Interview with the creators of Salvage Union

Salvage Union is London based, two two person company’s game. The game is a post-apocalyptic mech tabletop roleplaying game set in a scarred , dystopian, world, which is rules by corportations. The players, the Salvagers live outside the corportations control roaming the wastes in a vast mech, called a Union Crawler. All player have an own mech in this d20 system, which is powered by the Quest RPG.

At this year's UK Games Expo the game won Best Roleplaying Game award in People’s Choice category. Below you can read an interview with the two founder of the company, and co-creator of the game, Aled Lawlor and Panayiotis Lines (Panny).

 Congratulations for the People's Choice Award for Best RPG at UK Games Expo. What does this award mean to you?

Panny - It's genuinely incredibly meaningful and validating, we're a two person company and it can feel isolating at times doing something for a living that many people either don't understand or dismiss, having this sort of recognition from the community really helps me keep writing and designing.

Aled - It's nuts really to think that people like what you do. To be recognised in that way is amazing, it really makes you feel like it was all worth it. To work in the games industry has been my dream for ages and this really makes me feel like a part of it rather than a lucky pretender.

What memories bring you back from the Games Expo?

Panny - Shaking hands with Luke Gygax and Steve Jackson whilst Erik Lang looked on was absolutely surreal. Beyond that meeting the huge number of people in the tabletop community and the Salvage Union fans was great, it's still strange to me when people have played something I wrote and it's great seeing the enthusiasm and love for the game and setting.

Aled - Being told that we'd won. Absolutely that. I literally jumped up in the air, it was the biggest rush of happiness I've had in a long time.

What was the core inspiration, idea for the game?

Panny - What if Mechs but communism? Jokes aside, the initial ideas were conceived by Aled Lawlor and Mal Illidge, I came on to work on the design and writing as I loved the concept of playing as a group of scrappy salvagers building Mechs out of scrap and using that to fight corporations!

Aled - I'd been working on a mech miniatures game on the side and had written up a load of content for that and then I played a playtest of a game my friend Mal had been working on called BANE and there were some Salvage Unioneers as kind of set dressing to the session. They felt really cool as a concept so I figured why not take that and smash it together with some of the other stuff I had and sort of workshopped some rules out and had a loose framework. From there it languished until I suggested to Panny down the pub that I could do with help with the writing and that was that!

The game has some similarities with OSR games. How important was the OSR scene, when you created the game?

Panny - Whilst I wouldn't consider Salvage Union an 'OSR Game', it's intended to be 'NSR' [New School Revolution.], OSR game design principles were really important to the design of the game, in particular a focus on exploration, player agency, rulings not rules, and lethal combats , it's also no coincidence we hired two fantastic authors from the scene in respect to Diogo Nogueira and Luke Gearing to write modules for the game as well as they intuitively 'got' what we were trying to achieve with Salvage Union. Which is to say it was an important element behind the design as we felt it helped drive the experience we were trying to create at the table.

Aled - What Panny said!

Salvage Union already has some adventures published by Leyline Press.What are the future plans for the game?

Panny & Aled - We're looking to work on a starter set which would flesh out the central wastes, and provide a cheaper entrypoint for the game to players, with a big 'starter' campaign adventure and map and a condensed version of the rules set. We're also working on a module around the fall of the corporation 'Aegean Dynamics' which would have an ancient Greek/ fall of Atlantis vibe and a lot of underwater exploration and salvaging.

And at least, what RPGs do you play (when not SU)?

Panny: Lately I played Achaea (an ancient greek hack of B/X D&D), Cy_Borg and the Walking Dead by Free League.

Aled: I played Vaults of Varn, Troika & Mörk Borg.

The interview was created in written form.