Heavy Gear

Heavy Gear is in book form (pen & paper ) by Canadian publisher Dream Pod 9 published role-playing game. The first version appeared in 1994; now the game is in its third edition.

2001 the band released Heavy Gear: The Animated Series, a computer-animated television series with 40 episodes.

History

Heavy Gear belongs to the genre of science fiction role-playing games. The background is the fictional planet Terra Nova, about the year 6130 AD. According to the background story, humanity has spread to Survive a brief ice age of not more than 2000 years by the use of so-called Tannhauser gates about 9 other planets before the earth renounced its colonies and began an era of isolation.

The planet Terra Nova

Terra Nova is invested in approximately Earth-like; the planet is split into two halves - North and South - the superpowers USA and USSR correspond approximately to the late 20th century. To view the entire equator runs a broad desert belt - the Badlands. There, the polar bear blocks from their confrontations. At the time of the act, the fascist ruled Earth has opened for a third world war to bring the isolated colonies again militarily under their control.

Game

The game is designed both as a classic role-playing game as well as a tactical miniatures game ( tabletop, both with maps and modeled terrain ); accordingly, the game has a distinct military staining. The previously used and popular because of its simple elegance silhouette of rules has now been replaced by a unified and greatly expanded rules, Silhouette Core or SilCore called, which is all the games produced by Dream Pod 9 is based. The system works with simple six -sided dice ( d6 ). Characters have a variable number of skills (skills ) which are affected by a fixed number of attributes. For tests 2-5 dice are usually thrown and the highest pitched modified result compared to a threshold or an opposite throw to determine success or failure. The system is fast, easy to use, complex in itself and provides acceptable realistic results with a minimum of effort.

Source volumes

For the first and second edition of about 60 source volumes were published, which attract attention with a very detailed background and describe an enormously large number of characters, places and objects. Other features are the complex arc of the back story that develops over time and gradually picks up the other colonies - and the consistently high quality of the illustrations, which have at least the older source books numerous. An often bemängelter point to the products of the publishing house is the relatively high number of typographical errors.