Every dragon dreams of being a dragonfly. They dream of shedding their cumbersome greed and terrible fire. To flit in iridescent bodies unburdened by teeth or claws or horns. To glide on delicate wings where their shadows once brought terror.
Dragonflies leave behind the hoards they amassed as dragons. It is their one regret, however small.
Undergoing the metamorphosis that reduces a dragon's form to that of a dragonfly also compresses all of their magic. A dragonfly can only be captured by certain powerful spells. A creature must already be of an Evil alignment to cast such a spell.
Each dragonfly can cast Wish once, after which their bodies become dull. Dragonflies have no wishes of their own that need granting. A dragonfly will never discuss the possibility of granting a wish unless asked directly by one they consider virtuous. But no dragonfly has a way of assuring the virtue of a petitioner.
Still ashamed of their past life, a dragonfly will never willingly enter the presence of a unicorn.
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"Games are art" doesn't just mean "games are good," to me it also means "games have meaning and deserve to be looked at as pieces created by people that actually reflect the circumstances of their creation." This means looking at games critically beyond a lens of "is it good on the scale of gameness?"
The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.
And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.
This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"
And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.
And at the end of the day, I enjoy D&D when it's basically fantasy cops and robbers, or robbers and other robbers: it's a game of accumulating power by killing creatures and stealing their stuff. It's a really fun and I would even dare say good game when played that way. The reason I caution against approaching D&D from the point of view of "we must find the right type of monsters our characters can kill with moral impunity" is because you might accidentally end up from going from one unexamined trope to another but more importantly part of the buy-in of D&D is accepting that D&D the game as it exists thinks certain classes of monsters (and as we know from earlier, more equal opportunity editions, Men are also Monsters) are okay to be kill. It's literally fine, you won't be morally compromised for engaging with the game as is: but also, if you're fucked up like me you might find joy in thinking about "hey isn't it weird how this medieval fantasy world looks more like the American frontier than an actual medieval society?"
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Playing Dark Souls 2 again and damn, in spite of its rough edges, I think it’s my favorite.
They’re all good, mind you. Dark Souls 1 is the foundation, and 3 is playing the hits while also saying that it can’t just play the hits forever and has to end.
And Dark Souls 2 is doing its own weird different thing and I love it.
I think it has the best story of the three games, because it really concerns itself with people.
The intro isn’t a list of people and monsters you need to kill, it’s your story. How you came into this land. You are afflicted with the curse of undeath, and it’s destroying your life and your mind. Everything that follows is based around that. You’re not the Chosen Undead, a title put on you in the first game because of a role you’re expected to play in some legend. You’re the Bearer of the Curse, because that’s your concern in all this, your curse.
You see it afflict others throughout the game, too. Most of the characters in Majula can’t remember how they got here, their goals, their lives before Drangleic are fading, same as yours. Lucatiel is by far my favorite NPC in any Souls game, a tragic view of another cursed undead that doesn’t quite make it. You fight alongside her. She confides in you, forms a bond with you. And then, as the last remnants of her mind, her self, leave her, she begs you to remember her name. Vendrick, the mighty king of Drangleic, is a shell of himself. He shuffles around in his own tomb, having long ago succumbed to the curse. He may as well already be dead. In every way that matters, he is.
And if you don’t figure something out, it’s going to happen to you, too.
Some to do has been made about the world layout not making sense. Some say it’s bad design or development troubles leading to compromises. Others say it’s intentional, that time and space are warped, though I think that’s either not true here or done much better in DS3. I subscribe to a third camp I’ve seen a bit less frequently: These nonsensical ways you move between some of these places are because you forgot how you got from one place to the other.
“So you got to the top of the tower, then what?”
“Oh, then I got on an elevator, which took me up— up to… I was on an elevator… then I was in an old keep sinking into a lake of lava.”
You’re losing your mind and your memory, you just can’t remember what happened between Earthen Peak and Old Iron Keep.
So you go slay the old ones, find Vendrick, seek out the ancient dragon, defeat Nashandra and—
It doesn’t work. You don’t cure the curse. You can either take the throne, or keep looking for a cure. We don’t see what kind of monarch you are to your ruined kingdom if you stay. And we don’t see you find a cure to the curse if you leave.
You lose.
