Rolling the Bones

Games & Words & Monsters

[assumptionprime]

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.

[silicon65]

Chaos Eater

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price and Boris Karloff wizard duel to the death -

The Raven (1963) dir. Roger Corman

[oldschoolfrp]

Vincent Price, born May 27, 1911

[lex1nat0r]

The White Elephant: A Post-Mortem

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.

[goatsgomoo]

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).

[lex1nat0r]

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.

[lex1nat0r]

The White Elephant: A Post-Mortem

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.

[lex1nat0r]

"It's okay to like D&D now, no one thinks it's satanic these days!" but it should be though.

[lex1nat0r]

White Elephant: Mirror Match

AAR #39

The final session report from my now-completed Lancer game

Characters (LL 9):

Raiju (They/Them, Hacker 3/Heavy Gunner 3/Nuclear Cavalier 3/Stormbringer 3, Barbarossa 3/Monarch 3/Pegasus 3)

Rook (He/Him, Infiltrator 3/Brutal 3/Leader 3/Hunter 3, Balor 3/Gorgon 3/Minotaur 3)

Daylight (She/Her, Technophile 3/Engineer 3/Ace 3/Grease Monkey 3, Vlad 3/Nelson 3/Mourning Cloak 3)

Magpie (They/Them, Hacker 3/Technophile 3/Drone Commander 3/Spotter 3, Goblin 3/Hydra 3/Swallowtail 3)

NHPs:

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.

Combat 9.1: All the Marbles

Sitrep: Control

OPFOR (NPCs using statblocks from NPCs Rebaked):

(evil) ROOK (T3 Elite Veteran Goliath, Mag Gauntlet/Coercive Force/Power Knuckle/Oppression)

Deepest Blue, Darkest Black (T3 Elite Veteran Ace, Missile Swarm/Countermeasures/Emergency Jettison/Air Superiority)

Missile Corvette (T3 Veteran Rainmaker Vehicle, Seeker Volley, Suppression Salvo, Concussion Warheads, Self-Destruct)

T2 Controller Grunt x9

(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.

[lex1nat0r]

White Elephant: The Professionals

AAR #38

Session reports from my ongoing Lancer game

Characters (LL 9, +2 from last time because we're at the end here):

Raiju (They/Them, Hacker 3/Heavy Gunner 3/Nuclear Cavalier 3/Stormbringer 3, Barbarossa 3/Monarch 3/Pegasus 3)

Rook (He/Him, Infiltrator 3/Brutal 3/Leader 3/Hunter 3, Balor 3/Gorgon 3/Minotaur 3)

Daylight (She/Her, Technophile 3/Engineer 3/Ace 3/Grease Monkey 3, Vlad 3/Nelson 3/Mourning Cloak 3)

Magpie (They/Them, Hacker 3/Technophile 3/Drone Commander 3/Spotter 3, Goblin 3/Hydra 3/Swallowtail 3)

NHPs:

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.

Next time: Light up the Night

[hereticpraetor]

i havent seen the strong as fuck ice mummy in a while. i hope shes doing ok

[sourcreammachine]

spring thaw. weak as fuck water mummy now

[fedoraspooky]

It's that time again

[oldschoolfrp]

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)

[lex1nat0r]

White Elephant: The Right of All Sentient Beings

AAR #37

Session reports from my ongoing Lancer game.

Characters (LL 7):

Raiju (They/Them, Hacker 2/Heavy Gunner 3/Nuclear Cavalier 3/Stormbringer 2, Barbarossa 3/Monarch 3/Pegasus 1) - SSC Monarch “Danger Close”

Rook (He/Him, Infiltrator 2/Brutal 3/Leader 3/Hunter 2, Balor 3/Gorgon 3/Minotaur 1) - HORUS Gorgon “Everything is Fine”

Daylight (She/Her, Technophile 2/Engineer 3/Ace 3/Grease Monkey 2, Vlad 3/Nelson 3/Mourning Cloak 1) - IPS-N Nelson “I’m The Problem”

Magpie (They/Them, Hacker 3/Technophile 3/Drone Commander 3/Spotter 1, Goblin 3/Hydra 3/Swallowtail 1) - HORUS Hydra “Distributed Denial of Area”

NHPs:

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

[lex1nat0r]

White Elephant: Called to the Principal's Office

AAR # 36

Session reports from my ongoing Lancer game

Characters (LL 7):

Raiju (They/Them, Hacker 2/Heavy Gunner 3/Nuclear Cavalier 3/Stormbringer 1, Barbarossa 3/Monarch 3/Pegasus 1) - HA Monarch “Danger Close”

Sunshine (They/Them, Grease Monkey 3/Technophile 2/Engineer 1/Gunslinger 1, Pegasus 3/Black Witch 2) - HORUS Pegasus “Exchange of Affection” Player unlikely to be present for the rest of the campaign

Rook (He/Him, Infiltrator 2/Brutal 3/Leader 3/Hunter 1, Balor 3/Gorgon 3/Minotaur 1) - HORUS Balor “Your Burden”

Daylight (She/Her, Technophile 2/Engineer 3/Ace 3/Grease Monkey 1, Vlad 3/Nelson 3/Mourning Cloak 1) - IPS-N Nelson “I’m The Problem”

Magpie (They/Them, Hacker 3/Technophile 3/Drone Commander 3, Goblin 3/Hydra 3/Swallowtail 1) - HORUS Hydra “Distributed Denial of Area”

NHPs:

Molotov - Via Sunshine’s Technophile talent - Projects as a small velociraptor - unshackled

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

Sisyphus - Via Sunshine’s Pegasus 3 - no known projection habits, unlikely to appear [ha ha ha I have escaped] - shackled?

