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Lancer Tactics devlog

I'm gonna try out posting my ~monthly devlog roundup here as well. These suckers are glorified changelogs with anecdotes and gifs galore. Let me know if this is something you like seeing show up on your dash?

Map Editor

Got units able to be placed/deleted/moved in the mission editor

Can paint/remove command zones in the editor

Can paint minecraft-like terrain blocks in the editor

Can paint/rotate multi-tile props in the editor

Can edit unit character sheets and portrait via the editor

3D maps

Did a bunch of art tests with 3D mech models, provided by GeneralChaos, which we ended up deciding not to go with to keep things simple.

To avoid the can of worms that is animation, we'd have to lean into a static "tabletop minatures" aesthetic which we decided is not a style we want to be stuck with. By sticking with 2D sprites, we avoid falling into a sort of uncanny valley; it's easier to get away with not animating a 2D sprite than it is for a 3D model.

 We also experimented with 3D terrain. We decided to make a rule that the visual style for a piece of terrain should match its mechanical effect: obstructing terrain that you can't move through, such as rocks or buildings, will be in 3D, while non-obstructing terrain like trees will stick with 2D sprites.

Hooking up the 3D camera to follow events like movement and attacks did a LOT for making it starting to feel like it's cohering into an Actual Game™

Implemented cover! And an attack preview! Cover works by aiming a ray from the target to the originator (technically to and from each voxel of each, respectively, to handle size 2s shooting above size 1 cover) and tracking all the terrain blocks it hits (how we'll handle non-terrain hard cover TBD). I think I have it working according to Perijove's cover rules manual, but I'm sure there'll be edge cases to work out. This is a case where things are significantly simplified by working in squares instead of hexes; hexes have a lot more possible weird angles you have to deal with.

Re-added what I'm stubbornly calling Combat Popcorn; little bits of text that pop out when you use abilities and attacks.

UI & game screens

Added ability for the engine to show UI that's anchored to the game world via a little word bubble line but also stay on screen as the camera moves around.

Got word bubbles working; you can now write dialogue in the mission editor, hit playtest, and see it work in a mission! (it does actually translate correctly now; this gif is just from a bug I thought was funny)

Got ability effects mostly behaving appropriately again, including muzzle flashes. The easiest way to handle them ended up being NOT billboarding them so they always face the camera (like all other 2D sprites in the game); instead, I put them on a plane parallel with the ground and just spin them around the unit to point at wherever their target is.

Did some work ironing out our tooltip system. The standard in CRPGs these days is this kind of nested labyrinth of tooltops that you see in Baldur's Gate 3:

I Did Not Want to try and figure out how to wrangle that much UI, so we're instead opting to cap the nested tooltips at the second layer. You can lock a general tooltip for e.g. an action and then mouseover various items within that tooltip to get glossary definitions...

...and then instead of having those glossary tips be lockable/mouse-overable themselves, I collect all related terms to that glossary definition and let you tab through them.

Added skin overlay functionality to the portrait maker, enabling textures like scars, tattoos, stubble, and vitiligo to be applied to just the skin and not extend off into space.

Midway through writing this update, Carpenter sent me this gif of the randomization button working! There's a still a bunch of skintones/assets missing and a few are a bit janky, but it was exciting to start seeing the range of these lil freaks (affectionate) that this editor can create.

Mourning cloak license!

This is the one I'm probably most excited about: I did a bit of a content dive and implemented a basic character sheet + all Mourning Cloak traits and equipment. They don't have fancy graphics yet, but the weapons and systems can be added via the character sheet and used in-game.

It took a little under a day, including adding soon-to-be common mechanisms like bonus damage. This is great news in that it means the engine we've been building for so long in the abstract seems to do a great job in handling comprehensive actual game content, and that it looks like we've set ourselves up for success when it comes time to buckle down on churning that out.

I'm sure other licenses will come with unique difficulties (I fear the day it comes time to do the Mule Harness // Goblin CP) but I'm feeling good about it!

Vertical slice?

Taking a step back, the pressing question on my mind has been "when will we have a playable early access build?"

I was originally hoping for Feb/March, but what we've internally been referring to as the "3D cataclysm" has pushed everything back by at least three months, so the target for the first alpha build is now in May. So, ah, thanks for your patience! Seeing things come together, I've become more and more convinced that moving to 3D was the right call.