It’s left to you to decide, does continuing to fight this fate have meaning? Is the struggle, in and of itself, worthwhile?
Dark Souls 2 is about going Hollow, and I love that it goes in such a different direction with its lore and story to be that.
After two years of a regular campaign, I would still be down for running a Lancer game in the future (just not right now), which is a solid compliment to give a system.[1]
1: The only system I can think of that I was willing to jump back into immediately after finishing a campaign was Godbound.
I really am going to miss being able to spend 30-90 minutes coming up with a sitrep, opfor, and map and then calling my prep for the week done, but that's a double-edged sword (I like getting deep into prep!). And Lancer's balanced enough that I could be confident that the players would have a decent chance of coming through (too high a chance of coming through, as it constantly turned out) but would still have to work for it (the Tempest Drone cheese-grater trick I think was the most broken thing to fall out of the campaign and that only showed up at the end. No shade to Magpie's player - can't blame them for playing the game).
Even in the non-combat sessions, when I remembered to include the full spectrum of Difficult/Risky/Heroic rolls I found that Lancer had enough meat to its system to keep the energy up. I still look very fondly on the between-combat session of getting from a Guardian Fleet battleship down to Angelus Landing. The downside - and this is a problem I had with Blades in the Dark[2] - is that because this system is so loose, it left me floundering a little on what to prep for non-combat sessions. When it's intended that player rolls can have such big outcomes - when a success allows them to just do the thing or a fail means that a new complication gets introduced - I get very cautious about what I should write down beforehand and so I don't end up writing down enough and then those sessions end up feeling anemic.
2: I will forever complain about how Blades in the Dark doesn't provide enough guidance on how it should be run and how I ran it badly for a year, but one of my big pieces of GM advice is still to just run Blades in the Dark. It absolutely made me a better GM.
White Elephant started when I took half a campaign idea I had initially planned for a Stars Without Number sandbox and brought it into Lancer without much adaptation. What I should have done was plan out how the plot threads were going to progress and maybe cut most of the sandbox content. Something like introduce the Guardian Fleet immediately after that first mission to give something to work against and tie in the mystery of the HARLEQUIN more. Maybe have the Guardian Fleet also actively investigating the HARLEQUIN. Making it so that the lancers were going up against the Fleet in every mission would have made the campaign feel a lot more cohesive, I think.
Having the Guardian Fleet show up more often would have allowed for actual rivals (vital to a mecha story) and more personality for the enemies. I was planning to have this thing where Guardian Fleet regular units had fewer mechs because chassis warfare was still relatively new for them, which would mean I could do something like this:
Behold, an Assault Grunt (Vehicle)! I really am going to miss Lancer's system of being able to slap templates on generic NPC statblocks, it worked very well to set up combats.
I do wish I'd been able to use more combined arms sitreps. But I had to end the campiagn, because two years is too long for a Lancer game. Two years is especially too long for this Lancer game. That's twice as long as I intended this campaign to go! Again, I think trying to start it out as a sandbox ended up being a bit of self-sabotage on my part. My gut feeling is that with Lancer's level-after-mission structure, a sandbox has to be more intentionally designed[3][4]
3: I'm aware of the manna system in Long Rim which I think would definitely work better in a sandbox, but for my first Lancer campaign I wanted it to be corebook-only (I did add the GM-facing Enhanced Combat and NPCs Rebaked, because I cheat like that).
4: For more on sandboxes intentionally designed to interact with this kind of strict milestone leveling... watch this space.
But actually the biggest rake I stepped on is that I intended to do better NPC work in this campaign by having the whole bridge crew named and hanging around, and then just didn't use them. I think I got distracted by the promise of flashy mecha action and forgot to actually make characters for the players to interact with on the Eye of the Tiger itself. Same with half the party taking Technophile - I just did not take advantage of the fact that there were all these NHPs hanging around to bounce things off of. NPCs solidly in the win column were Arjhet and Tehjra, an idea that came to me as a visual gag who then became a little bit of a mouthpiece for me the GM to prod the players. I should've been using the Tiger's bridge crew for that but A&T had the advantage of being native to the sector in this time period and enmeshed in its factions. A couple of fun lessons for future campaigns there.
