Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

My FLGS closed partly because of the declining profits. The store owner could not compete with the lower prices that were offered by online retailers. He saw customers that he had known for years buy off the internet. This store had been in business for about 30 years so he got to see all of the industry changes. Carried nearly everything that SJG had too as well as very complete lines from other companies. Diversified with family games, board games, card games (traditional and collectable), chess and darts. He employed sales help that were knowledgable about the games and gave great service. However selection and service did not beat 35% off the cover price.

It seems to me that as we get more comfortable with shopping on line we will kill the FLGS. The FLGS is only superior in three aspects - staff having an opinion about the product and how it plays, allowing you to examine the goods upfront, and providing demos and gaming space if so inclined. The internet has reviews of games for free, Amazon's look inside option may meet the need for the second, and the last may not be important as we find more ways to interact on line.

Back to on topic- Glad that you picked up a new line. I won't be buying it. A Gurps version may interest me.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

That's too bad. You are missing out on both an excellent setting and an excellent system. If the system is good enough that SJG kept it, as opposed to converting it over to GURPS, that says something about it's quality.

As a Heavy Gear fan, while I wouldn't mind a conversion document for people who play GURPS, I would be leery of there being a GURPS edition of the game. It would be counterproductive to have the game compete against itself with a GURPS edition.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

The smart thing to do would be to include a GURPS conversion guide in the back. That way people interested only in playing GURPS would have an easy road to conversion and it would actually drive additional sales of the main book as well as other books in the line.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

It's smart if they have the staff time to devote to the creation of such a guide. If that small piece is likely to delay publication of the books by a significant amount, however, they may decide to put out a GURPS conversion later and get the reprints out the door more quickly.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

The GURPS system is good, but the Silcore system is simpler. It has less computed values, and it was designed to handle large machines/animals.

The last Heavy Gear edition had two core systems behind it. You could use Silcore, or the terribly cludgy OGL (d20). I find it ... possible ... that the additional books, like the Vehicle Companion, will have both Silcore and GURPS rules for each Vehicle.

I'll put the Heavy Gear setting this way. It's a huge world, every major city is documented, every faction explained. There are factions within factions, inter/intra-religious wars, cults, pirates (aka Rovers), and Genetically Engineered supersoldiers. The battles are intense and deadly, but allow for wonderful roleplaying. Amazingly, you can even play a game where the big 'n' stompies never have any 'screen time.' The world is that flexable. I could go on and on about the praises of the setting, just PM me. (I'll even tone down the fanboy)

Ultimately, the only thing that you really need to know is this:
Heavy Gear is about GIANT ROBOTS backed by a system that was designed to work with mixed tanks, infantry, aircraft, and GIANT ROBOTS.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

I am glad that you like it and can support it and GURPS. I really can't afford to eat up more of my recreational time and money learning another system that I have already seen (picked up a set of SilCore rules) and don't like. I agree that the setting is very detailed and has quite a few stories in it. Accessing it through a medium other than GURPS is not going to be a priority for me though. That was what I wanted to get across to the decision makers because I am pretty sure that they aren't keeping good enough tabs on me to notice that I haven't gotten my copy of HG. No rancor or insult intended just a statement of my own priorities.

When it hits the stands I won't mind checking the forum here for insight into how the rules function to produce a good mecha game (which by all accounts I have seen, it does) and hopefully how to do the same thing with GURPS.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

What are the essential setting/system assumptions for Heavy Gear - now that we are talking conversions and such? Where does it go for realism? Where does it not? Are weapons powerful vs. the armour available? Are Mecha easily handled/agile? Etc.

Vehicle stats are relatively simple in GURPS 4e, and Mecha would be easy enough to describe - they would mostly be set apart by where they could be hit ("arms" and "legs" rather than wheels and tracks), and by how they are able to move.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

Heavy Gear mixes realism with sci-fi crap.

It's 6000 AD or thereabouts. Earth had an ice age, crazy religious wars, massive migrations of the populations, made some genetic superhumans and eventually discovered anomalies that allow for interstellar travel. They colonized several worlds, ran out of money, and abandoned the colonies as the world economy collapsed and with it the world governent. Next Earth descended into a mad age of war lasting several hundred years which finally ended when one side won using super soldiers called grels and lots of nukes. The newly re-unified Earth now desperately needs: resources, a goal to sustain the pevailing fascist unification climate indefinitely, and something for a lot of socially stunted super soldiers bred only for war to go off and do somewhere else. Earth decides to warm up the mothballed gateships, and send their excess military polpulation out to reconquer the abandoned colonies.

As Earth is planning for a new interstellar empire, Terra Nova (one of the more successful colonies) is about to have a massive world war of their own, between the two polar superpowers that developed during the abondonment period. Just as they are about to go at it "for reals", The planet suddenly gets invaded by earthmen. Natch' the two superpowers unite and eventually drive the invaders off at a high cost, except the Earthers leave a lot of equipment and personel behind. These invaders form a new tiny city state in the desert equitorial region known as the badlands. Terra nova absorbs new technology from the stranded earthers. Meanwhile the Earth force that fled Terra Nova steals a few humanoid robot armored fighting vehicles that opposed them (called Gears) and uses them to develop an equivalent fightign machine called a Frame. They also develop a new better and more human looking super soldier.

