The big potential project i keep coming back to is a sparked by the resistance mech game for a posthuman science-fantasy setting I've been playing with. It draws inspiration from toy franchises that held my imagination hostage as a kid and preteen/teen (Transformers and Bionicle primarily), but pushes the least marketable aspects (like the weird robo-spirituality and bio-organic conceptual stuff) to the forefront. I'm also really interested in mech media that doesn't so much blur the categories of pilot and robot as scramble them, really going into the goo and viscera without any gloves. The setting really congealed together when i examined the metaphor of piloting a mech as living in a symbiotic relationship with a larger creature, and asked myself how literal I could make it.

I originally envisioned this as a setting for Armor Astir, and went into some detail thinking about how the different Approaches of the game would translate to the setting. That conceptual architecture is what initially pushed me to look at resistance games as a place to start, as i found it to translate pretty smoothly into Domains and Resistances. The visceral, stress-based management of these games also fits quite well into a claustrophobic, alien atmosphere with a lot of potential for body horror and examinations of Bodies in general.

As it currently stands, there are three "Class" systems that you assemble in character creation, each tied to the three "stat" systems in sparked by resistance: Pilot, Mech, and Gestalt. Pilot, predictably, defines your pilot's role and is more focused on the character beat or story-driven aspects of the character(s) you'll be playing - as such, it's the main source of Skills and has a wide range of moves associated with it. "Mech" is, again as expected, focused on the Mech, which as the pilot's "armor," is the primary source of Resistances. It offers moves that are more focused on the material, physical capabilities that the players are able to exercise. "Gestalt," as im calling it for now, it is focused on relationship the between the mech and pilot. This is where the players' Domains are usually drawn from. It comes with a single signature move, as well as an experience track for earning advancements in the other two types of "Class."

What I mean by "relationship" in Gestalt is not limited to how the pilot feels about gettin' in that there robot. In this setting, the pilot may command their mech like a steed, infect and control their mech like a cordyceps, combine with their mech like a Headmaster from transformers or a Gunmen from Gurren Lagann, or be a swarm of individual entities that come together and form their mech like an extremely complicated Voltron. As players, your Gestalt will ideally be challenged and perhaps changed as the character progresses and encounters various forms of Fallout; you may lose some of your components, walk the delicate line between mutualism and parisitism, or suffer the ultimate trauma of losing either a mech or a pilot. This is where player advancement comes in, as a record of that shifting, ambivalent relationship.

I'm going to try and flesh each aspect out more in future posts as a sort of design log, though with life right now im not sure how frequent that will be. Right now it just feels good to get the core premise out of my head and onto a page somewhere!