Tabletop

On Lancer, Again

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Blaugust is half over and I haven’t even posted the thing I promised months ago.

Lancer’s Setting

Because it’s been so long, Lancer is a tabletop RPG about giant robot pilots (for a somewhat flexible definition of “giant” that also includes power armor). It’s set in the Somewhat distant future of our galaxy, in which mankind has used both FTL and long-form travel to spread out among the stars. There’s a mild space-fantasy element primarily consisting of AIs that do things that can’t be explained by physics and what humans have learned from studying them. The term used for this is “Paracausality”, borrowed directly from Destiny.
Monarch Cutaway

Lancer’s History

Lancer is a post-apocalyptic setting, but not in the usual sense of the term. In Lancer’s theoretical future mankind developed near-light ships and managed to establish some colonies on distant worlds. With colonies established and more ships en-route, the collapse of society cut off communication and ended most life on Earth. After a roughly ~5000-year dark age or so, old knowledge was rediscovered in the Massif vaults, and a “world government” called Union was created after a bit of fighting. The game’s narrative present is about 5000 years after this.
IPS-Northstar Mechs
As a Lancer, you (probably) work for Union’s Third Committee. Old Earth (now known as Cradle) and most of known space are recovering from the aftermath of the Second Committee, whose authoritarian and imperialist policies (referred to as “anthrochauvanist”) made a bit of a mess of the place before they were overthrown. Time has resulted in some of the original colonists re-establishing communications, and they’ve had plenty of opportunity to develop their own cultures and in some cases technologies in the thousands of years since contact was originally lost. The most notable of these are the Karrakin Trade Baronies (who existed before the Fall) and the Aun Ecumene (established during the dark ages). Relations between these entities vary.
Smith Shimano Corpro Mechs

Lancer’s Technology

A major event in Lancer’s timeline is referred to as the Deimos Incident. A summary is that a super-powerful AI (known as RA or MONIST-1) was being studied on the aforementioned moon of Mars, and it managed to somehow take over and leave, taking the entire moon with it. It reappeared to force Union to sign a treaty concerning AI research, and has proven to be willing to show up personally to enforce violations. Much of Lancer’s “advanced” technology is the product of studying this entity, and is the given explanation for FTL. Some other factions have their own unique technologies: The Voladores are space nomads and have some knowledge of folding space that no one else does, and the Aun have “hard light” and their own unique form of FTL.
Horus Mechs
As far as what players get, there are 5 major Manufacturers. (It’s really 4 and a cult that has a gear catalog.) Your starter gear is from General Massive Systems, who produces a really quite good generalist mech and weapons of every type. As you advance as a pilot you get access to gear from the other manufacturers with more specialized portfolios. Horus has a strong emphasis on both hacking and defying physics, SSC makes fast, lightly-armored mechs, IPS-N mostly makes the opposite, and Harrison Armory uses the most advanced tech (some of it stolen) in theirs. These manufacturers are also some of the major players within union, so you may end up working for/against their interests. Just like Shadowrun, it doesn’t prevent you from using their gear while you do it.
Harrison Armory Mechs

The Unknown

One of my favorite things about the setting as written is that there are a lot of explicit and implicit mysteries. What does RA want and where is it? What happened to most of the colony ships during the dark ages? What are NHPs really? What weird tech is HA currently developing? What happened on Hercynia? That last one is the subject of the first module, but the rest of these you’ll just have to figure out as they come up.

On Lancer

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In the most recent podcast, I mentioned Lancer, a sci-fi mech RPG that’s currently on Kickstarter. I feel like I didn’t entirely do it justice, so here’s a bit of a longer explanation on what it is, and why I think it’s great.

The Premise

Lancer is a Mech-based Tabletop RPG using a custom d20 system. (A d20 is used for resolution, but the “standard stats” and levels and various other things that are in a normal d20 system are not here.) It’s set in a sort of future version of our galaxy with some hand-waves in the form of “sufficiently advanced technology” (think Mass Effect or Infinity) but very little in the way of aliens. As a result humans have spread across the galaxy, multiple factions are trying to advance their own agendas and the players are mech pilots who Got Involved. How exactly that works is left pretty open.

