Algol vs. Mekton Empire

The Algol Project:
Algol vs. Mekton Empire
The "Why" Algol and Mekton Empire don't fit well
by MC+ Creations

As long time fans of Japanese animation, it was perhaps inevitable that Guy McLimore and Greg Poehlein should discover the Mekton role playing system, an early anime-style game from R. Talsorian Games. When the game was updated as Mekton II, Guy and Greg approached R. Talsorian's Mike Pondsmith with a proposal for a major supplement that would deal with the future of the game universe as the inhabitants of the war-torn planet Algol where the game was based expanded into space. That project was known as "Mekton Universe", but it was never to see print.

Although Guy and Greg were unaware of it at the time, R. Talsorian had already announced an upcoming project called Mekton Empire, which was to deal with the Mekton universe in space in a different way. The project was long delayed, however, because the original designer, Jesse Matonak, had provided only a few basic notes on a couple of new alien races for player characters and some incomplete notes on the game setting. Eventually, Pondsmith turned the project over to Guy and Greg to complete.

Instead of going from Matonak's notes, the two designers used only a couple of character race names that had been previously announced, and built most of the project on the material they had been developing for the aborted "Mekton Universe" project.

Descriptions and backgrounds for Matonak's "Kirini" and "Elomani" races were built from the ground up. Brought into the game universe was a new race, the Kili, who Greg had created for an earlier anime-style in-house campaign.

Guy wrote introductory fiction pieces for each of the sections of the rules, using a set of characters who were based on and named after some of the principle playtesters of Mekton Empire. Jeff Lockridge became the brash pilot Jef, Kimberly Lockridge became the strawberry-blonde technician Kimi, and Guy's wife, Barbara Christine McLimore, had her middle name borrowed for the half-Elomani telepath, Krissdiin. In an amusing twist, Guy named the totally non-humanoid Kirini scientist (a globular green being with tentacles) after himself, spelled as "Gui".

Greg and Guy took the largely combat-oriented Mekton game system and expanded it into a complete anime-style galaxy-spanning space RPG, including an elaborately developed historical timeline spanning many centuries. Building on a suggestion by Mike Pondsmith, the background and non-player characters presented in the game, the galaxy map itself, and many of the important assumptions about the true nature of the game universe, were set up so a gamemaster could pick and choose what was true for his version of the game from a number of possibilities. The concept of "Variable History" meant that even a player with access to the game rulebook did not have the whole story of the universe's most important secrets, and assured that every gamemaster's version of the Mekton Empire galaxy would be different.

A complete new game subsystem was created by Guy to add psionic powers (long a staple in Japanese anime) to the game. Added to the package was new Mekton giant robot combat material created by Pondsmith and R. Talsorian's other in-house designers. The greatly detailed background, new game systems, and Variable History material created a manuscript that was more than twice as large than R. Talsorian had originally ordered. But they liked it well enough to publish it without deleting a single word, and it became R. Talsorian's first project to sell broadly in the Japanese market - quite a compliment for a Japanese anime-style RPG created in the US.

The Mekton system has been revised and expanded again with the long-awaited release of Mekton Zeta, the third edition revised basic rules. Mekton Empire, according to the current Mekton design team, remains about 90% compatible with the revised system.

Through three major revisions, the Mekton system remains the premier Japanese-anime role playing game, a testimony to the essential "rightness" of it's original design approach and a continued commitment to anime gaming by R. Talsorian Games.