Heavy Gear Leaguebook
The Leagues of Terra Nova are not just collections of city-states in a former space colony, each one has its own identity. In this review, I will cover four of the seven books, looking in turn at a democracy with a religious bent, a crumbling space-feudal despotism, a capitalistic society with asian overtones, and a benevolent totalitarian state.
Terra Nova and Heavy Gear
Terra Nova is the main world for Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear game. A short intro for those who have not heard of it: the planet has two fertile polar hemispheres separated by an equatorial desert belt. Humans came from earth, and established settlements. When the homeworld retreated, some colonists stayed behind. Initially, they formed independent city states, but commerce and defense required a higher level of integration. City states banded together to form leagues, which are today united by a common culture and outlook, and can be compared to nations. The process did not stop, leagues grouped themselves into two Alliances on the northern and southern part of the globe, and even they seemingly cannot manage to coexist peacefully.
The world is described in a sourcebook of its own, Life on Terra Nova. For those who want to get more information, there is a series of seven Leagebooks. Of these, I own four, which I am going to review here:
Northern Lights Confederacy - Land of the Prophet (NL)
Eastern Sun Emirates - Blood and Revolution (ESE)
Mekong Dominion - Land of the Dragon (MD)
Humanist Alliance - Utopia under Siege (HA)
Layout
All the books conform to Dream Pod 9's high standards. Broad margins in the Heavy gear pattern and clear divisions between sections provide a clean and crisp look. This leaves less space for text, but the Pod makes up for this by using a fairly small typeset.
Writing is crisp and to the point. There are no meandering personal narratives, no useless asides and no deliberate vaguenesses. The authors do not explore every detail, of course, but you get the feeling that they tell you everything they consider important. They do not hide secrets. Well Done!
Art consists of gray-scale reproductions of computer-generated images. We are shown city vistas, action scenes and character portraits. I would have liked some more depictions of everyday life, but that is a matter of taste.
Organization
The books are organized in a uniform way. They all feature the following chapters:
Introduction (1 page)
League Overview (9 to 11 pages) covers geography, history and economics. The chapter usually does a good job of setting the stage. Special attention is paid to the formation of each League and to modern history. The one thing that is sorely lacking from each book is a map. You get one in the main book, of course, but at least I do not always have that at hand.
Internal politics (13 to 17 pages) discusses the workings of the state and introduces political parties, social castes, secret societies, business corporations and organized crime, as appropriate to the League. This is the meaty chapter: it introduces the major players, their current concerns, important personalities and the network of influence and allegiance.
Foreign Relations (5 to 7 pages) is next. This chapter does not add much to the facts that are known from the history and economy sections.
Regions (25 to 29 pages, 49 in NL) covers the individual city states that make up the leagues. Each one gets a writeup of 2 to 4 pages, featuring an overview, a sketch of a map, some points of interest, and some paragraphs on local concerns, important characters, special events and regional produce. In most cases, the authors succeed in creating unique cities that both fit in the framework of their league and stand out from it for their peculiarities. Some descriptions left me with immediate campaign ideas. However, if a GM wants to focus a game on one the cities, he will have to do most of the fleshing out by himself. The books provide rough sketches at best, detailing the most fun aspects and leaving out the rest.
Culture and Society (9 to 17 pages) discusses national character, religion, customs, lifestyle, arts and entertainment, and technology. This chapter is an odd mixture of slightly tedious elaborations on the obvious, and interesting tidbits.
The last major chapter is Gamemaster Resources (19 to 21 pages). It covers character design and appropriate campaign themes. Region-specific equipment is introduced, mostly survival gear and special weapons for the local police force. We get a couple of one-page campaign ideas, new character stereotypes and some fully developed NPCs of modest to strong influence. The leaders of the Leagues are not detailed.
New Creatures get a chapter of their own in all books apart from ESE (5 pages). It boils down to 10 new animals, some of them just variants of established creatures such as the Iguana or Hopper. Not that useful to me.
In addition, each book features 7 to 8 one-page vignettes of game fiction opening each chapter. Most of them are actually helpful in establishing the Look and Feel of the League in question.
There is a one page Preface, a detailed table of contents and an index.
In total, ESE and MD clock in at 96 pages, NL and HA have 128.
The books
Finally, it is time to look at each single book:
Northern Lights
NL is about the leading League of the north: the Northern Lights Confederacy is a parliamentary demoracy, with a population that still embraces the somewhat anachronistic ethos of the frontier days - honesty, self-righteousness, cultural solipsism. Religion is pretty big, the Revisionist faith has a strong but waning influence on policy and society. Behind the scenes, a bitter struggle is fought between proponents of a purely secular state and those who want to keep the church in power.
Highlights of the book include the holy city of Sorrento and its guardians, the fighting monks of the Dorothean order - effectively some kind of religious police; the figures of the stern religious leader and his more shadowy assistant; the Prophet's shield, a secretive network dedicated to increasing the power of the church; Kenema Gear police; the underground war between the Forzi and Kolson crime cartells; and Valeria-PortAurora, the twin city of high policy and low life.
