In a world where Event Horizon has been fully reclaimed as a B-movie classic, I'm surprised Pandorum (2009) has yet to find its cult. Dependable character actor assholes Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid play flight officers on a generation ship, mysteriously awakened from hibernation mid-voyage. With little clear memory of their mission or even themselves, they try to piece together what's happened, soon learning
[spoiler]
the ship has become a medieval hellscape overrun by marauding black metal orcs. The first 30-odd minutes are note-perfect, intensely atmospheric sci-fi horror, and the rest is never less than entertainingly batshit, with some cool ideas around the edges. Imagine The Descent in space, by way of a Tool video.
Mechanised suits of armour are now a somewhat common sight throughout the Seven Spheres, their pistons hissing and guns thundering across a thousand worlds, and even among the Outer Planes. However, by planar standards they are a relatively recent invention, having developed only within the past few centuries. Despite this, they have rapidly become valued tools by mercenaries and travellers across the planes, alongside their uses as tools of labour in dockyards and warehouses from the walking city of Kelsats to the grim soul-depots of Dis.
History
The history of mechs is a complex one, as several attempts were made to create them during both the Daedalian Golden Age, and the Voidbloom, alongside more recently during the Angelic Cull. However, these attempts were hampered by two things. First, the technology required to allow such suits to move fluidly was virtually non-existent, with the closest being the Chalkespartoi which used a piston-driven, ball-jointed skeleton, although even it was prone to frequent failure. The second and perhaps greater problem was the ability to control the suit, as most required bulky internal joysticks and exo-skeletons to properly transfer the pilot’s movement into the suit’s own limbs. For this reason, most proto-mechs were restricted to use as heavy-lifting tools or for combat within the void, where the structural requirements of the suit itself were lessened in exchange for an increased toll on the pilot.
A change came, however, during the closing battles of the fifth Navirian Crusade. Here, the cult of war-engineers known as the Navirarchs discovered deep wells of a strange, black oil within the bowels of several moons and asteroids in the Greater Kelester system. This oil, later christened Hadal Ichor, had several notable properties. First, it was an incredible conductor. Second, it possessed the ability to replicate itself under certain conditions, and third, it was capable of forming a largely stable interface between the mortal mind and mechanical circuitry. This third property was said to have been discovered when a suit-wearing serf slipped into a deep ichor well whilst extracting the strange substance, and emerged as a powerful fusion of man and machine that took a direct hit from a mage-killer rifle before its runaway regeneration finally failed. This development fascinated the Navirarchs, and it was not long before the earliest frames of the Venator line were deployed, swiftly bringing an end to the fighting and bringing such suits to the public eye throughout the territory of both the Navirarchs and their enemies.
Thanks to their monopoly on mechs, the Navirarchs enjoyed a meteoric ascent in the region for a number of years, although their Venator frames remained relatively fragile and slow, as their joints couldn’t keep up with the stress the Hadal Ichor placed on them. Alongside this, the ichor required immensely high temperatures to replicate itself, meaning large incubators had to be produced to fuel the Venator frames. Finally, pilots who were frequently exposed to the ichor (which was directly injected into the bloodstream via needle-filled cockpits nicknamed Glass Maidens) experienced rapid tissue degeneration, especially in the circulatory system and brain, resulting in most pilots having a life expectancy of six months before their body or mind gave out.
Around this time, the Navirarchs began their last and most devastating crusade against the ancient empire of Vorsaine. Fearful of the Venators potential, the Vorsainites had begun development of their own suits based on the remnants of the truly ancient Chalkespartoi. Because they lacked the interfacing capabilities of the Hadal Ichor, these new frames (named Ferrospartoi) were less able to use complex melee weapons and tended to lose one-to-one engagements with Venators. However, they were significantly faster in both the open field and on rough terrain which the cog-jointed Venators struggled with, meaning oftentimes the Ferrospartoi would pick off the Venators at range before the terrifying cog-suits could even reach them. Because of this stalemate, the war between the Navirarchs and Vorsaine slowed to a stalemate, with engagements increasingly being decided by slower war-engines such as landships and tanks.
