Pacific Rim made a big splash this year with Giant Robots battling Mutant Monsters from Another Dimension. We have more monsters and robots to come, I’m certain. Hollywood has found their cool thing of the moment. Manga and anime series love this stuff – and I have enjoyed years of Giant Robots throughout childhood and adult life alike.
After watching Pacific Rim, I found myself looking for a solid system to run a game based on the setting. I tinkered with using Fate Accelerated Edition to run a Victoriana-based Giant Robot adventure, so when I spied Apotheosis Drive X it seemed like I couldn’t avoid giving it a closer look…
Form
Apotheosis Drive X is a 144-page PDF from Machine Age Productions, designed for the Fate Core system. While ownership of Fate Core will add depth and breadth to the gaming experience – providing expanded character options and game running advice – Apotheosis Drive X includes all the essential rules you need to play and direct the game.
The PDF keeps to a clear, single-column layout, ideally suited to reading on a tablet, or double-page format on a monitor. The PDF has a scattering of art and minimalist ornamentation around the border, making a printout no problem at all and unlikely to drain away your remaining ink.
Oddly, the game doesn’t have a cover image – but, that isn’t a real issue.
Features
Apotheosis Drive X brings the features of the Giant Robot/Mecha genre into sharp focus within the flexibility of Fate Core system. Fate Core provides the tools to throw possibilities wide open. I’ve used the system to run everything from pulp 20s investigation to slapstick goblin farce-quest. Apotheosis Drive X channels the sizzling potentials of Fate Core into bringing awesome in a world of massive mechanised warfare.
Roughly, the first third of the book deals with the Apotheosis Drive X setting. You have World War IV, clones, rebellion, internal crisis, and the devastation of a constant arms race to blame for the present. In practice, the setting provides the means and the background for you to pick up the story anywhere from the beginning – Generation Zero – when the first giant robots made their début, through to Generation Seven – the trans-human event that changes everything, including the playing field and the goal posts.
Generation Four, the notional ‘present’ in the write-up, provides a default state, where the key factions remain at odds on a relatively level standing.
The One Earth Accord represents the one time key power of the world, fielding Janus Class robots. The Oya were elite genetically modified foot soldiers of the One Earth Accord, piloting Oya Class robots, who spend the later period of the setting seeking neutrality and their own sense of identity.
Scattered across the inner system and asteroid belt, the Stratos Commonwealth have worn many guises. At first, the profit hungry Stellar Corporate Collective sought to make money hired themselves out to lesser nations states as mercenaries. However, this act served as the tinder for all out World War, and the StarCC became the enemy in their tooled up General Class robot suits. After a couple of wars that ultimately pushed StarCC out into the worlds of the inner Solar System, the faction now seeks a home on Earth and rights for the clones that make up the bulk of their numbers.
Finally, one time lesser nations of Earth combined their resources and potential to become the Peoples Collective. In the war against StarCC, the Peoples Collective provided a vital swing in the conflict with espionage that garnered key tech from the Corporate clones. The Peoples Collective changed the balance with their upgraded Myth Class mechs, but never truly took sides with the Accord. Now the Peoples Collective have got more than a few aces up their sleeve and their second fiddle role in world history has obviously left them with a bit of a chip on their shoulder.
Beyond Generation Four, the setting provides a view to how the world might develop, depending on the balance of power and the role the player characters play in events. Personally, I envisage using the system to run games in other settings, but this default setting for Apotheosis Drive X provides a sound foundation for adventure right off the page.
The middle section of the book presents the main rules of Fate Core. If you have read Fate Core, you will be familiar with the mechanics. If not, you have all the essentials here without need for any other book. Throughout Apotheosis Drive X, you will find a large X graphic in the margin wherever a new or variant rule appears – as the setting flexes and expands the crunch to work with the principles of a setting where your character is more than just a hero… you’re the pilot of a frakking Giant Robot!
For example, while Fate Core kept the number of character Aspects down to provide focus and lessen dead-weight, Apotheosis Drive X uses this slack in Aspect numbers to squeeze in three specific to your robot battle-suit. The suit has Stress and Consequences of its own – the way you measure damage capacity in Fate Core, meaning that your pilot can crawl from the wreckage and fight another day even when the mech goes down.
The Giant Robot genre might seem all about the awesome of mech-combat, but the Apotheosis Drive X system also considers the pilots – their fragile existence, personalities, and relationships.
Pacific Rim had a lot of relationship dynamics going on – and Apotheosis Drive X approaches that through Aspects, emotional Zones (allowing you to engage your ‘opponent’ in a battle of principles and personalities) and Challenge (a way to take a Fate Point by actively testing your character’s beliefs and personal connections, in such a way that you’ll either grow or change as a person on emerging from the conflict).
