Posted in: Games, Tabletop | Tagged: Kill 6 Billion Demons, Lancer, Lancer RPG, Massif Press

'Lancer' Sci-Fi Mech RPG Launches on Kickstarter

I first heard about Lancer at about midnight last night, after a friend dropped a link to the Kickstarter in Messenger. I had a few minutes of downtime, so I clicked the link, read for five minutes, and backed the project with more enthusiasm than I've had for a crowd-funded game in a long time.

Lancer is a "mud and lasers" role playing game set in humanity's far future:

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.

The world building is already top-notch, and that's not a surprise, considering one of the master-minds behind Lancer is Tom Parkinson Morgan, the writer of Kill 6 Billion Demons and Broken Worlds. I only say not surprising now, since I had never heard of Morgan's work before 12:32 this morning.

By 1:44 am, I was a fan, and had worked through the first three volumes of Kill 6 Billion Demons, which I really can't explain. It's very much its own thing.

Morgan teamed up with writer Miguel Lopez to create Massif Press, and Lancer is their first project under that imprint.

Lancer takes an amazing world and throws it together with some exceptionally evocative art. It's all pretty cool:

Nearly every gear option has lore attached to it, further defining the history and tone of the setting as well as acting as hooks for deeper player characterization. When you take licenses from the IPS-Northstar Raleigh, the gunslinging mech with the MJOLNIR chest cannon, you know exactly what you're getting.

There's a lot more to unpack, but a project like this doesn't come along that often. The crew at Massif Press also have an ambitious goal of making sure that Lancer will always have a free to play aspect to it, which they have already put in action- the rules for the game are already available, and it's not just a quick-play guide, either. The PDF I downloaded this morning is over 500 pages!

Lancer has already hit its funding goal several times over, and looks to do that again. Still, it's seriously worth checking out! With this much work already done, I think Lancer looks like a pretty safe bet to back.

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