James Nicoll Reviews

Dream Pod 9’s 1997 Heavy Gear, 2^nd edition, is a science fiction roleplaying and tactical game. Per the title, it is the second edition of Dream Pod 9’s Heavy Gear. The first edition appeared in 1995, almost exactly thirty years ago.

Second Edition’s writers included Philippe R. Boulle, Jean Carrières, Élie Charest, Jean Marcil, Guy-Francis Vella, and Marc A. Vézina. The art direction was by Pierre Ouelette, with art by Ghislane Barbe, Normand Bilodeau, Jean-Francois Fortier, Charles-Emmanuel Ouellette, Pierre Ouellette, plus many others too numerous for me to list¹.

The setting of the game: four thousand years from now, the competing nations of the exoplanet Terra Nova contend against each other and those darn Terrans using a variety of methods, not least of which is Heavy Gear powered armour.

Why review Heavy Gear just now? Because the system as a whole just turned thirty and because I just noticed Heavy Gear Revitalized on Drivethru. To quote:

Welcome to Heavy Gear Revitalized! Until now the older Heavy Gear ebooks available on DriveThruRPG have been scanned copies of the original printed books. Dream Pod 9 is happy to announce the release of high-quality electronic format ebooks for the Heavy Gear Classic Roleplaying & Tactical Game publications. Made possible by the team of Michael Butt (Project Manager) and Brad Fischer (Roaring Mouse Graphics) who converted the old Macintosh PageMaker files into modern Adobe format. A big thank you to Michael and Brad for taking on the massive effort to Revitalize all the old Dream Pod 9 Heavy Gear products. 

Not that I’ve dropped the $181.00. Yet. The old scans previously available for purchase are blurred and unsearchable so I am very, very tempted. If only the world were not on fire.

As far as I can tell, all four editions are available on DriveThru. However, 2E was my favorite edition, so that is the edition I am reviewing.

1E was a bit smaller, 3E had an unfortunate foray into the whole d20 mess — don’t ask — and 4E has not received glowing reviews. Many games appear to have intermediate editions where the company hit a sweet spot lost in later iterations. For Heavy Gear, at least from a roleplaying perspective, that was 2E.

Montreal-based game publisher Dream Pod 9 had been around since the 1980s, albeit not under that name. Previous products had been licenced for other company’s games: Jovian Chronicles for Mekton (more on that in a few months), Night’s Edge for Cyberpunk, and Star Riders for Teenagers from Outer Space, among others. I believe Heavy Gear was their second independent product, after 1995’s Project A‑ko: The Roleplaying Game (which I own and could review).

In 1995, Heavy Gear stood out as soon as it was unboxed. Pierre Ouelette’s art direction gave the line a distinctive look. Unlike some product lines I could mention — such as White Wolf’s Wraith—that distinctive look was enticing and eye-catching. Beyond that, DP9’s perfect-bound books were well-made. Indeed, my copies of the 1995 1E and 1997 2E look pristine… and not because I never opened them.

To digress slightly: DP9 eschewed cheesecake art. The women are not mere eye-candy. I mention this only because of the connection between DP9 and R. Talsorian; R. Talsorian very much embraced cheesecake art.

(That said, some of the rules examples focus on the misadventures of a young woman as she enrages other women by sleeping with their boyfriends, a bold creative choice.)

The mid-1990s were a fucking awful time to be selling roleplaying games a sometimes-challenging environment for game stores. Collectable card games, which offered an annoying combination of expense and risk for retailers, consumed many gamers’ disposable incomes. Tabletop roleplaying game companies appeared to be completing to see who could make the most catastrophic business decisions².

DP9 in contrast offered a slick-looking, well-supported line. Other companies might be cheerfully driving into the bridge supports for the James Snow Parkway, but DP9 gave every impression of a company that knew what it was doing, was doing it well, and planned to be around for a long time — which it still is, even if the focus now is on miniatures, which make money, rather than tabletop roleplaying games, which do not.