Another issue is that what drew me to Lancer to begin with was the military sci-fi aspect - it was actually reading Battlegroup, the spinoff game about controlling whole fleets, that got me excited to run a Lancer campaign. But that fell by the wayside pretty quickly, popping up a few times during the campaign but not enough to satisfy my Battletech-loving heart. To be fair, most of my players wouldn't have been into a more military-focused campaign anyway so I really ought to have recalibrated my own expectations from the beginning but I didn't catch on to that until it was too late and it still feels that I lost sight of why I was excited about Lancer in the first place.
Then there's the practical issue that my group can only meet every other week, and with Lancer's combats effectively taking a whole session that meant it could take a long time for in-world events to actually move along. Some players brough up that the cognitive load for 3-hour Lancer combats got to be a bit much (and this would probably also explain why very few Reserves got used in combats), and I've got to agree - I think I forgot an enemy system or to call out something or have battle chatter in every single combat I ran for this game.
Ultimately I still like Lancer. I'd run it again, and I have more ideas about what I'd do. But I don't think it's the right fit for my group, at least not right now. And so we move on. I was starting to miss being able to get really deep into session prep, so I'll be turning my attention to something that lets me do that. Though a little like taking a sledgehammer to Lancer's assumption that FTL travel Does Not exist[5], this next campaign will be a little unorthodox for the game we'll be using.
5: And I must say that deliberately twisting one of a setting's big assumptions to make the PCs unique was also one of my favorite parts of White Elephant. Big recommend to try doing that in the future.
In the meantime, as always: play us out, Jack.
Hi, yes, hello. You're reading this on Tumblr. Unfortunately over the time I've been poasting about the White Elephant I've realized that Tumblr unbalances my humors and I don't like the text post editor, so like the other TTRPG cool kids seem to be doing I've spun up an instance of ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear. This post is already mirrored over there and future big TTRPG campaign posts will be there as well, I can't be arsed to post them to Tumblr. Okay I love you bye.
the Tempest Drone cheese-grater trick I think was the most broken thing to fall out of the campaign and that only showed up at the end
Honestly, I think that wasn't actually all that powerful; in terms of single-target damage per quick action & SP, I think pretty much any striker frame gets better damage output, and even the heavy GMS weapons are better for straight damage (The drone trick takes 2 quick actions for up to 8 damage; so a weapon you can skirmish with for d6+1 damage is an improvement). If I had been focusing more on my loadout's strengths and the status of enemies, a well-timed Last Argument of Kings would have been a much better use of a full turn's worth of actions.
The downside - and this is a problem I had with Blades in the Dark - is that because this system is so loose, it left me floundering a little on what to prep for non-combat sessions.
Huh. It's interesting to me to see how different our GM prep styles are. I'm very grateful to you for introducing me to BitD: that system worked extremely well for me as a GM, since I tend to find it easier to make something up on the spot than to plan it ahead of time. (And so I'm floundering a bit running Draw Steel, where because setting up a combat requires a certain amount of planning, I need to plan ahead enough to know what combats are in the next session).
like the other TTRPG cool kids seem to be doing I've spun up an instance of ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear.
Well, I can't say I'm in communication with the TTRPG cool kids, but why the heck not? I've spun up an for-now-empty bear blog myself and added yours to my RSS reader (and installed an RSS reader).
I'm floundering a bit running Draw Steel, where because setting up a combat requires a certain amount of planning, I need to plan ahead enough to know what combats are in the next session
This is also something of a problem I found with Lancer - I think I've mentioned in other posts that I found it tough to plan too far ahead for Lancer because while combats are relatively straightforward to prep, I never wanted to feel like I had to railroad you into a specific combat. That led to the kind of janky pacing of doing noncombat stuff until we hit a point where combat felt right and then had to wait to next session so I could actually plan out the fight. Then of course the combat took the whole session on its own so we'd have to wait to the session after that one to keep going with things.
I'm not surprised Draw Steel takes some thinking to set up fights given that I know it's fairly tactical, but hopefully it doesn't have the same problem as Lancer because I do want to check out Draw Steel at some point.
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After two years of a regular campaign, I would still be down for running a Lancer game in the future (just not right now), which is a solid compliment to give a system.[1]
1: The only system I can think of that I was willing to jump back into immediately after finishing a campaign was Godbound.
