Leyline Press Blog — salvage union

One of the core design goals of Salvage Union was to create a simple, narrative focussed Mech game that was easy and fun to play.  Many Mech games people are familiar with such as Lancer or BattleTech are usually quite complicated, crunchy games. A few notable rules lite exceptions such as the Mecha Hack exist but the focus tends to be on crunch and tactical combat within the genre. We wanted to create something different, a Mech roleplaying game that was pick up and play and encouraged players to explore and engage with the game world and roleplay without worrying...

In our last article we explored why skill systems and modifiers didn’t work for Salvage Union.  One of the main reasons people want to have skill systems and modifiers in a tabletop roleplaying game is because of niche protection.  Players within a tabletop roleplaying game want to feel that their character is good within their defined role. The player who picks a melee combat focussed class wants to feel like their character is more apt in melee combat compared to the character who has picked a stealth based class. That stealth based player wants to feel like their character excels...

This is part of a series of design blogs exploring the development of Salvage Union a post-apocalyptic mech tabletop roleplaying game currently live on Kickstarter here. 

One of the most common pieces of playtest feedback we get for Salvage Union is to add stat modifiers, advantage or additional die bonuses or some variation thereof to the games core d20 mechanic. This article will explore why this is a bad idea for Salvage Union due to its different approach compared to other tabletop roleplaying games that do use such systems.  

Salvage Union runs off of a core d20 variable resolution mechanic. This mechanic is flat for all rolls and both pilot characters and mechs all use this same table with no additional modifiers. There’s 5 different success levels as you can see below. 

This is part of a series of design blogs exploring the development of Salvage Union a post-apocalyptic mech tabletop roleplaying game currently live on Kickstarter here. 

Salvage Union is a hack of the Quest RPG and in our last blog we explored what Quest is you can read that here.

In this blog we're going to answer a question we get a lot which is 'Why Quest?'

Salvage Union is a hack of a fantasy RPG called Quest and in this blog we're going to discuss what Quest is in lead up to explaining why we decided to hack it for Salvage Union.

Quest is a fantasy adventure tabletop roleplaying game developed by The Adventure Guild. Quest was developed as an accessible and player friendly game to introduce new players to roleplaying. Its easy to learn rules set allows the game to be focussed around narrative and story telling decisions.