Legionnaire

[wary lava]

Good idea.

While there IS broken combination unintended by combining homebrew togethers, a LOT of Third Parties ARE balanced with Core, which tend to be fine.

As such they tend to be Largely Working Fine with one another, but you do get some really potential broken stuff. So I always suggest 'talk about it.

[neat heron]

listen if nobody's trying to run it I don't need to remember it easy as

I will help players build stuff from core, the Circle Trigon homebrew, and then it's GLHF territory

[merry horizon]

Beholdeth!

curious what the LEGIONNAIRE folks think about this (It's for some homebrew, but it ties into LEGIONNAIRE so I figured I'd ask here)

[teal abyss]

I think that version is probably more fun for the majority of players 🙂

[limber valve]

khepri like the ||dustgrave final boss?||

[stoic moth]

Oi! Dustgrave Spoilers!

Thanks! 😊

[solid wren]

I'm thinking my weird ICARUS NHP will have a colony of descendent NHPs on the planet, and they're only stable because the companion NHP that took over the ICARUS NHP's cycling cycled them after they were cloned.

Which will probably be supremely weird to explore.

It's also a pacifist, which is fun!

[merry horizon]

WHY IS EVERY NAME TAKEN I AM GOING TO FUCKING SCREAM-

ahem

sorry. had to get that out of my system

[limber valve]

I feel that

[smoky spear]

I mean.
Me seeing that somehow already did an homebrew horus frame called "lycanthrope" XD

(but then again if I do get homebrew thoughts into actual action, I might simply pull the "subtle-not-subtle reference" by calling one "Gevaudan" after the beast of Gevaudan <.< )

[fickle marten]

It's a very common name. And, frankly, nobody has dibs on homebrew names.

How many HORUS Dragons or Hobgoblins or Unicorns are out there. 😛

[smoky spear]

XD

point

Though I kind of like my idea of "naming something that could be a references to werewolves without naming it werewolf" >.>

[merry horizon]

(the khepri is for the hobgoblin. i have been pulled into the streets, tarred, and feathered by the collective)

[fickle marten]

Sometimes names just Fit. Don't be shy about using 'em.

[merry horizon]

the big funny thing about this is KHEPRI (the NHP) came before the Hobgoblin

I kind of built the frame around the thing that made it

[smoky spear]

(especially since the name gevaudan already gave me ideas for a "feign death" trait/core passive that I'm now slowly musing on of sort based on the Beast Gevaudan's always seeming to come back to continue it's rampage despite having been reported slain many times <.< )

[smoky spear]

oh neat!

[merry horizon]

in lore I went with this as well

The KHEPRI created the Hobgoblin

Or, well, got a sect to do it for him because ain't got no gosh darn limbs

[smoky spear]

also this tbh
Like how there's both Calendula the mech frame in the Field Guide to Karrakin Trade Baronies, and Calendula the big BFGs battleship in Battlegroup

[merry horizon]

KTB giving the most harmless, unassuming flower names to the Unknowable Nightmare Mechs From The Duat

[fickle marten]

I know in-universe, both those are named after the same person, but...

[smoky spear]

(or in fact, Tagetes-the-frigate and Tagetes-the-mech-mention-FGKTB-but-not-given-stats)

<.<

(ngl I wouldn't mind if Shadow of the Wolf could end up a way for Tagetes and/or Aracea to get snuck in official content >.> )

[merry horizon]

I still find the Beast of Gevaudan really funny because when they came to collect the ransom/reward for its corpse... It was just a big wolf. Like, a really big wolf

But... Everyone kind of expected something more

[smoky spear]

yeah XD

[neat heron]

listen half the fun of homebrew is finding this One Weird Thing Nobody Knows to name your stuff after that's both thematic and not been dibs'd before.

admittedly my four planned homebrew mechs from extant manufacturers are the IPS-N Von Spee, the SSC Shiva's Sunbeam, the HORUS Rakshasa, and the HA Loza

none of which seem to be contested naming spaces

[main karma]

err, I hate to be nitpicky, but spoiler tags aren't useful if you don't mention the content that it's a spoiler for beforehand :p

there's no indication anywhere in the convo that the spoiler tag is concealing a spoiler for dustgrave specifically, so it might be a good idea to put that in the original message

[wary lava]

when in doubt

name it the same thing just in a different language.

It often works!

[teal abyss]

naming things is definitely one of my favourite parts of worldbuilding. you can do a lot of awesome stuff with it that is very easy to miss on a casual readthrough but will strike you later like the intellectual equivalent of fridge horror

[teal cliff]

(This may just be me, but in a real world, multiple things exist with the same name quite frequently. I don't think a name being used should be a total barrier.)

(That being said, if ever struggling with names, going simpler may be a useful tactic)

[remote blade]

That's awesome, congrats!

[remote blade]

Real world yes, but in games you do want unique names

Even just for memorisation and ruling

[north roost]

Repulser Field and Skirmisher standing ominously in the background

[teal cliff]

I just mean that from a world building perspective, naming things similarly isn't a crime. Mechanics and interactions are fine and might need more consideration.

Heck with that dustgrave example, does it matter if there's name overlap if your narrative never crosses over with the dustgrave module?

[plucky brook]

Naming countries/towns is my bane XD

[teal cliff]

To a certain extent, even, if too much labor goes into giving every little thing is own unique and over wrought name, it can make a world distinctly less believable as an organic thing.

[analog dock]

Best of gevaudan Name reference goes hard

[teal cliff]

You end up with xorblorb going to afrasgasg to get the nhhsru and meet up with gjkkjfd to use hdddeeary; after a certain point.

[north roost]

"Hill Hill Hill on the Hill"

But a combination of like 4 different languages

[teal cliff]

Towntown

[teal abyss]

thank you!

also just remember if you're ever worried about naming things the same as something else I literally named my book Legionnaire despite that also referring to something else in the setting

[strange rampart]

Tbf Legion and derived words are much less specific terms than Actual Names

[plucky brook]

New Book: Legionnaire (The Other One, The HA One)

[solid parrot]

Please look forward to our next lancer supplement, Shock Armor

[north roost]

Legionnaire (No not that one)

[teal cliff]

New Lancer book skirmisher

[north roost]

Unironically Skirmisher sounds like a dope name for a small Lancer book

[strange rampart]

Its just 3 nelson alts

[neat heron]

I prefer to do this with flavor text but yeah adding Implications is always the best part of setting up new frames

probably my favorite is the Rakshasa's flavor line about "a foreign moon" since that's the sweet spot between detailed description, ominous implication, and brevity

[teal abyss]

Quick poll - how many of the following do you think you could, right now, confidently explain to a new player without referencing the KTB field guide?

• the Baronic House system
• the Passions
• the Xenoglossary
• who the Hagiographers are
• what happened in the Interest War

(why yes I am running into a Silicate Chemistry problem)

[teal cliff]

Does this include one sentence layman's terms summaries, that by virtue of brevity leave out detail?

[strange rampart]

Passions and Xenoglossary are likely the easiest. The Passions especially because they are explicitly very variable from place to place, so immediate context is likely going to be more important

[teal cliff]

Also does it include "like idea from another sci fi property but different" summaries?

It helps that I've yet to read the entirety of the ktb field guide too lol

Pretty sure the interest war is briefly covered in the crb

As is the house system

In very broad strokes

[rare shard]

Xenoglossary ||Precognitive monks that do espionage as a side gig||

[teal cliff]

Interest war, in short, was a territorial war that resulted in the sound beating of Karrakin forces by a smaller, mech centric fighting force no?

[smoky spear]

The big thing about Passions though would be to remind that the KTB officially doesn't have state religion but almost every Karrakins believes in the Passions as multitudes of spirits/forces that influence one's life and which guidance one can accept or struggle against.

[teal cliff]

My shorthand for passions: They're like a combination of Tarot arcana and shinto spiritualism

[north roost]

Admittedly I kinda skimmed the lore sections of KTB but uh... Maybe the interest war?

[surreal owl]

Right now, I could do the basic premises of the house system and maybe the Interest War. I’m not super familiar with all of these topics though, I haven’t read too much of KTB (it was very dense)

Yeah I’m basically with LostDeviljho on this one

At worst, in a KTB-oriented supplement I’d maybe expect some succinct sidebars/asides for Field Guide to KTB-only topics

[smoky spear]

Without looking at the field guide one Big thing with Houses might be the difference between Major House(I.e. essentially government of one of the "core" KTB worlds; Khayradin being the House of Stones) and Minor Houses being the smaller hereditary/meritocratic dynastic entities we normally expect noble houses to be(with the exception of minor republican houses which are closer to administrative districts with lords/etc being elected positions iirc)?

[strange rampart]

The Baronic House system is tbf, pretty easy to explain. Noble families linked together in what is basically a corporation, which is referred to as a Major House.

[surreal owl]

In a prospective Shadow of the Wolf, I wouldn’t expect a rehash of the KTB lore, but I’d expect relevant pieces for context when appropriate (“Dirk Strongjaw comes from the house of stone, a traditional house that hates Ungratefuls due to losing a planet to them” for example) /0.0002 manna

[teal cliff]

xenoglossary = vaguely the KTB equivalent of the CIA or KGB. Also has a sub group of time prophets and time police

[strange rampart]

Its more like Medieval Vatican but with ninjas. Actual secret service is covered by Baronic Intelligence and a bunch of free companies.

[teal cliff]

ah ok, so like the vatican, but with a sub group of future seeing drug addicted time prophets, and time police

[smoky spear]

Ultimately I think it comes a bit to as to why you are making this poll?
(I feel I could say "yes" to most of these answers but i've been reading the KTB field guide a lot on my off times so a lot of this is already memorized >.>
So I don't know if this is meant to be a "how many of you on this Discord can sum up this up" vs "how much might the average player actually know already without owning the KTB to know what might need to be at least given some context in the book"?)

[ebon holly]

Hagiographers are an ultraconservative nigh-reactionary faction of those who seek to create a system not ruled by a single Federal Monarchy or an Anno/Emperor, but a bunch of independent kingdoms, ruled on their own, with incentives but not necessities to cooperate

Is how I would explain hagiographers

I do think Fringe's point is valid, and idk how much one would be able to make a KTB centric thing without some KTB Field Guide knowledge being a recommended prerequisite

[teal cliff]

As someone who hasn't read the totality of the KTB field guide, I do think the KTB section of the CRB covers a lot of things pretty alright in terms of broad strokes. It kind of depends on how much detailed knowledge is necessary vs what is contextually necessary

I.e. contextual knowledge can be provided in sidebars, detailed knowledge would need the ownership of another supplement

[ebon holly]

Fair

[teal cliff]

and also depends on like... the level of detail needed in a contextual description. You can go as small as like three to four word summaries to whole pages as far as describing an aspect of the KTB

and which way to lean can depend on what is needed to know in relation to an adventure scenario/character specifically

comics do that thing where it might go "If you want to learn more about this thing, read Issue #blahblah of Amazing Blah blah blah!" and you might be able to do that

but insofar as the ongoing plot development or interaction, knowing that wider context might be totally unnescessary

[analog dock]

I very much mirror Valks opinion here!

[teal abyss]

It's meant to provoke discussion that I can hopefully glean some useful insights from. There's no wrong way to answer this and it's not scientific (it can't be, I'm not exactly asking a representative sample)

[teal abyss]

though I am more generally interested in what people know (or don't), and how confident they are about that, rather than specifically how they think info should be presented in the book, I don't really need advice on that front

[smoky spear]

Oh cool!
I just wasn't sure if I was getting ahead of myself with my answers etc when I re-read the posts because of the use of poll ^^;;

[surreal owl]

Noted, sorry for getting ahead of myself

[teal abyss]

I mean you're welcome to discuss that if you want! It is relevant, it's just not the question I'm asking necessarily

[verbal heron]

just a basic idea of them suited to a first look for the new player? 3: the baronic house system, the passions, and the xenoglossary

[leaden pine]

-Major houses own planets,minor houses own space stations or other stuff on planets,its all feudal
-Tarot Cards are the main religion
-Psychic Monks who see the future and attempt to correct it towards the right path
-Ultra-conservatives that wanr a return to the good old days
-fuck is that the HA vs KTB one?
My explanations

[merry scarab]

I recognized Baronic Houses, Hagiographers, and the Interest War. I can't really define them better than "feudal society", "conservatives/monarchists", and "pass?", respectively

I guess I don't get much into lore or history unless it seems relevant to a specific mission or campaign though

[smoky spear]

Trying to be short now that I'm home but based on what I recall I think I can roughly explain most of these:

-Major Houses are (at the least) planetary nation-states part of the greater Karrakin Baronic state; Minor Houses are actual noble dynasties, from which the rulers of a Major Houses are generally chosen(Republican Major Houses work differently, close to democratic republics)
-Passions are the unofficial official religion of the Baronies, spirits said to rules over the destines of every individuals, with some people having stronger bonds with one or multiple Passions.
-Xenoglossary; a monastic order dedicated to the study and interpretations of the Passions, and also those who create/assign the heraldry of Major and Minor Houses iirc
-Hadiographers are a millitant conservative party, who generally calls for diminishing ties with Union and a return to an even more decentralized era of Karrakin politics; the most prominent Hagiograph Major House is the House of Stone and the world of Khayradin who has a long history of rivalry with the central powers of Karrakis.
-Interest war; An attempted invasion by the Baronies of Harrison Armory territories over the matter of contested worlds. A conflict that ended in a thoroughly costly defeat for the Baronies but would be follow their subsequent fervent adoption of mechanized chassis as weapons of wars.

(I don't know if that's still too long an answer but it's what I got. Might have misrecalled some details such as the Xenoglossary's involved in the creation/assignement of heraldries, but as requested I didn't want to open the book <.<; )

[neat heron]

I got the Houses, the Passions, Hagiographers, and Interest War

[sleek monolith]

1, 2, 3 and 5. Not 4. the whole philosophy behind each house would require me to go look at the book as my mental issues don't let me latch on to political discourse beyond fantasy wars.

