That Time I Ran a Mecha Hex Crawl - Steel Hearts ∀RES
I've never done a play report and frankly this isn't quite that. But inspired by recent rumblings of cool mecha blog posts and inspired by this fantastic pseudo campaign summary, I thought I'd talk about what was probably my most successful campaign: Steel Hearts: ∀RES! ((I'm just going to be referring to it as Ares from here on in)) - It was the final 21 Episode (Session) Playtest of Steel Hearts before the final version released this past June (those rules and resources are free and you can check them out here!) - It was also in many ways a Hex Crawl (even if it had a central plot the players were going through with a beginning middle and end).
In this blog post I'm mostly going to catalog some of the neat tricks I tried that worked to hopefully give you ideas for how you'd run your own Mecha Hex Crawl - I'll also be going into the story a bit, but I'd need a much longer blog post to do all of that.
So a little background for the uninitiated. Steel Hearts takes place in a semi-near future where Earth's moon cracks open (the Awakening) raining down giant Kaiju (Wyrms) on the world and causing a verdant apocalypse. There's also a magic stone called Betyl that can create intense heat when resonating with humans (who usually get selected as the Pilots for mechs). These were both brought here by a spooky precursor race (Anunnaki) that literally vanished at the height of their empire before there was multicell life on earth. Shortly before this the Olympus Initiative ((a private company with government funding to help save humanity from the climate apocalypse)) had emigrated a small population to terraform part of Mars. Today with a strong telescope you can actually see this lost "Martian Green Spot." ((Said Green Spot surrounded by increasingly inhospitable deserts: The Low-Oxygen Zone))
While most of my Steel Hearts games take place on Earth where the Olympian Initiative all but disappeared, this one was going to be different. We would be running on the isolated Martian colony, on Terra Ares, and seeing what they were up to while the main campaign had been messing around on Earth. In the nearly 100 years since the Awakening Wyrms had also come to Mars and disrupted the local Olympian rule. Moreover a scant 15 years ago, a revolutionary faction (Khaos) had overthrown the feudal lords of the Olympian Initiative (killing most of them) and established a new age of freedom, free from governments and lords and fiefdoms... Of course someone would still have to run the trains. Thus the Khaos Corporation was formed as the defacto rulers of the newly hyper-capitalist Ares, with their influence and pressure being felt in all corners.
Jump to our heroes. We begin in a junk yard, as scrapping is a reliable (if meager) source of income. Along with usual Steel Hearts random rolling, each character started with something unique they found in the scrap yard.
Because I'd prepped rolls for everything except for ages, I moronically said "Just roll 2 d10" - Almost everyone got a reasonable result... almost. One character rolled a 0 and a 2 either implying the character was 2 years old or 102 (It ended up being both). This would be Adam Zima, the "anchor character" around which a lot of the campaign's larger plot would revolve. He only had memories of the past 2 years and was currently working an unpaid internship with another character that had just been rolled: Ian Moses, the hyper capitalist gunsmith. (He'd just found several crates of guns in the scrap... and a crate full of sunglasses with the help of Zima).
Add to this gaggle Kowalski (the gruff mechanic, and former sanitation worker, who'd lost his arm and job during a terrorist attack on a Khaos Corp facility) who'd just found an ancient alien artifact that had decided to fuse to his prosthetic arm (fixing its faultiness that he'd rolled), and Sarge (an orphan turned killer, who said player would later replace with the more team-oriented Lexxxi Star, a glam rocker with two companions for life) and we were almost ready to start the campaign! ((These characters would later be joined by Seren Szilard, the wayward heir of a Khaos Corp mine owner who'd disowned their non-binary child.
There were just two more things we needed:
Life in Debt
Given Ares was relatively open world, I wanted to give players a motivation to do things and make as much money as they could. That motivation? Debt. The Khaos Corporation gives out loans rather generously, but the interest is anything but generous. Each player started with 2d6 x 1000 credits worth of debt (at a time when a new MEC Part cost ~1,500 and full repairs were between 500-1000 -- After this campaign I added an extra 0 to the end of most MEC costs, because it didn't make much sense for a personal shotgun to cost 1/5th of a 10 meter long railgun).
