Free Companies // crunchy Lancer downtime

[glad galleon]

Free Companies is a mechanical expansion to Lancer's downtime rules. It brings running of a player organization + base of operations — such as a mercenary group or Free Company — onto the camera during downtime play without disrupting the standard downtime-mission-downtime rhythm of Lancer. It is meant to ultimately support narrative play by including a balanced system of resources & complications to represent and provide prompts for that narrative.

Working Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A221bqT-JG7IHlurWxEIRNNXg18bvGurm5PL2BPG4MA/edit?usp=sharing

Mechanical summary:
In addition to mission reserves, downtime actions now generate a narrative currency of Weak or Strong Edges and ticking Project Clocks — which completing can grant permanent Assets for the squad such as dropships or npc cohorts which primarily increase the scale of player actions can take rather than the numbers.

GMs can tick Hazard Clocks as flexible catch-all consequences to rolls — which completing can result in persistent Fallout and extra tactical complications.

Combat missions themselves have some more spice in the form of Bonus Objectives and Rules of Engagement, which tempt PCs to push past a sitrep's base goals and add additional considerations to their methods, respectively.

Many of these mechanics can be taken a la carte! Feel free to take the bonus objectives for a spin and not worry about any of the new narrative mechanics.

Status:
This is completely unplaytested, so many of the numbers of various resources moving around could likely use tuning.

It's been sitting on my hard drive gathering dust for over a year; it was going to be a Kickstarter until Lancer Tactics took over my life. I wanted to post it as-is in case anyone wants to playtest/loot its corpse for mechanics (anyone has my full permission to do so). Who knows when or if I'll ever find the time to turn it into a pdf myself.

[nova tundra]

I'll have to knuckle down and fully assimilate this sometimes, been hungry for something like this.

[nimble kraken]

This looks cool as heck and I wish I’d had it back in 2020 for my first lancer game, the way we were handling narrative feels like this would’ve been good structure for it

[lean yoke]

Ohhh, I'll definitely need to follow this :3

I have to say it's interesting to begin to see more homebrew and third party begin to tackling more narrative side stuff like lore/worldbuilding such as what Legionnaires did and now this clearly tackling more mechanics stuff 😄

[icy tundra]

@weary ferry @brave lark might be useful for your ongoing MOB work?

[weary ferry]

Hi! It’s a bit rude to just call us in on a different project in someone else’s project thread

Better to focus on the Free Companies themselves than someone else

[icy tundra]

I apologise, this was definitely not my intention; I only thought it was worthwhile to tag you since Olive specifically mentioned she is posting it here so people can "loot its corpse for mechanics" (her words, above). Still, I recognize I overstepped.

[glad galleon]

Yeah I'm fine with it on my end, looting is indeed partially why I posted it 🙂 but I can understand why folks might want to stick with their own efforts

I'd be pleased as punch if an idea from this found life elsewhere

Half of it is adapted from Beamsaber / Heart / Into the Breach anyway