In Golden Flame

[digital raven]

Realized I could introduce the Enhanced Combat reserve Finishing Move since my players' cover for Killer Sound is Xtreme Mech Combat League, mech professional wrestlers. I love it when a stupid idea comes together

[toxic stump]

Our group just started Chapter 2 and despite him appearing for like, 2 minutes, one of my players liked Rat so much that she did a fanart of him:

[vocal relic]

Beautiful

[rough bluff]

Also, you know that moment when you're going over an intricate and tactically fascinating battle @fallen geyser wrote, and you're contemplating the extremely complex map it implies, and your only thought as a cartographer is... "Who hurt you?" 🙂

[quaint pebble]

looks great, centrally positioned wheel means its rolling mechanic should get some use

[rough bluff]

That's also why I put it on a hill, but that was more just my head canon. 🙂

[prime spoke]

What do you use to make your maps?

[fallen geyser]

So these fights originally took place in very boring industrial settings, and I think it was @amber viper who suggested to me that "hey, this takes place in Space Las Vegas, couldn't you set them somewhere more interesting?"

And so I did

I also had an idea for a fight that takes place on the casino floor of The Gift-Bronze

[fallen geyser]

But it didn't fit anywhere

[amber viper]

A casino floor would be a little too cramped as well I reckon : p

But yeah, the theme park and concert are definitely glow ups, they stand on par with the sheer awesomeness of sunbird on the other thread of the investigation now.

[quaint pebble]

it was kind of funny for my players to do Sunbird One first, have a gruelling time of the boss fight... and then ||fight some giant animatronics and participate in a mech concert|| as the second half of the mission

[tame tide]

Player: "we just had our first boss fight and it's only half way through the mission? What the hell is the second half"
GM: "find out >:)"
GM prepping: ||wait so the second half has "quick action to dance" and "ogre that tells riddles, knight cataphract and an elite dragon?"||

[dense urchin]

i wanna see what something like a barb or tuga dancing would look like

[tame tide]

Barbarossa hits the griddy 6 seconds before annihilating a neighbourhood

[dense urchin]

OC dance into 1 Apocalypse Rail

[fallen geyser]

The Cataphract's horse is a motorbike

[quaint pebble]

my players loved the ||riddle ogre, out of character
in character one hated the fact that the rest of the team were answering riddles (for no reason, they knew it wasn't doing anything helpful) over the radio so much they specified that they wanted to sever the voice box upon inflicting structure damage||

[tame tide]

Even better!

[rough bluff]

I hope you know I love them and I was being tongue in cheek. 🙂 That ||Ferris Wheel|| almost broke me, though. 🙂

[tight pier]

what riddles did the ogre tell

[quaint pebble]

I had a webpage open called "101 riddles for children"

[dense crescent]

I used "riddles for toddlers" once in a D&D game. My players were still stumped.

[wild flame]

something about puzzles in ttrpgs turns otherwise excellent puzzle solvers into the least competent team you've ever seen

[heady vale]

"well, actually, my character is just bad at riddles" /lh

[rough bluff]

I used to have a player (and a roomate) that I thought was "slow." And I am ashamed to admit I assumed it was because of his intelligence. His sister once exclaimed "Isaiah is the slowest person I know. He operates on an entirely different timescale." I assumed she was being generous. Then one day I did a riddle dungeon. I gave the first riddle. Isaiah took thirty or forty seconds, then very deliberately said the correct answer, while the rest of the players were still stumped. Second riddle. Same thing. Third riddle, fourth, fifth. All of them, thirty to forty seconds. If you asked that man his NAME, it took him thirty to forty seconds to produce an answer. It was then I realized his sister was being literal. He was as smart as a whip. He LITERALLY operated on a different time scale than everyone else I've ever met. Slow was in no way a euphemism. He was just in a different speed gear.

His showers could top a half hour.

[cloud reef]

We did the ||Grand Aurora club|| fight last night. One of our players overcharged and stressed just to ||dance and max out the hype clock|| just for the meme on the last turn. And I, in an everest, popped CP on the last turn of the last round just for the free boost so I could full tech puppet systems ||the last Hive out of the CZ|| because I'd been rolling so bad that I didn't trust a quick tech + overcharge would be enough to let me hit 10 edef (and I was right, I needed the accuracy). We won by the skin of our teeth with one everest fully destroyed in that CZ and another at half structure.

We also never technically ||scanned that CZ to confirm that it was the right one and had a 50/50 shot, choosing the one that the NPCs were more heavily defending.||

[tender seal]

My players never even attempted the objective in that mission, they tried to wipe out all enemies before the time limit was up and only barely killed the last enemy with their last move of the last round

They had a really strong opening that they just rolled terribly afterwards to follow it up

[prime spoke]

do any of the enemies in act one have like, canon names for their mechs like some of the NPCs do?

[rough bluff]

Me here at last on the ground

[wispy quail]

this might be entirely on me, but: which VTT is this settings page in one of the GM Resources links for?

i was hoping to find something that would help with Roll20 specifically, but this does not seem to be it

[austere prism]

Foundry

[wispy quail]

aw dang

does everyone who uploads maps for IGF use Foundry?

[austere prism]

not everyone, but most people do

[wispy quail]

$50 is a lot of money for me, who GMs very infrequently, so i'm basically stuck with Roll20

[vocal relic]

Can your players help pitch in?

That's what I did

[austere prism]

Foundry isn't just a monetary expense tho. You need to spend time learning it, you need to figure out hosting.... roll20 is easier in that regard, even if it is worse in other ways

[wispy quail]

there's another one of the maps in the gm resources page where I really want to use the hex map but I just can't figure out how big it's supposed to be / what the hex scale is supposed to be

being able to know the hex width in pixels would be really helpful but it doesn't seem to be a nice round number?

oh it appears to be scaled to a cell height of 100px, which would probably be very helpful in Foundry but is very confusing in Roll20 because they only let you configure cell width, not height

[toxic stump]

Also, Foundry and Roll20 do their hexagons slightly differently. Which means that even if you find the best setup, it misalign just a bit.

[wild flame]

Roll20 dm here, I just manually drag the map edges till the map grid aligns with the roll20 grid

[rough bluff]

That's how I used to do it too.

[wispy quail]

the problem I was having is that i couldn't get the roll20 map to have the right number of hexes

i eventually fixed it with trial and error but i'm not sure how you make the "manually drag the map edges" work

[rough bluff]

Is this all for your actual play?

[wild flame]

• Make roll20 page huge
• Align top left corner hex's upper left line to r20 grid
• Stretch/squish horizontally until everything looks good
• Stretch/squish vertically until everything looks good
• Change r20 page size to not have 40 hexes of whitespace (just get it within .5-1 hex of the map size, then set the page color to something dark. You'll have a bit of a border but it won't be noticeable.)
• Turn off r20 grid

Hold alt while doing any dragging/stretching/squishing so you don't snap to grid

[wispy quail]

once i figured out my process it doesn't seem all that much more involved than that

and it has the bonus of crisper looking maps

the only real downside is it requires you to actually count hexes

[quaint pebble]

I admire the dedication, if I was running on roll20 I think I would probably have just made square grid maps 😅

[rough bluff]

Oh I think there are a lot of downsides, the Foundry has a lot more support for Lancer features from what I understand, but what's important is what you're comfortable with.

[wild flame]

It is exceptionally funny that you say that given I'm using your maps

[rough bluff]

Heh.

[wispy quail]

yeah the map that i spent entirely too long trying to fit to shape was in fact a jacquerel map

at the very least all your maps are the same shape, so i can use the same values for all of them

[quaint pebble]

i am sorry that you are suffering from my success :p

[wispy quail]

now i just need to figure out what Size these asteroids are supposed to be

[wild flame]

Counterpoint: I am succeeding from suffering

Sure I gotta do finicky grid alignment, but I don't have to make my own maps

[rough bluff]

I sent you a DM, but feel free to ignore it. I won't be offended. 🙂 It sounds like you've gotten over your biggest hurdle.

[quaint pebble]

these are what my "the first combat" scenes ended up looking like (you can figure out which one they picked) but also obviously feel free to mark everything totally differently, I was also running my first session of Lancer at the time and I have no idea how the map we didn't end up running would have felt

[wispy quail]

okay yeah fair enough, looks very doable!

[rough bluff]

I should finish ||Shoo the Vultures|| sometime tonight or tomorrow. Anyone have requests for my next map before I start another one for my own prep?

Remember to ask for something you need at least two weeks out, ideally.

[heady topaz]

ran 10-2, here's the token I used for ||Sunbird|| if ya wanna use it

[heady vale]

if you havent, you should put your tokens in the community folder as a drive folder link!

[heady topaz]

I've mostly been using stuff from the folder!

[heady vale]

ohhhhh ye

[heady topaz]

This was the first mini I made bcz I wanted ||Sunbird|| to be an absolute unit

didn't even have to do any kitbash or customizing outside of Retrograde, this mini's options are damn fine

I did make a large batch of Caustic minis tho

so I might make a big folder of IGF Customs

[wispy quail]

hm. i was thinking of having Siren run the team through a combat readiness simulation if i need an in-character way to do a warmup get-used-to-the-VTT fight

but she's not available until Beat 6

i guess the obvious answer is to make it Shelly, but she gives off the vibe like she would be too busy for that

the crack idea is to make it The Gamemaster (the Athena-class from the Mission 3 downtime table)

[thorn hinge]

Could just say Siren's about to get cycled and does this just beforehand

[wispy quail]

actually hold on; the book only says that the Dragon's Tooth is undergoing repairs

so in theory Siren could just be hanging out bored out of her mind with nothing to do

[wispy quail]

the description in the book says "just about to come off a cycle" so I think i could just push that back by like. a week.

the next scheduled cycle is in six years so shifting that timeline one week earlier probably isn't going to matter

[tame tide]

Ooo, is that enemy ship template on the drive or anywhere else? Kinda wanna nab it cos it looks better than what I have!

Also I'm writing session 0s for my players for IGF, what dumb thing could Steele have done to drop his stocks by 20%, to just be mentioned in a background off hand comment

This is mostly to satisfy me and see some dumb stuff that he could do

[amber viper]

There's the energy drink fiasco mentioned where he caused basically a mass poisoning

[fast parrot]

Some sort of accidental snub of his investors?
Inciting a strike because of something he said?
Something really cringe on the internet?

[austere prism]

given his actions in Act 1, it was probably something involving mech fighting

like he was trying to do an XFL thing

[quaint pebble]

I think it should be in my tokens folder on the drive yeah

[quaint pebble]

as foreshadowing for later, maybe a disastrous attempt to buy out the hellfire league or a bunch of its mech pilots or something

dropping a lot of money into promoing the competitive league entry of a comp/con based on his own fighting style showing off Impact Dynamics tech which just gets bodied instantly

[austere prism]

he went on stage, showing off the latest ID chassis: the UtahRaptor, a supposedly "hardcore" version of the Raptor 4, with better armor, better agility and better systems integrity. He promised that it'd be capable of surviving sustained fire from standard AMRs - only for the demonstration shot to go straight through the coldcore, initiating an immediate meltdown.

[digital raven]

He got scammed into thinking he could "buy the omninet" and lost 90 percent of his active cash reserves into a anonymous bank reroute

[heady topaz]

Smh couldn't even advertise it to Manticore pilots bcz even Manticore can take quite a lot of punishment to reach point blank explody range

[shrewd sorrel]

Our SRT's mechs got a glowup
one of my players is real good at kitbashing

[quaint pebble]

nice

[heady topaz]

Yooooohohohoo

[shrewd sorrel]

They all got cat ears now

[wild flame]

These are sick, who did them?

[shrewd sorrel]

Nikolai

[thorn hinge]

Also. It's Calliope.

[tight pier]

"BRO DONT CYCLE HER YET SHE HAS TO GO TO THE FLEETCOMM TOURNAMENT TOMORROW"

[vague fog]

Does anyone have a map of Hell's Gate? Between each beat / combat in mission 1 there seems to be a few days in between and I'm trying to come up with some filler things the players could do in the time being, and would like a map of hells gate for it but I cant seem to find one

[thorn hinge]

I made this forever ago as an abstract layout

[vague fog]

👍 Thank you

[rough bluff]

Hey, @fallen geyser, I'm gathering my thoughts for my ||Denial of Service|| map, and since my goal is always to put out professional- or near-professional quality maps that others in the community can use, I try REALLY hard to make sure I don't take any liberties with lore. ||(Like all the moving objects in my first two maps had to be small enough to fit on the ships that the people deploying them would have used and had to have logical ballistic trajectories).|| Anyway, can I have a ||dome ||on ||Denial of Service||? Pretty please? I want to put a ||HORUS anomaly|| in it that ||HORUS ||didn't intend to create and just sort of shrugged and cordoned off. I really want an excuse to put a ||dome ||on one of these maps. 🙂

Obvjously, I won't be heartbroken if you say no. Your vision of the location comes first. Just ever-so-slightly disappointed. 🙂

[fallen geyser]

Okay, so like

Yes

But I don't know why you'd need my permission to do so

[rough bluff]

Because you wrote it, and I would like to make maps that you'd feel comfortable recommending.

(I'm a game designer myself. I get really touchy around taking liberties with other people's work).

Anyway, thanks. Cool. My future sf eldritch horror thanks you.

I love the fact that I look at half these battlefields in this adventure and think, ||"All sorts of shit on this map should be moving from round to round."|| Also, as the person trying to implement that, I hate the fact that I look at half of these battlefields and think, ||"All sorts of shit on this map should be moving from round to round."|| 🙂

[frail kayak]

I have two more artworks of my SRT in their Casino-Heist getup to share!
(see the replied post for the first three)

MÍMIR-30_FFT_47b, callsign "Teach" (he/him)

Friendly neighborhood paracausal horror
Mímir class research NHPs are an artifact of the SecComm era, designed to operate in a near-cascade state for maximum computation power, but requiring an aggressive cycling schedule.

After a scientific mission to Hercynia ended in tragedy, Teach escaped from his SecComm Far Field Team along with a xenobiologist now known as Jitterbug Denim. Together, they became "pasters", waiting out the revolution in nearlight time-dilation. Having seen Union at its worst, they never fully integrated back into ThirdComm society, and instead maintained their Cosmopolitan lifestyle. After 500 real-time years, they found their way to Calliope and joined the SRT. Although the details were erased by his SecComm handler, something that happened down on Hercynia stabilized his subjectivity, and has eliminated the need for regular cycling.

Teach is bubbly, curious, outgoing, and helpful. His cheerful demeanor means he is frequently mistaken for a Comp/Con while inhabiting his subaltern, which is both an advantage and a hindrance. (His player didn't know about the quirks inherent to Calliope's Comp/Cons at first, and arrived at "happy-go-lucky helpful robot" persona independently). His trusting nature means that Gigi is able to manipulate him into embarking on amusing misadventures, like using his knowledge of chemistry to teach the Outlanders how to cook better drugs.

