by Zebulon
Wanna hear me gush about a game that has a wild Golden Age of Sci-Fi Optimism, themes of mutual aid, cultural preservation and the rights of all sentient beings and being a mech pilot on the fringes of the great human Diaspora?
Created by Massif Press and written by Miguel Lopez and Tom Bloom, Lancer burst onto the scene in 2019 after a successful Kickstarter, and has had a few releases of supplemental PDFs, scenarios etc, and has a wealth of fan-original content by the games lively community. (Of note: Comp//Con, a free character sheet app and own rules reference site. Seriously, I can’t suggest it enough, it has everything you need to make a character from the core book and there are LCP files to unlock all the other files. Please, it’s so helpful.
Cutting their teeth between the weird fiction of Kill Six Billion Demons and writing for Magic the Gathering, Tom and Miguel, respectively, put in a massive amount of effort into trying to bring forth an evocative, optimistic and just plain fun setting, drawn out by an amazing team of artists.
Due to concerns/disagreements/violent sectarian conflict between the writer and editor over copyright for the interior art and cover, take it from me it is dope as fuck, and my apologies. Look it up.
Now, legal arguments aside, we have a work around thanks to Retrograde Minis, a website and Patreon that makes pixel art tools and assets for Lancer. This, honestly has saved my ass prepping for my upcoming games, if only for reference art for my players. They have a good share of the mechs available for free, and a subscription to their Patreon gets you so much more, able to make crude walking tanks all the way to the most High Speed Low Drag Armored Core designs you can get at, with full credit to the artists and what they do. Seriously, this community alone provides so much to this game. https://www.retrogrademinis.com/ is right there, friend, if you’re gonna run this game please consider using them.
It is the year 5016 of the Union Calender, 5016 years after a new Humanity rose from the ashes of old world and reached back out to the heavens, reconnecting with the wide spread throngs of humanity who survived or thrived independently, long lost and left behind by the collapse of Old Humanity. Linked by Blink Space, the Core Worlds of Union are advanced utopias, full on Star Trek Federation levels of advanced tech and prosperity. The needs of all are provided for, no human left to suffer. Using highly advanced, other dimensional entities called NHPs (Non-Human Persons) and the field of Paracausal Science, Union is entering a post-scarcity society.
It’s all good, if you are among the ten percent of the trillions across the galaxy to live on a core world. But the Diaspora, the long outstretched reach of humanity across the Orion Arm, ravaged by war, colonialism and the sheer struggle for life on some of the most remote sections of the galaxy, isn’t there yet.
This Union isn’t alone, and can’t operate alone. It has to navigate the intergalactic politics of Monarchist Nobles dealing with Labor Revolts on their moons, a weapons manufacturer formed by former Regime Personnel who oversaw a Xenocide, a Hyperluxury brand harvesting genetic code and forcing people to sign their genetic legacy away for biomods, an insane hacker cult who may be worshipping a machine intelligence who became extra-planar mathematics, and worse. Because it’s never a simple day out in the Diaspora.
And then there are those stuck on the edge of the galaxy in the grey space of being protected by Union, but so far out that the rule of law is looser – hard to call on Union help a hundred lightyears from the nearest blink gate. But people are here still, living in remote worlds and stations, trying to get by. The getting-by gets hard in space. Harder with space pirates, corpo grab teams, giant megafauna and insane cultists praising things they see in the Omni-net.
This is where you come in. You are the warrior elite of this period, born to it or just lucky and smart enough to be chosen to become one of the most premier pilots in the galaxy. You mastered the art of piloting the Frame, tall, anthropomorphized mecha ranging from little more than up-armored hardsuits all the way to towering, 30 foot tall artillery platforms. Armed with paracausal and conventional weapons on the bleeding edge, printed out thanks to ship- and planet-bound 3D printers called Makers, Frames have bled into every segment of life.
Standing head and shoulders over the standard mech jock in esteem, you have the chance to put your name out there in the galaxy.
You might be one of the lucky few to save the galaxy.
You are a Lancer.
Yeah okay, that’s a great fucking lore dump, thank you, now what’s the game dipshit?
Split between a rules-light narrative and hex-based tactical combat, Lancer puts the majority of its focus not in service to worldbuilding but to the mech combat, which admittedly tends to follow its well-worn wargame roots.
