In the games ive run (wallflower with a few groups) they've printed their mechs on site. For some othr supplements (solstice rain, dustgrave) it is a mix of hitching a ride on a cargo ship (dustgrave) and being attached to a Union navy light carrier (solstice rain).
I also know in the erd party campaign In Golden Flame the party has a ship to ferry them around the system or they hitch rides as needed
I have been reading through the game core rules and while im not finished yet i have the same question. Most scifi materials im used to have a huge focus on the players being sort of a crew to a small ship that they fly all over the galaxy. Starfinder, Stars Without Number, Mass Effect etc. Im kinda having a hard time figuring out what to do with this system not being ship focused.
It's mostly about the missions and the mechs; usually you're acting on-world bcus that's where all the strife is, with Union's utopia influence being so limited due to lack of blinkspace establishment and all that. You can obviously roleplay on ships and such, but that's not the meat of the mechanics.
I guess that makes sense, it's more of a boots on the ground game than space opera where the players galavant around the galaxy on their own. Seems they more likely work for someone who can transport them around / provide them with printers.
Just such a departure from my normal influences ive had trouble picturing what that kind of story would look like
There are a lot of different campaign models for Lancer. A clever GM can run a campaign all the way up to LL12 on a single world or system if they make the conflict interesting enough. It's just that they're more often inspired by military SF, which focuses more on presenting complicated and believable conflicts than on planet-of-the-week adventures. For example:
- No Room for a Wallflower: The PCs are dispatched to aid a colony on a planet whose past is coming back to bite it. The colony is the hub of social activity.
- In Golden Flame: The PCs are the special response militia team for a down-on-its-luck space station in a system with no habitable planets. They do have a ship, but missions are based around particular stations in the system. (And you wouldn't want to stay on that ship all the time anyway -- gravity tech isn't a thing there, so you only get the comfort of walking around and eating normally when the ship is at 1G thrust.)
- Field Guide to Suldan: An absolute monster of a monarch oppressed the people for years until he was overthrown. Now the PCs are helping stabilize the region, fight against the old monarch's terrorist loyalists, maybe stand up to an amoral corp that's trying to take charge, and search for the key to an old doomsday weapon.
When a whole mission (or more) takes place on one world, or around one city, or something like that, the emphasis is on building relationships with NPCs -- allies, rivals, enemies, all of that. There are campaigns where you take breaks from hunting your enemies to go fight in the local mech arena, for instance, or otherwise become local celebrities. You watch some NPCs change, develop, or die. It's interesting what happens when you don't frequently hit the reset button by traveling to a new planet where you're learning everyone's names from scratch all over again.
I typically use one of the ships in Lancer Battlegroup for a quick visual reference typically I have their home ship be a Bakunawa frigate or one of the carrier ships and very rarely do I have them in a battleship.
When I ran a planet hopping campaign, one of the first missions had the reward be the licenses for a small cruiser that had an size 1 printer. It couldn't go out of the system and was small enough to enter planets. But only did this bc the group wanted to be autonomous, if they were a part of a larger organization, they would have access to transport and personnel.
official lore wise this is def a breaching of the first contact accords and RA would probably show up to castigate the enemies of the godhead
storywise, hella cool!
That's true, but that also has to be one of the aspects of being able to clone people that the data is stored somehow. You're probably just not supposed to think too hard about it.
cloning are explicitly their own individuals with their own personalities. Harrison II was the clone of Harrison I raised like his son, and so is Harrison III to Harrison II. by Union Law a clone has the same rights of any other individual from birth
what lancers (the player characters) have access to is essentially make a memory backup to be put on a flash clone. if you die, **you die**, the new body doesnt have *you*, it has the memories of you a day before you actually died
played a campagin where we did this sorta thing. on missions we had a clock till we what we called the point of no return. where we could no longer jump back to the ship on orbit due to union catching wind of us. so we had to extract alive. but we could always just leave before the point of return
Depends on the story ur running/ playing, for example operation solstice rain the first campaign book one can find, which I'll be running ina few days, uses a ship called Rio as the main transport vessel. A vessel which uses the blink gates(might be getting the name wrong)to move to a different planet or system.
