I thought I’d escaped from the world of plastic dice and doing math worksheets for the glorious reward of bragging rights to other nerds about what kind of imaginary monsters I could kill, but I’ve been being slowly drawn back toward the pen and paper rpg side. It’s like a cancer going into remission, then coming back in full force like a 20-sided prostate tumor. If only I hadn’t nursed the habit with occasional Heroscape bouts- I thought it was safe if the dice didn’t have numbers– but my accursed sense of individuality got me using my old ‘my color’ d20 from my D&D dies for initiative rolls. The virus must have been lying dormant on the die, waiting for me to fail a saving throw!
So, yes. I’ve decided to start a new, Super Robot Wars-inspired mech rpg using the Jovian Chronicles ruleset. I’ve wanted to devise something suitable for it from the ground up, but I just don’t have that much free time. Luckily, the JC Companion’s mech generation system is capable of building just about any godforsaken thing, and despite making me want to tear my hair out at first, the formulas for deriving the stats is pretty good once you get by the curve. The Sil engine itself works really well for anime-ish play, too, since hero characters with their extra stats and skills tend to be able to finish off nameless mooks in a few shots while blazing about the field shrugging off damage, but not too invincible. And the fact that most of the mecha stats can translate into real-world statistics (MP’s convert easily enough to kph, ‘Size’ points break down to tonnage and can be used to determine volume as well, so on) kind of makes the Companion enticing as a tool for anyone who just likes making up big stompy robots and wants some kind of shortcut to figuring those attributes out.
It gets better, too- I got the book expecting to still have to make up scratch home rules for Voltron style combinations and variable fighters, and yet, right there in the back under a heading of “FANTASTIC!” technology, combining/transforming/assimilating/nanomachine-driven/HOT BLOODED mecha options are given. What all this means is you can build say, the Lagann from Gurren Lagann with the same set of rules as some gritty-realistic desert grunt mech. And that is awesome.