The unappreciated art of making mecha look inhuman

Something I noticed lately, by browsing lots of lancer homebrew and fanart and comparing it to the official art, is that a lot of third party artists, across levels of artistic competence, made mechs that looked plain to me for a reason I couldn't pin down. Again, this was only weakly correlated with other metrics for artistic quality, like posing, shading, and linework. After comparing them closely with other art that didn't give me that vibe and art from 1st party material, I realized what gave me that feeling: their mechs looked too human; they looked like they could be convincingly portrayed by a person in a costume.

If you look closely at official Lancer art and the best fanart, you will notice there are always details making sure the subject is unequivocably a giant robot and not a person in sci-fi armor.

One strange but effective way this is achieved is the legs: each manufacturer has one or more distinct style of legs, with the only overlap being between SSC and RKF (which makes sense because SSC has close ties tot he Baronies). Let's go through them and see what about them makes sure you know this is a mech:

Smith-Shimano Corpro + Royal Karrakin Foundries: SSC has three kinds of lower limbs: the Horse Leg, which they share with RKF; the Foot Without Heel, and the Anatomically Correct Human Leg With Toes.

The Horse Leg is not only obviously inhuman, but also obviously unnatural, bacause no biped would be able to move properly standing on horse hooves: it would be like contantly doing a ballerina tip-walk using clown shoes; that is something only a mechanical device assisted by top-of-the-line automatic balancing could achieve.

The Heel-less foot, due to being used almost only for their spider-mechs Death's Head and Swallowtail, has little dehumanization work to do, but it does cover that function when used on the Dusk Wink, which *is* in fact a person in power armour, but still the artist took care of reminding us of how mechanical it is, by giving it feet which have little in common with boots or any other footwear. The Toed Leg seems, at first, to be the opposite of dehumanizing: it looks the most like an actual human bodypart, it feeds into SSCs fetishization of the Human Form (phrasing entirely intended). However, that is also the reason why it very clearly shows the Monarch and Mourning Cloak are robots: because no suit of armor would ever look like a naked leg; this level of anatomical fidelity only makes sense for something mechanical, whose skin *is* armor and as such doesn't need to cover itself.

Horus: Horus is mostly the easy one, with how most of the art gives their mechs beastly paws and hooves, gecko-like foot pads, or long, amphibian fingers whose vague semblance to human hands only contrasts with the blatantly monstous shapes of the Pegasus and Gorgon. However, they have four mechs portaryed with human-like legs.

The Hydra has little need to mask its mechanical nature, but the Lich commits the grave sin of being clothed, one of the biggest risk factor in making mechs look like dudes in armor. To counteract this problem, it's feet have two very evident inhuman characteristics: they have only two long, slender toes, and they touch the ground only with their futhest tarsus, in a way that makes it obvious they aren't bearing any actual weight, as if both Lich and Hydra were alway hovering a couple feet above the ground and used their feet only to skip along it, like a venetian boatman might do with their pole.

The other two exceptions are the Calendula, which being an RKF design has their trademark horse legs, and the Kobold, which already looks inarguably like a robot thanks to the barrel shae of its main body, the Horus-patented Pikey Blobs Aesthetic(tm), but still has feet with actual toes, which achieve the same effect as those from SSC.

GMS: For the longest time, GMS did not have art at all, but let's look at the [G] Type Everest from Op. Solstice Rain:

While the Boot with Auxiliary Side-Toes shape of the foot could potentially belong to a suit of armor, if we look up at the knee it's a different story: look at the slabs on either side of the joint which restrict it to one degree of freedom, as opposed to the frontal protection typical of armor for humans; look at the opposite bends of hip and shin, which almost makes the leg look digitgrade. Inequivocably robotic despite the clearly humanistic design. However, the lower parts of mechs are not the only way their design is dehumanized: we come now to Inter Planetary Shipping - Northstar and Harrison Armory, and in a curious inversion they take the opposite approach.

