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Background
Just before the calendar hit 6000 AD, humanity was searching for a way to restore their kind. After a string of great disasters beginning with a solar flare in 5200 AD, the remnants of the human race were doomed to stay within the confines of domed cities, the last of their havens on what was now a barren rock, assailed by harsh winds and deadly radiation. In one of these domes, however, a team of genius scientists led by the eccentric Havyar Hrm was getting ready to correct the mistakes of previous generations.
Thanks to advances in robotic technology, the group of visionaries would send a machine through time, a breakthrough in advanced engineering programmed with all of the historical knowledge known to mankind and an overriding goal to protect all organic life on the planet. Despite the objections of one of the scientists, this ‘Savior Unit’ was projected to 5198 AD in an effort to keep the damage that would be inflicted almost 24 months later to a minimum.
However, chronoportation is an extremely difficult field of study and the team members inadvertently chose a period of chronal instability, scrambling the robot’s programming to the point of changing its artificial personality completely and screwing up the year in which it appeared. With the digits changing place, what was once called the last hope of mankind was now ready to reappear in the year of 1985 as one of its fiercest enemies with one overriding command: to destroy all organic life on earth.
Review
Book of the Machine is one of the first full-color, hardcover supplements for the Hero System. Released around the time of Gen Con 2009 and just before Hero System Sixth Edition rolled off the presses, it pouts a Fifth Edition logo on the back cover, but is nonetheless compatible with the new version of the RPG with only minor modifications. Benefiting from Cryptic Studios’ Champions Online massively-multiplayer role-playing game, Book of the Machine looks great, but it reads very differently from previous Hero
products as well.
We’ve written many times before that Steven S. Long seems to be one of the most prolific RPG writers of the moment, possibly writing just as many pages a month as Kevin Siembieda does for Palladium, but mostly Steven has always concentrated on game mechanics, character write-ups and ingenious ways to use or tweak the Hero System, which still stands as the best (but not the easiest), most flexible universal RPG systems out there. Sure, he has written up countless NPC histories, but this time the author takes a different approach, opting to tell the tale of Mechanon in a way that is reminiscent of a novel. Starting with Mechanon’s true origin, which is revealed here for the first time, Long takes the reader on a step-by-step chronological account of past events, most of which are tied to earlier Champions adventures and supplements, but with some modifications to satisfy Cryptic Studios and Champions Online players. Interspersed between the subchapters (each of which represents a decade) and the different sections (referring to more specific dates) are lavish illustrations and blue boxes containing Mechanon’s own status reports, alerts and tactical analyses.
All of this makes for a fun-to-read, very complete past history of Mechanon, who has been one of the main arch villains in Champions long run as an RPG ever since the game was first released. Still, while he’s always a guarantee for superb RPG supplements, Steven S. Long doesn’t have the sense of prose that colleagues like Robin D. Laws have, his writing being more functional and interesting than genuinely captivating. His short stories about Mechanon are an excellent resource, but never feel like they should be read within the covers of a great super hero novel.
It takes 42 pages, but in Chapter Two, An Enemy of Thousand Forms, Long allows himself to do what he does best: offer the reader a full description of Mechanon’s form and function (including such things as the transfer of his consciousness to a different model when his current body is being threatened, weapons, cyberkinetics, communications and his detachable head), the way his ‘mind’ works (basically, because his programming got screwed up during time travel, Mechanon wants to destroy all organic life on the planet, but some of his goals are subtly different and he might try to replace it with machine substitutes instead), weaknesses and, of course, statistics. No less than a dozen different stat blocks are offered (including separate ones for his detachable head), the most interesting of which is a spherical version of about 2 meters in diameter.
It gets even better when Steven S. Long comes up with versions of Mechanon that fit different genres: a Cyber-Mechanon for Cyber Hero, MechanoNet (a computer system) for Dark Champions, the seven-foot tall golem Meknon the Invulnerable for Fantasy Hero and Mechano N for Star Hero. Of course, in essence these character write-ups are superfluous, as just about everything in this supplement refers to the standard
Champions setting, but many players and game masters are bound to have several different Hero System genre books and such variant NPC’s are always fun to have.
Some of the most interesting NPC’s – especially illustration-wise come up in the third chapter, which is all about Mechanon’s robotic ‘lieutenants’, which don’t adhere to a strict hierarchy because they all have been constructed with a specific purpose in mind. The roster includes: AVAR-7 (which Mechanon stole from the reptilian Gadroon), Mechana (a female version of Mechanon, created during one of the periods in which Mechanon wanted to replace all organic life instead of just destroying it), Subedar (which specializes in blade combat), the awesome-looking Victrian Walker (which looks like an AT 43-model, but which begs the question why Mechanon would come up with a model without manipulative limbs, however short a time he might have considered it) and the Mark XII Computational Unit (a sentient supercomputer that is able to multitask).
There’s other robots as well, many of which can be summoned through Mechanon’s ability to manipulate technology. Case in point: the cool-looking Industrial Summoned Robot, which is made out of manufacturing, construction, or heavy lifting equipment. We are offered a slew of machines here, such as combat units, a giant robot, sensory drones, a host of robots styled after animals and a stealth android that looks like a human. There’s a lot of variety to be found within this chapter and it’s hard to think a game master might need even more different shapes and forms. The chapter concludes with three vehicles: an attack craft, a bombardment craft and a stealth craft.
Another great thing about Book of the Machine: the write-ups of Mechanon’s headquarters, the locations of which have, for various reasons (which aren’t necessarily realistic), remained secret so far. There’s the primary headquarters Alpha-2 on the Pacific seabed, the manufacturing facility Alpha-5 in the Sahara Desert, the small Alpha-8 on the surface of the moon, Beta-32 in the northern Causasus Mountains, Beta-41, which is hidden in an artificial iceberg in the Arctic, and Cislunar Mechanon, an experimental form of Mechanon which orbits the Earth. All of these bases ‘feel’ like they definitely belong to an artificial being, as none of them include life support systems. Because of the fact that all of these facilities use some standardized systems and lay-outs, Long is able to offer up detailed descriptions for the most important ones. The blueprints look great and the author comes up with several neat ideas that should inspire all but the most cynical of game masters.
Book of the Machine ends with about 17 pages of advice for game masters. Long writes about Mechanon’s tactical analyses of the most important organizations in the Champions Universe, his relationships with some of the major NPC’s (the most exciting of which is the one with Captain Chronos), possible coalitions, schemes and plot seeds. There’s also a discussion on how to include Mechanon in your campaign and more information on Project Clockwork, which was formed to combat the threat Mechanon definitely poses to the world.
Despite a few minor flaws, Book of the Machine is a beautiful-looking, very complete supplement and an invaluable resource for game masters who would like to include Mechanon in their campaign, or who want to tweak the standard history or descriptions a little in order to fit their own settings. We loved it and so will you. ‘Nuff said.
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