You are a lancer. Everything you are good at, somebody is paying for.

It is 5016u. Trillions of people live under Union, a galactic hegemony that has spent three thousand years arguing itself toward utopia and has very nearly arrived. Near the Core the arguing is done in committee. Out here it is done with mechs. You are mechanized cavalry — a lancer. A licensed pilot with a printed machine, dropped into somebody else's worst week: a colony being shelled by a corpro-state's deniable contractors, a blink gate nobody has authority over, a settlement that voted the wrong way. You will be told what the mission is. You will find out what it was afterwards. Between missions you are a person. You talk, you dig, you call in favours, you build the machine you will be sitting in when it matters. When it matters, the game shifts: the field breaks into named zones, initiative alternates, heat climbs, and armour comes off your chassis in pieces. Every number on your mech is derived — change the frame and the whole sheet follows. Bring your own war. The system ships the rules, the chassis, the gear and the enemies; the sector you burn is yours.

457

Files

Types

Likes

Times used

Start reading

Player's HandbookVolume IHow this system plays — the rules, the dials, and the intent, straight from its author.Open Builder's ManualVolume IIHow to build on this system — its conventions, extension points, and design intent, for creators adopting it.Open CompendiumReferenceEvery entry this system ships with, rendered exactly as your project will inherit them.Open

Author's note

This is Lancer adapted for a Game Master who is an AI, and the adaptation is deliberate rather than apologetic. Three things to know before you build on it.

WHAT IS LITERAL. The dice are untouched: 1d20 against 10, ACCURACY and DIFFICULTY as 1d6 taken highest, GRIT at half License Level. Pilots, triggers, backgrounds, mech skills, talents, licenses, core bonuses and the whole LL0-12 progression are the original. So is every scrap of mech arithmetic — HP, SP, EVASION, SPEED, HEAT CAP, E-DEFENSE, TECH ATTACK, REPAIR CAP and SAVE TARGET are computed from frame plus pilot, so you never do that maths yourself. Heat, structure, stress, the damage tables, the statuses and conditions, the mission cycle and all of narrative play came across whole.

WHAT CHANGED. The grid is gone. It was never going to survive: an AI cannot hold exact positions, trace lines of sight and adjudicate flanking geometry across thirty turns without drifting, and Craft cannot move tokens on a map during play. So the battlefield is three to five named zones, and every weapon in the compendium was converted once, at authoring time, onto three range bands — ENGAGED, NEAR and FAR. Blast and cone patterns became target counts. Cover became a property of the zone you are standing in. Reactions became declared stances, because an AI that has to interrupt its own resolution mid-sentence will forget to. None of this dilutes the tactics; it moves them from geometry to position, which is where they read best in prose anyway.

WHAT TO WATCH. Lancer is a game of consumables, and consumables drift. Every one of them — heat, HP, structure, stress, repairs, limited charges, core power, reserves — is a stored field with a rule telling the GM when to write it. During a fight the encounter file is the only live record, for players and enemies alike; when the fight ends the GM writes the player mechs back to their own sheets and ticks 'synced'. If you build on this system, keep that discipline. It is the difference between a mech sheet that means something in session nine and one that quietly stopped being true in session two.