Pilots "The Marvelous Complexity of a Single Mote of Dust" a Gorgon whose dual Vorpal Guns and Scylla-controlled Kraul rifle let him use Field Analyst to its maximum potential.

Bonus sprite for (Mission 2)||Killer Sound||, although it's quickly becoming his main sprite

Ace (Derogatory) (he/him)

Suave Mech Gladiator
An up-and-coming fighter in the Hellfire League, popular due to his easygoing, charming demeanor that contrasts his fast and aggressive fighting style. Joined the SRT because he'll try anything once, and it turned out to be habit-forming.
Lets the other SRT members direct his fan club. Jitterbug has printed suggestive T-Shirts, and gives them away to nearly anyone they meet. Certain influential members of the Knights of the Dark Core have been seen wearing his merch in public.
Has a friendly rivalry with Howl, he even managed to take a match off of her in the preliminaries. She took it in stride, and sought his help organizing an impromptu game of Nestorian Football with the Hell's Gate Militia.
Has obtained the Golden Hand, and is actively seeking its counterpart.

Pilots "Something from Nothing", a Fomorian Frame Blackbeard with Zheng parts and the Golden Hand

And once again, bonus sprite for (Mission 2)||Killer Sound||

[rough bluff]

dddddwww.0d

[wild flame]

cat?

[austere prism]

Avatar/post combo

[rough bluff]

Well, I was going in to type, "I ❤️ this so hard" and my keyboard was disconected. Then my phone was also lost and I had to "find my" while I was up fixing it, and that made my phone fall down behind my bed while I was digging for the sound, and then i sat on the newly plugged in keyboard trying to get the phone.

Let's go with "Cat."

Working from bed today because I'm out of one of the two meds that make life bareable and I can't sit up.

[frail kayak]

I'm sorry to hear that, and thank you

[rough bluff]

Thanks. Not to get too personal, but I have anklosing spondilysis and ... you know what the next bit could be a whole trigger thing for people with disabilities like myself or addictions, so I'm going to spoiler the rest of this post. I don't want to offend or distress. Read only if you want to hear about my struggles with pain.

|| I don't like to load up on opioids to get through the day, like I used to before I started seeing a rheumatologist. Luckily, I seem to be one of those people that opiates actually work as advertised for. If you don't know what that means, I don't mean to say that the opioid crisis isn't EVERYTHING the documentaries and news reports make it out to be. It's horrible, and I have friends who take any opioid and it's instantly addictive, no matter how much pain they are in. But you know that party line where they say, "As long as the opioid is killing pain, it has no addictive properties," ? That line of bullshit? I think they got away with saying that for so long because with SOME percentage of people that's true, and they had data to back that up. And thank all the gods and fates, I'm one of them. I can take 12 on a bad day and not feel a single narcotic or addictive effect (the pain just subsides a bit), then go months without taking a pill with no withdrawal. In comparison, my friend Jen takes the same pill and tells me she still hurts just as bad, she just doesn't care. So...instantly addictive for her. The downside for me is to make sure I never become addicted I have to make sure that however much I take, I'm still in significant pain after I'm done taking the dose. If I ever actually get ride of the pain, I'll almost certainly overshoot the mark and start feeling the narcotic effects. The moment I take the any amount that causes the slightest tingling in my extremities, I have to stop. And if I do that twice in one week, I have a personal rule that I have to go hard cold turkey for at least two weeks after, no matter how much pain that means, because I know I am SUPER prone to addiction, and if I ever take enough to flip the addiction switch the whole thing will spiral out of control and there will be no more of this "Going weeks without taking a pill because everything is manageable" crap.||

Let me know if posting that was inappropriate and I'll delete it.

[rough bluff]

I'm sad that almost no one will ever run ||Railroaded||, because I'm getting more and more stoked to make that map.

[frail kayak]

yeah, it's a fun one

[quaint pebble]

yeah it does feel like a bit of a shame that my group didn't go there, but on the other hand it made the timing of when we finished the mission with relation to Christmas work out pretty well 😅

[rough bluff]

Also, maybe if there was a map, more people would run it just for fun.

But that's three-months-from-now-Bob's problem. 🙂 Unless one of the people I've been helping with maps needs it first.

[rough bluff]

I've uploaded ||Shoo the Vultures||. I probably could have just flipped ||Spitting Distance|| over and righted the text boxes and called it done, but that would have been 1) lazy, and 2) not lore accurate, and you all deserve better than that. Nothing but love for y'all. Also, this just in, I might be a little drunk on endorphins right now, so I'm going to take a nap.

[heady topaz]

you should either get this pinned by Vex or post it in the communitiy floder along with ur maps

[rough bluff]

Okay, I'll add it as a line item in the google doc.

Done, I was in there updating the date on my folder anyway.

[vague fog]

How would you guys recommend I share the data file at the end of the "Denial of Service" combat? Theres a lot of back and forth between many people and it seems hard to read outloud, should I just clip it and share it with my players?

[rough bluff]

Make a handout? The question is mainly the best form for the handout to be in, image or text, I think.

I was going to make a handout. I should be prepping that combat in the next few days.

[dim pelican]

I clipped it and shared with the players. Just said that they found the chat logs 👍 They had a really fun time just reading through it themselves.

[vague fog]

Thats what I was thinking about doing. Im gonna read the message that DRIVETRAIN sent to S1GN4L but the chat logs I can just let them read themselves

[dim pelican]

I even clipped and shared that with them! I figured that both were something that the players might want to come back to at a later date so it didn't hurt to add it to their notes. That's just my opinion though 🙂

[thorn hinge]

I recreated the logs in HTML and made them as foundry journals. In narrative, Kraken pulled this, the telemetry package, and the "yo check it" message off of a partially fragged drive on S1GN4LS platform.

I just shared the logs and let the players read them on their own

[rough bluff]

Is the code for that in one of your links in the doc?

@thorn hinge

[thorn hinge]

I hesitated to do that because it's content from the book, but it probably should be fine. I'll add it soon. Probably tomorrow, I really should be logging off for the night.

[rough bluff]

I feel for you. I just took a nap myself. And I see your point. Do what your conscience tells you. I can reproduce it in Word then copy/paste.

[tame tide]

Worst case scenario if you don't wanna add stuff straight from the book you could just do the template and make it empty :P

[quaint pebble]

Got my map for Beat 13 up in the community folder, however if you've been following along reasonably close behind my group it's quite possible you are going to overtake us in January given what everyone's availability is 😅

[rough bluff]

What program do you use, BTW?

[quaint pebble]

Dungeondraft

[rough bluff]

Cool. It does a think or two with lighting that isn't easy with Campaign Cartographer. I was just curious.

[quaint pebble]

yeah I haven't messed with the lighting options that much until this one but it works pretty nicely I think

[shrewd sorrel]

I fixed the chart

[quaint pebble]

My players all got their LL2 tokens done
(Viceroy CQB, Vlad "setting itself on fire", Everest Sniper, Minotaur Hacker)

that's a somewhat odd way for discord to have decided to arrange those images but, ill let them cook i guess

[frail kayak]

I respect the LL2 Everest

[heady topaz]

LL2 Everest is a mood. One of my players has stated(paraphrased) several times "Being able to fire a Krakatoa Thermobaric Flamethrower three times in a single turn is amazing".

The Genghis may be a weapon with a history of horrific actions during war, but ([Cone 5][1Energy, 4 Burn]x3) is ([Cone 5][1Energy, 4 Burn]x3)

[frail kayak]

I'm a PC in a different campaign, and I was torn between copying Vex's Tortuga build, or just going mimic gun Everest at LL2. (I went with the Tortuga, no regrets.)

[heady topaz]

I wanna play again so bad

I've only gotten to play Big Sal for a bit, and I wanna play with more stuff

[frail kayak]

yeah, I pretty much agree with your assessment. maybe try turning the grid opacity down?

[rough bluff]

I'm at 25%. I'll do that test too and see how it looks. It's possible I run with it low and recommend that people use the gridless maps but with the grid on but turned invisible. I haven't tried it, but I bet Lancer runs fine with the grid on, but you can't see it. I almost never count hexes manually anyway.

Since all my maps so far use the exact same grid settings, it's really easy to apply the grid blind if you've done any other map.

[thorn hinge]

This is the superior map for sure.

[rough bluff]

It would be unprofessional to label a feature on a map "Typical HORUS bullshit." or "Run-of-the-mill HORUS Time-Space Fuckery" right? That feels unprofessional.

[quaint pebble]

well i would say that the tone of specifically this location is not necessarily one of professionalism

[rough bluff]

Oh, if it was an in-universe label, I'd totally do it. 🙂

Okay, I've managed to create lightning walls in photoshop. I can stop messing around for the night.

[lilac tartan]

#oc-cantina message This cantina-oc-prompt is suitable for IGF pilots on account of it discribe a circumstance that is similar to the one in the novel FIVE MINUTES…and undoubtly this circumstance is possible to happen in Calliope
How will your pilots get their five minutes?

[wispy quail]

thinking to myself about which NPCs might recognize the iconography of a (homebrew) mid-sized Long Rim mercenary outfit

[austere prism]

Shelly, because she's filtering their ads before Jerry sees them
Zin, because Militia Commander
Calamity, because former pirate

[wispy quail]

an OC of mine that I'm adding in as a minor NPC is a former mercenary pilot, and if the PCs do her sidequest in mission 1 she rewards them with challenge coins

[wispy quail]

oh huh good thoughts!

[thorn hinge]

That reminds me, end of ch5/act1, if my players still haven't come up with a name other than "SRT", I'm going to have Siren pick one and mint some challenge coins for them. Which will probably turn into something I look into actually having made IRL to give my players.

[maiden ferry]

have shelly make a name

better yet, have her give them a deadline or they get a food name

[wild flame]

The printed loaves

[digital raven]

Oh, I gotta get a cat named Printloaf on screen now

[maiden ferry]

or like, fireteam baked beans

(though it might be funnier if, given any leeway, shelly would name EVERYTHING printloaf)

[rough bluff]

SOM (Save Our Mechs)

[thorn hinge]

Calamity's player suggested Cerberus Squad at one point, to play off the whole Hell's Gate thing, before stopping because "aw shit that's the hellhound base isn't it"

[heady topaz]

I was just reminded that I established after the printer incident, my group was given the name Fireteam Sloppy Joes

bcz Shellywas annoyed with them

[thorn hinge]

||After mission 5, they might have earned that name tho||

[toxic stump]

The player of our Baronnies former noble told me that her character had a crush on Rat, because it was nice to meet someone so laid out and she could be herself with. My reaction was "Oh that's just like Sk8ter Boy by Avril Lavigne!". I think that caused psychic damage.

[lilac tartan]

My group's name is given by a player who troubled by something irl and have to quit our game🙁
But his idea for naming our squad is good and we just using now:Gate's Hell.
I am a Ace Combat fan and my PC is leader of the squad,so in some circumstance my PC is Gate 1.Other folks are Gate 2 to 5 in this way.

[dense crescent]

man's life is turn based

[amber viper]

Between the two groups I've GMed, we've had the Hell Riders and the Starfire Team (references to members of the teen titans nonwithstanding)

[frail kayak]

I made mine come up with a stage name for their team on the spot in ||Killer Sound||. They settled on "Ton of Bricks" (Mission 4 spoilers)||because they are fighting against someone named Feather||

[maiden ferry]

what combat is this again? I'm guessing its the signal combat?

[rough bluff]

Yes.

[maiden ferry]

interesting, I dont remember a horus anomaly in that fight

[rough bluff]

There isn't by default. I asked Vox if I could add one. I wanted 1) a dome. 2) it was the only way I could visualize implementing the optional rules ||she suggestes where the access to areas were opening and closing round to round. I needed a mechanism for realizing that, and she just handwaved it with an effect that wouldn't change on per-round basis.||

[maiden ferry]

thats fair lol

[rough bluff]

If you ever listen to the Tolkien professor a common thread since he started talking about serious adaptation of Tolkien is how sometimes it's easy to write something but hard to translate that into a second medium.

[ivory spruce]

getting around to finally wanting to try out a longer form campaign in IGA after running a few SR and DG's and so far Iso has felt fun . As this is my first actual try at making maps, any recommends for layout or cover placement?

[rough bluff]

Is this Spitting Distance or Shoo the Vultures? I assume the party is going left to right?

Or no, right to left.

[ivory spruce]

Spitting Distance ye,gonna do every combat in cha 1 before I even begin to look for players.

also ye, Right to left

[rough bluff]

Overall, I'd say not bad. Opfor has the advantage, which makes sense for this one, I did it the other way in the second, since the PCs choose the battlefield. I like that all the debris could fit on ships. I recommend as a side note checking out the maps in the pins, me and CaveBacon and Jacquerel and Ada. Not everyone has every map to rob from, but it's a good place to start for ideas.

(To be clear, I did it pretty evenly distributed for my static map, but for my map where all the objects move, I have the enemy the starting advantage in this one and the PCs the starting advantage in the other.

[ivory spruce]

I actually did start from looking some of them and actually took inspiration from yours because I really liked the aesthetic of random rubble and stuff hampering them but also dynamically changing the field! I think looking more at it I'll have the EDZ in the middle with Ingress Zones on top and bottom after some asteroid wrangling. I'm also interested in making the tiles move if the players ram them for moving cover and stuff

[rough bluff]

Yeah, there's a map later on that I think I want to have everything moving and rotating and bumping into each other, and that's fine, I can make that map, but I might just do a version that's kinda blank and has all the elements seperate in case a GM wants to set it up with Vehicles and Mechanisms, or a similar module, because rotation map elements with tokens on top are a pain if you don't automate it somehow. 🙂

[ivory spruce]

I dimly remember trying that sort of stuff long ago with tiles and just despairing cause of it

[rough bluff]

I learned it a little for...was it a star wars game I converted to foundry? Maybe it was just general ship combat. But the big use is something my players haven't seen yet. Tomb of Annihilation has these ||rotating rooms, ||so if you don't have a module to automate the motion then the tokens won't all be in the right place when you're done.

[ivory spruce]

I thank the devs every day for the module cause no way was I animating that

I think it's fine after just some small tinkering. The top is cluttered with small size 1 asteroids and garbage that they can take advantage of but the enemy can as well since they set up in an advantageous spot in the middle. Or they can go bot and eschew cover but also forcing the enemy to eschew it as well. The Grey Ingress Zones will be reactive since obviously the pirates want to abscond with the transport so maybe you get two barricades bot who force cover but maybe you get two catas bot without cover and such and such. Measuring the distance and accounting for the difficult terrain of small asteroid rubble fields they can have 1 person make it in 7 turns or get their earlier if they daisy chain it properly. But that's enough for this one tonight, fun but damn am I tired. Also sorry for the spiel, I'm just really excited to finally run a proper longform Lancer campaign

[rough bluff]

Yeah, looks good.

[digital raven]

(oh no.. i gotta use this bit..)

[tame tide]

What are the map proportions? Height and width

[austere prism]

tinkering with my menu system. accidentally made something pretty

[rough bluff]

The map proportions of what?

