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BLINK-COM ONLINE
[Connection established]
Hello world. i am [REDACTED] deniable operations and anti-corporate actions specialist for the Union DOJ/HR. i am currently in the midst of a conflict on the outer edges of Union space and/or the Long Rim.
i will however attempt to keep this account running to the best of my abilities, and forward any information to the relevant command structure in Sol. i thank you for any assistance you can give to upholding the pillar's.
Signed: [REDACTED]
This is nice
Showrooms of LANCER Manufacturers
IPS-N
IPS-N showrooms are what you'd get if you slammed a truck dealership, a hardware store, a camping gear shop and a sports bar together in the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. We're talking row upon row of shelves stocked with the most precision-engineered engine parts you can print on one side of the floor, and on the other, durable, hard-wearing survival gear. Camping stoves you can run off of your mech's coldcore, sleeping bags that'll survive a HEX charge, automatic camo cloth, the works.
Right down the middle, you've got the mech floor. They've got the Tortuga. They've got the Blackbeard. They've got the Drake. They've got the Lancaster and the Kidd. They've got the Vlad (they put a chain-link fence covered in DO NOT TOUCH signs around that one after the infamous CFO's 10-year-old Incident). They've even got the Raleigh, kinda tucked away a little bit behind the water feature, but it's there!
Everything on the shop floor is ruggedized to the point that you could take a mech's fist to it without leaving a dent - and they sometimes do that to demonstrate the engineering quality. There's a giant screen hanging from the ceiling displaying constant advertising for the mechs and IPS-N in general, usually striding purposefully through idyllic Diasporan wilderness or doing hard, honest work like starship loading or construction. There's a mixtape of the most famous bro-country hits playing 24/7.
Smith-Shimano Corpro
In a word: bespoke. Everything in this place is custom. Each and every desk is individually built according to the height of the salesperson who sits behind it, and manages to be a unique art piece without disrupting the overarching aesthetic of the showroom. Whenever there's a change of staff on the sales floor, they rearrange every single desk so that they're still in ascending order.
All of the salespeople are inhumanly pretty, by the way. This atelier has its own fully-staffed makeup and wardrobe team. You're part of a work of art when you work for SSC. Everything and everyone gleams. Even the most chic visitors might feel underdressed in the midst of all this splendour.
The mechs aren't just there to be sold, they're there to be part of the experience. You might see a Monarch holding up the ceiling like the titan Atlas himself. A Mourning Cloak might be posed provocatively like a nude statue. That Swallowtail - is it in a slightly different position every time you see it, or is that just its camouflage decals? How does it always manage to be just inside your line of sight, even when you're looking somewhere else?
They have a catwalk, like you'd see at a fashion show, but it's sized for mechs. If they really think you might make a purchase, they'll queue up the entire performance for you, and you'll get to see a Viceroy strut.
The mix tape for this showroom is a seamless mixture of complex jazz, psychedelic ambient and classical piano music. It's sophisticated and mysterious.
Harrison Armory
Imagine if America could be a showroom. Harrison Armory mech outlets are part dealership, part museum. Every mech is in its own diorama, depicting some heroic event in the Armory's glorious history. A phalanx of Sherman Mk. Is holds the line against some Diasporan slaver-tyrant's army. A Saladin fends off Karrakin hordes during the Interest War. The Genghis Mk. II? Oh, that diorama isn't open right now, it had to be closed for *coughcoughcough* and *coughcoughcough* but let's move on shall we heh heh
Everyone who works here has been in the Colonial Legion at some point, and knows every specification of the mechs they sell off by heart without even looking at their slate. If possible, the Armory tries to employ people who have actual combat experience with the mechs they're selling; people who can speak to the efficacy of their technology first-hand. It's one of the many programs which the Armory has open for retired veterans; it's easy work for decent pay, good benefits and it looks great on your Social.
The music here is a constant loop of patriotic Armory anthems. If you've ever heard the music from Starship Troopers, or the Outbreak of War from Star Ocean, you'll know what I'm talking about.