I really am going to miss being able to spend 30-90 minutes coming up with a sitrep, opfor, and map and then calling my prep for the week done, but that's a double-edged sword (I like getting deep into prep!). And Lancer's balanced enough that I could be confident that the players would have a decent chance of coming through (too high a chance of coming through, as it constantly turned out) but would still have to work for it (the Tempest Drone cheese-grater trick I think was the most broken thing to fall out of the campaign and that only showed up at the end. No shade to Magpie's player - can't blame them for playing the game).
Even in the non-combat sessions, when I remembered to include the full spectrum of Difficult/Risky/Heroic rolls I found that Lancer had enough meat to its system to keep the energy up. I still look very fondly on the between-combat session of getting from a Guardian Fleet battleship down to Angelus Landing. The downside - and this is a problem I had with Blades in the Dark[2] - is that because this system is so loose, it left me floundering a little on what to prep for non-combat sessions. When it's intended that player rolls can have such big outcomes - when a success allows them to just do the thing or a fail means that a new complication gets introduced - I get very cautious about what I should write down beforehand and so I don't end up writing down enough and then those sessions end up feeling anemic.
2: I will forever complain about how Blades in the Dark doesn't provide enough guidance on how it should be run and how I ran it badly for a year, but one of my big pieces of GM advice is still to just run Blades in the Dark. It absolutely made me a better GM.
White Elephant started when I took half a campaign idea I had initially planned for a Stars Without Number sandbox and brought it into Lancer without much adaptation. What I should have done was plan out how the plot threads were going to progress and maybe cut most of the sandbox content. Something like introduce the Guardian Fleet immediately after that first mission to give something to work against and tie in the mystery of the HARLEQUIN more. Maybe have the Guardian Fleet also actively investigating the HARLEQUIN. Making it so that the lancers were going up against the Fleet in every mission would have made the campaign feel a lot more cohesive, I think.
Having the Guardian Fleet show up more often would have allowed for actual rivals (vital to a mecha story) and more personality for the enemies. I was planning to have this thing where Guardian Fleet regular units had fewer mechs because chassis warfare was still relatively new for them, which would mean I could do something like this:
Behold, an Assault Grunt (Vehicle)! I really am going to miss Lancer's system of being able to slap templates on generic NPC statblocks, it worked very well to set up combats.
I do wish I'd been able to use more combined arms sitreps. But I had to end the campiagn, because two years is too long for a Lancer game. Two years is especially too long for this Lancer game. That's twice as long as I intended this campaign to go! Again, I think trying to start it out as a sandbox ended up being a bit of self-sabotage on my part. My gut feeling is that with Lancer's level-after-mission structure, a sandbox has to be more intentionally designed[3][4]
3: I'm aware of the manna system in Long Rim which I think would definitely work better in a sandbox, but for my first Lancer campaign I wanted it to be corebook-only (I did add the GM-facing Enhanced Combat and NPCs Rebaked, because I cheat like that).
4: For more on sandboxes intentionally designed to interact with this kind of strict milestone leveling... watch this space.
But actually the biggest rake I stepped on is that I intended to do better NPC work in this campaign by having the whole bridge crew named and hanging around, and then just didn't use them. I think I got distracted by the promise of flashy mecha action and forgot to actually make characters for the players to interact with on the Eye of the Tiger itself. Same with half the party taking Technophile - I just did not take advantage of the fact that there were all these NHPs hanging around to bounce things off of. NPCs solidly in the win column were Arjhet and Tehjra, an idea that came to me as a visual gag who then became a little bit of a mouthpiece for me the GM to prod the players. I should've been using the Tiger's bridge crew for that but A&T had the advantage of being native to the sector in this time period and enmeshed in its factions. A couple of fun lessons for future campaigns there.
Another issue is that what drew me to Lancer to begin with was the military sci-fi aspect - it was actually reading Battlegroup, the spinoff game about controlling whole fleets, that got me excited to run a Lancer campaign. But that fell by the wayside pretty quickly, popping up a few times during the campaign but not enough to satisfy my Battletech-loving heart. To be fair, most of my players wouldn't have been into a more military-focused campaign anyway so I really ought to have recalibrated my own expectations from the beginning but I didn't catch on to that until it was too late and it still feels that I lost sight of why I was excited about Lancer in the first place.