Another plus for the second edition: a perfectly functional, if perhaps crunchier than current fashion prefers, set of rules. As the title suggests, Heavy Gear offered a two-for-one deal: a complete roleplaying game and a functional tactical wargame³. The two games used the same core mechanics, which meant integration was easy⁴. There are some bugs — somewhat quirky organization⁵, the occasional grammatical flub, some unfortunately ableist slang — but otherwise Heavy Gear 2E offers a solid game. Actually, it offers two solid games and was great value for the money.

The layout eschews double columns, which means the text should be as readable in PDF (assuming the PDF isn’t blurring) as it is on paper. As nobody was publishing on PDF in 1997 this has to be pure luck.

Heavy Gear, 2^nd edition is available from DriveThru. Only the PDFs, through. There is no print on demand option, despite pleas from customers.

Oddly, Dream Pod 9 itself doesn’t seem to offer the PDFs and although they have some hardcopy backstock, they don’t offer the 2E rules.

Le nitty-gritty:

The rules begin with nine pages of maps and flavor text before the table of contents appears. This is not ideal. Neither is the white-on-black print used on those nine pages, which I do not remember being so hard to read. Also the font appears to have shrunk in the last thirty years.

(The 1^st edition had the table of contents right up at the front, a point in its favor.)

The table of contents is extremely detailed and conveniently numbered. With the two indexes, finding rules is easy. As well, each page header clearly identifies to which chapter it belongs. It is almost as though the designers wanted to make locating information easy.

Introduction

Discussion of what this volume entails, followed by a short history covering the period between the collapse of civilization in the near-future⁶ to the game’s era, four thousand years from now.

I wonder why the designers set this so far in the future? Nothing about the setting necessitates it.

The World of Heavy Gear

More detailed notes on the setting, with a focus on the hot desert world, Terra Nova. Most of the population can be found at the poles, with the arid equatorial regions serving as a convenient no man’s land. Internal divisions are rife, on top of which is the ever-present danger Earth will try to reincorporate Terra Nova into its empire… again.

Which is to say, a world seemingly designed to facilitate frequent clashes between rival groups.

Peace River Sourcebook

Notes on a specific location on Terra Nova.

Silhouette Basics

An introduction to the Silhouette game mechanics, around which the game is built.

The game mechanics use a dice pool system. In almost all cases, to determine challenge outcomes, a variable number of six-sided-dice are rolled. Only the highest value rolled is counted, to which is added any applicable modifier. The result is compared to a target number (either a set difficulty threshold or another character’s dice roll results) and the margin of success or failure determines what happens⁷.

Character Creation

Exactly what it says on the tin. Heavy Gear uses a point-based design system, in which points are exchanged for increases in attributes (inherent abilities) and skills (learned abilities). Points for one are not interchangeable with points for the other. How many points are available depends on the nature of the campaign. Costs escalate rapidly with value. For attributes 1 or higher, the cost is value+1, squared⁸. Skills cost their level, squared, unless they are complex skills, in which case costs are doubled.

As there are ten attributes and many skills, this means is that the values on the character sheets will look oddly low to gamers used to other systems. Attributes of 0 will abound, ‑1s won’t be rare, but attributes above 2 will be uncommon. Similarly, skill levels will usually be rated at 1 or 2.

Those values are more impactful than they appear. Each skill level adds a die to the dice pool rolled. Applicable attributes are added to the dice roll result.

Boy, we loved our attributes back in the 1990s. Ten attributes to model inborn ability may seem like a lot… but I didn’t even mention the five secondary attributes, which are calculated (not bought!) from the value of attributes and skills. On an unrelated note, ownership of a calculator will be a plus when playing Heavy Gear.

An odd detail: this is also the chapter where you will find equipment lists. I’d have given equipment its own chapter.

Unlike some games I can mention, the equipment isn’t purely or even mostly combat focused. As well, the designers managed to sidestep the usual 1980s and 1990s trap of listing hilariously underpowered futuristic computer equipment: in this game, data disks come in boxes of 10, store 10 terabytes per disk, and are dirt-cheap. Take that, Johnny Mnemonic!