This would change, however, with the emergence of Vulture Guilds. By now, the war had spread across multiple star systems, and the remnants of millions of frames littered hundreds of planets, moons and asteroids. Because of this, it took relatively little time for enterprising pirate and salvager captains to begin scavenging and eventually repairing these suits. It took far longer for them to unite, usually through their shared use of a specific frame modification, but eventually several larger salvage captains joined together to form what would become the Vulture Guilds. These guilds swiftly centralised much of the trade in salvaged Venator and Ferrospartoi frames, and once this occurred it didn’t take long for several engineers to experiment with combining the Hadal Ichor interface systems of the venators with the more versatile skeletons of the Ferrospartoi. From these experiments were born the classes of mech collectively referred to as the Firstborn, and from these numerous other frames were created, and their manufacture standardised. These frames were swiftly dispersed among numerous mercenary groups and nobles displaced from war-torn worlds. In short order mercenary companies tore through the inferior Venators and Ferrospartoi, prompting developments on both sides that eventually led to the Battle of the Gilded Plain, so named for the gold-tinted slag left over when both sides deployed terrifying experimental frames upon one another, literally liquifying their foes. Upon the still-cooling plains the leaders of Vorsaine, the Navirarchs, the Vulture Guilds and the heads of the largest mercenary factions came together to sign the Treaty of the Gilded Plain, bringing an end to the war.
After the war, the Vulture Guilds were largely dissolved, forming instead into several notable manufacturers who persist into the present day. These include such legendary companies as the elegant Halistrom, the Navirarch-backed Teleos, the utilitarian Runsk and Basker, and the lethal precision of Nakago. Many of these sponsored mercenary companies of their own, whilst other sellsuits formed their own in-house manufacturers.
Despite all this, most manufacturers were still held back by the cost required to produce the Hadal Ichor, and as fresh wells dried up across the stars, they were forced to pursue alternate sources. The first development was the neural jack, metal links that were surgically embedded into the skin of pilots, removing the need for direct injection, which both lowered the amount of ichor required to operate a suit and significantly increased the amount of time a pilot could operate the suit, in both the short and long term. The more significant development, however, was the discovery of colossal skeletons within the depths of the ichor wells. These skeletons, many of which bore strange gold symbols reminiscent of those found on cultists of Nyarlathotep, were dredged up and through vile necromancies, were raised to undeath. From here, specialist flesh-shapers were employed by manufacturers to transplant bone marrow from these titans into human stock, producing horrifically malformed creatures that bled ichor. These creatures were sealed away beneath ichor refineries, their skin engraved with eldritch symbols and pockmarked by hundreds of pipes that drew precious ichor into the waiting machines above.
By this point much of what a modern person might call a mech was set in place, with relatively few changes occurring in the years between then and now. Instead, most mech manufacturers began to specialise, and knowledge of mech construction began to spread out, with Runsk moving its headquarters to Kelsats, and numerous empires sponsoring their own efforts in the field of mech construction, with the most successful being the terrifying powerful Vorsainite Cataphracts. Alongside this, many smaller firms began developing mechs for specific purposes, such as the Firestrider and Gibbeteer frames, or ones specialised for other species, such as the numerous Igigi-manufactured frames, or the recent experiments emerging from the sixth layer of Pandorum.
Mechs continued to enjoy a role as specialised heavy infantry and fast attack units for several decades, but following their adoption in the Vorsainite War with the Droskol Empire, a group famed for their use of heavy tanks, it was found that, while mechs excelled in dispatching tanks at close range, the tanks decimated them from further away. Hence, an arms race began as the Vorsainites developed faster and more nimble mechs carrying more and more devastating close-range weapons, and the Droskol developed larger and more heavily armoured tanks, culminating in the Vorsainite Drachasta-I frame and the Droskol Uthoroka Fortress-Tank. These terrifying weapons eventually spread and diversified, forming the modern Lancer class of mechs and the basis of landfleet doctrine respectively.