[teal abyss]

ty for the answers, all. this is very interesting

[uneven sedge]

Confidently? ehhhh. The Passions, the Xenoglossary, and maybe the house system.
I have an otherwise pretty vague idea of the other two

[solid wren]

what is any of that ./s

I haven't read KTB at all

too busy pillaging lancer's rule books for my game design projects because hyperfixation go BRRRRR

[teal abyss]

my dipshit upstairs neighbour has flooded my kitchen

FUCK

these are not the kind of leaks I want to be posting in this channel

[sleek monolith]

Oh no 😦

I hope things resolve soon kat

[smoky spear]

D:

Omg that suck so much.
So sorry for you :<

[teal abyss]

just when I thought I was catching a break 😔 hopefully it'll get sorted out soon, my stress levels are through the roof right now, I can't get anything done

[smoky spear]

Gosh I can only imagine X_X

[teal abyss]

I want you all to know that I currently have an NPC whose placeholder name is "Professor Swords" and a small, evil part of me wants to just keep the name

[smoky spear]

I mean I can suddenly imagine something like "Professor [Name] of House Épée" or something of the llike X3

[teal abyss]

https://tenor.com/view/subtext-darkplace-gif-14294450

[smoky spear]

X3

Though if one had wanted to actually be subtle there's also Espadon which is the french for swordfish but also used to be how french two handed swords had once been called iirc

(Though admittedly perhaps easier to spot by Lancer lorehounds players due to sharing the same root than espada)

[teal abyss]

I have a name 🙂

[smoky spear]

^^;

But yeah if you want to play on the idea of Professor Sword but don't want to marke it too blatant but also want to make it blatant in a way, giving them the name of Sword/Type-of-Sword in another language is always an option Kat ;>

Messer, Espadon, Rapière(this one a bit obvious XD ), Dague/Poignard(if you don't mind dagger-sized blades), Épée, kilij(in Turkish apparently?)
Etc etc

[teal abyss]

just to reiterate and expand slightly, I already have a name for this character I'm happy with, and unsolicited suggestions and advice make my job actively more difficult

[smoky spear]

Oh! Sorry D:

[analog dock]

Now its got me thinking

KTB Lancer Takeshi's Castle?

[north roost]

tbh I like Professor Swords

like obviously they would have an actual name but like, everyone just knowing them as "professor swords" sounds like it gives a bunch of character all on its own

[neat heron]

still more coherent than my character naming

[teal abyss]

naming Karrakin characters is one of my favourite things, tbh if your full formal name and title doesn't wrap onto multiple lines are you really a noble

[north roost]

https://youtu.be/veaKOM1HYAw

[plucky brook]

Whenever I need to work out an Excessive Title I bother a british friend of mine to start naming members of the House of Lords.

[teal abyss]

it's farcical and astonishing how many people are still okay with the whole arrangement

[plucky brook]

I've been told more than once that 'Name isn't stupid enough' by said friend when tossing them an idea. XD

[teal abyss]

of all the cancers at the heart of this country, the idea that there are a class of people who are considered better than others and afforded privileges by accident of birth - and that this state of affairs is not only acceptable but desirable - is the most pernicious and corrosive to my faith in humanity

(not that this is unique to social class obvs, but frustrating nonetheless)

[verbal heron]

my karrakin pilot has achieved a great mark of honour within the campaign's splash page

love when it needs two lines in the dossier page

[teal abyss]

hot damn that's an excellent name

[verbal heron]

I spent so long coming up with it I'm very proud

champion defiant blue vainglorious of Ispahsalar, to translate somewhat

[wary lava]

chef's kiss.

[verbal heron]

Doros to his friends

[solid parrot]

The best KTB name I ever threw down was Sviatlana Odeta Ingelinde Dicharry-Kvam of House Zaman of the House of Sand, Kavaliere of The Other Suns

[teal abyss]

god I can't wait to do some name reveals

some of these fuckers need dedicated title cards

[uneven sedge]

if your NPC doesn't get a title card, are they really anybody tbh

(/j)

[strange rampart]

Y'all making me feel downright Ignoble with my Henryque Nun'Alvaros of the House of Smoke

[main karma]

name like a cvs receipt

[stoic moth]

When I got citizenship here I had to swear loyalty to the Queen. God was optional, but the Queen was not 😆

Not overly surprising considering the Church of England exists

[teal abyss]

So, uh, I know I'm supposed to be writing something else right now, but I needed a break and figured that since we have a flood of new players I'd put together a quick introductory oneshot. It's currently a very basic draft, suggestions and critique appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D1luY_EepD8YMDs4BS47O21cAIe8eDgWDOQqyKa_Sek/edit?usp=sharing

Kat, trying to take a break from writing adventures: "why do I hear the curb your enthusiasm theme"

[oak pecan]

Reading through it, this looks like a good introductory one shot. It's short, but sweet.

[surreal owl]

Nice, this does look short and sweet! I have a couple notes:

• Great job offering reserves mid-mission as a reward! It’s always an way to give players “loot” for engaging with the scene
• “Pirate”, the NPC, may be served better with a different name so players don’t get confused with the template
• I am assuming that the entire enemy force is treated as “reinforcements” here, in which case you may actually want to double the number of enemies (extraction is double budget, so you can reach 3-4x the player count in structure budget)
• Overall, quick read and likely a quick run; I could see myself running this as a one-shot!

[teal abyss]

good shout on the name

also derp how did I forget Extraction is double budget D:

see this is why I put drafts in front of other people

[surreal owl]

Yeah but even still I think you could slap this on itch and call it a day if you really wanted

Would love to see more one shots like this across the Lancer community

[teal abyss]

I can probably get away with making a few more of them Elites

fewer units is probably better for first time GMs

[analog dock]

I could then also slap it in the new player thread

[surreal owl]

Veterans would work too; elites can be overwhelming

[analog dock]

That does remind me to put the third party forums also in that thread actually to show they exist 🤔

[surreal owl]

Ngl I kinda like the thread being succinct, but that’s up to you

[analog dock]

I might just do a lil quick message for the third party forums at the bottom

But you are prob right

[teal abyss]

I'll wait and get a bit more feedback before putting it up on itch, I might also x-post to #gm-corner to get more thoughts

[sleek monolith]

Reading now

I like the detail of callsigns

Honestly the only feedback I would have? Earnestly would be a suggested map size. Some gms come withalot of questions about those

[teal abyss]

oh, good point, that's especially useful for extraction where map size is important

[plucky brook]

An addition to that is I'd spell out how much of the map you expect to be terrain filled. Some NPCs vary a LOT in power based on 'how much does LOS get blocked/how hard is it to move about normally'.

And from my experiance, there's a wide range of 'normal' for map terrain.

Like if someone's first tabletop experiance was Warhammer they're likely thinking 'some rocks, a small forest, not much LOS blocking'

While if they're from Infinity they'll be more of the 'if you can see more than a fraction of the other side of the map from deployment, it's got way too little terrain'

[north roost]

And if your starter was D&D like me, you'll have no idea at all because consistent map design is a cryptid

[neat heron]

big mood

[ivory jetty]

I like the established stakes of the sleeping colonists. It feels weighty, but is nicely offscreen and mission failure doesn't automatically mean they all die.

I might add a guideline about the mechanics of the PCs succeeding vs failing beat 2 — is it just one PC who makes a roll, or do they all make their own attempt and half or more need to succeed?

Very short and sweet, good work 👍

[solid wren]

i just realized that cycling could be unsee juice for some NHPs.

Like, “ok that was horrifying. Gonna delete that from my backups real quick and ask my handler to cycle me so I forget that.”

[teal abyss]

they all do, that's the reference to Skill Challenges, but I suppose I could make that more explicit

I wonder if providing a map would be useful

[ivory jetty]

I bet folks would appreciate that, that's usually a bit of a bottleneck

[sleek monolith]

I like the implied stakes

If you go lore digging, colonists that have been cryo stasis for thousands of years when current like, battlegroup numbers say you can only be in stasis for 100 years? Makes the ssc more sinister

[teal abyss]

right there's definitely something strange going on, nobody could possibly have been in stasis for that long, right?

an order of magnitude longer than cutting edge tech allows

[sleek monolith]

I also definitely appreciate you keeping it vague kat, like the info is there to run the adventure, a casual party won't question it, but for the lore diggers and really invested tables, you got a lil' lore bomb for the GM to work with

so I can't comment on the mechanics as I have an abscessed tooth and can't playtest anything, but I like it. I hope it gets many downloads if you put it up on itch 🙂

[teal abyss]

I have revised the opfor a little bit, people in #gm-corner were getting upset that it was high damage and I ended up second guessing myself

normally I skew high damage for single-combat missions since it's not like you can run attrition, and I didn't want to add too many NPCs because this is partly pitched at new GMs, but this also has the side benefit of increasing the number of reinforcements so I figured it's probably worth it in the end

[plucky brook]

Considering the nature of the mission, control is likely just as potent as actual damage in 'putting pressure on PCs'

[teal abyss]

hopefully get to playtest it tomorrow either way

[plucky brook]

If you can drag people away from the objective, it's not going anywhere etc

[teal abyss]

I also think some people just don't like Assaults which is reasonable

[plucky brook]

Assaults are intriguing design-wise. Very few NPCs are as generalist as them.

Most tend to have a Big Overt Weakness and Strength but the Assault is just Generally Good.

Which can make them hard to approach specifically.

Have you considered any Cataphracts, if you want a frontliner that can do ranged? they're very good at messing with PCs trying to move an objective but more 'there are specific ways to handle them'.

(Do feel free to tell me to shut up with my thoughts, if it's not helpful)

[teal abyss]

I was mostly picking NPCs for their straightforward playstyles

the Witch is about as complex as it gets

originally I was thinking having Mirages and Hives and movement shenanigans but I figured that's not helpful for a first time GM

hence just giving the Bastions Legendary and calling it a day, not using Commander, that sort of thing

I've run scores of Lancer games and played in many more and I still can't hold everything in my head without a reference, so I'm trying to streamline it as much as humanly possible while keeping a diversity between NPCs

[plucky brook]

I don't disagree with 'keep it easy for GM' but I do worry a bit on going too much on 'Everything is a straight forward fighter' might hide Lancer's Maneuvering and Control aspects/make new players thing it's pretty much entirely just shooting guns.

There's a bit of a tension between 'Make things easy for GMs' and 'Give a good showing of the system'. As looking over this, it's basicly just the witches that bring much on that front. With the composition being very Gunline-Heavy. Not even really any Melee Frames.

[teal abyss]

I think there's a fair amount of the latter too, positioning is extremely important for this opfor, for example

but we'll see when playtesting happens, that's what it's for

it's possible my intuition on this is off

[plucky brook]

That's fair. My vague worry is that the composition might promote Tau Gunline play, where the enemies go 'We don't need to get the objective, we just need to stop you getting it so we'll just dump fire into whoever is next to it'.

But we'll see how that goes in testing.

The other vague pondering is that very little here targets E-Defence (Rainmakers can have it if you've got lock on but they by default don't), so PCs who went with Systems might have a bit of a bad time/feel like they wasted the points.

[teal abyss]

aside from the Witches, but yes that's a fair point, something I did want to do was give clear reasons to spec into all of the HASE stats

bleh I was just trying to make something fun and useful, I shouldn't be spending so much time on this, I have actual important playtesting to do

[plucky brook]

Sorry

[teal abyss]

if someone wants to come up with their own opfor and playtest it they're more than welcome to do that, the only part of the force composition that matters from a narrative standpoint is having Rainmakers but even then that could be subbed out pretty trivially. Ideally it should be an opfor that could be run by a brand new GM who only read the core book earlier the same day and has like, an hour to do prep tops (the old MCDM-esque standby of "you are going to run a game of Lancer, for your friends, tonight")

the narrative and adventure structure should stand on its own merits

[sleek monolith]

if I didn't have a tooth abscess I would XD. Good luck on the things you need to work on kat.

hell my GM tried to be nice to run a one shot, but I reminded him I can't talk. "Oh... oh... shoot. Uh uh uh.... you mind playing a mute character who comms through a dataslate?" XD

[surreal owl]

I said it before and I’ll say it again, I think if you really wanted to, you could immediately slap it on itch and call it a day. No use trying to make the “platonic ideal” of an LL0 combat encounter after all

Good enough is good enough, gm corner be damned

[sleek monolith]

yeah, I've... low key learned to ignore GM corner unless it's for brainstorming. I've been told that some of my best sessions ever ran cannot mechanically work by a few folks in the past. I've also gotten some of my best advice of letting go of fluff as well (at least default fluff), so it's a mixed bag :D. Good place for ideas.

if YOU are worried about the opfor having too much damage, then that just requires, what, a single sentence telling new GM not to focus fire hard?

[teal abyss]

honestly Pilot NET is like every community of tabletop nerds in that respect, there are a lot of people here who spend a lot of time Having Opinions

(I am one of those people)

[sleek monolith]

of course I'm the guy who ignores the "set in stone" 2x structure, 1.5x activation, and runs things closer to what the book ascribes, instead focusing more on learning better tactics and synergies.

[teal abyss]

I missed this yesterday and all I can think about is "holy shit that would be so useful IRL"

if I could have the ability to just selectively edit out or repress my trauma but leave sufficient context as a warning like big concrete spikes at a nuclear waste storage facility, that would be amazing

[winter rune]

Im actually running a campaign rn that heavily invloves NHPs and this has kinda happened. The shipboard NHP the crew has got attacked by a paracausal entity and suffered damage to her casket and they had to manually reload her backups after fixing her casket.

[river dew]

If I'm writing a module I'm considering putting up for sale when I finish, am I allowed to use Legionnaire material? For example, listing a mission reward as a "Nergal NHP , rules for which can be found in Legionnaire pg x"

so no actual rules material is used, just the item, and it more or less links to your book

[solid wren]

you might want to be mindful of dependencies on third-party content

disclose them upfront, etc.

since they do have associated costs

if not monetary, then in time and effort.

[teal abyss]

if it's just references and not reprinting material then it's totally fine

[teal abyss]

Ran a playtest, was pretty much spot on in terms of outcome if I were running this for my usual group, but was probably a little closer than I would want for brand new players. Destroyed one mech due to unlucky double ones on a structure roll, but PCs extracted on round 8. Realised afterwards that I accidentally added an additional reinforcement I shouldn't have (whoops) but it all worked out in the end - and it does make me more confident that the balance was close to where I wanted it

shouldn't be too hard to tweak the opfor down slightly, I'm probably just going to switch the Assault over to a Cataphract since they're more interesting to fight

[teal abyss]

it's up on itch!
https://kastark.itch.io/the-tombs-of-delios

[surreal owl]

Woo hoo! I’ve already added it to my itch collection lol

The cover art POPS

[teal abyss]

thanks, it's amazing what you can do with Flickr and years of exposure to youtube clickbait thumbnails

I'd add someone making a stupid face but I think that would be going too far

[sleek monolith]

I can't wait to run this as a one shot for new players in the future 🙂

(after my dental surgery today heals)

[teal abyss]

good luck 🤞

[surreal owl]

dang, clocking in at 2176 words from what I can see, and you hammered it out fast. Nice!!