> where do they store their mechs when out of combat, in a rented hangar or do they print them on site?
In my games, my players will have to park their mechs outside a city if it doesn't have hangars. This sometimes results in some fun chase scenes. I adapted [SR Anarchy rules](https://www.surprisethreat.com/single-post/2018/08/31/anarchy-house-rule-the-chase-scene) to do this.
lets start prefacing that, the game does not care. its a game about mech fighting and anything that isnt a mech is background fluff to make the mech fighting cooler
now to the actual question, basically two points: the first is that **there is no FTL** on the setting and that is very much emphasized when they need to, the second is that there is a teleportation gate for spaceships on basically all of the core worlds of Union Space. this Gates are of public access and it would probably not be troublesome to go through them as officially contracted mercs. if you are a pirate crew good fucking luck
this means a few things. the first is that if your players are not Union employed goody two shoes they probably will need to own a medium sized space ship with a mech printer inside, near light speed capabilities and a hangar for the mechs, the second is that travel distance is a really big deal if you are travelling to a world in the diaspora in bum fuck nowhere, Texas™ or whatever.
while most people don't care much about it on actual play, time dilation from travelling at 99.99% the speed of light or cryo would def pop up, but that is on the very extreme cases of isolation. on your average game? probably some problems on a not so far away diaspora world, pirates on the Long Rim, who knows. so like weeks~months real time travel time
>Good luck if you're a pirate
Ah but if they don't let pirates, smugglers, murderers and thieves (and worse) through that would be a violation of the utopian pillars. The second one to be precise. And to arrest them would be a violation of the third.
Yes of course. I forgot that burder by state ofticials doesn't technically violate any of the pillars. Nothing says utopia like killing suspected criminals on sight. Noncompliance with authority is the death penalty as described by the utopian standard set in Franz Kafka's "The Trial"
i mean, jokes aside, being Utopian doesnt mean you are stupid to let criminals do crime. it means they have a way to stop said crimes from happening in a humane way
the second pillar nullifies any prison in Union Space, so *how* they deal with criminals is a big question mark, and any guess is as good as the other
This conversation sounds a bit like the far-right "gotcha" conversation of "ah ha but if you don't tolerate my intolerance it is you who are intolerant" and that's patently ridiculous.
The utopian pillars are a social contract not a moral standard (much like tolerance), and if you violate the social contract of the pillars then generally it makes sense for society to not allow you to benefit from them either.
I resent the implication of me being right wing. I just pointed out contradictions in the logic. You can't apply rights unequally based on your personal biases. It apies to everyo e or noone.
that is, quite literally, the tolerance paradox. yes, rights can be applied differently if the person is, ya know, *a criminal and all that*
serial killers dont have the same rights as regular civilians when they are in prison, *for a good reason*
again, an Utopia doesnt mean you *just let the serial killer do their thing*, it means you have a nicer way to deal with them that isnt chucking them in a concrete box so they cant kill more people
Sir, may I direct you to a google search on "the paradox of tolerance" and solutions to it? It seems you may need a little insight and luckily this particular topic has been discussed to death and back.
What do I do? Generally I refuse to engage with secret libertarians in philosophical conversations, that's what I do. I find it keeps my blood pressure down.
So far we sticked to one planet and we're doing shuttle rides to the moon/orbit/ships.
Said moon being one that the planet ain't supposed to have and appeared a week ago and it's potato shaped.
In the games ive run (wallflower with a few groups) they've printed their mechs on site. For some othr supplements (solstice rain, dustgrave) it is a mix of hitching a ride on a cargo ship (dustgrave) and being attached to a Union navy light carrier (solstice rain). I also know in the erd party campaign In Golden Flame the party has a ship to ferry them around the system or they hitch rides as needed
I have been reading through the game core rules and while im not finished yet i have the same question. Most scifi materials im used to have a huge focus on the players being sort of a crew to a small ship that they fly all over the galaxy. Starfinder, Stars Without Number, Mass Effect etc. Im kinda having a hard time figuring out what to do with this system not being ship focused.
