Spicy Solstice Rain

[tacit bear]

I'm new to Lancer and I recently picked up Solstice Rain for my group to give Lancer a try out.
When I read it I found the structure and layout of technical details very impressive (the combats have been great so far) but I found some elements of the setting and narrative lacking in oomph.

So, I made some changes, I thought I'd share in case anyone was interested in either giving some good advice to refine it or use it themselves.

**Heavy spoilers for OSR incoming! **
For all of the below, the players get pretty much the same brief as the book:

• Vestan Sovereignty is militaristic and opposed to joining Union, they are in a cold war with LSA
• LSA are in open diplomatic talks with Union and Ambassador Banerjee, they are a collection of smaller states who have formed into a super state
• Not much is known about the Republic of Okasnia. They have been natural in any conflict between LSA and the Vestan Sovereignty and they were engaged in diplomatic talks early in the process, but you haven't heard anything in months.

Vestan Sovereignty
The Vestans I feel got done dirty. As written they don't have any driving goals or reason to be so outright hostile. I wanted to try and give them something to fight for.
They are still militaristic, they are a closed culture. But they are more xenophobic in the "leave us alone" nature rather than actually out looking for a fight. I was thinking more like a very successful North Korea.
To add to this, the majority of the population are deeply spiritual. They follow a not well understood set of rules to live their lives and inside their borders they have holy sites they value very highly.
I understand this might be a bit of a difficult pill to swallow for only 500 years on the planet. I'm willing to take suggestions!

LSA
As written the LSA are "the good guys" so I decided to add some nuance here. The LSA are more contemporary and maybe a little over rational. They strive to provide the best for their own and are genuinely trying to build a great society. With that goal in mind they are happy to work with foreign powers to a common goal as long as it benefits them.

History
The LSA always butted heads with the Vestan Sovereignty as their land have the richest deposits of rare metals on the planet and the Vestans refuse to engage in any trade agreement.
So maybe 50 years ago the LSA took action and invaded a small region on their borders with the Vestans which was particularly resource rich. Little did they know, this site was of particular spiritual significance to the Vestans. This sparked a conflict which lead to the current cold war where neither side feels they can actually win. The LSA still holds the holy site and the Vestans have been plotting how to get it back this entire time.

Now
Union shows up and the LSA sees this as their chance to:

1. Get the support they need to at least hold their own, if not convince Union to kick down the Vestan's door and take some valuable land
2. Make a powerful ally in the galactic theatre and represent Cressidium their own way

Goals
Union has one goal:

1. Make a healthy alliance with any super power(s) on Cressidium
   They don't particularly care who they side with, right now the LSA are keen and the diplomatic talks are very intense as they try to talk through the details of what to do about the Vestans.
   What the LSA don't know is that Union are also talking to the Republic of Okasnia in secret talks. They are also interested to join but the details there are also very complicated.
   There might be a solution to have both parties at the table, but Banerjee doesn't think the LSA are ready to make the jump yet.

The Vestans are not interested at all. They have two goals:

1. They want their land back.
2. They want left alone, no outside contact.
   The threat of Union and especially the LSA getting galactic scale support has put their plans into motion.
   The events in the book detail the first step in the Vestan's plot to get back their land, it is their first and most important goal. They know they can't take it by force (the LSA have it fortified) so they are going for a bigger play.
   The laser that Col Kiros has with him could be a sign of the work the Vestans have been doing in secret to pull off this huge scale gambit.

What else?
I tweaked a couple of things. I cut Omari Garcia to make the Union cast list a little leaner.

The bus encounter in beat 1/combat 2 I changed. It's now a narritive scene where the PCs come across a Vestan scout mech, reactor off, pilot out, beside the bus. Then I ask them what to do.
They can shoot it, run away, stop and ask questons.
The pilot there has two goals in this order:

1. Scout ahead and report everything back to his unit
2. Protect and help the civilians
   Because his number 1 priority is reporting back, he will attempt to run if he sees the PCs and they aren't putting the civilians in danger. The PCs can kill/capture him though.
   After that, you can run the bus encounter as is, either as a skill challenge or as the Vestan's unit trying to stop the players.

I tweaked the dialog in FOB Sabre so the NPCs there gave a bit more flavour. Some are downright racist, some are a little more forgiving. With some questions the PCs can find out about the war that started the cold war or properly interrogate the captured Vestan pilot from the bus encounter for their side of the story.
I also foreshadow Col Kiros' laser here as mentioned in other threads here.

In the Col Kiros fight when they scan them, I also give the name of the holy site in addition to TARTARUS if the PCs choose it. If they interrogated the pilot earlier they could start to join the dots, if not they could try to find out later.
The LSA guys on the ground probably wouldn't know the Vestan name for the land, so it's going to require a bit of digging.

That's it I think! I'd love to hear any thoughts or feelings.
I'm pretty happy I added a little bit of chaos to the mix, albeit some of it doesn't make sense with the timeline, but I think that's an OK compromise to make the situation a little more engaging!

[zenith lava]

You could probably do something like what you’ve presented, yeah! I’ve definitely worked to add more narrative to O:SR in my own remix, maybe that will give you some ideas? https://trainlightning.com/solstice-rain-remix/

There’s also the #1107842047689379960 thread (it’s not my thread, I just post there) with a lot of other discussion from other folks on how they’d change up their O:SR games, for more ideas!

