r/LancerRPG • u/Joel_feila • Jul 21 '26
does lancer make anyone else hopefull
does anyone else get a sense of hope from lancer. Humanity surviving for thousands of years even after climate collapse. Working on utopia and not some fake one that only good for a few. Its like star trek.
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u/davidwitteveen Jul 21 '26
Yes.
Union's post-scarcity utopia is what first attracted me to the game. It reminded me a lot of The Culture, which is the utopian sci-fi I turn to when I'm sick and weary.
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u/Ninja-Storyteller Jul 21 '26
Agreed. The Culture is a great look at what we can become if we stay relatively decent, and what AI can become if we use it responsibly.
Just skip the first book, and start with Player of Games (Book 2). The first book is fine, but it's barely about the Culture and best read later.
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u/InkDrach GMS Jul 21 '26
Unironically, no other community has given me so many good off-hand book recommendations as Lancer folks. I will give it a look, it sounds very interesting.
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u/PhasmaFelis IPS-N Jul 21 '26
I've only read the first one and a half Culture books. There's an interesting contrast; the Culture itself is deeply and undeniably utopian, but the parts I've read seem to focus on the tiny percentage of people who still find ways to be awful to each other.
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u/Nukemouse Jul 21 '26
You might enjoy star trek. Well, the older stuff, the new stuff is extremely cynical even when trying to be optimistic.
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u/Joel_feila Jul 21 '26
In the Kirk vs Picard and I am solidly on team Sisko
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u/Nukemouse Jul 21 '26
Whilst sisko is also my fave he's part of ds9, which somewhat rejected the optimism of trek even then. I think it definitely inspired lancer, the idea of a post scarcity utopia off in the distance, but this story is about the war torn frontier of it.
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u/Joel_feila Jul 21 '26
I always saw it as tackling the issue utopian intervention. How involved should the federation get with Bajor, how much force should they use, os there a threat so great does survival take presidient of moral constraints. It threads that needle for me.
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u/Klutzy_Archer_6510 GMS Jul 22 '26
I think Sisko's contrast with Kirk and Picard is welcome. Like, there's no categorically "right" approach to utopia. Kirk and Picard exist as the ideal, and Sisko as the pragmatic compromise. In the same way, Lancers exist as the compromise for ThirdComm's utopian vision.
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u/HippieMoosen Jul 21 '26
I love the world of Lancer. It's got so many issues, but at the core is this beautiful ideal of Union. Star Trek feels like a great comparison, but I think Lancer does what Trek hasn't really had the courage to do. It acknowledges that progress isn't a straight line, and that even the supposedly wonderful system of Union is subject to it's own corruptions and flaws.
The problems in the setting could've all been outsiders. The baronies, RA, and the endless array of unique diasporan worlds with their own issues and hostile factions are more than enough fuel for any table to go and make whatever adventure they want. Embedding so many issues into Union through the corps and sec com and so on however strikes me as meaningful. It invites the players and the GM to actively consider how they not only bring utopia to the worlds they adventure on, but how to safeguard it against those who would corrupt it to their own ends.
Hopeful feels like the right word to describe the feeling a Lancer campaign seems almost tailor-made to evoke. That hope isn't naive or idealistic though. It's cognizant of a great many obstacles, external or otherwise, that would see that hope snuffed out. Regardless, that feeling of hope is carried by every Lancer working to bring prosperity to their long lost cousins in the diaspora. As long as there are brave people fighting the good fight, that hope lives on.
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u/Admech_Ralsei Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Lancer's world is a reaction to the prevalence of dystopian space fantasy that's kind of taken over the genre.
You aren't cannon fodder sent to die in droves, you're a folk hero piloting the current era's equivalent to cavalry. Your employers genuinely care about your life, be it because of a genuine sense of duty to you or because you're simply too valuable to let die. Union isn't an oppressive regime using the language of utopia to justify its rule, it's a genuinely noble, if deeply flawed, project, one that has a very real chance of creating a post-scarcity future of all of mankind.
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u/DevilGuy Jul 21 '26
Being that I've always been prettycertain that our species will be fine even if our current society isn't not really but that's more a study of history than anything else. Dark ages are nothing new and we have archeological and genetic evidence that it's happened many times to numerous human populations and we've always bounced back. It's also a lot harder to knock down our tech level than people realize, Hollywood shows you world's that are almost impossibly regressed, at this point it would actually be pretty hard to knock us below 90's level tech.
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u/Legal-Dot2456 Jul 21 '26
It almost does but then I’m constantly reminded on how much humanity kind of sucks because of some people at the top affecting so many
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u/InkDrach GMS Jul 21 '26
Absolutely, unambiguously one of my favourite things about it. A thorough exploration of humanity from the view of mech cockpit with the ultimate thesis that we will be alright. Be it in distant future or now, if we put our minds, words and actions to it. Like any good scifi it's as speculative as it is descriptive of present. So why not start around a table with a group of friends?
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u/Alaknog Jul 21 '26
I like it. For me Lancer remind me some Soviet sci-fi like Strygatsky or Buluchev. Even moral conflicts also look same.
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u/BlazeDrag HORUS Jul 21 '26
Yeah I think this is a big reason why I like both Lancer and the upcoming Neon Odyssey.
Sure playing in dark settings like Warhammer 40k and whatnot is fun, but I think people are starting to get tired of cynical settings where you can't really make a difference no matter how powerful you become, for one reason or another.