Character generation is fairly simple, starting by generating your pilot by selecting a small assortment of gear, backstory and callsign, as well as four “triggers” used to give a +2 bonus on your d20 – ranging from simple fisticuffs, charm to patching holes in mechs or your fellow pirates. The list is nowhere near exhaustive and does fall into the trap of being JUST on the wrong side of being too narratively open, for my tastes.
Once you got your window dressing, you get to pick three talents, ranging from movement boosts, access to weapons powered by your own reactor exhaust, enhanced electronic warfare, to your own little Cortana AI Buddy fueled by Paracausal Math from outside our realm (Don’t worry, they’ll behave. As long as they think they are still a person and don’t realize what they could do if they were to just break their shackling and ascend to a higher existence).
Then there’s the mechs themselves.
Again, because I can’t gush enough about this game’s writing: General Massive Services’ Everest is a generic mech, but it is given one of the most beautiful odes to human achievement and the collective effort, sometimes left forgotten, that all leaps in human progress require. From the onset you have access to all of GMS’ catalogue, but unless you want to run a Foreverest (still very viable), you are gonna need licenses. Each level in a license unlocks access to weapons, modifiers and parts from one of the 4 mech manufacturers, giving quite a breadth of choice.
I feel like I could go on too long detailing everything, so I’m just going to give some personal highlights here, things I find cool in each faction, rather than a hard breakdown of stats.
You got Harrison Armory’s specialty in top of the line military hardware, like the Saladin, a heavy defensive mech that uses faster-than-light tachyons to create bubble shields around itself and other mechs, as well as using what can only be described as eldritch-math enhanced handloads for maximum lethality. The fun thing about the Saladin is it tends to be purchased in bulk by Union, so stories abound of Big Sal being seen on both sides of brush wars or crises in the Diaspora. Funny enough, it’s put into focus that Saladin pilots rarely have to pay their bar tab.
Handling galactic shipping, IPS-N brings rugged industrial mechs produced primarily to deal with pirates, producing everything from a melee berserker like the Blackbeard to the walking bunker of CIWS-Armed-Brick-Shithouse called the Drake. Unironically, IPS-N is my favorite of the manufacturers, mostly because they’re whole schtick is blunt, simple options. The king of this is a toss up between IPS-N’s Zheng and Caliban from the Long Rim expansion. The Zheng is essentially a scrap built brawler capable of punching things regardless of being jammed, built by a single pilot dying from breathing irradiated air solely so she could hunt down and kill the remaining members of the pirate crew who trapped her here.
So many other mechs are designed to be a little heroic in stride. The Caliban isn’t. Bluntly, the Caliban is described as a product of the pure mathematics of “The cheapest way to bring down a pirate vessel”. Launched into a ship, the Caliban’s small ½ size and mounted shotguns and flak cannons begun a room-to-room deck clearing, removing the crew from any pirate vessel in a one mech boarding action.
Offering your EVA and Gundam designs, Smith Shimano Corporate’s aesthetic and design philosophy is elegance and maneuverability backed by high end systems, ranging from the precognitive aiming functions of the spider tank Death’s Head to the Macross missile boat Monarch. SSC stuff involves a real overload of high end, bleeding edge tech, with many of their mechs involving the most recent finds in blinkspace and paracausal studies. One of the mechs has figured out how to weaponize a near-lightspeed drive and a blinkspace module to bound across the field in a method described as “traumatic to both the user and anyone in close proximity.”
If only that was the extent of the potential horror, but no, we also have HORUS. Remember the Machine intelligence turned outer-dimensional god? Well, once it showed up and did its thing, people looked into it, and Things were Found.
HORUS is everything and nothing. An apocalyptic cult worshipping the first true God? The bleeding edge of post-human philosophists working for RA? A collection of the worst shitposters on the net working together in a DIY Paracausal weapons groupchat? The options are many and far apart. Whatever HORUS is, it isn’t to be underestimated or attempted to be understood. All HORUS tech is meant to feel otherworldly and operates on its own internal logic. You don’t BUY a HORUS License. It finds you. Either a drive left anonymously in your Omninet hook up, or a dream you had and built from memory or simply a new thing your mech-printer shat out.
“I wanted a Raliegh, why does that thing look like it violates things for fun?”
“It’s yours now, anyway.”
A lot of HORUS Mechs are big on control. Hacking their opponents, causing them to blink backwards or forwards in time or simply charging forward to take a bullet for another mech. HR Giger influenced Mech 4-Chan Skunkworks is a potential vibe I’m thinking of using for one cell.