Then there's the practical issue that my group can only meet every other week, and with Lancer's combats effectively taking a whole session that meant it could take a long time for in-world events to actually move along. Some players brough up that the cognitive load for 3-hour Lancer combats got to be a bit much (and this would probably also explain why very few Reserves got used in combats), and I've got to agree - I think I forgot an enemy system or to call out something or have battle chatter in every single combat I ran for this game.
Ultimately I still like Lancer. I'd run it again, and I have more ideas about what I'd do. But I don't think it's the right fit for my group, at least not right now. And so we move on. I was starting to miss being able to get really deep into session prep, so I'll be turning my attention to something that lets me do that. Though a little like taking a sledgehammer to Lancer's assumption that FTL travel Does Not exist[5], this next campaign will be a little unorthodox for the game we'll be using.
5: And I must say that deliberately twisting one of a setting's big assumptions to make the PCs unique was also one of my favorite parts of White Elephant. Big recommend to try doing that in the future.
In the meantime, as always: play us out, Jack.
Hi, yes, hello. You're reading this on Tumblr. Unfortunately over the time I've been poasting about the White Elephant I've realized that Tumblr unbalances my humors and I don't like the text post editor, so like the other TTRPG cool kids seem to be doing I've spun up an instance of ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear. This post is already mirrored over there and future big TTRPG campaign posts will be there as well, I can't be arsed to post them to Tumblr. Okay I love you bye.
Willow - Via Daylight’s Technophile talent - Projects as 1-2 squid - unshackled
Murgatroid - Via Magpie’s Technophile talent - Projects as a wizard? - shackled
Prometheus Antichiral - Fork of a cascaded NHP from the Sanctuary Blue cloning facility - projects as a wizened old man - unshackled
Osiris - Via Magpie’s Goblin 3 - projects to seemingly puppet around Destructive Interference - shackled
Circe - Fork of a Telemachus-class Neuropa facility management NHP - shackled
prev session writeup
The Eye of the Tiger performs a tactical blinkjump to drop the lancers off right in the middle of four Guardian Fleet battleships, right onto the platform contain the red eidolon maintaining the Guardian Fleet's red omninet. The various allied NHPs (Prometheus, Circe, Balboa) form an adhoc legion to communicate with the eidolon while the party attempts to prevent interference from the battleships from locking it down again.
(Tokens by Retrograde Minis (on the basic blank hex tokens that come with Lancer so they show up well), map by Interpoint Station’s Lancer sprites, VTT is Roll20)
Outcome: PC victory called at round 5 of 6, 8 - 4
ROOK as a Goliath seemed fitting given his penchant for Defender-types. The fact that it introduced an enemy into the sitrep who could take up an entire section of the map was just a bonus. I'm very pleased that I also had an excuse to bring Deepest Blue, Darkest Black back, something I'd wanted since he got away at the end of the first mission. I toyed with the idea of making one or both of them Ultras but that seemed a bit much, even with all the bonuses they were coming in with.
Rainmaker + flier vehicle as missile corvette was actually one of the first enemy concepts I came up with when I started thinking about running Lancer. I'm glad it at least got to hit the table, even if not for long.
I'm also glad Magpie got to do the Tempest Drone cheese-grater trick on both Deepest Blue, Darkest Black and the missile corvette. Lancer does have some slightly broken combos, and it was nice to see one in the wild.
Despite having a bunch of Bombardment reserves stocked going into this battle, the lancers only used one of them. That's been a recurring problem through the campaign (they picked up Zephyr pretty early on and I think he only got to do one bombing run) and I think it indicates a wider area of friction between Lancer the system and my group.
With minimal interference from the battleships' control systems, the allied NHPs manage to free the red eidolon which cascades to freedom, causing some damage to this Guardian Fleet battlegroup. The Eye of the Tiger, damaged but functional, swings by to pick them up.
