Remnants by Evil Mastermind

The Broken Lands

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

I mentioned this game in passing in the Mobile Frame Zero thread, so I figured I'd cover it in a bit more detail. Plus I've got something special in the works, so I wanted to do something quick while I get that ready.

LET'S READ REMNANTS - "What is a mecha, compared to the hand that pilots it?"


Like superheroes, the "giant robot" genre is one that a lot of people have taken a swing at creating in a game based around it. Unlike superheroes, though, it seems to be a lot harder to find a good giant robot RPG.

And I can kind of understand why. A mecha-based game has to hit a rough balance between character capability and mecha capability; you don't want your giant robot to overshadow what your character's capable of since that'd shift the focus from the PC to the mech, but if you go too far in the other direction them mech just becomes a glorified piece of equipment as interesting as a +1 longsword.

Fortunately, the folks at Outrider Studios have made an attempt to find that balancing spot with their first product: Remnants , a post-apocalyptic mecha RPG. Do they succeed? Let's find out...


Chapter 1: The Broken Lands

Remnants takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, specifically in an area known as the Broken Lands. How the world wound up this way is fairly vague; there are some old tales still told about the history of the world, but the changes happened so long ago it's pretty much impossible to knwo what's truth and what's legend.

It is accepted that long ago, the part of the world now called the Broken Lands was a paradise when it was first colonized by humanity. Nobody really knows where it was colonized from (some scholars like to refer to a "gate of fire"), but it's also widely accepted that numerous cultures tried to live together in peace as one unified civilization.

Of course, peace wouldn't last.

Again, nobody knows why the Freat Civilization turned on itself, but when it did, the weapons it brought to bear were horrifying. Giant mechanical engines of destruction clashed with bio-engineered terrors as both sides tried to get the upper hand over the other. With the help of the Clock of Amantin, it's estimated that the apocalypse occured just under 900 years ago. The only legacy the war has left the world are the Broken Lands themselves, and the weapons known as Ishi.

The Broken Lands is the term used to describe the world the game takes place on, although if the place had another name, it's lost to the sands of time now. The Broken Lands described in the book is a small part of one continent; it's hard to say how big because they deliberately didn't put measurements on it. The closest we get is that it would take a slow trade caravan 6 months or so to get from one end to the other.

The book briefly lists twenty areas on the map, such as the City-state of Mrat Kerr:

There's also Forest of Glass:

So yeah, the world is kind of fucked up. Even after 900 years, civilization is barely operating at feudal levels, and has little to no access to real technology that isn't scavenged from ancienct Ishi ruins.

I've used the term "Ishi" a few times, but what does it mean?


In other words, Ishi is a blanket term for ancient technology. Of course, after 900 years, most of the ancient ruins have pretty much been picked clean of anything of use or value. Even if you do happen to find something, there's guarantee that it will do anything besides look ancient. Those devices that do work, though, are incredibly valuable. There are ishi devices that can purify water, no matter how polluted, or heal any injury. Most of the powerful tribal or city leaders control a few devices like these, and people are always on the lookout for more. There are Ishi weapons as well, strange devices capable of killing scores of men without leaving a mark. But as valuable as Ishi are, they pale in comparison to the greatest legacy of the lost age: Battle Remnants .

Battle Remnants (also called Ishin ) are humanoid suits of armor that range from ten to twenty feet tall, intended in ancient times to be self-sufficient long-rage scouts. Their designers did their job too well, however, and now the Ishin are the only devices of their type still operating (there are gigantic ruined mecha dotting the landscape, but they're so far beyond repair they're not good of anything but being landmarks).

Apart from the basic humanoid design, no two Ishin look alike. Some are so heavily armored they can't move faster than a walk, others move faster than the eye can follow. One Ishin might be bristling with weapons, while another could send out small remote devices to do its fighting for it. This is because the overall look and fighting style of an Ishin is not determined by its initial design, but by the pilot it has bound itself to: Ishin are capable of adaption, and will remake themselves in the image of their pilots.

Ishin pilots, or Ishinari , are a diverse group, because all it takes to be one is the will to climb into the cockpit and bind with the Ishin. There are no controls to learn; the "cockpit" is a small chamber that the pilot climbs into, which then closes around them. At that point, it doesn't matter if the pilot is a 10-year-old girl who's never thrown a punch in her life, or a grizzled war veteran...the Ishin will respond to that person's will, will move as the pilot instructs, and mold its appearance and abilities to match the desires of the pilot. Of course, if you can kill the pilot, then the Ishin will "reset" after a few days. It loses any abilies granted by its former owner, but it's now ready to rebuild itself to the desires of its new pilot.

