The Joy of Mechs
Hello readers! I did a really stellar interview with Tom and Miguel about Lancer, which you’ve hopefully read, but we got carried away during recording. Instead of cut the guys off mid flow, I decided to let them talk. The transcription ended up being 13,000 words long, and the Dicebreaker commission was only 2000 odd.
Instead of wasting 10,000 words, I asked if I would be able to publish the extra words elsewhere, and they courteously agreed. I edited the transcript to make it easier to read, cut out some of the nonsense, and removed the questions that were covered in the Dicebreaker interview as a courtesy.
This is the rest of the transcript, I hope you all enjoy it!
Intros and Origins
Luke: I want to start by asking you a little bit about yourselves, how you met and what you were doing before Lancer
Miguel: That’s a long story! Tom and I actually met in the seventh grade I wanna say, playing Dungeons and Dragons third edition at lunch. We became friends through that and stayed friends through high school and parted ways for college. A few years after college, when Tom was looking to come back to the states I had a room open in my house in Portland. I was heading up there to do an MFA, this was probably 2015 I want to say. So Tom was looking to move back to the states, I told him I had a room in Portland if he wanted it and we kind of picked up from where we left off. We’d go on to make Lancer after we picked up a Saturday D&D group at Guardian Games. Lancer was born down the line after that.
Me: You said in your Escapist piece you were working in a Radio Station?
Miguel: So in 2015–2017 i was working on an MFA in fiction, and I finished that up. Afterwards I stumbled into a job at a local community Radio station called X-Ray FM, and spent about a year and change working my way up the ladder there from just an assistant-producer to showrunner, then up to showrunner and part time host which all sounds far more glamorous than it actually is. I was actually not paid for most of that!
Tom: I know it was miserable, yeah.
Miguel I got to about the producer level, and then they started paying me a grand a month to work about 60–70 hours. The schedule was…
Tom: Yeah you were working restaurant jobs too at the time, right?
Miguel: That‘s what I was going to say. At the same time I was waiting tables so basically my day to day schedule was wake up around 5 in the morning, get to the station at around 5:45/6am and then do pre-production ‘til the show stared at 7am, run the show (on Fridays I would also host the show) from 7–9am, then I’d hang around after for debriefings from assistant producers and other folks who were attached to the program, other folks who’d then edited the podcast, our news writers etc. We’d check in with the news of the day and sort of plan our next day’s show, then I’d go find some lunch and usually clock on at a restaurant for my waiting job at around 4pm — so I’d have from noon till 4pm, for my own time, and I’d clock on at whichever restaurant I was working at I’d work till 11pm, stay on and clean up and close, then go back home, check in with the folks who were writing news and tighten up whatever the document was — do my research if it was a Friday for whoever I’d be interviewing at the weekend — then start it all over again after a couple of hours of sleep. So, around that time Tom and I started working on Lancer.
We remember the start of it differently, I think Tom disputes how I characterise it in the Escapist piece, but I remember us talking about it on a bike ride back from one of our sessions one Saturday in the summer, we decided we wanted to try and work on a game. Back then we just called it First Cavalry sticking with the Cavalry theme for mechs. We just wanted to have a fun modular mech game, and y’know it was very different thematically and mechanically from how it exists now. It wasn’t started with this in mind. It was started with an intent: we wanna play this with our friends at the table at Guardian Games, and it was definitely going to be a project that we both worked on.
Tom was working on his comic and I was working at the station and waiting tables and so it was something we worked on in the spaces we could find, which was in part why the development process took so long. To take it from an idea to a hobby project to a thing we wanted to try and kick start. I think that process, like I said the current, the way it exists now is different to how it started and it’s entirely a process of the very incremental um, process of accumulation — I’ll end it there! Thus Lancer!
Me: So while this was happening Tom, you were working on (web comic) Kill Six Billion Demons?
Tom: Yeah man, so I remember the origins of this a lot differently to Miguel which is funny, there were definitely bikes involved…
Miguel: Yeah, there were bikes involved, we did a lot of bike riding!
Tom: We did a lot of bike riding! I didn’t own a car cos I work from home and stuff so I didn’t need to go anywhere. We used to bike all over town, and Portland is super bikeable. We’d chat and bike places and I know we talked about Lancer whilst we were biking, but I do remember the actual start of it. We were driving to get fitted for Tuxedos for a friend’s reading
Miguel: Oh right! I remember that.
