Description

Lancer is a mud-and-lasers tabletop roleplaying game centered on modular mechs and the pilots who crew them.

Ten thousand years after the climate crash that ended the Anthropocene, a survivor humanity rebuilt itself and spread to the stars. Numbering now in the trillions, they are a polyglot, cosmopolitan people, organized under a central hegemon: Union. The galaxy is vast before them, and humanity is its mirror. For some, it is a golden age of post-scarcity utopia. For the rest, that golden age remains a dream to be attained.

Into this roiling galaxy you take your role as a mech pilot from cold-blooded mercenaries to honor-bound Baronic cuirassiers, hardscrabble Union regulars to professional Constellar Midnights, Far Field teams at the uncanny edge of known space to the ever-wandering Albatross. Operating with a wealth of licenses from one of the galaxys Big Five fabricators, you and your friends play a tight-knit squad of pilots on campaign comrades together in a galaxy of danger and hope. Will you fight for Union, working to rectify the crimes of previous administrations? Will you run contracts for a corpro-state, working to advance private interests while lining your pockets? Will you fight to liberate your people from all masters, human or otherwise? Or will you fight only for yourself?

Lancer features a mix of military science fiction and mythic science fantasy. In the setting, conscript pilots mix ranks with flying aces, mercenary guns-for-hire brawl with secretive corpostate agents, and relativistic paladins cross thermal lances with causality-breaking entities.

In Lancer, there is promise in the potential, but the hard-won gains of humanity are under serious threat. From the internal: ruthless corpro-states, bitter anthrochauvinist reactionaries, and ponderous oligarchs, to the external: MONIST 1, or RA, an anoriginary being with unfathomable power and unknowable goals; the Aunic Ascendancy, the unbroken heirs of Old Humanity; and more.

Having only begun the project of recovering from its own internal political revolutions, Union now scrambles to reassert its control over a galaxy that would fall to chaos otherwise.

Who will you fight for, pilot?

Lancer is a tabletop roleplaying game that prioritizes four pillars of play:

• Rules-light, fluid, narrative play while outside of the mech.
• Tactical mech combat that promotes creative tactics, teamwork and explosive moments of action.
• Modular, progression-based mech customization where narrative, setting, and character is imbued in the gear, systems, and equipment your character chooses.
• A play loop that encourages narrative advancement.

Lancer offers deep, modular mech customization, a wide range of player backgrounds to prompt storytelling, and a system and setting with room for any narrative you and your group want to tell. Its best with a group of 3-5 players, and can be used to run a one-shot session or persistent campaign.