Your Mech is Different: Inspirations Behind BTE

Hi everyone, Dan here!

I've always been a fan of mechs. As a kid I would dream of growing up to be a mech pilot. I would enjoy shows like Gundam Wing, Zoids New Century, Escaflowne, and Big O while also playing PS1 classics like Armored Core and Xenogears. I remember one time explaining to my older brother that I thought I had figured out how Roger Smith piloted the Big O, pantomiming the movements with my hands and feet, only to be teased for being a nerd.  While there was no mech pilot's academy to join, some people could inevitably point out, "Well you could have learned to fly a jet or drive a tank. That's the next best thing." This notion, I have found permeates the mech subgenre of science fiction/fantasy. Mechs are certainly a power fantasy, but one that is very flexible. What they represent in fiction are different for each person and franchise.

What kicked off my journey into developing Beneath Twisted Earth was actually a YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes, Armored Core - Was It Any Good? This took me on a nostalgia trip to my childhood playing Armored Core, and the various franchises I had enjoyed over the year. It got me thinking about if I were to make a mech setting what core elements would I include for it to be my quintessential mech game?  (I've Game Mastered for a long time, so this is an exercise I entertain often, seeing a thing I like as seeing how I would apply it to TTRPGs.) Most mech tabletop games in my experience were very crunchy, (Mekton & Battletech were first to mind). This is because fans of mechs like the idea of customization, and making their mech. Having that control over building your machine, but I've never been a fan of crunchy systems. I've always found them cumbersome and tedious. "I just want to play the game!", I would say. 

The next day I threw together a three page mech construction system, and jotted down some notes for a dystopian setting that I could use with my house system someday. I was really happy with what I came up with. The mech construction was highly customizable, but not overly complicated (no number sheets needed). The setting was suitably bleak for a game about war machines, but had lots of potential to be tweaked to tell many different stories'. As I excitedly went over it with my wife, she encouraged me to put it out there. After all, when combined with my house system which I used to run games in any assorted setting that there wasn't a game for, it could be fleshed out into a full game. So I did.

Over the next six months, I began fleshing out that write-up and combining it with my house system. At the same time, I immersed myself in mech fiction to draw as much inspiration as possible. I played any mech video game I could get my hands on, I watched lots of anime, I researched every TTRPG I could find record of, I watched lots of YouTube retrospectives/reviews, and for the first time I dove head first into the world of Battletech, reading through several of the core novels.

This encouraged my design of the game to be more diverse. I wanted to any players who sat down at the table to play BTE to think of a mech and to be able to build it. Not in the number crunching, twelve volume, 30 hours of work sort of way. There are players who like that, and there are games that catered to it. I wanted a game that an experienced player could create their pilot/mech in 10 minutes without sacrificing customization or growth for the people who just wanted to get in their big, stompy robot and start living that life.

Something I found compelling about this deep dive is what mechs meant to different people. When it came down to it, in stories, mechs were always analogous to other archetypes. Mechs can represent many things, but I most often found them taking the role of the following:

Tanks
Jets
Suits of Armor
Horses
Cars
Swords (or other weapons)

Depending on what archetype the mech filled, determined things like how important the pilot was to the combat, what sort of stories were told, and what the capabilities of the mech would be. Because there was so much variation, I also found a lot of conflict in the fanbase over what they should be. This only reinforced to me the importance of customization, not because all fans are gearheads, but because mechs represented a flexible archetype. That meant the mech should allow for each player to express themselves/their pilot. While one player might want an oversized gun on crab legs with armor a mile thick, another player wants an angelic suit of armor that allows them to have sword fights in the sky, and still others want a custom grown symbiotes with bone claws and mouth lasers that fire when it roars in anger at their enemies. All have a place at the table as mech pilots in Beneath Twisted Earth. 

Tangented a little there, but allow me leave it there to you followers and future readers. What do mechs represent to you? What is your ideal version of a mech?

TL;DR - BTE's main inspirations are Armored Core, Battletech, and Gundam. Also, mechs mean different things to each franchise/fan so individuality is at the core of the subgenre. Because of this customization and player agency at the two core principles behind the game.