Tom: We wanted a mech game to play right? We wanted a mech game to play but there were only really a lot of proprietary games out there. That’s all we had, a lot of D20 modern things, like BattleTech, Beam Sabre which was super early back then.
So, there was no game that did what we wanted to do at the time, and I’d just finished writing an RPG for my comic. I spent 2 years in Japan teaching English, and I was already drawing comics for a while, and I wanted to do a serious project. So whilst I was in Japan earning a salary full time I started drawing KSBD, which then got published by Image. There was a big demand to do an RPG for the comic for some reason? People kept telling me to do a 5E D&D conversion of it and I was like “No, I’m not gonna do that I’ll write my own thing!” So I did it and I actually published it through patron and it was really successful, so I was like let’s write our own game man, let’s write one. Why not? Let’s write the thing we want to see. We lived in the same house across the hall from each other, literally our rooms were side by side so we could just work on the game, we could just knock on the door across the hall and be like “hey what do you think about this?” It was a fun production process.
Miguel: Very informal, yeah.
Tom: Eventually we put it online early to playtest, cos we wanted people to check it out. We had a bit of clout because I had an audience — a captivate audience from my comic book. People who knew me from my work, it was easy to say like “Hey the KSBD guy wrote a mech RPG, let’s check it out!” It quickly became much more broad than that, we had a lot of people pick Lancer up who hadn’t even heard of my comic before. It gained its own following pretty quickly. There was then a huge Discord community which grew up around it which became a huge proponent of it. It gave us a really stable source of feedback and playtesting. So we had this really public development process, and it was a blast man. It was really fun. Miguel and I didn’t intend to kickstart it, we just wanted to make a cool game, and then eventually — along the way a year and a bit in we were like, hey we should probably kickstart this, there’s a big enough demand for it and um, we never like done a crowdfunding project before, but we knew that was gonna be the only want to raise the money. We had no goals to print physically originally, but there was such a high demand for it that we were like, alright well why not, let’s just do it.
Miguel: Yeah the physical copy was not necessarily a nightmare, but it was a late edition. I drafted two plans for the Kickstarter. One was $16000 dollars for art editing and layout and we’d keep it as a PDF. Then there was a $50k one for a print one. I think we decided a week before launching the campaign … I think we announced the campaign before we decided whether or not we were gonna do the physical
Tom: Yeah we’re gonna kickstart this and… by the way we’re gonna print a book
Miguel: All that to say the physical book was a late addition.
Tom: We had pretty limited goals. Clear goals which were just to get the book laid out and edited and get a bunch of art for it. In that sense I think we did a really good job actually.
Luke: Am I right in remembering The Kickstarter passed its requirements really quickly ?
Miguel: Within the first hour of the first day…
Tom: We blew every single goal in…
Miguel:15 minutes?
Tom: All of our stretch goals on the page initially in four hours or something?
Miguel: I think we hit 80, or 100 thousand dollars on the first day?
Tom: yeah it was pretty ludicrous.
Miguel: At that point Tom had moved to Atlanta and was on East Coast time, and I was still in Portland. Tom posted it in the morning, and I was sleeping in…
Tom: Yeah engagements really high in the morning for some reason, so I think it was like 8 your time.
Miguel: By the time I woke up…
Tom: Hey dude we’ve done it!
Miguel: Tom texted me and 10 minutes later I opened up my laptop and we’d already hit our goal and were going past it. I had a panic attack. That was fun… when we hit $100,000 I had to lay down on the floor and just breathe. Yeah. I think my girlfriend took a picture of me actually.
Tom: Yeah I remember that — it was good, it was so funny. It was way more successful that we had anticipated.
Miguel: Far more successful.
Tom: We also had that thing of having a pre-existing community to get investing in it.
Situation and Context
Luke: Ok, so to pick up on something I noticed whilst reading the core book: A lot of the lore is contained in the mech loadout descriptions and so on. I don’t want to assume influences, but the way that I see the descriptions and the lore stem from these snippets, to pull on a fairly big touchstone in gaming these days, I get this sort of “Soulsian” vibe from the descriptions.
