Lancer Ttrpg - Tumblr Posts
More GG posting;;;
Skinned her...
Drew my two favorite mech pilots in their casual wear,,, love these two sm,,!!!! !
Hey people! this time a new Lancer commission! this time is a very custom Enkidu from Harrison armory. This time i add some new features to this commission, i add a custom skybox and also the snow vfx for a more interesting final render, hope you enjoy this one!
Commissions are OPEN for low poly models send me a DM for more info!
Also you can follow me HERE and i'm currently working on my first game so if you want to support you can go to my Ko-fi page! all shares are also welcome!
This looks like consept art for The Forever Winter. Badass.
Lancer comm for commissioner's campaign. They named the frame; Watchertower, and the pilot; Yippark
Hey people! this time is not a commission is a remake of my second Lancer model the Smith-Shimano Corpro Black witch that i made almost a year ago! now with animations!
if you are interest in your own ps1/low poly model my commissions are OPEN so send me a DM for more info and ask me about the animations too! all shares are welcome!
I'm working on my first game so if you want to support me you can follow me here
NEWGROUNDS X CARA REDDIT
I also start a Ko-fi if you want to support! i will be updating my info very soon and that will help me fund my game! you can check it out right here!
I was lucky enough to get commissioned by @synthetic-divinity to draw her mech “Wrath of Anat” this was so much fun to work on! Thank you again for trusting and working with me to make them come to life
Part 3 of my Lancer photobashing series! This time it's HORUS! (My personal favorite manufacturer)
Finally: IPS-N!
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 :)
I feel like its kinda the point that the setting isnt perfect (also ignoring the blatant imperialist ideas of eradicating the trade baronies out right), the whole idea for lancer is that all across the galaxy, millions of Lancers from millions of different backgrounds are fighting for the sole objective of always striving to make the galaxy and universe as a whole a better place, but that is a daunting task. Many different people will have a hundred different ideas of what "making things better" is, and even different groups of lancers will have conflicting ideals.
Do we attack the people trying to cause conflict in the galaxy? Do we usurp their leaders, and put in place people we deem more fit to rule? Do we attempt to have a dialogue with them, even though it may be pointless in the end? This is the dilemma at the center of Lancer. Utopia is not a concept that can ever be realistically achieved, and as they put it in the discord, it is only something that can only ever be strived for. "Utopia is not a noun, or an adjective. It is a verb. One we must attempt to perform every day, for the good of everyone, not just ourselves."
I can go on and on about what the themes of lancer are, because as I see it, it is the best we can hope for. Its not optimistic, not pessimistic, but realistic. It isnt trying to make a world you want to live in, but one we might already live in. For all we know, we could very well be the Old Humanity, on the edge of wiping ourselves out, or we could be the new generation, soon to discover the Massif Vaults.
I can seriously go on and on. I need to stop, so Im just gonna end this here.
i think the lancer setting is the closest thing i have to a love-hate relationship with a single piece of media. lancer lore is 50% the coolest most insanely awesome ideas youve ever heard and 50% bizarre "left-of-center" fascist apologism. in any just world thirdcomm would annex ips-n (at minimum) and turn harrison armories, ssc, and the baronies into dust. but they will never do that because canonically thirdcomm government has the HA explicitly-fascist party in government with 10% of the seats (and another 20% of the seats go to the monarcho-libertarian karrakites (and another 15% are "social-democrats" (fascists))).
but on the other hand you have some of the coolest descriptions of ship-to-ship combat ive ever seen, i love all the kinds of cosmopolitan cultures, horus rocks, for that matter all the weird nhp shit rocks, and so on. its just tacked on to this awful faux-utopianism.
Average Nelson activities
Lancers will see this and go "Hell yeah"
when playing lancer I only have two moods
Cool Gunslinger/cowboy
I want to cause problems
Update: they beat the boss! Shen Li, the SSC official that Key here lied to, challenged the party to a spar, and they managed to structure her before she could structure them… somehow
A LL12 Monarch-Death’s Head-Dusk Wing-Metalmark vs two LL0 pilots. And she *lost*
It was close tho- both pilots were at 2hp and one even entered Danger Zone towards the end… but we were all actively learning the combat system *during combat* so that’s probably how they survived
I popped literally everything I had in that Monarch, and I almost got one of them with a Fuel Rod Eject (Nuclear Cavalier 3), but the sniper build Everest that was Key’s mech got a lucky shot with his Thermal Rifle (Brutal 1) and knocked off one of Shen Li’s missile racks (Structure Damage 3/4), ending the fight.
Not to discount the other mech- a LL0 tank Sagramatha piloted by Hambi, the other one of my players- as it tunneled up to Shen Li (Prospector 1) and hit her right in the chest with a pickaxe
lancer moment