HORUS
Being a decentralized omninet collective with no official branding or even consistent manufacturing standards, it should come as no surprise that HORUS has no showrooms.
ERR:CONNECTION_INTERRUPT
CartesianWhisper: P55555t CartesianWhisper: Ignore that 5hithead CartesianWhisper: They don't have any idea what they're talking about CartesianWhisper: You want a mech, kid? CartesianWhisper: And I'm not talking the tra5h the Purv5 try to 5ell you CartesianWhisper: Or that overpriced garbage 55C want5 you to mortgage your genetic5 for CartesianWhisper: Or the macho trucker bull5hit IP5-N i5 trying to hawk CartesianWhisper: I'm talking about the REAL DEAL CartesianWhisper: The PROPER 5TUFF CartesianWhisper: Log on to rgx0582.node-7.c4l.omni CartesianWhisper: I'll 5how you what true power mean5 >:]
Hey people! this time is not a commission is a remake of my second Lancer model the Smith-Shimano Corpro Black witch that i made almost a year ago! now with animations!
if you are interest in your own ps1/low poly model my commissions are OPEN so send me a DM for more info and ask me about the animations too! all shares are welcome!
I'm working on my first game so if you want to support me you can follow me here
NEWGROUNDS X CARA REDDIT
I also start a Ko-fi if you want to support! i will be updating my info very soon and that will help me fund my game! you can check it out right here!
The unappreciated art of making mecha look inhuman
Something I noticed lately, by browsing lots of lancer homebrew and fanart and comparing it to the official art, is that a lot of third party artists, across levels of artistic competence, made mechs that looked plain to me for a reason I couldn't pin down. Again, this was only weakly correlated with other metrics for artistic quality, like posing, shading, and linework. After comparing them closely with other art that didn't give me that vibe and art from 1st party material, I realized what gave me that feeling: their mechs looked too human; they looked like they could be convincingly portrayed by a person in a costume.
If you look closely at official Lancer art and the best fanart, you will notice there are always details making sure the subject is unequivocably a giant robot and not a person in sci-fi armor.
One strange but effective way this is achieved is the legs: each manufacturer has one or more distinct style of legs, with the only overlap being between SSC and RKF (which makes sense because SSC has close ties tot he Baronies). Let's go through them and see what about them makes sure you know this is a mech:
Smith-Shimano Corpro + Royal Karrakin Foundries: SSC has three kinds of lower limbs: the Horse Leg, which they share with RKF; the Foot Without Heel, and the Anatomically Correct Human Leg With Toes.
The Horse Leg is not only obviously inhuman, but also obviously unnatural, bacause no biped would be able to move properly standing on horse hooves: it would be like contantly doing a ballerina tip-walk using clown shoes; that is something only a mechanical device assisted by top-of-the-line automatic balancing could achieve.
The Heel-less foot, due to being used almost only for their spider-mechs Death's Head and Swallowtail, has little dehumanization work to do, but it does cover that function when used on the Dusk Wink, which *is* in fact a person in power armour, but still the artist took care of reminding us of how mechanical it is, by giving it feet which have little in common with boots or any other footwear. The Toed Leg seems, at first, to be the opposite of dehumanizing: it looks the most like an actual human bodypart, it feeds into SSCs fetishization of the Human Form (phrasing entirely intended). However, that is also the reason why it very clearly shows the Monarch and Mourning Cloak are robots: because no suit of armor would ever look like a naked leg; this level of anatomical fidelity only makes sense for something mechanical, whose skin *is* armor and as such doesn't need to cover itself.
Horus: Horus is mostly the easy one, with how most of the art gives their mechs beastly paws and hooves, gecko-like foot pads, or long, amphibian fingers whose vague semblance to human hands only contrasts with the blatantly monstous shapes of the Pegasus and Gorgon. However, they have four mechs portaryed with human-like legs.
The Hydra has little need to mask its mechanical nature, but the Lich commits the grave sin of being clothed, one of the biggest risk factor in making mechs look like dudes in armor. To counteract this problem, it's feet have two very evident inhuman characteristics: they have only two long, slender toes, and they touch the ground only with their futhest tarsus, in a way that makes it obvious they aren't bearing any actual weight, as if both Lich and Hydra were alway hovering a couple feet above the ground and used their feet only to skip along it, like a venetian boatman might do with their pole.
