Salvage Union – First Read
I think at some point we all want to stomp around in a big robot. Whether you were brought up on a diet of Transformers, raised on Neon Genesis Evangelion, or were inspired by Pacific Rim, the mecha genre of games and fiction holds a place of fascination for many. The progenitor of this in the RPG space is of course Battletech. A complex wargame become RPG. Over the years it has dominated the genre with the occasional competitors nipping at its thick metal heels. In 2019 Lancer took the indie RPG world by storm with a blend of tactical wargame and narrative RPG. The latest robot on the block is Salvage Union from Leyline Press. A game of survival, community, and exploration in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The game is designed by Aled Lawler & Panayiotis Lines with art from Alex Connolly, Hamish Frater, Francesco SIlva, and Aled Lawler.
First Read articles represent me going through the book in question for the first time. It is my initial impressions of the mechanisms, themes, and setting presented within its pages. I have not played the game at the time of writing.
Salvage Union is an eye-catching book. The cover is presented like a Haynes manual (Haynes make detailed books about vehicle maintenance). The interior art is mixed between mechs with technical line drawings, lovely cartoon character classes, and sweeping landscapes reminiscent of the style of Jakub Rozalski.
Inside the book jacket you are immediately hit with lots of rules references and diagrams. This does intrigue but I am not really a fan of this. It feels confusing more than anything. We will revisit this decision later.
Salvage Union wastes no time in getting into the broad strokes of the setting. It’s a post apocalyptic wasteland, ruled by corps. There are weird creatures, and folk trying to scratch a living out of the lost areas of the world. You are tasked with going out from your moving homebase, called a Union Crawler, to find salvage to maintain and upgrade it. It has a very anti-capitalism vibe from the off.
Although the setting is fleshed out through implication throughout the rest of the book, it feels lacking in detail. There are nods towards the names of the corporations but nothing about their motivations and potential plot hooks. There is a very rough world map on page 270 that gives you names of the regions and some of the creatures you might find there. That’s it. I want more than this from my settings. What do these areas look like? Which corp is dominant? What are the interesting features in the area? Salvage Union wants the Mediator, the game’s name for a GM, to do a lot of work.
The book then asks you to create a Character, Mech, and then a Union Crawler (your homebase). Each player will make an individual character, load out their own mech, but the Union Crawler is a collaborative effort.
Characters are evocatively drawn and well described. I especially like that each of the classes you can choose to be has a ‘choose this if you want to…’ paragraph. It sums up each one in a concise manner. Once you’ve chosen a class you choose your first ability and here we run into an issue. At this point I don’t know anything about the mechanisms of the game. Some of the abilities are narrative based, but many refer to the various systems in the game. I want a brief overview of the mechanisms at the very least before making character choices.
When you choose a skill you are taking one from the first choice of 3 skill trees. These skills are described on the following pages, but not on the overview of all your skills. It feels like with a little more effort the skill map here could have been a lot more useful for new players. They could have even suggested ‘take this one if you don’t know what to get’.
Characters get callsigns, a huge nod to the trucker sensibility that the game is obviously influenced by. Backgrounds, keepsakes, and mottos are all flavourful additions that can be rolled up or chosen. Each comes with a little mechanical weight behind it, even if that hasn’t been fully explained yet.
Out of curiosity I checked out the quickstart for the game. It does a better job of explaining the rules before you see a character. On the flipside it does seem the quickstart is from an earlier version of the rules as it includes features not in this book.
Let’s take a moment to talk about graphic design. Here is the ‘How to create a character’ double page.
There are two things here. There is absolutely no need for it to snake like this. The snake leads to an arrow pointing backwards for a page reference that is forwards. No. Just no. This goes out to all indie designers: be as fancy as you want, but don’t forget that the harder you make your book to read, the less likely it is to get played. That doesn’t mean I want bland books. It does mean I want you to think about useability as a primary concern.
One of the graphic design choices I do like is that each segment of the book is colour coded on the edge of each page. This makes it easier to slip to a particular section of the book just by looking at the edge of it. Great idea.