Although some legs of IPS-N mechs use the above principle (the Blackbeard's angular feet whose toes almost look like retractable claws, Drake's heel-less boots, and Lancaster and Kidd's SPOT-like hooves), a lot of their mecha have quite human-looking armoured boots. HA goes a step further, likely due to a deliberate stylistic choice stemming from the anthrochauvinist ideals: Their mechs look very much like armoured warriors, often even with little skirts like the Iskander or Sherman or reinforced *baltei* like Genghis and Tokugawa. With one important exception: their head.

IPS-N has a very distinctive One-Eyed Cylinder with Another Eye on the Top shape for their mecha, it's probably a deliberate par of their brand; it sees some variation like Drake's looking more liek a helmeted facemask and Stortebecker's tricorn, but even Lancaster and Kidd have a sort of vestigial head on the front with a single eye coming out of a slit.

HA's mecha have greater variation, but nevertheless for all that their body is as human-shaped as possible, their heads are always distinctly not: Barbarossa has a flat prism with a this transparent section on top, looking more like the control tower of an aircraft carrier than a head; Genghis, Tokugawa, and Gilgamesh both have canopies recessed into their bodies; Napoleon also has a barely-extruding canopy with a strange shape and covered in Blinkshield emitters that make it look like a bug-eyed little freak; Sherman is quite literally built around having a cannon for a face; and Sunzi has its drum-looking Blinkspace device. The only HA mech that has a "head" region separate from the rest of the body is Saladin, and even then it's a flat cylinder with a rectangular window in the middle: a design which would never work as a helmet but makes sense as a rotatitng cockpit with a canopy.

The observant among you will have notice that I left out four mechs: Nelson, Vlad, Enkidu, and Iskander. That is admittedly because they are those whose design asserts its inhumanity the least.

Of the first two, despite Nelson committing the sin of clothing, it also compensates hard by leaving a gap in its tabard to show the hatch for the pilot, while Vlad unfortunately does not, and with the weirldy human-looking eye, if there wasn't a pilot for scale one might legitimately not know it's a robot without context.

Iskander is the one mech in the entire Compendium which can be cosplayed without altering its proportion: cyclopism aside, this could be a person in future armor.

Enkidu also has a look which could work just as well for a human-scale cyborg, but given that it's a deliberate statement of intent it gets a pass. At the very least it's elongated head and pad-less feet make it obvious that this is not a person in armor.

Conclusion:

Although I cannot prove it without some double-blind polls, I think one of the secrets to a good mech design is making it look not only obviously like a robot, but also giving it pose, proportions, and details such that it would look big not just on a white background with no context, but that if you tried to shrink it and put it in a scene as though it was more or less the size of a person, people would realize that it's supposed to be larger.

Finished a major Lancer commission batch a couple months ago

What it’s like to play a Goblin in Lancer

Heya to any Lancer peeps! I've been getting really into the setting of Lancer and I want to try my hand at creating an rp character. Problem is I've got a lot of different character ideas, but I'm not sure which ones would fit the setting best. I've also yet to actually play a game of Lancer so kinda don't know what I'm doing outside of reading the core book and fooling around compcon.

The current ideas I'm working with are a more standard outlaw style character, the second is a built to destroy idiot with a heart of gold, and a tech scavenger mostly making use of drones.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :)

Genuinely, I have no idea why this game does it for me. No other TTRPG has ever sucked me in this well. D&D, I've had an off and on relationship with, Pathfinder seems cool, but I've not played much, Warhammer doesnt seem like a great fit for me, City of MIst is oddly complicated, and savage worlds is impossible to get my friends into. Lancer though? It just clicks. D20s and d6s, so its fairly simple, awesome art, an interesting setting, I dont know why, I just love it, my players love it, and it lives rent free in my head.

My current state of existence. I'm almost literally vibrating with the bounty of lore I've consumed and the ideas I have for running this game.

So excited to try it at some point.

You know what? Im not sure why I haven't been making a campaign diary here yet, but since my players dont use tumblr, fuck it.

So as of late, I've been GMing for lancer, specifically running through NRFAW, since I haven't done a module for a game in ages, and it seems to be a pretty good one. We have 6ish players, but I've been overclocking the combats to kind of make up for it. My players all LL4, and are:

Dustmite, who had a strange NHP like creature latch onto him during a raid on a Metavault.

Mudskipper, who was trapped in said metavault for ~500 years. (Just enough time to have connections to the original Hercynian Crisis)

Butcher, a mech engineer and designer who joined the team after having his work stolen, and is here to start a new run.