On Lancer

The System

One of the more creative things about Lancer is that it’s basically two games stapled together. There’s a very open narrative system for pilot interactions while you’re not in a giant robot, then also has tactical combat built in for when you need to get into fights. In this way it avoids the tendency of other narrative systems to break down when negotiations do (I know this is a complaint my usual GM has about World of Darkness-based systems) but also supports doing more than just fighting (which is the generally largest complaint about systems like D&D 4e). Interestingly Kodra proposed something like this on the podcast for playing 4e, so it’s interesting to see it in a more realized form.

On Lancer

The Mechanics

Part of the fun of Gundam Breaker 3 to me is the very high amount of customization you can do on any given robot. Lancer uses the concept of Licenses to add their own spin on this, and getting more licenses means you have more options to choose from when designing a mech. Each license has one associated frame, and then an assortment of 6 associated weapons and systems that go with that frame thematically. Once you have enough license levels you can mix and match these as you choose (within certain limits) until you have a mech that does what you want it to.

There’s also a little bit of vertical progression associated with license levels, as your pilot skills increase and can result in your mech having more ammo, more HP, faster movement, etc. Pilots also have talents for further customization, plus a set of things they can do while not in their mech.

On Lancer

The Fluff

This is actually complicated enough that I think it deserves its own post. Until next time!

On Finely Cast Resin Miniatures

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It’s as much a surprise to me as anyone else that I’m getting into Warhammer Fantasy (now called Age of Sigmar). It’s also a surprise that the first faction I took an interest in wasn’t Lizardmen (now called Seraphon); this one actually caused someone else to lose a bet. Instead I decided to jump in with the start Collecting box that looked most interesting to me. I tend to favor large things, and the Beastclaw Raiders box is just 5 big things, so that’s what I ended up with. The majority of the units in this faction are mounted ogres (now called Ogors) and they’re large and hard to kill and it’s a faction definitely suited to my playstyle.
On Finely Cast Resin Miniatures
Branching out into other things in this faction, one of the options to field is a hunter and some frost sabres. This would add a few more bodies on the table for me and enable the faction to attempt some strategies that aren’t “rush forward as fast as possible”, so I ordered some. These come in the form of what Games workshop calls “Finely Cast Resin Miniatures” and everyone else calls Finecast if they’re being polite.

On Finely Cast Resin Miniatures
To date, I have never heard anyone say anything good about Finecast. I’ve assembled lots of plastic in the past, and I’ve had metal minis too, but this was a first for me. Getting these to a reasonable state involved a lot of cleaning, other work I’m not completely used to. In the process, I learned a few things.

  1. Resin is soft, and cuts with a sharp knife much easier than plastic. Care should be used when dealing with these.
  2. Resin warps in shipping/storage. The tip I got was to use hot water to bend them into shape, and then cold water to set them into that shape.
  3. Resin pieces don’t always fit together that well. I found it was okay to just hack bits off until they did fit, but keeping in mind point 1.

On Finely Cast Resin Miniatures
I’ve now filed this material away as “something to be avoided” and am factoring that into list construction. At least it’s good to be informed?

Them Apples

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Them Apples

What has been bizarre to me has been just how different the three years of Pax South have felt personally.  During year one I was completely overwhelmed and did my best to hit as many panels as I could while also making a bunch of media appointments.  During year two we had roughly sixteen people roaming around in groups of various sizes, so my focus was to spend as much time as possible with as many people as possible.  I was also overwhelmed but in a completely different way, with trying to juggle meeting up with folks while also hitting scheduled media appointments.  Year three I completely cut the whole parking debacle out of the loop which greatly relaxed the entire experience.  Additionally we went from having sixteen to roughly seven… with two pairs of those largely roaming together and leaving me with a semi regular group of three people.  This opened up so many doors because three is not an unreasonable amount of people to sit down and demo something together with, and as a result I played way more games during the course of the show.  So many that I never actually made it off the main floor or attended any panels.  In truth this felt like the best possible thing because it gave me lots of interesting experiences to come back and shamelessly milk for blog posts.  It also let me spend maximum time with my friends while attempting to extract the maximum enjoyment.  It did nothing for my longevity unfortunately with me making my way back to the hotel around 6 or 7 both nights to hang with my wife and decompress from the days event.