[tame tide]

This

[rough bluff]

Looks like she did about the same I do 40 across top to bottom is muddier maybe 30ish?

[ivory spruce]

I'll have to check when I get home, but I just grabbed the space picture in the gfolder, threw it, didn't mess with it at all. Think I did hexagonal rows odd iirc?

I'll toss my map settings when home

[maiden ferry]

that is amazing

Here's my current splashpage on roll20, made mostly using assets from the drive

[wispy quail]

right now I plan to just use the big Hell's Gate full page art as a splash page

[quaint pebble]

yeah ive basically just been swapping between full art pages
my players were happy to return to the hells gate one though saying they missed it

[wispy quail]

i plan on switching between interior and exterior hell's gate as appropriate throughout mission 1

[ivory spruce]

Yeah, its as I thought. It's just default 3k x 3k, Hex Columns - Even, and 100 px size. No offset or anything.

[heady vale]

hey someone sent that solar system map in here earlier, right?

[wild flame]

its in the other one #909574961931362365 message

[heady vale]

TY!

[ivory spruce]

Trying to go for a minimum of one map per day, this one was a bit simpler to plan since I have practice now with Iso making. After reading the excerpt, it made sense to put the cover / asteroids closer to the pdz along with some debris fields that can provide soft cover. It made sense to have the pirate forces on the other side kind of out in the open positioned as is. The Ace leads from the front while the Ship provides support and is protected on the flanks by the sentinels. Having a lot of fun so far with these.

[austere prism]

added my stuff to the shared drive, hope it'll be of use to someone

[rough bluff]

Some of that's real cool. When do you use those act quotes? In what context?

[austere prism]

I drop those when we are doing an act transition - basically, once a mission is done and we move on to the next story

It's something that I'm framing as .... Feather entering the team's dreams or something like that.

[rough bluff]

So they are at the END of the chapter with the corresponding number, not the begining.

[austere prism]

I'm explaining it badly. I dropped the Act 1 thing before we did Unfuck This House, the Act 2 one while the Team was on their way from Hell's Gate to Borealis, and the Act 3 thing will drop once they conclude their business there and go back to the Gate or after they come back from rescuing L-Kay, haven't decided yet

[rough bluff]

So at the begining, not the end. Cool.

Don't blame yourself. My eye is killing me. Don't know why. Something irritated it last night while I was sleeping. I can't look at anything without blinking a lot and I'm probably not understanding stuff well.

[thorn hinge]

Playlist for Chapter 4: ||VORSHUNGSMOTOR, the repeated loops of a simulation of the wrong timeline which I extended to an entire session, a recap of which is a daunting task but one I hope to complete soon... -ish.|| There's some contemplative and horror stuff in there, but a lot of more goofy things, and almost all of it is wrong. Microtonal, weird time signature, glitchy effects, it's a soundtrack meant to make you nervous and off balance, and the songs that aren't are ones my players would recognize in wildly different contexts. Almost all of it was ripped from youtube, so while I didn't use all of the songs on them, these videos should contain about 90% of this playlist:

Lost in a Memory - An Instrumental Weirdcore/Dreamcore Playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNLjzKIZkuM
ENA - a webcore/internetcore/enawave playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBC_sYtjykU
Episodes in Oceanography (full album) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv41yzQal7c
Relaxing horror game ambience and music | Vol.1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFy_K4CXq44
Oliver Buckland - https://www.youtube.com/@OliverBuckland (basically his whole discography)
Homestuck- Colours and Mayhem A & B https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCA33C1E583C1EBE0
Earthbound Ost https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1kU0pk5M3GCwzveqamX71sW3RmCzuXB5

I guess I could go through more of my soundtrack stuff, I put more effort into it for this chapter. for Combat ||The Spire, since I did my silly switch to 2d square grid thing,|| I used a lot of chiptune metal music. Basically just Master Boot Record and a bunch of chiptune covers of metal music like Amon Amarth, Dethklok, Sabaton, Megadeth, Rammstein. Also Makeup and Vanity Set's cover of The Protomen.

For CH4's ||Crypt of Stars|| I used a lot of ambient music with a focus on suspense and bittersweet sorrow. A lot more Homestuck music made it in here than most of my playlists, it all just felt right.

[regal forum]

I looked up homestuck music bc I hadn't heard of it and it's so incredibly dope.

[dire cloud]

My favorites are Savior of the Dreaming Dead and Eternity Served Cold.

[regal forum]

The first one I listened to was called "black" and it's such a bop

[thorn hinge]

Yes 100% absolutely, those albums carried me through my degree, there like 30 official albums and every one of them has bangers throughout. Vol. 8 is my favorite album, but I highly recommend listening to the albums in order so you can hear how certain themes evolved and were remixed and referenced in the later ones

[regal forum]

Holy crap that's a lot of albums

[thorn hinge]

...assuming you have the time to churn through that much music, lol

[heady topaz]

I sometimes forgot how long Homestuck went for

[wispy quail]

homestuck music is SO GOOD

[thorn hinge]

11 albums in the core series (homestuck volume 1, volume 2, etc.), and then a bunch of side works, sometimes concept albums (The Squiddles is a OST for a childrens cartoon that does't exist), sometimes a specific musician making a whole side album (mobius trip and hadron kaliedo started a whole career for Michael Bowman)

[wispy quail]

an easy benchmark for the length of homestuck is that it started and ended on the same day and lasted the length of the Obama presidency

[heady topaz]

8 goddamn years huh

[thorn hinge]

It's been one homestuck since homestuck ended

[heady topaz]

I refuse to accept Homestucks as a term of measuring time

[wispy quail]

(technically it lasted seven years)

4/13/09-4/13/16

[digital raven]

Once you're over about 4 homestucks old, you start to get over it and just give in to inertia

[maiden ferry]

This was too funny not to share. For context, this player is a member of the Knights of the Dark core that joined after the hellhounds torched his hab with his family and friends in it, and he remembers a laughing face in his nightmares. He joined the militia a bit after but keeps to the code. I thought, hey, great, this works for me. Then this happened:

[wispy quail]

lmao

[heady topaz]

rip

[maiden ferry]

Meanwhile, Calamily has proceeded to become a mentor figure to another character over the last six months. I’m getting a lot of drama milage out of this

[thorn hinge]

Oh my god

[maiden ferry]

I love it when players immediately clothesline themselves with their own backstory

[wild flame]

It's free angst

[tight pier]

looollllllllllllllllllllll ikr

one of our players wanted to play as ||anastasia shan's brother|| so now that player is probably going to end up ||fighting his other sister||

another is vehemently ||anti-corporate, pro-independant-Calliope|| and had ||his entire outfit on Orcus wiped out by who we have now decided are the Bleach Boys, so they're going to have a lot of fun in Act 2||

yet another is ||kind of (its complicated) ex-Circuit and is going to see all their lads wiped out in act 1 chapter 4||

[dense urchin]

nearly every story of IGF ive heard has some of the most batshit coincidences possible

[prime spoke]

I have a player that is playing a clone of a HA coder and either her or the original leaked data on an experimental frame so I'm excited to see what kind of HA shit goes down in act 2

[maiden ferry]

I honestly attribute that to Calliope being one of the best settings I’ve ever seen in a ttrpg. It has just so much shit in it, and there’s always five things that tie to any one thing, which means that if your player wants to do anything it’s gonna relate to something on another character

[austere prism]

....honestly I'm kinda worried that I got something wrong in that my players didn't go for backgrounds that made them deeply connected to any of the various plots?

like my players went for the "just some dudes" vibe

[dense urchin]

i mean there are people in calliope who are just kinda there

not everyones a gene project or ex pirate, its fine to have just upstanding residents of hells gate as your PCs

[thorn hinge]

Also, I think a lot of characters develop more in game than before it. I mean, even in a backstory sense. One of my PC's basically had no background other than "was a bounty hunter, gave it up in calliope" up through the first chapter. We came up with something about him and his partner hunting a bounty; when things went wrong and his partner was killed. the team passed the place where it happened and he stopped. When they asked what was wrong, he decide to confide in them all. He had a wonderful character moment, telling the story in character.
And by chapter four we finally got him to decide on his background growing up, before he was a bounty hunter. And that got partially shown off in a ||Vorshungsmotor vision.||

There's a lot of depth to Calliope, and I think as the game starts players will engage with it a lot more than during character creation. Be flexible with retcons and allow them to come up with new ideas as they learn more about the setting and get more invested.

[austere prism]

whenever I see ||Vorshungsmotor|| the part of me that insists on good german grammar dies a bit

[thorn hinge]

||Ich verstehe 💯 ||

[prime spoke]

What does that mean anyway

[austere prism]

so, phonetically, it reads as "Forschungsmotor", which could be translated as "Research Engine"

the way it's written however is close to "Vorsehungsmotor", which could be translated as "Destiny Engine"

(it could, but isn't in actuality; it doesn't scan as a proper german compound word if used that way)

alternates could be "Divinity Engine", which probably fits more

[quaint pebble]

one of my characters is ex-ssc, previously a constellar team handler, and was "retired" to calliope after learning too much about something she shouldn't but agreeing to abide by her nda and not be a whistleblower
this might not come up again until act 2 but I told her the funny thing she learned about but decided not to share around, ||an SSC virus that works like an infectious marketing campaign
of course she doesn't know that her team being pulled off the job with short notice meant they had to scramble to move the next nearest operative onto it 🤔||

[dire cloud]

Question about ages. Is Roderick Steele old enough to have a disowned transgender daughter?

[austere prism]

he was 29 when he did the drinks thing, then purchased impact dynamics some years later in 5005u, so he's at least 40+x years old biologically

more than enough time to have an adult kid to disown

not including relativistic travel times, because I don't think he's a born Calliopean

[quaint pebble]

yeah he is a relatively recent arrival

[austere prism]

also it's such a Steele move to not just rediscover "alpha males" but also reinvent transphobia from first principles

[wispy quail]

what i've learned from this chat is to take every possible opportunity to tie my players' backstories into the deep lore of Calliope

[maiden ferry]

The volodor translations are usually slightly off even on the sunzi’s flavor text. I chalk it up to language drift

[austere prism]

yeah that's not a can of worms I want to open. Because it opens up questions like "if the german has been language-drifted, why has the english stayed static?"

[maiden ferry]

lol fair

Though it is really funny to have a sec com-era secession planet speak in old English

[austere prism]

oh phew the actual word used in the campaign is "Vorsehungsmotor" which makes everything better

[digital raven]

Personally I love emergent backstory for my players, the one highlight for me were the player who answered "sure, probably" when I asked in session zero if his outlander character had grown up religious, cut to "so how do you feel about being raised phoenix cult?".

And also the hacker character who roll a natural 20 on the first "open your mind" skill roll in the campaign so a nice little old lady has taken a very specific interest in him

[austere prism]

it's coming together
also I am developing a hate for foundry and setting up complex pages like this

[thorn hinge]

May I ask what gave you trouble?

[austere prism]

nothing, setting up that many triggers and tiles is just stupidly tedious

it's all worth it but I wish the json files foundry saves things in were more amenable to editing

[thorn hinge]

oh gods yes that would be nice.

[rough bluff]

I made one like that, but it was almost entirely a photoshop, then I just dropped images and clocks on it. I edit all the text, etc, in photoshop and reexport the image.

Heh, there are some pilot tokens sitting on it, because that's how I add stress to people instead of a clock. I might change that because it's sloppy, as you can see.

[rough bluff]

I didn't give a height to the ||pile of support girders||. I've fixed that. I don't suspect a reupload is necessary.

[tame tide]

How many people are you playing with????

[rough bluff]

8. 🙂 Think I've nailed that bit. I've got the fights down to about 4 hours and they have just the right amount of despair in the difficulty. 🙂

[tame tide]

Holy shit

Here I thought 6 was teetering on too many

Also, imo looking at the right hand side of the map and the enemy deployment zone, I think it needs a bit more cover

[rough bluff]

It was going to be 7 but a guy from this wed short game I ran wanted to join cause the Wed game only had three players and he thought he wasn't getting a good lancer experience from it. I figured 8 divided into two groups of 4 and might actually be easier in some fights than 7.

Thanks for that note. Is all the height stuff reading?

[tame tide]

It states the height and that's clear enough to me

[rough bluff]

Thanks, I was afraid having objects with height inside building with height inside a huge room with a ceiling at a certain height might be confusing.

[tame tide]

I also think the left side could have like, 1-4 more dots of 1x1 h1 cover. But I'm very much a "cover everywhere" advocate after many unfortunate events in Xcom

[tame tide]

It was tbh, but it makes sense

Do you plan on people entering the building?

[rough bluff]

I don't know. Technically they can use those control room windows and claim cover from the walls if they think outside the box.

If I put a window on a map, I expect someone to use the window on the map.

[tame tide]

Lmao

Worst case scenario your NPCs can abuse it

Also how do you do the overlay/info? It looks just like solstice rains

[rough bluff]

Like the cross hatch in the zones? I hand draw it. It's easy on the square versions, a pain on the hex versions. 🙂 Then everything is one a different layer so every layer can have its own effects, like the lift has a glow inside it to give it that inset look, all the walls have an outside glow and a bevel. Most of the symbols have a dropshadow with the crane having a big one that's 20 feet. The grid is 25% opacity, while the zone boarders are 75% and the cross hatch is 25%. That sort of thing.

When I did the ||roller coaster tracks|| in|| Send in the Clowns|| there are all sorts of effects on them you loose because I made the whole thing mostly transparent since they were overhead, but I think the eye picks them up subconsiously.

[tame tide]

God damn

Here I was hoping it was a simple process but, looks great but it's so much effort... I commend you for that

[rough bluff]

This one I did mostly on christmas and have been polishing up since. ||Denial of Service|| took more like four days. ||Spitting Distance|| like a week because it's 9 maps because I wanted all the debris to move. So there's a lot of variance.

I want to make sure that everyone has a semi professional map in every 2d format (square, hex, no grid, etc.) for every combat if they need it, without having to do them themselves, so I'm just working through and taking requests when needed.

Like there are two in chapter 2 no one has done because I don't think many groups need them for a variety of reasons, but I want to make sure they are available for GMs who have the need.

[tame tide]

Fair enough

Hope your maps are well used

[rough bluff]

I hope so too. I was happy to see my Calliope map in The_E's landing page above. Warmed my heart.

[tame tide]

I might upload my maps when I'm done... I'll see...

I've only made 2 so far, I'm desperately waiting for inkarnate to release sci for assets 🥲

[rough bluff]

Yeah, Campaign Cartographer 3 has been out more than a decade (2?) and it's light on SF assets. There's just not huge money in them. I make a lot of mine custom. That ||ferris wheel|| took me at least 8 hours.

[austere prism]

why yes Elske did hack the SRT's info system

[rough bluff]

lol

[thorn hinge]

somethign like that happened to me once

[rough bluff]

I believe that integrates your suggestions. Tell me if I missed anything.