The forgotten and unreliable history aspect is also there, though that’s not just Dark Souls, I’ve got big into One Piece which has it too. I love when writers make worlds that have baked in histories then what you do is direct the audience to certain parts of it and leave other parts of it absent. Is that something you tried to achieve? You didn’t want the history to just be a timeline of events that happened in this order, it’s a strong narrative and it invites the reader to scour it for details, like the Deimos Event — they’re maybe not metaphysically possible and don’t follow set rules.
Miguel: Yeah, so writing Lancer… a large amount of the process on the gear and player facing stuff worked like this: Tom would give me a sheet with a bunch of draft names on it and a brunch of unnamed things on it, and a bunch of ideas, and I’d write based on it. I’ve played maybe 15 minutes of Dark Souls II before returning so I never got into the fiction of it, although I am aware of it being something you sort of discover in game rather than through exposition.
Tom: One of the core conceits we realised early on was we didn’t want to have like a big exposition dump… well we did end up with a lore section at the back…it’s not that big?
Miguel: It is Tom, it’s like 150 pages!
Tom: Isn’t it like 60–80 pages? It’s not enormous by any means? Ah well maybe I’m full of shit! But either way, I think it’s important to have flavour in every single thing in a game, that does two things: One it creates a sense of verisimilitude. Reading the rules is like you’re actually paging through a mech catalogue in a way. If you’d been looking through a mech catalogue you’d be seeing a lot of advertising text and info about the gun you just picked up or whatever.
The other part is that it helps add to that sense of like there being a lived in space: this book, this game is like a lived in space and all the stuff has flavour and juice, you get an idea of what a gun does and how it sounds by just reading about it.
Did you ever play D&D 4E? It’s a game that’s much more tightly put together than 5E, it’s a better “game” than 5E cos it kinda knows what it’s doing, but it’s very mechanically focussed A lot of people bounced off the game in a big way when they first started playing it, people kept calling it very video gamey. I was really confused by that so I went back and read it recently and realised that 4E has all these great mechanical options, but they’re so incredibly dry! You’ll have a fighter attack called like “Bloodfist Thunder Strike’’ or something
Miguel: Thundertusk Boar Strike.
Tom: Right! And all it will say is like “this does 7 weapon damage” or whatever, and you’re like this is the capstone ability! This is the fighter’s level 28 capstone ability and the text for the attack is a sentence saying like “you hit them really and hard” and the text for the mechanic is like “seven weapon damage” and it’s miserable. No one wants that. You don’t want that in your descriptions. Go look at 5E, one thing it does is have lots of flavour for the classes, for the abilities, it’ll be like “you commune with the mysterium, you cast your mind into the astral sea…” all this crap that has nothing to do with the mechanic but adds so much to the verisimilitude of the experience. So we gave everything flavour in Lancer, I don’t think a lot of RPGs have done that, so we’re kind of excited about that. We settled on that pretty early.
Miguel: If I could just jump in a little bit, to add on to what Tom was saying… I was coming to Lancer having done nothing but narrative fiction for a few years, and my last big project was a manuscript that’s currently in an archive folder on my desktop somewhere — it was a novel length work. The thing I was encountering as difficult when I was approaching a game versus a narrative was actually finding room to put a story in the setting — to put a story in the situation — and I think Tom and I agreed really early on that we wanted to flesh out the mechanical options and imbue them with narrative importance. It’s a game that doesn’t have classes, and so we wanted to have players be able to define their characters not only through the mechanical choices they make but the narrative too. To have them be influenced by the narrative moments attached to those mechanical choices.
Tom: That’s right, we talked about that. I remember that. So you’re not picking a mech, you’re picking a HORUS Mech, and that means something.
Miguel: Yeah, so if you’re sticking with the core setting of the game the choices that you make when you’re levelling up your character… We wanted to write them so you could use each bit of gear as a hook basically for your character and their story. Lancer is like… it’s kinda primarily tactics, so we wanted to add story to those tactics and the choices you make. I definitely wanted to write this iceberg tip of a much bigger thing for every single weapon, for every system or bit of gear or option. Before the big lore dump at the back of the book I wanted people to get a sense, as you said, that the world is much bigger than what you’re seeing on the page, and to sort of get a sense of direction if the player wants it when they’re picking something.
Tom: Yeah verisimilitude, hooks, this is a real place you could learn the history of.
