# Heavy Gear tags: #game/rpg/heavy-gear ![[Heavy Gear - 4th Edition (cover).jpg|600]] **Heavy Gear** is the Dream Pod 9 mecha RPG, launched in 1995 and still grinding its gears through Terra Nova three decades on — the hobby's longest-running argument that big piloted exo-armors and grimy politico-military fiction belong in the same box. It rides on the **[[Silhouette]]** system, a quietly elegant d6 engine that keeps the bookkeeping reasonable even while the setting sprawls from city-states to interstellar war. And it loves its own toys: gears are the draw, and the game is cheerfully built around them. ## Setting *"Heavy Gear is set in the distant 62nd century"* on **Terra Nova**, an arid world rich in resources whose control is contested by its inhabitants and, eventually, by Earth itself. Humanity spread to a handful of planets, and Terra Nova — the prize of the colony worlds — spent its **Age of Isolation** fracturing after the last Concordat ship left: cities became self-sufficient city-states, banded into leagues, and warred for dominance. In the North rose the **United Mercantile Federation** (born when its defenders armed bipedal construction machines into the first purpose-built combat gear, the **Hunter**, in TN 1674), the **Northern Lights Confederacy**, and the **Western Frontier Protectorate**; in the South, the **Southern Republic** (which stole and copied the Hunter), the **Mekong Dominion**, the **Eastern Suns Emirates**, and the **Humanist Alliance**. The vast equatorial **Badlands** desert separates the two poles — which has never once stopped them from fighting across it. The default tense is war: the North against the South in the **Interpolar War**, set off by the flashpoint of the wrecked *HCS St. Vincent*, with Earth's **CEF** hovertanks hovering as a reminder that the offworlds haven't forgotten Terra Nova either. Player characters are the soldiers, pilots, mercenaries, and duelists who live inside that machinery of conflict — the human fuel that keeps the gears running. The setting is openly the product of war's fallout, and the game treats that as its subject matter rather than its decoration. ## Mechanics — the Silhouette system Silhouette is a **d6 dice-pool** engine. Every roll assembles a pool, after which you **keep the single highest die**. The twist is the **Threshold Number (TN)**: every die beyond the highest that rolls equal to or above the TN *modifies* the kept die, adding **+1 each**. The TN defaults to **5**, and threshold bonuses/penalties (TB/TP) shift it rather than the dice. With no skill in play you roll a flat **3d6**; a **skill test** rolls **1 base die + 1 die per skill level**. If a pool is reduced to zero, you roll 2d6 and drop the highest. ### Success & difficulty Tasks are **independent rolls** (no one opposing you) or **opposed rolls** (both sides roll and compare). Independent rolls carry a **Difficulty (Dif)** — a number you must meet or beat on a kept die, defaulting to **5** — and each point over/under the Dif is a **Margin of Success (MoS)** or **Margin of Failure (MoF)**, which the Director leans on to grade how extreme the outcome is. Opposed rolls use a base TN of 5 and no difficulty: whoever keeps the highest modified die wins. ### Edges, challenges, and the other dice **Edges** add dice to a pool; **challenges** subtract them — and the game wears its training-wheels heart on its sleeve by rewarding *any* skill test made with a challenge with XP toward that skill, even on a failure. A spread of named effects keeps the dice honest: **Favored/Disfavored** decide ties, **reliable dice** add a die and drop the lowest for the effect, **unreliable dice** add a die and drop the highest, and **rerolls** (one, the whole roll, same modifiers) exist but are never cheaper than a clean first roll. ### Gears & combat Combat — *Conflicts*, in 4th Edition parlance — is where Silhouette earns its keep, scaling from a knife fight to a gear duel with proper damage resolution, Momentum, and vehicle-scale crunch. Gears themselves are statted as the piloted exo-armors the whole line is named for, and the combat chapter is generous with them; gear customization and repair get their own extended sections. ## Editions - **First Edition (1995)** — introduces Terra Nova and the Silhouette dice-pool engine. *Not in the library.* - **Second Edition (1997)** — expands the lore and refines combat and character creation. *Not in the library.* - **Third Edition (2003)** — deepens the setting and adds the dueling skill and background for character-driven campaigns. Heavy Gear Blitz, the line's wargame miniatures game, emerged from this era (a 3rd-edition Blitz book *is* in the library, tagged as a wargame). - **Fourth Edition (2024)** — the first new core in a generation, promising compatibility with earlier editions while modernizing the system, with conversion support for **Heavy Gear Blitz** and a run of new adventures. *In the library (core + adventures).* Two offshoots complicate the picture. **Heavy Gear Blitz** is the line's wargame/miniatures game on the same Silhouette bones (a 3rd-edition Blitz book is in the library, categorized as a wargame). And **Heavy Gear D6** (by Jason English) is a total conversion of the universe to the classic WEG-style D6 dice-pool engine — roll a pool, count successes — for players who want the Terra Nova toys without the TN-modifier math; the current copy in the library is the *Bravo Edition*. ### Fourth Edition adventures - **One Minute to Midnight** (Dream Pod 9, 2024) — an endgame finale for veteran characters as the War for Terra Nova draws to a close against the CEF in TN 1954. The book is up front that it's a campaign-capper: limited resupply, and not everyone makes it. - **Tempest Winds** (Dream Pod 9, 2024) — a fast-and-furious set of gears-practice scenarios to shake the rust off, a starting point for a larger story. - **St. Vincent's Maw** (Noah Tebben, 2026) — the HCS St. Vincent, the wrecked ship at the flashpoint of the whole Heavy Gear storyline and the trigger for full North-versus-South war. Two arcs (one Northern, one Southern) race to uncover the ship and explore the wreckage, plus a **St. Vincent's War** submodule of specific battles and four new landships. - **Sudden Intervention Pack** (Noah Tebben, 2026) — an expanded reissue of the 1995 classic *Jungle Drums* plus three special-forces campaigns (the Southern Intervention Unit, the Drop Bears, the 17th Provisional Assault Group, and the UMF Spacer marines). - **The New Breed (Director's Cut)** (Noah Tebben & Alexander Rose, 2026) — a Director's Cut reiteration of the classic New Breed campaign: the CNCS *Vigilance* duelling the AST *Draco* in the Badlands. Expanded CNCS and AST campaigns chronicle both ships before and throughout the Interpolar War, a third Badlands/Leagueless campaign rounds it out, and 16 landships get written up (four more appear in St. Vincent's Maw). ## References - [Heavy Gear Roleplaying Game Fourth Edition Kickstarter - Tabletop Gaming News](https://www.tabletopgamingnews.com/heavy-gear-roleplaying-game-fourth-edition-kickstarter-offers-fans-new-adventures-in-a-classic-universe) - [Heavy Gear - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Gear) - [Heavy Gear RPG 4e Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heavygearblitz/heavy-gear-roleplaying-game-fourth-edition/description) If the thought of meticulously customized piloted war machines grinding across a politically messy planet gets you going, **Heavy Gear** has been quietly waiting for you since 1995 — and the gears show no sign of running dry.