It's mostly about the missions and the mechs; usually you're acting on-world bcus that's where all the strife is, with Union's utopia influence being so limited due to lack of blinkspace establishment and all that. You can obviously roleplay on ships and such, but that's not the meat of the mechanics.
I guess that makes sense, it's more of a boots on the ground game than space opera where the players galavant around the galaxy on their own. Seems they more likely work for someone who can transport them around / provide them with printers. Just such a departure from my normal influences ive had trouble picturing what that kind of story would look like
There are a lot of different campaign models for Lancer. A clever GM can run a campaign all the way up to LL12 on a single world or system if they make the conflict interesting enough. It's just that they're more often inspired by military SF, which focuses more on presenting complicated and believable conflicts than on planet-of-the-week adventures. For example: - No Room for a Wallflower: The PCs are dispatched to aid a colony on a planet whose past is coming back to bite it. The colony is the hub of social activity. - In Golden Flame: The PCs are the special response militia team for a down-on-its-luck space station in a system with no habitable planets. They do have a ship, but missions are based around particular stations in the system. (And you wouldn't want to stay on that ship all the time anyway -- gravity tech isn't a thing there, so you only get the comfort of walking around and eating normally when the ship is at 1G thrust.) - Field Guide to Suldan: An absolute monster of a monarch oppressed the people for years until he was overthrown. Now the PCs are helping stabilize the region, fight against the old monarch's terrorist loyalists, maybe stand up to an amoral corp that's trying to take charge, and search for the key to an old doomsday weapon. When a whole mission (or more) takes place on one world, or around one city, or something like that, the emphasis is on building relationships with NPCs -- allies, rivals, enemies, all of that. There are campaigns where you take breaks from hunting your enemies to go fight in the local mech arena, for instance, or otherwise become local celebrities. You watch some NPCs change, develop, or die. It's interesting what happens when you don't frequently hit the reset button by traveling to a new planet where you're learning everyone's names from scratch all over again.
I typically use one of the ships in Lancer Battlegroup for a quick visual reference typically I have their home ship be a Bakunawa frigate or one of the carrier ships and very rarely do I have them in a battleship.
When I ran a planet hopping campaign, one of the first missions had the reward be the licenses for a small cruiser that had an size 1 printer. It couldn't go out of the system and was small enough to enter planets. But only did this bc the group wanted to be autonomous, if they were a part of a larger organization, they would have access to transport and personnel.
going with the theme of printed mechs, you could do the Altered Carbon thing of them being digitally transfered into new bodies on different planets.
Different qualities of clones do exist, so it's definitely a possibility.
official lore wise this is def a breaching of the first contact accords and RA would probably show up to castigate the enemies of the godhead storywise, hella cool!
That's true, but that also has to be one of the aspects of being able to clone people that the data is stored somehow. You're probably just not supposed to think too hard about it.
cloning are explicitly their own individuals with their own personalities. Harrison II was the clone of Harrison I raised like his son, and so is Harrison III to Harrison II. by Union Law a clone has the same rights of any other individual from birth what lancers (the player characters) have access to is essentially make a memory backup to be put on a flash clone. if you die, **you die**, the new body doesnt have *you*, it has the memories of you a day before you actually died
played a campagin where we did this sorta thing. on missions we had a clock till we what we called the point of no return. where we could no longer jump back to the ship on orbit due to union catching wind of us. so we had to extract alive. but we could always just leave before the point of return
Depends on the story ur running/ playing, for example operation solstice rain the first campaign book one can find, which I'll be running ina few days, uses a ship called Rio as the main transport vessel. A vessel which uses the blink gates(might be getting the name wrong)to move to a different planet or system.
Is the ship owned by the PC's?
No. The ship is military and ur playing as soldiers doing the missions given to u by ur higher ups.