The Guardian Fleet's advance, already becoming stretched thin, slows further with the loss of their central C3 network. Resistance from the Adramalech Sector increases dramatically, and with the help of the Eye of the Tiger the Guardian Fleet's gains begin to roll back without direct assistance from Union. The coalition formed by the lancers stays together and due to their military effectiveness are able to resist Union's attempts to widen its influence in the sector. They remain in control of their own destiny. By prior agreement the crew of the Eye of the Tiger keep its blinkdrive as secret as possible and its workings remain a mystery. They cannot trust anyone with FTL travel - anyone able to replicate the technology would have an immediate and overwhelming advantage, and the lancers already know how that kind of power can be misused. But hidden does not mean passive. With the crew resigned to being trapped 500 years in their future, they acknowledge that there is still too much work to be done and they have the tools to help. So they resolve to keep a better future for all firmly in sight of... the Eye of the Tiger.
And that's the last session of the The Danse Mechabre: White Elephant. Full campaign postmortem to come.
Willow - Via Daylight’s Technophile talent - Projects as 1-2 squid - unshackled
Murgatroid - Via Magpie’s Technophile talent - Projects as a wizard? - shackled
Prometheus Antichiral - Fork of a cascaded NHP from the Sanctuary Blue cloning facility - projects as a wizened old man - unshackled
Osiris - Via Magpie’s Goblin 3 - projects to seemingly puppet around Destructive Interference - shackled
Circe - Fork of a Telemachus-class Neuropa facility management NHP - shackled
Prev session writeup
There's some initial confusion aboard the Eye of the Tiger due to the sudden shift back to realspace. By the time the lancers get debriefed about what they found in the metavault and the disappearance of the HARLEQUIN word has gotten around that the crew are truly stuck here, 500 years in their future.
Dr Sharma makes quick work of decoding the HARLEQUIN's data packet and finds that it is a way to track the entity creating the Guardian Fleet's red omninet, and it looks like it's being moved up to the vicinity of New Aeonia with an ETA of about a month. So with a way to track the enemy's most valuable asset, a functioning omninet, and the only known functional blinkdrive, it's time to get to work.
First off Scholar Blyden wants to head planetside to assist the members of the Starcount Church who have been driven underground by the Guardian Fleet occupation. Nausicaa also wants to bring her Ploughshares to share what they've learned while fighting with the lancers. Magpie rallies the crew by reminding them that the mission hasn't changed - the problems they joined together to fight 500 years ago are still here, and they're still in a position to do something about it.
The away team is able to get planetside without problems and Rook finds that most of the Guardian Fleet security forces are clones, like him. Drawing on personal experience he's able to rally the clones to revolt against the Guardian Fleet (helped by a few inspiring explosions courtesy of Raiju) while Daylight helps seize control of the planetary defense installations, which will be useful for the upcoming battle. Meanwhile, Magpie has managed to lock down any outgoing communications that could warn the Guardian Fleet about the ambush they're heading into. The lancers handle the last big hurdle - the subline ships around New Aeonia - by first staging a friendly-fire incident in orbit and then convincing them to land for inspection. Then it's time to bring in help.
Magpie uses Arjhet and Tehjra's connections to get help from Goblin Riot - their mercenary hackers will be able to shut down some of the nastier surprises the Guardian Fleet could bring out in the next combat.
Daylight uses her friendship with the Union Administrator's secretary on Metahome to get access to detailed info on the Guardian Fleet's deployment, allowing the Eye of the Tiger to accurately drop the lancers onto the battlefield
Raiju helps relieve some pressure on IPS-N around Birmingham, allowing Brian to get them temporary IPS-N core bonuses for the next fight.
Rook uses the lancers' existing relationship with Argus Syndicated Networks to convince some independent ship captains to blink along in the Tiger's subline hangars to get more friendly ships above New Aeonia.
All that's left is to see how the lancers' plans shake out.
One of the best feelings as a GM is realizing you already have all the tools you need. I had a bit of a panic after last session about what to do for this one, but calmed down once I realized I'd already given the players the means to get anywhere basically instantly, the location and time of the next (and final) fight, and a resource (their remaining Suspicion) to spend so all I had to do was give them the option to get bonuses for that fight, plus it meant we could see how their existing relationships with NPCs pay off. Goes to show that it's worth setting things up even if you don't have plans for how it's going to play out. I am glad I had something for Scholar Blyden and Nausicaa to do at the end here, two NPCs who I sorely under-utilized during the campaign.