Each session that this debt wasn't cleared it would increase usually by 2-300 Credits. All I told Players is to not let this debt surpass 10,000 otherwise Khaos would try to repo their MECs. Sure enough much later in the campaign this exact thing happened. ((We'll get to that later)). Players would also later encounter NPCs with bomb collars that tracked debts well over 20k. These NPCs were forced to work to pay off said debt ((despite the fact that interest would accrue faster than they could pay it off)) or risk the bomb collar blowing if they ran away.
Every good Hex Crawl has a map, and this was one I was especially proud of. Buried deep in the junk of the scrap yard our heroes were looting when they first meet each other was a scrap of paper that I'd tossed on the table with no context. I'd intentionally crumbled it and let it sit at the bottom of several bags to get a good worn look. As Players unfurled it (and really had to rub out the creases to make it legible) to reveal this:
They began down in the South East in the scrap yards outside of the junker town Freewater (where there is no water and nothing is free). By the end of the first session a mysterious young girl had offered them a lot of money in return for escorting her to the Temple of the Rain Priests in the far North West (what would affectionately be named by players as "Eye Cave").
As they were fighting over the map, one of them realized there was something on the back and the energy was electric. More clues? More treasure? This puzzle box had even more pieces:
- Qarafa - A maximum security Khaos manufacturing and research base. Players went for this super early and the structure of the encounter was incredibly tense - They had to defend a platform (which was moving through the factory) against waves of enemies. For each wave they committed to they could ask a question (up to a maximum of 5) that the system had to answer truthfully and in detail. I was especially proud of this because I hand spliced the FF7R's Midgar Expressway track to split for the 5 waves, and would change / escalate the music as they got further in. After each wave they had the option to cut their losses, take their info and leave. They ended up pushing (and barely surviving) all 5 waves, including the final wave against the Primordial Oizys. (Well I should say "Waves" because he initially seems beaten, falling into the molten metal below, before erupting out of it for one last phase - It was really exciting to see my players genuinely freak out that there was one last fight.)
- Leith - a hidden casino run by the last Olympians who'd retreated here for a life of decadence... and literal vampirism thanks to an alien parasite. The heroes also went here earlier than expected, tempted by promise of "$$$" so it was fun seeing them navigate this situation when relatively outgunned. A lot of this arc was spent on foot which was a blast!
- The Library - They used the map and a recently decrypted device to navigate to an Anunnaki Library in the low oxygen zone, in search of better weapons and answers about this precursor race. The fight itself was overtly MMO-esc involving plates, damage phases and lots of extra Synergy for solving the combat puzzle.
- Manu Desert - Here they looked for a key to a super weapon in the belly of a giant Wyrm, but more pressingly they had their final showdown with a bounty hunter who'd been tracking / harassing them since the second session (and we were on session 18).
Steel Hearts was built as a game where you could never heal in MEC fights. You had a lot of options for minimizing DMG but that DMG was permanent once it landed and would need to be repaired by hand or in a garage. As a result the already strapped together MECs of my players took on an even more scrappy quality (especially early on). Random repair errors were few and far between, but I saw palpable relief on my players' faces when there was plenty of scrap to repair with or that a garage was being run by someone amicable. ((Similarly I found this changed the power dynamic with garage owners. Where in other campaigns their allegiance was a given, now Players were trying to get in their good graces for how vital their services were - If you too are running a MEC Hexcrawl there might be something to leverage here re: Garage owners who are terrible people but who can offer to repair your MEC... Also was fun because one of my garage owners was working with a bounty hunter and installed a kill-switch when Players weren't looking)).
The moment I knew I was doing things right was when one player commented there was an almost Cowboy Bebop-esc quality to how every haul and score was barely enough to pay for repairs and upgrade the MECs, so the players constantly felt hungry. ((Thus prompting them to scrap for every credit they could))
Similarly Players didn't have access to buy every MEC Part from go, instead they had to hunt down specific Bosses or go to specific cities to unlock those MEC Classes. This paired with how easy it was to swap out gear, meant that exploration wasn't just rewarded with credits but the opportunity to keep refining and tweaking their builds!