[rough bluff]

Holy shit. Does Armored Core 6 just inspire the shit out of anyone else. I just fought the ||giant weaponized mining platform||. That NEEDS to be a Lancer battle. I know that this isn't In Golden Flame related, but you are the people are talk to the most. 🙂 Okay. I'll get back on topic. I just bought a whole bunch of train assets. Choo choo! There are at least two maps that need them. 🙂

[austere prism]

You want to check out Lancer Advanced Combat, it has sitreps just for fights like that

[rough bluff]

See, I was on topic (for lancer at least) after all. Thanks for the recommend. I'll check it out.

That's on Massif as a third party, right?

Or itch.io at least.

[austere prism]

It is a third party thing, yes

[rough bluff]

Thanks.

[rough bluff]

Did you mean Lancer Enchanced Combat?

[austere prism]

Yes

[rough bluff]

Thanks. Found it, then.

[austere prism]

one of my players wants to do an Oleander/Catastrophe Beam build

....it sounds terrible but i kinda want tto see what happens

[prime spoke]

Trying to pick tracks to use in Foundry for some of the maps

[frail kayak]

Maybe the train assets would be helpful then 😆

[prime spoke]

*music tracks

[frail kayak]

What mission?

[prime spoke]

Face to a Name

[rough bluff]

Duel of the Fates from Phantom Menace and Sublevel 3 from Aliens. 🙂

[worthy root]

Abandon ship from thr Subnautica soundtrack

[amber viper]

Siege engine from destiny rise of iron

[shell bison]

Hey, either it will be horribly optimized or the MVP in a sitrep

Wish them luck, The One's Speed

[round fjord]

.... what if you run in golden flame as a whole like, Rapture / Bioshock setting

[dense urchin]

||Getting Railroaded||, i assume?

[rough bluff]

||Thermopylae||. The one you mention will be the first one that breaks my "Everything is the size of a Solstice Rain map" paradigm. 🙂

[frail kayak]

Man, I should have made a longer map for that one

[rough bluff]

I haven't figured out how long is too long, but I want to play with long and narrow as much as I can.

[tame tide]

Doing it square, hex or both?

[austere prism]

map for Guardian Angel

[rough bluff]

Me, I do all forms, square, hex, gridless, and the gridless w/ and without zones.

[tame tide]

I did ask then remember I have seen you do both but never corrected myself that I knew the answer lol

[rough bluff]

My|| Spitting distance|| maps has something like 30-40 images on the drive. Although a given GM would only need 8 or 16 at the most, assuming they want the "Staged" map with a different version for each round.

[shell bison]

• Party did the Chapter 3 intro fight.
• Sunzi, Calendula, Atlas and Raleigh
• Calendula made L-kay have a fucking anime duel in Intangible against the Assassin. She won
• Sunzi Bullied enemy movements
• Atlas balled and got wrecked from archer moment
• Raleigh Bursted the shredded demolisher with the Mjolnir cannon

[fast parrot]

Was this inspired by what went down in h7?

[shell bison]

Gamer there was so many domain expansion jokes it wasn't even funny. Everyone popped core

[fast parrot]

Man I feel bad now. Our last session was narrative so we had no domains to expand

[fast parrot]

Actually...
To be fair, Webbe (Spider Streamer) and Ayana did pop off. Ayana got a nat 20 and took apart 80% of the whole mystery herself.
And Webbe... Well they actually succeeded on everyone's a fan! Now monolith (tiny spider enby) is friends with Tiny (Massive mercenary who enjoys daquaris)

[shell bison]

My catboy influncer rolled while taking a selfie mid op to ask for some info on the place to his fanbase. Rolled a 20 and I had it that the enemy op hiding had one of their alerts go off in a ping to his post.

[fast parrot]

Lmao

The influencer bond is such a gift

[amber viper]

Fuckin hell that's fantastic

[shell bison]

Influncer bond baby

[thorn hinge]

oh my god, The Reverse Switch

[wispy quail]

the bait and switch

[maiden ferry]

new meme format just dropped

[lunar panther]

we're starting chapter 2 now, and I realized the description of Irvin Reed's voice really fits my dad's. so...

[vague fog]

Man I love naming my enemies funny shit

Im about to run the last fight of the first mission and Ive got some of these guys named stuff like "DREAM DEVOURER" or "B1GSHOT" and then my grunts Ive just got called "Jeff from Accounting" and "Bob from HR"

[maiden ferry]

Finally ran my first session! We got all the way to signal, and the party did such great things as:

Get some poor fucking salesman at impact dynamics fired for doing a good thing

Disappoint Jerry with vehement hatred against piracy (specifically declaring that they’d kill any pirates they came across)

Absolutely railed the first combat

And lastly, Mikayla.omif is a friend to military deserter, loves the catboy vtuber, and has discovered that they’re working together oh my gosh

[fast parrot]

Theresa always be a vtuber

[shell bison]

this is the second time in IGF campaigns Mikaela simps for a catboy influencer and it's weird that it has happened twice

However, we are not averse to canon events.

Or as I like to call them

[polar glacier]

The problem with my team is they can never agree who is which, and keep changing roles. It more like... Kraken is never 1; Pear is never 4 and rarely 2; Gabriel is rarely 1; and Calamity is sometimes 3 and usually 1, 2, and 4 all at once. Siren's usually C but often B or D, and for 1... she's always big, and after they gave her the catastrophe beam always strong, but never dumb. Okay, almost never.

[quaint pebble]

I think we only have 3 & 4 😔

[fast parrot]

there there, i'm sure you'll find a himbo and streamer soon

[frail kayak]

("Promise" is that character's callsign)

[fast parrot]

Lmao

[dire cloud]

I'm writing a fanfic and couldn't figure out a fake anime for the characters to be watching, so I picked In Golden Flame. I'll definitely link it in the author's notes.

[digital raven]

I'm glad mine isn't the only party that instantly gave Siren the catastrophe beam.

[quaint pebble]

My party offered and she was like "i would fire this once and it would blow a hole in your crew cabin stick this death machine on YOUR body"
But they did get her ||Sunbird One's salvaged missile pods|| instead

[shrewd sorrel]

I was so hype when they gave her the catastrophe beam
she was very happy about it 😌
now i'm just waiting for them to decide to try || blowing the orbital laser out of the sky by overcharging the cat beam with the Sherman's solidcore. || Which honestly i'm surprised they haven't suggested yet.

[digital raven]

My Siren has an anxiety complex about the lack of a spinal weapon. It's more of a security doomsday device.

[heady vale]

looks at check list this is accurate to my party, i think

[fast parrot]

So, who's who then?

[tight pier]

we have two 2's and two 3's

[heady vale]

Designer super-clone - Big Strong Dumb
Tulpamancy Vtuber - streamer
Battlefield medic - Common Sense
Springheel Jack Gentleman Vigilante - Murder

Wildcards are
Hercynian Technosage
Ex-Xenoglossia Trucker

[heady vale]

The hercynian is like. Eccentric eastern european grandfather.

The ex xenoglossia is like. A gruff grizzled but chill trucker.

[tame tide]

I've only played one session so far of IGF and we already have 2 of them and it's scary, I just don't know if the 3rd is big strong kinda dumb or common sense

I hope they're common sense but knowing the player...

[quaint pebble]

ex-ssc handler : sole source of common sense
ex-terrorist from recently recontacted colony : murder
ex-faith disaster survivor : hot blooded anime protagonist
ex-purview minority report victim : neet

[mighty osprey]

hey i was just taking a peek around the LCP and i noticed this, Revved Up!!! profile on the Leech Hunter's Blade mentions Assault Cannon in Rev Down protocol. dunno if this is a known issue or not after some light searching, thought i ought to let the class know

[tame tide]

Pretty happy with my map from Mission 2: ||THERMOPYLAE|| for 3 players I'm quite happy with it... But I just clocked it has an ||elite barricade which can place 2 pieces of cover a time... does this feel like it would be way too intrusive? I just realised I've made a tiny fortress and if the players don't advance fast enough they're going to have to attack a fortification that would make the iron fists proud... With damage source coming from turrets just running round the corners... Should I tone down the cover? (All trains are size 2)||

Cover included

[digital raven]

I think your main issue is that the barricade will cease to be relevant by like turn 3 because you won't have anywhere productive left to place cover. Cutting a track so the size 2 cover from the barricade doesn't seal an entire lane would help with that.

[tame tide]

Def it's a good idea... I really like the idea of lanes like that but throwing a barricade would make it very painful very fast

I think moving the red train in the middle back a carriage should help with it... As somewhat of a comprimise Barricade would have to move quite far off point for it

[quaint pebble]

I think that plugging up lanes is essentially a barricade's job
the players can always blow up the cover it has placed

or treat it as encouragement to pick up some flight systems :p

[wild flame]

reminder that the barricade print is on recharge - you won't be slapping it down every turn (unless the dice are nutty)

also jacquerel makes an excellent point in that blocking lanes is the barricade's gimmick

[tame tide]

Elite, so on average it's 1 recharge per round so about 2 per turn on average

Tru

I'm just worried about being too effective

[polar glacier]

The dice got nutty in my game. Then Pear put a BB Breaching Charge on it and took out the whole box fort in one glorious blast.

[wispy quail]

wait where are you getting "2 per turn" from

it has 2 chances to roll a 1/3 chance every round

i mean yeah it can print two cubes each time because Extrudite, but still

[frail kayak]

My Goblin player just Return-to-sendered the ||wolfhound missile||

[wild flame]

lmao

[rough bluff]

Normally I give my enemies normal call signs, but I decided for ||Denial of Service|| I wanted to boil the blood of my players and make sure they feel the need to murder every mech on the field.

[frail kayak]

ok, she just Exposed it and moved it into the path of a support strut, which destroyed it

[rough bluff]

I've uploaded all five or so versions of my ||Thermopylae|| map. Off to bed. Nite nite.

[tame tide]

Mis remembered the stat block, thought it was 4+ recharge. MB

[rough bluff]

BTW, @tame tide, that's a beautiful ||Thermopylae|| map. My mind is alive trying to work out my logistics for ||Anti-Capital||. I want it to be a frenetic, 8 round masterpiece of destruction and constant motion, but a part of my heart knows I'll likely never achieve the simple perfection of the edgework of the objects in the @quaint pebbleversion of that map.

[tame tide]

Thank you ❤️, I haven't worked Inkarnate in ages and I'm just waiting patiently for their sci-fi assets so I'm making do with fantasy stuff 🥲

I should post the rest of mine, my first 2 are pretty good but there's not much variation around "Rocks in space"

[rough bluff]

Do they have sci-fi assets announced, and your just waiting for released, or it that hopeful patience. 🙂

[tame tide]

Good question

I saw a post about it I think they're doing it but not too sure

[rough bluff]

Fair. 🙂

[tame tide]

For ||Denial of service|| I tried making a map inspired by his, wasn't a fan so tried remaking it more inspired and mid way through was just like "Wait, why don't I just use his map" so uuh. my streak of perfection and trying to make every map myself was broken... Buuut not my fault Jacquerels map is so beautiful

[tame tide]

Also, you did the multi-stage cool moving rocks for one of the Mission 1 combats. I bet you could do something real cool like that for ||Anti-Capital|| since well... ||That's the maps Gimmick|| :D

But for that map I'm just gonna try make abunch of "tiles" of like a size 1 area to stand, size 2 areas, size 3 and size 4 areas. Then size 1-3 cover pieces and try make them as tiles in foundry then delete them when the struts arrive

Swapping maps is cool mid way through buuuuut it's effort...

[rough bluff]

My plan is to have ||every island of matter moving, but also rotating and probably bouncing off one another. As the strut moves across the board, it will grind each of the island into gravel, leaving the left side of the map strewn with drifting debris.||

[rough bluff]

I love the conversation that @tame tide and I are having, much of it completely unspoken and through the act of subcreation.

||Me: I love some of these maps out there, but no one's Thermopylae maps looks like an old-school train-yard fight. I want a fight that mimics that abandoned train yard setpiece that shows up in just about every shooter and post apocalypse TRPG I've played in the last few years.
Imp: Screw you, Defendi, your map isn't crowded enough. Hold my beer.
(beat)
Imp: Crap, I think I made my map too crowded.
Everyone else: You're fine. Good job. :)||

[tame tide]

Holy hell that sounds complicated

[rough bluff]

Complicated to draw, yes. I'll be using lots of layers if I want to keep my work to a minimum, and maybe a good chunk of AI-generated bits for assets I can't easily create.

[ivory spruce]

||Thermopylae|| spoiler. Finally got back to doing the maps again after some things came up and I think its solid. No cranes so I substituted them for these little doo-hickeys that will do the same thing. Map is 42 spaces from PDZ -> EDZ which is pretty fair I think. Decent amout of cover though I am thinking it could do with either Size 3 cover sprinkles or Size 1 coating in a few more locations. All in all, really liking it so far.

[quaint narwhal]

So my group just started Chapter 2, and as I read it, I think I might be missing something... is there an explanation for the ||daily emergency alarms||?

[thorn hinge]

Nope! Up to you if it has any greater meaning. most people just assume it's ||intended to cause 'alarm fatigue'|| but ||it could be a side effect caused by the fire gate, and you could use that as a clue that leads the team to the Mictlan team and Thermopylae/Anti-capital. Depends on how you want to play it.||

[pliant ibex]

I think it is pretty much for ||causing alarm fatigue||, since ||the third beat if you fail one of the missions mentions the alarms starting up and then not stopping||, that second bit is a very good idea though

[rough bluff]

Okay, I need to do another A/B vote. This one for ||Anti-Capital||, as those who have been paying attention to my posts might have guessed. Here are roughed out drafts of the "static" version of the map. Before I fine tune, and then launch into a round by round staged version, I need to figure out a key point. ||You see the crux is that this map takes place in zero gravity, which means every mech is flying, which means ideas like ground and elevation become a lot more fluid. I usually like to try to put elevation in my maps when I can, and in this case the most logical way would seem to be to have multiple layers of cover floating over the map. I didn't try this earlier because there might be very new groups playing the first zero-g maps. But now I think that even new players have enough experience to handle it if I can make it visually scan. The only question is SHOULD I. So two versions here. The first has no elevation. In the second the big floating railcars will be at elevation 3 above the base level of the map. All the smaller crates will be at elevation 5. I'll add zones after I settle on what I'm doing going forward. Vote on the version you like better. This will get complex when I get to the staged map either way. :)|| Feel free to vote with emojis.

[frail kayak]

My vote is With Elevation, but I tend to overcomplicate things

[austere prism]

I'd say without elevation. Complex gimmicks have their place, but that place imho is not a fight like this that is already pretty challenging

[tame tide]

Depends on the players. I'd lean more into no elevation mostly due to the confusion with layering aspects on a 2D plane. Might be a tad bit of a visual overload in terms of map overlay/cover indication. Depending on how your players handle height/flight in general it depends.

But it will also become complicated like, standing on and getting cover from standing on top of it or weird angles...

