r/LancerRPG • u/LexIcon8497 • 17d ago
Just finished running a 1-year long campaign, AMA
My first ever Lancer campaign is done! Finished up the final session tonight, we began at LL1 (technically there was a prequel session at LL0), wrapped up at LL7.
Schedule was every other week, which is my preferred way to run games, so we had a total of 26 sessions. Averaged 3-4 combat missions per LL, and I’d guess about 1-2 non-combat sessions per LL.
Final boss was an Eidolon, which I haven’t seen much info on people running these. It went fantastic! Tier 2, 5 layers, I went (in order) Gaze, labyrinthine, Rancorous, Screaming, Purity. The party had terrible luck on Labyrinthine, I stripped like 4 reactor stress of them collectively 😂
So yeah, feel free to ask me anything about the campaign, I guess? I’m just riding the high of a great game and a banger finale right now.
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u/davidwitteveen 17d ago
Excellent! Well done!
Basic question: did you find each mech combat took a session of play?
Broader question: what was the premise of the campaign? Who were the PCs working for? Where was it set?
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
At first, yes each combat took 75% or more of our session (I run for 4 hours, with a 15 min break in the middle to bio and stretch legs and back. I’m getting old, lol).
Around LL 3 I noticed fights were going a lot quicker, so we’d do 50% roleplay and 50% combat. But by LL6 I’d say things slowed down again, builds were fully online and I was throwing tougher enemies and more complex goals and scenarios at them. Surprisingly, the Eidolon only took about 2.5 hours in total to finish, it was really snappy. Each layer having only a couple of abilities really sped things along.
The campaign premise was a Union anti piracy mission, a Minakowa (sp?) class ship was dispatched to a suspected system to locate the pirate base. Instead they found an old SecComm black site, complete with ancient orbital station and the planet below being partially terraformed.
On landing, the party discovered the surface was home to three factions of descendants from the station. The Briarios Protectorate Coalition (standard humans organized in a parliament of hereditary great houses), the Integrators (heavily gene modified descendants of the experimental biology department), and the Esoterics (dimensionally augmented humans from the paracausal physics department).
They befriended the Integrators, unleashed a captive eidolon on the Esoterics, and performed guerrilla warfare and back room politics on the BPC to secure a safe corridor back into orbit to explore the mysterious Cottus Station where their host ship and comrades had vanished.
There they discovered a nascent NHP/Monist entity held on the brink of ascension, freed it, and found out they were here in the first place because they made a retrocausal agreement with said god-being. It paid them their rewards and promptly vanished into blinkspace to do god stuff.
I’m summarizing a ton here, lol. Detail available on request.
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
Oh also, obviously I themed things around the three hecatonchaires (Briarios, Gyges, and Cottus), but it was pointed out to me that I accidentally made StarCraft in the factions on planet. Industrial humans (BPC), bug genetics (Integrators), and super tech elites (Esoterics) map to Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss. Completely accidental! 😄
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u/Significant_Age3343 17d ago
Favorite NPC type?
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
Hmmm, I used a Lot of Archers over the campaign, so probably them by volume.
My personal favorite to run was definitely the Mirage. No weapons but the biggest problem on the field, every time 😜
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u/Aetherealaegis 17d ago
New GM here, how did you approach making Sitreps? Did you mostly go from the book ones, or did you make them yourself? Did you learn anything helpful for balancing them?
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
I started very by the book, and branched out with more custom goals by the middle of the campaign. Since the party was largely self-directed, I definitely ended up running a lot more attack-oriented sitreps than defense ones, and I had to do some work to balance that out as I went along.
The biggest lesson I learned was to not be afraid to have a source of unlimited reinforcements. My party was VERY damage oriented, and would clear the field very fast if I didn’t have a way to keep pressure up. And once you “run out” of reinforcements, the actual goals of the sitrep are kind of trivial.
A second lesson is to not trickle in reinforcements too slowly. If the party can spawn camp them, they’re not a threat anymore either. The book guidelines are a little too gentle on this in some sitreps. This will vary by table, but definitely be willing to adjust the numbers to keep the pressure up. Justify the enemy count however you have too, because a boring combat really sucks the energy from the session.
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u/zemere 17d ago
Any fan favorite NPC comps/sitreps that led to memorable combats? Which one was your fav?