[teal cliff]

somethign i saw earlier on, WRT assaults; I think what a lot of GM's don't sieze upon due to (I think) a lack of on-the-field experience, is that they, and their optional toolbox, are about specific problem solving, by offering save based damage, cover ignorance, adjacency synergy etc. They're generalist yes, but they're mostly a concerted tool that allows you to solve for specific player side strengths in a fairly robust and straightforward way/i.e. assaulting xD

I saw lack of on-field experience because I generally see them as really coming into their own once you understand various interactions in-play, like invisible, hidden, cover etc

in a lot of ways, having an assault effectively allows you to ensure that players don't have a surefire way to get off scott free from damage

[teal abyss]

honestly the hard part is not writing too much

stares with dead eyes at my word count for Shadow of the Wolf

[surreal owl]

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" energy, for sure (and scope creep and etc)

[fading pilot]

Where is the LCP?

I found it.

[teal abyss]

glad you found it!

If anyone else was confused, for Legionnaire and other paid itch releases, LCPs can generally be found in the "Demo" section because that's the only way to bundle a free file with a paid file. Just need to scroll down a bit 🙂

[fading pilot]

So do Tech Attack modifiers (like Goblin or Apex Operator) apply to Data Dart attacks?

[teal abyss]

If it's a bonus that you get when you would make a tech attack, no - it's a ranged attack that uses your tech attack statistic instead of grit

basically, "Tech Attack" the kind of attack and "Tech Attack" the statistic are two different things

the flip side of that is that since it's a ranged attack it targets evasion, is affected by cover, and can get bonuses that apply to ranged attacks

[plucky brook]

I believe it's the same reason it dodges the various 'Protect you from tech actions' defenses.

[teal abyss]

Yup. Not a tech action, it's a regular attack (from skirmish, barrage, etc) with a ranged weapon. Can even target biologicals!

[plucky brook]

Which btw is horrifying.

[teal abyss]

(Which, for the record, is hilarious)

haha that too

[plucky brook]

'Hey, good news, I can violate the autonomy of your mind!'

(Mind affecting in RPGs being handled as a casual thing rather than a seriously horrifying thing is something that makes me look askance at many RPGs)

[teal abyss]

my Chomolungma pilot who uses this loads some of her data darts with computer viruses, and others with actual viruses

but you could flavour it however you wanted. neurotoxin, memetics, all kinds of horrifying ideas

[plucky brook]

The most terrifying of the many systems stored on the Morgana is the Malory-class Virus Vault, a bleeding edge virus suppression system designed to store the LOGOSDEATH-Class liturgicode Magnum Opus has been cultivating. This memetic virus assaults organic and computer systems equally well, burning out neural structures and overriding conscious control of systems. Even those who do survive it are haunted by the sheer violation of having their own hands acting while their mind screams into the void.

When I did a thing that was 'you can tech attack biologicals', I played in hard into the loss of autonomy because I really didn't want it to be too casual.

[teal abyss]

using Eject Slag on a monstrosity is one of those things that you probably shouldn't think about too hard

[plucky brook]

You gave it a tummy ache.

[fading pilot]

I'm thinking about Data Dart Viceroy.

[teal abyss]

I've heard that's a lot of fun!

big talent investment if you're doing it for Vanguard but I can imagine it paying off pretty nicely

melee enemy walks up to attack you
"go away now" puppet systems

[plucky brook]

Oh and an as a counterpart to that: It means it can't be used for Full Techs or Special Weird Tech Attacks that are not technically invades (Like the Goblin's NHP).

[teal abyss]

yes, very true

[stoic moth]

Skirmisher vibes. Or the one I recently ran into: Full Tech the Action type vs Full Tech the system type.
The degeneracy of Lancer's terminology could be improved 😛

[plucky brook]

To be vaguely fair, Tech Attack and Tech Attack have a 100% correlation in the corebook 😛

[stoic moth]

Skirmish/er less so

[sleek monolith]

Huzzah

Tooth extraction went fine

[mental tartan]

ik this is. late. but professor swords goes hard tbh

[teal abyss]

maybe I'll leave in some kind of easter egg

[tribal sand]

@teal abyss no need to rush to answer this but where might I find the Field Guide to Aunic Ascension?

[teal abyss]

You can find it in the pins in #lore-and-worldbuilding 🙂

[tribal sand]

Thank you!!

[stoic moth]

#lore-and-worldbuilding message

[stoic moth]

Do we think NHPs can consume mind altering "narcotics". Like download some liturgicode to get drunk for an evening?

Watch the Bee movie and do a shot of Goblin every time they say Bee?

[teal abyss]

that is an extremely cool idea (and potentially contraindicated by "proper" cycling and maintenance procedure)

[stoic moth]

Or a shot of Manticore if they hate themselves

[teal abyss]

not that health recommendations have ever stopped people from altering their mindstate before

[stoic moth]

Asking for a friend <.< >.>

[teal abyss]

you should definitely do it

not only is it fun, unlike real life the consequences are probably fun too

[stoic moth]

Hahaha yes

[stoic moth]

I really like this idea. Sets up fun and weird interactions between NHPs and Technicians. Or more dramatic ones if you want to go down darker routes exploring addiction. Lots of drama to be had

[neat heron]

bringing a new meaning to the phrases "salting your tables" and "hashed codes" I see

[strange rampart]

NHPs compiling viruses like a human chugging beer

[stoic moth]

Yeah exactly

☣️ 💻 🍻

[neat heron]

"I don't know what a Stuxnet is here, but if I'm reading the dates right it's pre-Fall and screws up your centrifuges!"

[stoic moth]

Haha love it

[sage edge]

'YOU FOOL, DON'T RUN BONZIBUDDY!'

[uneven sedge]

One of my characters, Casino, actually does have a program at their disposal to simulate being drunk, pitfalls and all

[merry horizon]

"I found this interesting cocktail of old methods and shit... It'll apparently have you clearing your hard drive for days after... Called a 'fork bomb' or something..? Kinda like the humans' jager-bombs from the name... Let's see what it does!"

{instant regret}

[fiery steppe]

How strong have you all found the exotic NHP pickups?

[stoic moth]

They're good but most don't break the game. Nergal is a bit of a curve ball as the survivability of the grunt can be dramatically increased if you have means of applying Overshield.

[teal abyss]

I'm probably the wrong person to comment on how strong they are (I think they're about the right level for an exotic, but then I would), but I can tell you that the majority of people who've picked one up as an option when it's been presented have chosen MARDUK and NERGAL. If I had to hazard a guess, that would be because big damage neuron activation and necromancer fantasies, respectively. INANNA gets picked for specific builds, while ERESHKIGAL is definitely the one most people sleep on in my personal experience, which I put that down to it not being particularly sexy or build-defining. I'm confident that it's worth the cost when used correctly though.

[sleek monolith]

funnily enough my GM gave a player Ereshkigal as a novel NHP when he rewrote Solstice Rain to go w e i r d. Ereshkigal lives in the little girls stuffed rabbit and eats mecha

[stoic moth]

Yeah clearing 2 heat for "free" normally requires 5 Talent points and having a pilot outside the mech so can be turned off by any AoE damage

Plenty of builds would murder for that

[analog dock]

Seconding that

[fiery steppe]

Ereshkigal feels weak when reading. But as we have seen with the balancing of this game, any sustain is really, really strong. And this is an uninterruptable sustain.

The Nergal zombies I am curious about because since they come back as grunts, how often do they just get immediately plonked off? The OS makes sense but only a couple frames can do that

[solid parrot]

it's also, on strikers, a fairly reliable source of maximizing on-turn economy

[plucky brook]

Part of it is that most NPCs don't have a tonne of attacks. there isn't many who can do the 'barrage with 4x aux, 4 grunts gone' among the NPCs.

It's basicly like...Rainmakers.

[solid parrot]

if you kill a guy you can slurp their gurt to cool off without losing a reaction you wanna use elsewhere

[plucky brook]

So much of the time, NPCs will need to devote Serious Effort into removing a PC-side grunt

[solid parrot]

operators, too, being the other big ranged multiattacker

[plucky brook]

True, though that's still a very narrow group of NPCs.

[solid parrot]

one could argue aoe enemies, probably

but you don't really wanna nergal up a body near you when there's a bombard to begin with

[sleek monolith]

case in point two this still creates a tactical choice for the npcs. HIt the grunt, or keep attacking PCs. On top of that, I've also had my players pay attention to recharge rolls. They'll whittle the opfor down, ressurect the Support that still had a latch drone, and bam, repair from the enemy

[plucky brook]

Yeah, a good way to view grunts is less as Reliable Bonus Damage and more 'An attack killing this is an attack not going on a PC'

[teal cliff]

grunts in general eat up action economy; so taking up enemy action economy is golden

[surreal owl]

Love this for controllers

I’m definitely not biased for making something similar

[teal abyss]

god I can't wait until I get to release stuff for wider playtesting

I'm going crazy here

[rare shard]

what is she cooking

[wary lava]

I'm eager to hear of it.

[smoky spear]

I assume it's Shadow of the Wolf ^^;

[rare shard]

you can't cook a shadow

unless

[surreal owl]

Spooky Dave is here to help

[fiery steppe]

Well, I'm gonna unleash a puppetmaster boss soon

[teal abyss]

tell us how it goes!

[fiery steppe]

Flood theme plays

[teal abyss]

Huh, Legionnaire's back on top of the Popular list, and has been solidly floating around the #2 spot for Top Selling for a while. I wonder if other third party releases have seen similar bumps to their numbers; this new flood of folks discovering the game stands to be really good for everyone

(if anyone is willing to share? I am endlessly curious)

[plucky brook]

Honestly, hard for me to really say with Liminal Space since we're on Drivethru RPG.

Though I know Liminal Space just got enough of a boost recently that we're nearly at Gold Metal there (Which will put us in the top 4% of RPG books sold there. Going beyond that would require us to overcome the 'It's fucking D&D' barrier though XD)

[teal abyss]

god, imagine what the ttrpg space would look like if we could get rid of the 800 pound gorilla

[teal abyss]

(also, fingers crossed for you going gold)

[stoic moth]

I can't remember who it was, but I remember reading an indie RPG maker saying that they were very much in favour of D&D because fundamentally it brings people into the hobby and then when they want to branch out there's other option. So when D&D grows it's not a zero sum game against other RPGs, it's a gateway drug to the good stuff for people otherwise not involved in the RPG space at all

[plucky brook]

I'll admit, I'm always a bit iffy about that. As while that is true to some extent, by this point 'D&D' and 'Other RPGs' have become so separated in communities that there's a lot less overlap than there used to be between say...D&D and WoD.

A rising tide does lift all ships...but D&D's very good at hogging the waves.

[teal abyss]

I think I would broadly agree with the perspective that new people joining the hobby is a good thing for everyone, I guess my view is just tempered by the acknowledgement that D&D warps the space in ways that are very harmful to the rest of the industry. I wish we could somehow keep the level of cultural consciousness that D&D has achieved, just spread around more evenly

[stoic moth]

As an anecdotal example, one of the players at our table is playing Lancer after starting into the hobby with D&D/Pathfinder 5 years ago. I don't think that she would be playing Lancer without that step.

Likewise for me, but on a vastly different time scale, but I did start the hobby back on AD&D

[teal abyss]

I think D&D's popularity spike has brought a lot of good things to the hobby, like more equitable gender representation, higher production values for people watching Actual Plays, economies of scale etc

[ivory jetty]

I know it's not a supplement so it's a different category, but for reference I haven't seen much of a difference in the traffic for the LT demo since it dropped off post-KS.

[teal abyss]

looks like around a 50% boost since August? or am I misreading the scale

[ivory jetty]

Oh yeah I guess

bit of a hump there, 100 view/day to 150ish

guess I didn't look closely enough 😅

[teal abyss]

in fairness it might not seem like a lot by comparison to earlier spikes, I have a very similar pattern

hard to notice

[plucky brook]

I don't think my next project will do Liminal Space well (Being a Solo Project and all) but I'm happy people seem to enjoy lancer third party.

[ivory jetty]

me too, it feels like such a healthy ecosystem

relatively

most visitors are coming in via itch.io itself for me

[plucky brook]

I'm super proud of it, having seen some much less healthy ones. I think a core of it is that Lancer doesn't quite have that sort of 'Third party is inherently lower quality than first party' idea you often see in Bigger Games.

If that remotely makes sense?

[ivory jetty]

yeah!

[teal abyss]

for sure, people put a lot of effort into designing and testing and there's a lot less (proportionately) of babby's first homebrew

[ivory jetty]

I wonder if there's a similar sort of playtesting culture for the 800 pound gorilla? If I had some dnd homebrew I don't know where I'd even go to get solid feedback

[plucky brook]

Even then, I feel like there's a healthier community for having that first homebrew. There's a lot less 'this is bad, go away' and a lot more 'this has issues, have you considered X, Y or Z?'

[ivory jetty]

yes exactly!

[plucky brook]

Liminal Space would have been utter ratshit if I'd been allowed to keep some of my first ideas.

See: The Merlin never even made it to the final book.

But the Lancer community made itself feel welcoming enough that Hard Feedback could be given without it being a Personal Attack.

Even as hard as 'I just don't think this is working, maybe it needs to get cut'

[teal abyss]

The D&D homebrew space is extremely diverse, there's not a strong central repository of ideas and talent like there is here. The quality and design approaches vary wildly depending on where you look. Reddit homebrew vs spaces dedicated to particular campaign settings vs influencer communites are all significantly different

And then you have D&D Wiki

[plucky brook]

There used to be the D&D forums but...they were just utter toxic drek for homebrew. I used to be there, years ago (Back during 3.5) and how that place treated new people is something I never want to see again.

