The New Breed

He Who Laughs Last...

Dayvid Curumbu and three of his friends sat at a table in a corner of the tavern. Three southern Gear pilots had just walked in, their backs to the sun, their shadows stretching across the worn wooden floor. Some tables went quiet, observing the newcomers through the tobacco smoke which filled the room; some other tables simply ignored the Southerners and kept on arguing, smoking, drinking, playing chobba with marked decks or rolling loaded dice around the carpa table. The strangers walked straight to the bar and ordered the most expensive drinks they could find, hoping to ingratiate themselves with the bartender - Dayvid knew it never worked, but they did not.

"Your turn," grumbled Maria, shifting uncomfortably in a chair which was obviously too small for someone of her size. "We don't got all day, y'know."

Dayvid nodded and smiled, careful to keep his eyes on Maria and off her lovely sister Mandie. He returned his attention to his cards, making a quick mental calculation. "No more cards," he announced "I'm set."

The Southern soldiers at the counter were already getting into trouble. One was showing off his wallet by offering drinks to strangers around him. Another was trying to hit on one of the waitresses. A third was seemingly trying to worm some information out of the bartender, who just couldn't care less about this type of customer. It was bound to explode, sooner or later...

Edgar handed everyone the cards they needed. Dayvid took advantage of Maria's distraction and winked at Mandie, who blushed and looked in the direction of the Southern troops. Finally, Maria noticed her sister's embarassment.

"What's going on?" she asked.

Dayvid chuckled. "Looks like Mandie here likes the uniforms on those Southerners..." he commented candidly, returning his attention to the game and ignoring Mandie's half-hearted protest.

Maria got up abruptly, throwing her cards on the table and pushing back her chair. She strode with determination towards the closest Southern soldier, scowling. "Hey, you!" she called out. "Whatcha lookin' at?"

One of the Southerners, a young caporal, turned around, genuinely puzzled. "Me? I... Nothing, why?" He then noticed Mandie at Dayvid's table, and his eyes lit up.

Maria was fuming. "So! You LIKE my sister? Think you're good enough for her?!?"

The caporal shook his head vehemently, sensing he was getting into slippery terrain. No sense getting into trouble with the locals. "No, not at all!" he exclaimed, ignoring his buddies' snickers behind him.

Maria grabbed the soldier by the throat. "So! You DON'T like my sister? Think she's not good enough for you?!?"

The caporal was young, but not stupid. This was leading to a fight, no matter what he did, and he might as well get the first punch. He swung at Maria with all his strength. She took it on the chin and looked back at him, her eyes dark, her knuckles cracking and itching for action. "My turn, soldja boy," she muttered.

From his vantage point, Dayvid leaned his chair against the wall and smiled. "Damn, but this is a good Summer..."

1.1 About This Book

This book serves several purposes. Unlike most of our other products, which have very specific and specialized goals, the Activision Game Sourcebook - as we call it in-house - aims at fulfilling several expectations which our customers repeatedly voiced to us. The first goal is to provide background information for those people who enjoyed the Heavy Gear computer game and would like to learn more about the various individuals involved. Several Activision people have been working hand in hand with our own staffers to ensure continuity between both products, and to guarantee that the transition between the paper game and the computer game would be seamless. As a result, if you have played (or are planning to play) Heavy Gear on your computer, you will find within these pages more background details on the characters you have learned to love (or hate), as well as a wealth of information on the ships involved in both sides of the struggle. You will learn, among other things, that the Vigilance and the Draco have already met, and that the results of the battle were inconclusive. The computer game picks up two cycles later and brings the events to their conclusion.

The present manuscript also serves another purpose. For months now, several customers have swamped our mailboxes with request for proper "in the trenches" campaign support. While we have made every effort in the past to include scenario and campaign seeds in our products, they still required the Gamemaster to do quite a bit of the work, including creating NPCs, detailing specific events, setting up tactical scenarios, etc. This book goes one step further and provides you with 16 RPG scenarios and eight tactical scenarios (half for a Northern campaign, half for a Southern campaign). The scenarios alternate between RPG and tactical, offering a perfect balance between both and allowing gamers to do an all-RPG campaign, an all-tactical campaign, or a hybrid version that caters to both clienteles. Furthermore, the scenarios from the North are connected to those from the South, so that a clever (and dedicated) Gamemaster could run almost everything at once and watch the story unfold as a well-crafted movie.

This product, aside from being a prelude to the events in the computer game, is also the perfect tool for a beginning Gamemaster to start a Heavy Gear campaign. The environment aboard the landships, whether North or South, is perfect to keep moderate control over the Player Characters' movements, and provides the GM with the perfect excuse to take the heroes where the story happens. For many Gamemasters and Players, this is the best book to purchase after the rulebook and Life on Terra Nova.

Lastly, this book was written to finally give our customers what they have been demanding from us during the last two years: landships. While we could not include landship creation rules due to space considerations, this is a taste of things to come. There will be official landship books in the future which will detail at length all that anyone needs to know to create a landship and to use them in RPG or tactical campaigns.

Readers may notice that the approach and the writing style in this book is very different from our usual material. You will find that we talk directly to the reader, use contractions and in general have adopted a more "directive" attitude. This is in part due to the fact that this is an introductory book aimed to satisfy two different groups of clientele. We hope it will serve its purpose well, and will encourage computer gamers to look at the paper game, and vice versa. For that reason, we felt compelled to modify our writing style significantly.

1.1.1 The making Of

Doing a book such as this one requires a degree of attention and organization which had never been necessary for our previous books. To our knowledge, there has never been a book in this industry published as a prelude to a computer game, and which required two teams to be in such constant communication on an almost-daily basis.

Officially, Dream Pod 9 is the custodian of the existing Heavy Gear universe storyline. On the other hand, we didn't want Activision to feel overly constrained in doing the computer game, aware as we were that the latter and the paper RPG/tactical games have specific requirements and restrictions which are often unavoidable. We did our best to give Activision as much breathing space as they needed, and to nonetheless incorporate the new material they created into our own universe. There were a few meetings where we bounced ideas around, until we collectively agreed that the coming Interpolar War was probably the best time frame to set the computer game.

Activision and Dream Pod 9 have great plans for the computer game, including moving some of the storyline forward (at last!) and introducing recurring heroes whose adventures fans will enjoy following from one game to the other.