#mekton

[zerrulon]

[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.)

[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.

[grrlmusic]

SGI IRIX – Mekton (1995, multiplayer game)

[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.”

[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.

[twilightovervenus]

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

[danisgaycorner]

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

Stardust Ghosts - Episode 5

(AnimatedPizza is my twitter @!)

[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

[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.

[zerrulon]

[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.

[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!

[feralmechpilot]

Fighting the urge to abandon one of the ttrpg games I'm running and start a horny as fuck mekton zeta game with sapphic kinksters

[peteramthor]

Available in pdf as well as print via POD.