Roughing it in a MEC
Almost all travel on the Hex Map (until the very end game where they got a carrier) happened "on foot" - eg, the MECs would be walking, or climbing through various environments as a means of transport. This did two really cool things:
1) I could run hyper difficult encounters where the goal was simply "Cross to the other end of the map to survive and enter the next Hex" - Which was very cool to run in tactical mecha combat instead of simply an escape roll. This also made players get a bit more creative with their kit the few times it happened.
2) In a campaign that was as much about trash as about nature, it was so much fun to spend time focusing on pilots cockpits as they accrued trash, companions and upgrades. Functionally each MEC was an RV and thus allowed for further expression and shenanigans. Always ask your players if they have a toilet installed.
There's also something very cool about the image of camping out in front of a giant MEC, clothes hanging on a drying line between it and a tree, Phobos ever present on the night horizon.
Despite the open ended nature of the Hex Crawl, the campaign was definitely still a story driven "season" of an anime, where "plot" was a huge focus. I did this in two different ways when sessions would open:
1) We'd start the session with a flash back from a character's past, either letting that player flesh out their character more or perhaps unveiling previous missed secrets and connections. For instance it was later revealed that Zima was broken out due to terrorists attacking the research facility that Kowalski worked at - And that his injury was due to Ian selling said terrorists explosives that packed a little too much punch - Terrorists who'd hired Sarge as a hired killer - The scene where these characters put all these pieces together was delightfully tense since Kowalski was pissed and the team was already on shaky terms... and it was followed back to back with the team's first encounter with a recurring bounty hunter enemy who required the team to work in total coordination to defeat.
((Another example is the flash back montage cold open of Ian Moses trying (and failing) to start businesses , slowly incurring more debt after helping Khaos succeed in its revolution. Said montage was accompanied by this song and remains one of the best pieces of improv I've seen a player bring to the table [Including accidentally creating a virus and killing its research team and trying to flip real-estate in a Wyrm-infested swamp]. Moses' development for a heartless capitalist to a somewhat tolerable capitalist was maybe one of my favorite arcs of the show))
2) We'd alternatively start the session with "burner" characters (eg low stat highly squishy, likely to die) in a flash point somewhere far off on the Hex Map. This way players could get a sense for what was happening, be it a Khaos Corp business meeting, a botched terrorist strike, or being the hapless researchers of a lab under attack from an otherworldly threat. This would also help emphasize the fragility of human life, despite the players having titanic MECs. It was also fun because if any of these Burner characters survived they had a chance of showing up in future sessions as NPCs!
Roaming Threats and Allies
Pretty early on it's established that Khaos' leader, Alexander Bernays, has 6 Primordials (most his former revolutionary lieutenants) who "keep the peace" in this new world. As a result, Players were always keeping a lookout for where / when these Primordials would show up (initially to avoid them, and later on to bait them out to beat them). Having these headliner threats on certain regions' roll tables was incredibly fun, and gave every area of the Crawl it's own vibe, from the hidden factory watched over by AI Oizys, to the cities under the protection of what was essentially a Voltron team.
Similarly that Vampiric parasite thing I mentioned? They later accidentally let that loose so I had a separate map tracking the infection's spread as monsters covered in black goo became more and more common. ((To the point that they effectively skirted around a whole quadrant of the world cause they knew bad stuff was up))
Likewise roaming allies (and especially roaming merchants) provided a welcome break from the constant threats of Ares. Often these junk merchants would have items varying from useless to enigmatic and trade was just as often barter for equally odd curios as it was for Credits.
One example of how I made haggling a puzzle was with the previously mentioned Pinyin. Firstly, to set the mood his (sometimes waterlogged) hobbled together MEC would erupt open hen Players agreed to trade, spilling out it's junk onto the ground ((upon further inspection the MEC's Betyl seemed to resonate on its own... perhaps haunted?)) Then I'd shamelessly use this brass cover of Emil's shop theme to further set this whimsical tone.
Being an excitable kid he'd drive a hard bargain for his items at the beginning, but every time Players would purchase something he'd get a bit more hyper and I'd up the theme's playback speed by x.25 and his deals would get much cheaper. Once Players figured this out they also figured out to buy the the cheap stuff first, thus driving the price of the expensive stuff down as Pinyin became more and more distracted by his successful sales ((and later on they resorted to just shortcutting this by giving him caffeine)). Once we'd peaked the song at about x2 speed Players would have maybe one maybe 2 purchases before this kid would tire himself out (dropping the song playback to .5 speed) and close up shop to sleep, thus creating an incredibly playful balancing act to strike the best deal.