Miguel: We’ve been accused of it before, but I think we wear it proudly: Lancer is definitely a soft science fiction project that wears the clothes of hard science fiction. I think that’s in keeping with the fundamental conceits we wanted to have within Lancer as a setting, where it’s not grimdark — not to rag on Warhammer 40,000 or something — but we didn’t want it to be nihilistic or cynical, we wanted it to have a sense… of a fight has been won, but the utopia that has been achieved is a verb, it’s still a thing in progress. It still could fall apart but for the players actions and effort y’know. I wanted to hold that in mind when I wrote the setting, I wanted to have the right balance — things are really good, and things are really bad. It’s really funny when I see it pop up in discussions of the book like, “They talk about the world being utopian but there’s all these problems!” and as the writer I want to be like “I KNOW! As the writer I wrote those in! Go fix them!”
Tom: Yeah without them there’d be no story, you can’t have a situation that’s completely static.
Miguel: People will screencap stuff about the Karrakin Trade Baronies and say “oh it might not say it explicitly but these people have slaves!” or for the NHPs they’ll say “humans are exploiting them and it’s cruel and awful” and I’m like “Yes! That’s the point! That’s called conflict!” That’s something I want your players to explore. I have this refrain in the fan discord, and I genuinely love that it’s a refrain as I am always interested in how players will answer, but they’ll ask me a question and I’m always like, “I don’t l know, I would like to know what the answer at your table is.”
Tom: It’s a roleplaying game, you should do some roleplaying and figure it out!
Miguel: It always feels like as a novelist first and narrative writer first, writing a game has always felt like I’m writing the outline to a story that I want to write, but I get to see how other people answer it I guess? How other people fill it out.
Luke: This ties into another question I was mulling over for later, but it fits now, so one of the big hooks of the setting is ThirdComm, and the Core Worlds, you’ve sort of answered it, but you might have some more specific things to say. So the question is, is this your idea of as close an ideal humanity can achieve?
The game obviously has a strong political seam running through it, and I feel like you can’t help but being a product of your time — it’s a purpose of Sci-Fi. The distinction I want to know is, do you think ThirdComm is as close to an ideal as we can strive for, or do you think ThirdComm is a necessary — you’ve called Earth Cradle, do you think this is the necessary place we have to get too — the game is these moments that you describe as being like the apex of a flip of a coin.
Miguel: ThirdComm is an enemy that I’d want.
Luke: That’s a good answer!
Miguel: Actually First, Second and ThirdComm were something that were born from interactions with the community. They were things I didn’t have words for until I got a lot of feedback from folks that they thought that Union was really inconsistent, which wasn’t necessarily an error if I could be an error. It wasn’t an error in that I intended them to be inconsistent because they span 10,000 years of history, but I realised I hadn’t really designed it well, for a reader to pick up what I was trying to put down.
So to stick with the “Apex of the Coin Flip’’ metaphor, FirstComm is the moment where you flip the coin, SecondComm is it screaming up into the heavens, and ThirdComm is at the apex right? I view them as having done many things right, but very much resting on their laurels in a moment that demands they act, and that is sort of where the game sits, right? It’s where a lot of frustrations that a lot of people have with Union in the game, and ThirdComm specifically, and I agree. I don’t think they’re the end state, or at least they shouldn’t be. There is something beyond the current situation, and Lancer as a game asks people about what it could be.
I have a few more Field Guides in the pipe that will expand on the story, we want to ask people to start to imagine what a more, shit, a more perfect Union looks like beyond ThirdComm… BUT, ThirdComm at least has the capability of changing. And, Lancer as a game certainly exists… y’know Tom and I… neither of us are ignorant of the political climate today, and our privileges, of being subjects of empires, and I think I try to wrestle with that when I am writing a game that asks people to be sympathetic to a galactic hegemon.
I’m rambling a little bit, I’ll let Tom carry on, but ThirdComm to me isn’t the end state, it’s the enemy I’d want cos it represents at least the chance of breaking in a more perfect direction.
Tom: I was just gonna add, I am very strongly anti-utopian and don’t believe in an end state in anything. I don’t believe history is so linear.
Miguel: I’d agree with Tom, neither of us view Lancer as having a singularity or apotheosis moment for humanity.
