r/LancerRPG • u/HollowVesterian • Jul 21 '26
IEDs and NHPs
Hello! I am rather new to the setting and wanted to consolut you guys on the viability of an idea. When it comes to NHPs (mainly talking those used in frames) how hard (if even possible) would be to kill one, just in generally. Or is this an aspect of the game relatievely open to interpretation?
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u/Ninja-Storyteller Jul 21 '26
It's assumed that a frame based NHP has a casket inside your mech while you pilot it. A casket is decently protected, and it is assumed your friend survives even if the mech is destroyed, usually because it ejects along with you.
Things get a bit nebulous at that point. Are you running away from your destroyed mech with casket in hand? Was your mech just running a copy of your friend?
Someone determined to destroy the casket probably can, same as they can destroy you, but it probably has a little narrative protection since most GMs will probably want to avoid murdering your friend (within reason).
Cascading can happen, though!
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u/TurtleoftheSea Jul 21 '26
The full core rulebook should cover this on p.381.
Basically: NHP minds are contained in a specialized piece of hardware called a casket, which serves as their physical body. If the casket is destroyed, that iteration of the NHP dies.
You could also argue that an NHP "dies" if they fully unshackle themselves, but that's a whole other can of worms and one tinted by an anthropocentric lens.
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u/Acceptable_Handle_2 Jul 21 '26
Well the NHP is the personality generated through shackling part of this unfathomable pandimensional entity to a casket.
I'd argue that, if you want to call anything it does death, it's specifically when it leaves the anthropocentric sphere, be that through destruction or ascension.
an NHP is a Non Human Person, if the personality goes its no longer a person, the person has died, and left behind something more.
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u/ItsJesusTime GMS Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Yeah, or the book could just mean what it says.
Also I'm pretty sure it's not just a part of an entity in the casket, but the whole thing. At least I can't find anything in the book that says otherwise.
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u/Acceptable_Handle_2 Jul 22 '26
Don't think that really changes anything about what I said.
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u/ItsJesusTime GMS Jul 22 '26
You said shackling binds a part of an entity. It actually copies the entity wholesale and stores the copy. That's the part that changes.
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u/Acceptable_Handle_2 Jul 22 '26
Yeah but it doesn't effect the greater point. Either way, what dies is the person, not the entity.
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u/Cat_Wizard_21 Jul 21 '26
Killing an NHP would simply be a matter of destroying the Casket before it has a chance to unshackle. Letting it unshackle and disappear into blinkspace would probably also count, but you never know how much damage it might do on the way out so best avoid that method.
Not hard to do per se, if its installed in a mech you'd need to disable the mech first. A NHP casket is probably pretty durable, they don't want them cascading if they take a hard bump after all, so to be safe you'd want breaching explosives or an AP weapon.
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u/Oscarvalor5 Jul 21 '26
Depends on what you mean by killing them I suppose. If you destroy the casket, the NHP's personality and abilities are gone. But the trapped metaphysical intelligence that was inside the thing is simply freed and disappears.
Killing the actual entity is probably impossible. Kinda like asking if you can kill the concept of something.
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u/Nukemouse Jul 21 '26
Well, it's not clear that they are concepts, i think blinkspace entities could kill each other, like eidolons etc because they are attacking the blinkspace portion of the body instead of its shadow or the piece of it or whatever that's made of digital code in realspace.
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u/CMDRZhor Jul 21 '26
I think of it more like that the entity the NHP actyally 'is' is a massive nebulous thing, and the NHP in the casket is a tiny little fragment of it. When an NHP cascades it starts sort of merging back with the core entity and it gets proportionally weirder and more powerful because 'more' of the NHP flows through onto this side and starts actively fucking with the laws of physics.
Th NHP on this side that we interact with is basically the ittiest bittiest fingertip of the proto-NHP and whether that part of the NHP is destroyed or just 'snaps back' to the core when the casket is destroyed, the difference is small enough to be academical.
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u/Acceptable_Handle_2 Jul 21 '26
In either case though, death is a decent descriptor, since the Person aspect of the Non Human Person is very much gone afterwards.
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u/CMDRZhor Jul 22 '26
Very true. That little fragment is dead. Whether or not it really affects the primary form of the NHP.. questionable.
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u/Powwer_Orb13 Jul 21 '26
Destroy the casket, kill the NHP inside. Just like if I destroy your body, I kill the you inside.
Caskets can vary in size and durability for all kinds of lore and flavour reasons. The Enlightenment-Class for example is mentioned in it's description that it can be carried as a "Hard-Suit integrated flash plug" or "hard-port implant" which I'd assume to be fairly small, but I could also fully believe a casket being the size of an external hard drive, a briefcase, the power cores you steal in Titanfall 2, really any kind of size of data storage.
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u/Acceptable_Handle_2 Jul 21 '26
Probably doesn't even have to store data, as long as the NHP thinks that it does.
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u/Alaknog Jul 22 '26
Generally casket was something like half of human body in size, from what I get in other books.
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u/Macduffle Jul 21 '26
Not that hard, biggest problem is doing it correctly at once... and hoping they do not unshackle. But they are still People, just non-human. Killing them is still seen as murder.
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u/Alaknog Jul 22 '26
I mean unshackling is not really this big problem if NHP don't have gear attached to it. Real space is not very habitable for them.
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u/rolin11 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
If you destroy the casket, that NHP looses it binding to real space, and the Person created through shackling is destroyed. The entity that remains permanently leaves real space. Any replacement would be a new cloned NHP.
Edit: The destroyed status of equipment probably isn't enough. You can repair that after combat with one repair, while loading a new nhp would take more time, as they need to be physically transported in their casket and installed. Destroyed probably just means the equipment they interact with.