RPG Moments of Awesome 3: Heavy Gear

[james_davis_nicoll]

Dream Pod 9’s Heavy Gear RPG depicted the ongoing struggles between Terra Novan factions as that world recovered from an interregnum that followed Earth’s retreat from empire. These conflicts often focused on Gears, Landmate-like piloted mechas. I liked the game mechanics but being hooked on Masamune Shirow’s manga at the time, mostly used the rules to try to design Tachikomas with a system that was never intended for that purpose [1].

The Heavy Gear product line cover designs were unusually eye-catching, unambiguously identifying the brand at a glance [2]. No customer ever had a problem picking out Heavy Gear products, regardless of where they were shelved.

One day, I decided to test just how recognizable the Heavy Gear products were. I handed a copy to a customer and had him walk away from the store until I could no longer recognize the Heavy Gear rule book.

The test failed because buildings and hills got in the way before resolution was a factor.

1: I could have used it as an Appleseed RPG but that never occurred to me.

2: And not in a ​“I’d better make sure that’s not the first thing people see when they enter the store.”

Comments

[kedamono]

Did you ever get that copy back, or did you sell it to him?

[vatine]

2: And not in a ​“I’d better make sure that’s not the first thing people see when they enter the store.”

The way that 's phrased, and my sometimes over-fertile imagination now requires me to find some brain-bleach. If you ask what it came up with, I will answer, but I won't spread this unprovoked.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Enjoy!

[vatine]

Oh, no, that's nowhere close to where my brain went. If it had been that tame, it would've been... shareable without consent.

[theresawright]

I never played this, but I remember looking at the material and thinking that they did a good job than most RPGs of justifying the use of Gears on the battlefield. Not that mecha are ever particularly realistic, but Dream Pod 9 made their Gears feel like a reasonable solution for the setting's militaries instead of just an excuse for giant robot fights.

just an excuse for giant robot fights

[james_davis_nicoll]

That would be Jovian Chronicles.

Re: just an excuse for giant robot fights

[viktor_haag]

One of my regrets was not adding a suite of the Jupiter Chronicle 1ed books to my library when I had a chance. In the later years of DP9 producing RPG materials, the editorial control go worse and worse, and when they moved to their "Silhouette System", I got less interested in their stuff. I have a set of the Tribe8 books, but I'd have liked to have a Jovian Chronicles collection, too.

Apart from the Giant Robots, I kind of liked the hard-ish-SF, in-system approach to gaming... it sort of had an Expanse feel before there was an Expanse (admittedly, with Giant spaceship Robots added as well).

[rwpikul]

One notable thing about Heavy Gear is that it freely admitted that tanks beat mecha in a straight-up fight and didn't try to patch it over in various ways¹. If you took a squad of gears against a platoon of light tanks, your gears were toast unless they had a decent terrain advantage, (with some of the heavy tanks you would be lucky to even get a shot off before being turned to scrap).


1: IIRC, FASA was on their third or fourth attempt when I last looked into Battletech.