Pass the Torch

[cerulean echo]

Welcome to Pass the Torch, a Lancer narrative. This campaign takes place more than a millennium after the timeline laid out in the Lancer Core Rulebook, building on its historical foundations.

In this grim future, the Milky Way burns with a mysterious nanite swarm, the Argent Plague, which has erased worlds and systems off the starmap. Under the weight of the Plague and a zealous insurrection, Union has stumbled, and its supremacy is challenged by the rising power of the Annorum Empyrea. The fragments of humanity grapple over ever-diminishing resources, clinging to life. Even the stars themselves are being consumed by the Plague, their lights dimming along with humanity’s hope.

Then a torch ignites in the sea of guttering candles. An impossibly titanic planet, Beacon, appears beyond the edge of frontier space. Forward scouts announce that it is free from the Plague, and that its scale could make it a viable refuge for humanity; a miracle made manifest.

Now, the galaxy holds its breath as the blink gate to Beacon nears completion.

Yet the planet is not the haven it seems. It bears a history of dark deeds, of loss, and of vengeance ascendant. The players shall have their chance to etch their story onto this new world, uncover the mysteries at its heart, and shape the future of the galaxy.

This demo includes:

• A narrative campaign for new or experienced players that will take them from License Level 0 to 2 across two of the three available missions.
• Two ‘Paths’, or narrative routes for the players to follow, aligning them with either the Annorum or Union.
• A description of the setting, including the historical timeline, factions, characters, and locations, all designed and organized for use by the Gamemaster (GM).
• Combats complete with full battle maps, sitreps, enemy forces, and recommended tactics for the NPCs controlled by the GM.
• A Player’s Guide with spoiler-free history and context for the setting, as well as descriptions of the available narrative Paths.
• New NPCs and a new NPC template for GMs, a new sitrep, as well as exotic gear and three new mech frames for players.

The Kickstarter for this game will be launched soon! If you’re interested in hearing when the Kickstarter drops, join the Mailing List!

For folks interested in trying it out, check out the free demo for Pass the Torch, which includes the first three missions of the campaign!

[summer belfry]

oooo

[prime spindle]

man this looks awesome but I don't have the LCP space for this aaaaaaaaaa

[cerulean echo]

there's a limit?

[prime spindle]

the comp/con website has a ~5kb limit on how many LCPs can be loaded at time

[cerulean echo]

Ah, well, best of luck then

[prime spindle]

Fortunately I had enough to load your stuff. This is what I'm at now lol

[daring hearth]

Ayy! I saw some of the NPC art for this and I've been looking forward to finding out more

[cerulean echo]

Glad to hear that! yeah, all the artists have been hard at work for quite some time now. they all did a pretty fantastic job

[prime spindle]

notice there's no HORUS license. that intentional?

[cerulean echo]

Saving them for Act 2 and 3, since I don't have art for them yet. I've actually got 3 Horus mechs in playtest now

[prime spindle]

rad
Excited to see future horus bullshit

[old folio]

This looks incredibly slick. The artwork is amazing, and I like the scrappier, grittier take on the usual Lancer setting.

[silk hamlet]

This looks stunning. A truly incredible amount of work has gone into this.

[shy vault]

wooo its live !!!!!

[stone lantern]

appreciate what i'm seein, i dig the new frames too

gave the kickstarter a follow and will certainly try to pledge heavily when it happens

also appreciating the new talents and downtime actions

[cerulean echo]

Thank you for the kind words! 😊

[rustic nacelle]

THE KICKSTARTER IS LIVE!!! This is absolutely incredible congratulations @cerulean echo

[cerulean echo]

Thank you! And thanks again for all the hard work with the amazing looking Egregorian art!

[rustic nacelle]

Thank you for the opportunity :) I can't wait to see the full thing completed!

[cerulean echo]

@everyone Damn folks, I don't know what to say. Kickstarter just passed the funding line and it's only been a bit over a day! Huge thanks to any backers in here, and to all the people that made this possible!

Time to buckle down and get to work!

[keen violet]

Backed!

[royal spire]

Im excited for this one the art looks so sick as well

[stone lantern]

gonna back asap

[eternal tangle]

I read through the player guide, I think "religious zealotry and themes," or something along those lines, should be listed in the GM and Player Safety section.

