Through Monday, October 12 we present the Heavy Gear 4E Bundle featuring the current (2023) Fourth Edition of Heavy Gear, Dream Pod 9’s SFRPG of mecha combat in the 62nd Century. The distant world of Terra Nova was once one of humanity’s brightest colonies, until Earth abandoned it. Left alone for centuries, Terra Nova’s 70 fractious city-states thrived. Now (AD 6146, TN year 1954) Earth’s Colonial Expeditionary Force has returned – to conquer the planet. Fleets of advanced hovertanks and legions of engineered GREL super-soldiers have subjugated large territories in a grinding war of attrition. Against them stand the heavy gears: four-meter, one-person combat walkers, faster than a tank and tougher than a GREL. Give your Commander, Duelist, Scout, Techie, or Grunt a lifepath (like Young Inventor, Street Rat, Farm Kid, Caravan Brat, Grew Up in the Garage, or your own idea), choose freeform skills and motivations, and climb into the cockpit to help Terra Nova’s last free city-states hold the line – or maybe join the CEF in its conquest of yet another world – or exploit the war for your own ends. The choice is yours.
Funded in a successful April 2023 Kickstarter campaign, the 4E Heavy Gear RPG supports gritty war stories for rookies or elites, for brave defenders or implacable invaders. Fight deadly battles for nine Terra Nova factions, unaffiliated Badlanders, or forces of four rival planets. The updated Silhouette engine, the venerable D6 dice-pool system that also drives the current (2022) Heavy Gear Blitz! tabletop wargame, lets you dispatch your team of pilots to the tabletop, or your painted models to a roleplaying session, without learning new rules. With the included conversion rules, returning pilots can bring their 2E gears out of storage into the fight.
“Giant robots” notwithstanding, Heavy Gear (like Dream Pod’s other mecha game, Jovian Chronicles) aims for a grounded tone. As with previous editions, 4E combat is highly tactical, rewarding position, teamwork, logistics, and awareness of what your gear can do. Skill and experience matter. For all its profusion of mecha combat illustrations and its 270 pages of gears, vehicles, weapons, armor, and personal equipment – whatever you’re carrying, or whatever is carrying you, there’s a stat block for it – Heavy Gear RPG 4E adventures are usually based on personalized character conflicts. The game differentiates combat and social encounters, and advises the Director to reserve 15-20 minutes per game session for “Intermission” actions like collecting intel, developing contacts, R&R, training, or “getting into trouble” (a defined rules option).
Character creation drops numbers almost entirely. Choose your character’s motivation, aptitudes, quirks, and “adversity” (detriment). Skills are specialization tags in any of 20 wide domains that range from Gunnery and Tactics to Culture and Showmanship. Skills and character traits add dice to your pool; a “familiar” skill grants a “reliable” die, which improves your success chance. (Yes, dice can also be “unreliable.”) Earn experience by making skill tests against tougher challenges; you gain experience in the skill even if you fail the test.
Eight character archetypes in the corebook provide ready-made traits and skills, and the Tempest Winds adventure adds the Handler, who fights alongside a bonded creature companion. You can even be a defector GREL, playing one of the very super-soldiers bred to conquer Terra Nova. This goes to Heavy Gear‘s overall realism. In a DP9 Community blog post, “5 reasons to play Heavy Gear 4E” (18 April 2023), 4E line developer Nick Huisman called the game “as real as it can be, while still having giant robots. […] There are certainly ‘bad guys,’ but by and large things are shades of gray rather than black-and-white. Even the major antagonists of the universe have reasons for being who they are and doing what they do. This also extends to politics, religion, social issues and all manner of situations.
“Heavy Gear will function just as well if your team is archaeologists searching for a rumored abandoned ship in the southern jungles, a hardscrabble caravan trying to cross a contested desert wasteland, or smooth spies conducting espionage on their own allies in an urban megacity. The gears are there for any of these settings, but the world is big enough that you don’t need them to have a fantastic game. Any genre can fit here. Want to tell a story about high-tech lowlifes? Try the planet Caprice and its megacity Ghamorra that spans hundreds of miles. Like the idea of mecha in a less military setting? Gear sports let players engage in the same fun you find in professional wrestling. Mafia drama? Tribal society coming into contact with outsiders? AI-gone-mad horror story? Clones-on-the-run thriller? All of these not only fit into Heavy Gear, they all have direct ties to the setting.”
This all-new Heavy Gear 4E Bundle gives you everything you need to tell modern, character-focused stories on the lethal battlefields of the 62nd Century. Pay just US$19.95 to get all five titles in our Heavy Gear Collection (retail value $97) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 483-page Heavy Gear RPG Fourth Edition Rulebook (plus the Director Screen); two full-length adventures – the introductory Tempest Winds and the high-power One Minute to Midnight, and The Art of Heavy Gear V4.
Get this Heavy Gear offer before the CEF’s hovertanks roll over the last free perimeter Monday, October 12.
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Heavy4E
PS. Pro tip: Start by skimming the rulebook’s first two chapters (pages 009-070), then skip forward and read Chapter 14, “Player’s Guide” (page 262). After that, continue with Chapter 3 and the rest.
