# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 28 - Mekton Zeta - Lowel Burn, Cold-Blooded Teenage Mecha Pilot tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/mekton > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice You know what? We have gone through some of the most hyper-modern game releases over the last nearly-complete month. Most of them have been complete bangers. A few of them have been less than perfect, but everything has been extremely new and well put together. Even the ones which were indie as hell and had no art, just the bare minimum of layout. I love that, but I think it's time for a little bit of cognitive rewind. In fact, let's turn back time to my favorite RPG of 1996. *"Hold up,"* I hear you say, *"I thought you were going through your collection in reverse chronological order from most recent to least recent. So how could you possibly have added a game from 1996 into the collection?"* That's an excellent question, voice in my head. Let me answer it. *"Because it was only relatively recently that I found out the original publisher had made a scan of the original text and were selling it in PDF."* I'll be the first to admit that it's not the *greatest* PDF scan I've ever seen. Putting it side by side with the actual first printing of the book, which I have on my shelf right now, the print is much more crisp. However, do you know what the original printing doesn't have? You are correct; it doesn't have the ability to share pages of it online or reference it on my desktop without getting up, walking across the room, grabbing a book, dragging it back over here, and flipping through it with my glasses perched awkwardly on my nose. So, join me in those wondrous days of yesteryear where we actually stare happily at the colorful cover and shockingly dense layout of … ![[Mekton Zeta (cover).jpg|400]] **[[Mekton|Mekton Zeta]]**. Seriously, look at that cover. It is beautiful. Rich colors with an extremely dynamic piece of art. Does it make physical sense? No, and *it doesn't have to*. What is this game about? It's a love letter to awesome Japanese anime with giant robots blasting away at each other. The subtitle tells you everything you need to know: **Anime Mecha Roleplaying**. That's exactly what it is. It's actually a terrible shame that we don't see cover design like this anymore. As much as I love the covers of some of the books in my collection — and I absolutely do love a lot of modern covers — nothing really captures the dynamism of the **Mekton Zeta** cover art. It absolutely does not give a fuck about anything except conveying the mood and energy of the kind of gameplay it wants to bring across to you. That mood and energy are super kinetic, aggressive, in your face, tons of action. Before we get into this, I want to give you an example of one of the pages from the scan because I think you'll see why it remains one of my formative books for learning to appreciate the art of RPG layout. You'll also see why I say this isn't a great scan. Hell, have a whole spread: ![[Mekton Zeta - Chargen Spread.webp]] Okay, admittedly there are a lot of background gradients and page element gradients and weird page border pseudo-skeuomorphic page elements, but the fact is this is still beautiful layout. 8.5 by 11 pages with a 3 column build, with the outside column generally used for full height boxes. Something that you didn't see very often and still don't in 8.5 by 11 books is a body font size which isn't insultingly small. Plus, all the Japanese inserts in headers and footers are just so cool. If you didn't already know, this game was published by R. Talsorian and used the same core mechanics as **[[Cyberpunk (RPG)|Cyberpunk]]**. One of the greats of the hobby is responsible for this game, Mike Pondsmith. His love and affection for the genre and for role-playing come across throughout the text. If you've never read it, you owe it to yourself to have the opportunity to do just that. I promise that will not be time wasted. ## Acts of Creation All right, enough dilly-dallying around. You can see in that spread that the character generation sequence is pretty straightforward, though that's only the first page of the Lifepath system. There's a couple more after that. The outline actually gives proper pointers to appropriate pages for reference. Designers, do this. Check your references and have many of them. I appreciate that we start up-front with figuring out the details of our background, because it's an anime story. If you're not making references to where you came from and who you were before the moment the story starts, are you really in anime? Anime characters have *history*. ### The Path of Life We know we kick off at age 16, so let's get on it. I'm going to run through this basically flat out because you don't need to see me rambling about each individual choice. We'll talk about the lifepath once I've completed it. **Money & Family:** Vice Pres. / Upper Middle Class, 800Y **Family Situation:** Something has happened to one or more parents. **Parental Fate:** You grew up on the streets. **Family Standing:** Family status is good, even if parents are missing or dead. **Siblings:** Only child. **Friends:** 4 friends. - Female, Someone who grew up with you - Female, A teacher or mentor - Female, An old school pal - Male, Someone who grew up with you^[Okay, maybe just one aside: I'm sure that everybody around him thinks that this character is in a harem anime, and there's absolutely no subtext of that. I think that makes this even better.] **Enemies:** None. **Romantic Life:** You are recovering from a tragedy in your romantic past. **A Tragic Love Affair:** They committed suicide or went insane.