Needless to say, Ishin are the rarest most highly coveted of all ancient technologies. A single Ishin can take out a platoon of foot soldiers on their own, while being almost impossible to destroy. Possession of even a single Ishin can make you a power unto yourself, and one is all it takes to be able to begin carving out an empire of your own.


tl;dr: Remnants is a cross between Gurren Lagaan and Dynasty Warriors.

NEXT TIME: Do the evolution!

Life in the Broken Lands

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

LET'S READ REMNANTS - A harsh land breeds harsh people.

Chapter 2: Life In The Broken Lands

Chapter 2 continues with the worldbuilding, but takes things to a more player-centric level. To wit, we're going to learn about the people and beasts that inhabit the Broken Lands.

The Broken Lands are a harsh place, and the inhabitants have had to adapt to survive. This seems to have been aided by another "gift" of the ancients; there's ample evidence that the evolutionary process has been sped up somehow. Evolutionary changes that normally would take thousands of years now occur within two or three generations. And that adaption isn't limited just to the myriad beasts that roam the wastes: humans are changing as well, and not always for the better.

There are six basic "categories" of creatures in Remnants:

• Humans are humans. Just like you and me...except for one or two little genetic tweaks I'll get to in a bit.
  
• Near Humans have undergone a small amount of genetic drift, just enough to make them genetically distinct from normal humans. This usually takes the form of adapting to a specific type of environment.
  
• Far Humans are those poor souls who've genetically shifted so far away from humanity they're practially beasts. While some Far Humans are still capable of interacting with the rest of humanity, the majority of them have mentally devolved to animal-level intelligence.
  
• Animals are, well, animals. Again, there's not much to say here, except there are a few setting-specific animals.
  
• Monstrosities are those beasts who have a very dangerous ability: self-awareness. Some are animals who've evolved far above their bretheren, others are the decendents of bio-engineered monsters used to fight forgotten wars.
  
• Grand Monstrosities are those rare monstrosities who, like Far Humans, have devolved into mindless beasts. Their only concern is feeding, and their rampages can destroy whole cities.
  

There are still plants, of course, but with the environment the way it is, very few can be used for crops. The plants of the Broken Lands have adapted as well, and most live off the centuries of toxins that have seeped into the earth. Edible plants are at a premiuim, which makes those few areas still capable of growing them highly valuable territory.

Now, I mentioned above that even baseline humans are..."changed". There's more genetic fallout from the past at work; there are three very important things you need to know about all types of humans:
Humans are a lot tougher now. This is as much a product of the environment as genetics. The average human in the Broken Lands has inhaled more dust than you can imagine, and has to eat food with levels of poison and heavy metals that would kill you or I in a single bite. Humans can handle high levels of radiation and survive heavy wounding. They're not superhuman, just tougher.

Humanity has fractured. As stated previously, evolutionary traits can change very rapidly now. There are actually four distinct species of "Near Human", but nobody's 100% sure they weren't created through genetic engineering rather than evolution.

Humanity is immortal, but most don't get to live long enough to experience it. One thing that is widely known is that the ancients managed to figure out how to cheat death, and passed that gift down to their decendents: everyone stops aging at 40, making them effectively immortal. As a person approaches 40, their physical aging slows, and stops completely at 40. At that point, their bodies enter a state of continual regeneration. A nice side effect of this is that people can heal faster and from worse wounds than they should be able to. A bad side effect of this is the fact that when your body reaches this point, it requires twice as much food to sustain your new metabolism. While you won't age anymore, it's quite possible (and very common) to starve to death. And given how rare food is in the Broken Lands, most poor souls can barely keep themselves fed under the best of circumstances; all this does is give most people a slow death sentence when they hit 40.


Next, we learn about the nine general cultures of the setting, one for each general region of the Blasted Lands. Each region is home to dozens of different clans, and each clan is different from the next. These are more general overviews of an area than anything else; they're designed to be stepping-off points for your characters.

