Games - Heavy Gear

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	Games - Heavy Gear

Heavy Gear is a game universe published since 1994 by Canadian publisher Dream Pod 9. It includes a tabletop tactical wargame, a role-playing game and a lesser known combat card game (Heavy Gear Fighter). The setting is better known through the PC-game incarnations published by Activision in 1997 and 1999, developed after Activision lost the rights to the Battletech/MechWarrior series. It also spawned a 40-episodes, 3D-animated TV series in 2001, which featured a much simplified version of the universe developed in the role-playing game.

The background universe of the game is extremely detailed: several million words have been published to date in more than a hundred books and game accessories. A continual epic storyline runs throughout all of the game's material, with new publications moving chronologically along the timeline.

As the name implies, Heavy Gear is best known for its humanoid combat vehicles (or mecha): the 'Gears' and 'Striders' used by the military forces in the setting. Its mecha designs are similar in size and tactical role to those in Ryusuke Takahashi's 1983 Armored Trooper Votoms anime.

Storyline

Heavy Gear begins on a distant planet called Terra Nova, roughly 4,000 Earth Standard Years from now (6132 AD). Terra Nova was once the crown jewel of the United Earth Government's colonies. However, an economic collapse forced the Terran government to abandon Terra Nova and all its other colonies centuries before, leaving Terra Nova in a dark age. Eventually, City-States rose from the ashes and either through treaties or tyranny, united to form national unions called Leagues. These Leagues would in turn ally (again either peacefully or forcibly) to form the superpowers that dominated the temperate southern and northern hemispheres of the planet.

As of 6132 AD (TN 1936, local calendar), the Confederated Northern City-States (CNCS) and the Allied Southern Teritories (AST) are recovering and rebuilding from the War of the Alliance, a brutal (and failed) attempt by the new Earth government to regain control of its colony. Despite a common enemy, the polar superpowers have great fear and animosity for each other, while the independent City-States of the equatorial region known as the Badlands simply try to survive the crossfire.

The storyline behind the game eventually moves off-world, as Terranovan special-ops teams are sent to try and regain contact with the other human colonies in order to unite them against the fascist government controlling Earth.

Rules

Heavy Gear uses Dream Pod 9's own Silhouette game engine. The latest edition of the Silhouette rules is sold separately as a book titled Silhouette CORE Rulebook, which is needed to play the third edition of the Heavy Gear roleplaying game. The wargame uses the Silhouette CORE Heavy Gear Miniature Rules, also available separately. The latter is played using miniatures and tabletop terrain, although some players prefer to use hex maps and paper counters.

Both the RPG and miniature games are built on the same basic rule mechanics. Silhouette is a realistic, simulationist system that defines characters in terms of 10 base attributes (agility, knowledge, etc.), 5 derived attributes (health, etc), and a variety of skills. Skill rolls make up the backbone of the system, which focuses on effect-based speed of play over grainy detail. The core mechanic involves rolling a number of 6-sided dice, taking the highest result and comparing it to a set threshold number. If the result is higher than the threshold the test is a success; if it is lower the test is a failure. The margin by which the test succeeded (Margin of Success, MoS) or failed (Margin of Failure, MoF) helps to determine the final outcome. Combat is handled by the same system, with characters taking penalty-inflicting wounds rather than depleting a set number of health points. As a result, the system can be lethal, especially on inexperienced characters.

Art

The Heavy Gear books are notable for their heavily illustrated content, above and beyond most of the games of the same period. Each book featured highly-detailed plans and cutaways of the machines, along with flags, insiginias, maps and other visual informations to help players' immersion. Most of the art was done by illustrator Ghislain Barbe, who was also responsible for the art of Jovian Chronicles, another Dream Pod 9 game line with similar anime inspirations.

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