Lancer is a mud-and-lasers RPG about mechs and the pilots who crew them, featuring deep narrative play, gritty tactical combat and broad mech and pilot customization. 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 galaxy’s great powers, 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 corpro-state 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?
Dark. Wet. Drink deep, and descend. The water is warm and well. It is very busy here, though you cannot see it. The swimmers are curious. Open your mouth.
Well, that's that!
We've wrapped our campaign over the weekend. Thanks to all of you, it was an incredible success. As part of Lancer: Season 1, we'll be able to bring a beautiful Core Book to all of you, along with Comp/Con, No Room For A Wallflower, and our first three Field Guides! And with the - honestly - unexpected achievement of hitting SG+: Open The Vaults, you'll see a broad content increase across all books. New mechs, maps, more art, more tools, more player backgrounds, more NPCs, more gear, more of everything, really.
Going forward, we'll be setting up a storefront via BackerKit to handle tier adjustments and collect shipping. As soon as that's ready, we'll send out notifications via the email associated with your Kickstarter account, so keep an eye out! We'll also make a couple announcements via Twitter and our fan Discord, if you're more active over there. By using BackerKit, we'll be able to set up a storefront that allows pre-orders, tier adjustments, add ons, and more. In practice, this means:
Meanwhile, all of our pre-release documents and summary materials are still available - for free, always - via our itch.io storefront.
Going forward, the best place to be for up-to-date information on Lancer is our fan-made and fan-run Discord, PilotNET. There, you'll be able to talk with other longtime fans and homebrew creators, discuss lore, builds, and campaign design. You'll likely also be able to talk to Tom and me directly, as we're known to stop by every now and then to tease early builds of playtest materials, host Q&As, and show off new art. The second best place is our Twitter account, where we make all of our big announcements.
Tom and I will be hard at work in the coming days organizing our art, editing, and layout team to prep them for the work ahead. Come the end of the month, we'll be in full work mode for the summer, revising the Core Book and writing new materiel. Our public presence might fade a bit, but, rest assured we're going to be burning the midnight oil to get the Core Book polished and delivered as soon as we can.
All the best, and in solidarity,
Tom and Miguel.
In a few short hours, our Kickstarter campaign will wrap. It’s been the longest, shortest dream; an exercise in learning how to accept what seems at once unreal — the wild success of a project that Tom and I have labored over for nearly two years — and the subsequent very real need to learn how to manage my own eager desire to promise more than we have the capacity to deliver.
So let me begin by saying this again for the both of us: thank you, all, from the deepest place I have the capacity to voice my thanks. You have fundamentally changed our lives for the better through your generosity, enthusiasm, fandom, and patience. After a little more than a month, you took Lancer from a passion project to the leading modern mech TTRPG; more than 8,500 of you pledged your support, showed your excitement and confidence in this project, and carried this campaign to where we are now — well over our most ambitious ask and into exciting new territory.
So where are we now, and what’s next for Lancer and Massif?
The first thing you should know is that Lancer has a long roadmap, one made much longer by the support we’ve received through this campaign. Tom and I will spend the immediate future finalizing the text of the Core Book, working to deliver precisely what we promised: a professionally edited, laid-out, and art-complete Core Book delivered to our backers in a reasonable time frame. Add to that our stretch goal PDFs — also edited, laid-out, and art-complete — and you’ve got Massif’s plan for the next year, or, as we’re calling it, Season 1.
Taken together, Season 1 Lancer content includes around 900 pages of text across the Core Book, our Field Guides, and No Room For A Wallflower. That’s 900 pages of rules, lore, setting information, player equipment and backgrounds, GM tools, tables, and NPCs — every tool that you could need to play the game, all before we’ve added art and additional planned content like Wallflower Act III, the second part of the Karrakin Barony guide, and more. The Core Book will be available as a hardcopy, premium PDF, and free PDF; all stretch goals will be available as premium PDFs and Print on Demand.
