How To Play Salvage Union

How to play Salvage Union.

 

Hi everyone, this is a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Salvage Union. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play Salvage Union yourselves.

 

The sections I’ll talk about are:

• Writing prompt

• How to attack

• Distances

• Actions

• Initiative

• Character creation

• Pushing a mech

• How to salvage

 

Writing prompt: The general idea of this system is that you and your mech are exploring the wasteland of a ruined civilization. You have friends who also have mechs and are exploring with you, which is good, because you wouldn’t want to be alone, not with all those Bio-Titan behemoth monstrosities that are amalgamations of creatures and machines, roaming the scrap filled battlefields. Can you salvage something useful from this scarred region, creating opportunity from the debris? Let’s find out, in Salvage Union.

 

How to attack: I will describe the general idea first and then dive into specifics. The general idea is that to attack, first you choose a target you can see who is within weapon range. Next you roll to hit. If you successfully hit, then you inflict your weapon damage. The game master subtracts your weapon’s damage from your target’s either hit points or structure points. Biological things like pilots have hit points, and constructed things like mechs have structure points. Most player characters start at 10 hit points. Most level 1 mechs range between 9 and 17 structure points. Most allied non player characters have 4 four hit points. Tech level 1 weapons deal between 1 and 4 damage per hit. That means that on average it takes as few as three or as many as ten strikes to reduce something that had 10 HP to 0, at which point they fall unconscious and are at the mercy of a mortal blow or not.

Now let’s discuss specifics. Salvage Union uses a twenty sided dice, also called a d20. There are no modifiers or bonuses to add onto the roll. If you get a 1, you fail horribly. You miss the target you’re attacking, you suffer something called a Setback with a capital S, and a severe consequence of the Game Master’s choice happens. Setbacks can affect your health, your reputation, your items, your environment, et cetera. For example with health: you could get hurt, such as taking two HP damage out of your 10 HP total, or roll on the critical injury table, or your module is destroyed. Some examples that affect your reputation are that you could lose an ally, a bounty could be put on your head, you could realize you broke a law and are now cast out of a community. Example setbacks impacting your inventory are that your weapon jams or runs out of ammo, you lose one of your treasured possessions, or your weapon’s effectiveness is now less than it should be. Example environmental setbacks are that your path is blocked by debris, or the town you were heading to got decimated by Bio-Titans before you could get there, or enemies are now flanking you. Those are just some of the potential consequences of rolling a 1 on the d20. If you roll between a 2 and 5, you fail and still face the Setback with a capital S, but without the severe consequence. If you roll between a 6 and a 10 on the dice