Damanor’s Lair: a Gaming Blog

 One thing that was interesting about Battletech was the idea that pilots could improve their abilities to pilot a vehicle or make weapon attacks. (I’m not sure it’s a good rule, but it was interesting.) So how can we model this in Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack? At the beginning of each clash/skirmish/battle, identify the pilot of each frame on your side by name. Determine their experience level. During each conflict, a pilot whose frame is destroyed may die. You have to decide whether a pilot automatically dies when their frame is destroyed or if they can somehow eject to escape. I suggest giving them a 3 in 6 or 4 in 6 chance to survive, but that chance may vary or even be zero depending on environment conditions. All players must agree to change the chance of surviving ejection before the game begins. Now for the difference between experienced and inexperienced pilots. One option is the Ace Pilot rules as adapted for Rapid Attack from pages 22-23 and 41 of  Intercept Orbi...

 One reason I like frankenmechs  is the same reason I liked the original Battletech setting: it’s like lots of the Mechs are built, or at least reassembled, in a repair shop. Your Mech has been in your family for three or more generations, and it can’t easily be replaced. If it gets beat up, you take it in and repair it as much as you can or you just fight with a broken Mech. Technicians are worth more than tanks, and nobody has any idea how some advanced machines like jumpships work. This was emphasized in the early Gray Death Legion novels. Mechwarriors always doubled as technicians, and when their base was captured, the worst part was that they couldn’t repair their Mechs. It was also front and center in the early scenario packs, where you had Mechs with permanent damage that couldn’t be repaired for lack of parts or permanent structural damage. One very cool take on it was the novel Double Blind, where Avanti’s Angels made a point to always collect what battlefield salvage...

  To celebrate sarna.net’s latest Bad Mechs feature, here’s my assessment of the Quickdraw . Let’s see if it fares any better in Mobile Frame Zero. The Quickdraw was designed to replace the Rifleman , but frankly is does a poor job of it. The Rifleman was designed as an anti-aircraft Mech but is also used for fire support. It has considerable firepower and great medium- to long-range damage-dealing potential, but also has paper-thin armor, has average speed for a heavy Mech (which is to say it’s slow), and tends to overheat. The designers of the Quickdraw wanted a much more versatile Mech and focused on fixing the Rifleman’s weaknesses, but this was at the expense of the Rifleman’s strengths. The 60-ton Quickdraw has SLIGHTLY more armor than the Rifleman and is 33 percent faster. It also uses jump jets for added mobility. Just these features took up half the weight of the Mech, however, and that’s not including other essentials like a cockpit, gyro, and internal structure. As a re...

In 2492 Earthwerks developed a new 60-ton mech, the Griffin. This heavy mech was designed as a close assault mech to fill a gap in weight class and function between the 20-ton Wasp and the 100-ton Mackie. It combined significant firepower for its time, but eventually became obsolete in the face of newer designs. Still, it was popular enough that Earthwerks continued the line, reducing its weight to 55 tons and changing its armament to handle long-range Fire support. Its primary weakness was a lack of close ranged firepower, as well as tendency to overheat (though less so than many other mechs). The Griffin remained common throughout the Succession Wars, being found in the armies of all the great houses and in the periphery. It’s a real workhorse design, one of a trio of 55-ton mechs found everywhere, along with the Shadow Hawk and Wolverine. GRF-1N Griffin: Size Medium (55 tons), Speed Average, Armor Medium. Particle Projection Cannon (1RA/1RD), Long Range Missile Tube, Jump Jets. 3RA...

I don’t know why, but I seem to be focusing on Mechs from House Liao’s Capellan Confederation. First the Cataphract, and now - well, this time I’m talking about the Raven . This is another new Capellan Mech design, this one based around electronic warfare. Capellan scientists developed a new ECM suite and probe system they hoped would be close to Star League electronic warfare systems. Unfortunately, the new system was so heavy and bulky that they couldn’t fit it into an existing design. Rather than give up on the technology, they built an entirely new Mech around it in 3024. The new Raven was designed to be a scout for command units. It was supposed to be attached to battalion command lances, usually as a fifth Mech. Unfortunately, the EW system in the RVN-1X Raven had some flaws. Its range was shorter than Star League era ECM and Probes, and it took up much more space in the Mech. When it took damage, the ECM system would actually make it harder for the Raven’s pilot to target enemie...

 (I love the work of Pasukaru76. They are better at building lego sets than I will ever be. Check out their work on Flickr .) In many ways, I prefer Francisco Duarte’s earlier adaptation of the Mechs from Battletech to Mobile Frame Zero. The later one has some appeal, but it actually changes the rules for light and assault Mechs to give them abilities you can’t normally get in vanilla MFZ. By contrast, the earlier version doesn’t change the actual rules at all. You can build any Battletech Mech or other vehicle and use it in a regular MFZ game purely run with the rules as written. Consequently, I’m going to switch to using those rules for my adaptations. If you want to switch to his updated rules, just give light Mechs the green movement D8 and say they’re destroyed when they lose the first white die, and give assault Mechs with a blue defensive system one blue D8 replacing a blue D6, and don’t ever give them the green movement D8. Light Mechs have up to three systems, usually in...

