Official trailer for Titans of Fallen Earth, our new kaiju versus mecha RPG
- Thread starter Accaris
- Start date
Juxtapozbliss
Adventurer
Looks interesting. What’s the system like? Level of crunch? How does it compare to Lancer?
It's a crunch-medium D6 dice pool system. From initial playtesting (which we did at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo and will continue to do until release), it's been thorough enough to be strategic but fast enough to not bog down the table. It's an additive based system with lots of dice (rather than counting successes) where big swings and blow-outs are possible. Distance, time, movement, and damage types are simple and easy to understand. There's more of Front Mission here than of Armored Core or Battletech.
Critical hits inflict status conditions rather than simply deal extra damage. Almost all attacks are assumed to hit automatically. Similar to a Palladium game, damage overcomes a defense rating to get to the target's HP (this prevents a boots-on-the-ground soldier from ever possibly harming Godzilla, for example, at least not without a tac nuke... the rules help support genre conventions). But there are ways to boost and influence attacks and skill rolls.
Thematically it's totally different from Lancer because it's cohesively tied to an alternative-history, 1980s, post-apocalyptic world inspired by Terminator, Akira, Aliens, and Mad Max. The lore is fleshed out, but it should be familiar to anyone who grew up with this kind of stuff and you won't feel like you need a cheat sheet to remember it.
Faction goals are abundantly clear and I've tried hard to make sure the game doesn't suffer from an identity crisis. There is a "villain" faction and you can play as them. Cross-faction parties are discouraged for this reason, but each faction has enough Titan customizability to make it a hard choice. The GM helps design missions based on the factions players choose and what their goals are at the table, although the GM can of course dictate the game from the top-down in the interest of time.
The soundtrack we're composing intentionally sounds like a Playstation 1 game, and you'll get feelings of Evangelion and Final Fantasy 7.
Rules-wise, because it's a skill-and-background system, you might see some surface level similarities with a game like Lancer (experience points can level up your background through training or they can be used to upgrade your war-machine), but Titans downplays the narrative and out-of-combat story experience in favor of a more militaristic, almost wargame-inspired approach. (There's nothing like Lancer's "triggers," for example, and if your pilot is separate from his Titan, he's probably going to die, because kaiju and battlefield hazards are exceedingly dangerous and humans are weak). PvP is possible and PvP skirmishes are a perfectly valid game type for a quick table pick-up.
You can also play as a kaiju.
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Kickstarter pre-launch is up! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aeres/titans-of-fallen-earth-a-kaiju-vs-mecha-simulation
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