The Mech Layer

Your mech is an EXTENSION of your character, not a replacement for it. This is not a game built around constant mech combat - you will fight often, but the on-foot action is just as, if not more, important. Therefore, your mech's aspects and stunts are LAYERED ON TOP OF those for your pilot - while they're in the cockpit, both sets apply.

You should expect at least half of all sessions not to include you piloting your mech. Every time you get in the cockpit and sortie should feel like a meaningful event, one where lives are at stake and everything about the story can change in an instant without warning. See 2 Character Creation#Mech Creation for special rules on building and using your mech.

Mech Creation

Your mech uses the same skills and approaches as everything else you do, but it has its own set of aspects and stunts. These SUPPLEMENT your existing pilot abilities, but apply only while you are piloting your mech. All your Pilot aspects and stunts can still apply while you're in the cockpit.

Mech Aspects

When creating your MECH ASPECTS, you'll start with a high concept and a trouble, just like your pilot. For your third mech aspect, describe your RELATIONSHIP to your mech. Is it your loyal companion? An extension of your body? A replaceable tool like any other? An armored coffin? All of the above, or something else entirely? Think about how you feel about this machine and what makes it yours - or what it means to you if it's not yours. This Relationship aspect is the only one that may be freely rewritten at a #Milestone; your mech's high concept and trouble both require a #Breakthrough to rewrite.

Gear Aspects

Mechs have two gear aspects, representing the equipment loadout you carry into battle. These aspects can shape the tactical options available to you and define how your mech actually fights. They can be invoked or compelled like any other aspect, but they also have a few special rules.

Mech equipment is proportionate to the mech using it, meaning it is enormous, intricate, and requires some lead time to change out. Your gear aspects are not available to rewrite during a #Milestone; instead, they may be freely changed when any of the following conditions apply:

• You are about to deploy in a battle for which you had time to prepare (so if you're dealing with a surprise attack or other scenario that requires emergency rapid response, you'll have to make the best of what you're already equipped with).
• A session begins or ends while you are in a position that would reasonably allow access to the facilities and time needed to reequip your mech (meaning you're not currently in your mech, you're not under immediate time pressure, and you're not in a situation or location that naturally prevents access to replacement gear like the middle of an empty desert).

Additionally, the GM may DESTROY a piece of gear as a special type of compel when your mech suffers a breakdown other than Dented. If this happens, write the breakdown aspect in a way that reflects the loss of the equipment (e.g. "Disabled Shoulder Cannons"). Unless you've established the gear aspect as something irreplaceable, like a bleeding-edge prototype, you'll get it back when the breakdown clears at the next Breakthrough advance. This is still a compel, so you will earn a fate point if it happens and you may spend one to refuse it. See 4 Challenges, Conflicts, & Contests#Harm and Mechs for the full rules on suffering and clearing breakdown.

Unless you use a stunt to get an additional, more mechanically detailed permanent capability built into your mech's design (e.g. a transformation, prototype defense technology, advanced neural link, or other complex feature), these aspects are assumed to be the only equipment your mech deploys with above whatever baseline your table agrees on in session 0.

There is no set equipment list, so you're free to outfit your mech with whatever gear you can dream up, but you must still work with the GM to make sure you're both on the same page about what a gear aspect can actually do.

EXAMPLES Beam Saber, Heat Axe, Shoulder Shield, Twin Head-Mounted Vulcans, Mega Bazooka Launcher, Enhanced Booster Binder, Atmospheric Re-Entry Balloon, Psi-Controlled Drone Swarm

Mech Stunts

Your mech starts with two stunts, written through the same process as your pilot stunts. You may purchase additional mech stunts with refresh.

Replacing Your Mech

If your mech is ever replaced, voluntarily or otherwise (see 4 Challenges, Conflicts, & Contests#Losing Your Mech), you are refunded HALF the refresh spent on your old mech's stunts, ROUNDED UP. You may use this refresh immediately to buy new stunts or reallocate it towards your refresh rating.

You may replace your mech voluntarily at any #Breakthrough. Some characters treat their mechs as disposable tools and upgrade without ceremony; for others, their mech is a deeply personal connection, and getting a new one is a significant story moment that's worth playing out as a dramatic scene.

Scale

Mechs have a SCALE, a number that models the way that being in a mech radically changes your capabilities without having to use completely separate rulesets for on-foot and in-mech gameplay. By default, the game assumes roughly 1 point of scale for every 10 meters in mech height, rounded. In the source material this game draws on, most mechs range from scale 1 to scale 3, with outliers starting at scale 4 and increasing from there. Keep all player and most NPC mechs at the same scale - decide this with your group at character creation. Normal humans on foot always count as scale 0.

You may wish to widen the bands to use fewer scale categories and a wider variety of mechs within each, or decouple the scale bands from hard measurements entirely and just use a ladder like "human, small mech, normal mech, big mech, huge mech, stupidly huge mech, bigger than any mech." That's completely fine! This is meant to be a SET AND FORGET mechanic that applies only when the difference between human scale and whatever you decide is the standard mech scale, or standard mech scale and something much larger, matters. As long as everyone's on the same page about the impact they can expect those differences to have, scale is doing its job.