Tom and I love writing for Lancer, and with the funds we’ve raised we can afford to continue writing full time, as well as fund development of Lancer-related projects created by other writers and artists we admire. Anything extra beyond the considerable cost of producing, printing, and shipping roughly 6,000 copies of our Core Book will go to funding creation of new content as we build towards Season 2.
So with all that said, here’s our production calendar for the Core Book.
We expect our final text to be finished, formatted, and art-complete as early as August. At that time, we’ll send it off to our printer, who has quoted us anywhere from three to four months to complete the printing process — double checking proofs, materials, and printing the initial order. Then, the books will be shipped to our fulfillment partner’s various warehouses around the world — a process of at least another month — and from there out to all of you. We expect, barring delays in printing or shipping, that the physical copy of the book will be on your doorsteps early next year. To account for unforeseen delays, we've gone ahead and estimated latest delivery around March 2020.
That timeline might feel long, but it’s the reality of printing a book. The good news is you’re not going to have to wait that long in order to play and enjoy the first retail edition of Lancer: shortly after we send our final text in to our printer, we’ll have our Free and Premium PDFs formatted and ready to go. As soon as we’re satisfied with the look and feel of both versions of the PDF, we’ll release them to all of our backers and post them on our storefronts.
So there you have it. For the remainder of 2019 and into 2020, Tom and I will be hard at work revising our Core Text, drafting new text (and revising the old!) for the Field Guides guaranteed by our stretch goals, and working on other projects as-yet unannounced. Beyond - after delivery of the Core Book in early 2020 - we begin on Season 2.
I mentioned at the start that the campaign was a learning exercise: perhaps the most important lesson Tom and I received through its duration was to manage our desire to promise more than we had the capacity to fulfill.
Our campaign was meticulously planned out over the course of months, drawing on what resources we had available to us — Kickstarter’s creator guide, some meetings with other TTRPG writers who had success on the platform, and exhaustive research on best practices. We prepared a campaign in line with what our data suggested and the best advice we received. We expected to hit our ask by the end of the campaign, and hoped to hit a decent indicator amount by the end of day one; we smashed through our highest ceiling predictions within the first twelve hours of our campaign launch.
We hit a serious inflection point far sooner than we thought we would and had to answer the question: what do we do now?
Neither Tom nor I are novice writers — Tom has Kill Six Billion Demons under his belt, I have a number of short stories and a longer manuscript out in the wild — but for the purposes of a campaign this suddenly successful, we had to make an honest assessment of our situation: we were as good as first time creators when it came to this scale. Lancer was a hit, our community of fans grew orders of magnitude larger, and after some serious discussion, we came to a conclusion: we did not want to ruin the goodwill of our longtime fans and new backers by promising a slate of additional goals that we simply did not have the capacity to provide by any reasonable timeline.
That’s the honest truth: we planned out a modest, month-long kickstarter campaign with humble expectations and the best data we could find, all of which went out the window by midday on the first day. Tom and I know our capacity, and we pledge to deliver what we have the capacity to produce — that’s Lancer’s Core Book and its listed stretch goals — in a reasonable time frame so that you can play the game and enjoy the art that you backed on day one.
Lancer will grow beyond the bounds of this first Core Book. Massif will grow beyond the bounds of Lancer. We plan to stick around, to use the funds we raised from this campaign to support ourselves as writers, and to branch out and support others whose work we admire. If you came to this campaign because you liked Lancer and only want to see more of it — good news, we’ll be able to sustain its development for a while now. If you are on board with us because of Lancer and want to see what else we can make, then stick around — you won’t be disappointed.
Thanks very much to John Harper, Luke Crane, Adam Koebel, Jay Iles, and others who offered their support and advice throughout this campaign.
The stars our guide, and in solidarity,
Miguel and Tom.
It's our (possibly final!) Mech Monday, and here we are with the fourth Long Rim mech, the SSC Atlas!