Overall, I found NL to be a highly convincing portrait of a colonial society that has passed the age of the frontier, but not fully realized this.
Eastern Sun Emirates
ESE describes a League governed by ancestral nobility. The population is split into three castes: slavelike workers, a beaurocracy, and the filthy rich and decadent emirs. The hereditary leader of the League, the Patriarch, is a madman, and a couple of vassals have started a rebellion that has lead to civil war. The land is in a state of turmoil, the old order is coming down, and excesses of all kind are commonplace.
The ESE book is full of contrast, and far more over the top than any other Heavy Gear book I've seen. There are blood sports and manhunts, but also age-old philosophies. The treacheries and intrigues of some emirs contrast with the nobility of others. Grandiose palaces cast a shadow on hovels and slums. The emirates have both wild, untamed swamps, and serene, grandiose mountains.
In the end, I was vaguely dissappointed. I have a certain soft spot for feudalistic space-settings (Dune, the Fading Suns), but I never found them plausible. ESE provides yet another variant of the theme, but is not more convincing than the others. Apart from that, the book just seemed not to expand the material described in the basic books as much as the other Leaguebooks did. There were not enough new ideas. However, this is just based on personal expectations: ESE is a good and thorough book on the collapse of a rather exotic society.
Mekong Dominion
MD transfers modern-day asia into the world of Heavy gear. We have wild, bandit-infested jungles, timeles villages of rice-growing peasants and modern cities that are at the industrial forefront of the world. Outlook is a mixture of traditional asian perspectives (as perceived by us westerners, though) and radical application of market principles. The first ingredient is evident in religions, customs and the importance of personal honour. The second manifests itself in the political system, where citizens and corporations are actually shareholders of the League.
Highlights include the power gambit between the two leading corporations and their respective taipans; the underworld with jungle bandits and urban yakuza; the Peacekeepers (think FBI with the dress and reputation of canadian mounted police); Ghost squads (high-tech commandos); junk films; the general cyberpunk-feeling of the cities in contrast to the almost too traditionally asian countryside (There is a picture of a brigand with a sword).
My impressions of MD were generally positive. The setting is believable, consistent and offers a lot of facets to explore.
Humanist Alliance
The HA is a scientifically governed Utopia, a League where benevolent administration ensures the wellbeing of each citizen. There is a caste system of workers, overseers (police and military) and leaders. Questionable methods of surveillance and indoctrination are employed to keep everybody in his place. So far, the Alliance was successfull in establishing a stable society, a high standard of living and international leadership in science and arts.
The highlights of the book are the various attempts at destabilizing Humanist society by their neighbours and senior partners in the Southern Alliance, the Southern Republic, and the Reaction, project LongNight, which consists of a bundle of programms to preserve the Humanist Alliance and its unique nature. Apart from that, there is the underground city of Gardena; a lot of cool research projects; global tourism; and the moral duplicity of big-brother agencies like HIRA (Humanist Insight and Regulatory Agency) and DHM (Department of Health and Morality).
I was blown away by this book. It established a convincing picture of a utopian society under pressure, and provided an awful lot of colourful details. The roleplaying potential of, say, a cell of HIRA Agents is just amazing, with moral issues, uncertainty within the organiszation, and a shadow war to wage against the invaders.
Summing up
In the end, I give a 4 in style to all books. As for content, ESE gets a 3, MD a 4 and NL and HA a 5.
Should you buy them? as always, that depends on what you want. Even if you are gamemastering Heavy Gear, 'Life on Terra Nova' may be sufficient if your campaign is focussed on the Deadlands or if your players move rapidly across the planet. On the other hand, if you are interested in the interior working of a league, pick up the book. This recommendation even holds for non-Heavy-Gear-players: the Leaguebooks provide a lot of ideas, and other than many roleplaying sourcebooks, they focus not so much on gear, locations and enemies, but provide a broader picture. Any Science Fiction GM will find a lot of stuff that can be easily adapted.
If you are interested, here are the data for each book. I will not quote prices, because I have seen the books in various bargain bins. just have an eye open for them...
Northern Lights - by Philippe Boulle, Alistair Gillies, Mark Hofmann, Jeff Mackintosh, Guy-Francis Vella and others - printed in 1997 - DP9 030 - 128 pages
Eastern Sun Emirates - by Joshua Mosqueira Asheim and others - printed in 1999 - DP9 053 - 96 pages
Mekong Dominion - by Andrew J. Lucas, Darren Rider, and others - printed in 1998 - DP9 036 - 96 pages
Humanist Alliance - by Jason P. Prince, James Cotsios and others - printed in 1998 - DP9 032 - 128 pages
In closing, I would like to invite readers of the other Leaguebooks to add the book specific parts to the forums of this review. Even if you do not have the time to do a full review, you can just give us a summary of subject matter and your general impressions.
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