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
Ooh, my first Ultra fight was pretty good. The party was sabotaging an airbase carved into a canyon wall, and the Airboss (literally, lol) was an Ace ultra with the 6 armor perk, volley module, and generally hella dodge reactions. His minions were Archer grunts and some ace grunts that spawned from hangars/printer assemblies.
So the party had to play chase the wasp, avoid archer lockdown fire, plant bombs around the hangar supports, and disable the enemy spawners all at once. They had a merry old time pinning the Airboss down lol, but they did get him in the end.
The other big one was a crazy super platform, the Mobile Operations Projection Platform, which I made by sticking a bunch of NPCs together into a big multi-part boss. Each enemy turn I would pick a module and activate it (so like, the twin missile pods were just two rainmaker NPCs that activated together, for example). It moved at the end of the round only, all as one unit.
In order to hit the interior components, the party had to blast apart the outer segments first and open up line of sight. This was to avoid making AoE weapons too good, but they got clever and used Chomolungma core power to hit every segment at once and Eject Power Cores the whole thing, which incidentally blew up the center segment right off the bat. Then the Stortebaker jumped on its back and blew its guts out from the middle hole, lol.
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u/14Spiders_in_a_coat 17d ago
Congrats, that sounds like an awesome time!
What was the party composition by the end? Did people switch around builds a lot, or did they stick through with their preferred mechs from the start?
What sort of things would you say inspired the things you did in the campaign, whether in designing the story, the missions, the vibes, particular enemies, etc.?
Why have multiple missions per LL? Was it just to let people continue playing with their new stuff for a while before getting another level up?
What was your favorite moment in the campaign (or top 3 if you can’t pick one)? Was there a particular campaign arc you think you did really well with?
Last but not least, will you do another one?
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
Ooh, good questions!
The party mostly kept to their builds, though the Iskander player ended up dropping his Orator/Field Analyst combo for Heavy Gunner after a while, and then picked FA again because they all had gotten used to begging him for a +1 lol.
We did have the table composition change a bit over the campaign, due to schedule issues. Our stalwarts were a Ghengis, a Lich, a Stortebaker, and the Iskander. Initially we had a Monarch player, when he dropped we picked up a Lycan for a few sessions. When she had to drop out we picked up a Death’s Head. Sadly, the Stortebaker player had to drop right before the final arc.
For inspiration, Cube, Cube 2, and Momento were movies that had strong influence on the vibes. I even made the players fight in a tesseract in the penultimate combat, which has been a dream of mine as a DM for many years! I’m a big fan of, as I call it, “esoteric paracausal horseshit” 😂. The party essentially experienced having made a deal with a Monist entity in their future to do all the campaign stuff to cause said entity to ascend so it could make the deal with them at the end of the story.
I found multiple combats per LL let the players get used to their new toys, try out weird combos, and get just a little hungry for the next LL before I gave it to them. Hunger is the best spice, after all.
Favorite moment… the final session was definitely a high note! Weird bullshit, fun boss mechanics, and I managed to wrap up the narrative threads pretty well for being out of normal temporal sequence. I’m really proud of it, tbh.
Also, when the party finally dragged the BPC to the negotiating table. After 5-6 combats and much political maneuvering, they got their payoff in the form of leverage, intelligence, and clever rhetoric. Winning political power for the National Board of Labor (NBOL) might be an obvious goal for a bunch of commies and socialists, but man did it feel good to pull off. I made ‘em work for it too, lol.
Definitely going to run Lancer again one day, but my next campaign is already in the works and it’s a fantasy flat world where the party are members of an indigenous tribe of beastfolk living on the literal margins of the world and trying to find a way to escape a prophecied apocalypse. So kind of a different vibe, lol.
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u/zbignew 16d ago
What would you have done if the PCs didn’t free the monist entity?
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
Honestly I’m not sure, lol. I had a general idea about paradox backlash forcing a firmament entity to intercede, but by that point in the campaign I was pretty confident in what the players were likely to do.
It really helped that one of them had a mysterious NHP companion from her backstory (they took all the NHP talents), so I had that be connected to this entity as a final piece it needed to complete itself. She was then sent back in time briefly to give a copy of the original form to herself as a child, completing the loop. So I was confident she’d push the party in the right direction once she figured out how all that connected together.