^[**Zeta** does *not* fuck around, baby. No being overly sensitive here. Pure anime melodrama.] **Physical & Personality Traits:** - Purple hair, Long and curly - Amber eyes - Intellectual, detached - Most values honesty - Most valued possession is a recording - Person most valued in the world is *no one* Well, if that didn't turn out awesome on every level and provide a certain levels of confusion for interpreting this, for the record, I rolled randomly for all of these traits. Many of them I could have simply chosen from the list, but I decided to let the dice have their say tonight. The challenge here is going to be rectifying the fact that the current family status is roughly that of a corporate vice president slash upper middle class with the fact that something has happened to his family and he grew up on the streets. And yet, family status is good. I think I have an idea. > The aliens only landed a couple of years ago and their initial contact was exceedingly violent, as in dropping giant robots in the middle of major urban centers and going on complete and utter rampages. > > Our protagonist lived in Tokyo (of course), and during that initial contact his home was destroyed, and he and what he thought was going to be his forever love were separated from their families. > > The stress of living on the street for a year and a half drove the poor girl absolutely insane, especially while watching aliens kill, murder, and destroy everyone and everything that she ever knew. > > Six months ago, she disappeared into the rubble. And not long after, he was discovered by his family as he was living in what was effectively a refugee orphanage. > > In the meantime, his father had made a real name for himself in cleanup and reconstruction as the aliens were being pushed back from the city itself, at great expense. Now he has a grudge the size of a small skyscraper, only slightly less large than the mech that they are going to put him in. > > He still has contact with the nun which was doing her best to hold that refugee orphanage together, as well as a couple of friends who also got recruited to the pilot program from the same group. His parents took in one of his younger schoolmates after they had been separated from him, and she now lives with them since her parents are dead. > > Emotionally, he's still trying to get over all of his trauma, and he copes by being withdrawn and intellectual. He absolutely will not establish emotional connection to other people out of a complete certainty that they are going to go directly into the teeth of an uncaring enemy and he doesn't want to go through that anymore. > > His most valued possession is a short video of his lost girlfriend that they shot on his cell phone to leave behind in case they never were reunited with their parents again. There we go. I think that is just barely enough melodrama to cover our story elements. Also, it's really fun to write that stuff out. If you've never done narrative interpretation from a well put together random set of oracles, you really should give it a try sometime. ### A Numbers Guy Now that we have this background, we can move on to figuring out what the character stats are. I'm not crazy about old school attribute plus skill systems, but it was 1996. Sometimes things are just of their era. In this case, the stats that we need to worry about are: - Attractiveness - Body Type - Cool - Empathy - Intelligence - Education - Luck - Movement Allowance - Reflexes - Technical Ability Education basically is your general knowledge and effectively says how much schooling have you gone through or at least how much do you know about the world. +1 is grade school +2 is high school +3 is a college education +4 is a master's or doctorate +7 you're extremely well educated +9 and above, "you know too much for your own good" That's just fun, say I. Stats run 2 to 10 with an average of 6. How we figure out what we're *spending* for our stats is also a bit of an artifact from 1996. The sidebar gives three different stat generation methods. There is the random character which has you roll 1d10 for each stat; that comes with a caveat that if the total number of character points is below 40, you may reroll your character. Not my favorite. There is the concept character where you roll 10d10, and that's the number of character points you can spend. And if you roll less than 40, then reroll the pool. This is the generally suggested method for PC creation. Not horrible, but not awesome. Finally, there is the cinematic character which is usually suggested for NPCs and pre-gen PCs. You get a pool of points based on how important the character is intended to be, and then you spend out of that pool. Interestingly, the average Joe is considered to be built on 60 points. A primary character is 70 points, and major characters (main bad guys or top heroes) are 80 points. We're going to try the suggested concept character method, but no promises that RNGesus will think anything of me at all. We roll and get 64 points to allocate. Respectable, I s'pose. Spread across 10 stats, including Education. | | | | --------------------- | --: | | **Attractiveness** | 6 | | **Body** | 6 | | **Cool** | 10 | | **Empathy** | 3 | | **Intelligence** | 7 | | **Education** | 2 | | **Luck** | 9 | | **Movement** | 5 | | **Reflexes** | 10 | | **Technical Ability** | 6 | | | | | **Total** | 64 | (*Huh. Look at that. I can cut-n-paste out of a spreadsheet right into Obsidian. Who knew?