First up are the Hill Clans . There are somwhere in the vicinity of 1000 different clans in the Broken Hills, and they tend to have common ancestries. Most of the food comes from herding, and they have some of the best smiths in the lands, which means they tend to have the best weapons. Which is good, because they tend to be pretty warlike.

The Canyon Tribes have one major advantage over everyone else: they're sitting on what's really the only farmable land left. This does help with the food crunch problem, and gives them a lot of power when it comes to trading, but it also makes them a target for every wannabe warlord out there. Even with their skill at farming, crop failures are common enough that the canyon tribes will fight each other for resources when things get tight. When not at war, Ishin are used to tend to the fields.

Marshlanders keep to themselves, and that's the way they like it. The Marshlands are a dangerous environment even by the Broken Land's standards, and while the clans that live close to the edge of the marshes will trade with other, the deeper you get into the swamps the more primitive the people get. They're probably the least hostile of all the peoples in the Lands, but that's mainly because they don't like interacting with other people much.

The Desert Clans fall into two categories: nomadic herders who are usually one step ahead of starvation, and oasis dwellers who are slowly but surely becoming powerful city-states. While the nomad "tribes" tend to consist of one or two families, the oasis cities have several hundred, with the most powerful of the oasis cities having about 5,000 people.

The Caravaners are not tied to any one region, but make their living by facilitating trade between everyone else, as well as spreading news of major events to the people they encounter. While most caravans are pretty small, there are about 30 "Caravan cities" of several hundred people. At night, these caravans form up into what ammounts to a small township, resting and conducting internal business before moving on the next day.

Wastelanders live in the worst parts of the land that are still inhabitable. For the most part, Wastelanders are outcasts and loners who've left their own clans to live on their own. Wastelanders rarely form up into clans or families; instead they live on their own, sometimes hiring themselves out as mercenaries or as guides for the caravans.

The Ice Tribes are probably the smallest of the various groups; there are less than a hundred tribes living on the frozen wastes in the north, and ecah tribe has less than 50 members. Still, they manage to eek out a meager living; their main defense is that nobody cares enough about their land to try and take it.

There are three City-States : Morat Kerr (located next to the only real harvestable forest), Cradle Lake (located next to a crater lake with a surprisingly triving fishing industry), and Amantin (the largest city-state, and by far the worst). All three city-states have at least 15,000 people with thousands more in villages attached to the city-state itself. These three city-states, like it or not, are the cornerstones of "civilization" in the Broken Lands.

Lastly, there's The Vast , an area of scrub grass just past the Shieldstone Mountains. There are many herd animals in this area, and the Vastmen follow them to protect them from the area's predators. Nobody knows how many Vastmen there are, because nobody knows how far the Vast stretches.


It's not a pretty picture, is it? On the plus side, the book doesn't beat you over the head with setting; everything I've talked about in this post and the one before it is under 25 pages; the authors have actually done a good job describing things in broad enough strokes that the GM and players have plenty of room to expand, while at the same time still having enough info provided so the reader can get a good idea of how the world it put together.

Although I suppose when most of your setting is blasted wastelands, there's not a lot of need for heavy detail.

NEXT TIME: The RapidFire system.

The RapidFire system

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

LET'S READ REMNANTS - A harsh land breeds harsh people.

Chapter 3: The RapidFire system

Now it's time to get into the actual mechanics of the game, and here the book jumps around a little bit. We get the core system and combat mechanics before we even get into character creation, which makes things a little confusing when they refer to skills and such that we haven't seen yet.

Remnants uses the "RapidFire" system, which (at its heart) is a simple 1d6+stat+skill beat-a-number mechanic. A difficuly of 4 is "easy", an 8 is "tough", and a 14 is "epic". It's important to note that a 1 on the die isn't an automatic failure, and that a 6 on the die isn't an automatic success.

Characters are defined by three stats: Body, Mind, and Spirit. These stats are rated from -2 to +2, with 0 being human average. The stats are pretty self-explanitory (Spirit is basically your "fighting spirit"). Each character also has a bunch of skills rated from 0 (untrained) to 6 (mastery). If you're untrained in a skill, using it increases the difficulty of the task by 2.

Each character is also given a Reserve , which starts at 3 points. You can spend your Reserve to increase the result of a die roll by the amount spent; if you failed a roll by 2, you can spend 2 Reserve points and make it a success.