I’ll definitely say that cutting Sgt. Garcia makes me a bit sad, so I much prefer expanding his role instead of just existing in the prologue and delivering a line or two during downtime. I have him be part of Combat 2/the Bus to expand his role

[olive escarp]

Not Kai but I think the nations of Cressidium were left a little vague for the purposes of doing campaign customization as needed, save for a couple bits here and there.

My approach to the VS was making them an imperial power in reluctant decline. Seccom remnant government that's only becoming more anthrochauv and radical as their dominance wanes, with authorities promising a return to the good ol days of planetary dominance unity.

[zenith lava]

Yeah pretty sure that’s the case for a lot of O:SR. It’s more focused on presenting tactical combat in Lancer and leaves a lot of narrative details for GMs to figure out

[olive escarp]

While I agree that making the LSA and Okasnia having flaws makes them compelling, I rather like the VS just being absolutely dogshit

The VS opposition to Union is also pretty striaghtforward. They're the wacky revolutionaries that drove the VS's ideological forefathers into hiding on Cressidium in the first place. There's a very easy rhetorical line of union getting a foothold being an existential threat to the VS and its ideology that could be used as propaganda from within the VS to stir action against union and anyone who allies with them

[tacit bear]

Yeah, reading the module, I felt like Kai was going for the safe option for the factions and it feels pretty "video gamey"
Which is totally fine! Infact, I'm sure there's a good equal split of gaming groups who just want to be "the good guys" and beat up "the bad guys" vs groups who are really into the narrative. I also don't like getting lore shoved down my throat.

I started reading the other thread about OSR remixed, but it's like 2k posts long, so it's not a quick read!

I spent some time on this and I was hoping someone could take something away from it for their campaign.

I guess if I had to criticise, I wish OSR was a little more explicit with "it's ok, you don't need to run this story word for word"
Even one of the aside boxes with a note or a foreword would have been cool, but obviously there's nothing actually stopping anyone

[tacit bear]

You can probably tell just from the quantity of the words I wrote about each faction, I was not trying to focus on Union for this (for better or worse)
I felt the players had enough representation from the other NPCs for Union. But if I wanted to give them a more active role I'd flesh him out more for sure.

[zenith lava]

Yeah, I fleshed out Garcia more because I wanted to make the most of what O:SR does provide me, as a GM. Understood that you’re looking at a different approach, it’s valid

[hoary hornet]

to be honest, I find "you have permission to change stuff" sidebars in RPGs entirely redundant

as you say, there's nothing stopping anyone, I don't need to give explicit permission to do so

[tacit bear]

I don't think that permission is what I'm getting at here. Most people reading the module understand they can do what they want with their own game.
It's more about setting the expectation that what's laid out in the module is either complete and immutable. As in, you've purchased this meaty PDF and you're going to have a rough time if you start moving stuff.
Vs explaining to the reader that it's a basis, wide strokes with an expectation that building on it and modifying it is not only OK but encouraged.

... All that said, I'm being very nitpicky here, I'm having a great time with it and so are my player, thanks so much for the hard work Kai!

[polar dock]

I also considered remixing O:SR to try to add some subversion as I know my players are the type of guys to enjoy "grey" situations
But I kept from doing it because I'm not a very experienced GM and going offroad seems a bit more difficult, and also because it could increase the risk of the players siding with the Vestans

And I have no clue as to how adapt the story to a side switch
And it also means no Winter Scar ?

So I'm fine with the VS being pretty bad

[bronze sphinx]

Yeah I will say if I as a player found out the LSA was an imperialist nation that started the conflict with the Vestans I would not want to fight for the LSA anymore

[hoary hornet]

So a couple of notes I think are worth mentioning here:
1). I think that characterizing the Vestan Sovereignty as nothing but a nation of bad guys isn't really correct even based on the text of Solstice Rain, to wit:

giving way to something more progressive, and there were even hopes of long-term peace talks
in the future. A recent series of assassinations and internal power struggles has, however,
prompted a renewed wave of hardline nationalism and neo-anthrochauvinist sentiment, vying
against the older and less outwardly aggressive regime for control of the nation. The current
relationship between the major powers is tense, but not to the point of outright war, and
representatives of the Vestan Sovereignty have agreed to attend talks along with the LSA during
this diplomatic mission.```

This isn't really elaborated on to an extensive degree, but it is nonetheless mentioned that the Sovereignty isn't a monolith of warmongers who just want to do war and are all evil

[hoary hornet]

2). Way, way, way back in the day when I was originally sketching out some concepts for what would eventually become Solstice Rain, I did actually consider having a bit of a twist like this, not so much where the LSA as a whole had done this but something like a faction within it was secretly inciting the Sovereignty's hardliners to launch an attack in order to create a casus belli for Union to join with the LSA against them, but as I thought more about it I came to the conclusion that within the bounds of what Tom wanted the module to be that this was an unattractive prospect for a number of reasons, among which I didn't want an introductory Lancer module to have the moral of "actually you guys are dumb idiots who got used like puppets"

I do not think the LSA need to be unambiguous good guys even without that sort of twist and I don't think I've really painted them directly as such, they're a national superpower, I'm sure there's stuff in their history which is less than great (though I don't really envision them as having committed like mass horrific attrocities, and in fairness I don't envision the Sovereignty as having done so either, no mass death camps or whatever), but that sort of exploration is beyond both the scope and the wordcount of what I was working within