The Hadal Ichor
Pumped in its purest state from fissures deep within dead worlds or stolen from the veins of half-alive cloned titans, hadal ichor is the both the fuel that keeps mech’s moving, and the material that gives the pilot the ability to move the mech at all. It is injected in small quantities into the spinal cord and bone marrow via neural jacks, allowing the pilot to interface with their mech whilst mitigating the effects the ichor has on the body and mind overall. Despite this, the ichor is still exceptionally potent, with most pilots seeing at most a decade of action before their body begins to waste away or, in more common cases, they succumb to an ichor-induced frenzy that leaves both the pilot and anyone around them dead. Indeed, most pilots are forced into retirement long before then, although a few survive longer, with certain legendary pilots keeping their minds for decades, and a dreaded few succumbing partially to the ichor, becoming bloodthirsty but terrifyingly intelligent foes that stalk battlefields for centuries. The exact makeup of the ichor is unknown, as although many suggest it to be organic, it emits a thaumaturgical signature closer to that of magically-active minerals such as urelium than that of a typical form of life. Furthermore, it seems to possess the ability to, in the case of certain pilots who display an exceptional aptitude, heal the metal plating of a suit and, in similar circumstances, allow the mech to move in ways that should be both physically impossible given the mech’s joint configuration, and at speeds that should cause the mech to fall apart from stress. What is broadly accepted, however, is that these abilities are tied to how deeply the pilot connects to the suit, as entry-level cuirassiers struggle to adjust to their frames and yet emerge physiologically unharmed by their piloting, whilst experienced pilots often come to view their pilots as extensions of themselves, dancing across the battlefield whilst often being barely able to stand for hours upon leaving their suits. This is to say nothing of the shock the ichor can deal the nervous system upon damage to the mech, with some pilots suffering immediate strokes or heart attacks when their frames are felled, whilst others display such an aptitude for the ichor that it seems to flow out from the mech’s ‘wound’ in great tendrils, knitting together twisted metal and restoring sundered limbs.
Art source
Common types
Mechs and their pilots bear a variety of names throughout the planes, such as the Ironclads of Kelsats to the Velites of Rhadamanthia. However, for simplicity, this guide shall use the classifications employed by the majority of mercenaries of the Celmian League, as they are likely to be most familiar to those experienced with such suits. They are classed by size and the weight of their armour primarily, although certain classes of mech tend to favour specific weaponry.
Cuirassier
Cuirassier frames are the smallest of mech frames, being barely larger than the skeleton rigs frequently used in planar industry, and occasionally as heavier infantry. Similarly, most Cuirassiers see use supporting other infantry or larger mechs. They tend to be heavily armoured, and typically stand 2-3 metres tall. They frequently carry large rail-arquebuses, heavy machine guns or heavy staffguns at range. When equipped for melee, they frequently wield massive shields designed to allow infantry to take cover behind them, and carry huge polearms for dealing with larger mechs. Due to their heavy armour, Cuirassiers are often regarded as slow by other pilots, and whilst they are certainly not the fastest, they can still put on surprising bursts of speed, especially in the cases of certain models, such as the infamous Teleos Bucephalus-II, or the infamous mercenary frame Jundun-Eter, a shotgun-wielding frame that laid waste to an entire void-fleet before disappearing through, if rumours are to be believed, a miniaturised portal spell.