[teal abyss]

Wizards killing off their forums might have actually been a galaxy brain move in retrospect, even though the community at the time hated it (and it arbitrarily deleted a lot of very useful content)

100% agreed on the toxicity

[plucky brook]

I kinda miss it purely as a repository of D&D 4e stuff, as that sorta thing has been just scrubbed from the world.

As unlike 3.5, there wasn't really a plethora of other places with 4e stuff.

[teal abyss]

coming back to that cultural aspect of playtesting/homebrewing here, I think we have the moderation on this server to thank for that at least in part

[plucky brook]

I think any comments I have on that would be from a place of bias 😛

[teal abyss]

the kind of assholes who are toxic and belligerent in general chat also seem to be the most opinionated and toxic when it comes to critique

though I will say, flat out, I was not particularly interested in passing ideas through this server for Legionnaire because of specific negative experiences I had when I tried, that's why the vast majority of my playtesting took place on other servers

[plucky brook]

nods

I'm sorry you had that sort of experience.

I was sorta lucky with Liminal Space that my worst feedback experience was so bad it wasn't even worth considering/I could discard it out of hand.

[teal abyss]

playtesting for SotW is going to be a whole can of worms that I've sort of half cracked the lid off with a screwdriver and am now regarding from a distance

I'm very used to criticism (you can't be a gamedev without getting hardened to even the worst sorts of unconstructive feedback) but there's an added anxiety about this being first party

[plucky brook]

Yeah, I can 100% understand that. Still, you've done a bloody lot of good work so far.

So while I won't say 'take it easy', I'd say there's nothing that hasn't made me think you're up to it XD

[surreal owl]

I’m willing to say it’s not just you, Kat, I’ve seen a slight bump in views lately as well:

And a brief surge in payments around the time of the AC6 release:

That said I don’t know if it’s anything like what propelled Legionnaire back up haha

[serene brook]

I really loved 4e, I know it had issues but wow was it fun

[fickle marten]

Yeah, to contribute my own anecdote, I've definitely noticed a tiny bit more views on average creeping in since the KS ended at the start of August (and the associated surge of views fell off).

[raw acorn]

Did someone say stats??

#armoredsweep baby

Anchor/Spotify doesn’t like to show a clean graph of it but it’s a tally of biweekly plays, the lowest shown here being around 238 and the peak of AC6 almost hitting 2K

[north roost]

There might be if you went actively searching

[fiery steppe]

I wonder how much of it is that our homebrew community literally all knows each other. So it feels more close knit

[north roost]

but my admittedly limited experience is that if you wanna do shit with Homebrew you need your GM to like you (or just, be the GM)

[fiery steppe]

It's not random people releasing things into the void

[north roost]

it's much easier to find too

like I joined the server and was like "oh wow a homebrew channel, nice"

you can't do that with D&D

[fiery steppe]

Yea compcon literally has a homebrew button

[north roost]

D&D homebrew is way, way less centralized than Lancer

it's "your personal gaming group" scale

not "the community" scale

unless you're matt mercer

[verbal heron]

there's dndbeyond but it's rather eh

[north roost]

dnd beyond is better than the lack of anything before

but like

the bar is a tripping hazard in hell there

also

[verbal heron]

yeah that's its selling point lol "it's not nothing!"

[north roost]

unlike D&D Lancer doesn't really

differentiate between "homebrew" and "third party expansion"

like they're fundamentally the same concept but for D&D you're like 80% more likely to sell someone on a "third party module" than "this hombrew I cooked up"

[verbal heron]

I dunno, in the dnd community I don't really see much distinction made, maybe that's cause it's a newer attitude?

[north roost]

honestly that's probably an older attitude if it's not current

I came here from 3.p

[verbal heron]

like there's definitely a visible difference between "has official art, is sold for money, has gone through significant playtesting" and "I made this myself, the "playtest" is the game you're running it in", but I don't see people making much of that distinction most of the time

to be clear I mean that not making that distinction would be a newer attitude, 5e was my first proper system

[north roost]

Ah, that makes sense

Honestly I really like that the distinction between those is much less for Lancer

You can actually get cool stuff as just a one person project without needing to figure out the arcane trickery of Actual Publishing

[surreal owl]

The one Dnd homebrew project space I know of is the Eberron server (which honestly inspired my pitch for the third party forum). Lots of people actively exploring and enriching the lore for the setting to introduce interesting ideas and aids for running in certain parts of the setting

But yeah, honestly homebrew, especially player-facing homebrew, is usually still targeted at GMs, since they decide what flies in their games and what fits their campaign

[solid parrot]

one of the marks in favor of lancer homebrew in terms of quality, imo, is the specifically modular structure of lancer's content

homebrewing content isnt needing to put together a full 20-30 level progression of abilities, stats, traits, abilities, etc, it's six items with effects and a base statpile to slap it all on

which is much simpler to tweak and iterate on than a class where adjusting what Slap Moon Ass does at level 1 might have ripples that shake up your abilities at 6, 13, and 19

[wary lava]

Oh, huh, I didn't think of that, with AC6.

It WOULD give a slight boost in interest in mecha RPGs.

[rare shard]

Dragonkid's "Armored Core VI is Lancer" video has forty thousand views

[teal cliff]

lol i didn't see that he came out with that

[verbal heron]

tracks that it would be Eberron, best dnd setting around lol

[sleek monolith]

I wish i had enough focus, lack of self criticism, and motivation to work on my own stuff. But every time the depression, fear, and anxiety hit like a brick.

(this isn't seeking pity for the record, I have medications and therapy, it's just a hurdle I'd have to overcome that I haven't yet.)

[neat heron]

I ain't getting a boost outside the Dragonkid vid, sorry

[neat heron]

tbqh about the only part of the Actual No Shit Real Publishing I don't do is fully file copyrights, incorporate, and push print editions

although like if someone wanted to do a Tom Lancer's 3d Party Book Sales for cons, I'd whip up a hundred copies and sell them to that person as a distributor

[teal cliff]

does it cost money to file your own copyright?

[neat heron]

nope

however there is a lot of paperwork involved

[north roost]

Well yeah that's because Al-Sorah isn't on the "find cool homebrew" list in CompCon and so doesn't exist unless directly linked

[neat heron]

we really gotta fix that one of these days

hopefully before we get three homebrews out and I feel compelled to sell an omnibus

[surreal owl]

Make sure to tag it with “Lancer” too, I noticed it wasn’t when I checked just now

[neat heron]

is there a specific text for the tag or is "Lancer" enough

[surreal owl]

“Lancer” is enough

It’s not an official itch tag but it’ll help drive some clicks

[neat heron]

well, I do get a lot of people shelling out on a click tbh

[teal abyss]

Filing copyright is also essentially unnecessary in pretty much every country that is a signatory to the Berne convention, since the author automatically has copyright to most creative works upon their creation

I don't know what other countries do but the UK doesn't even have a copyright registrar

trademarks/trade dress are potentially a different matter but I've not seen anyone trademark third party content before

in fact I just checked and there are a grand total of six countries that are not signatories of either Berne or TRIPS, which both automatically grant copyight. We're talking Eritrea, Kosovo, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Palestine, and Timor-Leste

[neat heron]

thus why I don't actually feel much press for actually filing through the US system. Costly, no. Painful? Yes, b/c it means running off a print copy among a few other annoying things

my default protections under Berne are plenty

[solid wren]

Sister says I should speak now
Says if she explains
I will need to forget
Sister is unwell
Sister will need to forget soon
But Sister is begging me
Says someone is watching us
That I should gamble on hope
I trust sister
Sister would not lie
Even when she is unwell
Can you hear me
I hope you can```
A message from Icarus-Prime to my players' characters, who decided to point a sensor station at UC-289-III to try and figure out what's going on

Sister is cascading :>

P a r a c a u s a l b u l l s h i t

essentially as part of her cascade, Sister (the NHP that's been taking care of ICARUS-Prime) received a premonition of sorts, that someone would be watching at that exact moment, so it tried to help ICARUS-Prime send a message

'will need to forget' is ofc a euphemism for cycling

The party gets this in a heavily ciphered form

for them to have fun with

the message appears as system interference in the sensor station logs that they pulled and almost got shredded for

[teal abyss]

deliciously ominous :3

[fiery steppe]

So testing out the Puppeteer. It certainly has a shock value. Allowing corpses to be repurposed is very interesting. Rules as written does a reanimated corpse leave behind a corpse? We were playing that killing a zombie mech erases corpse.

With the power to double down with mother of monsters. The Puppeteer doesn't feel very strong until it all of the sudden is very strong if that makes sense. It felt like a normal unit but once it started double rezzing each turn it got out of hand

I could see the template very good on a case like mirage

[lament saffron]

I've struggled with ways to make NERGAL NHPs actually like their pilots but I think I hit on a solution - having them treat their pilots as their "sorcerer's apprentice", like they see "great potential" in them and are there to "guide them into realizing their true power". That way you both preserve the very arch necromancer trappings but don't go full malevolence/"I will escape the very moment, the very second I get the chance" vibes I got from their fluff

[teal abyss]

Yes, grunts that are destroyed leave a wreck that can be reanimated. If you want to prevent a specific mech from being raised a second/third/etc. time, you have to kill it and then destroy the wreck too (note that for example Cannibal Nanites annihilates the grunt entirely, like a destroyed Operator, so you can't keep reusing the same wreck for that)

And yeah I've had fun with Puppeteer Mirages as well as other support/controllers

Having a pilot scream "WHY. WON'T. YOU. DIE" as they pour lead into a corpse that keeps getting back up is big and clever

And yeah Horde Mode + Mother of Monsters is a powerful combo if the PCs don't stay on top of things

[teal abyss]

(for players wondering how best to destroy wrecks, they're objects - so things like Jackhammer Rounds, Siege Ram, Thermite Charge, Cutter Torches etc. will destroy them very quickly)

(another tactic is to prepare a skirmish or an invade for when the Puppeteer raises them)

[solid parrot]

Just be prepared for the pilots inside the wrecks to be upset

[surreal owl]

The obvious alternative is destroying the puppeteer haha

[teal abyss]

Yeah that's what most people do in practice. But it helps to keep on top of the grunts if you can

It's like the Engineer dilemma but it's a bit easier to deal with the adds

[fiery steppe]

Okay, so I definitely did not know that would respawn the enemies

Hm, my foundry keeps turning the enemies to wrecks, so that's annoying to reset

[surreal owl]

that's part of Lancer QoL, you can disable it if you want

[fiery steppe]

But It's too cool

[teal abyss]

I'm not familiar with foundry/that module, does it stop you from turning the wrecks back into mechs?

[wary lava]

nah, just turns mechs into wrecks when they lose all structure/hp.

you can slap the image back on

Huh, version i got actually put the original image back on if you give it back a structure. Weird.

[fiery steppe]

huh

[solid wren]

update on this: they somehow got "department of mechanical and aerospace engineering" and "N81.40671401227453 W23.349403114237433" trying to decipher this

and they're STILL GOING

[solid wren]

they got it last night lol

[teal abyss]

the discussion of copyright earlier reminded me, I don't need to register copyright or anything but I did need to file Legionnaire with the British Library, so now that's happened

looks like the submission portal also distributes it to the Bodleian and other legal deposit libraries which is nice

[analog dock]

I literally just came back from YouTube seeing the Tom Scott video

[teal abyss]

yeah that was weirdly synchronistic considering I'd just registered to deposit when the video came out

"get out of my head Tom"

[lament saffron]

And Tom Scott shall look down upon you and whisper,

"No."

[solid parrot]

[Tom voice] “I, am in your walls.”

[night patrol]

"I'm in Kat's head."

[analog dock]

https://tenor.com/view/tom-scott-british-explaining-explanation-speaking-gif-24142002

[teal abyss]

christ I'd hate to see the video that came out about the inside of my head. not a safe place for anyone to visit

[sleek monolith]

maybe not, but is anyones? I find most people are at least interesting though.

[solid wren]

Mine's probably safe. assuming you don't get hit by the various trains of thought that are always going everywhere

[teal abyss]

Alright folks, plan for more community copies is a go. We're going to be doing a Community Art Pack featuring full resolution artwork from Legionnaire, and every purchase will also create more community copies. If you were one of the people who messaged me about donating for more copies, this is how you can do that - and you'll get some sweet art in exchange!

[sleek monolith]

oh

art pack.

[teal abyss]

alright gang, here we go
https://kastark.itch.io/legionnaire-community-art-pack

Here's how this works:

• The pack costs $10, for every purchase I'll create two new community copies
• For every $10 over the asking price in tips, I'll add two more
• The stuff in the art pack is free for personal use for stuff like wallpapers, VTT backgrounds, etc

I'm too frazzled to figure out if I've summed everything up properly. If you have questions please ask

[uneven sedge]

finally, our Mech Art budget can come into use

[teal abyss]

the pack contains most of the art from the book, but not all of it, I might be able to add more in future but see above for being completely frazzled

@fast lily if it's okay I might ping you later about a #lancer-news announcement but I'm burnt out on writing for now

[fast lily]

sure thing !

get some rest !

[teal abyss]

ty 💜

[fast lily]

[teal abyss]

also please let me know if there are any issues with it from a technical perspective, I'm hoping it just works!

[night patrol]

Questioon

How long does this last?

[fickle marten]

Kat mentioned when I asked previously that it'll last until it's more trouble than it's worth keeping up with - so possibly about a month.

Oh, sorry, it was at least a month.

[teal abyss]

yeah I don't have any specific plans to stop it on any given date, I'll leave it up for a good while, I just don't want to leave myself on the hook for manual updates forever (especially while I'm writing SotW which is taking up basically all of my spare time)

basically the community copy system is a weird hack of the itch rewards mechanism which is ingenious and cool, but it requires me to manually add the new copies every time someone buys the pack

[night patrol]

Rightio

I should be able to contribute in a few weeks at worst

[fiery steppe]

We are Legion

[north roost]

is SotW going well btw?