[cerulean echo]

That's a fair request, I can see about adding it to future books

[modest geyser]

Howdy howdy I will like to inform you the player data doesn't work at all when I try to put it into compcon

[echo stump]

As helpful as it is for me to say - I have just tested it and its running fine for me?

I take it you're downloading from the Itch.io and have tried reinstalling

[modest geyser]

yes

This is what happens when I try to put it in

[prime spindle]

that's a known issue with V3 comp/con
it can't accept any lcps that have a .0X in it's name or LCP manifest.
the only way to fix that is to go into the LCP and manually edit the manifest.

[modest geyser]

Ok

[cerulean echo]

oof

Okay, I can get that fixed pretty quick

[cerulean echo]

Alright, it should be working now.

At some point I'll have to look at what it takes to make an lcp work with v3

[peak otter]

Just picked up the demo and pledged a bit. I do think it's neat to see someone with the confidence to go "That setting this is placed in? Yeah, we're completely shattering the status quo and doing something very different with the pieces."

[cerulean echo]

Much appreciated for the pledge! I think it's interesting to take the history and trajectory of each group and system and tracking out where they might go when things change. Nothing is erased, but people and situations evolve after a millennium of hard times.

[peak otter]

Super excited to see more after reading through the demo. Speaking of, are all of the acts planned to release at once or are they being dropped one by one? And if it's the latter, when can we expect act 1 roughly?

If that's on the table to answer that is

[cerulean echo]

Acts will be dropped one by one, and I estimated for the Kickstarter that Act 1 would be ready by late 2027. There should be much less time between Act 1 and the subsequent Acts

[peak otter]

Thanks! I'll be looking forward to it.

[quiet trench]

I like the picture of the mech that looks like it's riding a flying sword.

[cerulean echo]

Yeah, Peyton did a great job with it

[quiet trench]

I might try to get in a late pledge if I can, I like what the demo offered so far.

[drifting crescent]

Apollo the Cultivator Mech kicks ass tbh

Very xianxia

Very cool

I like all 3 mechs

-- SSC Apollo @ LL6 -- [ LICENSES ] SSC Apollo 3, SSC Dusk Wing 2 [ CORE BONUSES ] Auto-Stabilizing Hardpoints, Overpower Caliber [ TALENTS ] Executioner 3, Hunter 3, Combined Arms 1, Exemplar 1, Pankrati 1 [ STATS ] HULL:4 AGI:0 SYS:0 ENGI:4 STRUCTURE:4 HP:19 ARMOR:0 STRESS:4 HEATCAP:9 REPAIR:5 TECH ATK:0 LIMITED:+2 SPD:5 EVA:10 EDEF:8 SENSE:10 SAVE:14 [ WEAPONS ] Flex Mount: Neutron Stardusters / Neutron Stardusters // Auto-Stabilizing Hardpoints Heavy Mount: Sword of Damocles // Overpower Caliber [ SYSTEMS ] Impact Absorbers, Flicker Field Projector, Graviton Regulator, Centripetal Cycler, Zero-Point Collider, Armament Redundancy

Preferably has an off turn to charge Zero Point Collider to send people into the sky.

Jump into the air, free action fall yourself immediately at someone with the sword of damocles, hit them, launch them with zero point collider into height 5.

Punch them with the aux weapons to move them where you and your team needs them.

Free action fall then for bonus damage.

You can also gravity catapult your teammates and make them land safely without fall damage (optional)

Combined arms 1 and flicker field keeps you sticky while engaged so you dont have to leave if you dont want to. Any ranged misses is punished by Orbiters as the attack is harnessed into mario red shells thay orbit you waiting for someone to run into them

[cerulean echo]

Pretty good build and setup. Probably eventually wants Skirmisher 3 so it can jump even in melee without taking Overwatches. Had a lot of fun with this one in playtesting

[drifting crescent]

Skirmisher 3 makes a ton of sense

[peak otter]