Reiter
Where Cuirassiers are by and large slower, more heavily armoured frames, Reiters are skeletal deathtraps clad in minimal armour and equipped with exceptionally powerful thrusters. Most commonly deployed against light(er) tanks or artillery positions, or in scouting and skirmishing roles, Reiters have barely any armour, and typically carry a single large weapon, such as a heavy rail-culverin or a massive tank-glaive. They tend to be quite cheap to manufacture, not counting their engine components, and as such have the highest mortality rate out of any mech class. Despite this, plenty of pilots flock to Reiters, as their incredible speed appeals to many thrill seekers. Reiters vary a fair bit in size, as some are little more than wireframe suits, whilst others sport stilt-like legs that raise their height up to 4 metres.
Cavalier
The most iconic class of mech and the one favoured most by independent mercenaries, Cavaliers keep a healthy balance of speed and armour, and display easily the broadest variety of frames on the market. Most tend to focus on a larger melee weapon such as a tank scimitar or claymore, and carry a ranged weapon in the offhand, such as a rail-falconet or grenade crossbow. Frequently, these weapons are built directly into the frame, allowing for gimmicks that, while impractical in standard-issue frames, are frequently favoured by mercenaries. Famous mercenary frames include the Landsknecht and Muramasa rigs, which sport robust sensor suits and a broad variety of weapon hardpoints that make them exceptionally common bases for mercenary frames. So great is the Landsknecht’s popularity that it has become a byword for mercenary in itself, and troops of them are common through the Crucible and beyond.
Demi-Lancer
A recently developed class of mech, Demi-lancers were designed as more affordable generalist alternatives to the larger and heavier lancers, and frequently see similar roles to their heavier counterparts. They are most commonly armed with heavy rail-culverins or mage-bombards, alongside melee weapons such as anti-tank zweihanders or decapitator scythes. By and large, demi-lancers serve as duellists, taking on similar sized tanks or other mechs, although many, such as the Beowulf frame, have seen extensive use hunting large monsters, such as dragons or giants. Demi-Lancers tend to be heavily armoured around the chest and upper arms, but far more lightly around the legs and forearms, something that cuts a surprising amount of weight from the frame and makes it surprisingly nimble even when compared to some cavaliers. However, it does leave them more vulnerable to disarmament, and even leads to stories of some lucky infantrymen managing to blast a demi-lancer's legs out from under it and hack it apart once it fell. Ironically, many demi-lancers have seen use specifically for defending artillery positions and landships from other mechs, easily cutting apart smaller Reiters and, in a few cases, outmanoeuvring and destroying huge Lancers.
Lancer
The apex of military mechs, Lancers are the largest and most heavily armed of all standard mech frames. They carry exceptionally heavy weaponry such as back-mounted rail-mortars, mage-bombards or sun disks. However, the weapon for which they are named is their most feared, the huge storm lance. This weapon was specifically developed for cracking the thick plating of the Lancer’s principle prey, large tanks and, most infamously, landships. Storm Lances are made up of a thick vulcanite and steel tip at the end of a long, exceptionally durable rod that is wrapped in several coils of mage-gold. This is used to channel a deadly electric charge down the lance that can be blasted from the tip as either a devastating mid-range projectile or, more commonly, directly into the hull of a landship. For this reason, all landships regard lancers as high-priority targets, as most are armoured enough to withstand several shots from even exceptionally large guns, and can accelerate at terrifying speeds thanks to massive back-mounted charge thrusters. If a Lancer can reach the landship without being taken out, it often can completely destroy the vehicle, as it can easily shrug off most of its point defense weapons whilst using its lancer to strike deep into the belly of the war-engines. As such, many landships now include small groups of cavaliers or demi-lancers charged with preventing any lancers from reaching the ship, a job that the more manoeuvrable craft excel at, as while lancers’ charge thrusters allow for incredible acceleration, they turn poorly and even simply causing a lancer to slow down and turn is often enough for several artillery strikes to obliterate it, or for the lancer to call off its charge entirely.
Other classes of mech do exist, with exceptionally large lancers being rare but not unheard of stories. Such mechs will get their own posts eventually, as many operate far more esoteric weaponry than a 'simple' storm lance.
