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The new edition of Heavy Gear starts off with the Third Edition Heavy Gear Player’s Handbook, a nice thick hardcover volume of 256 pages. Together with the SilCORE rules this book contains everything necessary to get started in the Heavy Gear universe. In fact, if you’re into d20, you won’t even need the rules - the revised DP9 lines are 100% OGL compatible, with stats for characters, equipment, weapons and vehicles presented for both formats.
The Player’s Handbook is basically a compilation of several books. It contains much of the background (including equipment) from the HG 2nd ed. rulebook, most of Life on Terra Nova 2nd ed., just about the complete HG Equipment Catalog, and a few bits from the Technical Manual and Duelist’s Handbook. This goes together with the Pod’s stated intention to boil down HG to a more compact format. The pre-3rd edition game line comprised about 60 different volumes (not including doubles that were updated from 1st to 2nd ed.) - a daunting number.
The first pages contain a number of charts taken from the 2nd ed. Rulebook: a map of the 10 human worlds, connected by a web of jump gates, one of the Terra Nova planetary system, and one of Terra Nova proper. The maps are exquisitely made, but unfortunately only represented in black and white (I recommend visiting the Pod’s website at http://www.dp9.com, where you can download the improved full-color maps for free as a PDF file!). Chapter 1 contains a short introduction to Terra Nova, mankind’s new home and the main setting of the game, including planetary basics and a very short history of mankind (as seen from the TN point of view) from the beginning of Earth’s new ice age to AD 6134 or thereabouts (TN 1934 - the present).
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 provide background information on the North, the South and the Badlands, respectively. This part has been taken over from Life on TN for the most, with some additions from the different League Books. The material is of high quality, informative and does its best to bring the complex and highly detailed world of TN to life. Every nation and city-state to found on the planet has a page or half a page giving an evocative description and some interesting details and hooks for potential adventures. At the end of each chapter you will find a few pages describing organizations of influence. If you want a more detailed look at the different leagues (nations) and their cultures, you will have to turn to the Heavy Gear companion, though. The Player’s Handbook only gives the bare essentials, but even so these three chapters take up nearly 100 pages, about a third of the whole book. There are one or two dangling references in this part (e.g. the Humanist Alliance section refers several time to Operation: Long Night, without once explaining the nature of this operation - looks like the cut & paste-demon has struck again), but otherwise quality is very high.
Chapter 5 deals with characters. Character generation rules have been completely omitted, saving space which is instead dedicated to presenting new skills and feats, mostly for d20, and 21 different character archetypes, nicely illustrated and with stats for both SilCORE and d20, and the new d20 classes to go along with them. The rest of this chapter is made up of information on the Northern Guard and Southern MILICIA, dealing with ranks, salary, recruitment etc.
Chapter 6 comprises about 150 page of equipment, clothing and weapons (lots of those, in keeping with the warlike nature of the background), basically the equipment section of the 2nd ed. HG rulebook with the HG Equipment Catalog added - a good thing, as you now got everything in one handy package. The major gripe with this chapter is the lack of editing. The editor seems to have simply cut & pasted, not caring about the different layouts and the slightly differing weapon stats. Players looking for the stats of the generic weapons presented at the beginning of each section will have to search a bit before they find them at the end of the chapter, and even then the number of shots each weapon can carry is missing from the SilCORE stats, old mistakes from the rulebook have not been corrected and in some cases been made worse (numbers referencing descriptions and illustrations for medical equipment are now *completely* wrong). Apart from that these small defects the chapter is a gold mine. Clothing, survival equipment, computers, tools, armor, surveillance equipment, communication equipment, and loads of guns - everything a gamer could ask for. And most of it is nicely illustrated to boot, the write-ups are well made and, of course, everything is dual-statted.
Chapter 7 deals with general technology, supplementing the old rulebook stuff with some choice additions from the 2nd ed. Technical Manual, including that splendid Jaguar Gear cutaway. Basic information is given on such topics as modern composite armor, sensors, weapons, engines, optical neural nets and so on. This chapter also contains the updated stats for the eight standard Gears and two standard Striders, half of them northern, the other half southern designs, again with splendid illustrations and dual stat blocks.
The remaining 18 pages are dedicated to Dueling and Khayr Ad-Din, the city of trash and Gear duels, providing new gamers with a setting so you can get started right away. Basic rules for tactical dueling are included as well. It seems the history of mankind in chapter 1 has been cut to make room for this. I just hope the missing historical bits will turn up in some other source books, for this has always been one of my favorite parts.
The book rounds up with character sheets for SilCORE and d20 (though the SilCORE sheet is the old 2nd ed. HG sheet - what gives?), a compact index and a timeline giving the milestones of the HG metaplot from 1935 to 1948. (By the way, the chesspiece system ranking characters according to their importance for the metaplot seems to have been abolished.)
All in all, the Third Edition Heavy Gear Player’s Handbook is good value for money if you’re new to the game or don’t have a complete collection. In my opinion it’s worth having even if you want to just upgrade to the new edition. It contains everything of importance in one handy package, and the hardcover and binding are of good durable quality, as far as I can tell. There are a few instances where the old cut & paste has gone wrong (for example, take a look at the small white print near the bottom of the front cover...), but these are very minor annoyances. In my opinion, Heavy Gear is still one of the best roleplaying games around, and this book is well worth its money.
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