Tom: Yeah, that was really important thing to leave out of the setting intentionally/
Miguel: I really have to collect these things and release them on our Itch.io page, but there’s short stories and apocrypha for Lancer that I’ve been releasing very selfishly on the Discord, and there’s a story in there that writes out exactly this question.
It basically follows two characters at the foundation of Union talking about the necessary continuation of the struggle of utopia as a verb basically, and they cast it as like… there’s no end state to this, it’s a struggle between I dunno know, primordial forces good and evil. It’s a boxing match that’s never gonna end. I think Tom and I both view — specific interpretations aside — Union existing in that context. Neither of us want the setting to reach a Iain M. Banks Culture singularity type thing.
Tom: It’s a question not a conclusion, right?
Miguel: Yeah…
Tom: We want to ask you questions and be like, what do you think about this? People are smart enough to play their games out and figure out how to answer questions, but we want to answer good questions. And also, Union’s a thing that has a lot of problems, it’s doing a good job and it’s trying to do its best. Are there still issues with ThirdComm? Still Issue with Union? Absolutely! But that’s life man, it’s complicated! It’s very complicated, we live in a very complicated age… unfortunately. But y’know, the best you can do is try to understand, learn and respond in the best way possible
Miguel: And do it with friends.
Tom: Sure, do it with friends if you can. And I think the setting of the game respects those sensibilities, of asking provocative questions and not trying to draw too many conclusions, but being like “what about this? Let’s discuss this real quick?”
I think Miguel’s done a fantastic job with the lore personally…
Miguel: Thank you!
Tom: He’s been like 90% of it. I just added all the memes and apocrypha around the edges.
Circumstances and Stakes
Luke: Ok, so now I want to get slightly into your takes on some of the more political elements of the game. When you say Lancer was envisioned as a setting kind of as a question to be explored and the table, is the game in a way — you’ve mentioned a couple of things already such as not having a reward system, the post scarcity idea, there are a lot of things in the game the at are maybe deliberate, maybe not deliberate, but could be seen as maybe responses to more traditionally conservative fantasy that you would see in D&D 5th Edition
Tom: Sure, yeah.
Miguel: Yeah, I think so.
Luke: And Second Committee feels very much like not a direct 1:1 but perhaps a stand in for the Imperium of Warhammer 40,000 in its sort of fascist overtones
Miguel: …yyyyeaah.
Luke: Was this intentional or did it just evolve that way? Did you ever want to position Lancer as an RPG that was looking at these other RPGs and settings and saying, “But what if this as opposed to that?”
Miguel: If it sells copies, then yes!
Tom: Hahaha!
Miguel: No no no! Just as a writer, Second Committee was actually… no disrespect to Games Workshop but I forgot about 40k when I was writing Lancer. SecondComm was never supposed to be a specific response to a specific setting, it was just like my take on looking back at the media that I enjoyed when I was a teenager writing, consuming and watching science fiction. It was very “humanity fuck yeah!” kinda stuff
Tom: Like Halo.
Miguel: Yeah like Halo, and I was reading a lot of golden age science fiction books like Starship Troopers kinda stuff. On a raw plot level we needed something to contrast ThirdComm against to show that this was better than what came before but still had a lot of room to improve.
The SecondCommittee stuff was like — the intentional stuff was that I wanted it to be a, I dunno, a Verhoeven-esque, not to compare myself to him at all, but a Verhoeven-esque sendup of sort of a glorious humanity; one that is a diverse empire bent on expansion, buoyed by a sort of manifest destiny of going out to the stars and populating them with people, and their very specific view of what people are.
A lot of people have asked a similar question of “is this supposed to be like the Imperium of man in 40k” and when I was writing I wasn’t thinking of it as a specific response to it, but I would it certainly include it in sort of the pantheon of things I was writing against, or in conversation with I guess? I grew up playing 40k, I would get stuff for Christmas all the time, Tom and I played it in tournaments together too, I devoured the fiction — what there was, not the standalone books, what there was in the Codices (army books). But, when I sat down to work out the specific histories and actions that the Second Committee took I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, just the general theme of, I dunno, golden age Sci-Fi depicting humanity as being better through strength.
One of the upcoming campaigns we’re working on right now, which has existed in various draft forms is called “No Room For a Wallflower” really dives into this topic a lot more I think, but obviously that’s not the text we’re discussing today, but once that comes out it’s another, look at what I feel to be problematic with fiction that it is uncritical of humanity.
