After chewing for years on how to fix FTL travel in Heavy Gear, I came up with a simple retcon that makes it all work much. much easier. See the Tango Among The Infinite page for more information!
Oh, what a last few months. I hope the next time I have to move it’s to the retirement home, then to the cemetery.
Anyway, I’ve finally had the chance to clean some things up for Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango. I’ve revised my plans for most of the existing worlds, and I’ve written new entries for the worlds of Home and Jotenheim.
Check out the Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango page for more information!
I’ve had several ideas lately for how to revise or replace the world of Eden in Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango, so I decided to put everything all on one page. Visit A Tango on Eden to see what I’ve come up with!
I’ve updated my entry about space travel for Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango.
The short version: “It’s just like Alien.”
I’m rebooting the Heavy Gear canon world of Eden to build a “Cool Plane” setting based on Warbirds and Ace Combat, but that’s not the only option. Check out “Option 3 – Central Eden Government and Administration” on the new and improved page for A Tango on Eden!
I’ve added another page for Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango. This time, I’m working on improving how interstellar travel works in the Heavy Gear setting. Visit A Tango Among The Infinite for more!
I’ve been jotting down my ideas for quite a while about what to do with my Heavy Gear-themed sandbox game, and I’ve finally firmed them up enough to share them. Visit the Infinite Tango page to read the “tangos” I’ve come up with so far. Enjoy!
I’m still looking for more worlds to fold into my Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango sandbox setting, so over the last couple of months I’ve been dismantling the Heavy Gear sourcebook Life on Eden. For those who aren’t familiar, when the time came to send LoE to the printers, DP9 mistakenly sent the wrong text file – they sent one of the very first drafts of the book rather than the final version. As a result, LoE is chock full of run-on and incomplete sentences, text that could only be rewrites from the editor, and just plain gibberish.
I’ve been applying Dr. Guilty’s Machete of Sense to the book to see if I could salvage it. The answer is a resounding No.
I wrote up several critiques about the material in the book and all of the problems I found, but I finally realized that I was wasting my time. The published text was still only at the phase of throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what stuck. The edits and rewrites that (I hope) came later, where things were rewritten to work together or cut if they didn’t work, have never appeared in print.
The “dragons of Eden” are a good example. The text describes how several species of “fantasy” creatures were created on Eden before the comet impacts that wrecked the planet’s biosphere, but that’s about all it says. There’s no mention of why they were created (for a zoo, or an exotic safari?) or how many, very little on how many are left, and nothing at all about how important they are in the present setting. Are they a food source, or a scourge on the local communities? Are legends written about these beasts? Is there a local version of Saint George, fighting a dragon in his suit of powered armor? What was printed was still miles away from that stage of the writing process.
Tearing LoE down gave me a lot to consider about my own writing, and there are kernels of some good ideas in what was published. As it was released, though, LoE is unusable. DP9 themselves have rewritten Eden to fit the HG: Blitz! setting, so the book is only good anymore for stripping for parts.
I think I’ll dust off my old “Life on Shangri-La” project, which was a similar world using Warbirds and Ace Combat as primary sources – but there may be more to borrow from LoE that I first thought.
As for other worlds, the search continues….
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that for the planet Eden in my HG:IT sandbox setting, I have not used the book Life on Eden.
There are a couple of reasons:
Recently, though, I’ve been rereading LoE and a discussion I had on the RPGNet forums a while back, and for some reason the phrase “royal flying squadron” stuck in my head. I remembered units like the Lafayette Escadrille and Manfred von Richthofen’s “Flying Circus” from the First World War, and I find the idea of a more rough-and-tumble operation like that immensely appealing. I can mine the Guild and the rest of the material from Warbirds, and it’s the perfect excuse to include the custom paint jobs featured in Ace Combat.
I’d love to see an F-22 Raptor with the “Hat in the Ring” emblem of Eddie Rickenbacker’s 94th Aero Squadron. If I find the right image, I’ll make something myself.