Scale modifies the dice in two ways:

• In general, when attempting an action where the scale difference between you and your opposition makes things easier (e.g. evading a mech's sensors; throwing a car; painting a target), the roll should be adjusted down by the difference in your scales. When the difference makes things harder (e.g. fighting a mech with small arms while on foot; precision repair work; dentistry), adjust the roll up by the difference.
• Any time an attack by a larger-scale opponent succeeds against a lower scale opponent, double the scale difference and add that number to the amount of hits scored above the target. This stacks with the first rule, so if a Scale 2 mech shoots at a Scale 0 character on foot, the on-foot character's Defend roll is already reduced by 2 (since it's the opposition for the mech), then, if the attack is successful, four more hits are added before assigning strain or consequences. The intent here is to model the idea that anyone not in a mech who takes a direct hit from a mech-sized weapon is likely to be reduced to red paste, without making that into a hard guarantee.

This system does break down somewhat when dealing with extreme outliers (scale differences of 3 or more) or things like spaceships that dwarf mechs, but whose size advantage is counteracted by being far slower and more cumbersome. The GM should use their best judgement and err on the side of "difficult but fair" when dealing with things that are still within the realm of mech combat. For anything larger, an approach other than direct combat with the massive target will be needed (e.g. the Death Star trench run, where the rebels faced ferocious and extended opposition from comparably-scaled ships and point defenses in order to reach an exploitable weak spot they could actually affect, but never had to deal with the Death Star's planet-killing superlaser). You are encouraged to come up with creative ways to circumvent or nullify the scale modifiers, like blowing off a mech's sensor array to force the pilot to open the cockpit and expose their body to direct fire, or a mech stunt with a specific application to small-scale precision work like "Nested Manipulators."

Harm and Mechs

Armor

Armor is similar to strain in play, but differs in two ways. First, where strain clears automatically at the end of each scene, restoring armor requires you to be in a position where it makes fictional sense for your mech to be repaired. If a scene ends with your mech crash-landed in the desert, no spare parts to work with, and no one else around for miles, you're going to need either a way to change your circumstances or some very impressive Tinkering.

To repair your armor when you're not in position where it makes sense, you must Tinker as an overcome action with opposition equal to the amount of armor boxes you're trying to repair (maximum 5). This represents your best effort with the resources available to you; regardless of the result, you cannot attempt this again until your mech takes additional harm or you gain access to resources that can help you.

The other difference is how you upgrade your armor. Where strain is innate to your pilot and scales with their Persevere skill, armor is a mechanical quality of your mech, not you as a person. Instead of taking a skill increase during a 2 Character Creation#Breakthrough, you may add 2 armor boxes to your mech (to a maximum of 8). If you ever get a new mech, those upgrades do not carry over. You and your GM may decide together that it's fictionally appropriate for the new mech to already have better-than-standard armor when you get it (e.g. it's a fresh-from-the-factory prototype custom-built to your specifications), but that is not an assumed default.

Breakdown

Breakdown works a little differently than consequences. Instead of the wide-open field of situation aspects you can create when your pilot suffers harm, breakdown pre-defines the way that damage to your mech escalates throughout a fight. This is meant to take some of the pressure off everyone at the table to quickly figure out wording in the heat of a battle, automatically create relevant and usable aspects, and tune those aspects to continuously ratchet up the tension of the scene.

A DENTED mech (2 harm consequence) has taken damage that isn't immediately harmful, but creates a weak point that can be exploited later. Maybe an important structural piece is cracked, or an armor plate is blown off to expose a vulnerable area.

A DAMAGED mech (second 2 harm consequence) has had one of its systems or capabilities weakened, but retains most of its functions - maybe it's lost a booster and slowed down, or its targeting is thrown off, or its joints are starting to lock up.

A DISABLED mech (4 harm consequence) has lost a critical function - perhaps a destroyed limb, a broken weapon, loss of flight capability.

A DOOMED mech (6 harm consequence) is moments from destruction - you can still try to fight, but you're likely to need a new mech afterwards. Perhaps oxygen is leaking, the power plant is overloading, or you've lost all mobility and are a sitting duck.

Unless there is a relevant aspect in play somewhere in your game that would prevent it (e.g. "critical supply shortage" at your hangar), Breakdown is cleared entirely at each breakthrough as your mech is repaired to full function. Such aspects are hugely impactful to the tone of a game, as well as to overall player agency; the GM should keep that in mind and have talked with the players about the kind of story they all want to tell before one is deployed.

As with normal consequences, breakdown slots can be filled in any order as long as all harm taken is ultimately allocated and pushed through.

Losing Your Mech

If you concede or take an extreme consequence while your mech is Doomed and you're inside it, the mech is DESTROYED unless you or an ally in a position to intervene sacrifice a point of Refresh and describe how it survives the engagement through extreme luck or effort (as with buying stunts, you can never drop your refresh below 1). If your mech is destroyed, you acquire a new one at your next breakthrough, or earlier if the fiction offers an opportunity to do so (e.g. stealing one from an enemy base). Work with your GM to design a new mech that's appropriate for the state of the fiction and the resources available to your character. A replacement mech at breakthrough should never cost you resources outside the fiction layer; the game is premised on you being a mech pilot, and even though you spend a lot of time out of your mech, you should never be without access to one for an extended period.

If your mech is ever taken out while you're in it, it is destroyed, and whoever took you out gets to decide what happens to you just like when you're taken out on foot. See 2 Character Creation#Replacing Your Mech for what to do if you survive.