There was indeed a mini-edition change in the works mere weeks away but it looked like DP9 were finally changed somewhat and were at least giving the rules to their PDF customers as a free update. Forewarned by my prior experiences, I started looking for news of another edition change as it had been a couple years since L&L came out and was due for an early DP9 edition swap soon enough, i found some info on the upcoming Field Manual (including here on dakka). After a few years of not really paying attention to HG (other than the occasional nerdrage post in Balance's threads here), I found myself contemplating visiting Terra Nova again.

Recently, I stumbled onto an incredible deals on Southern minis for Heavy Gear. With my book collection phased out yet again, I was back out of the HG hobby (and so was my FLGS which had their entire blitz collection made unsellable just like with their previous HG sets). Unfortunately, two years later Locked and Loaded was announced as replacing the four Blitz books that had been published to date and a promised free PDF update never materialized. After getting some assurances from the guys at DP9 at Gencon that Blitz (which came out a few months earlier) was here to stay, I got back into the game mainly because of the new minis, which reminded me in shape/style alot more of the old RAFM ones than the tactical ones did. During that time, HG came out with new revisions of the core same books roughly every 3 years and eventually ended up with Blitz. We both decided not to buy HG products anymore (and my friend got out of minis in general) and for the next almost 10 years my only involvement with the game was playing a convention game here and there (including playing penny-marker vectore based Jovian Chronicles and Gear Krieg back when it was just gears with little WWII plastic infantry bits glued onto the minis!).

Unfortunately, DP9 decided to switch editions around two years later as well as completely change the scale of the minis from then on and both of our collections were now not really compatible with future products. I started up a Northern force while my friend collected the South. When we played a few games at Gencon, we both were hooked (and ironically earned playtesting credit for the second HG book published!). We both were intrigued by the art and the idea of smaller mech combat and were fans of DP9's prior works (both of us owned copies of Protoculture Addict and the Macross II Robotech books). My interest in Heavy Gear started out back in the mid-90's when a friend and I saw an ad for the upcoming RPG Heavy Gear in the Gencon Program guide. If you're not interesting in my not-so-short tale of gaming love found and lost, I'd suggest skipping ahead to the pic below and then the next post.

To start out this blog, I'll go through a bit of the somewhat love/hate history I've had with the game in the past.

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