(Header image from the Salvage Union Quickstart by Aled Lawlor & Panayiotis Lines, published by Leyline Press)

Salvage Union is about 2 things: Mechs and resource management.

MECHS

Ahhh yeaahh this is why you get into this game. Everyone wants to play a big ass robot running around a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It is an innate human desire to get into a big robot fight a kaiju with a massive sword. Gundam, transformers, mech warrior, real steel – all media that teach us that the best version of us is the version of us piloting a ginormous machine smashing other machines or kaiju ass. WE LIKE MECHS.

Does Salvage Union do mechs good? You bet it does. The game itself is very simple, the resolution mechanic is a single d20 roll, no modifiers, with various static bands of success and failure. The real crunch comes in building and customizing your mech with cool junk you find while out scouring the wilderness. The mechs are vastly different from each other, each with its own niche and drawbacks.

One of our mechs was built purely to crush the enemies and protect the flock: high structure, high damage output. The second was an engineer, able to take apart or repair mechs and swap out systems and modules on the fly out in the field. The last was just a big flying platform that the pilot stood on and shot things from miles away with their anti-matter sniper rifle: quick, fragile, and deadly.

How do you make your mech into your mech though? Systems and modules! Strap a giant green lazer onto its head to annihilate your enemies from above, or put some dozer blades onto its knees to kick all that boring rubble out of the way as you sprint to that yummy junk in the next region. You can also make your hull magnetic! Who needs arms for carrying your precious salvage when instead you can just stick the cargo on your back and know it is safe and sound, held on by one of the fundamental forces of nature. Eat your heart out Isaac Newton!

Pilots

So the mechs are cool, but I bet you are wondering if it’s cool to be outside of your mech. Well…. It’s fine. No one is playing this game just as the pilots, but there are rules for it. They give you interesting mechanics for both in and out of your mech including letting you and a companion act first in combat, workout exactly where a mech should be targeted to critically damage it, or give an instant rapport with any errant wastelanders you find while out on your journey.

I think really the main purpose of rules for out-of-mech pilots is to give context to really how big and powerful your mechs are and how screwed you are without your mech. Most pilot sized weapons can’t even hurt a mech, and if you get stuck in a radiation storm without your mech, you are going to die.

Pilots make the mechs feel massive. The make it clear that mechs are your only lifeline to surviving in this hostile wasteland. You need your mech. It is an extension of you, and should be treated as such.

Resource management

I cannot stand resource management in most games. If you have me counting arrows, I am out. I refuse to play spell casters in 90% of traditional high fantasy games because I cannot be bothered to ration out my spell slots when I could be playing “big lady with sword” who is equally effective in the last combat of the day as she was in the first.

But in this game? That shit slaps.

Remember all those cool systems and modules and pilot abilities I mentioned before? You don’t have to roll for those, they just work. Assuming, of course, that you have the necessary resources (action or energy points) to use them. It is so empowering for the engineer to just tell the gm, “Hey! I use my pilot ability and sever this behemoth’s core module” and it just happens. Suddenly this very dire fight is over in an instant after a genius maneuver, and nary a single die was rolled.

“But birdmilk! That’s bullshit! That removes all tension from the game.” No. You are wrong and it is awesome. It rewards those strokes of genius and guarantees your characters will be good at what they are supposed to be good at. And importantly, they can’t do those game changing maneuvers all the time. The timescale is different from a game like dnd. There aren’t short rests. Regaining ability points takes weeks. Once you use a resource, you better not need it for the rest of a salvage mission. And if you run out, or push your mech too hard, you might just fuckin die.

Importantly, this dance of resource management is true for all the mechs in one way or another. There is no fighter equivalent that can just go all day. Every choice is a group decision of “Can our mechs make it to the next hot spot? Even if we collect the salvage we came for, will we have enough to make it back to the crawler in one piece?”

Some mechs can move resources from one pool to another, like the engineer fixing structure points at the cost of ability points, but thermodynamics always gets it cut and you will run out of resources eventually.

The scarcity is genuinely scary. Even time is a precious resource! My players defeated a band of roving nanites just in time for a radiation storm to come rolling in and they had to act fast. If they tried to get all the way back to their mobile base, the scout rig would have certainly been destroyed in the storm, potentially taking the scout with it. Plus they just found 70 units of high grade salvage but only had room for 18 to carry between them, and would have lost a third of that if they lost the scout’s mech. It was trade offs all the way down!

I think the designers absolutely nailed the mechanics of scarcity, which feels extremely appropriate for a game that promises the experience of being a wasteland future junker with a big ass mech.

-birdmilk

Acknowledgments

Get Salvage Union here.

Thank you to my delightful players: Wonderbrain as the pragmatic scout who could not roll above a 10, eyvindur as the brawler who never backed down from a fight (even against a bio-titan), and Zee as the engineer that kept everyone alive.

Thank you to Panayiotis Line and Aled Lawlor, and their fantastic team at Leyline Press who put together a game that did exactly what it set out to do, which is no easy feat, including a quickstart that has more than enough free content to run this game for months.

As always, thank you to kraftpaperhat for designing the Secret Sunday Sampler brand and logos. In addition, a thank you to Quintin Smith for making Quinns Quest and its associated discord, where I met all of these wonderful people and get to run all these games.

No AI was used to write this blog (Not by choice. I asked and it said no.)

P.S. Combat is not the point of this game. This is a game about salvage and resource management. The combat is fine, but meant to be quick and dangerous and force you to make decisions about when and how to use your resources. If you want a combat centric mech game, consider lancer. Or buy both games and smash them together into the high scarcity high combat mech game of your dreams. The world is a computer and you are the processor (Does this metaphor work? I don’t understand computers).

P.P.S. This game requires the players have a base and I LOVE that. All games need that. It gives you a place for the players to make home, it gives consistent NPCs for the players to interact with, and it gives you a big old knife to stab in their back if they are being naughty.