maza's Full Review: David Pulver - Gurps Mecha: Mighty Battlesuits and...
I like Mecha stuff in general, whether it is movies, comics, or books. I own a couple of mecha RPG rulebooks as well and have recently reviewed FASA’s Mechwarrior RPG. GURPS Mecha is an RPG rulebook based on Steve Jackson’s GURPS role playing system.
GURPS Mecha begins with an overview of the genre, and ideas on how to run mecha based campaigns. This section is typical of similar sections in most GURPS books. The tips for running anime-style campaigns were interesting and would be very useful to Game Master’s that are not very familiar with the Mecha genre, or need a few more ideas. I had enough anime influences to be able to just read quickly the whole chapter.
Following the introductory chapter, come the character generation chapter. As you can imagine, there are sample character types that are common in anime. These are pretty representative of the genre, although I'm surprised that no mention was made of the infamous Five Man Band, of which the Voltron team is the prime example. Besides Mecha characters there are archetypes of battle suits and cinematic aliens as well as a selection of sample mecha, including the inevitable Valkyrie/Veritech clone, Cyclone clone, and BGC hardsuit clone.The advantages section included some very anime-style new advantages, such as the ability to summon your power armor by shouting out "Super-Tarkuss-Armor-Power-Energize!!" or something similar. There's also the infamous Shojo Mallet (think Akane). A simplified version of the vehicle action and combat system from GURPS vehicles exists, but if there is going to be heavy use of vehicles in the campaign, or if the Game Master or the players need a bit more information and flavour, then reading GURPS vehicles rulebook is essential. A good thing about this supplement is that they finally factored weight into a version of the jumping rules from the basic set. Next comes the design rules. Yes, they actually appear after most of the other rules, a first as far as I can tell. They're basically like the ones from Vehicles, but simplified greatly, in much the same way as GURPS robots had simplified rules for buying sensor packages and communicators. It seemed a lot easier to get the machine that I had planned for than it was in Vehicles. This is probably due to a lot more guidelines suggested.
If the basic design rules weren't enough, there's a whole chapter on optional rules, which are what make GURPS Mecha the most different from Vehicles. Rules are given for combining mecha (a la Voltron) and Transformers. Finally, transformation rules that aren't simply "Build a robot, build a vehicle, and say that the robot transforms into the vehicle." These machine transform by "folding" subassemblies against the body, in much the way that transforming toy robots do. Advanced rules include a large number of options such as overload boosters, psionic mecha, battlesuits, swords and shield, magic and even steampunk based mecha. This is what I'd been waiting for.Finally, there's Cybermech Damocles. It's a mini campaign background/world , much like the one in Psionics. I personally think all backgrounds in non world-books should be like this: concise and more of a guideline than a "Do it this way" thing.
Of course, there's always the art. It's Dan Smith, trying to draw in the anime style. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the very well done chapter pieces. Sometimes he doesn't, and the pictures start to look like my first anime pictures did, especially the people. Drawing anime style faces isn't as easy as it looks. One last note on the art, however. I recognized quite a few designs as being almost unaltered from ones appearing in real anime. There's a Zentraedi battle pod in there, and a BGC hardsuit, and a couple of Macross-style destroids that could have stepped right out of the actual anime. I suppose it's kind of like putting Maximillian and a headless Johnny Five in GURPS robots, but it seems a bit much.
In general, I liked the book, but then I usually like the GURPS tech books, and I like anime a lot. The best part of the book was probably the advanced mecha design chapter, which adds extra detail to precisely the areas that it should.
RPG Definition for the uninitiated
A typical Role Play Game would be an activity satisfying most of the following:
1. It involves persons consciously playing fiction roles (either medieval, contemporary or sci-fi roles)
2. It involves the collective creation of a story
3. Usually one of the participants is responsible for guiding the activity
4. There is no audience besides the participants themselves (unless there is a demonstration of course).
5. The main purpose of the activity is to entertain the participants.
There are published books, often referred to as Rulebooks, containing unique rules regarding how to create a character (role) or how to resolve specific actions. Generally the success of an action is determined with by rolling one or more dice (dice can be funny in RPGs since they tend to have more than 6 surfaces).
Besides the rulebooks, there are books describing settings in which characters can role play. Settings are very diverse and include high or low fantasy worlds, dystopian worlds, contemporary worlds, or alternate reality worlds.
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