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 lancers receive several congratulatory calls after helping save the city of Neo Corinth from the OMS Shield Frontier mechs. They also receive calls from Metahome's Union administrator and someone calling himself Helix, apparently associated with HORUS, asking to meet. They decide to meet with Helix first.

They find Helix at an abandoned construction site, apparently alone. He asks why they let him escape with the red omnihook. The lancers explain about the blinkspace data they have, claiming they're just curious, Helix confirms the red omnihook can be used to more efficiently process the data, and that HORUS suspects the local blinkspace disturbances are due to a metavault in the "local" blinkspace that is holding a MONIST-class entity that HORUS calls the HARLEQUIN. The discussion is amiable until Helix reveals that some members of HORUS, while they don't condone the Guardian Fleet, aren't mad about there being a counterbalance to ThirdComm Union in the sector. This puts the lancers on edge but Helix reassures them that's not what he personally believes and isn't a majority opinion. Next the group asks about the ideological differences between HORUS and the Horizon Collective that prevent them from working together. Helix explains that at least the local HORUS cell views the ontological differences between organics, NHPs, and MONISTs as irreconcilable and thus there must always be a hierarchy between these classes of entities. HORUS, Helix says, acknowledges this and thus views it as necessary that whatever class HORUS belongs to is on top of the hierarchy. He dismisses the Horizon Collective's attempts at cooperation across classes as well-meaning but impossible. With that explained, the lancers demur from trying to get HORUS to cooperate with the HC to interpret the blinkspace data together. They leave, still on friendly terms, and Helix assures them that HORUS will step up efforts to arm resistance movements on Guardian Fleet-occupied planets.

Next is the meeting with Augusta Kerlin, the Union administrator. Her NHP companion REMUS is there as well but doesn't say much. Augusta warmly greets the lancers and thanks them again for helping to save the city, though Shield Frontier factions are still active on the planet and in the sector, and with the Guardian Fleet encroaching things are still heating up. Given the situation, Augusta asks if the lancers are in possession of anything they think might help Union clean up this mess. Magpie says they don't and the others back them. Augusta, who doesn't actually seem to have all the info herself, backs down and lets the lancers know that Union is still open to cooperation.

Social obligations fulfilled, the lancers go out drinking and Daylight manages to befriend Augusta's secretary who might come in useful.

The next day, Dr. Sharma announces that the blinkspace data has been successfully interpreted. They now know the location of the metavault within blinkspace. Reasoning that if the local omninet can be unscrambled it would give a big boost to efforts to fend off the Guardian Fleet, the lancers resolve to go where no one has gone before. After giving any crewmembers of the Eye of the Tiger to opt out if they want, the ship hits the blink.

This session got me thinking about Clocks. From the beginning the group has had to deal with a Suspicion clock that tracks how close the factions in the sector are to realizing that the Eye of the Tiger is equipped with a blinkdrive. I have found that Clocks are less about what happens when they are filled and are more useful as a threat, communicating to players what could happen as a consequence of failure. I don't think I've filled a majority of the major Clocks I've set up in games, but it's nice to have them around.

My specific thoughts are wondering, given the Suspicion clock is only at 5 of 8 segments, was it the right move to have Augusta (or someone above her) suspect something about the Eye of the Tiger? There are in-universe reasons for someone in Union to suspect the blinkdrive is in the sector (if you know you know) but is it an unfair escalation to have the players confronted with that? I could have had it just happening in the background, but if it isn't going to appear on-screen then what's the point? Although if I just made the decision to have that happen in the first place what's the purpose of having the Clock to begin with? Should events happen in the game as segments are ticked and not just when the Clock is filled?

Ultimately I'm happy with how I handled things. The meeting added tension, and the Suspicion clock remains a threat that will change the campaign if the lancers somehow manage to fill it in the handful of sessions we have left before the campaign ends. But I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on how I'm using my tools.

Next time: Chains, chains will hold you down

[goatsgomoo]

[lex1nat0r]

White Elephant: This City Made Us

AAR #34 & #35

Session report from my ongoing Lancer game.

