Every so often, I get the craving to dive into the mecha genre, and each time I have thought about introducing it to some kind of roleplaying. This has stretched through freeform play by post, play by email and even a brief dabbling with the Mekton Zeta RPG. However, as the years have passed the people who I had played with have moved onto other things. While scratching the itch, I looked up the interview that Seamus did with the team behind Mechasys. It was an inspiration and while it doesn’t do everything, it is broad enough that I can do a lot of things and I would really love to play it at some point. With that said, the old formats I played in don’t exist anymore and realization has dawned that the most likely I am to see it in action is if I have run a game myself. A bit rested from my first completed attempt at GMing I began to bandy about a few “what-ifs”. What started as playing around as character creation led to thinking about how I would frame a game…and from there, I leapfrogged into another idea: showing how a campaign can be built.

To be clear, this is not the only way to make a campaign. Plenty of GMs love to make sandboxes to fill. Others like to wait for a session 0. In my mind there is no bad way to design a campaign so long as people are having fun. This is simply one path, and has served as a mental exercise about how I personally would go about making a world that myself and my friends would enjoy playing in. I’ll be breaking it into steps to help people follow along the process.

Step One: What is your audience? 

Who you are making the game for is just as important, if not more important, than what you are trying to play. Ideally, you would want a group that is already familiar with (or at least not hostile to) the Genesys narrative dice system, as that is often a major stumbling block. For this, my personal tabletop group fits the bill.

Step Two: What is your audience interested in, and what touchstones do you have available to tie your game to?

The good thing is that there is an abundance of options to tie a mecha campaign to from the variety of animated shows and films, to video games, or even webcomics, affording the luxury of grafting tropes and setting dressing to premises that overlap with what my personal tabletop group tends to enjoy.

One common framing device for games this group has played is post-apocalyptic setting, including Apocalypse World and Twilight 2000. From that, an immediate example from a preexisting setting springs to mind to draw upon: the world of After War Gundam X, a timeline that opens with humanity recovering from a war so brutal it had led to societal collapse in most of the planet, abandoning wide swaths to scroungers and tin pot dictators. For an added perk, this happens to overlap somewhat with the tone of Edge of the Empire, which is also about heavily armed people at the edges of (or are outside of) what is considered society. This leads to my elevator pitch for this new setting:

War between Earth and Space broke out a generation ago, fought with single pilot armored cavalry machines known as “mechs”. The fighting turned pyrrhic: multiple volcanic winters crippled food supply for years, leading to mass starvation. Unable to sustain its reach, the Earth has abandoned large stretches of its holdings to concentrate resources, leaving behind whatever materiel that it could not strip, leaving those who could not or would not leave. Two decades later, the damage has begun to fade, letting humanity begin to pick up the pieces again, but across most of the planet the only law is what the people there enforce. The party plays a crew of freelancers, making their way as the old factions compete with the new for their piece.

Step 3: Themes

One of my favorite things I take from the Fate RPG is the way they use High Concepts to succinctly set what idea is of crucial importance. From there, all choices have a root to draw from. Come up with a few thoughts about what seems important to the world:

• Those left behind
• Buried tech
• People returning
• Colonies
• City States
• Scarcity

These were the first five things that I spitballed out. After mulling on it for a while, the word that I came up with is “Abandonment”. Lands were abandoned. Machinery was abandoned. People were abandoned. What else did people leave behind in order to survive? It’s an interesting prompt, and it makes writing out characters easier.

Step 4: Faces and Locations

Another nice worldbuilding tool from Fate that I have no qualms with stealing is populating the setting with people and places . This is something that can also be done with, or supplemented by, player involvement at a Session 0. Simply ask yourself (and your players) who and what exists in this new world you are playing in?