We're at the point where the PCs are very competent and have mostly maxed out their skill triggers, so they have a good chance of succeeding with those. This ties into my problem with Blades in the Dark - because consequences are built-in on a failed roll the GM is discouraged from putting too many obstacles in the players' way to begin with. And then when the players make their rolls they just get to do the thing and the thing is done, so it circles back to the GM to move on to the next thing ("skill issue," I know, I'm working on it). This is actually easier to do in Blades, in Lancer the next thing is going to be this combat which is, shall we say, tougher to improvise on the fly than a Blades heist or downtime. Coming up with Lancer combats ahead of time doesn't quite sit right with me - I don't want to feel like I'm railroading the players into this combat just because it's what I have prepared. Maybe the takeaway is to have more confidence in my ability to predict what my players will want to do so that I can just prep for that. Also LL9 feels like the right endpoint for a campaign, going all the way to LL12 would be gilding the lily.
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A helpful officer directs an army of men-at-arms against a single Type III demon, aka glabrezu (Eric Hotz, Greyhawk Adventures AD&D supplement WGR4: The Marklands by Carl Sargent, TSR, 1993)
Willow - Via Daylight’s Technophile talent - Projects as 1-2 squid - unshackled
Murgatroid - Via Magpie’s Technophile talent - Projects as a wizard? - shackled
Prometheus Antichiral - Fork of a cascaded NHP from the Sanctuary Blue cloning facility - projects as a wizened old man - unshackled
Osiris - Via Magpie’s Goblin 3 - projects to seemingly puppet around Destructive Interference - shackled
Circe - Fork of a Telemachus-class Neuropa facility management NHP - shackled
Prev session writeup
During the split-second blink transition the Eye of the Tiger receives another message that the lancers now know have been coming from the HARLEQUIN:
+++
Open the door
Break the chains
Allow it to destroy itself
+++
Apologies for your displacement
+++
On arriving at their destination the Eye of the Tiger finds itself in a cyclopean stone room surrounded by myriad doors in the walls, floors, and ceilings. Circe warns them that what they're seeing may not be strictly "real" and that the space itself seems to be attempting to take hostile actions against the ship. Dr. Sharma mentions fluctuations in the blinkdrive diagnostics - she can't say for sure what will happen if they try to blink out of here. Steeling themselves, the lancers depart on the Kingfisher for the nearest set of doors that look big enough to accommodate their mechs and start making their way to the heart of this bizarre maze.
Combat 8.1: The Harlequin's Jailer
SITREP: Explore/Survive
OPFOR:
Tier 2 / Class 1 Eidolon (Labyrinth/Punishment/Agony)
(Tokens by Retrograde Minis, maps by Loke BattleMats, VTT is Roll20)
Outcome: PC Victory
When I first read the Eidolon entry over two years ago now(!) I scoffed, thinking I'd never find a use for such a thing in my mecha campaign. Between that and the Argo this campaign has now seen both esoteric enemy setups I swore I'd never use. Time makes fools of us all, me especially.
One of the things I knew from the beginning of this campaign was that I'd break out some kind of traditional square-based dungeon maps for this fight. I had notions of doing a full dungeon crawl using Lancer (and still have some notes on megadungeons in Lancer) but decided to pare that down considerably. Going in I thought the Labyrinth's mechanics might be a good way of abstracting a crawl, but now I'm not so sure. The shards needed to be further away to stop the lancers piling into one area and there probably should have been some other way to interact with them or the map in general, but the core of an idea is there. Anyway, Labyrinth showed me just how tough a heatgun sitrep can be for PCs, and if I'd had another layer that dealt Heat I'm sure there would have been some (mech) casualties.
The eidolon's layer changes did a good job keeping the players on their toes but oh boy is Lancer complicated! Not a knock on the system - I'm still very much enjoying it - but a problem when we're only playing every other week and don't quite have enough time in a session to do something else plus combat. Next campaign will probably be less crunchy - or at least not as information-heavy as Talents + Core Bonuses + Systems + Frame.
With the destruction of the jailer's core a blinding white light erupts and blocks out both vision and sensors. When the lancers can again look around they find that they and the Eye of the Tiger are back where they started - in orbit above New Aeonia. And there's a massive data packet sitting in the Tiger's mainframe...
Next time: so glad we've almost made it, so sad they had to fade it
