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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9300556" data-attributes="member: 7044704">If you have $10 to spare and don't mind reading scans of books from 1995 (with a couple of missing pages no less - cripes, what clowns) I would recommend grabbing the <a href="https://www.wargamevault.com/product/304452/Mecha---Spirit-Warrior-Bundle" target="_blank">Mecha! + Spirit Warrior Empire bundle</a> from Wargames Vault.  The setting the original publisher (Seventh Street games, long defunct) developed for this set of mecha miniatures rules is one of the quirkiest things ever written, and even if you never use the actual minis game rules (which are fine, but not an RPG unless you count early Car Wars as an RPG) they offer a pretty good basic answer to how to suspend your disbelief and play a campaign of interstellar mecha warfare.  Precious few descriptions of the game online these days, but a Q&D synopsis would be like this:All the Aztec gods are actually a clan of nearly-godlike aliens who are fighting a war to the death with a bunch of their relatives to gain a reward from an even-more-godlike alien.  They're bound by completely arbitrary rules that are meant to keep from blowing up the universe and have to use merely-mortal proxies to do the fighting, equipped with (by their standards) crude technology like mecha suits and gigantic interstellar space-fold ships as transports.  The central clan of aliens originally recruited a bunch of Neanderthals from Earth as an army, but when their numbers started running low from casualties and they went back for more they discovered they were extinct (partly because they took so many in the first visit).  So instead the clan pretended to be gods and recruited a bunch of handy Aztecs, transporting them to a new homeworld and training them to use "warrior skins" (mecha) to fight the proxy species of other alien clans - and each other, because the competition makes them better fighters and the individual gods kind of hate each other and all want to be in charge of the clan.  Meanwhile the Aztecs are also still fighting Flower Wars with stone-age weaponry on their new planet because tradition and bloodthirsty stupid alien gods, that's why.  Most of their advanced tech is produced for them by the gods and their autofactories, and might as well be magic from their POV.  There's also a group of former Aztec neighbors who were recruited to hold off the Bad (well, Worse) Guy aliens while teh Aztecs were getting up to speed, and they've secretly interbred with some Neanderthals who escaped the war and hid out in asteroid lairs and actually sort of understand what's going on, and at least two different proxy-warrior species in the service of other almost-god-alien clans, one of which is supposed to be extinct...etc.Let's face it, just using mecha is already suspending enough disbelief to crush neutronium.  You might as well lean into it hard and have a gameable, tightly constrained interstellar war fought for the glory of horrible alien pseudo-gods by soldiers who mostly have no idea what's going on.  At the very least it's an entertainingly gonzo read and a good source of inspiration for doing something slightly less crazy as an RPG.  An inconceivably-far-future setting where they build war mecha solely because they look cool and fight their "wars" as much for entertainment as anything would be a decent approach - maybe all that counts is your side's ratings on the Pan-Galactic Streaming Network?  Trading godlike aliens for godlike AI viewers is so much more realistic...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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