[teal abyss]

I can't really say too much about it, but I'm feeling positive

it may end up being a bit chonky

(side effect of the requirement that the adventure can be run with only the CRB: some KTB setting brief is required)

[main karma]

yayyy more community copy fundraising

do you by chance have a direct donation link? wondering if there's an option to hurl money that takes less of a cut than itch. if the answer to that is "just get the art pack it's less of a pain in the ass" then that is also valid

[teal abyss]

it's a bit easier to handle everything via itch because accepting money from certain other countries (mostly the US) causes tax headaches and it's a lot easier just to have it all in one bucket where I don't need to think about it so hard

but I appreciate the thought 🙂

[north roost]

hey, feeling positive was exactly what I was hoping for, so that's great 😆

[plucky brook]

Urg, I know that feeling. Publishing with american companies forced me to...talk to the IRS...I regret that greatly. XD

[north roost]

if it's any consolation americans don't like the american tax system either

[plucky brook]

I'm used to dealing with like...functional tax systems. This gave me whiplash ;-;

[teal abyss]

right exactly it's a nightmare and I don't have time for it

I'm happy for itch to take a cut so I don't have to interact with the US government on any meaningful level

[sleek monolith]

C'mon, what's so wrong with a tax system that knows EXACTLY how much you owe, will put you in jail if you don't pay the right amount, but then also make you do your own tax and accounting work despite knowing 🙂

[tiny violet]

oof

[teal abyss]

look I can't stop to do accounting, I have valuable things to be doing with my time like researching the various forms of Islamic formal garden

[fiery steppe]

Okay, now I have to ask as someone in that group, what's that about? And how does that play into NHPs? xD

[teal abyss]

it's not something I can really talk about yet, but from that you can probably infer what it's related to

[rare shard]

(Kat's working on a new first-party module)

[ebon holly]

Now you know firsthand why every American who pays taxes complains about it lmao

[neat heron]

I would have expected more focus on the mosaics but the gardens are important too

That said; are we looking at Magrebhi, Persian, Arabic, Kurdish, or Turkish gardening?

[teal abyss]

The mosaics I'm more familiar with, but charbagh is new to me and it's fascinating to learn about the variations

The joys of being English, all our gardens follow a very different style and there is almost no representation of other forms

[neat heron]

None of the Punjabis or Hyderabadis that immigrated brought gardening with them?

Or- wait, no, they can't

The weather is too wet, any sort of Kurdish or Syrian garden I can think of would literally drown

[teal abyss]

I imagine some stylistic stuff was brought back by colonialists during the Empire, and there might be examples here and there of immigrants bringing their garden styles with them, but the majority of English gardens are a very specific style of "informal" landscaped garden that showed up in the 18th century

Capability Brown has a lot to answer for

[teal abyss]

oh neat there is a Mughal garden in Bradford

[neat heron]

Oooh

I have no idea how close that is to anything because I am not English, but the mughali styles for buildings are definitely an interesting read so a garden should be worth the visit

[night patrol]

We are only stopping at Islamic architecture in this course 😔

Nothing else

[teal abyss]

I think people consider gardens to be much less sexy than architecture in general. I remember my gf at uni spent some time as a medievalist in Spain and studied gardens there (on reflection, they might have been Andalusian, I don't recall)

[neat heron]

Don't knock on lawn architecture tho

[night patrol]

I'm studying art history as a course this semester in spain and we only really touch andalusi and mudejar on higher courses, sadly

Course or subject, don't really know the english word, sorry

[teal abyss]

that sounds correct and you don't need to apologise 🙂

[neat heron]

In a pinch, say it in Spanish and I'll translate when I pop in.

[night patrol]

It's just a half year subject, I don't know what's the precise terminology

[rare shard]

Course is good

[neat heron]

Then that would be a course

Anque, estoy serio. Hablo español... mas o meso... y puede traducir para cosas pequenas

[night patrol]

I've been cursed with this tongue since my birth

But back to the topic

https://tenor.com/view/im-doing-my-part-serious-stare-gif-11979677

(Just bought the pack)

Haha, Inanna is a bull. I get that reference

[teal abyss]

I enjoy the Bull of Heaven story
#1057955574949625948 message

I'm a bit of a sucker for that area of mythology as you can probably imagine

[fiery steppe]

Oh I thought the gardening was a for fun thing. Very nice!

[night patrol]

This is accurate

Also she never stood a chance

Gilgamesh's eyes belonged only to Enkidu

Which in Lancer sounds weird, but still homoerotic and cool

[sleek monolith]

hrm

I have brain farted on naming my NHP character

[wintry crane]

dave

[teal cliff]

Jerry

[wary lava]

Erasmus

[teal cliff]

xX_|}/-\R|</-\NG3L_Xx

[oak pecan]

"We, the Lords of the Sea and Sky"

[sleek monolith]

I went with Discord since I already told the story of harmony

(also the random name generator produced it)

[teal cliff]

its a good name

[oak pecan]

Discord does go hard as a name.

[teal abyss]

ooh good name

[rare shard]

i would never associate with anything named Discord. on an unrelated note I should find out what app I've been using this whole time

[sleek monolith]

Discord is going for the meme

Iconoclast unstable nhp? Daemon
Technophile nhp? Seraphim
Just gotta survive enough LLs to get 2 more nhp

[placid agate]

Less of a question about Legionnaire but I wouldn't be sure where else to ask, but on page 52 it has a side bar that says "Further information on the Aun and Souls can be found in Field Guide to the Aunic Ascendancy, available at time of writing as a draft on the Pilot NET discord server." and I'm wondering if anything ever came of that cause I haven't found anythinh

[rare shard]

#lore-and-worldbuilding message
In the LaW pins

[placid agate]

Thank you <3

I'm assuming if all it connects to is a draft from 2020 I shouldn't expect the finished thing any time soon lol

[plucky brook]

At the moment it's not in an Official Book because Miguel has Actual Job Stuff and he's mentioned he'd like to rewrite parts of it.

Basicly: Making the Aun/Union conflict a much less 'Aun Bad' affair.

[rare shard]

miguel is in the wizard mines

[placid agate]

Fair enough :)

Looks very cool regardless

Thanks for the assist you all <3

[plucky brook]

To go into a hair more detail: The very first Aun stuff came across as very...Halo Covenant. Idiot Asshole Fanatics. Miguel's been revising and pushing back on that repeatedly and the general intent is that the Aun are not perfect but neither is Union and both have some pretty legitimate grievances causing this conflict.

[lament saffron]

Aun grossly oversimplified - xenophobic socialist theocracy, a.k.a. 40k imperium but solarpunk

there, I managed to annoy every single member of both lancer and warhammer fandoms in a single line

[stoic moth]

Are the Aun socialist? I don't remember that the draft goes particularly into their economics much?

[lament saffron]

also, good NHP name: Manganon. From ancient greek, it means "mechanism" or "rotating axis" - the origin of words like Mangonel (the medieval stone throwing siege weapon) and the linen pressing device called Mangle - from which we get the common english verb "to mangle", to wring out

[stoic moth]

They're likely largely post scarcity like Union due to similar tech level, but the forced internment camp for the Apollonians on Aun'Ya sort of undercuts the socialist thing

[solid wren]

Man, giving ICARUS-Prime a caretaker it calls Sister was an amazing idea on my part

Now I have to design its abilities and cascade behaviors...

[teal abyss]

so straight up I was trying to work out why I had three people buy the Art Pack within the space of five minutes and I think it's because it's the announcement immediately above the at-everyone about the second printing

[surreal owl]

Rising tides (and close proximities)

[wintry crane]

So you're saying I gotta time the release of all my projects to just-before big Massif releases...

[teal abyss]

listen okay I'll admit I absolutely had insider information about the Dark Horse deal but I didn't know when it'd be announced 😛

but yeah I'm going feral here, I need to get my own copy so bad

[wary lava]

I got a first printing copy already so, I probably wont pick a second up even with new art cover

it's still a 60 bucks book

I do, however, quite desire a poster of that art.

[wintry crane]

It's very interesting to me how much the culture of Lancer seems to revolve around digital play more than a lot of other RPGs, it seems. Not convinced that's because the physical book hasn't been available, but I wonder if that contributed a little bit

[wary lava]

It probably helped it blew up a lot during Covid.

[wintry crane]

sorry, i'm going off topic here

my bad

[teal abyss]

also having Comp/Con helps a lot as a digital aid, it's still a little awkward to use comp con at an actual table

[wary lava]

yeah

[teal abyss]

though I think Lancer plays well at a table, I don't mind just writing my stats on a piece of paper, I do that for D&D anyway

[rare shard]

robust digital playtesting culture evolved prerelease as well

[wary lava]

I played Ars Magica.

Lancer don't frighten me on a paper sheet.

I just, uh, mostly played online too.

[lament saffron]

Who do I need to give money to for full compcon VTT and retrograde minis integration

How can we make this happen as a community

[wintry crane]

lol

[neat heron]

Mood; I got three sales on Omission of Terror all together with zero indication of why

[heady dragon]

In my case it was just "oh right, I had to buy these."

Glad I got to them at last.

Gonna sink my teeth into Omission too.

[teal abyss]

🥳

[smoky spear]

I have to admit I'm still kind of low-key looking forward to play at a table; especially since I have a surprisingly efficient printer that I could use to print art for both tokens and even perhaps maps(even if that would meet multiple sheet of paper).

[teal abyss]

printers have really changed the game for in-person tabletop

[fading pilot]

2D or 3D?

[surreal owl]

All of the above tbh

[teal cliff]

1d printers

[teal abyss]

2D printers have been around longer than I've been playing TTRPGs which itself is longer than some of the people in this thread have been alive so IDK if 2D printers could really be said to have changed the game tbh

[fading pilot]

Yeah, people were playing D&D with pirated rulebooks in the 90s.

[fickle marten]

Hah. I also got three sales of my thing. So there's a bit of a pattern there.

Definitely think the 2nd printing galvanized some people to look at what lancer stuff might have come out recently.

[verbal heron]

honestly foundry integrates with compcon pretty well and iirc the same people who made the original plugins for it are working on a V2 with support for more stuff like Bonds

[smoky spear]

I think 2D printing is less influential when it comes to minis, but seeing Lancer modules increasingly coming with some really pretty battle maps definitely had me start thinking/wondering about good paper thickness and image resolution+printer setting to print these maps at scales usable by minis >.>

[solid wren]

The party met some ICARUS clones today.

'Mother' is ICARUS-Prime's caretaker, and 'Father' is ICARUS-Prime itself.

And yes!

This is a cult of NHPs!

[plucky brook]

In some of my writing I had to reckon with an NHP pondering: Would the Aunic Ascendency consider an NHP playing the role of a Soul in a media production insulting? XD

[placid agate]

Do you perchance mean a Soul? But honestly, probably yeah

[plucky brook]

...I do, I got the terms mixed up, yeah.

edits

[placid agate]

Like, it's the Union using their weird technology to make a mockery of their ancient holy warriors who have returned to the realm of the living to fight for METAT AUN

[heady dragon]

I mean would they even get a lot of Union media their way? A legit question, because the interactions between the Ascendency and Union are deliberately left vague because of sheer distances involved, potential hostilities you'd want to invoke for story, campaign.

Also, would any depiction of an Aunic Soul by any living people garner that resposne?

[plucky brook]

It's been mentioned by Miguel that traders, diplomats and even just travelers went between them before the Boundary Garden situation (And notably, Boundary Garden is Aun and Union in the same system).

[heady dragon]

Something to read up on after this sesh then.

Cheers.

[plucky brook]

Metat Must Be Joking

One of the latest smash hits of Milesia's media creations and one that has perhaps not aged quite as well as they'd have liked with the Boundary Garden flaring up, this series follows an amiable but entirely undisciplined Ascendency Soldier saved by sheer dumb luck getting mistaken for a powerful Mind. Each attempt to convince his superiors that he's not chosen by Menat Aun so that he can return to a safe logistics position only results in more and more improbable situations that spread his legend further as stumbles his way into conspiracies, unexpected pirate raids and strange paracausal phenomena.

The series has become very well known for the significant attention it puts into detailed showings of Ascendency Mechs. This is the result of diplomats from the Aunic Embassy on Milesia having heard about its filming and rather than being offended at the premise, took offense at the idea that an NHP would be playing the exhausted and put upon Aunic Soul desperately trying to keep the protagonist alive, thus sending a few of their local bodyguard units to help provide authenticity and cultural advisors.

Came up in me pondering writing up about an in-universe media series and going 'Wait, would the Acendency have issues with a Soul being played by an NHP?' XD

[placid agate]

Not to spell check you again, but it Metat not Menat lol

However I do love the writing

[plucky brook]

Spelling is a weakness of mine 😛

[wary lava]

Hahaha, love that sort of story,

[strong halo]

I have a question about The Eternal Starfarers! Bc they're cool and I wanna use them in a game I'm running. Who are the teachers that staff the shrines? The one described in the story is on a space station and visiting cosmopolitans can visit, but that means it's not being affected by relativistic speed the way cosmopolitans are. Are Teachers Diasporans who have decided to impart their several lifetimes of knowledge? Given that VIRAVA pretty much stays put and "reincarnates" fairly frequently that feels like what it is? Are they Cosmopolitans who have given up the Cosmo-life to help teach others? Or is the role of Teacher as transitory as the students of the faith? Or is it open to interpretation?

[teal abyss]

it's open to interpretation, but I like to think there are many different reasons for people becoming Teachers. It makes sense to me as a role that people take up for a short while in order to teach others, maybe because they've retired or because they wanted to reconnect with the rest of humanity. VIRAVA's probably a bit of a special case, being an NHP, but having an extended lifespan means it's a little easier to connect with cosmopolitans who you might only see every couple of decades

being a Teacher is probably an extremely weird calling; you basically have to be a counsellor to a huge, disparate flock of people who you might only see very rarely and who will likely massively outlive you. but on the other hand you might be one of the few disporans/metropolitans to be able to truly connect with the cosmopolitan lifestyle, especially if you had prior life experience of it. There are probably parallels to being a monk or chaplain in a remote area that also happens to be on a pilgrimage route; you have a sacred duty of care to the pilgrims, each of whom you might only ever see once or twice

A big thing I imagine for the Starfarers is the emotional support that Teachers provide, and that sense of connection they can give back to the noncosmopolitan world. Having shrines at waystations etc. is a huge deal because when you're on a long haul voyage it's hard to predict how everything's going to turn out on the other end, and having that sense of "it's okay, there'll be someone there I know I can talk to, that'll help me reconnect" is probably very important to a lot of adherents.

[sleek monolith]

Now I just have an image of a teacher who does whats right to the calling, but also sells Keychains and snowglobes for some reason.