Luke: That’s a great answer! — I didn’t think you’d specifically taken from 40k but it’s emblematic of a certain type of fiction.
Tom & Miguel: Yeah sure.
Luke: In the past 40k has been different things too. I really miss the old Codexes as well, but that’s for another day. I remember reading the Eldar codex when I was 10 and being blown away like “You can’t invent this stuff! This is… no!” and nothing that they’ve ever done since has ever captured my imagination as much, but maybe that’s because I’m not 10?
Tom: Yeah.
Luke: Right. Recently there’s been a lot of writing, feels like more so this year than any other year, potentially because of the “situation” we’re in, but it’s been about the Politics of D&D especially.
Tom: Yeah man, yeah!
Luke: A lot of critical writing has been about how it’s a game that upholds some very old politics. Some of it is contentious stuff, and I see how some of your mechanics fit into it, such as the idea there not being any explicit reward system in Lancer, and the ideas of colonialism that Lancer deals with — were there any things that you looked at and said D&D “these are the touchstones of exactly what we don’t want to do?” You’ve said you’ve played it a lot, so you clearly like it, but?
Tom: I’ll take this. The lack of material rewards, it was important to me to think about how missions work. In Long Rim we’ve added a Manna system in cos people were complaining about a lack of granularity there, which was an issue but what’s interesting to me when you run games is the stakes involved in things, right? So the key in Lancer it’s based on running missions, and missions have an explicit step in them, and that step is : “what happens if we fail here?”
That means it becomes more about the stakes the characters are grappling with, and the consequences of their actions during a mission than it is about material reward right? And that’s always more interesting to me as it ties it into the narrative.
So this whole mission structure grew out of that. Instead of being tied to having like “oh we want 500 gold” or whatever, cos you’ll find that becomes an incentive to a certain point, and I think in the future I'll introduce some other stuff that has more roleplaying implications, like when you want to incentives players to act a certain way you can use reward systems like that to do so.
So basically what I want to incentivise is people caring about why they’re doing things, “what’s the mission about? What’s at stake here?” That’s much more interesting than “let’s go and do this cos we’re gonna get paid” which isn’t a strong player incentive to start within my opinion.
A lot of the systems that made it into the game made it in cos I don’t think that reward systems worked particularly well in games like D&D and I don’t think they’re actually good mechanics to start with, but it did tangentially tie into how the game treats certain things like race and stats and stuff.
It was important for us that we had a game that was free of the cruft cos a lot of traditional role-playing games and traditionally fantasy does have a traditional conservative outlook — it’s about someone that’s very rich and is plundering the land and is y’know, you aren’t telling stories about serfs, you’re telling stories about knights who are landed gentry!
In Lancer you’re still playing Knights, but you’re playing Knights in the sense you stand for something, and that something could be money, that’s fine, that’s up to you if that’s the game you want to play, but at least I think we made a system that lets you avoid that.
We wanted to make a setting and game system where you’re encouraged to be creative and have all these big questions and answer them in your own way, so that’s what we wrote the mechanics towards. A lot of role playing games end up being written as a weird mercenary thing where everyone’s running around plundering shit and murdering everyone because that’s what the mechanics incentivise. Lancer’s about violence, it’s about war right, and we’re not gonna get around that. It’s not a game about peace negotiations, it’s about the people who come to solve problems that can’t be solved with words, but we wanted to at least make sure there were some interesting questions to answer with your cool mech.
There was this tweet going around the other day which encapsulates Lancer pretty well which was like
I’m talking to my therapist:
“oh man I hate war and the glorification of violence and stuff”
Therapist: “yeah”
“But then i love it when a big axe comes out of a mech and hits it and rips its head off”
Therapist “yeah, who doesn’t?”
So that pretty much encapsulates the whole thing.
Luke: Haha, I can definitely see that in Lancer! The rest of your answer also touches on to one thing that I was chatting a friend about, we were talking about the fact that I was going to do this interview, and my friend who does a lot of D&D and Pathfinder and stuff like that thought it was really interesting that Lancer makes a point of — I hope I’m not wrong in saying this — it kinds of exceptionalizes who Lancers are as a group of people, which comes with its own baggage and the book acknowledges that really well, but one thing it does that you talked about before — D&D incentivises that specific privilege — one of the problems it has, is this a question? I might just be rambling now… but D&D has this thing where it positions itself in a way that says anyone can be an adventurer when that’s not really the case — it’s turned out this isn’t a question!
