Monthly Mecha: ECH0 & Kai Poh, plus CJ Tucker

• A 4-page ttrpg about a dead mecha pilot finding peace in a world that has moved on
• with GM-less storytelling and map drawing
• for 3 or more players (1 pilot and 2+ children)
• With unique, randomly generated and collaboratively constructed settings

• Imaginative worldbuilding around children and a ghost
• Great, pithy writing in a tiny, affordable game
• Can generate a range of emotions by the final stage of play
• Incredibly easy to pick up and play on the spot — with some replayability too
• Options for duet-play too

I recommend this game! In fact, this game is a great example of why you don’t need big books for your ttrpgs. An entire world and its tone is packed into this tiny little document with evocative writing. I’d love to find a way to incorporate it into a session zero for a larger mecha game, although it also deserved to be played in its own right.

Kai: I saw the wreck of a Japanese Zero fighter when I was a little boy, in Sabah, I think in the early 1980s. I was in a car with my father and his colleagues, on the way to some sort of factory or work site that they were consulting for. We stopped the car and one of our companions showed us the plane lying in a wild field nearby. It was a skeletal frame; decades of curious visitors had stripped away many metal and wood parts. The frame and wings still held their shape, so the pilot must have landed relatively safely, then had to abandon his plane. You could imagine many different stories about the history of the warplane and its pilot.

Ech0 is a guess at what a bunch of kids could have found if they met the pilot's ghost. I think a good touchstone is to think of Miyazaki's idyllic settings, the ones which hold echoes of a past war, like in Porco Rosso or Future Boy Conan.

Kai: Ech0 is a simple map-making game where all the players share narrative agency. There are no dice rolls for action resolution, only for location prompts. It's a game about war where the fighting and dying has already happened a long time ago. Specifically, each kid describes the site of one of the fallen mecha as the group explores, but the dead pilot describes what happened in the past, for the children to react to. The text just provides tables of prompts, images and ideas to guide worldbuilding. This was when map games were still pretty new to me. Apart from the work of Avery Alder and Takuma Okada, there wasn't much that I knew of. My partner Elisha and I were pretty much fumbling around in the dark when we made this.

Kai: I see every group bringing a lot of their own influences and ideas to the game. Some people turn up the comedy with the kids. Some play the pilot confused or shell-shocked or deeply saddened. And there's a map you've made at the end, an artifact you can peruse to remember the adventure. I'm hoping people will just want to see what they and their fellow players can make in the framework of this game.

Kai: The Deep Forest by the wonderful Avery Alder, the first map-making game I ever encountered. And Alone Among the Stars (and its spin-offs) by the inestimable Takuma Okada. These were the games at the very start of my journey of design.

Also, Takuma made Oldhome, which I think is a really lovely game with some of the same vibes as Ech0.

Asa: First of all, the title of this game is so clever, Goodbye, World </3. Can you explain where it comes from?

CJ: Thanks! I remember it was such a lightbulb moment when the title came to me. It's a pun on the phrase "Hello, World," which is used to check whether computer programmes are working. Since "Hello, World" is the thing you make a computer say when it starts working, "Goodbye, World" felt perfect for a game set at the end of a robot's life.

Asa: Mecha media often explores relationships between people and machines but to different ends. Why did you want to explore this theme in Goodbye, World </3?

CJ: Lots of my games centre around the theme of death, but Goodbye, World was my first! The idea actually came from discussions with my partner, who is even more emotional about robots than I am. My goal from the beginning was to make a game that would make them cry. There are some people where saying that is a really strong pitch and there are some people who give me weird looks, I trust your readers to be the former!

Asa: Goodbye, World </3 plays with medium (text and speech) in really fun ways. Why were you interested in exploring medium?

CJ: So you've got one person playing the pilot, who communicates through speech; and one person playing the mech, who communicates through text, and the amount of messages they can send is ticking down as they die. The game is super short and gets right into the tension, which makes for some super explosive roleplay. The idea of some players typing and some players speaking came from This Discord Has Ghosts In It by Will Jobst and Adam Vass. I loved the idea of making the texting feel diegetic, like it's appearing on the mech's HUD or something. Also, making the mech send texts turned their communication into a resource, which I think still has loads of design potential beyond what I did in Goodbye World.

CJ: Discord Ghosts was one of the first indie RPGs I ever played, and it still has a dear place in my heart 4 years later. It was a perfect game to come out during lockdown and it's still an amazing experience now. Other than that, I quote Titanfall 2 on the back page of Goodbye World, the relationship between the mech and pilot in that game's campaign was a huge inspiration for me!

CJ: If it wasn't clear enough already, I adore This Discord Has Ghosts In It, so that's definitely a big recommendation from me.

In terms of mecha stuff I've gotta talk about Immortal Gambit by TitanomachyRPG, Lex Kim Bobrow cites Goodbye World as an inspiration for it, which was such an honour!

I also read Aether Nexus recently and really enjoyed it! All the art is gorgeous and the character creation was really fun, looking forward to playing that sometime in the future!