A mecha RPG where the machine is illegal and yours
You failed out of the programme, and the thing in the hangar they were about to scrap has decided it will answer to nobody else. The invasion is not going to wait for the paperwork.
No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
A war machine with no limits is boring
What the mech can do is stated with its limits, and damage carries between engagements, so a fight is won by a good decision rather than by describing the attack more forcefully than you did last time.
The world
When the Helian invasion shatters the orbital defenses, a washed-out cadet finds the only weapon left standing: a decommissioned, semi-sentient war-mech that chooses her as its pilot.
The frontier world of Tessar is humanity's last fortified colony, defended by towering piloted mechs called Vanguards. After a peacetime treaty mothballed the war-frames, the Helian fleet arrives to find the cradle of humanity nearly defenseless.
Who is in it
- The Tessar Defense Corps
- the demoralized, under-equipped colonial military.
- The Helian Swarm
- the invading fleet of adaptive, hive-coordinated war machines.
- The Vanguard Project
- the disbanded program that built the legendary war-mechs.
Where you go
- Hangar Zero
- the sealed bunker where the last working Vanguard was mothballed.
- Tessar Spaceport
- the colony's lifeline, first to fall under the invasion.
- The Shattered Belt
- the debris field of the destroyed orbital defenses.
What already happened
- The Treaty of Stillwater
- the peace that disarmed Tessar and doomed it.
- The Helian Vanguard Strike
- the surprise assault that broke the orbital defenses.
Who you can play
-
Junie Park Washout cadet
A self-doubting washout discovering she's the only one the machine will accept.
At the start: the unlikely, untrained pilot of humanity's last war-mech.
-
Aegis Sentient war-mech
A weary, ancient war-machine that wanted to stay asleep and was given one last pilot.
At the start: awakened, bonded to a rookie, and carrying old grief.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.