One thing about Mobile Frame Zero is that games are much more interesting and tactical with three or more players. Most war games that I know of, including Battletech, usually assume there are two forces fighting each other. My first game of Battletech was a three way game against two of my brothers, though, which made it a game of alliances and talking other people into destroying your enemies for you. There are a few examples of three-way fights in Battletech fiction. First, near the beginning of the novel Lethal Heritage by Michael Stackpole, Phelan Kell of the Kell Hounds is going after Kenny Ryan and his band of pirates. They are somewhat overmatched, a Wolfhound and Blackjack against a Locust, Panther, Griffin, and Rifleman. (The remaining two Mechs of the Kell Hound lance are away for this battle.) Then it turns out Ryan’s Mechs are being chased by three mysterious Mechs from an unknown source (spoiler: it’s Clan Wolf) who have already damaged their Mechs. Kell and Tang (his lan...

. I’m going to be honest, when I was really into Battletech 20+ years ago I thought the Clans were awesome. I wanted to play the Inner Sphere against the (I liked the underdog even then), but I thought they were pretty cool. My opinion of the clans has become less favorable for what it did to the whole setting. Even so, one of the things I thought was cool was the Elemental , or Toad in Inner Sphere parlance. A group of five infantry in power armor, each armored well enough to withstand a medium laser, they were my introduction to a whole sub-genre of science fiction that was established by Heinlein in Starship Troopers and expanded on in John Steakley’s Armor . They were so cool that when my brother (12 years younger than me) saw the Toad toy from the animated series for sale, he called it an elemental and insisted on getting one. That led me to collect all of the toys, but that’s another story. Mobile Frame Zero actually has a simple way to deal with miniature power armor in Interce...

  The TRP-1 Trooper was a Marik mech first built in 2475, the first light scout mech designed in the Free World’s League. Unfortunately, it was plagued with design flaws. Based on their Workmech industrial design, the Trooper lacked an ejection system and its legs could not endure heavy combat. It overheated easily and its knees and ankles tended to lock up. After Toddlette Industries spent 25 years correcting significant flaws with the lightweight design, they upgraded it with newer battlemech technology, changing the name in an effort to distance it from the Trooper’s bad reputation. The FLE-4 Flea was the result. The Flea became increasingly rare during the Succession Wars until the appearance of Wolf’s Dragoons, who had a large number of Fleas of both the FLE-4 and FLE-15 models and made an exclusive production agreement with Earthworks. Eventually the exclusivity clause ran out and it became more widespread. The FLE-4 was the original model of Flea developed from the Trooper ...

 Sarna.net  has an entertaining new feature called Bad Mechs. Their first victim: the ASN-21 Assassin. I admit that this is not one of my favorite medium mechs. This 40-tonner really is significantly worse than a lot of light mechs. Yes, it’s faster and more heavily armed than a Wasp or Stinger , but that’s not saying much. Much smaller mechs such as the Commando out-gun it. The Jenner has almost as much armor, as much speed, and more firepower. A Valkyrie or Panther has more armor and is much more powerful at long range. But I have a certain affection for underdog mechs, and the Assassin is definitely an underdog. If you can win a battle while piloting an Assassin, you’re doing well. In Mobile Frame Zero terms, I think the Assassin has a chance to redeem itself. ASN-21 Assassin: Weight: Medium (40 Tons), Speed: Fast, Armor: Light, Laser Cannon, Antenna, Jump Jets, Missile Rack (2RD/1Y/1G/2W/1Rd8S). Against clan or advanced technology: [2RD/1G/2W/1Rd8S] I decided to just ...

 I love FrankenMechs . Whether it’s Samual “Shorty” Sneed’s hybrid Rifleman/Warhammer/Archer/Phoenix Hawk in Snord’s Irregulars,  or Professor Burke Kale’s Prometheus in the adventure Unbound,  or the way Rifleman and Warhammer legs look the same, or the way the various original Clan Omnimechs seemed to be built with the same few arms and legs, it was always cool to me. Like hacking a physical system to work with something else, or building with LEGOs. I don’t have enough engineering know-how to build anything complex, but I like how it looks. During the Third Succession War, the Capellan Confederation and House Liao found themselves short on factories to produce heavy battlemechs. Their big factory on Carver V was taken by the Free World’s League, and in the three years spent fighting over the planet, the factory was destroyed. To make up for this shortfall, their engineers designed a “new” mech in 3025 by combining features of existing designs. They took the legs, right...

Way back in the day, I was into Battletech . Really into it. Like, I had a copy of every novel ever published and all the rulebooks, supplements, and games I could find. I spent thousands of dollars on this game. There’s just something very cool about giant robots destroying each other. I played other games, like Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and some others, but Battletech was my first gaming love. I eventually lost interest. It happened about the same time that the company FASA went under, so it was a good time for a breakup. I started college and didn’t have enough time to play a tactical game that takes hours to get through. Cue 20+ years montage. My interests in different games grew and shrunk over time. I played various editions of Dungeons and Dragons, Mutants and Masterminds, and Hunter: the Vigil, and I picked up a ton of other RPGs and tabletop games, including more obscure ones like Sorcerer, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, Burning Wheel, Continuum...