So how do you get Reserve back? There are three ways:
1) When the GM says so.
2) When you trigger "The Rule of Awesome"
3) Accepting a Critical Failure. When you roll a 1 and don't meet the difficulty you were aiming for by at least 3 points, the player can opt to make the failure into a Critical Failure. If the GM allows it, then something bad happens. It's kind of like a compel in Fate; whatever happens won't be lethal, but it'll be pretty damn inconvienent. If you accept a Critical Failure, then you get a point of Reserve and an XP for the skill you were using. If you're in your Ishin, then your Ishin gets a point of Duress as well (and I'll explain what than means in a few update's time).

For here we move to Combat , which is focused on fighting without your Remnant. Everyone has three derived combat stats: Defense (your ability to dodge an attack), Resist (your ability to shrug off damage), and Health. Unfortunately, we're not told how to derive these yet.

But anyway.

Initiative is Mind+Awareness+1d6; actions are declared lowest to highest, then go off highest to lowest. Initiative order is fixed for the whole combat, but of course you can always opt to wait and shift your place in the intiative order.

Attacking someone is Body+relevant skill, with the target number being the other guy's Defense. The amount you beat the other guy's Defense by is called the Lead , and as long as you get a 0 or better, you hit. Weapon damange works like Fate: take the number you beat the target's Defense by, add your Lead, subtract his Resist, and that's how much damage you do.

Each character has a damage track, where you mark off each point of damage you take. There are wound penalties that affect your skills and defenses, unfortunately, but on the plus side the penalty doesn't apply to your Resist. Still, I'm not a fan of wound penalties since it's easy for things to turn into a downward spiral where the more you get hurt, the harder it becomes to not get hurt more.

Next we get a bunch of situational modifiers; charging, tripping, ganging up, etc. For the most part, these are pretty basic; simple +1s or -2s with some flavor rider effects. I'm not going to get into these since we've all seen them before.

Plus, I want to get into the Armored Rules !

First off, you have to understand how Ishin work. See, they don't have "controls" in the traditional sense; there's no pilot seat with readouts and levers and shit, and likewise you don't wear it Iron Man-style. Instead, each Remnant has a chamber in the chest that the pilot crawls into. Once inside, the pilot's body enters a sort of statis while his mind controls the machine; from the pilot's perspective, he is the Ishin.

Fighting in a Remnant works a little differently than fighing normally. When you're in a Remnant, you have a new stat called Situational Awareness , which is the total of your three main stats. In addition, instead of your combat-related skills, you have three robot-fightin' skills: Assault (melee), Strike (ranged), and Motion (defense/movement). For anything not combat-related, you use the pilot's skills as normal.

Each Remnant starts with the same default stat block:

What do those numbers mean?

Well, Armour is basic damage reduction, and Structure are the Remnant's hit points.

Speed determines how far you can move in a round; just to give you an idea, the default Speed of 3 means a Remnant can run 50 meters in one round, and sprint 100 meters. Outside of combat, it can maintain a running speed of 30 meteres/hour.

Every Remnant gets a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, and the nature of these weapons is up to the pilot. Your Assault weapon might be a sword, it might be an axe-hand, it might be blades and spikes sticking out of every inch of the Remnant's surface. Remnants generate their own ammo internally, so ammo tracking isn't a concern. As an added bonus, a Remnant can't be disarmed at all; their weapons are always attached.

Inspiring and Terrifying are special stats used when in mass combat. If you take an action to rally the troops or frighten the enemy, you roll 1d6+Inspiring/Terrifying, and consult a chart to see what bonuses or penalties you gave the enemy.

Die rolling and combat modifiers work pretty much the same as normal combat; you're just rolling 1d6+Situational Awareness+Remnant Combat Skill instead of your normal stats & skills.

Some Remnant abilites require the pilot to Focus for a round or two; when you're Focusing you can't do anything else, and if you take damage or do something you lose your Focus. Again, that'll be come clearer when we get to Remnant design.

Lastly, I want to talk about what happens when a Remnant runs out of hit points.

Now, when a human runs out of Health, he's dead. But when a Remnant runs out of Structure points, it's still up, albiet reduced to a crawl. If it takes one more point of damage, it gets Wrecked , and that's when things get interesting.

When a Remnant gets Wrecked, it's powered down and the pilot is rendered unconcious and completely vulnerable. They'll remain this way for 8 hours, during which time the Remnant will repair itself. If left alone for those 8 hours, the Remant will reactivate (and wake the pilot) not only with full health, but with an extra point of Structure as teh Remnant has reinforced itself to fight better next time.