Shadow Dragon, a hotshot ace who seeks to prove themselves to their asshole parents in SSC.

Cavalier, who spent years on the wrong side of the tracks and is trying to finally make it up to his brother "Mauler" with CRT Contingency White.

And the player I havent gotten to have join much, Guardian, who very much doesnt live up to the name, who pilots a Raleigh, and has an odd fascination with the planet.

SPOILERS FOR NO ROOM FOR A WALLFLOWER LATE SPRING/EARLY SUNMER

So yesterday we finally had another Lancer session. For some reason Guardian was once again absent, but the rest of the party was able to make it for downtime 2.

Dustmite, Butcher, and Mudskipper decided to start the morning after the attack on evergreen by figuring out the deal with the captured pilot from the assault. They learn that he is a Hercynian Ranger named Arro Ordo(i gave Dthall a brother) and he explains that he was a member of a contingent of Rangers that had broken away from the main force, and they were tired of the seeming inaction that Dthall was showing towards Evergreen, but now he realizes his mistake and that Evergreen is not with the machine or Union as he also refers to it. The party doesn't ask much more beyond that, but Mudskipper begins getting a headache (for reference, he's an empath and he took cynosure) so he decides he needs to go lie down, only for Butcher to decide that he wants to figure out what cynosure is and look into his mech.

<THEVOICESTHEVOICESTHEVOICES>

Mudskipper is knocked out by a strange force, rendering him unconscious, and while Butcher and the rest of the party try to figure out whats going on he begins having a nightmare (the group is trying to cure Cynosure, so I thought it would be fun to scare them). After a bit of digging through the code and some old seccom research documents into Paracausaul systems, they are eventually able to piece together what is going on.

<AREYOULOST?><3002-ITWASYOU>

After curing him of Cynosure, a few days pass and Mudskipper is starting to feel a bit better, however he is concerned for his mech, which while it doesn't have an NHP, shows some signs of sentience. (As the GM, i let everyone in the group kinda flavor their backstory however they want, and Mudskipper is an amnesiac union operative who was sealed in a metavault for 500 years. I have aome pretty grand plans for him, so I will reveal them later >:) )

Mudskipper and his mech, the Kappa, a horus hydra pattern group, have a conversation where he apologizes for installing the software, before kappa makes mention of the strange signal it is beginning to hear.

\\from across the sea, a prophet speaks of a great flood, and of bodies rising from the water

Concerned, he immediately tries to tell the party, but everyone just assumes its a residual effect of Cynosure.

A few more days pass while the party decides to follow up on a rumor they heard about an old buried weapons cache a day or two's travel north of evergreen, but while they are gone they want to make sure the town is safe, and so they begin construction on defences around the perimeter. Its about this time that Shadow Dragon gets a call from his horrible parents, and Cavalier also gets a call from his brother. Apparently Cavalier's brother Mauler will be arriving in the system soon, and wants to meet to catch up, while Shadow Dragon's parents are only calling to make sure the situation around evergreen is being stabilized, but they threaten to take away his licenses if they are unable to remedy the issues down there.

After a few days of prepping, a worried patience meets them at the gate before they leave. Thanks to the new emplacements he hopes they will be safe, but wants permission to use the players mechs while they are gone for defence. The players allow him to do so, and they begin heading off...

Okay, thats not the end of the session, I'll be back to finish this once Im done in the shower. I have to get ready for my job, unfortunately.

(back now)

When the players arrive at what they assumed was a bunker, or some kind of old military installation, and discover that its the ruins of a crashed carrier ship. Inside they begin exploring, finding a large amount of old weapons, and a massive kinetic driver cannon in pieces.

Further in they find a section of old offices and command centers, where in there are hundreds of scattered documents across the floors and in destroyed shelving that has to be pried open. Old manifests for cargo and weapons, as well as classified reports of the weapons they are using and researching. Horrifying beasts of metal, and the WorldKiller TBK initiative. Unsure of what this is referring to, they open the final cargo bay, and discover a Genghis MK1 with the barrel reduced to a molten slag, and a room covered in large clawmarks, in the center of which sits the HA-enkidu, a terrifying weapon which they fought only a few weeks ago.

