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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Cooper" data-source="post: 2010731" data-attributes="member: 24255">Armageddon 2089: Total WarMongoose Publishing product number MGP1201 Ian Sturrock304 pages, $44.95This is not a playtest review.Armageddon 2089: Total War is the first book in a new d20 game line from Mongoose Publishing, depicting life on Earth in the year 2089.  As the book points out, this is a rather dystopian world, filled with ecological disasters, nuclear strikes, and impending all-out war using a relatively new type of combat vehicle: the WarMek, a generally humanoid-shaped war robot piloted by a human and bristling with weapons of incredible devastation.Sounds like fun, right?I'm no stranger to the concept of the WarMek.  There's a whole genre of books, movies, comics, videos, games, and whatnot - from the Battletech line to the various Japanese Gundam series - dealing with combat robots.  (Heck, even in the Marvel comic books Iron Man is getting to be more and more like a man-sized mecha!)  However, this is the first mecha-based RPG I've ever read through myself, so I have little to compare it to.  I only state this up front because I'm going to gush like a schoolboy about how cool this game seems to be, and I want to get my biases (or lack thereof) out of the way.Okay, that said, I'm very impressed with the whole concept.  The execution could have been better in several ways - I'll get to those in due course - but I have to say, I really like the way Ian Sturrock took the mecha concept and applied the d20 system to get a cool new game out of it.Here's the breakdown of the book:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Welcome to Armageddon 2089: a 3-page "future history" of how events shaped the world of 2089</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Introduction: a 2-page discussion of the game and a breakdown of the book's chapters</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Characters in Armageddon 2089: PCs and NPCs</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Skills and Feats: Some for PCs, some for WarMeks (and some for both, used different ways for each)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Mercenary Companies: Designing the mercenary group your PCs will be a part of (including such things as budgeting, negotiating contracts, and hiring staff!)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Personal Equipment: Stuff your PC will need when he's not in his WarMek</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Personal Combat: Including changes to combat that are different from most d20 games (no Armor Class, for one thing - rather, a Defence Value to see if you get hit and Damage Resistance to strip off some of the damage)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WarMek and Vehicle Combat: The good stuff: fighting while in your WarMek!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Electronic Warfare, Scanning and Communications: In this game, much more important round-by-round than you might have thought</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WarMeks of the World: Details on some of the more common WarMeks - the "Monster Manual section," if you will</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WarMek Construction: Designing your own custom-made WarMek</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WarMek Technology: Specific add-on parts to WarMeks, like weapons, fire suppression systems, and comm gear</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ground Vehicles and Aircraft: Planes, helicopters, tanks, subs, etc.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The World of 2089: A breakdown of the world's countries and political alliances</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Corporations: The "big names" in the world of 2089</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Campaigns: Running an Armageddon 2089 game</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Glossary: Selected terms explained</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Designer's Notes: What Ian Sturrock's thought were in designing the game like he did</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Index: Self-explanatory, and useful in a book of this size!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Record Sheets: Sheets for your PC, WarMek, and mercenary company</li> </ul>My first impression in reading through the rules was that in many ways, the WarMeks of Armageddon 2089: Total War are like the starships of Star Fleet Battles.  You have the configuration of the vehicle in question with what specific equipment is in which location, you have to get past the defenses (armor for the WarMeks, shields for the Star Trek spaceships) before you can start destroying the interior components, and so on.  With this said, I was initially surprised to see the rules calling for the PCs being the WarMech pilots.  When I sit down to play Star Fleet Battles, I don't care about the captain or crew of the vessel of the ship I'm running - all I care about is how many phasers and photon torpedoes the ship has, the strength of the shielding, and how fast it can go.  However, I commend Ian for not taking this approach: by focusing on the pilot inside the WarMech, it's possible (indeed, likely over the course of a campaign) to have a WarMek destroyed but the pilot escaping (most WarMeks have ejection seats, it turns out) to move on to a new WarMek.  Plus, this opens the game up to be more than just WarMeks fighting enemy WarMeks (or planes, helicopters, tanks, infantry, etc.) - you can have your PCs exit their anthropomorphic combat vehicles and go on missions outside their WarMeks as needed.  A good call.As far as the WarMeks themselves, there is a good variety in the book and rules for designing your own to boot.  I appreciate the fact that while based on the premise that humanoid robot combat machines were the "way to go" as far as future combat went, the details from that point on are as "realistic" as possible.  Lasers, for instance, aren't the superweapons they are in the Star Wars movies - they can be countered by smoke and rain (or an ablative armor coating).  