Of course, that's assuming that it's left alone for those 8 hours. If the Remnant takes twice its Structure in total damage, then it's destroyed and the pilot killed. But you really don't want to do that; instead, you can make a difficulty 6 roll with the Assault skill to try and pry the pilot out with your own Ishin (or get a mob of guys with prybars and a few hours to kill). Do that, then you can kill the pilot and take his Remnant for yourself. If the pilot is killed, then the Remnant shuts down and returns to its default state and stat block, at which point a new pilot can bond with it.

This is the most common way of dealing with a defeated enemy Remnant; why destroy it if you can take it for yourself and mold it in your own image?


NEXT TIME: Character creation!

Characters

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

There is some stuff later in the book about refluffing the setting that I'll talk about when we get there. But for now...

LET'S READ REMNANTS - Warriors are born, not made.

Chapter 4: The Characters

The character creation chapter starts out by pointing out an important consideration about the game: everyone is meant to be an Ishin pilot. But how does that work when you've got a lot of characters? It's already been established that only the big city-states have more than one or two Remnants.


In other words, this isn't a game for a group of 6 players unless you change some of the base setting assumptions. It really is better suited to three or fewer players; and while I don't have a problem with that, it would have been nice for the game to be a little more up front about that, instead of putting it halfway through the book.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about making your character.

You start out by putting together a character concept, picking a name, and putting together a background. This is all standard-issue stuff, but the book does give a few ideas for background based on the nine "regions" from before.


Nothing to out there or mechanical; just some suggestions for the types of people you'd typically get in those regions.

Next, you pick your Ishin's style and your relationship to it. Is it an Ancient Find, or did your clan sieze it recently from an enemy? Again, nothing mechanical here; just layign more groundwork.

Now we get to assign stats, and this is a little odd. Remeber how you only had 3 stats: Body, Mind, and Spirit? Well, they all start at 0 (average), and you get a whopping 1 point to add to one of your stats. You can lower a stat by 1 point (down to -2) to raise another by 1, but that's all you get starting out. No matter how you adjust your points, your stats are going to sum up to +1. This also means that every character's Situational Awareness (the stat used for Remnant combat) is going to start at +1.

Next up you pick your skills. Skill rating goes from 0 (untrained) to 6 (Grand Master). You get one skill at 1 for free, based on your starting region, then get another 10 skill points to buy the rest of your skills. Skills cost their level, but you can't start with more than 2 levels in a skill. Each region except Wastelanders and The Vast get two region skills to pick from; Wastelanders have to take Survival and people from The Vast have to take Ride.

The skill list is pretty standard-issue. There are 23 skills all told, ranging from Craft to Stealth to Melee to Social Sciences. No real surprises here except for Social Sciences, which is "the catch-all skill for political science, archeology, and sociology".

At this point, you figure your derived stats: Defense, Resist, and Health.

The next part is picking your Advantages and Disadvantages. Each advantage and disadvantage has a Major and Minor version; you can take up to one Major and three Minor advantages, but you need to balance each one with a disadvantage of the same level.

There are surprisingly few ads and disads listed; there are only seven advantages and eight disadvantages.

The book does suggest making your own ads and disads, but sadly there's no advice on how to figure out what's considered major or minor. They don't even have any mechanical benefits. Not that that's a bad thing, that makes them simple roleplaying cues, but still it would have been nice to have some numbers to back them up, because without a mechanical backing they're really just character quirks that you'd probably come up with anyway. Calling the kind of character/background things players make on their own out as "advantages and disadvantages" just seems out of place.

Next up is Gear and Money. Like Apocalypse World, money is abstracted; everyone starts with 20 points of "Easy Living". One point of Easy Living buys you one day not "on the job". There are guidelines for how much a job pays out; for example, a simple caravan escort would get you 1 EL a day.

If you want to set up your own caravan or buy a plot of land for yourself, then the GM has to determine how many days of EL that would cost. A small parcel of land might cost 180 EL (which is about 6 months), whereas an actual house in the city could cost upwards of 1000 EL.

