MECHNOIR is an alternative Player's Guide for Technoir: High-Tech, Hard-Boiled Roleplaying. It includes nine new shiny training programs, six big stompy mechs (or 'rigs'), and the two transports that bring them to the battleground. There's special rules for destroying the tags on your enemies' rigs and transports and a section for how to deal with scale when hardboiled criminals go up against hard-cased machines.

Bundled with the player's guide are three new Transmissions that outline the major colonial factions on Mars: The Chosen, the Shiat al-Raj'a, and the Martian Autonomist Union.

Technology

Massive walking machines called “rigs” were engineered to carve into the red husk of Mars and construct new colonial structures for those who fled an Earth that didn’t want them anymore. Only practical in low-gravity environments, these mechanized giants are piloted by specialized riggers who use cerebral inputs to command the rigs as extensions of their own body. But when the colonies turned against each other, these rigs were retrofitted with weapons and utilized for their destructive capabilities in a war that spans the red planet.

Environment

Mars has a toxic atmosphere, horrific sandstorms, and less than half of Earth’s gravity. It’s not exactly easy for anyone to live here. This forces colonists to huddle together in the sealed domes and underground structures the rigs built. Even inside, farming is less than sustainable and polution is a growing danger as the ability to recycle or replenish Earth’s imported resources is limited.

Society

The various communites that live on Mars came to escape religious and political pursecution on Earth. Now far from their oppressors, it didn’t take them long to turn their disdain towards each other. War has broken out between the planet’s three primary factions: the personality cult of the Shiat al-Raj’a, the Martian Autonomist Union, and the cloned zealots of “The Chosen.” Now the working-class riggers, once responsible for building the colonies, have been called on to be the warrior class that might bring society’s destruction.