For me, a good mecha RPG isn’t really about the robots. Or rather, it’s not only about the robots. I’m not here for Gundam melodrama or lovingly tracking armour facings on a hex map; I’m closer to ABC Warriors than Wing Zero. I want players to feel how absurdly powerful a mech is in the moment, and how contingent that power is on dodgy welds, overheating reactors, and the creaking society that built it. A good mecha game should be about relationships, exploration, precarious communities, and drama, with fights as punctuation marks rather than the whole sentence.
With that in mind: Salvage Union looks suspiciously like the mecha game I’ve been trying to trick other systems into being.
The vibe: clanking 2000AD, not sleek anime
The pitch is straightforward and familiar: post-apocalyptic world, the planet slowly rusted and irradiated to bits; mega-corporations hoard the good land in arcologies, everyone else scrabbles in the wastes.
You’re not elite soldiers, you’re salvagers, roaming the world in a gigantic walking commune called a Union Crawler, bolting together scrap-built mechs to keep your people alive and independent.
It feels much closer to ABC Warriors, Stalker, and the grimiest bits of Fallout than to clean-cut Gundam. Mechs are ubiquitous industrial tools rather than sacred knightly relics. Bio-Titans lumber around, the alien nanite “Meld” lurks in corners of the setting, corpos are explicitly The Bad Guys, and the book comes right out and says “this game is not for fascists”. So the politics are not shy.
This is already a big point in its favour compared to the relatively plain-vanilla militarism of Battletech. The world has teeth and texture.
Rules: Quest-style d20, with crunchy toys around the edges
If Lancer’s dense tactical loadouts and combo trees made your eyes glaze over, Salvage Union is a relief. The core mechanic is lifted from Quest: you roll a single d20 whenever the outcome is interesting or risky. 20 is an outstanding success, 11–19 is a straight success, 6–10 is a tough choice, 2–5 is a failure, and 1 is a cascade failure with extra pain. No modifiers, no target number maths. The texture comes from the result band, not adding +7.
That “tough choice” band is doing a lot of work. In combat the default is “deal half damage, or full damage and take a hit yourself”, but the book gives plenty of other options: overheating, collateral damage, hurting relationships, waking up something nasty. It nudges you toward drama rather than pure hit-point attrition.
You can push a roll by overclocking your mech: reroll, then take 2 Heat and immediately make a Heat Check, risking a reactor mishap if things go badly. It’s simple, but it nails that “I can juice it a bit more, but something’s going to crack” feeling that’s fundamental to good mecha fiction.
On the crunch spectrum this sits somewhere around lighter than Alien or Mothership, heavier than Into the Odd. The turn structure and range bands are straightforward; there’s no grid, no facing, no nested conditions beyond some tags. Combat is dangerous but not an exercise in build optimisation. If Lancer felt like doing your taxes, Salvage Union is more like end-of-round clean-up in a board game, a little admin, but manageable.
Mechs, scrap, and the joy of breaking things
Where the crunch does live is in the mech workshop. You pick from about 30 chassis and more than 150 systems and modules, gated by Tech Levels from 1 (junk) to 6 (corpo super-weapons).
Mechs have Structure Points (SP) instead of hit points; when SP hits 0 you roll on a critical damage table and bits start coming off. Systems and modules can be damaged or destroyed outright, only to be repaired back on the crawler in downtime or with precious scrap in the field.
The result is exactly what I want: mechs feel big and capable, but also like physical objects that can be mangled. You can swagger in your jury-rigged tunneller-tank, but one bad fight will leave you limping home with half your kit hanging off and a long conversation to have with whoever runs the Mech Bay.
All of this plugs into a simple but effective scrap economy. Every interesting location lists Area Salvage; each haul turns into Tech-rated scrap, which you then spend on repairs, upgrades, and custom builds. Scrap also pays the Upkeep on your Union Crawler. Fail to “pay your dues” and your mobile commune starts falling apart.
Crucially, the book explicitly says combat is meant to be costly in scrap, energy and abilities, and that this should encourage players to look for non-violent solutions. That’s a rare and welcome message in a game about giant robots.
The Union Crawler: where the humans live
The real masterstroke is the Union Crawler. This is your walking town, a mech the size of a tower block that houses your whole community. Players choose a crawler type, name it, assign NPCs to each bay, and then upgrade it over time with new facilities: Med Bays, Crafting Bays, Cantinas, Nanite Labs, and so on.
Downtime is structured as a little game loop of its own: pay upkeep, restore SP/HP, repair or craft systems, train new Pilot abilities, pick new equipment, then gossip in the Cantina to pick up rumours and decide where to go next. It’s very explicit that NPCs on board matter, that you should name them and give them keepsakes and mottos just like the player characters.
In practice this moves the emotional centre of gravity away from “my badass mech” and toward “our very fragile community”. The crawler is your ship in The Expanse or your wagon in Oregon Trail: a shared resource, a shared home, and a shared liability. There’s a lot of space here for exactly the relationship-driven, low-combat drama I’m after: arguments over where to steer next, who to ally with, whether to take a risky contract for the sake of better med tech.
Exploration and campaign structure
Salvage Union really wants you to run sandboxy expeditions, not plotted missions. The default Campaign Mode uses three map layers: a wide campaign map, regional maps for each area, and zoomed-in area maps like specific valleys or settlements. Movement costs time in hours, days, or weeks depending on what you’re moving (mech, pilot, crawler).
The book gives solid advice on tracking time, placing scrap so there’s always just enough, and letting factions and NPCs act off-screen between downtime cycles. There’s guidance on escalation: the more you interfere, the more the world changes.