*) Surprisingly, not as much pain to allocate as I thought it might be. It helps that the stats are pretty obviously self-explanatory and don't have a lot of overlap. And once you look at how many points you really have to allocate, it's not as many as it looks like, especially since education is pretty well defined and for most characters who are going to be starting the game at 16 it is absolutely going to be the dump stat. It seemed fairly obvious to me this character was going to have an extremely low Empathy, which is absolutely going to come back to bite him on the ass at some point. I like this bit in the description of what that stat actually is: > You may need to be Cool for troops to follow you, but you need Empathy for them to *like* fighting for you. We also have a calculated stat (Stability) which represents how hard a person is to sway, confuse, frighten, or otherwise befuddle. That's equal to the character's Cool times 2.5, rounded down. Since we have a Cool of 10, 2.5 times that would be 25. This guy is going to be very hard to interrogate, intimidate, lead, or seduce - possibly because he just doesn't give a flying fuck about life anymore and is just going headfirst into the teeth whenever it comes along. ### Skill-Up Time for one of my least favorite artifacts of games of the era: distributing skill points. This sort of thing is why I eventually ended up gravitating toward GM-less games, which had a trait descriptor system rather than a skill point system. Lists of skills are the devil because scope and effectiveness vary way too much between individual skills, and yet their point cost are all exactly the same, except when they *aren't* and those systems are even more complicated and a pain in the ass to use. We get a pool of starting skill points equal to the sum of our Intelligence and Education plus 10. 19 skill points. The book is good about reminding us that we are still *only* 16, so don't worry too much if that feels awfully low. Point costing is a bit of a pain, which I hadn't remembered how much since I haven't created a character from **Mekton Zeta** in over a decade. If the desired level of skill is +5 or less, spend 1 point per level. If the level is greater than +5, it'll cost 2 points for each level above 5. If the skill is a hard skill to learn, marked with an H in the listing, it may not be purchased at a level greater than 5 by a starting character. I'm going to go throw together another quick spreadsheet with some calculations on it, and I will return shortly. | Skill | Level | Cost | | ------------------ | ----- | ---- | | **Mecha Fighting** | 1 | 1 | | **Mecha Gunnery** | 3 | 3 | | **Mecha Melee** | 1 | 1 | | **Mecha Missiles** | 1 | 1 | | **Mech Piloting** | 2 | 2 | | **Intimidate** | 2 | 2 | | **Streetwise** | 4 | 4 | | **Awareness** | 3 | 3 | | **Hand to Hand** | 1 | 1 | | **Blade** | 1 | 1 | | | | | | | Total | 19 | Everything's so much faster when you set up a spreadsheet. Also, things are a lot faster when you realize that the character is only 16, and you're probably not going to have any skills above 5, no matter what. This does keep the point costing a little bit lower, but it doesn't change the fact that if you want to be a mecha pilot you are going to have at least five points tied up in doing *just* that right out of the gate. You can be able to run your own crime family with Streetwise for cheaper in points than having a spread of useful skills in mecha piloting — at age 16. You see what I mean about skill systems and the variations of skill focus as it goes. One thing that I absolutely have to give to **Zeta** is that it is very good at giving you example target numbers and relative values for every single skill. Then it follows that up in the character creation skill section with talking about how skills work and what difficulty levels are and an entire list of situational modifiers that you can run into. That is the place to talk about those mechanics; organizationally, it's amazing. ### Age vs Beauty It's at this point that the game gives you an important choice, and it's an important choice that you don't normally get in RPGs. Now and only now do you decide if your character is going to be a fresh-faced rookie, or if they're going to be a serious professional who's a bit older and a little rougher. If you go with a professional, you can choose what you were doing for your profession. It basically shakes down to every two years of age past 16 that you've lived, up to a maximum of 30 because there are limits for anime — some things are just unbelievable — you can pick one additional profession that your character pursued and pick five of the seven skills off of that profession bump them up on your