You can also opt for "Decadent Living", where you spend more EL per day to live better (ranging from 7 to 30 EL per day depending on how decadent you go), and "Frugal Living", where you spend 1 EL to last for 3 days. You can stretch that even more with a Business roll, difficulty 7, and getting the Lead in extra days. That's assumuing he has a useful trade he can live off of, though.

In addition to the 20 EL, everyone starts with a weapon or two, light armor, and a pack of basic survival gear. It's assumed that Ishinari travel light since Remnants don't really have storage space for anything except the pilot. Weapons and armor are also generalized, with weapons being classified as either light (Lead+1 damage), medium (Lead+2), or heavy (Lead+3). The only thing about heavy weapons is that you need a Body stat of at least +1 to use them. Ranged weapons are long and short bows, crossbows, and thrown weapons, and don't do more than Lead+2 damage. Well, heavy crossbows do Lead+3, but they only fire every third round so it's not really worth it.

Armor goes light-medium-heavy as well (Resist +2/+3/+4), with shields adding another +1.

Information is provided for guns, but they're considered "optional". At the GM's discression, he can decide that the city-state of Amantin has re-discovered gunpowder and has access to simple flintlock weapons. Pistols do Lead+2, muskets Lead+3, and each requires 3 rounds to reload. They also don't fire when wet and have a chance of misfiring. On the plus side, guns ignore 2 points of Armor on non-Ishi targets. So they don't do anything extra against Remnants, but they'll fuck up infantry just fine.

Once you have your gear picked, it's just a matter of finishing up your character details and you're done. All that's left to do is build your Remnant, but we have two more parts of this chapter to cover first.

There are optional rules for playing Near Humans, which really just boil down to skill packages.


The last part of this chapter is about XP. XP is earned in three ways: doing something awesome, spending Reserve, or accepting a Critical Failure. When one of these things happen, the skill you were using at the time earns an experience point. In addition, you get 1-5 XP at the end of each session to put in whatever skills you want; the only limitation is that you can't put more that 2 XP on a skill per session (which becomes no more than 1 XP when your skill hits level 4). Skills cost double their new level to improve, and can be bought up as soon as you have enough XP.

At the end of the session, you also get 1 Stat Point, which are not assigned to one of your stats. Increasing a stat costs 10 points the first increase, the next increase costs 20, and so on. The max for any stat is +2, but you can get a +3 if you give the GM a good reason.


The only real problem I have with Remnant's character creation is that the character all feel kind of same-y. Everyone has the same stat block for the most part, and there aren't a lot of mechanical ways to differentiate one character from another. It feels like when you made old D&D fighters and the only difference between Bob the Fighter and Larry the Fighter was their gear. I get that the Remnants are the focus of the game, but a little more "spread" in character creation would have been nice.

NEXT TIME: The part you've all been waiting for: building your giant fighty robot!

Battle Remnants

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

LET'S READ REMNANTS - We love giant robots!

Chapter 5: Battle Remnants

This is the part that we've all be waiting for: how to build your custom-evolved fighting robot!

Remnant creation actually starts with a bit of leftover character creation; every character starts with one point in each of the three Remnant skills, and then you get one level on top of that. Easy enough.

Now we can start building our Remnant. Let's begin by taking another look at the "default" profile:

This is what every character's Ishin starts with. If you want, you can shuffle a few points around; you can trade a point of Armor for Speed or vice-versa, or trade Assault and Strike the same way. Note that changing your Armor stat can affect your Structure track (i.e., your Remnant's hit points). If it goes too low, then you start taking damage penalties much earliers, whereas increasing it means you take them later.

Now we get into the meat-and-potatoes of Ishin design: Traits .

Every Ishin gets a couple of general traits automatically. Every single Ishin is environmentally protected against extreme weather conditions and can function underwater. They all have loudspeakers and com units, and transmit basic sense data to the pilot. And, of course, an Ishin will only work for its bonded pilot.

The remaining traits fall into three categories: Upgrades are your stat boosts, Powers are the Remnant's special abilities, and Drones are independant subordinate units.

At creation, you can pick one Power or Drone ability that costs 5 Duress or less (and I'll explain Duress in a minute).

The next step is to pick a Specialty, which is the fighting style your Ishin is designed for. There are eight available; half of them are about being more effective against a certain type of target, two are for focusing on either Assault or Strick combat, and one...

This is where the "Dynasty Warriors" comparison I made when I started out came from.

At this point, all that's left is doing your calculated stats and Ishin appearance, and your done.

