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Dream Pod 9 has released the Heavy Gear Blitz! Field Manual. Th eBook is available from Drive Through RPG as a free downlaod for those who have bought eBook versions of the Locked & Loaded Rules, Black Talon or Terra Nova Gambit books.



The Field Manual is essentially the 'rules' section from Heavy Gear Blitz! Locked and Loaded with changes and updates from the Gear Up! magazines compiled and tweaked to provide a stable version of the rules. The Locked and Loaded, Black Talon, and Terra Nova Gambit books are still used for army creation and background (with some tweaks from the Field Manual).

There's also three new 1/144th minis coming out for dedicated Engineering Gears from the North, South, and Peace River factions:


From the left to the right we have the Northern Engineering Grizzly (with arm-mounted chainsaw), Southern Engineering Cobra, and Peace River Valence work Gear. These are open-cockpit designs intended for use in construction, field engineering, and vehicle recovery tasks, but they may get forced into combat occasionally.

The Field Manual is great! I was impressed enough with Blitz to buy the rules, and this makes them even better. I love the fact autocannons now have range on the entire table. Makes terrain super important or high speed maneuvering to get into a good fire postion. Very modern. Its going to make me get into this game all over again. The free army builder software is really great, I can't say enough good things about this game. Of course I've been a fan since 1st edition, but dropped out some years ago. I almost wish it was in 28mm, but you wouldn't get the fire and maneuver combat that makes it great. Any ways, give it a look.

-K

*wishes for a UK stockist* :(

I do love those construction gears.

does this book makes blitz up to version 2.5 now? will dp9 be making it mandatory at all their convention and other official events?

i am glad that they're retroactively giving the rules update free to purchasers of the L&L pdf at least so that their purchases aren't invalidated by a mini-edition change. if they had done that with blitz, i wouldn't be miffed with them.

I think it will be the standard rules. And, as you said, it's included free with a lot of the PDFs. The printed B&W version is $15.

Overall, I like most of the changes. The most noticeable is range brackets have gone from 5 to 3, with the third generally being 'infinity'. One of my rare attempts to influence the rules writers (generally ignored for good reason ) was to add a note that players can agree to redefine infinity as 10 feet or similar if playing on a very large table, but I'm not sure if that made it in. This has the effect that blocking LOS has value and you can be hit at any range, just not likely. Plus three brackets are just less fiddly than 5... The damage rules have also been tweaked such that models with more damage boxes aren't as easy to overkill.

It's also "supported" that those who want to play an army from Return to Cat's Eye can skip Locked & Loaded... The Field Manual is a full rules printing, including updated datacards and some minor list tweaks, so Locked & Loaded is mainly useful for the army lists (which I think is over half the book) and background.

Balance wrote:I think it will be the standard rules. And, as you said, it's included free with a lot of the PDFs. The printed B&W version is $15.

Overall, I like most of the changes. The most noticeable is range brackets have gone from 5 to 3, with the third generally being 'infinity'. One of my rare attempts to influence the rules writers (generally ignored for good reason ) was to add a note that players can agree to redefine infinity as 10 feet or similar if playing on a very large table, but I'm not sure if that made it in. This has the effect that blocking LOS has value and you can be hit at any range, just not likely. Plus three brackets are just less fiddly than 5... The damage rules have also been tweaked such that models with more damage boxes aren't as easy to overkill.

It's also "supported" that those who want to play an army from Return to Cat's Eye can skip Locked & Loaded... The Field Manual is a full rules printing, including updated datacards and some minor list tweaks, so Locked & Loaded is mainly useful for the army lists (which I think is over half the book) and background.

the 3 range bracket change is probably a good thing. granted my recent experience is zero but i was quite surprised when blitz 1.0 streamlined a ton of the old HG rpg/tactical rules but still kept all those range brackets.

IIRC from the original blitz... do sturdy boxes count for anything if you get a heavy or crit damage result? does this change with this ruleset? also, is running around at full speed and firing indirect weapons (which meant you ignored all modifiers.. pos or neg) a cheesy but legal strategy?

warboss wrote:IIRC from the original blitz... do sturdy boxes count for anything if you get a heavy or crit damage result? does this change with this ruleset? also, is running around at full speed and firing indirect weapons (which meant you ignored all modifiers.. pos or neg) a cheesy but legal strategy?

Sturdy boxes: I'm paraphrasing, but there's some big changes here. Basically, instead of 3x Armor in damage always overkilling a model, now you need to remove every box and damage can remove any number of boxes (determined by multiples of armor). Overkill still exists, in a sense, that it's the condition in which the model is really most certainly dead and is removed from the board versus merely dead (killed slowly) in which the model remains on the board and is now a possible source of cover.

Indirect fire: Attackers do suffer movement modifiers. You're firing against a static threshhold of 4, so you can hit the speedy little units a bit easier, but you're going to want to stand still (or at least move slowly) to do it.

I'm waiting for my printed copy to really read and absorb. There's also some interesting changes to melee weapons in that some smaller guns have the melee trait and are the only ranged weapons you can use in melee without giving the opponent a free strike, so there's a small but valid niche for the built-in light machine guns and such that many Gears have on them.

Earthbeard wrote:*wishes for a UK stockist* :(

I do love those construction gears.

That would be great wouldnt it.

rich1231 wrote:

Earthbeard wrote:*wishes for a UK stockist* :(

I do love those construction gears.

That would be great wouldnt it.

Jorvik Games ahs some stuff, but I don't know if they have newer stuff in stock.

Awesome! I've been waiting for them to compile all the rule changes from Gear Up.

The updates make some of the larger units a bit more interesting... The Kodiak, for example, now very harder to insta-kill and has tweaked defensive modifiers so it's merely 'easy to hit' not 'a massive bullet trap'.

The Field Manual also has some nice flow charts to to help explain some of the more complex rules pieces.

Any word on the actual book release date ?

I think printed copies should be shipping on or around the 22nd.