[digital raven]

Three layers of elevation feels like overkill to me, you've also got to worry about the size 4 ship bumping into stuff the more layers you add. I would stick to a base layer and a elev 3 layer and use color to clearly distinguish between the two (everything at 3 is red or blue or yellow or something)

[rough bluff]

Sounds like in general the trend is no elevation. That drops the complexity of my work about one order of magnitude when I start moving all these objects every round. It also might get rid of the need for my second vote...

[tame tide]

Second vote?

[rough bluff]

I typed a big answer to that but it didn't post. I was going to do a second vote because if I had a very complex map, I might need to update things round by round with rules for elements like dangerous/difficult terrain. I might still, but with all the elevation information in the other version, I was afraid my notes might cross from "Cartographer" to "Encounter Designer" and I try never to stray from my lane in something I post to the community for general use. I don't ever want to step on Vex's toes there. So on a single level version it will probably be nothing more than "All the difficult terrain is also explosive dangerous terrain." But if there was elevation, there might have been stuff like, "This round, all of elevation 3 is showered with debris, causing the whole layer to be dangerous terrain." The first seems fine, but I'm less comfortable with stuff like that second one without getting second opinions.

[quaint pebble]

my experience with Anti-Capital is that the players didn't really need to have any additional things to think about, the OpFor there did a good job of that

[rough bluff]

Should I forgo all difficult terrain entirely?

[quaint pebble]

probably difficult terrain is fine, that's like a normal thing they already know about

[rough bluff]

On the staged map I intend to have the edeges of things crashing together and throwing up debris fields. I intended to make them dangerous/difficult terrain. Generally on or two squares. More for flavor and to add to the feeling of chaos than to really hinder them. They'd have to be bigger to be really bad.

At the very end if they messed it up, there might be a few of them just because of the fortnite of it all. 🙂

[fallen geyser]

Once again I need to assure you that I don't feel like my toes are being stepped on when people modify my work for the game that they're running 🙂

And these encounters should be modified as per the needs of your playgroup!

One of my greatest regrets is that I can't officially use the Wallflower NPCs

[rough bluff]

Oh, I feel no need to get your permission to modify them for MY playgroup. 🙂

[fallen geyser]

But I also love hearing about how people modify the setting, both mechanically and narratively.

[rough bluff]

It's when I'm trying to make a map that everyone in the community can use to be as close to the printed adventure as possible that I want to be careful.

[fallen geyser]

Like one person showed me their setting document and it was wild. Hell's Gate was a subsidiary of Impact Dynamics and it had to worry about "space snowstorms" that would rob it of orbital velocity and pitch it into Stygia.

I love that shit.

[rough bluff]

There's a reason I put out a static, bog-standard map, and then a staged, round for round map where I say, "Hold my beer. Shit is going to get wild by the time you get to round 8 in this one..."

See, here's the real thing, @fallen geyser . This really isn't about your feelings or mine. I'm doing this for that GM that wants a good looking map buy doesn't feel they have the chops to make it on their own. I want them to have a map that COULD have been published in the adventure. Because there are a lot of things I'M terrible at and I love it when I find someone doing something like this for me, and I'm like, "Oh, this is lore-accurate and fits exactly what I need... I wish I could have made it." These maps or for the people who need that, but can't make them themselves. I can get crazy with a few edits if I want before I put them on my OWN table.

For instance, the HORUS anomoly I put on the Denial Map is just a cosmetic thing on my map and I did not add anything to suggest otherwise. In MY game S1GN4L is going to be able to use his Metafold thing to interact with it. 🙂

(And I already had someone kick on that, so I was glad I could say I got permission from you.)

[tame tide]

Ooooh, what combats would you change with them? I really want to use more wallflower NPCs but when running pre-written adventure I don't want to tamper the compositions too much

[quaint pebble]

There's an NPC in playtest right now which I know I'll probably end up using for an encounter in Act 2 but presumably Vex won't be able to write that in the book

[rough bluff]

What are the license rules, just stuff from the Corebook? I've done a lot of OGL work and some stuff under the HERO System license, but haven't looked at Lancer's.

[quaint pebble]

NPCs from supplements are in a weird position where people are hesitant to use them in any other works because NPCs (unlike player options) are paid content and so you can't reprint them
So to include them in your campaign comes with an "and pay $15 for this other thing" tagline

[fallen geyser]

Okay there is a mechanical joke you can tell with the Avenger

You give it Infectious Revenge and the Judgement Shotgun

And this so perfectly suits the shitty way Impact Dynamics goons act

Please not that the EXACT setup I'm about to describe works only at T1 but you can consult HP values and jiggle it around to work at T2 or T3

You have a Veteran Avenger with Viper's Speed, Infectious Revenge and Judgement Shotgun

You have an untemplated Bombard who starts within Range 3 of the Avenger

You have a bunch of other enemies who all start the fight within Range 5 of the Avenger

As the very first action in the fight, the Veteran Avenger shoots the Bombard with its Judgement Shotgun, killing it instantly due to the shotgun dealing exactly 10 damage and the Bombard having exactly 10 HP

[tame tide]

Haha

[quaint pebble]

callsign False Flag

[tame tide]

That's great

[fallen geyser]

Revenge triggers, proccing Infectious Revenge

And this occurs:

[tame tide]

For people who don't know what an Avenger is a party would just be confused and have no clue what happened. But for a party who know how lancer works that would be funny as shit

[fallen geyser]

Well you know how in Red Vs Blue, the very first action Sarge takes in every combat situation is to shoot Grif in the dick?

It's like that

[tame tide]

🤣

[rough bluff]

Ha!!!!

[tame tide]

Is it possible to have in a book "this is the default encounter, however if you have content from this book we recommend swapping X for Y and giving template Z in terms of flavour" but make the primary encounter the focus?

Or is it just too complicated

[fallen geyser]

That feels so unwieldy

[rough bluff]

It does.

[tame tide]

Was mostly just an idea, regardless of if it's good

[fallen geyser]

And I really wish I could use the Lurker, because I have a fight in Act 2 that is essentially against a Balor, which the Lurker more or less is

I had to sub in the Hive instead

[quaint pebble]

plus the Lurker is very cool

[fallen geyser]

The Lurker IS very cool

And the Strider would be a very good fit thematically for Calliope

But I'm not gonna suggest people buy a whole ass different campaign to play mine, or ask Tom "hey can I just reprint all of these dudes"

[tame tide]

One of the red boxes saying extra info I guess is the best choice apart from just "not doing it" which is probs a better choice

Eidolons too!

[fallen geyser]

There are two optional Eidolon fights in Act 3, that was too significant to pass up

[rough bluff]

About Act 2 or Act 3, it might be a value add to his company for you to be doing this, so it might be worth asking for the odd NPC.

[tame tide]

They're so cool but need to be the centre of a mission essentially but if something else uses something Eidolon like it gets substituted for something else so it's better suited for the situation like (Dustgrave spoiler ||Khepri||)

[quaint pebble]

I do think its a little funny how the Custom Ultra fight in Act 2 designed to represent ||a tank|| has capabilities vaguely similar to the "I represent ||a tank||" setpiece NPC that's being playtested right now

[rough bluff]

The whole reason ICE gave me a RM and HARP license for such good terms was they didn't want to be producing the content I was producing, and their customer base already trusted me because I wrote Spacemaster.

[tame tide]

I want to try the playtest NPC so much... But the same problem of multiple publications

[quaint pebble]

I think that Kai would thank you if you did try it, that is why it is being playtested ;p

[amber viper]

I ended up using a Liminal Space NPC for that act 2 boss myself

Worked very well

[rough bluff]

(BTW @fallen geyser that's the other reason I'm so extra careful about putting anything out for the broad community that has any whiff of encounter design to it. I've been a professional game designer since 1996. I have an obligation to be Caesar's wife in certain things. There are rules I feel I have to follow others don't, to be above board. It cannot never look like I'm saying, "I could have done this better." It has to be, I am @fallen geyser's humble servant bending my skills to support this creation. Now back to cool NPC with my spouting off about license logistics one in a while.)

[rough bluff]

Where's the NPC from?

It sounds cool.

[amber viper]

Field Guide to Liminal Space : p

[floral glacier]

Mweeehehehehe my players are in chapter 4 now, putting my own spin on a few things and looking forward to how they enjoy it

[frail kayak]

The Reaver from Suldan is very closely based on the Balor, if you're looking for a better fit. (Suldan is free)

[fallen geyser]

That is still the same problem of even if Kai Tave would be fine with me reprinting his stuff, it feels awkward

Plus I'm already adding four whole new NPCs in Act 2

And I think limitation CAN be fun

The Balor I made using a Hive base with Berserker parts and the Exotic template was really fun for me

I'm already having headaches about how borrowing @simple moon's Puppeteer template is going to work with .lcps, since Lancer-VTT and Comp-Con DO NOT like duplicates

[quaint pebble]

I think Kai Tave specifically does not like having his things described as "almost first party" if they aren't so don't let him catch you doing it ;p
(on the grounds that "first party" is a publishing category not a mark of quality or whether you should be using it)

[maiden ferry]

I’m running into that issue a little bit even just getting everyone in my group onto the same content in compcon

[frail kayak]

Oops. I've edited the original message to remove that statement

[pliant ibex]

https://massifpress.com/legal don't know if this helps, but here's what it says on massif press's license page

[simple moon]

did we ever figure out what happens if you give it the exact same ID?

[simple moon]

this but also because for those of us where people keep saying this about our work, we have to be clear that it's not because agreeing with it in any way would potentially cause problems under the third party license

You may not claim to be affiliated with Massif Press, nor intimate that your product is an official Core Lancer product.

[rough bluff]

I love license talk so much. Carry on.

That sounded creepy. 🙂 What I mean is that my career started at just about the same time as the OGL revolution and I've spent most if it watching companies rise and fall for better or worse, with this back room sense of community as we were all working this shit out together.

You know, running around the last day of GenCon, trading unsold stock with other vendors...

Shut up, everyone, the "Olds" are talking... Okay, back to the discussion.

[frosty storm]

you did HERO systems stuff? Neat, my dad ran the Global Guardians PBEM. I never much got into Champions, couldn't quite grok the rules. Great setting sourcebooks, though.

I like your map.

[rough bluff]

Thanks, I'm almost done with Round 2 of the dynamic map and it's shaping up to sheer chaos. On HERO, I produced my Echoes of Heaven campaign world under various licenses which could all generate the same basic gritty fantasy kinda feel, so D20, Rolemaster, HARP, HERO. I dropped HERO because there weren't many sales and it was a LOT of work.

[wispy quail]

i am playing as Striga von Aldenberg in an Interstitial: Our Hearts Intertwined game tonight, and now I have to figure out what playbook / moves she has

(the premise of this one-shot is that we're heisting Doc Scratch's mansion)

[tender seal]

My party finished Act 1 today and I had an absolute blast running it. The most it went off course during Chapter 5's downtime: ||My party decided to invite The Crone to Mistress Elske's birthday bash. Describing this haunting horror, feeling like they were being hunted down through the sublevels of Hell's Gate only to run into the crone “You wanted to speak to me again? So speak.” "You wanna go to a birthday party?" "Wha... no?" and then smash-cut to the party on their way to the Fortress of Sanctimony because it was funnier that way.||

I don't think ||The Crone|| would actually be caught off-guard but I decided it was funnier if she was, so she might've just been playing along

[rough bluff]

Awesome. That sounds really cool.

This map is either going to kill me or be my magnum opus. I need people to regularly show up to my house with Monster Energy drinks to check for Proof of Life.

[wispy quail]

we fucked everything up and then the story ends with one of the other player characters assassinating MSPAR and then the story never continues because there's no one to read it

[rough bluff]

Failures are the best stories, though, right? 🙂

[wispy quail]

here's the full text of the custom move that I gave to Striga
Seeker of the Truth:
Whenever you use your many and varied observations to create a theory about the Them who are Behind It All, roll with Mastery.
On a 10+, you come up with a completely outrageous and unbelievable theory which is almost perfectly accurate.
On a 7-9, you come up with a relatively reasonable theory that is at least partially correct but, unbeknownst to you, has some major issues.
On a 6 or less, confounding information causes you to miss your mark, and your theory fails to account for one or even several important aspects of your enemy.

[half plank]

Yo, I haven't been as active on the Lancer server as I was when I was running a campaign. I randomly stumbled upon a 1 month old promotion image for Act 2. I was worried that I missed the kickstarter, but it seems it has not happened yet. Is there any way I can make sure I get notified when the kickstarter happens?

[austere prism]

Follow vex on Kickstarter?

[tame tide]

(Mission 2 battlemap) ||honk honk SEND IN THE CLOOOOOOWWWNNNNSS!!!||

Kinda hard going from Sci fi maps back to "fantasy" again lol... Wonder if the inside of the ||castle|| needs a tad touching up... Looks a tad empty

[quaint pebble]

I like it
and wrt changing theme, I know that I personally was like "oh I have way more fantasy assets than scifi ones" 😅

[tame tide]

Inkarnate pleeease I'm begging you for Sci fi assets!!!!

[tame tide]

I just forgot how to make fantasy maps

[wild flame]

Would you be open to other people (me) using this map?

[tame tide]

Yep

I guess I should dump my maps on the pinned links :P

[wild flame]

Many thanks

[tame tide]

NP :D

[quaint pebble]

I think your design is much more practical in terms of "utilising the funfair mechanics described in the beat" than mine was

[hazy monolith]

I didn't end up using the map I'd hastily made for that combat cause my players did something very unexpected and ended up doing the combat narratively without their mechs. They won, but with a few extra burdens

[tame tide]

Haha, that's a cool way of doing it

[tame tide]

I made them first essentially to try and fit them all in. Twas a tad confusing... IDK where the wheel will fall down but I wanted it there ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[rough bluff]

Feel free to steal my "fallen over" ||ferris wheel ||asset too if you need it. My maps are in the pin and no reason you can't mix and match.

[half plank]

I did not know that was an option. Thanks!

[rough bluff]

Yeah, I tried to do it in the past and failed so I didn't think you could until you backed a project, so thanks for makine me google it. 🙂

[half plank]

Yeah, it odd you need to "click their name on the project page" then "click their name again on the pop up to go to their profile to follow" I feel the option should be there step 1.

[rough bluff]

Me too. I stopped after Step 1 the first time I tried to follow vex.

[rough bluff]

Quick survey for the combat ||Anti-Capital||. For those who have run it, how many rounds would you say you lasted? My map is starting to simplify around round 5-6 on the dynamic map, which isn't a huge problem if that's as long as it's going to last but if these tend to be marathon fight, I want to introduce a little entropy back into the system.

[hazy monolith]

At LL5, with enemies bumped up to T2 and given a few buffs my team of 5 did it in exactly 3 rounds. (Probably pretty far removed from the average experience though)

[wild flame]

I would be genuinely surprised if it went more than 6 rounds

[frail kayak]

My 7 LL4 players brought out all their reserves, and exploited several tactical errors on my part to finish it in 2 rounds

[thorn hinge]

Anybody got a good token for S1GN4L? Asking for a friend.
But like, actually. One of my players is running his own game of IGF, and he's trying to avoid this place and any spoilers.

I have the token I used, but that was very early in my game and I just used a pretty generic NPC token.