Ooh, I don't have the PDF on me right now but I just remembered something. It might be helpful to make explicit mention of ||the pandemonium (I think that's what it was called) in a header or something. I'm assuming it's probably in the spoiler section about the farseers' first visit but I had to do a bit of ctrl-F sleuthing to figure that out. As is, it's a little confusing because the disappearance of the residents and what caused it seems very important to at least have a timeline of.||

||I assume you probably don't want to reveal the full extent, but it might be helpful to have a blurb that goes something like "all of beacon's original population is gone. This is (presumably) because of an event called the pandemonium. Here's roughly when that happened."||

[cerulean echo]

When I was writing the demo, I made the choice to only (mostly) include sections that GMs would need while running it. I decided that section wouldn't be relevant, since no characters in the demo would be aware of the information. ||However, the timeline of the Idaeans and the events of the Pandemonium will definitely be in Act 1.||

[peak otter]

Fair enough.

[cerulean echo]

It's a fair thing to want to know, but I didn't want to overload the (already very long) demo with too much detail.

[cerulean echo]

Hey, wanted to share this: DMtheTulio has been developing a Pass the Torch - Demo module for Foundry VTT behind the scenes.

It includes all of the following:

• NPC tokens
• Pre-built enemy forces
• Battle maps with Terrain Height Tool module data built-in
• Rollable tables for obstacles, sights, etc.
• Art handouts to share with your players

All this makes running the demo dead simple. And I'll be working with @pine spade in the future to make modules for each of the future books! You can check out the module on the Pass the Torch - Demo page.

[pine spade]

Hey hey, just wanted to say that I am very thankful for the opportunity to work on the FoundryVTT module and if you spot any bugs or inconsistencies be sure to let me know so I can fix it outright!

(I am unsure you will find any as Mogrit has been proofchecking everything extremely vividly! 🥰 )

[peak otter]

Oh hell yeah. Absolutely not nescesary but that extra mile is always so useful

[cerulean echo]

48 hours left in the Kickstarter! Have had the biggest smile on my face all month about this. People at work keep asking why I'm so happy, and it's hard to explain

[cerulean echo]

And it's done! Or just beginning, depending on the perspective

[peak otter]

Congrats! By a massive margin too. That's kind of insane

[cerulean echo]

I know! Way more support than I ever could have anticipated, and I'm hard at work getting everything moving in the right direction

[ivory terrace]

Eagerly awaiting this. My group is excited for a full length campaign.

[lime kernel]

Just finished running the first mission of the Annorum path!

[cerulean echo]

They got wiped out huh? How'd it happen?

[lime kernel]

So basically they started out outside their mechs for Pants on Fire. The Rainmaker hit 3 of them(Party of 4), so one of them put a gun to Soleni’s head saying she’d shoot her if they weren’t allowed to reach their mechs (had her roll a Threaten check and she rolled a 20). This caused the rainmaker not to go next and one of the party with expanded compartments reached Soleni and got her in a mech. With the hostage save tho, the Rainmaker hit the one who aimed a gun at Soleni and made her Down and Out. They then had to save her, one of them getting out of her mech(leaving Soleni as a pilot briefly) to apply a Corrective. Anyway it was Round 4 before they had even left the point they started at. One of them got shanked by Djinn and destroyed (had to eject with Nora), one overcharged in the extraction zone and just threw her mech at the Mirages, and the last two were so surrounded they had to eject directly into the EZ(setting their mechs to self destruct). They had to get Nora out with a Crane, all their mechs were destroyed, they only ended up killing a single enemy, but they did win with both Nora and Soleni still alive!

[lime kernel]

To be clear btw be we did have a lot of fun(even if there was a lot of cursing at me as the GM), the degree to which the situation was fucked created great drama and making it out literally by the skin of their teeth was awesome!

[cerulean echo]

Yo, not gonna lie, it's stories like that which make writing all this worth it. Thanks for sharing that! Hope you'll keep rocking into the next mission. Though they might have a rough time with it, lol

[lime kernel]

For sure! In their defense, they did have some supremely bad luck. Chomolungma used Wide Area Code Pulse and missed 5/6 targets, twice they rolled 9 heat on an overcharge, and just generally missed way more than they hit.

Viper's Speed Rainmaker on a combat where they're out of their mechs is diabolical tho 💀