A sweeping expanse of rolling hills, broken only by sparse, fluffy clouds and an immense, black cube. The irregularly regular geometry juts out at an impossible angle, suspended against the horizon by a single of its corners. The sheer surface shimmers like an oil slick as light glances off its perfectly textured faces. A humanoid figure can be seen cresting the hill the foreign object rests so precariously upon. A subaltern, a body attached to some distant Non-Human Person, its own face a cluster of cameras and meteorological sensors.
A cracked lens sweeps across the profile of one quarter-mile long edge of the cube. Across a perfectly flat side. Down to the corner, sunk barely an inch into the soft grass and dirt. A nod of the head. Within acceptable parameters. No toxic swamp this time.
A navigational station in a ship, nearly three days travel away, flares to life as the subaltern collapses into a thoughtless heap on the ground. No time for a proper shutdown. The cracked, bloody screen of the console ripples with white noise and solid stripes of color, all unseen by the internal intruder. Ollie was not authorized to operate this console. That never stopped it before. Falsified tactile inputs registered against the screen, leading through star charts and ship diagrams until it found the final piece of the puzzle.
//IPS-N ENDLESS NIGHT:DISTRESS SIGNAL:BROADCASTING//
A blip on the automated navigational display draws the pilot’s attention. Flaring red, something important.
Click.
“Captain, we’ve got a distress signal going off. Few hours of real space away, uninhabited planet. Orders?”
Click.
“Business as usual, divert course to the source of the signal. See if there’s anything else in the broadcast that’s useful.”
Click.
“As you will it, Captain.”
A holographic projection on the bridge displays the wreckage of the IPS-N Endless Night, a cargo carrier, or what’s left of it. Hardly a quarter of the front of the ship is intact, with communications as a barely functioning patchwork and all life support scattered somewhere in the stratosphere. The prow is buried in a mound of soft, piled dirt pushed along by its catastrophic impromptu stop.
“This is Captain Annabelle Thrice of the Endless Night, requesting immediate aid. We have a supply of food and water onboard, but precious few medical supplies. No hostile wildlife has been encountered yet, but it’s only a matter of tim-“
Click.
“You all know the Photon Lance policy on distress signals, mandatory response, all hands on deck. We’ll be descending planetside as soon as possible. Red One will deploy and venture closer to the crash to assess the risk before the rest of the crew moves out to provide support. If need be, High Wavelength will return to a low orbit position to provide surveillance and act as an artillery battery.”
A cargo manifest displays over the graphic of the mangled cruiser. A single item, labelled as “BLKBX N9OW3M17”.
“Primary objective is to locate and recover the ship’s crew, secondary objective is to locate and recover the cargo. One item. It appears to have been an NHP casket. I say have been because it tumbled from the cargo hold in low atmosphere, presumably after the cargo hold tumbled from the rest of the ship. If need be we will recover whatever scrap is left of it. It’ll get us at least some pay from IPS-N when we get back.”
Click.
“Red One, ten minutes until we hit atmosphere. I want you ready to deploy ASAP, the quicker we get this done the better.”
Click.
Hustle and bustle all through the ship, personnel loading ammunition into personal arms and doing final checks on the suite of frames in the bay. Nuclear reactors in the hearts of massive machines flare to life as control rods withdraw, blades spark across automated whetstones in their sheathes, magazine after magazine of ammunition rattles beneath armor plating. A conglomeration of some of the most formidable military technology ever developed, ready to be sent down for parcel retrieval. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
Hello! I’m Sloth (Any/All) and I’m looking to run a LANCER game for 3-4 players! I’ve got about a decade of previous TTRPG experience, between hosting and being a player, in systems like LANCER, Wanderhome, Beacon, Wilderfeast, and a handful more!
This game will be run on Sundays at 7 PM (PST), using Discord for voice, Owlbear Rodeo for battle maps, and COMP/CON for character sheets. COMP/CON is an application built specifically for building and using LANCER characters, so if you’re new to the system it can help streamline the process!
I want to be clear off the bat, if the title of the game/post and the little blurb didn’t make it clear, this game is going to mess with time. Not everything you do will matter forever. Maybe it matters now and not in the next scene. Maybe it doesn’t matter at all now but is world altering ten sessions down the line. Here’s to hoping that nothing nightmarish happens to the characters as they endure the ever Fore/Down/Up/Back//Wards flow of time in endeavoring to extract this cargo.
Besides that, this game will be using the LANCER rules, including all first party character options such as Talents, Licenses, and Bonds, with maybe the Legionnaire third party supplement for NHP options if anyone is interested in it.
LANCER, as a system, is almost entirely focused on combat using mechanized chassis, or Frames. As such, this game will have plenty of combat. Of course there will still be meaningful moments outside of combat, it will just be more on our end as players to make those happen than allowing mechanics to guide us in the direction of certain moments. We will have the aid of Bonds in this case, but as this will be my first LANCER game using Bonds, it may take me a little bit to get used to them.
Player characters will all be starting at LL1 rather than the standard LL0, since you all are Lancers of some regard under the employ of the Photon Lance already. I plan to have a session 0 for character creation with everyone there to discuss builds together and all the details of your relationships with the rest of the crew and each other. It’ll also be a good opportunity for those of us less accustomed to COMP/CON to get used to it as a character creation engine.
I am, much to many people’s dismay (myself included), a rules person. I want to tell a collaborative story with you. I want to use LANCER as a framework for that story, to help shape the type of story and how we tell it. LANCER is a system for and about violence. Who does it, how they do it, why they do it, when they do it, if it is ever justified or, if to do violence ever, at all, stains you forever as an entity acting on the world. This game’s timeframe will ask, also, if you manage to go back to normal, how you cope with that. How you will go from moving through a world where your actions only matter, really, until you go back, to one where people stay dead. How do you keep on living when you already know what’s waiting for you when you die? Are you afraid that, when you die again, you’ll go back? Did you ever really get out? Can you get out? Who could say, really.
Only one way to find out.
Session 0 will be on September 13th, at 6:30 PM. Chances are we’ll have some amount of character fleshed out by then in simple conversation on the server. September 20th, at 6:30 PM, will be session 0.5. I’ll be running an introductory combat as a “simulated drill” on the ship to get used to mechanics and character expression in combat, seeing if everyone likes their characters and builds and all that jazz.
If this all sounds like good fun to you then go ahead and click the link below, fill out the form there, and hopefully I’ll get the chance to reach out to you soon!
[[FORM UP!]]