Roleplaying Rules

This chapter details the rules embellishments that pertain specifically to roleplaying campaigns.

An interesting detail regarding experience: like many games, one accrued experience points (XP) while adventuring. These could be spent in a number of ways. One could increase attributes and skills, which was expensive in terms of XP and time. One could also purchase Emergency Dice, to be added to dice pools in emergencies… such as having rolled terribly.

Tactical Rules

This would be the tactical miniatures game.

It’s a perfectly functional wargame. You don’t have to use miniatures (cardboard chits would do).

Trivia: local game company RAFM (for whom I worked in 1982 and 1983 until I was mercifully fired⁹) had the license to produce Heavy Gear figures. RAFM, which has been around for half a century, just closed.

Campaigns

Pointers on how to run long-term games.

Field Guide

Equipment lists and records for the tactical game.

1: DP9 meticulously listed all of the creators, far more than the people named above. The only reason I am skipping the entire list is because I am working from my hardcopy rulebook, from which I have to discover how to cut and paste to an electronic document.

2: Arguably, TSR won the terrible decision contest by going tits-up, despite owning the most popular roleplaying game. They were by no means the only company to fold or dramatically restructure in the 1990s, but they fell from the greatest height.

3: Although if you want to design Gears from scratch, you need the Second Edition Technical Manual (December 1998). Another point in favor of the 1^st Edition: it included the vehicle design rules by default.

4: Integration of the two games would be ill-advised from a survival perspective. To quote:

[quote] To convert vehicle weapons to RPG scale, their damage multipliers is (sic) multiplied by 10 and their range scores by 50. (…) So an autocannon with a Damage Multiplier of x8 would have a Damage Multiplier of x80 if used against a character. [/quote]

Without getting into game mechanic minutiae, this means if hit by a round from an autocannon, a heavily armoured character might be identifiable from dental records, whereas you’d need a DNA analysis to ID an unarmoured character. Which would be bad.

5: Quirky organization is more than compensated for by two (!) different indexes.

6: USA delenda. As the great disaster was an ice age, Canada delenda as well.

7: For example, weapon damage is determined by multiplying the margin of success by the weapon’s Damage Multiplier. Remember footnote 4? Let’s say the autocannon gunner just barely hit their target, with a margin of success of one: 1×80 is 80 damage. Or perhaps the gunner did very well and got a margin of success of 5. That’s 5×80 or 400 damage.

Generally speaking, 50 points of damage is sufficient to kill someone outright. 400 would be somewhat more than 50.

Potential players may take comfort from the fact that while human-carried weapons were not as deadly as vehicle weapons, it was still perfectly doable to get one-shotted by a pistol or a rifle, or to perish from the long-term side-effects of a massive wound. It’s almost as though weapons are designed to kill and combat is risky.

This seems an appropriate juncture to acknowledge that the rules point out that one does not have to focus on combat in Heavy Gear campaigns. Terra Nova is a whole world! There’s lots of non-violent stuff to do!

8: Attributes of 0 cost 1 point. ‑1 is free. ‑2 and lower will provide points that can be spent elsewhere… but as the designers foresaw players abusing this, the points you get from reducing attributes below ‑1 are far less than the cost to increase them above ‑1.

Not all attributes are created equal. Attributes have associated skills. Remember the ​“applicable modifiers” mentioned up in the basics section? That includes the value of the related attribute. Agility has lots of associated skills. If a character has a high Agility, that will affect the outcome of many skill tests. Psyche in contrast has a single associated skill, and so will affect very few skill tests. This is probably why the Psyche section also has a very defensive discussion of why Psyche matters, despite its apparent irrelevance to the game.

9: For reasons of personality incompatibility, I’d rate it as the worst job I’ve ever had… and I’ve had a job where being beaten to death was a serious possibility, not to mention the job where I could have been blown up, set on fire, and reduced to a slurry. Which would be bad.