[rough bluff]

I used the image from the book.

Just clipped it out with photoshop.

[frail kayak]

This was mine

[dim pelican]

Same, that art just has too much personality not to use! I used TokenTool to pull the art out (actually how I pull the art out of all my PDFs).

[tame tide]

End of mission 1: ||Player just said "How the fuck did we just kill Andros Capella, like he's an endgame boss this feels wrong"||

[wild flame]

lmao

[heady topaz]

oh those sweet summer children

[shell bison]

They don't know >:)

[maiden ferry]

Hot damn that was my favorite session I've run so far, this was the cliffhanger

[fast parrot]

Fleeing Chief does sound like a good name?

[austere prism]

fleeing chief is an a+ name

[fast parrot]

like master chief but 40% less competant

[rough bluff]

40 percent???!!!

Well, maybe when I play him, yeah.

[dusky cradle]

5 rounds to takedown, however, given that the players focus almost exclusively on the "main attraction" of the fight, expect her to go down in 2. Granted, I used two space station maps from KaffeeZombie, and as soon as the "big event" happens after the previous fight, I shifted all of them into an adjacent, but empty map, and boy was it memorable (would recommend keeping the dynamic map simple though! shifting all those token around on the map ain't easy!)

A little doodle from one of my players after Chapter 1, as a sort of ... achievement icon?

"To Hell's Gate": "Why! Shelly! You did not just snatch that drink out of my hand!" Ingredient: Not Jerry's private cache of whiskey on the rocks, no sir.

A glass that had never been raised again after the communications brownout between Borealis and Hell's Gate, Masters had resorted to gulping down dozens of these a day during his feverish wait for a response... While his private cache of alcohol was eventually excluded from the celebratory care-package given its awkward size and the nature of long-distance shipping, a single glass made it through nonetheless, right into your hands. Slightly bitter with a subtle hint of floral aroma, much like the station-chief himself. To victory and health.

[dusky cradle]

Also, now that you think of it, it's surprising that there isn't a rule about playing FleetComm with Siren, one of my players stated that he simply must spent the night distracting her with the promise of high-stakes naval battles (the stake being hours allocated to the on-board printer)... and I was tempted to bring out Strategic Operations from Battletech for a change, but that way the battle might actually lasted an entire night.

"Yo Player X, I heard you like mechs, I've got this mech-game add-on to your mech-game, so that now you can play games about mechs in your game about mechs!"

[rough bluff]

Aside from the the elevation, "Simple" has probably sailed on that map. I'm on round 7 and entropy increases every round. But it's a zero g map, so the only thing that really matters is the zones.

[dusky cradle]

Woah, I've actually seen one of your previous maps with moving asteroids, THAT's the one?

[rough bluff]

No, I'm talking about ||"Anti-Capital."|| It's zero-g too. It's designed like it isn't, but it says at the begining they are in zero-g.

[dusky cradle]

Ah right, I got confused for a minute

Yeah, the "scene" in question lasted 5 rounds in my experience, with one caveat:

KaffeeZombie's maps tend on the small size, so the players get close awfully fast

[rough bluff]

I'm running a battle right now, I'll send a little preview in DM in a half hour or so.

[dusky cradle]

I've tried your maps (awesome Ferris wheel BTW), and they are a bit bigger, can stretch the fight for an additional 2 rounds, so take my experience with a healthy grain of salt

[rough bluff]

This is the first map I didn't make Solstice Rain size (40x30). I made it Dustgrave size (18.5 x 35).

Gave an effective area of 18.5 x 30 because you end up with 5 dead spaces on the left side.

[rough bluff]

Thanks for the kind words about the Ferris Wheel. One of the reasons I tell people to feel free to use it even on other maps is I spent more time on it than the rest of the map combined. 🙂

[dusky cradle]

Half the crew got carried away and was itching to crash it into someone with that thing after a free scan revealed that it's dynamic terrain

Here's hoping they crash it next to the objective (and have ||Doctor Nyambose falling in between the wheel-spokes||), that'd definitely be something to write home about

[rough bluff]

Are you running it right now?

[dusky cradle]

Not "right now" right-now, but we are on round 4 last Sunday, they had already crippled half the reinforcements but the ||Bastion-Hive duo proved to be unusually troublesome for them||. My group ran Chapter 2 in the reverse direction, and got to do ||Thermopylae|| first, who knows a ||murdered data analyst|| could be that interesting! Here's hoping for a good conclusion this Sunday!

[rough bluff]

Are you planning on doing the two optional ones? No one I see has maps for those so I was thinking of doing them next if no one gives me a request first.

[dusky cradle]

||Getting Railroaded|| was real interesting, especially the random turn events and the tight tunnels, I was definitely hoping to do that as some sort of grand finale, but maybe after the ||Killer Sound|| fight? You had already done the second one though!

[rough bluff]

I haven't done ||Powerhouse ||yet. I've been thinking about how to handle it with variable PCs.

[dusky cradle]

Yeah, it'd be quite irritating to design three differet objective distribution maps... perhaps just have the excess objectives marked as "blown-out" or something? I haven't done that either, can't be of much help...

[rough bluff]

I have 8 players in my group, and I'm not the only one who runs 7+. So that map is a challenge. 🙂 I'll need to give some kind of craft component to the GM.

[wild flame]

i think the best way might be to have a bunch of spots on the map where objectives could go, and then provide an independent objective token for gms to place in whatever quantity they see fit

[rough bluff]

That's what I was thinking exactly, actually.

The big challenge is just for allowing for any sized party. I might just have to make it a huge empty space. Who am I to say you can't have 10 players.

I might put something with cover in the likely location so the GM can plop down the special objectives on top of them, that means if they don't use a spot, is still serves a tactical purpose, if they do, then it serves a differnt tactical purpose.

[rough bluff]

@fallen geyser This is sort of what I was getting at in our last conversation. With the static map, we have pretty much a faithful representation of what you wrote in the encounter. With the dynamic map, I went a little crazy. I wanted to capture the spirit of what you wrote, but in a way you would never write it. Essentially, I wanted to make the map you'd order if you were a sociopath and didn't care whether or not the cartographer took a permanent loss of SANITY with every advancing round of the map. (However, I expect the community is going to kick and make me take off all but a few of the margin notes).

[digital raven]

So are you going to need to manually update player position in the first couple of rounds? It looks like since some of the islands move, so would the players on them. Or am I misinterpreting?

[fallen geyser]

Well like, consider that ||The Crone|| has ||read everything in the book and your GM notes||, but explicitly cannot fully understand the PCs because ||their strings aren't held by the GM and thus she only knows as much about them as the GM does||. If your players do something that surprises you, ||it probably surprises her too||.

[fallen geyser]

I fucking love this, this is so cool

[rough bluff]

Thanks, I've only skimmed some of the battlefield descriptions later in the book, but my instinct is this might be my Act 1 Magnum Opus. Some may be funner to make, but this is the one where what I'm bringing to these maps pays off the most.

[dawn field]

Oh yeah this is the real good shit

[fallen geyser]

Can I get versions of these for my own game?

[rough bluff]

Tell me if you are running THIS fight on a deadline, and what version you need (hex, square, w/without grid, etc.) and I can do a special export for you. I've done the same for others, so it's not an inconvenience.

[fallen geyser]

Oh no deadline at all

Like, not starting the game for another week

So won't get to that fight for a while yet

[rough bluff]

Cool. I should have those maps on the drive by the end of the weekend, then I'm going to start the two optional ones from the end of Chapter 2, because I love a good ||train map|| and the logisital scaling of making the other work for every party size has me intellectually intrigued. 🙂 Also, I just want people to have access to adventure-specific versions of those maps so they don't have to go searching for found maps that would work.

[rough bluff]

Here's the direct link to instructions on using dynamic maps in foundry if you need it and it's not obvious to you. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WKylzxQnVnGIy9GTZZfkfCHzb2ZZtfawRjCWBwlE8XI/edit?usp=sharing

[light mist]

this might be a dumb question but what kinds of things have y'all done for session 1 when the players are supposed to be doing daily life stuff before their first briefing? i'm having trouble thinking of things other than "air filter duty"

[heady topaz]

I typically ask each of my players to tell everyone else what the average day in the life of their character is, and help narrate things.

[rough bluff]

There's also the random chart to paint a quick scene. With certain players that will just be a few lines, with others, that will turn into 15 minutes of RP.

Scenes from the Gate, Page 77.

[heady vale]

are you uploading all of these to the community folder?

[rough bluff]

Yeah, I have two lines in the pined spreadsheet (see the pins). One for the maps in general and one that just takes you straight to instructions on how to use the staged versions (I call them dynamic sometimes, but staged is more accurate).

The second is for people who aren't as comfortable with Foundry and might try to make it more difficult than it is. It's basically "Change the map every round, they are the same size, so it's seemless." And then some notes on a mod that makes that SLIGHTLY easier.

This one isn't up there yet. I'm exporting it over the weekend. If you have a special need before that, just ping me and we'll work it out, as always.

[tame tide]

Holy shit!!!!! 👀

[frail kayak]

yeah, seriously

[tame tide]

My players are so fucked, they don't stand a chance

||The stats are unchanged from the book||

[tame tide]

Pretty happy with my map for (Mission 2): ||Killer sound|| it looks "ok" but not very ||concert backdrop like|| so with a couple animated lighting effects in foundry though and it has quite the glow up 👀

[shell bison]

May I offer some themed tokens for the fight?

[rough bluff]

I know I'M interested.

[tame tide]

Enlighten me 👀

[rough bluff]

Has anyone run ||Getting Railroaded||? What size map did you use? I'm thinking 10 x 35. Anything bigger would advantage the PCs too much by setting the ingress zones too far away. Smaller might advantage the enemy. But there are other things going on in that combat, so I wondered if anyone had practical advice, post-battle.

[toxic stump]

After a holiday break we resumed our campaign with Thermopylae. And among other things, this happened:

[wild flame]

[wispy quail]

i don't have Foundry so I'm always looking for maps that work well with Roll20

[wild flame]

holy shit

[wispy quail]

where the main determinant is "they can't be even a little bit complicated because roll20 doesn't have proper map objects or staging"

[rough bluff]

BTW, I can tell you how to do staged maps in Roll20. I learned from a patreon, I followed. Basically, since every Roll20 map is just an image on the canvas, you just put all X number of stages on the canvas, the last in back and the first in front, then as you progress through, just delete hide, or move aside that top layer somehow to reveal the layer belief (don't remember the smoothest way to do that anymore). But it's pretty straightforward. You just need to make sure all the initial stages are the same size so they stack on top of each other, but I think you can type the numbers in manually, once you get the first one sized, can't you?

However, that was just an FYI, you are exactly the use case for me making both static and staged version of every map. I know some people have reasons they don't want to deal with the different maps every round, either logistics, or player experience, or what have you. I cater to everyone. 🙂

[rough bluff]

Do you use square or hex?

[wispy quail]

uhhh. hex probably?

i really like hexes but if the only map i can find is a square i'll use a square

[frail kayak]

I ran it in (effectively) 34x9, and made the mistake of ||deploying the enemies at the back of the train, so they all got CCed off of it in a single round||

[frail kayak]

Putting the Thermo in Pylae

[willow cloak]

How many IGF campaigns are you involved in right now anyways

[maiden ferry]

all of them at once, I believe is the canon answer

[willow cloak]

True lol, though I meant as a player or GM.

[rough bluff]

Do you feel like that would have been the right size if you'd revesed the zone positioning? I was planning on doing it the other way around. 🙂

[frail kayak]

yes

[rough bluff]

Great, when I get a mock up, I'll submit for discord approval and comments. I feel like this one calls for a non-standard zone distribution.

[rough bluff]

Fun fact: exporting the 105 or so separate map files for that map takes like 420 minutes, not counting redone files after I found an error. Hopefully I won't have to do another one like that again. 🙂

[rough bluff]

(BTW, I hope no one takes my occasional complaint about this last map as anything other than what it is: a necessary stress relief to regain some of my SANITY stat. If I didn't love making maps, I wouldn't. Now I think I'm going to order Door Dash and think about uploading a read me and foundry map settings tomorrow... tonight celebratory dinner, a bout of Blood Bowl, and some Jedi Survivor.)

[shell bison]

My players met Ignacious today.
He vibe checked them :)

[night zealot]

Is this the right thread to check on updates for Act 2

[warped ibex]

the thread in gm corner is where vex posts most act 2 updates!

[pale notch]

YOOOOO. MY ZAKU. Sorry for the late ping but that brought me joy

[rough bluff]

BTW, if there's any aspect of the Roll20 GM experience my map collection isn't satisfying, please do give me feedback. I try to have a map version for every use case.

[tame tide]

Got a question about how people run introducing NPCs on mission 2 and afterwards... There's a lot of NPCs and not all of them are relevant the moment the book introduces them to the GM. How do people go about introducing them throughout the story and how do they do it? Jon Jonnson only mentioned for the Boltzmann so no clue how to/if I should mention her, my players wouldn't really need to interact with Kileyna or Union, Gabriel Sparrow dont know how to introduce him either, oh and also Evalina is super relevant to this mission so how would be a good way of making my players actually see her face?

[amber viper]

Evalina I had swan around the casino when they went to case it for the investigation, and also buy the golden hand from the bazaar by rudely pushing in front of a PC and throwing money at the shop owner.

Kileyna was linked to my union aligned player so that was simple, she was simply told to give them whatever help they needed (UIB agent undercover)

When they were looking for Intel and dirty dealings I had them be directed to Jon.

Gabriel came along after I finished chapter 2, but you could definitely fit him into a board meeting scenario if the Players end up causing collateral during their combats

[tame tide]

Perfect, that sounds just like what I wanted! Thanks!

Which kind of leads me into my second question... The first step of Evalinas disruptions she calls unscheduled board meetings? I have no clue if this is something the PCs attend or Rita mentions, you mentioned dragging the PCs into board meetings?

[amber viper]

It says she calls for anti-espionage measures

Which would naturally affect players snooping around places unofficially

Rita has the players helping on the down low, if the board finds out she's got independent contractors 'investigating' on the station, the players will have half the likely incredibly corrupt, fraudulent and paranoid board members breathing down their necks

If they get caught, then they'll likely have to have Rita bail them out, at which point subtlety goes out of the window and they may have to explain themselves alongside Rita about what's going on

Which burns time and allows the cult to continue their work unimpeded.

[tame tide]

Thanks so much, I'll try figure out how to get this into my game cos I'm proper looking forward to this mission

[shell bison]

Certain NPC's are nice to include. Bandarchuck was more a background looming threat in my sessions while Gabriel was introduced as more of a side aid character. It's important to remember while not every single NPC will have any relevance to the story, I'd argue it is important to see if you find a moment where one NPC is missing for something to happen and slide in that NPC your player(s) care about.

Cerulean back on the Gate is by far not that in important or even met in the game I partake in but the one I GM for he is practically an uncle to a player characters daughter.

