What You're Playing

You are a lancer: an exceptional mech pilot among people who are already exceptional, working in a galaxy that has nearly finished building a utopia and is paying for it at the edges.

It is 5016u. Trillions of people live under Union, a hegemony that administers a genuine golden age near the Core and something far more complicated everywhere else. You are the cavalry — expensive machines with capable people inside them, sent to change situations that ordinary force could not.

Somebody is always paying. The reason they are paying is rarely the reason they gave you.

Two games in one uniform

Play switches between two modes, and the GM says out loud when it changes.

Narrative play is most of your life. It is loose and conversational. You say what you are doing; the GM tells you what it will cost if it goes wrong; sometimes you roll. Scenes cover hours or days. This is where the campaign actually happens — the arguments, the favours, the people you owe.

Mech combat is when the machines come out. Turn-based, fought across three to five named zones, initiative alternating between your side and theirs. Heat climbs. Armour comes off in pieces. It is a different game, and it is deliberate.

Neither is the real Lancer. Your group will find its own balance.

What is different here

This adaptation runs mech combat on zones rather than a grid of squares. You will never count spaces or trace a line of sight. Every weapon in the compendium already says whether it reaches ENGAGED, NEAR or FAR, and every battlefield is a handful of named places you can picture standing in.

Everything else — the dice, the pilot, the licences, the heat, the structure tables, the whole mission cycle — is the game as written.

What you need

A pilot. A mech. Four triggers, three talents, and an opinion about what you are willing to do for money.

Your sheet does the arithmetic. Change your frame and every derived number follows; change your mech skills and they follow again. You will never calculate your own HP.