#lancer meta

[drabasp]

new lancer lore revealed, the loreheads had a normal one about it

[scratching92]

So I’ve been thinking about the Celestines and the Neo-Celestines and the way they’re presented in Lancer, and I want to kind of dig into them a bit.

Everything we know about the CELESTINE project is... vague. The vast majority of it comes from an incomplete draft of No Room For A Wallflower, and even then the information is presented in such a way that it's not entirely clear how much of it is actually true. All we can reasonably infer is that the Celestines were the result of efforts by SecComm to research decorp, that they either succeeded or came close to succeeding, and that they were wiped out by the Albatross in order to prevent the breaking of the First Contact Accords.

And while you could maybe justify their deaths in the face of the horrifying existential threat that is RA, there's nothing I could see that marked them as particularly malicious in nature. It doesn't seem like they were punished for their arrogance or hubris - instead, at least to me, it seems like they were researchers caught finishing their work at an inconvenient time by the people who told them to do the work in the first place and had to go. It's not entirely clear how much the CELESTINE project knew about the FCA prior to their breakthroughs - it's possible it hadn't even gone public yet, depending on how close these events are (though admittedly, the Albatross knew of the FCA, so maybe it already had).

Anyways, all of this is to say that nothing about the CELESTINE project strikes me as particularly selfishly motivated. This is not so for the Neo-Celestines.

What we know about the Neo-Celestines is frustratingly muddied. It seems like in-universe the Celestines and the Neo-Celestines are conflated with one another, and while this makes sense from a character POV, there are at least a few lore blurbs scattered across the book that do not make any distinction, and so you have to piece together what the Neo-Celestines were based on puzzling out what seems at odds with what little we do know about the Celestines and the timeline. But one of the few things we do know is this: the Neo-Celestines were slavers, and they met their downfall in an event known as the Neo-Celestine Disappointment.

In light of what I've already mentioned about the Celestines, it seems odd that the Neo-Celestines are described as slavers. Like I said, the Celestines don't seem actively malicious so much as they were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And even if they were, there's nothing that quite suggests they would have taken slaves. So I've been wondering about how that happened exactly, and I think the answer I've personally arrived at (and maybe I'll be wrong if we ever get more Celestine/Neo-Celestine content in official Massif Press material) is that the Neo-Celestines, despite the name, likely don't share any ideological lineage with the Celestines.

Like, sure, the Neo-Celestines were about decorp, but I think the underlying motivations behind why they sought decorp were likely different. If we assume the Celestines were motivated by scientific curiosity (and admittedly, as I'm writing this I do realize that the Celestines existed primarily in the context of SecComm, so maybe that assumption is also flawed), then the Neo-Celestines were likely motivated by something else. My own personal headcanon here is that maybe the Neo-Celestines were much more aggressively Anthro-Chauv, or at the very least incredibly elitist and hierarchical, and they latched onto the Celestine name less because they shared ideological motivations with the Celestines and more for the "branding", so to speak. Maybe after a couple thousand years they got cocky, assumed RA wasn't showing his face again, and instigated a push for decorp as a means of drawing a line between themselves and their lessers - "ascending" to the lofty heights of Posthuman and subjugating the lower, ordinary Humans.

It's worth pointing out here that the Neo-Celestine Disappointment took place in the twilight years of SecComm, likely during Union's civil war that led to the emergence of ThirdComm. In that context, the Neo-Celestine movement could have been a sort of desperate, final grasp for certain Anthrochauvinists within SecComm who maybe decided "fuck it, our way of life is crumbling as we speak, who gives a fuck about RA?".

Again, this is all mostly just headcanon based on what I remember of the precious little Celestine content scattered across the Lancer books. But I am deeply curious about all of this stuff, and I wanted to take a moment to speculate about all this decorp stuff because it is pretty fascinating.

[drabasp]

Union Politics and the Karrakin Trade Baronies, or, Why Union Lets the KTB Do All That

Let me open this post with a small disclaimer: what I am saying here is not necessarily meant to be argumentative, nor is it targeted at anyone in particular. Lancer is a TTRPG setting, and as such is infinitely malleable in terms of setting alterations in order to suit you and your playgroup. This behavior is explicitly encouraged in the core rulebook and I encourage you to do it yourself, in order to better set the limits of what you might want to engage with in the course of play.

However, it has been my experience that it is usually best to understand the material that you're bending when you do so and I'm not entirely sure that some people do- an understandable problem to have when you do not just consume guidebooks in one sitting or fixate on the particularly fucked politics of some aspects of the setting. Of particular concern to me is the Karrakin Trade Baronies (henceforth the KTB,) one of two parts of the setting to get its own dedicated guidebook and the subject of the forthcoming module Shadow of the Wolf. It's a repressive aristocratic state that is home to some of the worst sanctioned atrocities in the setting, but also its a part of Union, so why does the "utopian" Union let them do that?

It's simple: the KTB is a vassal state in an extractive colonial relationship. This is text.