As they head back to evergreen, the heat and humidity is searing, as early summer has set upon them, and on approaching the colony, patience radios for them.

Something is coming. From across the ocean, a siren comes to finish a war that should have ended hundreds of years ago.

SPOILERS FOR NO ROOM FOR A WALLFLOWER LATE SPRING/EARLY SUNMER

So yesterday we finally had another Lancer session. For some reason Guardian was once again absent, but the rest of the party was able to make it for downtime 2.

Dustmite, Butcher, and Mudskipper decided to start the morning after the attack on evergreen by figuring out the deal with the captured pilot from the assault. They learn that he is a Hercynian Ranger named Arro Ordo(i gave Dthall a brother) and he explains that he was a member of a contingent of Rangers that had broken away from the main force, and they were tired of the seeming inaction that Dthall was showing towards Evergreen, but now he realizes his mistake and that Evergreen is not with the machine or Union as he also refers to it. The party doesn't ask much more beyond that, but Mudskipper begins getting a headache (for reference, he's an empath and he took cynosure) so he decides he needs to go lie down, only for Butcher to decide that he wants to figure out what cynosure is and look into his mech.

<THEVOICESTHEVOICESTHEVOICES>

Mudskipper is knocked out by a strange force, rendering him unconscious, and while Butcher and the rest of the party try to figure out whats going on he begins having a nightmare (the group is trying to cure Cynosure, so I thought it would be fun to scare them). After a bit of digging through the code and some old seccom research documents into Paracausaul systems, they are eventually able to piece together what is going on.

<AREYOULOST?><3002-ITWASYOU>

After curing him of Cynosure, a few days pass and Mudskipper is starting to feel a bit better, however he is concerned for his mech, which while it doesn't have an NHP, shows some signs of sentience. (As the GM, i let everyone in the group kinda flavor their backstory however they want, and Mudskipper is an amnesiac union operative who was sealed in a metavault for 500 years. I have aome pretty grand plans for him, so I will reveal them later >:) )

Mudskipper and his mech, the Kappa, a horus hydra pattern group, have a conversation where he apologizes for installing the software, before kappa makes mention of the strange signal it is beginning to hear.

\\from across the sea, a prophet speaks of a great flood, and of bodies rising from the water

Concerned, he immediately tries to tell the party, but everyone just assumes its a residual effect of Cynosure.

A few more days pass while the party decides to follow up on a rumor they heard about an old buried weapons cache a day or two's travel north of evergreen, but while they are gone they want to make sure the town is safe, and so they begin construction on defences around the perimeter. Its about this time that Shadow Dragon gets a call from his horrible parents, and Cavalier also gets a call from his brother. Apparently Cavalier's brother Mauler will be arriving in the system soon, and wants to meet to catch up, while Shadow Dragon's parents are only calling to make sure the situation around evergreen is being stabilized, but they threaten to take away his licenses if they are unable to remedy the issues down there.

After a few days of prepping, a worried patience meets them at the gate before they leave. Thanks to the new emplacements he hopes they will be safe, but wants permission to use the players mechs while they are gone for defence. The players allow him to do so, and they begin heading off...

Okay, thats not the end of the session, I'll be back to finish this once Im done in the shower. I have to get ready for my job, unfortunately.

Some retrograde minis sprites I recolored and added stuff to for my next Lancer game, we are planning on doing essentially an arena that the players can play with in between our wallflower sessions, when not everyone can get on. we have a Zheng, a Blackbeard, and an Atlas all on the same squad this time around.

Lancer NRFAW SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edena, exhausted after days of conflict, and fearful for her life, must give a speech. Broadcast on a wide area, a signal comes through. Desperate, tired, she gives up. Mountain Fall. With Beggar-One's takeover of Evergreen complete, he unleashes his ultimate weapon. Silent Night.

went ahead and finally started making some new art for the new year, mostly lancer stuff, since its my obsession.

Here's for the players, and as far as the NPC's go, well...

and for the other faction:

I've certainly been trying to keep busy!

I MADE MORE MUAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

In this campaign I'm running, it revolves around a planet of fully Decorporialized Aliens, who fought in a war against a devisive war against Ra a long time ago. Those that remain are the survivors.

The Kar'Daren Hidden Sect: a security/spec ops force.