Back to the book. Mech workshop is next. Here you get an overview of your mech stats and then dive into creation. This could be very involved as you effectively get a budget to build your mech and equip it. Each mech comes with 3 builds, that could be used to shortcut this process. The first 5 come with a build that is labelled as ok to get your started which is a great touch. I would have liked there to be downloads for those mechs on the Leyline press site but that is me being very nitpicky I admit.
All the mechs are really beautiful line drawings with a huge variety in what they look like and what they can do. From the heffer like mule, to the squid like Kraken, all sorts of ideas are evocatively represented.
Although you only have access to level 1 tech at the start, the next 40 pages after the mechs are filled with enticing options that your players will want to work towards.
As I mentioned earlier, the primary motivation of the characters is the maintenance of their Union Crawler. This can look like anything you can imagine, but is effectively a moving homebase/ village. It starts out with somewhere between 100-500 people, and some place to visit in between missions. The Union Crawler allows mechs to be upgraded, rumours gathered, and salvage traded.
You can gather Salvage all over the wasteland and it is used to maintain your Union crawler. You can also use salvage to upgrade your crawler and the mechs you pilot. With this bit of creation complete the game moves onto its rules and the section for the Mediators.
The core mechanism involves rolling a d20 with a 6+ being a success with various levels of consequence depending on the result. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that I haven’t mentioned stats much. Unlike most RPGs you don’t really have any outside of hit points and the ability points that let you activate the skills you have chosen. Rolls are just straight with no bonuses and in fact there is a warning to not adorn that core system with ideas from other games.
Players can get a re-roll in some circumstances, like calling on their keepsakes and backgrounds we touched on earlier. That is really it in terms of levers for players to pull which feels a bit lacking for my tastes. It may be that the abilities you have on your mech and character will prove to be the core of giving the players more mechanical impact on the game.
Combat range is largely abstracted so no maps are required. At the same time there is a selection of different types of actions much like you might find in a game like DnD. I don’t know how complicated this might get in play, but it doesn’t seem too bad.
The rules are followed by advice for the Mediator, the GM. I found this very generic and not really helpful in understanding what a session of Salvage Union looks like. It was here that I realised I hadn’t seen a single example of play throughout the book. No character creation example, no combat playthrough. Nothing. I would have loved some examples of what characters do in a session, outside of gaining salvage. This feels like a huge oversight and makes the book feel more like a reference for those who already know how to play it.
The book does cover what a campaign looks like. The recommended format is a year long! Much as I may have jumped at the chance to do such a thing when I was younger, I feel like having your default as ‘around 1 year of real time play, assuming 1 session per week’ is a bit much. It feels like this is how the game was played during testing, but doesn’t consider how it might be approached by people coming to the game for the first time.
The designers do cover how to setup regions, areas, and campaign maps to play in which can be populated with enemies and plot hooks. Remember those inside pages at the front filled with diagrams and rules? I had trouble visualising what this map setup looked like just from the description, but there is a diagram in those inside pages that really helps. That diagram is not repeated here where it feels like it would be most useful. An example would have been great as well.
The Mediator section of the book is followed by some enemies to populate your games with and a scenario to get you going. This introductory scenario is a welcome addition to the book as it gives you a better idea of what a session of the game looks like.
I showed Salvage Union to my group and they are very taken with the idea of having individual mechs, and a homebase to operate them from. That is the core selling point of the game to me. It makes me want to run it, and my players want to play it.
I found Salvage Union to be a really mixed bag on this first read. It feels like a very loose setting attached to a very detailed character, mech, and homebase creation system. The setting is incredibly barebones: tell me about the corps, the areas, the motivation of the denizens of some of the areas. Give me some examples of play, combat, and more ideas to weave into my sessions.
How this will shake out in play I don’t know. I find it hard to see exactly what the game will look like from the book. It may be that the investment from players in their characters and mechs will be enough to carry the group into a campaign. I will be running at least the intro scenario and I would hope at least 2 or 3 more to get a feel for the campaign structure and give my players a chance to level up. I’ll report back from the wasteland when that happens. Ten four rubber ducky.
I was given Salvage Union by Leyline Press for review.
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