Monthly Mecha: Beam Saber & Austin Ramsay, plus Seamus Conneely

• A ttrpg about pilots trapped in a grueling, generations-long war
• built with Forged in the Dark (FitD)
• for 4-5 players, including a GM
• With customizable mechs and clever vehicle quirks

• Fits well with the FitD/BitD system
• Lovely b/w art with fun illustrations in the margins.
• Customizable mechs and clever vehicle quirks
• Thorough examples of play, plus short fiction!
• Cutting Loose: destress with another pilot during downtime

I recommend this game! There is a lot of hype around Beam Saber, and it’s well-deserved. It’s a natural fit for FitD yet has become popular on its own merit. Personally, it hits the techie bits/customization bits that many love about mecha ttrpgs within a fiction-first playstyle with mechanics that facilitate character drama and roleplay. The hype is real.

I also appreciate the microfiction, which makes the game text enjoyable and helps establish the play as well as the setting.

Austin: Beam Saber primarily draws inspiration from the Gundam mega franchise that has spanned dozens of series over 40 years. However, that's far from the only source. Battletech, Redline, Hammer's Slammers, The Black Company, Legend of Galactic Heroes and more are all things that I pulled ideas from.

Austin: The most unique thing about Beam Saber is the Cut Loose, Connection, Assist loop which helps centre character relationships. Pilots Cut Loose with each other to remove Stress in a scene RPed together. This increases their Connection which means that they know each other better and are more invested in their success. In following Missions when they Assist each other, the Stress cost is greater the stronger their Connection is, but it also provides greater benefit. After spending all that Stress, they'll need to Cut Loose again after the Mission, completing the loop.

Austin: People should try Beam Saber if they want a mecha TTRPG that isn't heavy on the crunch nor super focused on the gear your mech has, but still has the necessary complexity for interesting tactical decisions. It also puts focus on the stories that develop between the pilots via the previously mentioned Cut Loose, Connection, Assist loop.

Austin: I'm going to recommend Unknown Armies as it's one of my favourite games. It's a weird modern supernatural horror game about people asserting their own realities over others in pursuit of power. Both 2e and 3e are a blast with a great stress system that helps to correct the mechanical and moral issues of the traditional Sanity Points.

Seamus: Being interested in the mecha genre and being involved with games at all are actually linked pretty heavily for me. My best friend Christian is the one who first introduced me to both Mobile Suit Gundam and AD&D 2e about three decades ago, so really this is all his fault. While that's the starting point, where the unbroken chain of events starts is a few years later, as Chris and I were physically separated for a bit by changing schools. I was staying up late, and Toonami's Midnight Run had Gundam's 08th MS Team and 0083: Stardust Memory on. The trailers/teasers alone grabbed my attention - Norris Packard's Gouf Custom taking out a Guntank with a sword and a spray of blood-coded oil stuck something fierce - and that was more or less it for me. At first, y'know, the appeal was the cool robots, and that never really goes away, but the more I consumed the more the really memorable moments were the human ones. Gouf Custom vs. 08th MS Team is an excellent fight, sure, but Packard's last thoughts being of Aina as he completes his mission but does so using a sacrifice play because he won't kill her lover? Now that's the really good stuff.

Seamus: Writing reviews and games can first be traced back to a series of Brians. The timeline is a little fuzzy at this point, but I started posting gaming material at the Gaming Security Agency, and when Brian 'Fiddleback' Casey left there to form the Mad Adventurers Society I eventually followed. My longtime GM Brian Liberge got into game design first with his Pulp! the RPG, which was a short-lived but fun game best described as FATE Accelerated before Accelerated was a thing, and I eventually designed an adventure for it, along with helping playtest her other very pulpy game Ace Adventure. Then, back at MAS, Fiddleback had gotten bullied into following up on a game design idea posted on Twitter, and recruited some help for it. From this came Transit: The Spaceship RPG, my largest collaborative effort, a game of artificial intelligences with starship bodies and one of the most-run games at the PAX East chapter of Games on Demand (entirely my fault).

When MAS wound down, Fiddleback encouraged everyone involved to keep going on their own, and I decided to do so with Cannibal Halfling Gaming (other former MAS alums include The Hydian Way). This is where mecha and TTRPGS hook up again, because in the interim I'd been involved in a series of Gundam play-by-post forum roleplaying games, and a player from one invited me to join their online TTRPG group. Aside from being my first departure from D&D via a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, the GM of that group at the time turned out to be Aaron Marks, who wound up being my co-founder for CHG. So, without being into mecha, CHG just wouldn't exist in the form it does.

