Player's Handbook · Chapter 1

Welcome to Mercenary Mech Warfare

Welcome to Mercenary Mech Warfare, a roleplaying game with no player-rolled dice, no statistics and no arithmetic. Everything your pilot is, and everything your mech is, is written down in words, and everything that happens follows from those words.

You are an elite mercenary. You fly a heavy mech, you take contracts nobody else will touch, and you get paid in salvage and reputation. There is nothing for you to roll, nothing to add up and nothing to look up on a table — the only dice in the game are an optional, GM-only roll behind the screen to randomize wandering encounters. You say what your pilot does. The Game Master tells you what happens.

Your character is two linked files.

	What it holds
The Pilot	Concept, Background, Callsign, Abilities, Gear, Condition
The Mech	Frame, Role, Component loadout, Heat, Structure

The Pilot is the person in the cockpit. The Mech is the machine they fly. When the cockpit door closes, they are one character.

This book teaches you to play. The next chapter builds your pilot and your mech, and the ones after cover Abilities, hardware, how actions resolve, and what happens when machines get hurt.

Manual updated Aug 28, 2026.

Craft Text

Mercenary Mech Warfare

Mercenary Mech Warfare is a heavily modified version of Craft Text, a mostly diceless, statless roleplaying system. There is little arithmetic. A character is a concept, a background, a condition, a list of Abilities, and the Gear they carry; outcomes follow from those fictional facts.

Crafted by

@Slipstrider

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Versionv18

CreatedAug 22, 2026

UpdatedSep 4, 2026

Mostly Text-Only System

MINIMAL player rolled dice. No player numbers. Just what your character is.

Abilities are what let a pilot attempt what others cannot. Tech keeps a mech flying — repair, engineering, hacking and drones — Physical covers the body under stress, and General covers command, negotiation, professions and hard-won knowledge. Specialist disciplines push each field further, from ace piloting to chief engineering. Many form named chains, so Chef leads to Expert Chef and then to World Class Chef.

Equipment sits in one slot per body location, and each slot only offers gear that belongs there. There is no combat subsystem or advancement track because the Game Master handles both through the fiction rather than arithmetic.

Author's note

I recommend using GPT Image 2 for a consistent art style. If you don't care about the art, then switch styles or turn it off to conserve energy/credits.

Inside the World