind of weirdo fan I am.

My point is that if you need to spice up your fiction, throwing 'new Boomer X' at the Sabers is one thing, giving the Sabers some power-up parts you dreamed up is another, but using the designs Artmic came up with before you did is more galaxy-brained than either. Shit, I should know, it was what Craig Reed did for the fanfics that I continued off of back in the day. And it's the same with these extraneous lore details that some rando RTAL staffer dreamed up a quarter-century ago, because they beg to have an entire fanfic made about any one of them. What happened to Jeena, folks? Inquiring minds want to know.

Anyway, that's it. That's all. Read through these and be a better fan because of it.

#stmpd reviews bgc fanfic #bubblegum crisis #fanfiction #fanfic rec

[zoredaichaso]

Logo of the gang in our Gundam rpg campaign.

#gundam #oc #rpg #mekton

[luunie]

From the Mekton Zeta group chat.

#gundam #cowboy bebop