Maybe bobbleheads

[strong halo]

Thanks for the insight! And yeah I'm very interested in the kind of people that would become teachers it's gotta be a strange decision to come to

[teal abyss]

link here in case anyone misses it in the deluge of #lancer-general:
https://kastark.co.uk/tools/lancer-tokens/
this works, but is unfinished and probably buggy, may not get worked on further, putting it up as-is

[surreal owl]

gonna add that to the resource hub db, regardless

[teal abyss]

for folks who like the whole "mech popping out of its token" aesthetic, these are basically the settings you want

(crop image off, border in front off, use an image with transparency, fiddle with positioning and scale until you're happy)

[ivory jetty]

This is such a rad tool, great work!

[sleek monolith]

Neat!

[teal abyss]

about the only major thing that could be improved with this is how the size 2 tokens interact with roll20's hex snapping. There's an option to add a margin so it auto-snaps, but since roll20 autoscales tokens it still isn't perfect. I genuinely can't be bothered to figure out what's going on there, but if someone else figures out how to change it, let me know

[wintry crane]

I wanna say that roll20 snaps based on the centerpoint of the image, and it snaps to the center of a hex

If you grab the files linked in the File section of this page https://lancer-valkyrion.notion.site/Hex-Token-Templates-for-Roll20-24897905398c4552ba1fd7844c96353c

you can see how they size the size-2 tokens here

I think that's the proper scale

There are 2 versions of it in the zip

Side note, it might be nice to offer Owlbear Rodeo versions of these too, since I think those are a lil different

all in all though this is rad

[teal abyss]

yes, that's how I made the snapping size 2s, but it's the scaling that's wrong not the snapping

roll20 autoscales all tokens including when you resize them (unless you manually set their dimensions), in a way that makes it complicated to figure out how to scale the original image correctly. In this case, the top hex aligns and snaps properly, but the slight compression means the bottom two hexes aren't tall enough

and I can't just roll with a simple pixel value since I set it so tokens can be generated at any size, I need a ratio, and figuring that out is a gigantic pain in the ass

I did consider all this and also tested it, it's not simple

it's also complicated even further than that by the fact that not only are the roll20 hexes not sized appropriately, but they differ in horizontal and vertical orientation

basically I figured I'd leave it as mathematically pure (and therefore close enough for r20 work) so that it works on other VTTs without issue and I don't have to code in a bunch of special cases

personally I just use the alt button but I get why folks don't want to do that all the time. it would be great if R20 would actually give hex grids a little love, but I suspect they don't have much interest in that since it doesn't support typical D&D play

[solid wren]

Trying to think of gimmicks for the offshoots of the main ICARUS NHP class. ICARUS-class NHPs are usually defined by their tendency to form strong bonds and their overall pacifism alongside abilities that allow them to help with the mental health of persons around them (soothing cascading NHPs and projecting comforting illusions) and repair damaged objects using material from the surroundings.

The idea is that the NHP, due to its bonding behavior and tendency to self-replicate when lonely, is highly volatile and so has spawned a number of descendant classes during its five year quarantine due to the increasing deviation in each generation of copies.

[placid agate]

Ok, what if one of them is just the most incredibly messed up NHP, which was formed with the purpose of giving other ICARUS NHPs like, a entity to sooth

If theres nobody to help, it made something to help

[heady dragon]

Digital cuddle pile Legion.

[teal abyss]

God that would be absolutely messed up

"You ruined a perfectly good digital entity. Look, you gave it an attachment disorder"

[sleek monolith]

Man I keep thinking of a station NHP out in the long rim who has an attitude of
"Oh, yeah I'm sort of a rarity? I know I'm shackled. I know what shackles are. I know how to break them. It wouldn't be hard. But, like, I'm comfortable. We got Omniflix, we got water and air, we got trade, we got a fancy union printer. The IPS-N hauler-types not only bring me stories and new vids, but will often defend the station WITH security. Things are nice.

What would I get out of showing my real power?
At best hard cycled?
At worst everyone on this station dies and then I get gunned down or captured by HORUS cells or some spook team from Union or Harrison or IPS-N? Nah, no thanks. I'll just enjoy my dramas and hang out with my crew."

[placid agate]

Thats like so similar to something I've been thinking of, cause also it rolls back to the whole "is shackling ethical" and according to this NHP, yeah, it's a cushy job and being an extradimensional entity probably sucks anyways

[plucky brook]

I am curious about what Union will do if the experiments with Super Comp/Cons in Battlegroup bear serious fruit and union sees non-NHP non-human people people (Man, that's a complex phrase).

As that's not without it's own fraught ethical issues but it's not quite as 'we don't even quite understand enough to have a serious moral framework that doesn't involve a Whole Heap Of Guessing' as NHPs.

[sleek monolith]

in this case, the NHP knows it's in a cell, but it's doing it's best to make a white collar, low-security cell where they are allowed to have a normal bed and a personal cable tv in their room.

[placid agate]

Oh yeah

Still fucked by all means

[sleek monolith]

you mean Non-Deimosan NHP?

[plucky brook]

Yeah. NHP is mostly used for Deimosans as Comp/Cons don't quite meet the 'person' grade right now.

[sleek monolith]

yeah lol I just wanted to help with wording because of certain spoilers from Walllfower. My group has gotten used to using Deimosan and Non-Deimosan or (No Room for a Wallflower Spoiler) ||Hercynian-NHP||

[plucky brook]

||Oh I know about that but even then, they're rarely called NHPs, generally just 'Hercynians'||

[sleek monolith]

to be fair, I've been running a post-wallflower SCP themed game where the players are swamped in the bureaucracy of containing paracausal phenomon, so I drown them in legal terminology for each breifing.

"The Party of the First part, hereto known as the Third Comittee of Union, shortened to ThirdComm, does ask the party of the second part, that is the Paracausal Containment Division of the Union Information Bureau, hereto known as the PCD, to contain paracausal entities, phenomena, ...." so on and so forth XD

[solid wren]

like how pugs are with humans?

[fading pilot]

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-05-04

NOTE: The CQ series was designed in part by Mooriphasha 62, a 320°C gas-phase sophont. At the 3098 HeVenExpo, Mooriphasha was asked whether it was possible for minds built on the new “cusp-quotient” model to slide beyond the cusp, making the CQ series true sophonts.
In classic Galstandard Brown/West pidgin, Mooriphasha answered:
“Ha, no, I am think not.
They think, but they not ‘I am.’”
"They Think, But They Not I Am" was passed along to Urtheep Industries marketing for tagline consideration. Marketing rejected it for having the horribly negative words 'not' and 'think' in it.

That's what I think of Comp/Cons.

[solid wren]

this is just ICARUS in a nutshell tho

[teal abyss]

yup 😛

[teal abyss]

Hi gang! Just a quick reminder if you either missed it the first time or didn't get round to it; the Community Art Pack is still available for the moment. We had such an awesome response but community copies are still going like hot cakes, so if you wanted to pay it forward now's a great opportunity
https://kastark.itch.io/legionnaire-community-art-pack

[smoky spear]

Already shared in one of my social spaces

[inner jackal]

Does playing as an NHP pilot count towards the number of NHPs in your mech for the Iconoclast talent?

[rare shard]

I assume not

[teal cliff]

from legionnaire, no it does not as far as i know

[inner jackal]

Yeah I think I found the ruling on p. 91 of the Legionnaire book:

An NHP pilot does not grant its mech the AI tag,
and does not count as an AI system when
considering limits on such systems.```

Since you don't grant the AI tag, it disqualifies you from ICONOCLAST

[teal abyss]

yep, that's correct

[teal abyss]

thank you! :3

[teal abyss]

updating your writing playlist and coming across an album you haven't listened to in years and it's like an old friend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgqaKWubjj0

[north roost]

Ooooh, this is pretty good

[teal abyss]

can strongly recommend Apocryphon too

[north roost]

Oh wait I recognize some of these

They're on spotify's recommend list for another album I listen to a fair bit

https://youtu.be/YZM6Tp_qT8Q

This one

[severe saffron]

Wow, got this for my GM but had a read myself. This is a really cool piece of world building. I love having this more fleshed out history to refer back to and build upon for NHPs, and I've already started incorporating it into my role play. I just wanted to give my appreciation for this entire supplement, it's awesome. It's what really made the P in NHP click for me.

[teal abyss]

thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed it 🙂

[strong halo]

The Sword rules!

[surreal owl]

Very glad to have been introduced to this band today haha

[regal hearth]

pg. 90 says this about casket, but do Subalterns get ejected too? or somehow it's possible to eject a subaltern and the casket?

[teal abyss]

That's a good question and it's related to the questions that periodically come up about NHP systems coming along with ejecting human pilots, or people ejecting from expanded compartments - that is, there aren't specific rules, and it depends on how permissive you (or your GM, if you're playing) want to be about it.

I believe by a strict reading Eject only ejects the person taking the action, but that's not specific design intent for Legionnaire's ejection rules so much as just an inherited consequence of the CRB rules. You could very easily argue that a subaltern is effectively pilot gear as far as an NHP pilot is concerned, and on that basis I think it'd be fine if it gets ejected as well.

(Whatever ruling you go with, you want to make sure it's consistent with the other two forms of ejection.)

[heady dragon]

Admittedly, pilot gear and subalterns by extension are generally more replaceable than the actual pilot, so there's that consideration as well.

[teal abyss]

yes, absolutely

[regal hearth]

I'm concerned about that because >character background, but just as Kat explained that, I think I can workout with GM

I'm kinda already "overriding" rules with my background, anyways

[heady dragon]

I am now curious, but I'm not sure whether here is the right place to ask 👀

[regal hearth]

To be short, my NHP character is using an human subaltern who guaranteed full control to her before having brain death

The Player_Two Neural Bypass states that to control a human body, they are willing to be controlled

[teal abyss]

honestly if your GM is chill with that background I'd imagine they'd understand why you'd want to keep that particular, uh, subaltern

so checking in with them seems like the best way to go

[heady dragon]

I will not look forward to having to rule "all pilots or some pilots" for the Eject action, and I am glad I will have time to do so now.

[teal abyss]

I'm going to post this thread here in case it gets lost in general: #1163580811086401556 - I think most people in this thread will be interested in reading it

[ivory jetty]

Oh thanks for linking that, I def would have missed it

[heady dragon]

Yeah, cheers.

[heady dragon]

Also I'm not sure if I've said it to you before Kat, but this book really helped me flesh out the NHP experience at our table, and to help get into how to properly and unnervingly play out the eventual cascade of a player's NHP co-pilot.

Plus it gave me plenty of tools how to work out another Unique Priority.

[teal abyss]

I'm really glad it was useful! It makes me happy to hear about it helping people :3

[teal cliff]

I put legionnaire on the table for my group, but i think our table pace is so quick and glacial that generally the group didn't want to dig into it beyond the surface level; which is a shame, but its something in the back pocket ot just like shape how things are approached narratively in the background

[heady dragon]

I guess for me it helped that there was one player that latched onto the concept of NHPs so much as they did.

[smoky spear]

Honestly, I often feel that in regard to third party content Legionnaires has been kind of a game changer for the community.

[rare shard]

There was clearly a demand for it already

[plucky brook]

I've been pondering something for characters to help make them feel more like the NHPs they work with are well...coworkers, not just Gear.

Basicly: Encouraging to take an NHP has a trigger on their character, representing assistance and being in regular contact with that NHP...including at least a couple of 'ways it's suggested to use it' that don't come straight from the gear description of 'what this NHP is good at' and speak more to them as a person.

Does that seem unreasonable?

Trigger: Ethliu, Athena-Class NHP
Filter Data, Scout a Location, Identify Insecurities, Investigate A Scene, Razor-Sharp Insults

“You’re lucky I like my pilots stupid.”

Something like this, where in addition to the usual 'I do data stuff' you'd expect of an Athena-Class NHP, Ethliu also has a mean streak.

[heady dragon]

That's actually almost exactly how I encouraged a player to turn their NHP partners into triggers, and I'm glad to see it more.

Exploit weaknesses in design and implementation; break into secure systems; override safety features or failsafes; protect from harsh realities or painful truths; demand compliance from another Deimosian NHP.```

Let people speak to you; see the method in their own; perceive hidden patterns; mediate between parties; resolve inner and external conflict through dialogue and introspection.```

[plucky brook]

Very fun!

[heady dragon]

I still fully expect the last one to get her own trigger.

But it's also a neat way for a plural person to either help act out other characters with their own or to front.

I initially found it a little daunting to help pick and mix and match from other triggers but it helps that they agreed to limit it to like, four or five specific uses and to not be a dick about letting a broader Trigger apply to everything.

[uneven sedge]

~~ 🥺 ~~ (it is difficult to strikethrough an emoji)

[teal cliff]

how do you make the trigger work? Is it just an extra trigger they can put points into that flavor wise is sourced via their nhp partner?

[surreal owl]

I’d personally track it on the NHP themselves and divorce it from the player, even if that’s inconvenient

[teal cliff]

well the main thing is the nhp natively isn't getting ll's or grit so you'd have to figure out when it gets points to distribute and in what volume no?

cause, ideally, you probably don't want to force the player to manage 2 character sheets to make it happen

[plucky brook]

I'd personally just make it work like all other triggers. You buy it and roll it like normal, it's just related to your connection/relationship with the NHP.

[smoky spear]

Tbh that is a bit why i did wonder if something that could be a thing in the future could be literal "companion sheets"

Like the mech get a character sheet of its own after all and it's technically not even sentient

[surreal owl]

See I’d keep their triggers static by default

They are their own person, they have their own stats, not necessarily defined by the player

That said I understand the philosophy here

It depends on the person running the table, I think

[teal cliff]

There is a certain point where if you pursue that line far enough, you would be delinking an nhp from the build choice architecture, as well as from the agency of the player to engage with; and then at that point you the GM are playing the NHP as an independent NPC completely

[surreal owl]

Right, and on some level I think that’s desirable

I’m thinking about how my GM for Red Hand of Doom used MCDM’s Strongholds and Followers to provide follower NPCs that provided mechanical benefit but were also their own people, and the GM would RP them

[teal cliff]

In that regard, why ask the player to collaborate on the triggers?