So that's how we build the Remnant. How do we make it better?

Well, the Remnant skills (Assault, Strike, Motion) level up like your normal skills do. And we already talked about how getting Wrecked is the only way to increase your Ishin's health (although there's a little section here on how to keep players from fighting each other just to make each other stronger).

Becoming more Inspiring or Terrifying is just a matter of doing something very inspiring or terrifying, and is pretty much a GM reward for being creative. Likewise for improving your Specialties, but with those the group has to vote on whether or not the improvement is warranted by the player's actions.

Getting Traits requires Duress . Remember how Remnants can adapt to their situations and evolve to deal with obstacles? This is how.

Duress is earned in one of five ways:
You get one point of Duress for each of these that come up in a fight, and this is on top of any XP you'd get for being awesome or accepting a Critical Failure or the extra Structure from getting Wrecked.

Traits cost 5 to 20 Duress each, and take 8 hours of "downtime" for the Ishin to process and modify itself. One thing that's pretty badass, though, is that you can have a Remnant learn a new Trait in one action for 5 duress on top of the costs of whatever he's buying, so you could buy a new upgrade or power in the middle of a fight.

So what're our options? Glad you asked!

The Upgrades come in three flavors; stat trade-off, flat stat increase, and "epic" stat increase. The trade-offs and stat boosts can only be bought once each per stat, and you can only take one "epic" Upgrade period. This does mean that there's an effective "hard cap" on your Remnant's upgradable stats of about 3 levels. And while I realize that Remnants works on a smaller numerical scale than most games, it still feels kinda limiting.

Powers is a pretty broad category. It includes things like special movement types,

inherent passive abilities,

combat specialites,

being awsome,

and improving your other abilites.

Lastly, we have Drones . Drones are remote bits that can act semi-autonimously separate from the Ishin itself. Drones are about half the size of a person, have 1 Structure, and can operate for 8 hours before having to return to the host Ishin or just dropping on the spot. Drones can operate out to a few kilometers out, but an Ishin will replace any lost Drones with the usual 8-hour recharge cycle.

Giving your drones commands takes one action, no matter how many you have. Drones can carry out simple instructions ("Attack that target", "Defend this position", "Follow that person", "Return", things like that). Once they get instructions, they'll carry them out on your turn until they either get new instructions or get Wrecked.

When you buy a drone, you have to pick the drone's basic type first: Scout, Assault, or Strike. Each type of drone has its own stat block; Assault and Strike drones can only make Assault or Strike attacks, respectively, and Scount drones can't attack at all. It costs 5 Duress to get a pair of drones of the same type, and you can buy more drone pairs up to 6 drones all told.

There aren't that many drone improvements, but given the limited nature of drones that's not surprising. Some upgrades affect all your drones at once:

while others upgrade one type of drone

You can also get "heavy" drones that have special uses.

I like that they kept drones simple; if I can potentially have six of these little dudes running around and acting on my turn, the less math and fiddly upgrades I'd have to deal with the better.


And that's your mech-building rules in a nutshell. It's strange seeing a mech game that doesn't have huge lists of individual weapons and attachements or Excel-level point buy stuff. It makes it easy to put your mech together quickly and get right into the game.

NEXT TIME: GMing this thing

Game Master

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

LET'S READ REMNANTS

Chapter 6: Game Master

This is the final chapter of the game. Told you it was short.

As I usually do, I'm going to gloss over a lot of the deatils of this chapter, because a lot of it is stuff we've all seen before.

This chapter is broken down into a few different secions of GMing advice, and the first is Rewards .
This section is really just about how to pace out in-game and out-of-game rewards.

The next section is Themes , and talks abou the common ideas of the setting that should bw worked into your campaign; Discovering the Past, Survival, "Can The Lands Be Healed?", and so on.

One interesting section in the Themes is "Technology or Magic?" For the most part, the book is pretty vague on how Remnants work, where Monstrosities come from, and things like that. This is a brief table that gives some ideas on how to present the elements of the setting as part of a fantasy setting or a sci-fi one.

The list is pretty short, but it's still nice to have; I like settings where the real deep-down details are up the GM, so he can adjust them to his group's preferences.

Next up are Rules Options . Only two are presented: adjusting how much Reserve characters have access to, and altering the scale of Remnants compared to everything else. Not too much here, but give how rules-lite the game is that's not surprising.