Then we have the Holy Sect, comprised of a combination of the citizenry and religious leaders who believe Ra's wrath may some day return.

Finally, we have the Speaker Sect, who have secretly been in communication with HORUS agents from the RDICL group for the last 20ish years, and have begun experimenting on their forms, in case Ra ever does return...

(RDICL, pronounced Radical, is a HORUS trans-humanist group who have been using the Kar'Darens to discover the ability to decorporialize on their own, without Union's knowledge.)

Feel free to use these tokens for any game/group, I welcome it freely, plus if anyone wants, dm me and I may be able to make some for your group too!

went ahead and finally started making some new art for the new year, mostly lancer stuff, since its my obsession.

Here's for the players, and as far as the NPC's go, well...

and for the other faction:

I've certainly been trying to keep busy!

My party from Lancer be like:

Come on down to Hercynia! We've got

• A sad boy in his metal mark with severe daddy issues (who is literally just Astarion baldur's gate)

•The time traveler with a dead bug-brother who pilots his mech

•Anubis, the god of the dead and his trusty side kick with a laser cannon of doom

•A manticore pilot [deceased]

•literally just potemkin from Guilty Gear

•Why are you blue? Patience^3

•Samurai dedicated to the art of f a s t

•just a dragon who's here for the vibes

Here, Finally drew all my player's Mechs (again)

Here's all the current Survivors of the Second Hercynia Crisis.

My party from Lancer be like:

Come on down to Hercynia! We've got

• A sad boy in his metal mark with severe daddy issues (who is literally just Astarion baldur's gate)

•The time traveler with a dead bug-brother who pilots his mech

•Anubis, the god of the dead and his trusty side kick with a laser cannon of doom

•A manticore pilot [deceased]

•literally just potemkin from Guilty Gear

•Why are you blue? Patience^3

•Samurai dedicated to the art of f a s t

•just a dragon who's here for the vibes

Maybe not the hardest sci-fi per say, but definitely more so than most settings. The reactors are based on real technology, and the mechs control kinda like a video game, but the paracausal eldritch math creatures that broke time and decided to gift humanity horrors from beyond comprehension™ certainly isnt an exact science

You.

Yes you, the one thinking about running a tabletop game but you're tired of running DND and/or you're fed up with Hasbro's bullshit.

You should run Lancer.

Why?

1. MECHS. It's a hard sci-fi far future setting with space magic powered MECHS.

2. Combat is crunchy but there's also a specific rules-light system for narrative roleplay.

3. ONLY THE DM HAS TO BUY ANYTHING. All the player side materials are 100% FREE.

4. Massif press publishes their own incredible character building site called CompCon. You can even import homebrew!

5. Explicitly inclusive setting. Published adventures have gay and trans characters, PoC characters, etc.

6. Incredible community.

when playing lancer I only have two moods

Cool Gunslinger/cowboy

I want to cause problems

So... Lancer × The Locked Tomb... I like the idea of Griddle being a Balor pilot and Harry piloting a Lich. What about you?

Hey hello, thank you for the question. Also sorry for all the Lancer to my tlt mutuals, it will happen again. Harrow has to pilot a lich, even if just by vibes alone.

I don't know about Gideon in a balor, what was your reasoning? The heiress of the minor house of a remote karrakin barony planet has to appear for a contest with other house heirs, despite being her enemy she needs to bring the prodigy blackbeard pilot, famous for pushing recklessly ahead and engaging in brutal melee ignoring the exposed reactor. When the contest is announced Harrow disappears into dark corners and goes on searches in obscure omninet spaces and comes back in a forbidden mech of ancient lore.

But also, consider: Harrow, mercenary contracted operative stranded on a destroyed ship, modifying the mech of her girlfriend who just died to get harrow here safe, and coming out crying and punching the pirates who did it to oblivion

Or a brand of mechs with NHPs who call themselves necromancers bonded to their cavaliers, and fight as a tandem, the cavalier shooting and moving and the NHP hacking enemies and protecting their mech

Today: planned another Monster of the Week session for @merelyroleplayers

Tomorrow: planning a two-shot of Heart: The City Beneath for Actual Play UK

Wednesday: GMing my first session of Lancer (not for public consumption)

You give me a week off dayjob work and I fill it wall to wall with RPGs 😇