There is a legend of a place, a million light years from here . . .
A far place, where mighty armies war with gigantic metal warriors . . .
A place called . . . Algol.

From humble beginnings -- a battle map in the very first "White Box" edition depicting two equatorial islands, each roughly the size and shape of England -- Algol has grown along with the MEKTON game. The "Blue Book" usually thought of as MEKTON I expanded Algol to an entire world, one teetering on the brink of total war between superpowers, backed by the threat of a global ice age. MEKTON II moved the timeline ahead, describing the rest of the star system in more detail and opening the door for a much different, but very familiar, conflict: that of the space colonies against the planetary nations that spawned them. MEKTON EMPIRE gave us a whole galaxy, in which Algol and all its troubles were but an obscure footnote in the long history of the Bendar Galactic Empire.

By the time of MEKTON ZETA, Algol had become one of several campaign settings mentioned in the main rulebook. Again, former enemies had joined against a new threat -- the Aggendi invaders, awakened from their long sleep by a madman. And now, with yet another edition of MEKTON due, who knows what the future holds?

Here, for those who would study the history of Algol, is the world as it originally appeared in the back of the "Blue Book" fifteen years ago. We thank Mike Pondsmith and R. Talsorian Games for allowing us to reproduce it in this form, and hope you find it of interest.

Footnote: The Real Algol

There is a real star named Algol -- which means "the demon's eye" in Arabic, because to Arab astronomers, it seemed to "wink." Algol (also known as Beta Persei, the second brightest star in the constellation Perseus) is a binary consisting of a small, bright star and a larger (and fainter) orange one. When the bright star passes behind its large companion, Algol seems to dim, falling an entire magnitude. This eclipse happens every 2.87 days and lasts a total of ten hours. Algol also dims, though not nearly as much, when the smaller star partially eclipses the larger.

As described in the various editions of MEKTON, the Algolian system is even more complicated. A total of four stars orbit a common center of gravity: a blue giant (also named Algol), a yellow star much like Sol (Minbar), a red dwarf (Kobol) and a burned-out stellar remnant (the Dark Companion). The planet Algol circles these four suns at a distance variously described as similar to Saturn's orbit (MEKTON) or Mars' (MEKTON ZETA). This arrangement, along with the planet's three moons, makes for spectacular visuals -- important for any anime series -- but is rather implausible; some people on the MEKTON Mailing List have suggested that the Algol system must have been engineered this way, either by the Bendari or some other species advanced enough to move stars around for their own purposes.

This page created and original material converted by Lorax.

Material copyright R.Talsorian Games 1985, 1987, 1996. All rights reserved under Universal Copyright Convention. This material may not be reproduced in any form without express permission of R.Talsorian. Mekton, Mek, Algol and Roadstriker are trademarks of R,Talsorian Games, Inc. 1987.