Off the top of my head:

• There is a hub for players to pick up jobs, trade what they find, pick up rumors that is outside of any major faction.
• There is an Earth Government trying to reestablish control of their old holdings.
• There is a spacer group looking to colonize newly fertile areas for a food supply
• There is a confederation of pirates and/or scavengers
• There is a pirate group that is at odds with the party
• There is an Earth Government captain who is hell bent of enforcing “the law”
• There are independent territories resisting encroachment from outside settlers.
• There are people who make a living by combing through the forgotten and abandoned machinery left behind

That is not meant to be a comprehensive list, as not everything needs to be spelled out by session one. There is abundant time for players to offer suggestions or (even better) write them out in their backstories to help drive engagement and it will do for the purposes of setting out a bare bones structure. Each of these will be assigned either a location to occupy or an NPC that represents them (a “Face”).

In another move of “ruthlessly pillage from systems you like”, Factions from Shadow of the Beanstalk also give a way to handwave the economics of massive war machines: the Favor system. Instead of having hard currency in a post-apocalpse setting, players can trade favors to keep afloat, restock or even upgrade.

A quick breakdown might work as such:

Minor Favor – Restock on consumables, minor repairs without Mechanics rolls (less than half HT damage), a piece of personal grade equipment, basic medical care, idle rumors in the faction, an escort through their territory

Standard Favor – Repair severe damage without a Mechanics roll (more than half HT, critical hits, lost weapon),gain rare or restricted personal grade equipment, send reinforcements into a fight, gain useful and limited information or rumors

Major Favor – Replace or gain vehicle grade equipment, acquire a new mass produced mecha, assign a force under your command, gain information with top secret clearance.

Extreme Favor – Gain standing within that organization, gain critical information that only a few people know, upgrade a machine or gain a new machine with +50 BP from your previous.

Each player holds and bargains with favors using social checks, and may pool them with other party members to negotiate.

Step 5: Establishing Conflict

A story is nothing without conflict. As with Faces and Locations, these are best when a GM has a character thread to them. But fret not! It is perfectly fine to have a starter villain before snowballing into challengers that have deeper ties to the player characters. To this end, another tool from Fate that I am going to shamelessly steal is setting an imminent and pending trouble and leaving the option to reassess after the first story arc is complete.

Looking at the board of locations and faces, I see a group of pirates, who could be lured into conflict if they thought there was a juicy enough prize. One such prize might be a boomtown hub and trade nexus, a place where players would have a stake in looking out for. Furthermore, that city’s well being and expansion puts it at risk in the long run, making it an interesting pending trouble. Unlike Fate, this isn’t a formal system, but a GM tool to frame and shape conflicts as they come. These seem like useful tools to frame an initial conflict and adjust the path based on how the players resolve these issues.

Step 6: Compile Your Setting

So, we have a conflict, we have people, we have places. Now, it’s time to put them all together into something cohesive. None of these are carbon copies of any preexisting setting to be entirely inaccessible, but the broad strokes will sound familiar to fans familiar with some of the tropes.

Factions

United Solar Nation – The remains of the Earth government, which clings to a name that no longer matches its holdings. Clustered within the tropic zones, it has begun to expand back into its old territories and has been annexing regions that formerly had aligned with them. Commonly referred to as “Oosens” by outsiders.

The Lunar Hegemony – Made up of former lunar and orbital colonies that underwent a worker’s revolt after decades of brutal working conditions for little to no pay. While significantly outgunned, space superiority allowed them to cripple earthside communications networks and orbital drops were able to reinforce on the tactical level. However, the bitter fighting and the environmental damage meant that it was unable to maintain any terrestrial holdings, leading to extreme rationing and population control. With conditions normalizing they have stopped short of resuming war, but have been occupying territory as “colonies”. Often referred to as “Loonies”.

League of Free Cities – While conditions remained dire, numerous regions have been able to claw back some level of law and society. Incredibly diverse in  economy and structure, and often rivals to each other, the League has been rallying in recent years to act as a bulwark against the USN and Hegemony as those factions begin muscling in on the sub-tropical regions that previously hadn’t been worth the fight.