Seamus: Oh gosh, we've been doing this for eight years and counting, so even though we've only touched a fraction of the games out there in the world that still translates to a lot of games. Because of later questions I'm going to avoid mecha for this one, actually. Listed in no particular order: DIE, Back Again From the Broken Land, Cowboy Bebop, Fabula Ultima, Stewpot, Wildsea, DOGS, FIST, To Change, and Galactic and Going Rogue.

I kept myself to ten (technically eleven, the last is a two-for-one), but I think it's a pretty good cross-section! 

Seamus: I wrote a whole article about this once, which probably isn't too surprising. To paraphrase for the purposes of this, though:

The challenges are first and foremost fighting with the True Final Boss of TTRPGs: Scheduling. Time is by far the rarest resource, and it needs to be spent well, and it's hard to reach a point where you feel like it is. I don't review games as a primary, secondary, or even tertiary source of income. In some ways, this is very freeing! I can focus simply on things I want to focus on, without worrying about financial consequences. "Passion projects made by enthusiasts," as our contributor SloaneTVBand put it when writing about her own overall body of work. The challenge there is that it means you often don't have time to run every game that lands on your desk, and you can't justify cutting away other things to make more time because you're not making any money off of it, which means a lot of reading reviews, which can be contentious. 

Then there's picking what to write about in the first place. There are more games than there are days in my probable lifespan. At CHG we try not to write about anything we outright dislike unless there is some other value to it, so that narrows things down a fair bit, but still. Then, you have to balance hyping up something that you like while also being critical of its shortcomings - speaking just for myself, I've had a review or two be a little too hype-flavored because the strengths of the game I was reviewing were also inherently its weaknesses for other types of players, and it's important to make that clear.

The joy of reviewing games is deeply tied into the feeling of "Hey, here's this cool thing I found, I think you'll like it." CHG's tagline is about bringing games and gamers together, and introducing just one person to a game they end up loving that they may never have otherwise discovered is just the best. It can also make a creator's day, which hopefully encourages them to keep creating, and I love that. Another high point is that you get to be a better game-runner, player, writer, and designer by consuming more media, and this lets me do so. My exposure to different types of games, design theory, experiences, and even world views has ballooned exponentially by being someone who chooses to then write about those things.

Seamus: Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage is probably the one I'm most proud of. The nature of solo/duet games is that they can drill down into a very specific experience, and I think LATSW does that the best of my works. It has the strongest vibes! Anyone with enough time in the mecha genre has seen a pilot in a broken machine, monologuing before their machine vanishes in fire or staggered by what they just experienced before the supporting characters manage to find them. That's what LATSW is all about, and every playthrough I've had or talked about or (flatteringly) seen via someone else's actual play has made the player(s) FEEL something, even if they're not really mecha heads.

Seamus: The fun bit about this question is I get to link to a bunch more articles. "CHG: We've Got An Article For That!"

Mecha Hack is a stellar, um, hack of The Black Hack (thanks to Silhouette Zero and Force Majeure for introducing me to it), great for those who want to roleplay with giant robots but don't want a complicated ruleset.

Mechasys is made using Genesys, the generic version of the system behind the Star Wars RPGs originally published by Fantasy Flight Games. It does a really neat job of advancing both your pilot and your giant robot, and overall the impact and improv of the narrative dice is something I enjoy.

CHVLR is a Wretched & Alone solo game wherein you take on the role of the newest recruit to an experimental military program, barely into your teens, cybernetically implanted to better use your giant robot and thrown into the fray with little to no training. Really, really well written piece of work.

I Have No Railgun and I Must Scream is another solo game, this one from the perspective of a mecha pilot's sibling, who has to stay on the home front. It's a really unique perspective on the genre, an excellent game in its own right that I think also has some potential for being played in tandem with other solo mecha games.

HOME is a mapmaking game for 1-4 players about trying to protect your home and build up its defenses while fighting your way through multiple kaiju attacks. Great bit of worldbuilding, you get a cool map made up in the bargain, and really tense battles.

Seamus: The Cog That Remains, my own Wretched & Alone solo game of a mecha mechanic and their (probably doomed) effort to keep their machine intact and its pilot alive, is marching towards the Definitely Very Final Version - it's going through one last editing/rewrite pass, has added an actual play log by Leslie Trautman that doubled the length of the book and then some, and is currently discounted by 65% to itchfund for some interior art to complement the excellent cover art by JJ Ariosa.

When this interview gets released I will also be in the throes of National Game Design Month. As of this writing I am completely winging it, but hopefully I've settled on an idea by the time folks are reading this. Either way, I encourage people to join the Discord (I'm one of the mods, say hi when you get there!) and the game jam to try to slay the NaGaDeMon themselves!