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t all tormented souls and broken hearts, but Apotheosis Drive X does look to embraces all aspects of a genre that can all too easily just become about awesome massive robot weapon-rigs going one-on-one for the survival of Humanity!
The Drive Die is an interesting addition with a big X. To simulate those kick-ass moments when you pull out all the stops and go all or another against the opposition, Generation Four settings and beyond have the oomph of the Drive Die.
When you need to pull out all the stop, you declare use of your Giant Robots Drive Aspect prior to making a roll. You then swap out one of your Fate dice for a standard 6-sided. All results from the Drive Die count as a positive, so you have the potential of a result from -2 to +9 – which counts as some serious ammunition when the doo-doo goes down!
The last two sections of the book deal with Directing the Game and Adventures. The Director section covers advice on running the game, making it clear that stories in this genre make the Heroes the focus. You need to fill the world with urgency and excitement, and keeping the story moving at pace.
One bit I liked surrounds the opposition, and the need to leave survivors. Without survivors, you have no stories, no propaganda, and no revenge. Nameless mooks – referred to as Mass-Produced Units – acquire a name when they survive and agency to return to challenge the Heroes some day.
In the Adventure section, sound advice on creating a jigsaw of potentials rather than a linear, rail-road plot makes solid sense. When you offer flexibility in so much of the Fate Core system, you can’t take it away when you run your adventures.
The section breaks down the principles and elements of adventures into major and minor scenes, along with key non-player actors who need as much as purpose, motivation and drive to be there as the player character Heroes.
To fully illustrate the principle, the book rounds off with “Captain Cornelia Black and the Ghost Titans”, a 13-page adventure by Filamena Young. Troublesome pirates and needful friends makes for exciting times on terra firma and in space. The adventure serves as a useful reference in bringing elements of an adventure together without committing to too much over structured detail and linearity.
The final few pages round off with an Index, followed by blurb about the upcoming HD-release, containing “tons of bonus material.” I’m keen on seeing this release, as it specifically mentions rules for two-pilot mecha and Kaiju… subject matter close to my heart in picking Apotheosis Drive X up in the first place.
Having got this far, I’m not without criticism, mostly minor.
Apotheosis Drive X contains far too many Page XX references. Given the newness of Fate Core and this setting – at time of writing – I might cut a little slack, but… this is a PDF in a world where electronic documents get updates all the time. They should – updates are relatively painless.
A pass through this document with Acrobat Reader’s Find function locates thirteen examples of p. XX – most to do with the same sections, like Milestones (stages of an adventure or campaign), Directives (see below) and Skills. Update, distill, upload – done. The strangest example is the Index at the end of the book, labelled as Chapter XX.
On top of the XX, Apotheosis Drive X would certainly have benefited with a proof and correction for spelling. The errors seem to come in rashes, with pages free from any followed by sections where they pile in like mooks at a dead-end ambush.
Another minor criticism relates to the lack of any electronic bookmarking. The final page of the book references the upcoming release of a ‘HD’-version of the game with expanded content, but that shouldn’t mean this ‘SD’- version struggles along as a loveless cousin. With Fate Core recently refreshed and with a new setting that has so many references in the text to new mechanics, quick links would be a real boon.
My final, perhaps biggest, criticism relates to Directives. Through the earlier part of the book it mentions time and again that the Director does not have the same pool of fate points that a normal Fate Core game provides. In Apotheosis Drive X, you accrue fate points by playing to your directives.
It isn’t very clear, but the whole of the Directing #ADX chapter – Chapter 7 – is your list of directives. This is not simply advice, this chapter presents the values you run the game by. Only by playing within this structure do you generate the fate points necessary to buff your own characters or compel player characters to take a fall. I had to read through the game more than once to cotton on to this, worrying that I’d missed something. You haven’t – it just isn’t absolutely obvious…
Final Thoughts
Apotheosis Drive X has a really solid foundation in place for kicking off awesome mecha action using the Fate Core engine. Caught in the waves of interest for Fate Core, it shows up a little rough and ready in the plethora of p XX and spelling errors; but, it doesn’t detract from the great content. I like the sense of bringing on the action and grand intentions of keeping it fun. Apotheosis Drive X focuses on the heroic characters front and centre, adding extra content to ramp up the excitement without slowing Fate Core down.
The supplement isn’t perfect and certainly warrants a clean-up and expansion to better embrace the potential of breath-taking mecha battles and their true potential. In Apotheosis Drive X, we have the cut-price DVD experience and we await the Blu-ray Apotheosis Drive X “HD Director’s Cut Edition” for the full-on eye-watering in-your-face seat-of-your-mecha-pants experience. Now that I’ve had a taste, I’m looking forward to it.
Bring it on!