The Scavenger’s Guild – In the desperate bid to keep people (and agriculture) alive through a the environmental collapse, people worldwide jury rigged anything they could think of to survive. Most failed, and even the successful ones require constant maintenance to continue work. Few could afford to turn down vital equipment, regardless of how dubious the source. Inevitable cases of fraud soured the reputation of these scavengers, leading to the formation of the Guild. The Guild provides customers some level of trust and quality control by disciplining unscrupulous or incompetent members, while providing a reliable marketplace for resale and resupply to those who delve into what was forgotten.

The Carrion Princes – With the USN and Hegemony’s sudden scramble for survival, countless soldiers were suddenly lost in the sauce following a brutal war. With large pools of discarded war materiel and no homes to return, to piracy and brigandry abound among this abandoned soldiery. There are arguably more armed pirates than current enlisted armed forces in the world, but they tend to be disorganized and undisciplined. Nonetheless, some of the cannier ones realized that they required some rules to prevent killing the golden geese and have begun breaking up regions as “princes”, often finding extortion to be more efficient as well as more “legitimate” operations as “military contractors” (often bitterly referred to as “an army without a state”). Their territories are bitterly contested, and rule is typically enforced from the barrel of a cannon.

Locations

The Free Port of Suez – Outside of the tropical zone, Egypt cooled significantly enough that the USN did not consider it a priority when grappling with survival. However, after a few dire years, the strategic importance and presence of the Nile delta allowed survivors to establish a habitable environment around the canal, making it a major trade hub and beacon to those making their way outside of the USN or Hegemony, and its position makes it a crown jewel of the League of Free Cities.

Faces

Laurance du Levant – The so-called “mayor” of the Suez region. A former USN diplomat disgusted by their choice to leave people to die, he called upon his litany of favors to hold together his assigned region and has refused calls for reunification with the USN.

Kapitan Johannes Swalbe – A former Hegemony mecha team commander, Johannes is one of the few Carrion Princes who actually has some military training and is versed in operations. While notorious as one of the best armed groups that has survived contact with USN forces they have a reputation for at least a modicum of professionalism.

Lieutenant Erina Cortez – A promising young USN officer, Erina has been tasked with winning hearts and minds in the outlying regions of currently held territory by promising order and stability. Relatively new to the position, Erina is a passionate idealist who is somewhat mystified by the resistance to reunification and the surprising level of respect that outlaws hold in her patrol area. Whether that patrol area actually belongs to the USN is a bone of contention that has not yet been thoroughly picked.

Step 7: Set Player creation rules

With a rough skeleton of the world at large, it’s time to turn things over to the players. Now is the time to set bounds and balance roles to let each player have their niche to shine:

• Character creation shall be to Genesys core rules.
• Archetypes may be chosen from Genesys core, Shadow of the Beanstalk and Mechasys
• Careers may be selected from Shadow of the Beanstalk and Mechasys as appropriate
• All players may choose a faction that they owe a Minor Favor to (this is optional)

The following equipment options are available at game start:

•  Basic mecha frame pool with minimal R&D pool (100 total Build Points). Gain a major favor with one faction or a Standard favors with two separate factions
• Advanced mecha with minimal R&D pool (150 total Build Points). Gain a standard favor with one faction.
• Supreme mecha frame pool with minimal R&D pool (200 total Build Points)

Mecha Setting Requirements

In this setting, all mecha:

• Are standard at Silhouette 3
• Are considered ships at Silhouette 5
• Function as Ground movement as base
• Have unlimited operation time (pilots do not apply)

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And there  you have it. While things are likely to change when the rubber meets the road (or beam weapon hits the armor), you as the GM have the framework to start a Mecha Wasteland campaign. What sort of strange miscreants occupy this world? Stay tuned for a very special part two with a Meet the Party.