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Well, I finally killed the DC Heroes campaign. It took me a couple of hours to work up the nerve to tell the players that I wanted to move on to something else. It was easier when Donald couldn't come up with a character. I've been more and more fixated on GURPS 4E after it was announced, and that's what I want to use. It's not coming out for another couple of months at least (August is the official release date, though I'm getting the limited edition hardcovers which will probably be shipped late July).

So, finally it is time to run GURPS, which I've been working up to doing since I started Game Mastering six years ago. For the first campaign I'm going to run BattleTech in much the same style as my first BattleTech campaign. All these ideas are swarming in my head, but I need to make sure that I keep the campaign simple. Don't want to overdo it.

The setting will be 3038 or so. The Free Rasalhague Republic was formed in 3034 and the resulting Ronin War has already come and gone. It's about a year before the Federated Suns invades the Draconis Combine in the War of '39. I believe the Federated Commonwealth has not been formed yet.

Duchess Selena Kyle still rules Altair. The Near Earth Defense Association (have to change it to a better name) is probably about 5 or 6 worlds strong by now. Most of the previous PCs are still around in the upper echelons, though perhaps the new PCs will meet an occasional Old Guard or two.
As I currently envision it, the PCs are new graduates of the Altairan Military Academy. They'll be posted to a new unit, Princess Rianna's Royal Lancers (Rianna being Selena's daughter, though I haven't decided who Selena married). Actually the unit is the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The first big arc being rescuing Princess Rianna, for which action their unit will be renamed.

Video game format. It'll be mostly Mech combats with cut scenes in between for the roleplaying. I'm thinking 75% hot Mech on Mech action and 25% out of Mech interacting or doing special ops type things. There are some MechWarrior adventures that were published, I'll have to see if I can use one of them. But mostly I still want to do Mech combats which are easy to do and fun to play.

I'm going to use regular BattleTech rules for the Mech combat, with GURPS skills replacing the standard Gunnery/Piloting skills (use BattleTech modifiers at x2). I've been reading MechWarrior 3E and it looks like a nice system. I especially like the character generation Life Paths, so I'm thinking of letting the players use the MW 3E character generation rules then converting their characters to GURPS terms. Which means I need to work on conversion tables.

This will be a night game so I only expect Donald, Sweet, Woo and Fulton to play. I'm not too sure if Shannon could handle it, as he tries to avoid BattleTech. I'm sure Rowe would like to play and maybe Pick too but not sure how I can swing that without alienating Shannon. In any case, four is a good number of players for me.
Copyright (c) 2004 Kevin C. Wong
Page Created: June 13, 2004
Page Last Updated: June 13, 2004