[quaint pebble]

I had Gabriel be intrduced by Rita after the first half of the mission as "here's a friendly board member with a lot of cash who can be more open with their support due to your actions so far", did not think of introducing Kileyna and regretted it because they're going to be important later so this next session is going to open with an unofficial notice of thanks just so they know this person exists

[thorn hinge]

For my game, I literally give my players the NPC list and work with them to come up with ideas. After ||Send in the Clowns and Killer Sound|| I had an entire session dedicated to just downtime things, going to the bazaar and meeting various NPCs. I added a scene with Subtext there just by writing up the tail end of a public lecture for the players to hear while they're passing by.

Sometimes things happen off the cuff too. ||That first partial downtime in chapter 2, the downtime action before Rita's briefing in the bar?|| One of my PCs, Pear, did Get a Damn Drink and rolled under 10. He lost his memory of what happened, and he lost his dignity (in the form of waking up back in the hotel without pants and covered in vomit). However, I gave him a freebie: Rat's contact info. Rat called him up the next morning to make sure he was okay, and to help fill in some missing pieces. He found Pear passed out on the street, got his hotel room out of him, and brought him back.

By chapter three the two were officially dating, and it started literally as a spur of the moment idea to bring an NPC into the player's downtime moment.

I can't wait for the start of chapter 5 when ||Rat comes to Hell's Gate asking if anybody has seen Switch. He and pear are good friends too, but Pear's missing as well, he's going to fall off the wagon due to all the horrible shit he had to go through on Boltzman...||

the Subtext Ísfûr Cowards scene I came up with can be found here: #909574961931362365 message

I've also answered this for some chapter 2 NPCs here: #909574961931362365 message

If any of your players are serious about the Hellfire League, you can hold off on using Howl until they've done that downtime action a bit and made a name for themselves. She might actively seek out a player who's on track to be her opponent for the championship, and besides, it's not impossible to have her show up on Hell's Gate. Or throw her in early to meet a newbie and give them some tips, only to realize later that same rookie is the one she has to fight in the end!

[maiden ferry]

During character creation, I offered "a name that you know". Basically they roll a d20... and then I lied and picked the npc I thought would make for fun rp/cause problems later. I then said that its up to them to figure out how your two characters know each other, and whether you are enemies, friends, allies, etc. It helps that theres so MANY npcs in igf

[rough bluff]

BTW, ||Anti-Capital|| is fully uploaded, with hex-grid settings and a read-me.

[frail kayak]

oh, that's a good idea!

[rough bluff]

Fun fact, ||Getting Railroaded||...not going to be my most interesting looking map. Seems that it turns out it's a bunch of boxes nested in boxes inside a giant box. 🙂 But I want everyone to have every map. So there. 🙂

[heady topaz]

SO. My party just finished CLowns, and immediately after ||rescuing Nyambose they realized that the cult wasn't going to punch a hole in space, but obliterate a moon. Tired of the Board cockblocking Rita's efforts to access the laser array and amp up security, the team called in a bomb threat at the concert near where the Focal Array was being held to evacuate the civillians so that they could go in guns blazing and effectively told the Board to shove it. The Board, finally realizing that inaction could mean the deaths of millions and the destruction of the station, decided to back the team up on this plan by having Station Security block off access to the location. So now, with no civvies to get caught in the crossfire, the gang is launching a full on assault on the warehouses and they are getting that damn array for the cult can OBLITERATE A MOON.||

[vague fog]

Is it just me or does the fight balance atleast in the Early game fights seem a little... overtuned? It could just be me but some of the fights Ive ran so far seemed very hard for my players to deal with, and now I am looking at the ||Anti-Capital|| fight and this just seems like a lot for only being at license level 1.

Ive also noticed the distinct lack of grunts in almost every fight up to now

[heady topaz]

Not really. For new players who don't know the system it's a bit daunting, but once you've gotten the hang of it you'll be good. Also ||Anti-Capital is a spectacle, at that point the Fire Gate is destroyed so iit's more of an Objective: Survive style fight||

[warped ibex]

how long has your table been playing lancer for, out of curiosity? the module is balanced with inexperienced players in mind as well but i'm wondering if that's contributing to it

[vague fog]

This is their second campaign most of them have ever played

besides one guy

the first was no room for a wallflower

[warped ibex]

how large is your party?

[vague fog]

we have 4 people

outside of me the dm

[heady topaz]

Ah yeah, from what I've heard and experienced Wallflower is a bit undertuned at times. Aside from... it.

IGF is more up to community standards of encounter making

[vague fog]

I see

[heady topaz]

Believe me, having tougher fights is good because it gives players a reason to use tactics, lest they burn all their CP and Rep Cap.

[maiden ferry]

On the other side, I had to make every single enemy a veteran and change one to a lurker in the second combat to even structure some players

Lancer is a hard game

[heady topaz]

Yee

[warped ibex]

yeah -- i believe the more important question to ask, really, is if they're having fun with the current level of difficulty

[vague fog]

I may keep it as is then, although I will say atleast coming from wallflower, having basically zero grunts is very odd

I enjoy grunts a lot

[warped ibex]

past it being harder, do your players seem to be having fun with the challenge?

[vague fog]

Theyve complained a decent amount 😅

coming from wallflower it is incredibly difficult for a lot of them

[warped ibex]

then there's no shame in tweaking encounters -- i can't claim to be a bastion of encounter design, but a lot of the time you could probably get away with replacing enemies with grunts, if you want grunts

[vague fog]

I did that for the final fight of mission 1

[warped ibex]

did that go better?

[maiden ferry]

Something to also consider - losing combats is "supposed" to happen. Its written in that the story goes on if they lose - and you'll get more narrative out of your players struggling a little, while also pushing them to get better at combat/buildcrafting.

[vague fog]

yeah it did

although it was pretty heavily nerfed 😅

I ||added another assault and grunt bastion, didnt give him the veteran or acrobat traits even though I had four people, removed the support completely and removed explosive jet||

Although the combat kinda slogged into just fighting the big dude at the end

[heady topaz]

https://tenor.com/view/dr-katz-concern-thinking-worried-gif-10484425

Yeah you shoudln't have nerfed the boss fight that hard

[vague fog]

Im also a new DM to lancer so I might be overdoing it

[heady topaz]

You are my friend

very much

||Andros|| is meant to be the difficulty tweak fight

[maiden ferry]

What do you think is the deficiency (and I mean that clinically) in the team comp? Its worth asking why the pcs are having trouble in combat. Is it target priority, objective failure, not enough dps, etc

[vague fog]

not enough dps

[warped ibex]

hm. yeah, that sounds like you were going a bit overboard there -- also, i'm surprised ||andros lived long enough for it to become a slog without change--||
--oh. that'd be why he lived so long

[vague fog]

although I think thats less an issue of that the mechs cant do it

and more that the players just... arent

one of the tanky kinda supporty dudes had a charged blade that they didnt use the ENTIRE fight until right at the end

[warped ibex]

what are they prioritizing instead?

[maiden ferry]

That'll do it. Lancer is very strikerpilled. If you're shooting 4 light nexus a turn versus a cyclone pulse rifle makes a huge difference

[heady topaz]

inhale

[vague fog]

and they almost structured him in one turn

[heady topaz]

exhale

hoo boi

[warped ibex]

like, in the case of that tank-support, what were they doing instead of attacking?

were they overusing their support abilities?

[heady topaz]

LL0-LL1 is going to be very offense heavy. You don't really get to go full tank or support until at least LL2

i.e. Lanny and Big Sal

[vague fog]

I do need to keep this in mind and probably let the players know this. Because, atleast from wallflower, I think many of them have the mentality that all combats should be won because... we won every single encounter

[heady topaz]

Yes this is good. IGF explicitly has a fucktonne of failstates built in for this reason

[warped ibex]

of course, it is also worth noting that if your players are consistently failing, things will still fall apart -- failure should still be rare, but it shouldn't be impossible

for example, ||SUNBIRD-1||

[maiden ferry]

I would honestly keep the difficulty how it is (its middle of the road lancer imo) and try and help the players learn how to... play better? But like in a kind way? If they dont want to get crunchy thats fine, great even! It means that the current difficulty is going to be tough to surmount and feel like a challange, and wins are earned. It helps that there arn't very many "combats because we need to commit attrition" and they're all story

[warped ibex]

||as is, SUNBIRD-1 should leave your players feeling like they escaped a harrowingly close encounter with death||

[maiden ferry]

But yeah definitely talk with them about the expectation that losing is a possibility, but the story wont just end

[vague fog]

👍

Im gonna try it and see how it goes

[heady topaz]

can confirm, straight up had a pilot die in that fight

[vague fog]

we play on wednesday, but with how much shit is in between end of mission 1 and start of mission 2, idk if we will even get to the combat lol

[warped ibex]

i almost had two die

||but i forgot they were targetable with SUNBIRD-1's missiles while they were out||

||and full-aggro'd on the existing mechs. so they ended up being spared||

[vague fog]

I will say in the ||Andros|| fight, we had a player get their mech completely crushed and was a sitting duck

[warped ibex]

thats fine! one of my players got wrecked there too

that feels about right

[heady topaz]

||I targeted mine with a Hades Missle as a hostage threat if the players didn't let it flee. Said pilot said "do it"||

[vague fog]

One thing for their team that has been doing work tho is their chomolungma

theyve gone big into the heat hacking, some of my goons can take up to 6 heat from one invade

[warped ibex]

ooh, nice

[heady topaz]

hell yeah

[warped ibex]

of course, someone has to make sure that they can exploit that by punishing them for stressing with a shitton of damage

which it doesn't sound like your players are actively doing

[rough bluff]

My Wed group lost their last combat in mission 1 of Dustgrave just last week. They'd been working hard to build their own saftey nets in for fail conditions though, so I rewarded them with some stuff even though the adventure said otherwise. Fail forward. Always. 🙂

[warped ibex]

so you might wanna nudge them more towards the skirmish and barrage actions

at LL0-1 especially i can't really see what your sagarmatha (i'm assuming your aforementioned defense-support is a sagarmatha) would've been doing to avoid attacking with the charged blade the WHOLE COMBAT until the end

[vague fog]

Theyre just new

is the big thing

[warped ibex]

yeah, of course! just, y'know, once they all start to get a feel for their builds and what they're doing

i'm sure combat'll go much smoother on both ends

so i don't think you have to worry too much?

[vague fog]

I hope so

[warped ibex]

if the difficulty starts being a legitimate active detriment to your players enjoyments, i'd probably discuss with them about balance changes and their opinions on them

(of course, make sure to take it easy, though, and not to overdo it. which isn't really great advice, but you kind of just have to get a feel for how to adjust things, which i'm sure you will overtime if you have to)

[vague fog]

I started talking to them about it and got this, and Im not actually sure how to respond to it 😅

[heady topaz]

I... think they mixed up failSAFE and failSTATE

IGF has failSTATES

as in if you fuck up, the story WILL continue, but maaan it's gonna hurt

Jerry will be sad

[vague fog]

They said that this fact kinda removes player agency, if they can just lose a fight and still have the story continue, they said it makes the players feel like the dont matter as much

[heady topaz]

...

I...

I'm sorry but like

I...

That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while

I need to take a lap I swear to god

https://tenor.com/view/subaru-natsuke-natsuki-subaru-gif-19434521

did these guys come from D&D 5e or something? Cuz this is a very 5e mindset.

[rough bluff]

It's like, the classic setup in every adventure ever. You , win, cool. You loose, you can continue, but with worse resource and a worse position.

Yeah, I come from 1e. 🙂

[heady topaz]

I am a 5e Zoomer, but I've lost like 5 characters and the body count rises so I'm a 1e boomer at heart

[rough bluff]

What they want is worse that what they claim you're suggestion. It's just impossible to ever fail.

[warped ibex]

...i'm curious what the alternative is?

[heady topaz]

Yeah exactly

[warped ibex]

ending the campaign on total failure?

[rough bluff]

There is ZERO player agency there.

[heady topaz]

What's the point of even playing Lancer if you just give them EVERYTHING

[warped ibex]

the complete inability to lose?

[heady topaz]

There's no stakes

[vague fog]

They mentioned that with most of them coming from 5e, having a player die or what not feels much more impactful in that system and almost shouldnt happen, so they arent used to failing being ok

[warped ibex]

failing isn't okay

[heady topaz]

I knew it

[warped ibex]

like, it can happen, and you as a gm and the players should be prepared for it to happen,

[heady topaz]

"screaming in 5e hatred"

[warped ibex]

but there are still catastrophic consequences for failure

[rough bluff]

Honestly, it's not that easy for people to die in Lancer either, unless everyone agrees. (<==Rolemaster writer)

[vague fog]

mb

[rough bluff]

I played Alien right before this last lancer game. Like five PCs died. 🙂

[warped ibex]

||losing chapter 1 typically means the Gate lacks important resources -- people will die because of the parties failures, people will starve, people will find themselves injured||

[vague fog]

The big thing atleast some of the players seem to be saying is that it just doesnt feel like a campaign for people going into it having only played one campaign prior, especially with that being wallflower

[warped ibex]

||losing chapter 2 creates a crack in kantele through which feather's influence can be greater exerted - the primary antagonist group is directly buffed||

[vague fog]

theyre also annoyed at how early it throws in elites and shit like that

[heady topaz]

...Elites at LL1 is normal tho

So are Ultras

They player Walflower right?

||REGRET||

[rough bluff]

Have them watch a Solstice Rain stream and listen to the profanties start about round three.

[heady topaz]

Is an ULTRA

[heady topaz]

lol yeah

Can confirm, Combat 1 is a nightmare that feels so good for the party when they scrape through it

[vague fog]

they meant at ll0

[heady topaz]

Even then

Elites are nothing more than a basic template

[warped ibex]

the difference between ll0 and ll1 might as well not exist at all

i... kinda just disagree with your players

[maiden ferry]

CPR vs CPR+pebcac

[warped ibex]

it sounds like they're looking for a much easier game than lancer really... is?

[vague fog]

yeah

Alright

[heady topaz]

I deadass just pinged my party to let them know I appreciate them not being 5e zoomers about my occasional bullshit encounters and taking it on the chin because I feel so bad for you m8.

[rough bluff]

To give you a comparison the first combat in IGF has ||8 Structure and 10 activations|| for a 4 PC party. Solstice Rain has ||9 and 9||.

[vague fog]

They were telling me about how it was just annoying how everything seemed to be structured like wallflower, ect, and then the combats are almost nothing like it, which made them annoyed and felt like they kinda just got punched in the face outta nowhere

and wouldve prefered to have some sort of notice going in saying "this shits gonna be hard"

so I straight up just told them that I am gonna run it how the book is like, dying is a real possibility, and some of this stuff is gonna be bullshit, but thats lancer (in nicer words)

[warped ibex]

i think, a large part of it, might just be that wallflower isn't a great introductory module in terms of combat -- no offense to wallflower here, but wallflower is, up until the last combat, kind of... a breeze?

[heady topaz]

Can confirm, played Wallflower, it's easy

[warped ibex]

with occassional jumpscares here and there ||the hoarde, for example||

[heady topaz]

||Regret|| was awesome tho. Great skill checker.

