Hyper Core: Anime Mecha

System

Hyper Core - Game Mechanics
Hyper Core - Player Characters
Hyper Core - Non-Player Characters

Setting

Map

(The Purple Villain area on the peninsula south of the Tech and Starting Nations is actually occupied territory, where you will start. The shaded in zones are major metropolitan areas, so some of them are downright massive. The Gray areas you see pop up in the tech villain and defensive areas primarily are snowy mountains. That's probably where the Omnium comes from... concentrated in the south-western side of the main mountain range.)

World History

Event 1: About 200 years ago, the Villain nation did something/discovered something that started a major upheaval in the world.

What did they do that caused a major shift in the world?

• the discovery of the wonderfloniun (please someone else name this) that acts as the power source/makes Mecha possible and let us handwaved physics. Maybe this kicked off an industrial revolution, which due to positions of wonderflonium reserves favored the advancement of Villain Nation and Tech Nation. (Thorya)

Event 2: About 45 years ago, The Villain Nation and the Tech Nation were conducting joint experiments and opened a Rift. This rift introduced a threat to the world, and in order to combat that threat, the nations developed Mecha.

What came through the rift?

• An aggressive empire launched a war of conquest. The inhabitants of the other side of the rift come from an alternate world where dinosaurs never went extinct, but continued to evolve--including descendants of dromaeosaurids (like velociraptor and deinonychus) that have evolved sapience and a complex technological society. Many of their war "machines" were in fact bio-engineered dinosaurs of other species, adapted as weapons of war. The sapient dromaeosaurids were not all united in their support of the invasion--and many who came through rift were actually imprisoned political prisoners being used as slave labor by the empire. Additionally, there is a second sapient race, descended from hadrosaurs ("duck-billed" dinosaurs), who are much more peaceful, much less technological oriented, but can create complex, mind-blowing art and music. So the the post-rift war world now has two minority sapient species from another world living as refugees and feral bio-engineered dinosaur war machines. (Muskrat)

• The dinosaurid one probably has more to work with as what lies beyond the rift. I wanted to use an idea suggested in an earlier thread (about the motorcycle machines being the cores of larger robots) as a sort of unified motif/aesthetic. I picture like one of the base forms as a sort of black ipod cube with eyes that plug-and-played into other creatures and/or their technology to form the colossi that the mecha were designed to fight. Whether they were sapient, wild, amenable to peace, etc. would be an exercise for one of the other questions. (Brontes)

• Maybe the eldritch abominations are also behind the technology that opened the rift? They knew something unpleasant would come through and wanted it. Maybe they're some sort of psychic vampires that feed off the suffering of other sapient beings, whether humans, dromaeosaurids or hadrosaurids? I say that, although I've never been keen on the eldritch abomination trope and its implication that some beings are incapable of empathy and morality--it reminds me too much of real-world racist ideologies. (Muskrat)

• I hadn't been thinking quite along those lines, but that could work. We could say that the humans of this world gained the tech to allow human-machine interfaces of the sort used in mechs from the technology that was used to turn the dinosaurs into war machines. (Muskrat)

Event 2A: The Rift was sealed 19 years ago, and the war ended shortly thereafter.

How did war end?

How did The population feel about it?

Event 3: 1 year ago. The other nations discovered that the Villain Nation was experimenting again. When the nations banded together and ordered the Villain nation to stop, War broke out.

What was this experiment that initiated a war?

• Various experiments regarding tech/bioengineering with things from the Rift, that may have the potential to reopen it. I assume the experiments have been going on for a while (maybe since the end of the last war), but were only exposed a year ago. (ajdynon)

• I'm a bit partial to the elevator pitch of Ctech, wish it hadn't gotten all weird as more books came out, but with that in mind: Maybe the villain nation are experimenting with an engel or tager type situation, blending some kind of eldritch abomination into with a human pilot/human transforming into an eldritch abomination. (Tigerwolfe)

Glossary

Hyper Core - Glossary