Electronic warfare plays a big part of WarMek combat, too - although in this case, I think realism perhaps should have taken a back seat to player fun.Let me explain that: a standard mercenary team usually consists of several WarMeks of different overall specialties - the frontline fighter, the sneaky scout, and the communications specialist, to name the most common.  Sadly, while the other guys get to blast their missiles and mortar shells at the enemy, the poor guy in the communications WarMek spends his game time making scanning rolls and passing on information to those doing the real combat.  Sure, this is a generalization, but in many ways it's the equivalent to the old D&D "somebody has to be the cleric" situation.  Every D&D party needs someone to heal up the others, and every WarMek party needs somebody to do the scanning on the enemy team.  Kind of boring, though, in my mind.  Many D&D campaigns tackle this problem with the NPC party cleric - I would have liked to see something of the sort addressed here as well.  (Maybe something as simple as every WarMek having computer-run scanning equipment on board that does the job automatically, feeding info to the pilot.  Each player makes his own scanning rolls every round in addition to the "fun stuff," like blasting enemy WarMeks with missile barrages and particle accelerator cannons.)The production standards in the book are both high and low in places.  The illustrations of the WarMeks themselves are absolutely fantastic, but really make the rest of the artwork pale in comparison - especially the cartoony PC illustrations in the front, which are really rather jarring since they seem so out of place.  The background of most pages is a futuristic-looking piece of computer equipment of some type (circuitry?) which looks appropriately high-tech, but is occasionally distracting as the shading lines up such that several words in a sentence are inadvertantly "highlighted" by dint of having a white background while the rest of the sentence is superimposed on gray.  Most of the tables are made to look like computer displays (a good idea), but the use of alternating white and green text was not so smart, given that the dark background makes the green text difficult to read and in many cases certain lines end up the wrong color.  (I can see what they were trying to do there: make rows of alternating color like is common in many tables, but the end result is not all it could have been.)  Like several other Mongoose products I have seen, this one could have used at the very least another round of proofreading, as there were several misspelled words, at least two sentences that got cut off in the middle, and a rather embarrassing shifting of the real-world "9-11" attacks on the US off by a year.  Also, when designing your mercenary company, the starting money is either $20 million or $25 million, depending on where on the page you read.  That probably isn't that big of a deal, though, as I assume that just as some people prefer starting a D&D campaign with, say, 5th-level PCs, others will want to start their Armageddon 2089 campaign with 10th-level PCs and a $100 million mercenary company (so they can jump straight into the higher-end WarMeks), so you could pretty much start with as much (or as little) money as you wanted.Some other odds and ends I wanted to point out in this review: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">While British spelling predominates throughout ("armour," "maneouver"), I notice that US naming conventions often take precedence when they conflict with the British words for the same thing.  For instance, on page 6 it recommends you'll need a pencil and an "eraser," not a "rubber."  (Good thing, too!)  In the section on vehicles, it refers to "trucks" instead of "lorries."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The names of corporations are often clever and thinly-disguised, real-world companies.  For instance, we learn that the most common computer system is "Portals" ("Windows") by "Verisoft" ("Microsoft").  There's an ecological group called "Greenwar" ("Greenpeace" apparently gone all military).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Believe it or not, there are several instances where your d12s will come into play!  Electro-Magnetic Pulse effects (page 124) and spraying an area with rapid-firing weapons (page 104) will both have you pulling out your underused d12s.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I just wanted to point out that it took me awhile, but that orange symbol on the front and back covers of the book, while they originally reminded me of nothing so much as a Mexican wrestler's mask, are actually the stylized letters "A," "T," and "W" - Armageddon Total War.  A very clever use of the fact that those three letters are vertically symmetrical.  Kudos to whoever came up with that.</li> </ul>Those of you wishing to start up an Armageddon 2089 campaign will be pleased to note there are already four accessory books available for the game line: War Machines of 2089, Behind Enemy Lines: Kazakhstan, Earth 2089, and Armoured Companies, with no doubt much more to follow.  It looks like Mongoose is putting a good deal of support behind this campaign, which is always a good thing to see.  They're also publishing Armageddon 2089 material in their new Signs & Portents magazine.For those who might balk a bit at the $44.95 price tag of this book, think of it this way:  everything you need to play the game is included - in many ways, this is the equivalent of the D&D Player's Handbook (PC creation rules), Dungeon Master's Guide (combat rules), and Monster Manual (WarMek stats) all rolled in to one.  Of course, you also need some parts of the Player's Handbook to play Armageddon 2089 since it's a d20 game, but if you don't already have it you can probably download the appropriate bits from the SRD, and page 7 tells you specifically what "bits" you need: character creation basics, abilities, classes (up to the description of the Barbarian), skills (up to the description of individual skills), feats (up to the description of individual feats), and combat (ignoring the magic stuff).Overall, this looks like an excellent adaptation - in as "realistic" a style as possible - of the combat mecha genre to the d20 system.  I can't wait to scrounge up some players and give it a whirl myself.</blockquote>

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