sheet. Get your money for that two-year period spent working, and if you are taking a dangerous profession (marked on the template) you get a life path event. However, if you are more inclined to the young hotshot or the kid right out of school, we have something for that too. These are templates which are extremely stereotypical, but they also come with seven points of skill boost and some equipment with starting cash, and you're off to the races. There's also a nice compact list of anime character examples which really show that the authors did the work when it came to research and enjoying the genre. ![[Mekton Zeta - Top Ten Examples.webp]] How often do you get to see someone refer to **[Orguss](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/SuperDimensionCenturyOrguss)** or **[Votoms](https://timeldred.com/votomshub/)**, right?  I think this character really only works if we go with the rookie aspect. To that end, let's go ahead and take the Anime Hero template. Not the hot-headed kind, however. The cool, detached, probably will watch you die and then turn away entirely expressionless kind. We'll just tweak the character skill list a bit… | Skill | Level | | -------------------- | ----- | | **Mecha Fighting** | 1 | | **Mecha Gunnery** | 4 | | **Mecha Melee** | 1 | | **Mecha Missiles** | 2 | | **Mech Piloting** | 3 | | **Intimidate** | 2 | | **Streetwise** | 4 | | **Awareness** | 3 | | **Hand to Hand** | 1 | | **Blade** | 2 | | **Wardrobe & Style** | 1 | | **Motorcycle** | 1 | | **Stealth** | 1 | Yeah, there we go. I'll just put our two points of mecha weapon skills into gunnery and missiles, because it's that kind of day. I'm amused that we pick up a point of wardrobe and style automatically, because obviously we know how to dress like a cool motherfucker. We also get a free point of blade and stealth, which both make sense. But a point in Motorcycle? Why not? You would think it would be a point in generic driving, but no, it's specifically Motorcycle, which isn't even in the list. The equipment bonus is a little bit nuts. Wardrobe of hip-hop clothing, motorcycle, sword or handgun, pilot's suit, and ¥300. I'm not sure our character is the sort to go for having hip-hop clothing. He seems like he has a closet full of various shades of black, all of which have high collars. We can make the motorcycle work, though. And we'll take the sword rather than the gun. ### Equipage This is it. The moment you've all been waiting for. The shopping episode! Otherwise known as one of my least favorite parts of RPGs, but it's at least reasonably sensible for the most part here in **Mekton Zeta**. It's not like we're wallowing in money that has to be spent or allocated and really what you're looking at for the most part is this massive table of weapons and all the what's and wherefores about them, as well as their tech levels. The tech levels range from 1 to 10, with 1 to 3 being pre-20th century Earth, 4 to 5 is 20th century Earth, 6 to 7 is near-future/solar system exploration, 8 to 9 is far-future/interstellar travel, and 10 is hyperscience/trans-galactic empires. Since Earth has clearly just been invaded by aliens and we're fighting back with giant robots, let's say that we are currently in TL6 for the sake of buying this gear. Let's see, looking at the non-weapon stuff, one of the things we absolutely have to pick up is a school uniform for ¥40. Because what kind of a show would this be without it involving high school? We'll take a communicator (cell phone) for ¥100. Absolutely necessary to our lifestyle. Dried food for ¥20 because a life on the streets makes one a bit of a hoarder and that gives us enough food for a week in a worst case situation. A sleeping bag for ¥20 because again living on the streets makes one overprepare and a lovely med kit for ¥100 because one should always be ready. Total: ¥300. That's how you know you've accidentally priced out things appropriately. ![[Mekton Zeta - CCC2025 - Lowel Burn, Cold-Blooded Young Mecha Pilot.webp]] ## Exunt Okay, that looks to be it. *Lowel Burn* is ready to rock and roll. I know you are all excited for me to build a mech in one of the best tabletop systems for mech design, only surpassed by its own supplement, and potentially **[[Jovian Chronicles]]**. But that's not going to happen today because it is character creation challenge, not giant robot creation challenge. Maybe we'll go through and do some mecha designs next month at some point if I get that little itch in the back of my brain. Obviously, the most interesting part of character generation in **Mekton Zeta** is the integration with the Lifepath system and how that starts you off by building a framework that the character can flow into. You can get a ton of really meaty narrative hooks going with just that and it's absolutely without question the most fun part of character generation. However, the skill system remains one of my least favorite parts of every RPG, even here. Overall, I still enjoy character building in **Mekton** and it's good to be able to go back and touch base to remind myself of that fact. A lot of games don't stand up to a revisit, especially nearly 30 years after publication. Tomorrow, the trepidation sets in. Do I want to *actually* do this? I did set the conditions. Things are about to get spicy.