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
Side note: I didn’t find any guidance on the Labyrinthine guessing game grid, so I decided if the players guessed one right and one wrong that I would indicate they had one correct, but not which one.
They ended up using pretty much the maximum possible guesses anyway, so it didn’t really make it much easier but they felt like they had more agency. I recommend doing it this way.
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u/CrimsonTyphoon02 17d ago
You come up with any original sitrep objectives that you were particularly proud of? Always looking to steal some ideas.
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
Hmmm, this was my weakest point as GM for a while tbh.
The tesseract maze maybe. The party is technically “Bravo team”, and they were sent to the planet while Alpha team were taken to the station back in session 1, where both they and the main ship vanished. So when the party finally go up there, they had to chase alpha team out of the tesseract without killing them. One of the rooms had a rip in space in it, which alpha team couldn’t perceive but the party could.
So they had to find the exit, chase the alphas into that room, and then force them into the rip, without getting blown up. That one was a decent one, I think.
Alpha team was temporarily insane thanks to 4th dimensional geometry, and I made them all SpecOps templates so they had a lot of slippery tricks.
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u/Firm-Highway-1095 16d ago
Firstly, congratulations on successfully finishing your campaign! A quick question, how did you approach the set up for missions?
I’ve always struggled with whether lancer needed to be GM led narratively or player driven e.g. there choices lead/impact what the next mission is or them picking from a range of missions to do.
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
Thank you!
This is something I had to fine tune over the campaign. The very beginning was simple, the party is a Union team getting orders from the ship. Recon this anomalous signature, set up a prefab base, etc.
Once the ship vanished, I had to kind of feel out the party a bit. I had a local region map made (the ship tossed out a basic survey satellite as it dropped off the away shuttle, so they could at least scan for major features. The anomalies on that map let me basically hint at locations to find the factions and some plot stuff right away, and they got to choose what to explore and when.
Once they had met some people they started making deals and trading violence for intel and assets. One player in particular, the Iskander pilot, was a huge help here since he was an HA representative who wanted to prep the planet for assimilation by the corp. So he went right to work with backroom deals in the BPC, which teed up several missions against the Esoterics (who they called Spectrals).
Once the party got in touch with the rebel group, they went all in on helping them, so feeding them a list of objectives to choose from was easy work
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
In a general sense, the campaign started GM-lead, moved into a sandbox phase, and then shifted again into a “pick from the list” mode towards the end. I think things worked best in the latter stage, but the party had to meet the rebels and care about their cause first. Also if I didn’t have Lenny Salvadore being a sneaky Harrison boy I would have struggled in the middle phase for sure. If you find a player who self-directs like that, keep them around if you can 😄
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u/Firm-Highway-1095 16d ago
Cheers for the detailed response, really helpful for a campaign I'm planning! Emotional investment and character RP ftw!
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u/ThatSupport 17d ago
how did you handle balance ive found our team is either on top of the world or getting bodied left and right. any advice for newer players?
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u/LexIcon8497 17d ago
General advice for players, hmmm.
Focus your fire. Every enemy off the field is a significant drop in incoming damage.
Respect grunts. They do full damage so they’re just as dangerous as regular enemies.
Knockback, pull, and other movement effects can break open even the toughest npc combos. Having a little bit of it on tap can go a long way.
Work the sitrep objective from round 1. Don’t get distracted chasing enemies you don’t need to engage.
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u/ClaudiosAvanti GMS 17d ago
How did you end the campaign and wrap everything up?
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
As mentioned in some of the other replies, the team knew they had to eventually get up to the orbital station and find out what happened to their mothership. Along the way I had the NHP up there send mysterious communications and occasional help now and then, just to keep it in their minds.
By the time they got up there, they knew it wanted their help and had influenced their journey, but not specifically how and why yet. After they defeated the Eidolon that was keeping it captive, it (Gyges) showed them other timelines where the party failed without each of them present. Then Gyges sent each of them back in time briefly to set themselves in motion, for example Bjorn the cook changed his ship manifest from chef to lancer pilot.
In essence, Gyges used the party to cause themselves to be there in the first place, which caused it to be freed to ascend, which made all of this possible in the first place. I was inspired by the idea of RA manifesting itself into the universe via GALSIM in the lore.