A little about combat: Each combat sets up almost like a little war game, with players and NPCs alternating in turn order(players always go first). You could ignore the Sitrep system fully, but the handy layout of different scenarios and rules, along with clear context and results for a win/lose/draw. You got from vicious last stands like the Holdout, long running escort missions and full on assault in Gauntlet. The game leans heavily on “failing forward” in terms of a story complex, suggesting and providing tools for plotting out missions, encounters and longer extended ops.
In terms of complexity, I have to use a kind of… embarrassing analogy. I prepare for the boos and hisses: It has a very D&D action economy. It is very much a wargame and I can understand turning people off.
Content wise, the community itself has provided reams of homebrew,. I would heavily suggest looking at Field Guide to Suldan and Legionnaire, both of which provide a lot of neat hooks that I steal a lot of for my first campaign. Field Guide to Suldan has an antagonist I can only explain as “Cloned Generational Col. Gaddafi Is Pissed He Got Couped, Now He’s Terroristing.” It still feels like a lot of work was done to get this game into a good shape, and the community has done wonders to make sure as much of the game’s resources are available digitally that it is significantly less of a problem. The tools are there to help implement the crunchier aspects of gaming.
My tastes are more narrative, but this game offers a very nice “having my cake and eating it too” aspects for Wargaming Mech Stuff I’ve been looking for for a while (although I am willing to play an inferior mechanical system for a good setting).
This game is worth the price just for the sheer level of extremely poetic and involved worldbuilding, as well as what feels like a fascination with Star Trek’s Wagon Train to the Stars exploration of the wide spread of humanity across the stars. Long lost worlds who have drifted from the past, but presented as new, legitimate peoples descended from, though not bound by, the origin point of humanity. Lancer has to be the most optimistic sci fi RPG I have read, one that is in love with the idea of how far humanity can progress and how it is struggling with but capable of facing systemic issues. It offers a view of humanity scarred by horror and war and discovering the only way the galaxy could be saved was by collective action, mutual aid and reconciling with the past.
I feel like I can’t explain how optimistic I find this game without spoilers. Some of this comes out in the core book, but I feel like I should still warn because there are details from a module, No Room For A Wallflower Act 1, that may come up. Here we go:
The Revolution took thirty years.
The Second Committee of Union, the predecessor to the current administration and stalwart defenders of the galaxy and the human race, were willing to do anything to preserve the human race. Well, THEIR VERSION of the Human race.
It had committed atrocities before. From firing a deathcloud of Near-light asteroids at another empire to wipe them out in another thousand years to regularly invading and colonizing worlds already settled by other cultures dating back to The Fall of Old Humanity, Sec Com was far from a gentle hand in the affairs of the galaxy.
And then it began a campaign to wipe out a sentient, thinking, feeling species with individuality for the crime of just being in the way.
The war was rough. The tall forests of the first Xenocide’s location, Hercynia, made the use of tanks and aircraft difficult, the Jungles of Vietnam on a global scale. Dense jungles and intense tunnel fighting against the insectile Egregorians lasted years. Lacking access to armored assets, the coalescing developments of man-machine interface and power-assisted Hardsuits lead to the first Frames: tall, upright walking exoskeletons capable of high mobility and multifunctional mission profiles. A new Calvary, one that gripped the galactic consciousness and lead to mass deployment by everyone from luxury brands and shipping companies. Perfected on the front lines of Hercynia and the war fronts of galactic conflict, Frames would later see mass adoption and fundamentally change life in the galaxy.
As if this wasn’t enough, chemical and paracausal Weapons were deployed on Hercynia, a planetary scale equivalent of Agent Orange called TBK weapons – Total Biome Kill.
Freshly tested Frames in one hand and TBK in the other, Second Committee smiled, turned to the rest of the galaxy and prepared to turn the weapons of the first Xenocide to quell uprisings upon the core of humanity. Because they were Union, and they would defend the human race.
Revolution was impossible to avoid. The galactic civil war was violent, bloody, and horrific, and the first xenocide became a background event to other atrocities and exaltations of the revolution. The Third Committee of Union was born, and had a simple charter at its core:
I. ALL SHALL HAVE THEIR MATERIAL NEEDS FULFILLED.
II. NO WALLS SHALL STAND BETWEEN WORLDS.
III. NO HUMAN SHALL BE HELD IN BONDAGE THROUGH FORCE, LABOR, OR DEBT.
And from that, ThirdCom turned back to the galactic stage and tried to fix the sins of the past, to rebuild and bring the utopia of the core worlds to as many people as possible as nicely as possible.