The net effect is that an average session will have maybe one or two fights, surrounded by travel choices, negotiations with waster settlements, hard calls about whether to stop and salvage or rush to help someone. With the right table, that’s a very human way to do mecha. The machines are tools you bring to bear on social and moral problems, not the whole story.
The scenarios: what sort of stories do they tell?
You’ve got three campaign modules plus the core book scenario to choose from. All of them are sandboxes with faction play, but they scratch slightly different itches.
The Downing of the Atychos (core book)
The built-in scenario is a good “pilot episode”: the crawler arrives in a region with a waster settlement (Scrapper’s Bluff), a key reservoir, and the wreck of a corpo transport, the Atychos. There are trade caravans to save or ignore, corpo interests to bargain with, and a community living off the corpse of a fallen crawler.
Players spend their time scouting, salvaging, deciding whether to defend, exploit or abandon the locals. It’s a solid introduction to the loop and already has that “who do we help?” angle you like.
Rainmaker– weather as a weapon
Rainmaker is a full campaign (10–15 sessions) about an ancient weather-control system whose keys are scattered across a chain of anomalous micro-climates. The hook is discovering impossible rain patterns in old meteorological data and realising someone once steered the clouds.
The players’ job is to explore the eight regions (bogs full of irradiated water, drowned cities, desert “hell,” etc.), deal with local factions, and track down the RAINMAKER keys. Ideally before everyone else realises what’s going on and starts killing each other for control of the sky.
This one leans hard on exploration and politics. There are Bio-Titans stomping about, but combat is very avoidable; the interesting questions are “who gets the rain?” and “do we trust ourselves with this button?” It’s also drenched in weird environmental detail: haunted camps, drowned streets, monstrous weather experiments.
I prefer relationships and drama over constant fights, so Rainmaker is an excellent fit. It’s about choosing winners and losers in a thirsty world, not just topping up your scrap meter.
We Were Here First! – meteor showers and body horror
We Were Here First! is set in Gehenna, a restricted zone where Chimerid meteors fall, bringing with them mutagenic goo called Chimerium. Corpos, raiders, cults and other salvagers all pile in to get a slice.
Each session begins with rolling where fresh meteors land; factions race to reach them, sometimes beating the players to the prize or clashing with them on arrival. Chimerium is incredibly valuable, it counts as high-end bio-salvage for crafting organic mechs and weapons, but exposure forces you to roll on a delightfully horrible mutation table.
This module is very Call of Cthulhu-adjacent in tone: escalating risk, mutations with no cure, factions that will happily burn you for profit. It supports my interest in horror and consequence, but it is more about repeated hazardous forays and big set-piece threats like Bio-Titans and mutated beasts. You can definitely play up relationships (especially within and between the factions), but the default loop is “chase rocks, dodge monsters, get weird”.
False Flag – cold war in the nanite dust
False Flag is is perhaps my favourite of the available modules.
It’s set in the aftermath of the Vornaya Event, where a nanite detonation turned a region into a black dust wasteland full of anomalies and Meld weirdness. Two corpos, DronTek and Stefanus, are fighting a covert war over a worker-run mining settlement that sits on top of the good stuff. Open warfare would cost them their shares, so everything is done through sabotage, covert ops and deniable assets – i.e., the PCs.
The structure is clever. At the start you’re offered contracts from multiple factions; each job you take advances their agenda. Do enough work for one and you unlock faction-specific “closed contracts”: dirty operations like stealing a “Big Brother” mech for a false-flag raid, or literally poisoning a town’s water supply with Meld so it looks like a rival atrocity.
The module is explicit that it’s about moral choices and the cost of collaboration. Players will be constantly choosing which horrible people to help, how far they’re willing to go, and what happens to the workers caught in the crossfire. There’s still plenty of exploration (icy gulfs, nanite coasts, anomalous zones) and Meldites and anomalies provide the big weird mecha-horror moments. But the heart of it is political.
Who this game isn’t for
This isn’t an all-purpose mech panacea.
If what you loved about Lancer was the dense tactical grid game (status conditions, range bands measured in hexes, precision balances between classes) Salvage Union will feel too soft-edged. The d20 result bands are intentionally swingy, and there are relatively few mechanical levers to pull beyond gear choices, positioning, and whether you’re willing to push and overheat.
If you want your mecha to be shiny hero suits in a high-gloss anime war, you may bounce off the tone. This is a game about scrappy workers in rustbucket machines, arguing over whether to side with the least-awful corporation this week. There’s hope in there, but it’s collectivist, not shōnen.
If your group hates resource loops and downtime, you’d also be fighting the current. So much of the game’s identity lives in scraping together enough scrap to pay upkeep, upgrading the crawler, and making choices about what to repair or craft first. Strip that away and you’re left with a pretty simple d20 narrative system that isn’t doing anything you couldn’t get elsewhere.
And finally, the content leans into exploitation, trauma, body horror and systemic injustice. There are solid safety tools up front and plenty of reminders not to revel in the nastier bits, but it’s still there. If your table wants cosy, low-stakes mecha slice-of-life, you’d have some sanding to do.
So… is this the mech-siah I’ve been searching for?
For someone who bounced off Lancer’s spreadsheet spirit and finds Battletech’s lore a bit beige, Salvage Union is a very strong candidate. The rules are light at the table but give you enough dials (heat, scrap, critical damage) to make mechs feel powerful and precarious. The Union Crawler frames everything around a community that lives or dies by your decisions. The published campaigns, especially False Flag and Rainmaker, are built for exactly the mix of relationships, exploration, hard choices, and occasional, very memorable fights, I’m looking for.
If what you want is to tell stories about tired, principled people in clanking death-machines trying not to become the thing they hate, Salvage Union doesn’t just support that, it quietly assumes that’s what you’re here for.
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