When It Goes Wrong
Your mech is going to break. That is not a failure state; it is the middle of the game.
Damage and armour
Four kinds of damage: kinetic, explosive, energy and burn.
ARMOR subtracts from every incoming hit, 1 to 4. AP weapons and burn ignore it. RESISTANCE halves what is left.
Burn burns twice
Take burn and you immediately take that much damage, ignoring armour, and then you mark it. At the end of each of your turns, roll an ENGINEERING check: success clears all of it, failure deals that much damage again — and it stays marked.
Burn from new sources adds to the pile. It is the single most dangerous thing on a battlefield and players consistently underestimate it.
Heat
Heat is not damage. It is strain on the reactor.
At half your HEAT CAP you are in the DANGER ZONE, visibly — vents open, plating glowing. Some of your best gear only works from there, and that tension is intentional.
Go over your HEAT CAP and you overheat: 1 STRESS, an overheating check, and all your heat clears.
Structure — you do not die at 0 HP
Your mech has 4 STRUCTURE. At 0 HP it takes 1 structure damage, you roll on the structure table, your HP resets to full, and any excess damage carries over.
Roll 1d6 per point of structure damage marked and take the lowest:
| Lowest | Result |
|---|---|
| 5–6 | Glancing Blow — IMPAIRED until the end of your next turn |
| 2–4 | System Trauma — a mount's weapons or a system of your choice is destroyed |
| 1 | Direct Hit — stunned, or a HULL check for your life, or destroyed, depending on structure left |
| multiple 1s | Crushing Hit — destroyed |
Overheating works the same way against STRESS, and ends in a reactor meltdown that kills anyone inside.
Repairs
REPAIRS are your budget between trips to base.
In combat, STABILIZE spends 1 REPAIR to restore all your HP — and it is also how you clear heat, reload, put out burn, and strip a condition off yourself or somebody you are ENGAGED with. Learn it. It is the most useful action in the game.
Resting for an hour clears all heat, clears every status and condition on your mech, and restores half your pilot's HP. Then you may spend: 1 REPAIR for full HP or one destroyed system, 2 for a point of STRUCTURE or STRESS, 4 to rebuild a destroyed mech from its wreck.
A FULL REPAIR — ten quiet hours somewhere secure — restores absolutely everything, including your CORE POWER and every limited charge.
Dying
A destroyed mech is not a dead pilot. Pilots eject. Machines get reprinted, and you are licensed to print one at a time.
If your pilot does die, you decide whether to make someone new or bring them back as a subjectivity-override clone. The clone looks the same and carries an imprint of the memories and draws on them to act. It is not them. It is a very convincing amount of them, which is worse.