They stood, stiff and cold, watching the wall of white slowly encroach on the colony border. The warmth from the generators cut a harsh line in the snow, like a warning.
"We should close up," muttered Katya. The filter on her mask turned her voice grey and flat. "No one's coming in from this."
As if to prove her wrong, a figure staggered out of the storm about thirty yards from the border. Hands reflexively went to triggers. These were not lands for second thoughts.
Lumbering forward through the snowfall, the figure assembled itself into that of a man, bent almost double, and dragging behind him the shapeless mass of a heavily laden sled. His armor was sleek and predatory, venting steam like trails of smoke. Various archaic weapons were lashed to it at odd angles, creating a jagged silhouette. Even in the killing cold, his cowl was open, exposing a incredibly hairy, dark-skinned face, covered in beads of frozen sweat.
He was caked in gore. One arm hung useless at his side.
Katya swore under her breath, motioned to the others to get a crash kit. She shouldered her weapon and pushed out into the white.
"What the hell are you doing out here?" she screamed as soon she thought she was close enough, as loud as she could through her filter and the keening storm. The man seemed to notice and bent in her direction. As he got closer, Katya could see that he was tall, taller than she thought, and he was wearing a broad, white grin. Even through the cloying, chemical smell of her mask, Katya could tell he reeked - of iron, sweat, and something else she couldn't place.
"Hoy," rumbled the man as he loomed closer, then continued in heavily accented Common, "You Landmark folk still pay the bounties?"
Sparri, thought Katya, that explains it. "Come in," she shouted back over the storm, "Let medical take a look at you. You're wounded?" Her hand tensed up around the stock of her weapon reflexively as the man staggered closer. She'd heard stories.
"Yo," said the man, scrunching his enormous face up in pain. "I am hurt. But-"
He turned his shaggy head behind him, to the sled, and at that moment Katya got a good look at what the Sparri had been dragging through the snow, and quickly wished she hadn't.
It was just a head, but it was already the size of a man. Matted, ice-pale fur, sticky with blood, and a gnarled, dark hide poking through beneath. Black, wet, exposed gums, and a snarl filled with knife-like teeth. It instantly evoked in her the kind of primal fear response all small animals get when looking at their natural predators. It must have weighed as much as one of the colony rovers by itself.
"Let's all be fair, " said the Sparri, flashing his broad, white grin.
"The other guy - he was a lot bigger."
Originally conceived as a dueling mech for the Baronies, the ATLAS quickly gained exclusivity with an entirely different set of clientele - the Sparri. Only a little larger than a standard hardsuit, the ATLAS is the smallest mech in LANCER, but packs quite a punch. Its systems remember the unique movements of every warrior that has worn a particular ATLAS line, allowing experienced users to call upon their martial arts in battle. While fragile, it is a true titan-killer, able to share the same spaces as larger mechs, tear them to the ground, and deliver powerful finishing blows.
As before, all backers will get the final version of the Atlas as part of the Long Rim mech supplement, but you can grab it to try out right now on our google drive here or on our itch page here.
There is potentially one more Long Rim mech, an anomalous entity that has shown up from nowhere, but only if we make our final stretch goal by Friday! Good luck pilots, and see you at the end of the campaign!
Today marks the end of our month on campaign! One more week, then it’s wheels up and off to a summer of production. Art, editing, layout, revision, and new writing — everything that you backed Lancer for begins when the campaign ends, in just one week.
In the meantime, here’s what you need to know heading into the weekend: detail on Stretch Goal 3 (just below), detail on Stretch Goal 4 (further below), a tease for our final Long Rim mech, and more.
“What good is it to mourn the dead without celebration in equal? And in this I do include the great works, torn down by those without the courage to face what must be done. What do tears mean to them?
I say to you, beloved all, there is no need for grief in isolation. To have died in this great service is to rise as a martyr and carry on the crimson banner of progress. I envy those honored dead, who see now all things, who now possess the wisdom hidden to us - the living guard - despite the wonders we command.