The other two exceptions are the Calendula, which being an RKF design has their trademark horse legs, and the Kobold, which already looks inarguably like a robot thanks to the barrel shae of its main body, the Horus-patented Pikey Blobs Aesthetic(tm), but still has feet with actual toes, which achieve the same effect as those from SSC.
GMS: For the longest time, GMS did not have art at all, but let's look at the [G] Type Everest from Op. Solstice Rain:
While the Boot with Auxiliary Side-Toes shape of the foot could potentially belong to a suit of armor, if we look up at the knee it's a different story: look at the slabs on either side of the joint which restrict it to one degree of freedom, as opposed to the frontal protection typical of armor for humans; look at the opposite bends of hip and shin, which almost makes the leg look digitgrade. Inequivocably robotic despite the clearly humanistic design. However, the lower parts of mechs are not the only way their design is dehumanized: we come now to Inter Planetary Shipping - Northstar and Harrison Armory, and in a curious inversion they take the opposite approach.
Although some legs of IPS-N mechs use the above principle (the Blackbeard's angular feet whose toes almost look like retractable claws, Drake's heel-less boots, and Lancaster and Kidd's SPOT-like hooves), a lot of their mecha have quite human-looking armoured boots. HA goes a step further, likely due to a deliberate stylistic choice stemming from the anthrochauvinist ideals: Their mechs look very much like armoured warriors, often even with little skirts like the Iskander or Sherman or reinforced *baltei* like Genghis and Tokugawa. With one important exception: their head.
IPS-N has a very distinctive One-Eyed Cylinder with Another Eye on the Top shape for their mecha, it's probably a deliberate par of their brand; it sees some variation like Drake's looking more liek a helmeted facemask and Stortebecker's tricorn, but even Lancaster and Kidd have a sort of vestigial head on the front with a single eye coming out of a slit.
HA's mecha have greater variation, but nevertheless for all that their body is as human-shaped as possible, their heads are always distinctly not: Barbarossa has a flat prism with a this transparent section on top, looking more like the control tower of an aircraft carrier than a head; Genghis, Tokugawa, and Gilgamesh both have canopies recessed into their bodies; Napoleon also has a barely-extruding canopy with a strange shape and covered in Blinkshield emitters that make it look like a bug-eyed little freak; Sherman is quite literally built around having a cannon for a face; and Sunzi has its drum-looking Blinkspace device. The only HA mech that has a "head" region separate from the rest of the body is Saladin, and even then it's a flat cylinder with a rectangular window in the middle: a design which would never work as a helmet but makes sense as a rotatitng cockpit with a canopy.
The observant among you will have notice that I left out four mechs: Nelson, Vlad, Enkidu, and Iskander. That is admittedly because they are those whose design asserts its inhumanity the least.
Of the first two, despite Nelson committing the sin of clothing, it also compensates hard by leaving a gap in its tabard to show the hatch for the pilot, while Vlad unfortunately does not, and with the weirldy human-looking eye, if there wasn't a pilot for scale one might legitimately not know it's a robot without context.
Iskander is the one mech in the entire Compendium which can be cosplayed without altering its proportion: cyclopism aside, this could be a person in future armor.
Enkidu also has a look which could work just as well for a human-scale cyborg, but given that it's a deliberate statement of intent it gets a pass. At the very least it's elongated head and pad-less feet make it obvious that this is not a person in armor.
Conclusion:
Although I cannot prove it without some double-blind polls, I think one of the secrets to a good mech design is making it look not only obviously like a robot, but also giving it pose, proportions, and details such that it would look big not just on a white background with no context, but that if you tried to shrink it and put it in a scene as though it was more or less the size of a person, people would realize that it's supposed to be larger.
What it’s like to play a Goblin in Lancer
SPOILERS FOR NO ROOM FOR A WALLFLOWER LATE SPRING/EARLY SUNMER
So yesterday we finally had another Lancer session. For some reason Guardian was once again absent, but the rest of the party was able to make it for downtime 2.
