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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 9704242" data-attributes="member: 63">I've been bit by the BattleTech bug.I got back into the game 9 months ago. I painted some <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/battletech/comments/1l3k1qm/crossover_lance_for_weekend_tournament_battletech/" target="_blank">minis</a>, played in a tourney, read some of the cringey old novels (and one good one). And now I want to do my own mech thing, not in the BattleTech universe, but more a near-future techno-thriller with mech combat action scenes.Care to help me out?The elevator pitch is that it's the year 2050, there's a war on, armored walking combat mechs are newly introduced on the battlefield, and an arms company's propaganda AI has been tasked with persuading the public to think mechs are cool and effective so the company can rich selling them to the military. The AI becomes obsessed with the player characters' squad of mech pilots and works to make them famous heroes, even at the expense of the broader military objectives. Throughout a series of missions that become increasingly bizarre, the group will work out what's going on and have to use the very tools it gave them so they can destroy it.Think Phantom of the Opera crossed with the novel Daemon.I need to do a lot of work to flesh the idea out. What am I saying the setting is like in 2050? Where's the war? I know I want the arms company to be called Rampant, which is a nod to the Bungie game Marathon, where AI that starts to go crazy is called 'rampant.'Player characters are really a big thing I need to figure out. I think it'll be boring if they're all just soldiers who all get along and obey the chain of command, but how do you justify in a war having multiple people from different organizations each showing up with multi-billion-dollar combat vehicles and working together? I can maybe make it work by starting the campaign when some disastrous battle gone wrong results in the chain of command breaking down and units from multiple loosely-allied factions have to team up. But then why would they stay together afterward? Just for the sake of war PR, after they have a great victory?Who are they: soldiers, test pilots, stars of an arena mech combat league, etc? Do I want any anime-style tropes of people bonding with their mechs, feeling like they are a chosen one (even if that is later revealed to be a narrative created by the AI (named ERIK, after the Phantom: Exalting Rampant's Ingenuity Kinetically)?What are the opposing factions? I would want some sort of recurring villain - maybe an enemy commander, or even the strategic AI that coordinates the opposing army's strategy. And there'd need to be characters within Rampant whom the party can work with or see as enemies. The combat scenarios I think are comparably easy for me to come up with. I've got a ton of ideas that I think would be fun and let the players use their mech's tech in novel ways, so the fights are less about dealing damage and more about solving puzzles and outwitting the other side.But what are they doing out of combat? Do they get swept up in spycraft? Do they have to go on press junkets? Is there some R&R time between big military operations when they can maybe even go to peace summits (which will fail), which give them a chance to meet NPCs on the opposing side, and get slipped information that hints that ERIK is up to no good?Any ideas will be appreciated. Even if I don't use them, they can get some juices flowing. What would you want to see in a mech campaign?</blockquote>

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