* The line editors did spend a lot of time in 2004 and 2005 cleaning up the texts and artwork of Life on Utopia, Life on Eden and Life on Atlantis for a combined volume called the “Colony Companion,” but by then the company had moved on to Heavy Gear Blitz!. The Companion was never published, and the Blitz! setting has gone through several revisions and retcons of its own.
I wanted to share some ideas for Heavy Gear’s “penal colony” world of Botany Bay, based on this recent thread on RPG.net.
This excerpt from the Heavy Gear Second Edition Rulebook is basically all that was ever published about the planet:
”After ten years of trying, the Earth government finally abandoned all hope of selling this lifeless rock. Rising crime rates across the colonies and Earth itself, combined with a popular anti-capital punishment movement, led the Earth government to establish Botany Bay as a prison planet. Prisoners were forced to mine radioactive ores and grow experimental crops. The military wardens of Botany Bay were notoriously cruel. When Eath’s Gateships withdrew, most of the staff and all of the prisoners were left behind on the barren rock. Little is known of their fate.”
There’s one basic problem with this: Penal colonies are done on the cheap, to return resources to the mother government with a minimum of expense. That’s why you use prisoners in the first place, or offer convicts commuted sentences in exchange for building the colony.
However, space travel in Heavy Gear is a Big F’ing Deal (travel times are measured in months), and it’s very expensive. Also, crops and radioactive ores aren’t exactly hard to find in our own solar system, or any of the other HG worlds for that matter. From the description alone, there’s no reason why you couldn’t establish a penal colony like Botany Bay on one of Jupiter’s moons or in the Asteroid Belt.
So why would you spend the time, money and effort to build a colony on a hostile alien planet, with people who didn’t want to be there and for resources you could get somewhere else? What makes Botany Bay worth the trouble?
Here are a few suggestions:
The Lost Colony
All was as it seemed, at first. The Human Corcordat had a world nobody wanted, and was facing a popular backlash against the death penalty. The decision was made to turn Botany Bay into a penal colony. The worst of humanity’s criminals (along with adequate food and supplies) would simply be thrown down a gravity well, never to bother anyone again.
Before long, though, the Concordat adopted a series of extreme “law and order” policies, including the deportation to Botany Bay of anyone found guilty of “crimes against the state.” The laws were vague enough that the Concordat had a lot of leeway, and soon academics, engineers and other specialists were being deported on the flimsiest of evidence.
The reason was very simple: Evidence of another human civilization had been found on Botany Bay, and specialists had to be brought in who could not reveal what they knew. The Concordat’s expansion of arrest powers was just the most practical solution. That it was morally reprehensible meant little to the Concordat’s leadership, they had to know what was there.
When the Concordat economy collapsed and the Gateships were ordered home, the Botany Bay researchers were told to keep working and that the government would return to check on their progress.
No one imagined three hundred years would pass….
This is another way of introducing a Project Argo ship and its survivors to a Heavy Gear campaign, similar to what I’m doing with the world of Argos in my Infinite Tango sandbox. What (or whom) is found among the Argo ruins is up to the GM.
“We Are Not Alone”
As above, but the civilization found was not human. The Concordat was desperate to keep a lid on the news that other intelligent life had been found in the universe, and a “societal lockdown” was seen as the only way to do that.
What did the inhabitants of Botany Bay find – and what were they able to learn while Earth was gone?
“The Only Death Penalty Still On The Books”
The people on Botany Bay found something. And they woke it up. And it was pissed.
Whatever it was, it was so bad the Earth government decided the only thing to do was run and hide. That’s the real reason Earth withdrew the Gateships and abandoned the colonies.
Now facing the consequences of a global war and a struggling biosphere, Earth has no choice but to return to the stars, but one order exceeds all others: “DO NOT APPROACH BOTANY BAY.”
If you want to fold Eclipse Phase or Aliens into the Heavy Gear setting, Botany Bay is the place.
Banzaidyne IV 