Ashs Adventures
Blog Posts from Ashgar on Ash’s Adventures website.
On Lancer, Again
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.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.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.
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.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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The Fluff
This is actually complicated enough that I think it deserves its own post. Until next time!
On the 2017 Game of the Year
Excuse me while I brush the cobwebs off.
At some point this month (possibly even this week), there’s going to be a Game of the Year show from Aggrochat. I’ll keep most of my thoughts contained to that show (or possibly a post after said show), but I do want to place some special emphasis on one game from last year. In a year filled with many incredible games, one stands out as my overall favorite.
Hollow Knight was my favorite game of 2017, and also my favorite Metroidvania, period. (For anyone wondering, it’s displacing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.) It’s a beautiful and expansive entry into the genre, set in a kingdom of bugs. The art style is fairly unique: It’s hand-drawn with limited use of color. This is fairly subtle, but it’s enough to give most areas a unique feel. Things that hurt you tend to be orange.
A while back, Matt Lees mentioned (when talking about Hyper Light Drifter) that “It’s a bit like Dark Souls” basically translates to “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” I’m not really going to help matters at all: Hollow Knight bears a more than superficial resemblance to Dark Souls. Aside from the obvious “lose all of your currency on death” aspect, it really shows in the storytelling. You are dropped into the kingdom and a nearly empty town with no context. Bits and pieces of the story are handed out as you go, mostly from various NPC interactions. Taken as a whole, you can get a picture of the world (and the awful things that happened before you got there). You get the feeling of being alone in a very big world, thanks to how rare it is to see NPCs that don’t want to do you harm.
The thing that really puts Hollow Knight over the top for me is the incredible sense of exploration. The game is very nonlinear even for the genre, and the map is very large. Without sequence breaking, you need to get the fireball, the dash, and the wall climb. After this point, things get really open. You’re intended to go into City of Tears, but there’s very little preventing you from poking the other edges of the map and finding your way into some very dark places. On a smaller scale, the game is good at rewarding poking into things. Hidden rooms are blacked out until you either walk into them or break open the entrance. Tiny corners tend to have some sort of reward, usually in the form of a relic (lore and currency) but sometimes a captured grub or something rarer. I also found traversal a lot of fun once you have the dash and wall-jump, although no single ability stands out in this area. (Ori still holds the crown for most fun movement ability ever.)
All of this without even mentioning the charms, or the bosses, or the major secrets. I really had fun with this one, and you can probably hear me repeat a lot of this in a few days.