Vasteel: Mobile Suit Combat



Welcome to the Vasteel: Mobile Suit Combat Wiki
Originally designed as a gaming system for Gundam toys, this is the second edition of my tabletop wargame derived from Games Workshop's Inquisitor game and primarily designed to be used with 1/144 Gundam miniatures. The title Vasteelcomes from an old Turbo Grafx game of the same name. I do not own the rights to any of the IPs I use here, but I thought it would be nice to pay homage to some of the classics that have inspired me through the years. This game is a shoutout to any and all mech stories and games, but is clealy most inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam.

Beginnings
I have always been a fan of the Gundam series. My first exposure and perhaps my favorite story of all is Stardust Memory 0083. I subsequently have become particularly interested in the Universal Century timeline due to its relatively realistic take on mechs and science fiction. I had also spent a lot of time involved in miniature building and tabletop wargaming, primarily through Games Workshop and their Warhammer 40K setting. When Bandai made a series of Gundam toys, I bought them up as fast as I could. One of the first things I did was to adapt a 40K game called Inquisitor into a Gundam game. The idea was to have only a handful of units on the board but to have detailed rules for combat and damage. Unlike so many other games that deal with "meaty" units that inexplicably survive direct hits from firearms, I loved the idea of massive robots duking it out and blowing off limbs while still fighting on with a huge arsenal of powerful weapons. This first edition was hastily made and was mostly a copy and paste of Inquisitor with a few rules changed to make the mechs tougher. Though me and my friends played many fun games, it puttered out as we moved on to other games and interests.

2nd Edition
Many years have passed since the days of our Gundam toy battles. Though my interest in wargaming had never gone away, its prohibitive costs eventually got the best of me and I took my seat on the sidelines, content to watch but rarely play. My urge to build, paint, and play with miniatures never died, but had been pushed aside for other hobbies. Then a new beginning occurred. I was well aware of Bandai's 1/144 scale Gundam miniatures and had owned some in the past, but my roommate showed me some that he had collected and it sparked my imagination. The models are well designed, offering a great deal of articulation. They are capable of being assembled without glue or paint (though I personally always do both). There are tons of models to choose from, including those from the Universal Century as well as many others from other timelines. And considering the small number of models needed to play my game, the cost of most of the miniatures was very reasonable, averaging around $15-$20 per model, though this also depended a lot on the different model grades available.

The first thing I did was drag out my old Inquisitor rulebook, as well as copies of Heavy Gear, and Battletech for big robot reference material, and started a 2nd edition Mobile Suit Gundam game from scratch. These new rules, though clearly based off of Inquisitor, are heavily modified to represent the scale, power, and inhuman nature of giant mechs doing battle. These rules also include point values and design charts to make the game balanced, which was never a key feature to Inquisitor, being mainly designed for narrative purposes.

Two important ideas grew as I started this new game. The first is that this is not Gundam. Though I almost exclusively use Gundam miniatures and base most of the concepts off of Gundam, I do not want this game to be prohibitive. Instead, I want a game that allows players to build whatever robots that they want as long as they keep in mind the points needed to field their units. There are plenty of very good models and toys that are perfectly reasonable to use in this game. My use of Gundams is both because it's my preferred setting and because I think the models themselves are simultaneously of good quality and fairly priced. The second thing that I feel strongly about is that there are no limitations to what is commonly known as What You See Is What You Get (shortened to WYSIWYG) aside from the model's silhouette. There are a few reasons for this. Unlike some other wargames, the models used in this game can come from any source, not just Gundam. Even within Gundam there is little consistency for weapons. Though the fanbase has provided us with plenty of details about each and every weapon that appears on a mobile suit, I am not going to design new rules for every variation of a submachinegun. Instead, there are plenty of rules for choosing a variety of weapons and even modifying them to perform various roles. The only real aspect of WYSIWYG that definitely applies is a unit's silhouette, or the amount of space the model takes up and how visible it is on the battlefield. For example, if you are using a model that is only 2 inches tall, it will be significantly harder to hit based purely on the fact that it can hide much easier. Or conversely, a unit that stands a foot tall is far easier to hit because it sticks out above most buildings or even other mobile suits. The key reason to choose a properly sized miniature has everything to do with how many weapons and how much equipment you want on it. A very small suit cannot carry five heavy rocket launchers. If you want to use a model that is of a certain size or you want to equip the unit in a certain way, you must adhere to the rules of size. Other than size, I (and the rules) could care less what your unit looks like.

Disclaimer
I do not own the rights to any of the source material used to develop this game. I do not own most of the images used. This is a fan created game.

Latest activity




Photos and videos are a great way to add visuals to your wiki. Find videos about your topic by exploring Wikia's Video Library.