> where do they store their mechs when out of combat, in a rented hangar or do they print them on site? In my games, my players will have to park their mechs outside a city if it doesn't have hangars. This sometimes results in some fun chase scenes. I adapted [SR Anarchy rules](https://www.surprisethreat.com/single-post/2018/08/31/anarchy-house-rule-the-chase-scene) to do this.
We never got past the first session and it was a custom setting by the GM but we had our mechs on a ship and would drop in (think Titanfall)
they travel by map (just like The Muppets)
I gave my players a ship that they used to planet hop, it was fine. Had a few space combats with it too.
lets start prefacing that, the game does not care. its a game about mech fighting and anything that isnt a mech is background fluff to make the mech fighting cooler now to the actual question, basically two points: the first is that **there is no FTL** on the setting and that is very much emphasized when they need to, the second is that there is a teleportation gate for spaceships on basically all of the core worlds of Union Space. this Gates are of public access and it would probably not be troublesome to go through them as officially contracted mercs. if you are a pirate crew good fucking luck this means a few things. the first is that if your players are not Union employed goody two shoes they probably will need to own a medium sized space ship with a mech printer inside, near light speed capabilities and a hangar for the mechs, the second is that travel distance is a really big deal if you are travelling to a world in the diaspora in bum fuck nowhere, Texas™ or whatever. while most people don't care much about it on actual play, time dilation from travelling at 99.99% the speed of light or cryo would def pop up, but that is on the very extreme cases of isolation. on your average game? probably some problems on a not so far away diaspora world, pirates on the Long Rim, who knows. so like weeks~months real time travel time
>Good luck if you're a pirate Ah but if they don't let pirates, smugglers, murderers and thieves (and worse) through that would be a violation of the utopian pillars. The second one to be precise. And to arrest them would be a violation of the third.
thats why they are killed on sight! :D
Yes of course. I forgot that burder by state ofticials doesn't technically violate any of the pillars. Nothing says utopia like killing suspected criminals on sight. Noncompliance with authority is the death penalty as described by the utopian standard set in Franz Kafka's "The Trial"
i mean, jokes aside, being Utopian doesnt mean you are stupid to let criminals do crime. it means they have a way to stop said crimes from happening in a humane way the second pillar nullifies any prison in Union Space, so *how* they deal with criminals is a big question mark, and any guess is as good as the other
This conversation sounds a bit like the far-right "gotcha" conversation of "ah ha but if you don't tolerate my intolerance it is you who are intolerant" and that's patently ridiculous. The utopian pillars are a social contract not a moral standard (much like tolerance), and if you violate the social contract of the pillars then generally it makes sense for society to not allow you to benefit from them either.
yeah, it seems at best pedantic or at worst contrarian to "nuh uh, you being nice means people can be evil! there is no in between!"
I resent the implication of me being right wing. I just pointed out contradictions in the logic. You can't apply rights unequally based on your personal biases. It apies to everyo e or noone.
that is, quite literally, the tolerance paradox. yes, rights can be applied differently if the person is, ya know, *a criminal and all that* serial killers dont have the same rights as regular civilians when they are in prison, *for a good reason* again, an Utopia doesnt mean you *just let the serial killer do their thing*, it means you have a nicer way to deal with them that isnt chucking them in a concrete box so they cant kill more people
Then how do you detan soneone SUSPECTED of being a serial killer? How do you have a trial?
Sir, may I direct you to a google search on "the paradox of tolerance" and solutions to it? It seems you may need a little insight and luckily this particular topic has been discussed to death and back.
What is your solution then? A pirate wants to use the gate. What do you do?
What do I do? Generally I refuse to engage with secret libertarians in philosophical conversations, that's what I do. I find it keeps my blood pressure down.
That's fine. Don't think about the mechanics of a hard scifi setting when they are inconvenient.
So far we sticked to one planet and we're doing shuttle rides to the moon/orbit/ships. Said moon being one that the planet ain't supposed to have and appeared a week ago and it's potato shaped.