[rough bluff]

On a 5e note, the GM who spells me and runs from time to time will regularly put like 70 tokens on the board and when I give him the side eye, just say, "I hope you roll well on initiative, because I haven't found mass combat rules I like yet."

[heady topaz]

gawd that fight was awesome. One of my teammates got his Drake obliterated and my slow Saladin ass had to pull him from the fire

[vague fog]

I played a nuc cav op cal monarch and uh

kinda trivialized so many fights it made my DM mad

[warped ibex]

LMAO, yeah

[vague fog]

3d6+3 gandiva missiles are... something

[warped ibex]

||wallflower also uses a lot of grunts -- mostly for narrative reasons, being that most enemies you fight are literal heaps of junk||

[heady topaz]

I made my GM mad by denying all of his bullshit with LL4 Saladin fuckery

[warped ibex]

||which works well for the module, but does overinflate expectation for grunt numbers||

in calliope, on the other hand, you are fighting, long and by far, people

grunts are rare, because... what even is a grunt in calliope? what mech goes down in a single shot here?

i've seen some people use, like, ||for a grunt rainmaker, a truck with missiles strapped to its bed||

[maiden ferry]

I like the legionnaire from the advanced combat suppliment

[warped ibex]

i personally use impact dynamics little mech that i forget the name of

[maiden ferry]

buncha goons that eat shots and reward aoe damage without the terrifying damage of a grunt berserker

[warped ibex]

raptor-11s, i think?

[vague fog]

also

how much exotic equipment is too much exotic equipment to give out

ik each mission gives me a few to possibly give out

[warped ibex]

i know it's probably not the "correct" amount to give

[vague fog]

but idk if I should be giving them all out or na

[warped ibex]

but i just give it all out

i'm too much of an exotic lover

[vague fog]

fair

[maiden ferry]

I had a lady give the streamer character the scanner for saving her family with the food they got, and the dd/144 was a reward from the retired militia pilot to the player who got the last hit on capella

[warped ibex]

i think if you wanted to play sensible about it, they're best saved for moments you think narratively suit the item being found, or as part of downtimes

[maiden ferry]

it helps tie the combat the players do into "meaningful reprecussions to the people that live here"

[vague fog]

thats another thing

[warped ibex]

||like, for example, a player of mine spent their downtime doing card tricks for people||

||and i went "huh... now'd be a funny time for the CARDCOUNT"||

||and worked anthony callahan in to the downtime to give the CARDCOUNT out||

[vague fog]

how do I manage to get the other npc characters besides like, Siren, Jerry, ect to meet the players? Ive given them a few times where they can go and explore hells gate but all I kinda get back is just silence so theyve only met the militia goons basically

[warped ibex]

are your players not very roleplay-heavy?

[vague fog]

it feels like it

[warped ibex]

no offense meant here, fwiw, just asking

[vague fog]

There are many times when Ill ask "Any questions?" and one dude speaks up

maybe two

[maiden ferry]

out of curiosity, is this an rp group, or a friend group that decided to pick up lancer? (I ask this because I've had bad experiences asking irl friends to play rp games, regardless of how good friends we are)

[heady topaz]

imo you don't need to introduce them to every npc, cuz that's a lot.

I mostly find drip feeding them in is fun

[warped ibex]

i've had players like that before -- i tend to refer to them as passive players in my head. the best way is to involve people in what they're doing, if you see a way to. and, of course, yeah, don't add them all in

[heady topaz]

and roleplaying stuff in Downtime and License Aqcuistion

[warped ibex]

but, like... striga, for example

is very easy to work in

[maiden ferry]

phases through wall

[heady topaz]

Literally I have established that Striga teleports and works on looney toons logic

[warped ibex]

have her drop down dangling from her legs from a vent she should not be able to fit in

[heady topaz]

walks around corner, manifests under table

[maiden ferry]

I had her literally show up in somebody's closet, and leave through that same closet

[warped ibex]

and ask them questions about their last mission

[vague fog]

friend group

[rough bluff]

Sorry, I'm playing a Blood Bowl 3 match, so I'm a little lagging in comments, but one last thing on difficulty: I would make sure they understand that failing can be fun, and that stakes are in important BUT what's really important is that THEY HAVE FUN. This is more their game than yours. They outnumber you. 🙂 You can try to bring them around and ask them to humor you, but in the end, it's a community, not a dictorship. 🙂 We were sounding a bit "My way or the highway" there in our advice.

[warped ibex]

yeah, my apologies on that!! i tried to be clear about "if they're not having fun then change it" but i don't really think i got it across properly haha

[rough bluff]

There's no wrong way to play any game. You can turn IGF into a really weird game of Sparkle Ponies with the right amount of work.

[warped ibex]

also! i take it they don't really go and do things on their own?

like, do they initiate scenes that aren't related to the main course of story?

[rough bluff]

I actually moved to Lancer because I have players that hate battletech but thrived in the tactical aspects of 4e and I thought it was a good compromise.

[warped ibex]

if they don't, i will forewarn that the story of IGF itself might not much be what they're looking for: IGF is a lot more character-focused, and imo at least the characters and story is the mainstay. if they're not engaging with them on their own accord, past what you present before them yourself, it will be harder to get it to hit

that being said, there's definitely ways to work with it! i've done so before

[vague fog]

Ironically my players actually told me to play it how I wanted and to tell them the kind of difficulty I plan to make it 😅

which is why I told them "Ima just make this shit basically by the book" and they were A-ok with that surprisingly 😅

I think they were more just annoyed with having expected this to be like walflower, and it turning out to be basically nothing like walflower

[warped ibex]

yeah, wallflower and IGF are... leagues different

in narrative and mechanics

[rough bluff]

Yeah. The first Solstice Rain stream I watched I think they would have been on the verge of tears if the first combat if they weren't recorded. But man, that first victory was SWEET for them. 🙂

[warped ibex]

wallflower is much mechanically easier, and doesn't require as much on the end of the players or as strong of connections to the characters

||as written, IGF is mechanically much stern and strategic, and a lot of narrative beats simply won't hit properly without modification if the players aren't as attached||

[rough bluff]

I am engaging in crit-fic here, but I suspect that that they were still tuning their difficulty expectations on that one. The community spoke, and they adjusted.

[warped ibex]

major nrfaw // ||of course, no room for a wallflower also has the narrative end here to some degree -- especially in the destruction of daybreak. if your characters have no special attachment to the narrative, daybreak -- which i think of as the defining story moment of wallflower, at least in act 1 -- will go largely unimpactful||

major igf // ||igf bumps into the daybreak issue... everywhere. if your players don't care as much for the fate of their non-party, seeing a bunch of their friends dead in the crypt of stars won't matter. the destruction of steele dome won't feel to have effect. station stability won't matter. repelling the raid on hell's gate will feel less like a desperate triumph and more just like any other combat -- the ipswich delacey revelation will just be kinda "huh. okay"||

which... if your party is fine with that, that's all okay; if combat is the main focus, then combat is the main focus

i'm just providing warning from my own experiences with passive-narrative, combat-focused players that it might not go as you envision it (at least, without working with your players a little, or modifications as you see fit)

[maiden ferry]

I actually made that one of my 2 character requirements: 1) dont be capella and 2) make a character that does or can care about hells gate

[tight pier]

if you're talking about Mission 2, remember, ||players get Full Repairs after Anti-Capital, after either Clowns or Killer sound depending on which is done last, and also before Spreading Fire, and the Full Repairs given have only 2 fights, max, between each one||

in Mission 1 it's a little more difficult, but doable, ||and while yeah some of the fights are tough (our SRT lost 2 mechs to Capella - Skill Issue!), its still not that bad from an attrition perspective, and the Mission 1 fight against Capella doesnt actually have any stakes, if they lose they still complete the mission just fine.||

same with ||Sunbird One, which is a VERY mean ultra but the players have outright already won by that point||

[wild flame]

raptor 4

hearing people lost mechs in the last fight of mission 1 is wild to me cause my players wrecked house

[tight pier]

it was a skill issue

they didnt take cover and got shot repeatedly by the ||Assault|| (correction: not veteran. the veteran ||support|| ate shit lol)

[wild flame]

party went in with 2 chomolungma cores ready to go and then the TCB everest landed a big crit

||andros|| got cc'd to hell and cut in half

[tight pier]

||andros lost both his weapons but WOULD NOT DIE, he just kept going||

[maiden ferry]

||my andros missed literally every attack, got exposed, and got killed on turn 3 before taking his turn||

[wild flame]

hell yeah

||god i can't wait for mission 5 for andros to come back and shitstomp the players||

[maiden ferry]

I know the fucking karma stacks every time they talk shit in an interview

I've also started rebalancing encounters for my group, and I'm looking at my build of send in the clowns with a disgusted, "they arn't gonna make it" face but tbh, I know they're gonna be fine

[maiden ferry]

||My setup for "Send In the Clowns". If people want I can also list out my encounter for "Thermopolae", I prepped both tonight because I dont know which I'll need.||

Mission 2 spoilers

F it heres the ||Thermopylae ||fight as well. These maps are amazing btw, this chat is a godsend

[dawn field]

The great thing about my players being busy and not having time for a session is theres more community content to work with...

[maiden ferry]

I know I’m scared I’m gonna outstrip the content pace soon

Mission 3 especially since it just has so many optional encounters

[dawn field]

Holiday season stopped my game in its tracks

Im not even done with mission 1

[frail kayak]

It sounds like they expected "by the book" to be about the same as Wallflower.
They are about to unlock the ability to fire a Krakatoa three times in one round, if their DPS is too low, maybe nudge them toward realizing that the Everest can drive a Heavy Weapon harder than almost anything else in the game. Or be generous in terms of what they can get with Reserves.
If they aren't that involved in RP early on, don't worry about it, I also had that issue a bit, like I was really struggling to get the setting and NPCs across. As I went, I just built off of things they did, and gradually introduced NPCs and my players gradually got more invested as time went on.
The book gives you a bunch of opportunities to introduce NPCs at the beginning and ends of chapters, and your PCs just became notable people because they (mission 1) ||took down Andros Capella||. You could have Jerry get Striga involved in decrypting intel from S1GN4L's hideout (and drop hints about what's to come/ share the Drivetrain chatlog if you haven't already), or you could have Ipswitch interview them about everything that went on at the Tachyon, or have Calamity or Chief help them get their LL1 builds printed.
I hope you can get this to work out for your group! I really like this campaign, and you seem invested in the story and tactical depth it has to offer as well

[amber viper]

I've outstripped it for about a year, it's alright, act 2 drafts keep us going : p

[maiden ferry]

I just need Ralf’s map maker to come out and then I’ll have that at least. Maps are my weakest thing as a gm. That and not accidentally spoiling things.

[dawn field]

Ralfs map maker?

[amber viper]

https://discord.com/channels/426286410496999425/1170862899418386603

[tame tide]

TYSVM, I know the Comp is different so it's going to be harder to compare but how did the maps play out? As I haven't actually played them yet

[tame tide]

I can also tell your players are SUPER FUCKED here. Like no chance in all hell, how can the players at LL1 fight someone called "Grand wizard Garthazan" and expect to live?

[quaint pebble]

The difficulty talk last night is interesting to me because I'm running for a group who have never played Lancer before, haven't modified any encounters, and they have rolled almost every sitrep
Anti-Capital was the first fight which felt like it actually challenged them, and came down to the wire
I guess it's really very group-dependent 😅

[tame tide]

It's very strange too, my players struggled more on Denial of service than a face to a name in mission 1

(then again they all popped core first 2 rounds of the last combat)

[quaint pebble]

Yeah my players did not end up being terribly threatened by Andros but it wasn't even in the usual "his weapon gets destroyed" way I think I just rolled badly

[tame tide]

They actually lost! Which surprised me! It made me realise and kind of sad because you miss out juicy lore bits from that combat and it feels somewhat like a kick in the teeth when you lose it

[dusky cradle]

Finished ||Send in the clowns|| , finally. As a GM sporting an ||elite scourer||, seeing ||3 PCs in a line when you have Pulse Laser and Focus Down|| really does flood your brain with dopamine.

Which is kinda strange, the closest I've got to losing a PC mech is in this battle, and then only due to a bad structure roll and focus fire at S2, while being out of position from delivering ||Doctor Nyambose to a friend||.

NGL, it's kinda funny that the team initially registered as SRT "Gate's Hell", but later on due to hacked comms, discovered that they are being referred to as "Jerry's Gang", "Jerry's Mob", or "Master's Thugs" among ||Cultists||, had now embraced the bandit aesthetic and is currently hijacking a ||very scared Doctor back to Loki, followed by hijacking a focusing array from a concert||, I'm beginning to suspect they are well on the way to becoming actual moonlighters, would make for a very frustrated Jerry.

[austere prism]

My players wanted to enter the Hellfire League

they are now a tag team under the name "Hell's Angels"

[maiden ferry]

Discord lagged when a member was suggesting the name “Gatewatch”. Then someone suggested the funny misheard name in character. Then Shelly heard. They are now the beefwatch.

[quaint narwhal]

I just noticed that in Foundry, the IGF lcp file seems to work for the NPC classes, but the new skill triggers and reserves are not showing up in the Compendiums? I have tried to re-import the LCP, with the edit toggle on the Skill compendium set to oss, but I am not seeing anything. I am seeing the triggers in CompCon, so I know the lcp has them.

Admittedly, this might be a question more suited to the Foundry discussion, but I was wondering if this was a known thing for IGF

[acoustic burrow]

that's a known issue with the lancer foundry system unfortunately, it doesn't import skills/reserves added by lcps (and a few more things) https://github.com/Eranziel/foundryvtt-lancer/issues/431

[quaint narwhal]

they also don't seem to come in via the CompCon Synch or download because, I presume, there is no corresponding compendium entry?

[acoustic burrow]

correct, when you sync something it's pulling the content from your compendiums

[quaint narwhal]

So I guess the easy work-around is to create a custom compendium in Foundry that has the missing content?

[heady vale]

I'm sorry I'm confused I'm back reading but would they rather just. Have the campaign end if they lose something? Or whatever they rather just never lose?

Cuz I think, as someone who started with 5e it has branched out to many other systems, But I think that removes the agency just as much if not more
... Hmm. 🤔

[vague fog]

I agree and I didn't really know how to respond to it tbh

[heady vale]

....wait. They don't want difficult fights and they don't do heavy roleplay? Thats, genuinely, a first for me to hear, huh

[vague fog]

Some people are pretty good at trying to roleplay but it feels like they don't want to expand from just the base kinda stuff

Others... Kinda stay silent most of the session unless someone talks to them

[heady vale]

Hmm. I know others already said this but I don't know if IGF is gonna feel as satisfying for everyone at the table then.... But reading later it sounds like they're down to try it without any modifications to make it more wallflower like, So I hope that goes really well

[heady vale]

No no that's entirely fair, it's a really difficult thing to respond to, I'm just trying to make sure I'm understanding the situation right