This is the Recke for Mechnoir. I had a lot of fun drawing this one. I wasn’t originally planning on illustrating the rigs when I first devised the idea for the Mechnoir player’s guide. It’s one of the reasons this is taking so long. It takes me about 8 hours to draw each rig. And I have to fit that time in amongst my other projects (like doing layout for the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying books and making videos for Evil Hat). But I feel like the booklet would be lacking if not for some pictures of the rigs you’re going to be stomping around in, right?

The other thing that I realized when I started on the Mechnoir player’s guide is that a player’s guide alone wasn’t going to cut it. It’d be weird to just add mechs to the existing Transmissions like Hong Kong or Los Angeles. Mechnoir needed its own transmissions built up around the idea. So, the Mechnoir player’s guide will be bundled with three mech-specific Transmissions that detail three different cultures that have begun to colonize Mars. These have been written my the handsome and talented Mark DiPasquale (who wrote the Singapore and Hong Kong Transmissions) and will go into layout very soon.

The Warsaw is a heavier rig than the last two you saw. One of the the things that distinguishes heavier rigs (besides a heavy tag) is that they can have more than one armor tag.

These armor tags are important in Mechnoir, because they allow you to avoid unwanted damage. When someone inflicts a sticky or locked negative adjective on your rig that describes physical damage, you can burn an armor tag instead of taking the adjective. Since heavier rigs have more armor tags, they can take more of a beating. The largest rigs have three armor tags. Taking one of these down can be like a boss fight in a video game. Pretty epic.

So, this is the Coyote 5F:

The chicken-legged robot in the last post is called a Dancer 38. These “rigs” were designed as construction vehicles for taming the harsh landscape of Mars. Hence the yellow and black color scheme. The Dancer is designed for surveying terrain while the Coyote’s articulate arms allow it to build, maintain, and repair large pieces of machinery. They are two of the eight vehicles found in Mechnoir, the upcoming alternate player’s guide for Technoir.

Mechnoir is now in its final playtesting stages and, when it is ready, will be made available free-of-charge to everyone who backed Technoir‘s Kickstarter campaign. Plus, it’s going to be bundled with three Transmissions giving you plenty of content for giant stompy robot action on the surface of Mars. The bundle will also be made available for sale on DriveThruRPG.

Stay tuned as we reveal more about the world of Mechnoir and show off the Warsaw D9 next week.