But the Human Diaspora is spread throughout the Orion arm of the galaxy, and pretty words are nice but the guy on the neighboring planet is declaring himself Christ The Buddha and he just bought guns from those SecCom Guys who were fleeing to start their own corpostate. “Can you do something before I get annexed?“
Humanity’s spread was achieved pre-FTL travel, and the time spent turning inward for a galactic civil war meant the vast diaspora has taken their time to self determine, to make their own way in the galaxy. Some are SecCom refugees who formed the largest paramilitary company in the galaxy, paying lip service to the pillars but meanwhile running a colonialist empire in their own subsector of the galaxy. They bring stability and security, sure, but watch as you gradually are forced to strip yourselves of everything you were, now vassals of an empire who views you as subjects, not citizens.
Others are a luxury brand name corpostate with a strong belief that the human form can be perfected. They openly practice eugenics for fun and profit, enslaving people for their genetic legacies. Some are the descendents of the oldest human empire, currently struggling internally between a regressive movement who want to reapply serfdom on the ignoble class and another who want to disregard the class system fully.
The Galaxy is trying, struggling, tripping and falling, but moving ever onward toward Utopia – A galactic civilization, cosmopolitan, universal, with equal respect to all cultures who can abide by those three pillars.
Despite everything the galaxy has been through, it still looked at itself and each other, and people decided on one thing: The only way humanity could continue is with freedom from want, a respect for galactic individualism and culture, and that all sentient beings are created equally.
What Lancer does is it hopes. Humanity is still recovering from the past, but it can reckon with it. It is trying to rebuild, but without the certainty they will succeed. And yet Thirdcom, one galactic government among a few, is doing its best to plow through and try and make the galaxy a better place. Because it’s rough out there, and all we have is each other. The only way forward is the idea that human beings can only make it through the galaxy by working together, as equals. The path is hard, but there, and worth walking, even if Union collapses.
To me, someone steeped in cynical dystopian fiction, Lancer is a breath of fresh air. A setting offering the hard sci-fi reflection of culture and humanity mixed with the yearning optimism that humanity can thrive if it works together to uplift all. Even if it fails, it tries.
It posits a near extinction level fall of humanity, the reintroduction of a wider galaxy, fascist domination, genocide and war across whole solar systems in its background. Nothing original. How many settings offer these?
On paper, this is traditional heroes’ fare, but the stakes of what you are fighting for are part of that optimism. It isn’t Grim, Fascist but Necessary successor states brawling it out over the scraps of a forgotten empire, turning to superstition or national creeds to justify glassing a planet. There are no slavering gods in the outer dark who would turn any justified revolt into somehow another cult for dark and evil beings.
The galaxy is as tragic and complicated as our world is, with people rising and failing on the moral scale directly. No single villain stands out. No grand great and evil titan stands above all. You’re living in a galaxy that has spread over tens of thousands of lightyears from this setting’s prehistory. Union, potentially the future of the galaxy, is precarious, the fingers gripping the cliff edge. And you, as a Lancer, are capable of helping decide the fate of the galaxy, or at least a small part of it.
In times like these, that means a lot. That or my depression is making this book hit especially hard.
Either way, I cannot suggest this game enough. It is a breath of fresh air in the RPG space, even if it’s been out for 6 years.
I’m behind the times, shut up.
Tom and Miguel, thank you for this setting.
If you want to hear more about this, send letters in, I can happily answer questions or just gush about this setting for hours. I have been contemplating writing short stories about the escapades of my IRL crew, running through the first campaign I’ve run, calling it Flash Clone Blues.
So, all that’s left for me to do now is let you go. Go find yourselves a copy and see if it hooks itself into you like it did me. See if your free time is spend thinking about the Albatross and the dives into the Metavaults. See if you consider Dune-esque powerplays between the Great Houses of the Baronies. Wonder just what the hell RA is up to.
Drink deep and descend.
Have fun.
Zeb would rather be up in a cave being a shaman creature telling stories, but we decided on this whole Culture thing, so I guess I’ll stick with being a person for a bit.