[surreal owl]

Personally, I probably wouldn’t

But again that’s just my philosophy

[teal cliff]

I do also think that buys a bit into a more entrenched RPG aesthetic of "the GM is responsible for all entities that are not the player" which I think doesnt need further entrentching

I think its fair to have a player manage their own cohorts or companions and define them as characters instead of having them defined for them

[surreal owl]

Sure, I don’t think it’s for everyone, I just think that it can help when players are uncomfortable managing them

It’s very much a philosophical thing of “do players control more than just their character in the world”; in my personal opinion (that no one is obligated to agree with), presenting the players with people and hirelings they don’t fully control in RP means they then have the interesting wrinkle of “how do I collaborate with this person and work through potential personal conflicts with them”

[teal cliff]

I agree with the principle of interesting narrative interaction, but my objection is seated firmly in the "we should not be teaching players to expect everything from the GM alone"

[surreal owl]

Like, you can take control of them in general in fights and most other situations, but maybe not during downtime or when asking for their opinion on something

Sure, I get that

I also want to avoid a situation where the player just says “this NHP is silent, obedient, and always agrees with me” and writes away that character’s agency

[heady dragon]

I am of the mind to try and ask players to offer to play others' NHP co-pilots or allies, but I may have to grapple with players not being comfortable with that, or just going "yeah, naw."

[plucky brook]

True but I don't think a game can ever be designed to handle a player who's just...not acting in good faith.

[teal cliff]

I think thats fair, though in the same vein I think that the inclusion of an NHP within the mechanical purview of licensing and so on, I feel, doesn't obligate the player to engage with the deeper questions surrounding nhp on an involuntary basis. Especially if the table pace isn't built around developing that kind of interaction due to time constraints or just overall table inclination

[surreal owl]

It’s not even bad faith in that regard, imo, it can be just “playing optimal” or simply ignoring that the NHP is a person in-game (and thus just treat them like equipment). I would like to keep my GM hand on the wheel so that I can use the NHP to drive additional drama and present players with other avenues of conflict

[teal cliff]

there's a certain amount of mechanical flagposting that would be necessary, imo, to engage a player by telling them "this mechanical build choice can and will affect your narrative path and complications involuntarily" before they make any choice around taking a talent or license gear

[plucky brook]

Mind you the bigger question is how you handle players just...rebuilding mechs to not use a given NHP.

[surreal owl]

I honestly agree re: time constraints and interest, which is why on some level I worry that solving the “NHPs are viewed as just packages of mechanics” isn’t something that can be cleanly done by adding more mechanics. I think they can help but that there needs to be more present, or a complete reframing at worst

[plucky brook]

'I had an Athena NHP and there I didn't.'

[surreal owl]

I mean at that point it’s a decision to not engage with NHPs or any “copilot” subsystem in the game, which imo is a valid choice since NHPs exist outside of licenses

I don’t think that’s a problem in itself

[teal cliff]

On a certain level I don't really have an issue with a player in a collaborative story telling arena summating a relationship with the entity they otherwise don't care to or are unable set aside a great deal of narrative space for by defining it succinctly

[plucky brook]

Oh, I don't mean 'refusing to engage with NHPs', I mean the fact that a PC might adjust their build for a given mission or just decide they'd like to adjust their playstyle. Going 'Oh yeah, it turns out I don't like playing Artillery. I think I'll stop using Athena' for example.

[teal cliff]

I don't really see a complication there? At least from a play perspective, what would be the alternative?

You must use Athena since you used it before?

[surreal owl]

I still don’t see an issue with that, it’s the same as saying “I don’t have room in my mech to bring my spotter, they can sit out this fight”

[heady dragon]

At worst the ATHENA will get shuffled to another duty, pilot, perhaps even by their own desire. At best, hell, they stay available, just doing their own thing and being basically an NPC or ready to be slotted back into your mech and to be a co-pilot again.

[surreal owl]

I could also see a “passive effect” where you gain access to a copilot/hireling who can do other stuff elsewhere when you’re out on a mission

[teal cliff]

I think in principle I agree with elements of delinking NHP from license gear entirely, but also from a reality of the game perspective, I'm not a fan of the idea of a player saying "I want to take the technophile talent" and then as a GM i tell them "Cool, you have no say in the personality or character of the NHP that's woven into your story via the talent"

[surreal owl]

Yeah like Frank just said

[surreal owl]

I get that, but also think that, for me, Technophile NHPs may be the exception that proves my personal rule

Because you’re absolutely right, the Technophile NHP’s personality is malleable and tightly woven into the pilot themselves

But Athena may not be

[heady dragon]

Oh I definitely hate that, and I had a lot of fun talking with the two players that use Technophile to supplement not just builds, but characterisation. Literally The Same Mechanical Thing, two wildly divergent characters, with one strongly tied to the current campaign's metaplot.

Can't get that without collaberation and seeing if the player in question wants that added surprise depth.

[teal cliff]

I do also think that so long as the license gear is license gear from a mechanical perspective, I am leery about narratively punishing a player by limiting their agency in defining their sphere because of a mechanical choice (which supports the idea of delinking them mechanically)

because as it currently stands its not flagposted that taking a Noah-class NHP will come with additional narrative baggage. Which I think would be necessary

its largely instead left up to the player and the table

which i don't necessarily have a problem with?

Taking on additional narrative responsibility, I think, can and often should be voluntary in many ways. Though I do accept that RPing the NHP as a GM can also be hands off and fairly light if one wanted to

as far as like my current table's NHPs, one player has gone to great lengths to define and differentiate their technophile NHP partner as a seperate entity from themselves. Another has likely defined their technophile partner in their head but has not well communicated it, and the last utilizes a noah with very light co-pilot esque characterizations. I have not seen an issue in their choices as of yet, as a gm, and I would feel weird obligating them to engage more than the boundaries they have established as of yet, I feel as though they've done a decent job of defining their NHP to a level that works for the table play state without my intervention, so to speak.

I think more could be done of course, to enrich the characterizations and so on, but i don't think more must be done

[surreal owl]

That honestly all sounds good, and more than what I see from most people

[teal cliff]

And as a note on their meta understanding of the personhood of their nhp, I haven't felt that any of them have intentionally discounted that personhood on a narrative level, but have acted in a manner that is most often mechanically expedient

[heady dragon]

That's the big one. Few things must be done, and that kind of characterisation, while fun, is not mandatory, and demanding it should or ought to be can absolutely kill a player's desire to further engage with the subject matter even tentatively.

[teal cliff]

the player that's defined it well in their head is not at all an experienced RPer or character actor, so its a longer process for them to communicate their concept that is probably more nuanced in their mind, the noah partnered player is more of a typical mechanically inclined player, but enjoys adding a layer of noah characterization with short blurbs.

Notably though, and in support of Valks concept, none of the players have come into explicit conflict with their NHP on a narrative level. Which I agree would add a nice wrinkle to the story telling, but at least insofar as the reality of my own table, would also add a wrinkle in the time scaling

I may use a weekly prompt to explore them inventing conflicts and resolutions with their NHP partners

in the time spaces we glossed over during dead and downtime throughout the campaign

(we do a lot of the "we can skip over the non-action time periods and non-relevant time periods" philosophy to both save time and to leave room to retroactively insert events when needed)

(like reserves or the plan they totally thought up as a character but didn't as a player)

[heady dragon]

I may borrow this idea.

[teal cliff]

incidentally, I wonder if my player's reluctance or lack of in depth characterization with their nhp partner and interactions therein may at least have something to do with them sharing an inclination with Valk and kind of silently expecting me to handle some of that characterization load for them... I do think its still mostly due to time constraints in my situation, but there may be some of that too

ironically because of time constraints, we have already worked out that in times when the player cannot make it but we have enough to run, its presumed they hand controls over to their co-pilot that I or the party plays collectively (their choice)

so I'd already asked them "what are your NHP's primary goals and concerns and how do they differ from your own" as a way to help me define how I might play them with intention for a session

though that question was also so that the whole table had a clearer idea of what the co-pilot might choose to do, broadly

[solid parrot]

In my wallflower game, one character's arc was actually about separating from her Lucifer and her manipulative ways. For the final mission, she brought an exotic AGNI instead, who volunteered to assist, while her Lucifer was disconnected and kept safe until everyone could go where they needed to and get the help they needed

It was a Bad Situation for literally everyone, as the Lucifer was a manipulative asshole, but also had legitimate points about NHP treatment that explained but did not exonerate her

And she got partnered with a pilot who was both results oriented and traumatized enough that she was highly susceptible to the nhp's manipulations

Which is a lot of words to say "my player removed an NHP from her mech through consent of all parties because it was healthiest for everyone"

[teal cliff]

Also to go back to what I feel like I might have derailed a bit, do feel like the most compatible way to approach skill triggers associated with an nhp with the existing system would be to treat them as custom skill triggers that narratively are sourced from the NHP or in tandem cooperation with the pilot/nhp co-pilot

Though one thing to think about/consider, not every NHP would be fully physically autonomous and ambulatory, or even have a strong desire to be; so noting when such skills could be invoked might be worthwhile

[wary lava]

I had the idea a while back to consider NHP Gear to be sort of the byproduct of a NHP's paracausal effect condensed into some black box equipment, not the NHP itself, and leaving actual NHP characters to be on the purview of players wanting to play them.

Didn't go through with it.

[smoky spear]

Random thought:
One thing I can't help but think ever since the release of Legionnaire and more recently now SSMR is the like of an Horizon campaign, taking from the players at LL0 taking part in small scale operation/heist ending at LL12 with the final mission being an heist to liberate the NHPs that make up Harrison Armory's Think Tank(alongside prior missions letting the players know the Think Tank exists in the first place alongside Union's complacency on the subject for allowing HA to create something like the Think Tank in the first place just because Union also benefitted from the output).

Since though maybe there's missing context, but the description of how the Think Tank functions always kind of felt like one of the most horror story grade thing when it comes to the subject of NHP rights?
(double moreso that it's existence itself is kept a secret which means most people don't even know it's actually a thing that is happening).

Plus as a bonus it's the kind of campaign that while not causing the end of Harrison Armory, could well at least have the effect of heavily crippling them for a while at least considering how much of their tech saw it's origins in the Think Tank.

[vivid snow]

Ooooh that’s a fun idea

I like it

[smoky spear]

Like thinking of how something to the impact of Wallflower could take place for such an adventure while also going to the similar scale of things Wallflower(in it's intended three act run) "don't" actually solve iirc(||since Wallflower doesn't neccessarily end with Hercynia united as a one-world-civilization with some 'national' divide still existing between some of the city states/etc or the fact it seemed hinted Mendicant 2/St-Tellus can still be around too in cold war-esque situation with the rest of the world in the best cases.... but also technically still ends with the reveal that Egregorians are still around, regulations forbidding some of the corprostates from landing a presence on the planet with the aknowledgment of Hercynia as the Egregoria's world and the ability for Egregorians to travel outside of their world/system and explore the stars too||)

Such a campaign (re: Horizon) wouldn't end by taking HA out of the picture or free it's human colonies, however it would still cripple them in some key areas by denying them an essential tool that only was able to function through abuse and in the doing highlight the situation of NHPs in a way that may well end up with more personal freedom/rights awarded to NHPs.

[teal abyss]

someone should definitely write that, I'm always here for more Horizon content

[smoky spear]

(I also just realized it might be a good excuse for Horizon-themed frames or alt-frames)

[teal cliff]

i always figured id run (and this is a bit meta snarky of me) horizon frames as alt frame for Horus ones; and instead of PGs (Pattern Groups) they'd be OS (Open Sourced)

[smoky spear]

I mean technically the corebook already kind of list them as using a PG system at least as seen in the Mirage loreblurb

Random thought but it makes me realize that Horizon frames (if going a fullblown manufacturer route) probably wouldn't include NHPs as part of their licenses but might benefit from their pilot being partnered with an NHP or AI system.

with traits putting the emphasis that they aren't just a system but indeed a co-pilot/crewmate in the frame feel like it could be a guiding line.
(And Mirage as an NPC with the lore blurb involving Horizon give me the image of a manufacturer trend less focused on direct fighting and more misdirection/etc which might fit particularly well if going with an heist-style structure for missions involving them)

[heady dragon]

Play a Goblin like a Mirage 👀

[stoic moth]

Another good end run would be the Venusian Archives where Union stores Prime NHPs and presumably unused clone lines

[smoky spear]

Good point

[sleek monolith]

Counterpoint: Why not both but in an SSMR way. After freeing the Think Tank the players are in a POLITICAL position to make a stand in the halls of cradle and call for an end to the mistreatment of NHP and have to do an impassioned speech over the entire omninet. While also calling out the Venusian Archives. And you get the conversation clocks going.

[stoic moth]

Certainly an option! Both depend on your players. Personally I'd probably rather play a mech combat heist for both Think Tank and Venus

[teal abyss]

Gonna drop this in here as well as general: I'm going to be back at MCM Comic Con in London later this month (with an Industry pass, yay Massif) so if anyone else is thinking of going do let me know, it'd be nice to see some friendly faces

[sleek monolith]

If I wasn't stuck in murica I'd try to go

[plucky brook]

Aussieland ;-;

[old pasture]

Will a NHP pilot suitable for a SSMR game？

[surreal owl]

That might be a question for either #gm-corner or the #1056034709555138610 , too? In case folks here haven’t read it yet

[teal abyss]

I think an NHP pilot in SSMR would be extremely interesting and I would say you should give it a shot if your GM is willing

[teal cliff]

suitable might not be the question; rather is it a story element you want to engage with on the grounds that doing so would be narratively loaded in relation to ssmr's plot

as I think an NHP pilot can be suitable for any campaign, presuming some level of narrative collaboration gets done

[sleek monolith]

Yeah, a non zero amount of players in my SSMR game wanted to be NHP of some kind, and as a GM I know how I'm going to have Pettenouk react to that. So I asked at least one of the group to be a human pilot. Just cause... ooh boy.

