Heavy gear
Heavy Gear is an RPG game published in book form (pen & paper) by the Canadian publisher Dream Pod 9 . The first version appeared in 1994; the game is now in its third edition.
In 2001, Heavy Gear: The Animated Series was a computer-animated television series with 40 episodes.
history
Heavy Gear belongs to the genre of science fiction role-playing games. The background is the fictional planet Terra Nova, the year around 6130 AD. According to the background story, after surviving a brief ice age of no more than 2000 years, mankind spread over 9 other planets by exploiting so-called Tannhauser gates, before the earth broke away from its colonies and an era of isolation began.
The planet Terra Nova
Terra Nova is laid out roughly like the earth; the planet is split in half - north and south - roughly equivalent to the superpowers USA and USSR at the end of the 20th century. A wide desert belt stretches around the entire equator - the badlands. This is where the polar blocks carry out their confrontations. At the time of the action, the fascist-ruled earth set out to bring the isolated colonies back under its military control after World War III.
game
The game is designed as a classic role-playing game as well as a tactical miniature game ( tabletop , with both maps and modeled terrain); accordingly the game has a distinct military coloring. The Silhouette set of rules used earlier and popular because of its simple elegance has now been replaced by a unified and greatly expanded set of rules, called Silhouette Core or SilCore, on which all games produced by Dream Pod 9 are based. The system works with simple six-sided dice (D6). Characters have a variable number of skills, which are influenced by a fixed number of attributes. Tests typically roll 2 to 5 dice and compare the highest modified result thrown to a threshold or opposite roll to determine success or failure. The system is fast, easy to use, intricately complex and provides reasonably realistic results with a minimum of effort.
Source volumes
About 60 source volumes were published for the first and second editions, which stand out due to their very detailed background and describe an enormous number of characters, locations and objects. Further features are the complex arch of the background story, which develops over time and gradually also takes up the other colonies - as well as the consistently high quality of the illustrations, which at least the older source books have numerous. An often criticized point about the publisher's products is the relatively high number of printing errors.