Characters (LL 6):

Raiju (They/Them, Hacker 2/Heavy Gunner 3/Nuclear Cavalier 3/Stormbringer 1, Barbarossa 3/Monarch 3) - HA Monarch “Danger Close”

Sunshine (They/Them, Grease Monkey 3/Technophile 2/Engineer 1/Gunslinger 1, Pegasus 3/Black Witch 2) - HORUS Pegasus “Exchange of Affection” Player not present for session #35

Rook (He/Him, Infiltrator 2/Brutal 3/Leader 3/Hunter 1, Balor 3/Gorgon 3) - HORUS Balor “Your Burden”

Daylight (She/Her, Technophile 2/Engineer 3/Ace 3/Grease Monkey 1, Vlad 3/Nelson 3) - IPS-N Nelson “I’m The Problem”

Magpie (They/Them, Hacker 3/Technophile 3/Drone Commander 3, Goblin 3/Hydra 3) - HORUS Hydra “Distributed Denial of Area”

NHPs:

Molotov - Via Sunshine’s Technophile talent - Projects as a small velociraptor - unshackled

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

Sisyphus - Via Sunshine’s Pegasus 3 - no known projection habits [ha ha ha you can’t see me] - shackled

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

We open with Rook revealing to the crew that he and the Ivan they know are clones. The lancers are accepting, no surprise given that they had earlier helped out clones on both Sanctuary Blue and Angelus Prime. That settled, they head to Metahome to work on that blinkspace data.

En route, Arjhet and Tehjra bring up the question of what they're going to do when the crisis with the Guardian Fleet is resolved and point out that the lancers could have a lot of say in the direction of the galaxy given they control the only known full blink-capable ship in existence. Collectively the lancers agree that no major polity should have access to this kind of technology. It's a satisfying answer for A & T.

On arriving in local Metahome space, the Eye of the Tiger is approached by a RimTech and Mil Agro frigate. They broadcast their proper IFF and the friendly factions let them through but raising suspicion as to how the Tiger could have gotten to Metahome so quickly.

Planetside, the lancers find the OMS branch in the city of Neo Corinth effectively barricaded by a joint RimTech and Mil Agro force, who are also keeping an eye on Neuropa. The Union administrative staff are also busy trying to convince everyone that Union is in control of the situation in the sector.

The lancers meet up again with the local Horizon Collective cell and with Dr. Sharma's assistance feed the blinkspace data into the red omni device. Dr. Sharma and the HC tech crew get to work crunching paracausal numbers, leaving the lancers free for downtime.

Daylight immediately gets into trouble trying to infiltrate the OMS building under siege. She gets inside fine, but gets cornered and has to bring in the rest of the lancers. They decide to cause a mech-based distraction which convinces the OMS people to go hot. While OMS blows its cover and starts brawling with RimTech and Mil Agro, the other lancers get inside and start heading for anything informative. They find a second red omni device in the bowels of the building, as well as a second group of infiltrators trying to take it. After some discussion the lancers let the other guys take the device as the PCs already have one. And then it's time to hop in the mechs to contain damage to the city.

Combat 7.1: It's German for "the gambler"

Sitrep: Search and Rescue (from Enhanced Combat, mech NPCs use statblocks from NPCs Rebaked. All NPCs are Tier 2.)

OPFOR:

DIE BETTER (Veteran Berserker, Parting Gift/Overdrive Servos/Harpoon Cannon)

Fail Deadly (Veteran Seeder, Mag Mines/Hopping Mines/Last Line)

Seeder (Hopping Mines/Last Line) x2

Mirage (Vehicle, Flier/Warp Targeting)

Berserker (Overdrive Servos)

Pyro (Lingering Flames) x2

(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: Called for PCs on round 3 of 6

Difficult to evaluate this one as the session went over the usual time and Danger Close had pretty much wiped the board with a max-damage Divine Punishment so I made the decision to just give the players the win. We hadn't played in a while so everyone needed to get back up to speed. I could have split this across two sessions, but given we're already two years into a campaign that was supposed to wrap up in at most a year I don't really want to prolong things. Ideally we're only a handful of sessions from the end.

Next time: Into the Gleam

[prokopetz]

BRB, writing an essay arguing that, since the number of people doing character build theorycrafting is anecdotally much greater than the number of people engaged in active group-based play at any given time, Dungeons & Dragons in its modern form should properly be classified as a solo journalling game.

[prokopetz]

"Name one genre of media more creatively inbred than Dungeons & Dragons clones" easy: self-labelled deconstructions of visual novels developed by people who have only ever played other self-labelled deconstructions of visual novels.

[dreadwedge]

used to be jump scares on youtube videos was the sudden demon or the screaming woman. now jump scares in videos is the nordvpn or the betterhelp. really makes you think. really makes you consider. really makes you believe. really makes you investigate. really makes you bifurcate. really makes you spiralize. really makes you shiver and dance. it makes you shed your skin. it makes you engage in futile acts. it really makes you partition the hard drive. it makes you cut apart the hard drive. making you dissect the hard drive. making you reconstitute the hard drive. making you fill the hard drive with a glue-like substance. making you fill the hard drive with a glue-like substance that is derived from beans. i am making you fill the hard drive with a glue-like substance that is derived from beans.