About a generation passes and the two polar powers on Terra Nova are on the verge of a world war once again. This time they do fight and just as things are wrapping up something major happens to indicate that Earth is apparently ready to try another invasion this time using very different tactics. Terra Nova decides to reunify and clandestinely strike at the Earth forces on another colony world called Caprice that is being used as a staging area. They also want to establish ties to the other colonies worlds (Home, Utopia, Atlantis, Botany Bay, Jotunheim, New Jerusalem)and work to destabilize any Earth military presence on them. Eventually the Earth forces find (rather submissive) allies to help them fight their war on the Utopia colony(which has just had a pretty bad nuclear war). The Earth fleet sent to new Jerusalem just disappeared.

As to the machines, you have tanks, helicopters, jets, and other stuff resembling what we have today. (which seems a bit odd after 4000 years). People have sophisticated cybernetics and prosthetics available and medicine available to them.

The Gears themselves are controlled by a pilot using video game like controls to guide a trained nueral net that does the actual moving. Supposedly the controls somewhat resemble fighting game combos (like in Street Fighter 2). They are typically powered by a v-engine (and interal combustion engine) and stand around 12 to 15 feet tall and are most often used for war, reconaisance, security, and contruction. Gears are similar in many respect to Armored Troopers from the Votoms anime series and Labors from the Patlabor anime series. They can carry weapons in thier hands or on harpoints and can mimic a wide range of "human" movements including laying prone to fire a bipod supported anti-tank gun over a sand dune.

Larger robots are called walkers and have more armor but are easier to target and less agile. They fill the role between gears/afv's and tanks. (Every colony seems to have their own name for their own robotic vehicles. Caprice called theirs mounts.) Tanks rule the battle field but they generally need gears or infantry to support them. Aircraft and artillery help out too.

Heavy gears typically have rockets, autocannons, fragmentation cannons (giant shotguns), machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers as armament. Less common are specialized equipment like drones (think UAV's only more automated), anti-missle defense systems, guided missles, particle beams, field guns, lasers, ECM gear, satellite uplinks, riot shields, flame throwers, active armor, supplementary armor around the cockpit resembling a bullet proof vest, or melee weapons. Many weapons are rapid fire or indirect fire or have special ammo that can penetrate armor or fragment. Most gears have fairly simple weapons because the deserts and swamps of Terra Nova play hell with touchy equipment like lasers. Bang for the buck is the name of the game.

Gears can be built from exotic materials to greatly lower their senor profile. They often have a secondary movement system or SMS in their feet or legs that lest them "roller skate" at a higher speed than they can run. Some can operate underwater or in space. The bigger they are the less maneuverable they are and the easier it is for sensors to pick them up.

Generally firepower overwhelms armor. The best way to survive is to manever to make yourself a harder target to hit.

Heavy Gear also has huge hovering landships acting as carriers and fire bases that can only work on Terranova due to some odd magentic property of the planet.

Animals on terra nova are often three jawed or have multiple spines. Arthropods and vaguely reptile-like creatures are common.

Space ships in terra nova tend to be smaller system defense ships. Gateships are huge, old, and getting kind of rare (sort of like Jumpships were supposed to be in 3025 Battletech). Gateships open space anomalies that lead to other star systems in a fixed network. Getting to one system usually means passing by the next world in the network so FTL travel is a bit inconvenient and strategic. On the other hand more sophisticated gate drives seem to be finding ways around this by opening anomalies that were previously considered unnavigable.

That's about all I remember.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

I played in two Heavy Gear campaigns several years back. One was VERY over-the-top and my Gear was the ultimate intel mecha. I could see anything on the battlefield, so I was everyone's forward observer. My husband had a super-dueling Gear that was also a terrifyingly good sniper. The GM was a friend of mine who is, as far as I can tell, the INCARNATION of the Super Munchkin. Nice person, just can't restrain himself from Munchkining out.

The campaign premise was interesting, though. It was based on the typical HG storyline about Earth coming back to retake its colony with an interesting twist: some of their experiments (ala super-soldiers and gengineered mecha) had gone awry and were threatening both Terra Nova and everything Earth had.

In its normal form, though, the setting is interesting in that the planetary topography affects the civilizations. But it was clear to me that they intended to highly some of the serious flaws in our modern civilizations. For example, the North was religiously overzealous, drowning a noble culture in far-right-wing neo-conservativism and Crusader-like attitudes (hmm, and this was written before Dubya). The South, on the other hand, was decadent and decayed, run by people who were simply wishing to aggrandize themselves and didn't care how their populations suffered.

By the way, in the above game, we played Southerners. The super-duelist (my husband's character) was secretly a rebel feeding information to people who were going to collapse the government after the war with Earth was over. He was making plans to run north.

I wish I could recall more details about the setting, but it's been years... Something like eight. Yikes!

But it's an interesting game. ON TOPIC, however, yes, I would definitely be interested in a GURPS conversion, too. I felt the HG system did a great job with the minis combat aspect and terrible with characters. The characters just aren't very details.

Re: GURPS Heavy Gear?
 

I must say that this looks very good for a GURPS conversion. Actually, there may be things to draw upon from the THS supplements, in terms of construction principles etc. The blend of cybernetics, bionics and transhuman principles are easy enough to implement - certainly no harder than, again, THS. Ultra-Tech and Bio-Tech shall be our friends ;-).

I'm beginning to look forward to seeing the electronic versions of this game pop up.