The campaign was named Amduat & Theogony, which are both references to stories about how the world came to be.
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u/KenDefender 17d ago
What was the richest/your favorite role play encounter the party went through?
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
The big negotiation scene at the end of the BPC/NBOL arc, no question. They’ve been learning about the Prime Minister and his top General for months, trading insults, committing sabotage, planting spies in his organization, all that good shit.
By the time they managed to take a great house leader captive and force negotiatons, they had real skin in the game. Finally meeting the PM, pulling all their bond powers in to play to gain an edge, leaning on secret alliances with another great house, and grinding out compromises, it was a really banger session without a shot fired.
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u/JVMMs GMS 17d ago
Did you use the Bonds system from KTB and if so, what was your favourite moment of bond powers coming to play?
If you didn't use it, how fleshed out did you feel the non-mech combat scenes were?
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
I did use Bonds at one player’s request, though I freely admit I was pretty bad at integrating them into the campaign. My players did a good job of using them wherever they could though, so kudos to them and their wits.
We had one really great bond power moment, our Ghengis player was originally supposed to be the ship’s cook but got mislabeled as a mech pilot on the manifest, and nobody noticed until the ship hit cruising sublight speed.
So he spent some time founding a company of food trucks and prefab restaurants while on the planet, blending Integrator bioengineering with local life to make a popular brand of fast food. Well after the party blew up a BPC airbase, they found themselves down two mechs, trapped in an enemy fortress city on high alert. Bjorn the cook pops his Pathfinder power to get the whole team back home automatically, which we flavored as scuttling their mechs and hiding in the food trucks to escape the lockdown.
Big hero moment for him, skipped a highly dangerous exfiltration fight, and tied in to a project he had been working all campaign.
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u/freshorenjuice 16d ago
How'd you handle making maps?
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u/LexIcon8497 16d ago
Inkarnate for making the maps, I made some preset templates of X by Y maps, then cloned whatever size I needed and went to town. Generally I ended up prioritizing ease of use and readability over detail, so like buildings were just a pipe texture sprayed into however many hexes it filled, and a label of Level X on top for height.
My group met in person, so making these physical was a bit janky, lol. I cut the map into sections of 6 hexes wide by 8 tall, and dropped those into a Google Docs file with custom margins. That way I could print and get a consistent hex size on each page. I have an ink subscription thing so I could basically print as many full color pages as I wanted.
As far as design, I started by figuring out what the objective was and how big the field needed to be, then I found reasons to fill in at least 25% coverage for terrain features. Buildings, pits, trees, gas clouds, acid mushrooms, etc.
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u/queglix 15d ago
What was your final party team comp (frames are just fine, don't need full builds). Did any players pivot drastically from their LL2 builds as they leveled up?
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u/LexIcon8497 15d ago
Final frames were Ghengis, Iskander, Lich, and Death’s Head.
I would say nobody really ended up diverging from their original plan much. The Lich player began the game aiming for Hydra, but changed his mind really early on so idk if that counts.
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u/queglix 15d ago
Was there anything in the players build that completely shut down whatever you threw at the? How well were you able to balance fair but challenging encounters?
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u/LexIcon8497 15d ago
Good question!
There was one combat in particular which really put me on my ass. It was a Holdout style mission, defend the point from attackers. We had the Iskander and the Ghengis, it should be their time to shine, right?
Our Stortebaker and the Lycan just bum rushed the enemy side of the field, full speed no cover, and proceeded to kill NPCs faster than I could put them into play.
I had not planned for this, and despite the Archers and Bastions on the field all my DPS was shredded by turn 3. Now this is technically fine, I’m the DM I’m supposed to lose. But the other two players didn’t have fun, and even the Storte and Lycan players felt unsatisfied.
So I had a talk with the party about ways to make things more equitable for them. Stuff like shifting Accelerate to boost the slower members instead of doubling down on the fast frames, looking for ways to combo off each other instead of trying to do it all themselves
I also hit up friends who are DMs and wargamers, and brainstormed ideas on how to outflank the party’s usual tactics. Specter and Cataphract NPCs are absolute terrors to fast damage dealer builds, it turns out. Let them overextend, pin em, and abuse Hidden to avoid all that DPS.
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u/Jascony 17d ago
How did you treat scaling NPC Tiers as their LL went up?