Monthly Mecha: RIG by Not Writing Games

Mecha TTRPGs Monthly

RIG cover art. July Mecha TTRPG Newsletter

This is Asa Donald with your monthly mecha rpg for July. This newsletter is 100% free. To support it, me, or my games, sign up for my upcoming Kickstarter Violent Delights: a chess-based RPG about Romeo & Juliet. If you’d like to hear more from me, you can follow me on bluesky.

Community content, including a game jam, a free game, and an opportunity to support an artist;
Our featured mech ttrpg, RIG; and
An interview with the creator, December of Not Writing Games.

Nuts & Bolts

Curated content from the community

Suggest Content

Community Content

The OSG LOCKED IN Mecha Game Jam for this July. A game jam about the cockpit as a coffin. This game jam originated as a tossed-off idea on the podcast On the Shoulders of Giants (OSG), a podcast about mechs across media and why we love them. This jam is intended to explore a trope/theme the hosts have enjoyed running across in mech media and to prompt mech-loving creatives to make more.

A Hymn for the Odd-Host is free on itch.io. By Ethan Yen of Prequel and ChainxLink, it's mech-adjacent, really, but it looks and sounds fun, so I've added it to my To-Play list.

A Hymn for the Odd-Host is a two-player asymmetric game that blends elements of strategy and roleplaying. One player plays as a broken robot with a terrible secret, guiding a sentient slime to repair its damaged subsystems. One player plays as the sentient slime, uncovering the truth while feeding off of this stranger's energy. What emerges is a story of two strange entities and the relationship that grows between them.

Costin Wilken-Schelling (Cozzymandias) has opened public commissions: visual artist and mech enthusiast has opened up commissions following the Paizo restructuring. At the very lest, you might check out his portfolio for some excellent mechs.

Cyberrats in Space is crowdfunding on Kickstarter. This tactical mech RPG is like Mausritter but with more tactics, corporate satire, and robots, which is to say it has rodents! Yes, I've shared this one a few times, but I like Alex Rinehart's games, Boog's art, and the campaign is live right now. You can find my interview with Alex below:

Community Releases

LAST CHARGE OF THE SENTRY ARCANES: a GM-free roleplaying game with tarot card game mechanics for constructing mecha and generating tales of war and resistance.

Personal Releases

Violent Delights: A chess-based RPG about Romeo and Juliet
In the lead-up to my next Kickstarter, I've been publishing essays and interviews about repurposing board games for RPGs. Here are the final three in a series of six:

Romeo kisses Juliet in a chequer-floored ballroom.

Community Content
You can submit your own community content for this newsletter. It's 100% free. Share your new releases, blogs, reviews, etc. as long as it's related to mecha ttrpgs.

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Featured Mecha TTRPG

This month's featured ttrpg is RIG by December of Not Writing Games.

RIG is a single-player mech RPG based on Spencer Campbell's souls-like RUNE system. In RIG, you pilot a mech that has been reclaimed and murdered over and over again. You explore a dark science fiction version of earth, fighting enemy rigs and alien hulks, collecting new equipment, and moving toward the earth's core. RIG uses a standard deck of playing cards and several six-sided dice, gradually filling in the world with more challenges and mysteries as you interpret what happened there.

RIG is one of those games that is just plain fun. December, the designer, chalks some of it up to the RUNE chassis, but it's more than that. Although RUNE is fun (and underrated at that!), RIG brings a fictional premise that fits the system well – one about exploration, about mechs and their upgrades – accompanied by December's excellent writing and sprinkles of lore.

RIG

Writing and Design by December. Art by Galen Pejeau, Daniel Comerci.

RIG on itch.io

An interview with December:

What is the general premise of RIG?

Asa: This game drips with lore from the very first page and sprinkles it throughout each level, as your mech progresses toward the Core of Recombinant Earth. What is the general premise of RIG?

December: RIG is a single player souls-like mech TTRPG. You play as a pilot trying to survive in a decrepit science fiction version of Earth, piloting a mech that has an impaled sword for a heat sink.

I wanted to make a sci-fi Dark Souls game. Early on I had the idea of a mech that was "dead" that had been stabbed with a weapon that was now acting as a heat sink, and that you cleared heat by using the weapon. Everything sort of flowed out from that: mixing dark fantasy you'd see in something like a Fromsoft Game with a distant sci-fi ruin full of corporate neglect and weird magic. I wanted to see if I could tell a story and build a world with just flavour text and hints of lore.

What led you to use the RUNE system for a mech game?

Asa: RIG feels simple, but truly you've managed to seamlessly connect several puzzle pieces with solid game design and encounters. What led you to use the RUNE system for a mech game?

December: I mean Spencer Campbell solved the design problem of making a Dark Souls game in tabletop with RUNE, so he already made a solid foundation I could riff on. The modular nature of the items, the ways enemies move in relation to your character, it didn't take much to make it about undead robots in space. He does great work and released the system for others to iterate on, so that's what I did!

Who should try RIG And why?

Asa: Who should try RIG? And why?

December: If you like Fromsoft video games in general and single player TTRPG experiences in particular, RIG was made for you. I love the world of Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Armored Core, but I am terrible at those games. But those fights are way easier when it's dice on a grid.