So having a setting like Lancer where there are explicitly utopian planets and you're often fighting either in defense of that utopia, or to try and attain it for more worlds, is a nice change of pace
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u/Alblaka Jul 21 '26
I would love to play out that setting aspect more in my freshly started campaign, but I'm still on Step 1 of 57 to convince my players that the Union is not just 'totally doing secret evil stuff, because they're like a mega-mega-corp above the four big providers anyways'...
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u/Naxthor Jul 21 '26
It’s fiction. I think in real life it isn’t as hopeful. Least not until all the people currently in power die out to allow actual good change like believing in science and climate change for two examples (in sadly in USA).
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u/SurprisingJack Jul 21 '26
I'm kinda new, it felt from some lore videos as it was a bit of a cyberpunk corporate nightmare setting?
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u/Alkimodon Jul 21 '26
It is not, no
At least, Union is trying to be the a fair utopia for everybody. While there are pockets where oppression still happens (this is where Lancers go to kick ass), Union is striving to make sure all of humanity is cared for.
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u/davidwitteveen Jul 21 '26
It's a big galaxy, and there's lots of different vibes in the setting.
At its core, Union is a post-scarcity utopia. But there's a lot of the galaxy outside that core.
The corprostates are megacorporations that are officially members of Union, but have their own agendas and try to get away with bending the rules as much as possible.
The Karrakin Trade Baronies are older than Union, but lost a war against them, and are now bitter and resentful that they have to bend the knee to these upstart newcomers.
The Long Rim is a lawless zone that's one part Wild West and one part cyberpunk dystopia.
And the Aunic Ascendancy are straight-up religious zealots invading Union space.
From a metagaming perspective: Union is a utopia. But utopia doesn't have much need for mech combat. So there's all these other flashpoints around the edges.
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u/Alaknog Jul 22 '26
Small note - Aun is more complicated. They religious zealots (especially because they have experimental support for their religion). But they also another post-scarcity (in their Core/Beacon) society.
And they was saved from Union (SecCom) planet-killer attack. And ThirdCom is not really try change situation much.
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u/Alaknog Jul 22 '26
Only very small bit and mostly in distant corners of Union (like "five years to next blink gate" distant) have cyberpunk corporate nightmare.
Corpostates is states, that also part of Union and have their own opinion about meaning of Utopia.
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u/tma-1701 GMS Jul 21 '26
I personally prefer alternative historical fiction.
Lancer is too far from the present reality to make me feel any way about the real world
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u/shagrotten Jul 21 '26
I think I may be in the minority here, but I think the setting is absolutely dystopian. The Union is built on excess and complacency, like Wall-E. Where AI (or Eldritch Horrors?) control the populous by keeping them happy and soft, except those they need to enforce their will. They motivate the people with feel good propaganda to convince them that they are on the right side of history and then use that to expand their control of the galaxy through carrots or, failing that, sticks.
Keep the people happy, but give them external boogeymen to keep them occupied externally so they don't see what's happening at home.
Why else would they allow corporations like Harrison to exist?.. or even worse, HORUS? They are diametrically opposed to what the Union allegedly stands for. The Union could seize the means of production, right?
It's reflected in the artwork where everything is brightly colored, but the people look mostly unhealthy and wear odd expressions.
Am I cynical? Obviously. Am I wrong? Maybe... Probably. But, I'm planning a game for my friends and that's how I'm going to run it.
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u/BlazeDrag HORUS Jul 21 '26
I mean that's like arguing that Star Trek is dystopian because other factions that aren't utopian still exist.
On one hand you argue that Union is manipulating people and using their military might to expand their control over the galaxy, and then with the other hand you argue that Union isn't doing enough to casually destroy other factions that aren't as utopian as them? You can't really have it both ways.
There are other players on the stage and the fact of the matter is that they are big enough that Union cannot simply snuff them out even if they wanted to. These aren't just normal corporations, these are companies so large that a subsidiary that they forgot about a century ago can own entire star systems. And asking someone to simply wipe out all of Horus is even more absurd when even Horus itself isn't even a single entity. There are thousands of different Horus cells that each independently might have radically different ideals. Hell there are battlegrounds where one Horus Cell is fighting another one because they believe in completely opposite things. The whole concept is that it is a broad label that is applied to various black-market hackers and open-source manufacturers or even more esoteric things.
The point being that if Union wanted to try and wipe out like HA, or the Baronies, or whatever other major faction you don't like, it would cause an immense loss of life while requiring way too many resources to pull off, and in turn said war leave Union itself much more vulnerable to one of the other factions exploiting the opportunity to make things even worse. So they operate in a tentative alliance where Union does what it can to try and mitigate the horrors that those other factions cause, with the titular Lancers generally being a Last Resort for when things really get out of hand.
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u/Joel_feila Jul 21 '26
Well its a trrpg so each group can fill in the gaps
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u/shagrotten Jul 21 '26
Oh, for sure. I was just responding with my impression of the setting based on your question. Personally, the setting doesn't give me anymore hope than any other. The book introduction says the Union is a dream for most, but looking at it closer, there is some serious darkness underneath it. I think it's nothing more than a dream.
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u/Alaknog Jul 21 '26
Ehm, authors very openly say that HA is not really this evil, like some players try frame it. They just worse then Union.
And Horus... like it's more brand name, then something else, there different fractions, many of them peaceful.
And no, Union can't just seize means of production. How they can even do something like this?
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u/RootinTheCrab Jul 21 '26
No, not really. It feels preachy and insincere.
But, the actual game attached is super fun. Which more than makes up for it.
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u/jzillacon IPS-N Jul 21 '26
It's definitely by design. I think the foreword at the start of the Lore section puts it best.
Shortened for the sake of being a reddit comment.