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies, p. 3)

The long and short of it is this- the KTB's initial encounters with Union were short and violent, as these encounters were with an expansionist Second Committee who coveted the KTB's rich resources. The first of these wars featured SecComm nearly securing an incredibly quick victory via an initial refusal to engage in ship combat in favor of simply barraging civillian populations instead:

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies p. 33. I recommend reading this entire section actually, as I find few Lancer sourcebooks willing to go this into detail about single events- the Battle of Kantus Void (starting p. 32) is described in great detail and is frankly quite horrific)

Only to retreat at the last minute in order to deal with the Deimos event.  (e.g. the emergence of Ra on Deimos, followed by the First Contact Accords. One of the ramifications of this is that Union gets access to blinkspace and NHPs, which one might consider a Big Deal technologically.) The second war was won via an overwhelming technological advantage from SecComm as a result of the Deimos event , to the point where the Second Union-Karrakin War gets scarcely a paragraph in the book, and the result is the New Prosperity Agreement, as follows:

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies, p. 34.)

So: Union gets a treaty-guarantee that the KTB has no military fleet, a regular supply of the resources mined in the KTB (explicitly to fund the growth of Union Core), and the KTB gets the Dawnline shore, reparations, and the guarantee that Union will not depose their government. This treaty remains on the books with the transition to ThirdComm, because the demand for resources did not end with the end of SecComm:

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies p. 36. Note the term “printers” here, this is not Star Trek, there are no replicators, your mech was built with raw material that was probably sourced in part or in full from the KTB.)

That is to say: why has the Third Committee allowed the KTB to continue doing what it does? Because 1. There is a treaty saying protecting the existing government and specifically the nobility 2. That treaty is the thing that feeds its shipyards, printers, and the resource demands of its core worlds 3. The First Utopian Pillar says "All should have their material needs fulfilled," so any action that threatens Union's supply lines is viewed as a threat to Union's ability to uphold the Utopian Pillars:

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies p. 36, this one is actually a bit more of a stretch but this is the only thing I can imagine "Union relies on the New Prosperity Agreement to... uphold its principles" refers to.)

You may be asking a few questions.

Does this make absolve the KTB/make their existing structure okay?

Absolutely not. The existence of the structure of landed nobility over an ignoble population is a power structure that itself produces the problems like those seen on Free Sanjak- this is something I see a lot of existing ink spilled over and I think this is made explicitly clear just about everywhere. However, I think it is important to understand that the conditions that the Ungratefuls fight against are those involved in resource extraction, and those are ones that they identify as being ultimately in service to union, as Tyrannocleave says:

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies p. 82)

In fact, even the core guidebook notes that the Ungratefuls tend to regard Union as hostile for these reasons:

Lancer Core Rulebook p. 415, notably the edition that contains the GM rules and setting notes. All other citations from this source are the same.)

They also will target Union openly:

(Lancer Core Rulebook p. 415, paragraph truncated due to page limit in source, the opening lines were "Beyond this, Ungrateful activity ranges in scope from the local to the interstellar. Some cells focus on direct...)

The actual politics of the Ungratefuls are their own discussion, though, and this post is far too bloated as-is.

The same conditions that incentivize resource extraction as a precondition of survival also incentivize existing power structures in the KTB to sanction and allow the kinds of abuse on Free Sanjak. Resource limitations (also noted in the early pages of the KTB guidebook as growing) in the KTB are not a result of lack of material but a demand for export, and those limitations are never going to be felt by the nobility, who will inevitably guarantee that they will be fed, but rather the people.

That is to say- the conditions of the nobility existed prior to Union, but the continued abuses are informed by the Treaty obligations imposed by Union, and this is something that the Ungratefuls textually understand.

Is Union doing nothing?

As shown in that second to last rulebook excerpt, also no. However, the actions Union is taking are broadly informed by the necessity of maintaining plausible deniability. Union is funding and maintaining the Ungratefuls, but are unwilling to put pressure on what is an unstable larger diplomatic situation:

(Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies p. 81)

That is to say- their larger aid to the Republican Houses (Water and Dust) filters into support for the Ungratefuls, and the UIB hires free agents to run support for them in order to make Union's hands in the conflict seem clean. However, this does not mean any sort of direct intervention by any forces that have clear ties to ThirdComm, as they are unwilling to jeopardize diplomatic ties to the KTB writ large. Or, in short: Union Navy and the DoJ/HR are hands off for this one.

Wait, isn't ThirdComm supposed to be utopian?

I read Union as being a government with a complicated history that seeks to act in the direction of Utopianism. I think that what is textually true about the KTB and the way Union interacts with it, however, is proof of how complicated that project can be. To sanction the KTB is to remove the resource flows that make the Union Core a society that can easily uphold the First Pillar. To maintain this relationship is to continue the colonial legacy of SecComm and continue tacitly endorsing both the aristocratic, exploitative present in the KTB and the extraction that it now seeks to maintain. The compromise that Union has come to is to accept the resources while funding freedom fighters, a position that I wholeheartedly disagree with as a citizen under American Empire who finds that this "compromise" uncomfortably echoes similar situations in the real world, but I think that the inclusion of this in the setting serves to pose the question: what should be done, when you are building Utopia on still breathing body of Empire?

There's a larger discussion to be had here about Lancer as a Utopian setting, but that demands a word count that I think this post has no space for. Suffice it to say- I think that discussions of the KTB should consider this context more, because I think that this is a question the setting is asking, and it is one worth engaging.