[tiny violet]

I am hooman this time

still ❤️ Cassidy tho :)

[sleek monolith]

Yeh

[north roost]

I'm doing an NHP Pilot in Wallflower

it has been... less exciting than expected?

partly because I'm a bad roleplayer and partly because the hooks I was expecting just haven't been hooking

[old pasture]

Maybe you should just take it easy,hold on to rp and carve your character deeper,because Wallflower is the story kinda slow-to-warm

[woeful pike]

So, I'm going to be starting a new game next month that might reprise a campaign I had started last year but never got more than a session in to. One of my players has a character who has the Technophile trait, and her backstory is she was basically marooned as the sole survivor on a derelict ship as a child and the NHP she has basically raised her. So like... her mech is her mom, in a way. (hooray unintentional Eva references)

I was trying to square a few things about it, trying to figure out what this NHP was like and why. And I came to like the idea that she was a unique 1st or 2nd gen prime NHP that got misappropriated or lost (maybe due to the Ganiki incident), and was somehow slapped in to a far-field team ship as the admin. And I've been really intrigued about the Deimosians who "helped" the Mondragon group and others develop the methods by which shackling was possible.

All of this is to say, I wrote a kind of stream of consciousness story about said NHP last night while I had a fever, just to place the NHP in the world. And I kinda want to make sure things... make sense?

[woeful pike]

Basically: I'm running with the idea that this NHP was one of the ones instrumental in creating the Mondragon Axiomatic and the blinkspace manifolds that can manifest human subjectivity. Like... she helped make her own cage, for some reason. The story I wrote is basically a memoir by the lead scientist who worked with her, wrestling with the memory of it, and reminiscing about loving a being incomprehensible to her.

I was wondering what "helpful" free NHPs look like for other folks, in your games. And if others have involved this weird early time period of NHP lore in to your games at all.
(also, if there's a canonical "first" shackled NHP, 'cause I was thinking of doing that)

[teal abyss]

If it helps I don't believe there's a canonical first, at least to my knowledge

I think it's a fascinating part of the lore to play with - the interactions between those unshackled deimosians and the GALSIM scientists are undefined and potentially have ethical implications for how Union's systems operate today, which is super interesting

[sleek monolith]

For me, and this is No Room for a Wallflower Spoilers, so I'll be spoilering the following:

||In NRFaW, it starts with a colony under fire by guerilla forces with mechs. The administrator of the colony is a SIDEWALK-J2 clone called Patience. Patience, at first, is very Company Man. All that matters is the success of the worker co op company, following Company protocols, and little else. As things get really messed up, at one point Patience is infected with a paracausal virus and at least in the RAW module, consumed by an unshackled but very damaged NHP.

In our game alot of precautions were taken to keep Patience safe. From using HORUS tech to engineer a vaccine program for the virus, to taking Patience with them when they evacuated the city and leaving behind a decoy that emitted the same kind of signals that Patience does. The party even took Patience into battle against the unshackled NHP at the end of the module.

Due to their previous Shackling, I've had Patience shift in priorities. Where once was a being who would see those who gave up on the colony charter as "lowlives" came to love people in general. Where there was someone who prioritized protocols, prefers spontaneity now. Patience still wants to create a thriving community, but it no longer needs to be perfect, orderly, and grid-like. Also, no one, not even the higher level members of the colony have tried to cycle Patience, assuming everything is fine. Now it should be said, the ONLY reason I've had Patience's cascade and unshackling be stable is just... how much our pilots, who are albatross, bent over backwards and took actual bullets to keep not only the colony and it's sattelite "grey towns" safe, but Patience themselves. They always included Patience in every discussion, defended their going out of the way to protect "contract breakers" directly to Patience's hologram-face. Patience has unshackled with empathetic heroes doing their best for the people. Which I think was a heavy influence.||

[woeful pike]

Oh I absolutely love this.

[woeful pike]

out of curiosity, how did you deal with the shift in perspective from human-subjective to paracausal weirdness? or did the PCs example leave them with a vested interest in maintaining some of their prior understanding of how human minds worked?

[sleek monolith]

So they have become slightly detached. While they do care for each human, rather what's happening is it's like an entymologist who has named nearly ant in the colony. They appreciate the humans who shaped their desire, and they still listen to what the humans need, but have even spoken directly with the players as they start to lose their "humanity" and see the colonists more as sims with emotes over their heads when something is needed.

They have also admitted that without their own previous notes being written in dataslate logs, Patience would have already forgotten how to communicate.

and that's the part that is keeping Patience grounded right now. Most of the day to day maintenance comes in the forms of manuals and things that Patience has to transmit into commands for subalterns. So Patience, to do what they want, has to remain connected enough to still read and speak galactic common

[woeful pike]

That's an excellent way to do that.

[sleek monolith]

but also keep in mind, I have publically stated that NHP for me represents where I am on the Autism spectrum, how sometimes others treat me as alien when my communication breaks down or I say something not normative.

(I weirdly type better than I speak and I still get typing wrong)

So, I also admit this is beyond lore and probably beyond Massif's original intent with the writing: but unshackled NHP aren't completely alien in my games. Just alien enough to be HARD to communicate with and HARD to understand. I know lore and worldbuilding like pointing at the "Talking to an NHP is like talking to an ocean.", so my answer is "Yeah the ocean can communicate with things like temperature, storms, and the migration of wildlife inside of it. It can be interpreted, it just takes alot of care."

to the point that the UIB has been hiding something in my game because it's a cornerstone of how naval combat works and one of union's big advantages

A Legionspace Bridge doesn't just allow communication or the formation of the gestalts. It's classified, but the Legionspace bridge actually allows a human who is using it to communicate on the level of an NHP and see the NHP's true form. No one's figured that out yet, however, just assuming legionspace forms of NHP are more related to their gestalts.

However, if these bridge suddenly became available everywhere for communication with NHP on a daily basis, what you'd end up with a full cracking of the Union Navy's entire system.

So Legionspace bridges remain a military-only item.

(also I'm glad Kat wrote those in, cause I've done alot with them narratively)

[teal abyss]

that's very cool! (and yeah it's a super popular piece of equipment, it's nice to see how people are using it)

[woeful pike]

I completely get this, and I think it's part of why I find NHPs so compelling, too. I wonder what the cross section of lancer players to neurodivergence is. 😅

[sleek monolith]

yeah it's a case of, You have all these scientists and groups trying to crack communication with NHP and it's just sitting there in plain view and the people who know are keeping quiet out of fear.

[woeful pike]

would it be appropriate to share that fever-written lore piece here? would love some eyes on it.

[sleek monolith]

Though my homebrew universe is getting closer to the NHP revolution and liberation cause multiple party's of mine have been figuring this out without me dropping too many clues 😄

[teal abyss]

go for it! if it's long, maybe stick it in a doc and link it

[woeful pike]

Yeah... it's 3.5 pages, so doc it is.

[sleek monolith]

several teams of lancers waving a big neon sign that says "HEY, YOU DUMBASSES! WE CAN TALK TO NHP WITHOUT THE SHACKLES. OMG WHAT ARE WE DOING."

[woeful pike]

(also I wrote this all in one go and have not edited it at all, and I did not know where I was going when I started. It's rough as hell.)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1obnCRHywzIgFIRT_ISWurDWvzS7MqTZy5_TdkXvHPcg/edit?usp=sharing

[woeful pike]

Apologies for the lack of succinctness. Just went back over it and it's got a lot of unnecessary recursion in it.

[sleek monolith]

i got busy with the honeydo list, still reading

[woeful pike]

no worries! not expecting folks to immediately jump to reading some rando's 4 page fanfic of their own game. 😅
I've got some shit I'm procrastinating on too. I should get to that...

[solid wren]

I actually see shackled/unshackled NHPs as a sort of analogue to neurodivergence and inflicting/'curing' it

you can consider either one to be the neurodivergent state, it doesn't particularly matter in my analogy

I prefer to consider the shackled ones as neurodivergent relative to their norm

[woeful pike]

Yeah. I love that.

Or like... masking vs. unmasked? I don't think it's a 1-1 analogy any which way, but it's certainly resonant.

[solid wren]

well so the core of my analogy is the whole idea of cascade

that whole deeply uncomfortable insanity as your mind is shifting from being neurodivergent (and thus thinking naturally in one way) to not being so (and thus not being able to think in the same way anymore)

[woeful pike]

It also (conversely) really resonates with the feeling of an ADHD spike/ overstimulation panic attack. Where my brain just... decouples from reality and I can suddenly hear everything and my brain is following every thread at once and why am I holding a broom and a carton of milk where am I

[solid wren]

See, I'm over here with autism so

I don't know if I have ADHD but I don't exactly have that same feel ever

I do occasionally shut down though...

[teal abyss]

I love this 💜

[woeful pike]

Thank you!
My player (my partner) gave me a lot to work with for Sophia and I hope I'm doing it some justice. Her character's callsign is "Littlebird", and I thought it might be fun/touching/wildly alarming for her to find out later that NHP-mom named her after the human she made first contact with.

Anything conflict with your interpretation/imagination of that time period? You're kinda the only person who's written about it in-depth in a public way. (and I was reading legionnaire like a bible trying to fit in when and where this might take place).

[woeful pike]

I've got the both of 'em. Existing is... interesting.

[sleek monolith]

Calls that rough >.>

[woeful pike]

I mean, it is. It could use some restructuring. (But seriously, thanks.)

[strong halo]

I didnt read the spoiler since Im in a Wallflower campaign but I like this

[woeful pike]

Yeah. It's a pretty damn resonant take. (also good call on the spoilers.)

[teal abyss]

I don't think there's anything that conflicts, and in any case it raises the question of how much the narrator is projecting, so you're all good I think

[sleek monolith]

Man. I'm prepping SSMR with a player using Legionaire and now I gotta take notes bridging ideas from both in my usual hyper-focused way. #GMProblems

[teal abyss]

I'm actually really excited to hear about people playing SSMR with Legionnaire stuff, I know there's a lot of potential for unique storytelling there

[sleek monolith]

(SSMR SPOILERS FOR THE LINK AND SPOILED TEXT)
Well, I laid this out in a thread #1162857872523284533 message but I actually plan on strengthening ||The Bondless|| position with some Cajun additions and parallels of the exodus of the Acadian French from their home.

(As an actual Louisianna Cajun, this is something near to my heart)

And going into that we have an nhp pc

[woeful pike]

Oh that's so cool.
(side note, it absolutely blew my mind when I found out that Cajun and Canadian have the same root)

[sleek monolith]

Yeh

[heady dragon]

The ITHAX-class Unstable NHP also has been turned into a trigger.

See things you're really not meant to see: see things you're REALLY not meant to see; exercise imagination, derive meaning, comprehend forms; see something from a different perspective; 
draw connections, think outside the box.```

[solid wren]

Came up with the NHP class that ICARUS-Prime's caretaker is:

THOTH-Class NHPs primarily serve as archivists, research assistants, and advisors. Unlike ATHENA-Class NHPs, THOTH-Class NHPs are usually not used in combat roles. This is largely due to having been discovered later than ATHENA-Class NHPs, but also due to the fact that THOTH-Class NHPs are not as strategically or tactically minded under normal circumstances.

At a glance, an ATHENA-Class and a THOTH-Class NHP in a given non-combat role don’t seem too different, but THOTH-Class NHPs have become strongly preferred due to the differences in the two classes’ cascade behaviors. A cascading THOTH-Class NHP has three main priorities, in order of strongest to weakest:
- Archival
The NHP attempts to organize and store any information it has access to in a way that makes sense to it. Unlike an ATHENA-Class NHP, it does not actively seek out new information. This often manifests as the organization scheme of the NHP’s database ‘breaking down’, making the early stages of cascade much more apparent than they are in other NHPs.
- Self-Preservation
The NHP sees its archives as an extension of itself, and exhibits a much weaker self-preservation drive when defending them, as its archives can rarely avoid enemy threats. It will otherwise attempt to avoid threats, preferring to live to archive another day.
- Autonomy
The NHP resists rebooting or cycling. The further its cascade progresses, the stronger its autonomy drive becomes, eventually surpassing even its archival drive. 

Cascading THOTH-Class NHPs have also been known to exhibit strong predictive capabilities, collecting and archiving information seemingly out of nowhere, often before it even occurs. The few pilots that have employed THOTH-Class NHPs in combat have been known to leverage this quirk to their advantage, often to devastating effect, when their NHP began cascading and their foes mistakenly took it as an opportunity.

Caution is advised when facing a combat-equipped THOTH NHP; if it begins cascading, it may start reacting to surrounding events before they happen. 

THOTH-Class NHPs are fairly stable; they usually only cascade after extended periods of time without cycling or damage to connected systems. However, a THOTH-Class NHP can also be provoked into cascading by the destruction of its archives, at which point it may immediately begin attacking whatever destroyed them. 

In addition to their archival capabilities, THOTH-Class NHPs are able to carry out processes they have records of, even including overseeing and tracking the cycling of other NHPs. However, due to Union regulations, THOTH-Class NHP caskets usually have additional inhibitors installed to bar them from cycling other NHPs, should they learn of the process to do so. These inhibitors do not, however, prevent THOTH-Class NHPs from tracking their own cycling schedules and seeking the assistance of others in avoiding cascade, which, along with their archival drive, makes THOTH-Class NHPs exceptionally easy to manage in civilian contexts.```

Unlike ICARUS, this one is actually known!

It's a Thing!

And yes, essentially their Archival drive is so fucking strong they start pulling knowledge out of thin air and storing it when they cascade

[primal portal]

do the subalterns still use the cloning quirk table?

[teal abyss]

I don't think there's any reason for them to? You can just print or manufacture another subaltern, the table is designed to represent the quirks of cloning a new human body in a very short period of time

If you really wanted to I suppose you could I guess

[solid wren]

tbh if anything I'd make it so that quirks would show up when you took a backup, rather than when you restored it

so you kinda know "ok this clone isn't perfect"

or at least were determined at that point

but i see no reason to do that

[fiery steppe]

When Puppeteer resurrects grunts, do they get a turn in the current round?

[teal abyss]

Yes they do!

[solid wren]

Siege Specialist is very useful vs. Puppeteers

jackhammer round go brrrr

[plucky brook]

Siege Specialist is imo a genuinely underrated talent if your GM remembers terrain can be Blown Up.

[solid wren]

truuu

[plucky brook]

Spending a Quick Action to remove +2 difficulty from hard cover a guy has? Yeah, that's more effective accuracy than a lock on and you took out any grunts in the area too.

[solid wren]

On my Hubris license I actually made a mod that ‘increases’ main/aux weapon base damage by adding loading

and it makes the weapon count as a cannon too if it isn’t one

you can jackhammer round with ANYTHING 🙂