Dustmite, Butcher, and Mudskipper decided to start the morning after the attack on evergreen by figuring out the deal with the captured pilot from the assault. They learn that he is a Hercynian Ranger named Arro Ordo(i gave Dthall a brother) and he explains that he was a member of a contingent of Rangers that had broken away from the main force, and they were tired of the seeming inaction that Dthall was showing towards Evergreen, but now he realizes his mistake and that Evergreen is not with the machine or Union as he also refers to it. The party doesn't ask much more beyond that, but Mudskipper begins getting a headache (for reference, he's an empath and he took cynosure) so he decides he needs to go lie down, only for Butcher to decide that he wants to figure out what cynosure is and look into his mech.
<THEVOICESTHEVOICESTHEVOICES>
Mudskipper is knocked out by a strange force, rendering him unconscious, and while Butcher and the rest of the party try to figure out whats going on he begins having a nightmare (the group is trying to cure Cynosure, so I thought it would be fun to scare them). After a bit of digging through the code and some old seccom research documents into Paracausaul systems, they are eventually able to piece together what is going on.
<AREYOULOST?><3002-ITWASYOU>
After curing him of Cynosure, a few days pass and Mudskipper is starting to feel a bit better, however he is concerned for his mech, which while it doesn't have an NHP, shows some signs of sentience. (As the GM, i let everyone in the group kinda flavor their backstory however they want, and Mudskipper is an amnesiac union operative who was sealed in a metavault for 500 years. I have aome pretty grand plans for him, so I will reveal them later >:) )
Mudskipper and his mech, the Kappa, a horus hydra pattern group, have a conversation where he apologizes for installing the software, before kappa makes mention of the strange signal it is beginning to hear.
\\from across the sea, a prophet speaks of a great flood, and of bodies rising from the water
Concerned, he immediately tries to tell the party, but everyone just assumes its a residual effect of Cynosure.
A few more days pass while the party decides to follow up on a rumor they heard about an old buried weapons cache a day or two's travel north of evergreen, but while they are gone they want to make sure the town is safe, and so they begin construction on defences around the perimeter. Its about this time that Shadow Dragon gets a call from his horrible parents, and Cavalier also gets a call from his brother. Apparently Cavalier's brother Mauler will be arriving in the system soon, and wants to meet to catch up, while Shadow Dragon's parents are only calling to make sure the situation around evergreen is being stabilized, but they threaten to take away his licenses if they are unable to remedy the issues down there.
After a few days of prepping, a worried patience meets them at the gate before they leave. Thanks to the new emplacements he hopes they will be safe, but wants permission to use the players mechs while they are gone for defence. The players allow him to do so, and they begin heading off...
Okay, thats not the end of the session, I'll be back to finish this once Im done in the shower. I have to get ready for my job, unfortunately.
(back now)
When the players arrive at what they assumed was a bunker, or some kind of old military installation, and discover that its the ruins of a crashed carrier ship. Inside they begin exploring, finding a large amount of old weapons, and a massive kinetic driver cannon in pieces.
Further in they find a section of old offices and command centers, where in there are hundreds of scattered documents across the floors and in destroyed shelving that has to be pried open. Old manifests for cargo and weapons, as well as classified reports of the weapons they are using and researching. Horrifying beasts of metal, and the WorldKiller TBK initiative. Unsure of what this is referring to, they open the final cargo bay, and discover a Genghis MK1 with the barrel reduced to a molten slag, and a room covered in large clawmarks, in the center of which sits the HA-enkidu, a terrifying weapon which they fought only a few weeks ago.
As they head back to evergreen, the heat and humidity is searing, as early summer has set upon them, and on approaching the colony, patience radios for them.
Something is coming. From across the ocean, a siren comes to finish a war that should have ended hundreds of years ago.
SPOILERS FOR NO ROOM FOR A WALLFLOWER LATE SPRING/EARLY SUNMER
So yesterday we finally had another Lancer session. For some reason Guardian was once again absent, but the rest of the party was able to make it for downtime 2.