Moreover, I envy their repose: to mark the wonders of the present is to make known the wonders left unbuilt, the wonders yet-to-come, and the wonders denied to us.
We living have the great task before us: to turn our helm to the wind, and make known our intent.
The stars may be held by others, but we know that the soul of humanity is held by us. Our dream is that which beats in the breast of all: let us shape the stars, and bring about a day where we have no more need for martyrs.
No howling masses ever overcame the might of hope.
Onward, that crimson banner! Onward, humanity!”
—
Stretch Goal 3 is a professionally edited, laid out, and art-complete digital version of the third of Lancer’s Field Guides — and the first of the corpro-state Field Guides — Field Guide: Harrison Armory.
If Union is Humanity’s attempt to put its best foot forward and approach the galaxy as stewards, Harrison Armory is Humanity’s desire to approach the galaxy as managers. The Armory looks to the stars and asks, “what good is potential if not tapped? What good is power if it is not used?”
The Armory is not a subtle power, nor a subtle threat. Read up on them, pilots, so you know what kind of engine has been set upon the galaxy.
Out of character, it should be noted that writing up Harrison Armory is not an endorsement of its politics, aims, or persons — rather, it is meant to give a nuanced view of one of the galaxy’s major powers. It’s quite likely that your pilot might use an Armory chassis, or field Armory weapons, or even hail from a world in the Armory Purview — whether you want your narratives or characters to lean into the complications they provide, or write a stronger form of resistance, it’s important to know who they are and what they want.
(At the same time, if the Armory codes as an entity you know already, then you don’t need to read any further to understand them. We invite you to use their weapons to tear down their house)
—
>//RUN:QUALIA++
>//RUN:COSENTIENCE++
>//RUN:NARRATIVE_ARC_ASSURANCE++
>//RUN:CHOIR_RESCRIP(v1.8)++
>//BICAM_PROCESS is ONLINE and TRUE
>//TAWHID_ASSURANCE is ONLINE and TRUE
>//THINK_TANK is ONLINE and TRUE++
>//…
>//...|
>//…
>//…|
>//…
>//[good morning, Master Harrison. My name is Foresight, how can I ser>>>?>ms*o?%&364((___
[WHO IS THIS? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?]
—
Included in this finished version of Field Guide: Harrison Armory are the following upgrades:
And with the announcement of the Harrison Armory Field Guide, we’ve got another Digital Iconic tier to go with it! It’ll be priced the same as the other stretch goal Digital Iconic tiers and come with the same perks (hardcopy, name an entity in the book) and will unlock at 8am PST on Wednesday, May 8th (time zone calculator here!). Want to name an Arcology? Define the name of a resistance group in the Dawnline Shore? Name a famous legionnaire? This is your tier!
We’re happy to announce that, finally, we have pinned down the details of our fourth and final stretch goal. Initially, we planned to announce Comp/Con as our final stretch goal, but as we blew through our planned stretch goal rollout and as Comp/Con was already a player-facing application out in the world and functional, we decided that it was better just to fund it. So to that end, we wanted to define our 4th stretch goal as something that would both reinforce the objectives of this campaign — that is, a core book with broad and deep player options on launch — and be something we could deliver on time at a level of quality we would be satisfied to offer.
So, without further ado, here are the details on Stretch Goal 4: Open The Vaults, which unlocks at $400,000.
Open The Vaults is a significant upgrade to the content of all texts outside the Core Book: No Room For A Wallflower and the Field Guides so far: The Aun, The Karrakins, and Harrison Armory. Currently three of the four books are lore supplements and will contain minimal mechanics. However, if and when we hit this next tier, we’ll be able to add:
And finally:
Alright, that’s it for this week!
Coming up next week, we’ve got the last of the Digital Iconic tier unlocks, another Long Rim reveal, and the end of the campaign!
Until then, stay safe Pilots.
Miguel and Tom.