Game Reactions: Kill ENGN (CY_BORG mech expansion)
Link: https://www.killengn.com/
a Cy_Borg compatible supplement for building and fighting large mech vehicles in the world of CY.
Kill ENGN is a 64-page zine expansion designed for CY_BORG that adds mechs to your game. There is also a pre-written adventure in a 40-page zine called Cast Oubliette. I backed these on Kickstarter in late 2024, and the PDF delivered very quickly, but I've only just gotten around to reading it because I'm bad at backlogs.
As ever with anything -Borg, the visuals are intended to bring a lot of the vibes, and these look great. Kill ENGN takes the typical design language and definitely learns all the right lessons. It's visually very busy, but still easily readable and useable at the table. The finished product is extremely slick, no notes here. The writing is also really high quality, which isn't always the case for third-party supplements like this. Overall it's a really professional piece of work.
There are rules for building a mech that use the typical character creation structure, so it's nice and familiar, and makes the mechs feel important, not just like a piece of equipment. It also means there's a lot of flexibility and customisation, and I could easily see more classes and gear being added to expand it further.
Although this is a zine expansion, it's very close to being a full game in its own right. You have character creation, lore, combat rules, gear, enemies - you could almost run this standalone, showing how much effort and detail has been put into it.
One other thing I love is that there's a lot of good tables sprinkled throughout the book, and a strong mission generator. This should really help GMs to incorporate the mechs into their campaigns beyond 'wow it'd be cool if we had mechs'.
For Kill ENGN itself, I'd say it's an easy recommend if you play CY_BORG and like mechs. And who doesn't like mechs?
Moving to Cast Oubliette, the adventure, it's of a mixed bag for me. For one thing, I'm not a huge fan of the primary font choice, which I didn't find all that pleasant to read for the whole zine. A quick overview though: in the adventure, your characters go to what is essentially a mech fight club and get an early opportunity to experience mech combat in a contained scenario, which is a nice touch. It also serves as a 'you meet in a tavern...' style introduction, where you will eventually be pulled into an adventure towards a facility owned by Grivt Dynamics, a corporation building mechs.
The format is typical OSR-like Borg-style with simple maps and bullet points. A frequent concern I had was the length of some bullet points, which are really more like paragraphs of text, as you can see above. It also leans a lot on diagetic text, to the point where it took me longer than I would've liked to parse the intended structure of the adventure. I often struggle with this in games - the diagetic text approach can be very cool, but honestly as a GM what I want more than anything is clarity in the rules and instructions. Sometimes I definitely feel that is sacrificed too easily.
The final act of the adventure is cool, and there's a good story going on for the players to uncover, although it feels like it arrives in this last act without much prior setup. The hook here is very light initially, and players will need to follow the story for the sake of it rather than their characters being really driven to.
There's also another opportunity to jump in mechs at the end sequence, which raises an issue I'm not completely sure how I feel about. Players have two opportunities to get into a mech in the adventure, once at the start, and again right at the end. The rest plays out like any other cyberpunk adventure. On the one hand, this adventure could serve pretty well as a way to introduce mechs to your ongoing campaign, and that's explicitly what it's intended to do. However, I'd have really liked to see the included adventure be one that primarily takes place in mechs, so players can let loose, and GMs have an example of a purely mech-based adventure. It's solid though, and again includes more useful random tables too.