Dustmite, Butcher, and Mudskipper decided to start the morning after the attack on evergreen by figuring out the deal with the captured pilot from the assault. They learn that he is a Hercynian Ranger named Arro Ordo(i gave Dthall a brother) and he explains that he was a member of a contingent of Rangers that had broken away from the main force, and they were tired of the seeming inaction that Dthall was showing towards Evergreen, but now he realizes his mistake and that Evergreen is not with the machine or Union as he also refers to it. The party doesn't ask much more beyond that, but Mudskipper begins getting a headache (for reference, he's an empath and he took cynosure) so he decides he needs to go lie down, only for Butcher to decide that he wants to figure out what cynosure is and look into his mech.
<THEVOICESTHEVOICESTHEVOICES>
Mudskipper is knocked out by a strange force, rendering him unconscious, and while Butcher and the rest of the party try to figure out whats going on he begins having a nightmare (the group is trying to cure Cynosure, so I thought it would be fun to scare them). After a bit of digging through the code and some old seccom research documents into Paracausaul systems, they are eventually able to piece together what is going on.
<AREYOULOST?><3002-ITWASYOU>
After curing him of Cynosure, a few days pass and Mudskipper is starting to feel a bit better, however he is concerned for his mech, which while it doesn't have an NHP, shows some signs of sentience. (As the GM, i let everyone in the group kinda flavor their backstory however they want, and Mudskipper is an amnesiac union operative who was sealed in a metavault for 500 years. I have aome pretty grand plans for him, so I will reveal them later >:) )
Mudskipper and his mech, the Kappa, a horus hydra pattern group, have a conversation where he apologizes for installing the software, before kappa makes mention of the strange signal it is beginning to hear.
\\from across the sea, a prophet speaks of a great flood, and of bodies rising from the water
Concerned, he immediately tries to tell the party, but everyone just assumes its a residual effect of Cynosure.
A few more days pass while the party decides to follow up on a rumor they heard about an old buried weapons cache a day or two's travel north of evergreen, but while they are gone they want to make sure the town is safe, and so they begin construction on defences around the perimeter. Its about this time that Shadow Dragon gets a call from his horrible parents, and Cavalier also gets a call from his brother. Apparently Cavalier's brother Mauler will be arriving in the system soon, and wants to meet to catch up, while Shadow Dragon's parents are only calling to make sure the situation around evergreen is being stabilized, but they threaten to take away his licenses if they are unable to remedy the issues down there.
After a few days of prepping, a worried patience meets them at the gate before they leave. Thanks to the new emplacements he hopes they will be safe, but wants permission to use the players mechs while they are gone for defence. The players allow him to do so, and they begin heading off...
Okay, thats not the end of the session, I'll be back to finish this once Im done in the shower. I have to get ready for my job, unfortunately.
Some retrograde minis sprites I recolored and added stuff to for my next Lancer game, we are planning on doing essentially an arena that the players can play with in between our wallflower sessions, when not everyone can get on. we have a Zheng, a Blackbeard, and an Atlas all on the same squad this time around.
Maybe not the hardest sci-fi per say, but definitely more so than most settings. The reactors are based on real technology, and the mechs control kinda like a video game, but the paracausal eldritch math creatures that broke time and decided to gift humanity horrors from beyond comprehension™ certainly isnt an exact science
You.
Yes you, the one thinking about running a tabletop game but you're tired of running DND and/or you're fed up with Hasbro's bullshit.
You should run Lancer.
Why?
1. MECHS. It's a hard sci-fi far future setting with space magic powered MECHS.
2. Combat is crunchy but there's also a specific rules-light system for narrative roleplay.
3. ONLY THE DM HAS TO BUY ANYTHING. All the player side materials are 100% FREE.
4. Massif press publishes their own incredible character building site called CompCon. You can even import homebrew!
5. Explicitly inclusive setting. Published adventures have gay and trans characters, PoC characters, etc.
6. Incredible community.
Finally after numerous hours
I have finished it!
Here is a portrait for my Lancer OC Archer
