Leyline Press Blog — salvage union design blog

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a game designer is to know when to kill your darlings. As much as you may love an idea, sometimes you have to just bite the bullet, take it out back, and shoot it in the head. This will make your game better, but it's a tough and painful process.

Salvage Union is a post-apocalyptic, Mech, tabletop roleplaying game with accessible mechanics.

This is a two part blog post. In the first place we will be explaining the formula we used to design and balance the 30 Mechs in the Salvage Union Core Book.

In the second post we'll be going deeper into the design decisions that led to us creating the formula and it's utility in play and for homebrew content.

Salvage Union is a post-apocalyptic Mech game where players assume the roles of scrap salvagers. We, as the developers, aimed to create a gameplay experience centred around the core concept of salvaging. To achieve this, we drew inspiration from the 'Gold for XP' system in early editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This system tied experience points to the discovery of gold, with each piece of gold found translating to 1 Experience Point for the player character. This encouraged exploration and strategic thinking as the goal became to explore the environments in the game to discover the gold, rather than to simply defeat the monsters. In Salvage Union, we sought to establish a similar connection between the importance of scrap and exploration.

Salvage Union is a tabletop RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world where players take the role of Mech Pilots who salvage scrap in the wastes. They live together within a ‘Union Crawler’, a giant Mech that acts as a home base. The game uses a gear-based progression system, where the Mech's advancement is determined by its Chassis (base stats), Systems (external hardware like weapons), and Modules (internal hardware like hacking chips). Progression in the game involves finding new Mech components or scrap to craft them. There are six "Tech Levels" that represent increasing power and access to more tools and abilities.