Them Apples

Of the really awesome games that I played, I think the very first that I sat down to play as a group is a card game called Wicked Apples.  At first I watched a couple of my group play it together, and when they finished the first round got dealt in for round two.  The idea is simple and the card game itself extremely small… I have not counted but it seems like maybe the card deck as a whole is maybe around 35 cards.  What I like so much about the game however is just how quickly it can be played.  One of the big challenges with most modern tabletop games is that they take a fair bit of time to set up, play and break back down.  In most cases you need a dedicated hour or more to really feel like you have enjoyed the experience.  At work I have been kicking around the notion of doing some tabletop gaming at lunch, especially since I have a coworker that is way deeper into the weeds than I am in the board gaming community.  However the challenge that is what sorts of games can you realistically play in a 30-40 minute window and get enough hands in to make it feel like you actually accomplished something.  When I saw Wicked Apples I immediately thought that this game would be perfect for this scenario because each hand seemed to last around ten to fifteen minutes depending on how much stalling from the players.

Them Apples

The game consists of barrel cards, wicked apple cards matching each barrel color, and an assortment of unique apple cards that each have specific effects on them.  The game starts by dealing out barrels to each of the players… or in our case simply choosing whatever color you wanted to play.  That player the is handed the wicked apple of a color matching their barrel, as well as three random apple cards dealt face down.  The goal is to take these four cards and arrange them in any order in front of you face down… but at the same time memorize the position of each card.  The goal of the game is not to eat a wicked apple, be it your own or another players.  After setup the turn order is determined by the number on the players bucket from lowest to highest, but later in the game this will be determined by the top apple in each players bucket.  Each player can take one of two actions:  Peak or Pass.  Peak essentially means that you can secretly check to verify what apple is sitting in a given slot in front of you, and Pass means that you can take any one of your apples and give it to any other player.  After all players have either chosen to Peak or Pass, everyone has to choose an apple that they are going to eat that round.  If you are doing this right then all players reveal their apple at exactly the same time…  however we were pretty awful at doing this and wound up being a slow staggered reveal.  The eating order is determined by the number in the top right corner of the card, and each player performs the actions on their card if possible taking turns in ascending order.  The “if possible” is in there because there are situations where for example you have no apples… and as a result cannot say pass an apple as directed by the card.

Them Apples

The game carries on like this until one of two things happen… either only one player is left standing at the end of a round where in that case they are the winner.  There is also the possibility that ALL players are eliminated in the same round, and essentially everyone loses.  Whatever the case, once you know the rules of the game it goes extremely quickly and I could see playing a bunch of round rapid fire in a short period of time.  There is functionally a lot of strategy and bluffing involved in what is essentially a game of memory.  Do you pass a good apple to the player beside you and think that ultimately they are going to assume you gave them your wicked apple?  Are you going to pass your wicked apple and then follow up by lacing it with the Candy Apple that forces a player to eat that apple next?  I absolutely did that last move, while also passing the poison apple to another player that round functionally executing both of them.  It is absolutely a game where you know every other players is going to back stab you and do so constantly, so the ramifications of this realization become greatly blunted and just part of the fun.  The individual decks at Pax South were $15, and I went back and forth on Friday about picking one up.  However one of the first things I did Saturday morning was run back and purchase one, and I am super glad that I did.  It seems as though they sold their last deck sometime early Sunday morning, and apparently this was their entire current stock as there are zero available through the website either currently.  So yeah… I guess it is probably cruel to tell you about a game that you literally cannot get at this very moment, but I still enjoyed it enough that I wanted to talk about it.  Like I said before I personally plan on taking my deck with me to work and trying a few hands over lunch to see how well it works.  It is easy to pick up and fast paced enough that I can see this doing really well with a wide variety of players.  If you have the chance to check it out in any upcoming shows I highly suggest you do so.