LANCER — A Long Winter

Well well well, if it isn't that time of the year again, folks! After skipping 2024's Yearly Patreon Post — the arrival of a new edition of a certain d20 roleplaying game put paid to any potential for exploration past those poxed prime pastures — we're back at it with some more LANCER.

In an attempt to pick back up where I left off, I ran my same group of players through the Operation Winter Scar narrative, the events of which directly follow on from Operation Solstice Rain (as featured in 2023's post).

Once again, I cooked up a few odds and ends to up the audio-visual ante. Here are some clips of the results in action:

Scene transition effects:

GMS:

IPS-Northstar:

Smith-Simano Corpro:

Horus:

Harrison Armory:

Scene-specific effects:

Earthquakes:

Rapid atmospheric depressurization in a space elevator (⚠ volume warning ⚠):

Reactor overload:

Other tools:

Condition management:

Custom login screen:

I would recommend LANCER to any group which likes a crunchy, tactics-heavy game — or any erstwhile fans of D&D 4e — and as such, I have once again attached my entire Foundry world, and copies of (almost) all of the modules used, should you want to fire it up and take a big robot (or three) for a spin.

Note that the Foundry LANCER system requires Foundry v12, at time of writing. The README in the attached zip includes information on how to set up a side-by-side install of an older Foundry version.

The zip, and the included Foundry world, also includes:

• Scenes; all the scenes for the 6 combats and connecting beats are preconfigured.

• Actors; all the NPCs and enemy mechs are available in the sidebar, for each configuration of encounter.

• Macros; a handful of macros are available in the macro bar/directory. See `media/*` for demos of these, and the "Usage Guide" README section for more information.

• Scene transitions; scenes in the navigation bar can be right-clicked -> "Scene Transition" (for an "entering mech" transition) or "Scene Fade" (for a basic narrative fade-to/from-black). A unique "Credits Transition" for the joke credits scene (`Eɴᴅ Cʀᴇᴅɪᴛs`).

• Playlists; a handful of ambient tracks linked to various scenes.

• ...and more! See the README for a full rundown.

Notably not included is any of the main text of the PDF; you'll need to pick up your own copy of Operation Winter Scar. The core LANCER rules are available for free, and additional GM-facing content can be found in the Core Book.

For everything else, see the included README, or hit me up in chat.

That'll be all, for now. Until next time, stay safe out there.

For those interested, LANCER's 3rd-party license is don't be a shithead [sic], under which making the entire system into a videogame is allowed. All credit to the original artists/authors/designers; a full list can be found in the zip's README.

[The em-dashes in this post were ethically sourced (copy-pasted from Wikipedia). All typos and grammatical errors are canonical and in-universe.]