Lock N’ Load: Weapons and Tactics is the weapons supplement for Battlelords of the 23rd Century. But even if you’re not playing Battlelords, if you want a huge variety of sci-fi weapons, this is the best I’ve personally seen.
1. All In A Day’s Work
Of all the fiction I have read in Battlelords books to date, this is easily the best. The story is actually engaging and fun to read. It also does a fairly decent job of showcasing some of the more popular weapons in the book. It’s still not Hemingway, but it’s not bad.
2. Weapons Tables
Most books would not bother with a separate chapter just for weapons tables. But then, most books are not Lock N’ Load: Weapons and Tactics. This section is actually a big chapter – more than 20 pages of tables listing hundreds of different weapons. Not all of these are guns, either – there are explosives, grenades, hand weapons and satellites. This staggering quantity of tables is quite handy when trying to pick out the right tool for the job, especially when the job involves killing a lot of people.
3. Weapons Descriptions
This chapter is the bulk of the book. Nearly 100 pages detail a range of weapons, from hand axes and caltrops to chain guns and omega cannons. Each section includes some notes on tactics, which help the reader understand more about the weapons and when it might be a good idea to have them. Because there are so many types of weapons here, the next few paragraphs will mention a few highlights, just to give you a taste for the variety.
After a quick run through archaic hand weapons and powder weapons (like machine guns and six-shooters), the book moves into attractor/repressor weapons. These interesting weapons can largely be used to immobilize enemies without causing damage. Of course, if one member of your team is holding the giant lizard in place with one of these large guns, the rest of the team is going to have a lot easier time plastering him with plasma cannons and sticky grenades.
Carousel guns use magnetism to accelerate heavy slugs toward the target. They take a few seconds to charge up to maximum damage capacity, but properly charged, these are exceptionally effective guns.
The chain gun section is followed by the section on chemical and biological weapons. These insidious weapons can cause everything from encephalitis to dehydration. The tactics explains that using these weapons is a good way to be hunted like a mad dog.
Compact artillery can be transported to a battlefield without the normal retinue of supply vehicles, and can come in pretty handy when you need to blow the snot out of a particular location.
Disintegrators and EMP weapons do pretty much what they sound like, as do flamethrowers. The next really new weapons is the flux interference generator. These odd guns only affect flux shields, but since a flux shield can protect a target from your otherwise decimating attacks, the FIG might come in handy.
Frost guns are like the opposite of a flamethrower, and gauss weapons are fantastically accurate sniper weapons. Gravitational effect weapons are essentially gloves that can hurl targets into the sky, just to drop them when they get a few stories off the ground. Gravitational shears, on the other hand, are dastardly guns that emit a ray of gravity atop an anti-grav ray, effectively slicing in half anything they contact. Careful use is recommended around friends.
Thrown grenades, launched grenades, grenade launchers and grenade machine guns are all very cool, but pretty easily understood. Implosion field technology, by comparison, is weird. They basically bypass armor to drop a collapsing flux field around a target, smashing his tender bits.
Jammers are like the ultimate anti-weapon. Since nearly every firearm in this book depends on electronics, a jammer can render most foes completely unable to retaliate. They are a fantastic way to disarm large bodies of enemies.
Juicers are my favorite guns in the game. They are relatively archaic by the 23rd century, but still wicked awesome. They essentially wrap a slug in a field of plasma and turn the metal to ‘juice’ – thus the name.
Killer satellites, or K-Sats for short, are small spheroids capable of hovering around a battlefield and picking off enemies while their owners have martinis in their bunkers. Any good science fiction setting needs laser weapons, and Battlelords lets you choose between impact lasers, laser machine guns, blasters, and more. Mag guns fire magnetic rounds that stick to armor before committing some nefarious attack, like drilling through armor and injecting poison or just plain blowing up.
Micron weapons are the ultimate assassin’s tool. These small, easily-concealed weapons fire injections of nanoids into their targets, delivering anything from tracking devices to deadly poisons. They are also highly illegal without a permit.
Several pages of mines are followed by several pages of missiles, which are followed by modern hand weapons. These modern hand weapons are darn cool, from hopped-up recoilless hammers to light swords.
The section on mortars is followed by neuro cannons – brain scramblers that can drop a target without a fuss, and may even leave your victims intact long enough to be kidnapped.
Omega cannons are the most common heavy weapons in Battlelords. These huge guns are capable of firing flux barriers that do massive concussion damage, so that targets feel as though they have been hit be a falling building.
Personal nuclear weapons and plasma cannons are followed by pulse cannons and specialized weapons like tasers and sonic disruptors. Thermatics are weapons that superheat targets, cooking targets in their armor.
Thunderbolt generators are awesome guns – they fire bolts of lightning. Web generators glue targets in place, and the chapter is finished with several pages of accessories and ammunition options.
4. Tactics
This short essay on tactics would only be appropriate in a game like Battlelords, because most games just don’t spend as much time focusing on large-scale tactical combat. Tips for deployment, entrenchment and urban warfare are all interesting, but would be largely academic if it were not for the intensely combat-oriented theme of the game.
5. Optional Rules
In case you desperately need to run a Battlelords game with even more rules, this short chapter provides optional rules for displacement fields, energy consumption, and knockback. These rules can make a combat game more interesting, or they might just slow you down and annoy you. They are optional, however, so use them if you like them.
Observations
As with every book in the Battlelords line, the illustrations and design are impeccable. The layout is thoroughly readable and enjoyable, and the art is just too cool. The cover is evocative, and the technical drawings of weapons are useful.
As with the first Lock N’ Load book, the writing is vastly improved from the core book. It is still a little immature or overly personal at points, but it is quite readable.
Summary
You know that scene in Matrix where Neo says he needs guns – lots of guns? He didn’t need those racks of M-16s. He needed this book. There are so many guns in this book, a character can equip himself for literally any kind of combat mission. Some might be a little esoteric, but it is impossible to deny that these are cool. If you play any science fiction game and want to spice up your armory, consider picking up a copy of this book. It also makes a splendid companion to the first in the series (Lock N’ Load: Armor, Equipment and Cybernetics).
Substance: 4 – Holy Moses, there are a lot of guns in here.
Style: 4 – The writing is tolerable, the layout is great, and the art is tons of fun. About the best interiors you could ask without full color.
