I've come to the inevitable 'mech game' point in the creative cycle of a tabletop designer lol. I'm not going to pretend like this project is going to be extraordinarily unique or groundbreaking, but it will be fucking cool, and it'll update systems from old tabletop games that I grew up with and loved (IE: Battletch. It's a Battletech clone ok?). Game will be a 'single roll' d10 system that uses some other dice sizes (d8 and under) for damage and tables.

What's the concept?

The idea is to take some general design cues from battletech but then streamline all the finicky stuff and focus the game around the crew of a mech to expand tactical options and decision trees while shrinking the amount of inherent rules complexity. Each mech will be crewed by a crack team of three mobile dragoons who operate it's central systems: weapons, reactor, electronics, and piloting. Dragoons hop between systems to perform necessary actions, crewing their assigned system for the round and contributing their corresponding stats to all rolls made for that system.The reactor churns out power that is allocated to all the other systems to perform actions with, the weapons system shoots stuff, the piloting system moves the mech around, and the electronics systems disperses shields, acquires target locks and can perform electronic countermeasures to counteract equipment and systems on other mechs. In addition to operating a control system, crew can climb on the exterior of a mech to repair damaged systems, do a bunch of unique actions to supercharge weapons, juice up the reactor, inspire their allies and so on.

I envision the game being played a couple different ways, and have some extra rulesets planned for the various play-styles. All of these are gonna use the same ruleset as the base game but will play out a little differently and have different roles for the individual players.

• A classic 1v1 skirmish game where players build out their own unique mechs from a huge variety of chassis type and customization options and then beat the shit out of the other side til one guy's units are all dead. Straightforward, simple, fun.
• Solo play where you build out your guys and do scenarios against units controlled by AI cards.
• "Multiplayer Cooperative": where you do scenarios against either AI controlled units OR a gamemaster type role who controls all the baddies as a team of 3, with each player controlling a single dragoon who works with the other players to pilot a single mech together. Super excited for this concept, I think it'll play super cool as there's a lot of layered decision making to do between the various crew roles that will translate into some really synergistic and satisfying gameplay when all the players mesh to execute cool shit. 
• And then the weird amalgamation of all the above which is Narrative / Campaign play. This will basically be a ruleset for building a small mercenary detachment and running a number of different scenarios either cooperatively, solo, or competitively against rival mercenary groups controlled by other players with the results of each deployment granting points to buy upgrades, repairs, and dragoon advancements. I've got some really cool lifepath creation systems planned for the dragoons controlled by the players during a campaign to create loads of roleplay potential, and some cool ideas to mix solo play with cooperative and competitive so that players can progress their militia group on their own time. Planning on testing out a time system where a 'round' of narrative play takes place over a week of in-game time and each week a number of random deployments are generated with various rewards that a group will have to commit their resources to for that week. I think there's some huge potential for 'league play' where a couple different groups can run their own mercenary teams and fight over a huge campaign map.

Lore and Setting?

Scattered factions of humanity have long ago expanded from the territories of earth and its home system and now squabble for resources to further expand their empires. Periodic expansions of territory are considered in terms of ‘spheres’ which represent the distance a colony ship can make it from a populated system under the constraints of current technology. Within a new sphere mercenary groups reign supreme as they are hired by the various factions to conduct warfare on their behalf in order to secure crucial systems for colonization, sparring with other mercenary groups and operating on the fringes of known civilization as they resupply for battle upon the unknown frontiers. 

Right now I’m envisioning battle deployment as huge mercenary dropships entering low orbit and dropping in their mechs with single-use rocket boosters slapped onto them to decelerate just enough to survive the impact in big fucking explosion of rock and debris once they hit the surface. Then after battle, all the debris and mechs are hauled back up to the dropships by these big magnetic carrier-VTOLs or something. Toying around with keeping it in a shared universe with another project - Neon Noir - and use evolutions of the factions that exist within that game. We’ll see, I’m not super attached to anything setting-wise right now.

Anyway, here's some early test pages from the initial rules chapter. I'm about 1 week along on the development cycle lol