If you do a Hex Crawl like this I am begging you to put in bounty hunters. Hephaestus was the main one who had been tracking the players since the second session, and it was always incredibly tense when he showed up via random rolls.
Moreover one of the best sessions I ran started in medias res as players were trying to escape through a Hex while being chased by 2 Bounty Hunters ((I'd arranged with Ian Moses that he'd sold the info of where they were... to 6 Bounty Hunters)). Each of the other Hunters had a different proc for when they'd show up in the fight - One for if a player successfully negated all DMG from an ATK, one for when players crossed the half way point of the map, one for when players got to the "exit" (where a bounty hunter would put up a force field before joining the fray) and one for if any player asked "How many of these guys are there?!?" or if Moses revealed the exact number ((Each being introduced with a Borderlands styled title card, each Hunter themed after a different movie monster / actor from the classic Universal cinema days)).
What's fun about Bounty Hunters in MEC games is you can go all out! Because your goal is to take players alive, the story will still continue even if all the MECs get trashed. (Heck I'd had a whole session prepped). Somehow though my players managed to beat this gaggle. (My players were incredibly good at Steel Hearts at this point and went undefeated for the whole campaign... but there were a lot of close calls).
Between all the bombastic fights, the fact that there was never really an HQ to go back to made for some truly profound quiet moments out in the deserts, or deep in the jungles. If I could plant one idea in your head, it's this: You should have a fishing episode. In Ares it gave players some unique gear and a chance to reflect on the journey so far ((we did it right in the middle of the campaign)), and slowing down for moments like this is incredibly important. Shameless plug for the fishing game I've unironically used in every Steel Hearts campaign I've run: Reel Robot Fishing. For real, it always yields something memorable.
All the Heartfelt Stuff I Can't Put in a Small Blog Post
- RED who was Adam Zima's robot buddy that they found in Lethe. There was so much to this character and how the party taught him to be human that it deserves its own blog post. Similarly everything that happened with Zima was wild, but also very specific to this campaign. We'd open each of his memories with a different song that hinted at certain things happening and helped shed some light on the other test subjects that were like Zima, and the way he transformed from zero to hero was amazing.
- Actually pretty much every PC got at least 1 or 2 NPCs who they had extensive interactions with and explored themes of forgiveness, change and growth (somewhat unintentionally but it worked vvv well).
- Another favorite was Anastasia, formerly the most blood thirsty and violent of the Primordials, after being beat (and assumed dead) she's later found in the desert having lost her memories and doing ear-bleedingly bad recitations of mantras (Initially a nod to Corin Nanders). As she rediscovers her past she's horrified at the person she used to be, and because of the Players' acceptance of her she becomes one of their main allies (and even a love interest).
- Or how Seren's father literally ripped in an alternate reality version of them to replace their queer child with a cis daughter. This session was such a gut punch but the two ended up effectively becoming siblings and teaming up against their shitty dad.
- Literally the whole plot line about Anunnaki weapons that could erase people from this reality and alter people's memories to never have remembered their existence, and the gut punch that befell Kowalski when he realized he'd unwittingly done that to someone in a moment of desperation ((said weapon was like an instant win button, that pretty much never got used because the player who had it was always suss of it))
- The ways this campaign tied into all the other Steel Hearts campaigns, both in Adam being related to an up-til-now enigmatic pretty boy, and also how a recurring (cross dimensional?) antagonist had appeared under a new name and seemed to be amicable to the party.
- The fact that a Nokia Phone ornament on a Zima's random rolled rail gun (courtesy of a table made by Ian's Player) became a staple of the campaign ((specifically with a Haphestus who would often call on it, hinting that he had a hacked satellite network at his disposal)).
- The way a team of rogues eventually did the whole found family thing in a really heartfelt way. Which was especially gut punching in the campaign's ending where Zima sacrificed himself so the rest of the party wouldn't have to... ((I even had everyone shred their character sheets to make their wishes for the future so they thought they were all dead... But Adam's wish was for his friends to survive)).
- And so so so much more. But hopefully this has given you some ideas to run your own Mecha Hex Crawl or Campaign!
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