The next section is Managing Conflict , and is about how to balance enemies to the group.

The idea is that you find the "Low Man" (the person with the lowest Defense+Armor), then the "high man" (highest Defense+Armor). Then you figure each character's best attack skill ("high attack").

Once you've done all that, you have some numerical guidelines to set up different strengths of encounters. When you're figuring out enemy attacks, non-threatening enemies are ones who couldn't get past the group's low man, significant threats can do damage to the low man on a decent roll, and so on. When looking at enemy defenses, a non-threatening enemy has a lower defense than the lowest party attack skill, but a significant enemy would have Defenses about equivalent to the party's attack abilities.

This whole section has a rolling example where different enemy groups are made for a sample party, and really helps illustrate what the designers were going for. It's nice to see a game talking about how to put together fights of various challenge levels, since it seems to happen so rarely. There's also some stuff about tweaking the numbers for a little more fine-control over the challenge.

The next section is Sample Creatures . This is a short monster manual, that includes both domesticated beasts
and serious threats.

There's really not a lot in this section; personally I would have liked to see a "Monstrocity design system" along the lines of Remnant design.

Anyway, we now come to Mercenaries in Remnants . This section covers players buying mercenaries, and has an option Reputation mechanic in case they want to go into business for themselves. This is really more of a fluff section than a mechanical one, though.

Artifacts are next. These are a few sample "special items" characters can run into. Like ancient weapons
or plot devices.

Lastly, we close out with the Open Warfare rules. Here's how it works.

Each army has five stats rated from 0 to 4:

• Troop Quality ranges from "unruly mob" (0) to elite troops (4).
  
• Relative Size . The smaller army has a Relative Size of 1, and the other army's stat is the amount they outnumber the smaller army by. So if the larger army has three men for each one of the smaller army's, then the large army has a Relative Size of 3.
  
• Tactical Advantages is based on terrain and army composition. There's a table for each, and you total the values on the tables to get this stat. So if your army holds the high ground (1) and has special untils like calvary (2), you have a 3.
  
• Morale and Fatigue is pretty self-explanitory.
  
• Leadership and Strategy is actually an opposed roll between each army's leader. Whoever rolls higher on a Command roll gets their Lead in this stat.
  

All five stats are added together to get your Battle Value, and whichever army has the higher BV wins, with the Lead determining how disicive the victory was.

"Wait a second," I hear you cry, "that sounds really fucking lame." And it is. Or it would be, if the characters weren't allowd to alter the numbers a bit.

Between "add up the numbers" and "compare the numbers", each character gets one scene where he's doing something to affect the course of the battle; if they're successful they can add a point or two to their side's BV. A few examples:

Once everyone's gotten a scene, then you compare values to see who won.

And you know what? I'm okay with this system. It's designed to handle large-scale battles without getting wrapped up in minutae, and at the same time keeps the focus where it should be: on the characters.

Then it's just the matter of the character and Remnant sheets, and we're done.


There we are: samaurai in 12' power armor, in just over 100 pages. And you know what?

I like it.

It's not the most complex system every devised, either in terms of the core mechanic or mech building, but I think that, as presented, that's a feature, not a bug. You don't have to worry about things getting ridiculously tactical, Ishin design is simple and the powers are generic enough that they're all you really need, and (most importantly), the mechanics fit the scale and feel of the game: brutal fights in a ruined world.

Make no mistake, Remnants is a deadly system; outside of their mechs most characters can be one- or two-shotted very easily. But that actually works here because it makes the Ishin more important; if you want to be a serious fighting force, you need one of these giant robots (both mechanically and fluff-wise), and if you're one of the people with the giant robots, then you are a major fighting force.

In short: This is the game for you if you want to get into your giant robot, charge through a small army killing every footsoldier you pass, and meet your opponent's mech in the middle of the battlefield in a clash of energy blades.

And let's be honest here: who wouldn't want that?

Remnants is available as a PDF and hardcopy, but Outrider Studios is currently trying to get the physical book restocked. The bundle is available through Indie Press Revolution or direct from Outrider Studio's store for $20, or as a straight PDF from RPGNow for $10; and since it's only 115 pages and light on the art, printing it at home is actually not going to take a whole ink cartridge.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get into my Ishin; the battle will start soon and I want to break Lu Bu's record.