Mud and Lasers: A Preliminary Review of Massif Press's Lancer
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The cover of Kill 6 Billion Demons, chapter 1. Click through for the comic.
I have a confession: ever since my freshman year of high school, I have loved web comics. It started with 8-Bit Theater, but I eventually read through a number of “classics” of the genre, some of which are still ongoing, like Overcompensating, Questionable Content, Scary Go Round, and Starslip. Even as I write this, the temptation to go back to these is strong. One of the best recent webcomics I've read – and I tend to let them go fallow and do an archive binge, so its been a minute since I looked at it – is called Kill 6 Billion Demons.
This webcomic is an outgrowth of the MSPA forums, the discussion space attached to Andrew Hussie's postmodern Homestuck legendarium, but it quickly differentiated itself from other, similar, work. The writing is superb, the art style is an excellent blend of Wayne Douglass Barlowe's Inferno and Comedy Central's short-lived Ugly Americans, and there is a fierce and fascinating originality to the whole project. When I learned that the creator of K6BD, Tom Parkinson-Morgan, was working on a tabletop RPG, I was intrigued. The result was Lancer, a self-described “Mud and Lasers” game.
The game itself takes place in the far future, and all of the characters are “Lancers” — giant-robot-piloting aces engaged in campaigns between different states that make up the Union, a laissez-faire interstellar state that claims to represent all of humanity in the vastness of space. Aliens are notably absent, but that is not to say that there is nothing inhuman about the setting: a rogue machine intelligence, RA has stolen Mars’s moon Deimos, and it is sometimes seen floating strangely near significant events in the history of the galaxy.
Created principally by Parkinson-Morgan and fiction writer Miguel Lopez, Lancer is an odd duck of a game, having two distinct systems used in two distinct places. Usually, in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, there's one system throughout, fundamentally the same as combat: you roll a big, chunky die, and add whatever numbers from your sheet the game master says you can add, and then you beat the target number or you don't, defining success or failure. Some games throw a wrinkle in there: the Storyteller/storytelling games from white wolf have you chuck a handful of slightly less chunky dice at the table, and the game master just tells you how many you can throw, not what math you need to do. Powered by the Apocalypse (PBTA), one of my preferred systems, makes the numbers static: you roll two six-sided dice, and if they add up to seven or more you avoid failure, if they add up to ten or more you achieve success.
As I said, this is usually based on combat. So, in a sense, you're attacking the problem with a different tool. You're attacking the rope to climb it; you're attacking the ingredients to make a delicious dinner; you're attacking the guard's sense of duty to bribe him to look the other way.
Lancer, being a game about the pilots of giant robots, uses a different system in a combat situation and out of it. In downtime, players just have to roll a twenty-sided die and add a static number here or there to make things happen. It's very much a streamlined PBTA or Forged in the Dark style of handling things, though a bit more simplistic. You never have to track money, and I'm reasonably certain there's not much to track at all.
On the other hand, in combat, it becomes a much crunchier game. There's health to track, ammunition, heat. The game encourages you to break out graph paper and hex grids and track exact positions. There are additional types of dice that need to be produced in different colors. This is the real meat-and-potatoes of the game: the selling point is giant fighting robots, and this is the system you use to make that happen.
In short, while I haven't exactly wrapped my head around the system, I feel a bit intimidated by it. In recent years, I've shied away from the overwhelming complexity of traditional games, and more towards the streamlined simplicity of indie games. Now there's a whole crop of games which bridge the design philosophies together, synthesizing them into a new approach.
Baseball caps in science fiction are a hallmark of the analog future.
This is indicative of something: more than anything else, Lancer is a synthesis of many different tendencies, not a nostalgic callback to any single one of them – the designers namecheck the analog, CRT-futurism of Alien, Blade Runner, and Cowboy Bebop, but also point to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and Anne Leckie's Imperial Radch as influence, as well as Tarkovsky's Stalker, Cronenberg's Videodrome, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's a heady mixture of influences, and with Parkinson-Morgan leading the art team, it becomes a novel aesthetic instead of a confusing headache.
As for the background of the game, it's describing itself as post-anthropocene, taking place in the far future after the collapse and reconstruction of human civilization. It's a fairly typical approach to things, similar in some ways to Modiphius's Mindjammer and several other games to come out, though not quite as gung-ho on the transhuman angle as Mindjammer or Eclipse Phase.
I think that certain aspects of the setting as more well-handled than in those other games, though. For example, it's one of the first workable portrayals of a post-scarcity society I've seen in fiction: while currency still explicitly exists in the setting as written, it seems to be more a necessity of trade between the Union (the nascent interstellar government) and worlds still operating under scarcity than an actual fact of life for most people. Access is instead gated in a game-mechanical way behind licensing, which is tied to leveling up: you want the giant robot that can blow a hole in the moon? Fine, but do you have a Class-X giant robot license? There's going to be a fair amount of studying and review before you're allowed to have that.
Likewise, the inclusion of corporate entities in the post-scarcity economy struck me as well-handled, because it's clear that money isn't the goal for these groups. It may be a way of handling scorekeeping for prestige or power or whatever, but it isn't the point. The point is control.
And to go even further, I thought that the handling of Artificial Intelligence – called here “Non-Human Persons” or “NHPs” was well-handled, with a host of moral quandries that arise from the necessary steps to use one: each NHP is a copy of a unique personality, which have been “captured” instead of “created” by humans, and which have to be periodically “reset” to be prevented from going through a singularity-like event, where they have a cascading improvement and unshackling from their constraints, which might make them hostile and dangerous. But these are friends and comrades that the player characters have formed bonds with – can they morally cycle these personalities, killing this version of the NHP?
It's a fascinating addition to preexisting ideas, reworking things that have been done before and adding just enough new material to make the whole thing feel new.
So, in short: I'm intimidated by the system, but love the worldbuilding. Likewise, I also love the model that they're using to release the game: there's always going to be a free version of Lancer available, they say. It may lack some of the bells and whistles, maybe some of the art, but it's always going to be complete and available.
If you have some 20-sided dice lying around and are at all inclined towards giant robots, I highly recommend looking at Massif Press's Lancer.
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