Miguel: Well if I can jump in, it seems like what Lancer does acknowledges that not everyone is gonna wind up in the cockpit of a mech, but you have. We talk about how we don’t want to exceptionalize the player, but by virtue of being the player character they are exceptionalized and we wanted to acknowledge that not everyone is gonna wind up there, not everyone who winds up there has the same road of getting there, but you’re there now and you better make it count.
Tom: Also you’re not exceptional by birth or privilege, it can happen in a bunch of ways is the point. You’re not some god-given person who’s doing this thing, you could just be a guy who got into Union Auxiliary and worked through the military ranks, and there’s a certain amount of exceptionalism through action I guess, if that makes sense. It’s gonna happen in any setting, by virtue of you being player characters, but we’re explicit about that. Anyone could end up being a Lancer, you’ve already got to the point of being a mech pilot which already makes you pretty cool. You got there, you didn’t get it handed to it. Well maybe a few of you did if you came from the Baronies. We hope you feel bad about it!
Luke: Also Lancer is a game that in the text of the book, very much focuses on the idea of the moment, whereas a lot of games like D&D don’t. They are built to be long campaigns and they’re not a moment, they’re just some people stumbling into a plot, whereas Lancer has been set up to be more mechanically “this is the thing that is happening — this is the now, make decisions through actions” like you say.
Tom: I always think it’s important to write games that have a tight play schedule. We’re running missions. Lancer’s basically a game where you’re set to run 12 missions and it’s good, it’s over, that’s a whole campaign, and I think you’ll find most people don’t even go that far. This idea that you’ll be doing this enormous years long campaign doesn’t play out in practice a lot of the time, so it’s better to design something where you’ve much more of a structure to it, it makes better stories than something that’s gonna be open-ended. Those systems are nice, but I like things that have a little more focus. My favourite RPG is Blades in the Dark for example, which is a game with a very explicit structure.
Luke: I’ve never had the pleasure of playing it, but I know of it!
Tom: It’s my favourite game! The thing I love about it is that it knows what it’s doing, it’s a game about being a criminal, doing crime stuff, and it has a very very tight play structure.
You do a Heist: so first you have a Score, then you go on a Downtime, then that leads into Entanglements which leads into more stuff you might go onto another Score to do, it feeds into itself really nicely. I think it’s excellent, I like that aspect of the game and I tried to capture that in Lancer a bit. We’re gonna do missions, we’re gonna figure out why we’re doing it, what we’re bringing with us, and what we’re gonna go, then we’re going to go and do it, then we’re gonna come back and have some downtime, and we’re going to do that twelve times. Easy to plan for too as a GM!
Luke: This is off the cuff but does your community ever come back to you and say “Hey we ran this huge campaign and we got into this stuff” You say Lancer asks questions, do people ever answer those in the community?
Tom: Oh, no! I think the questions are too big, you couldn’t answer them in the course of a campaign but like, you might grapple with them a bit. We have NHPs (Non-human persons) in the game, it’s the most popular part of the Lore, Lancer’s quote-unquote AI, and people run campaigns where they explore that question a lot, so we get a lot of that stuff. “We’re running a game and we started becoming an NHP liberation front, or we released an ancient NHP and it almost killed or ate everyone” I dunno, random bullshit like that. That's what we see the most.
Miguel: Our Lore channel is really active, to the point where they have a sort of an in-discord meme of a Lancer bingo of topics that are constantly brought up.
Tom: Yeah, yeah!
Miguel: They’re worried over and argued over.
Tom: Someone always asks if it’s ethical to date NHPs…
Miguel: It’s been zero days since we’ve had an NHP ethics question! One of the things I did not expect but am humbled by every single day is the knowledge that the channel is very active and people are playing this game that has a lot of things I care about written into it. Sometimes specifically, sometimes when reading back on the text I realise it’s been put there unconsciously. To know people are engaging in, roleplaying in, or world building using this as a… assuming it to be a canon text… for me, that’s a win! It’s indicative of people consciously or unconsciously wrestling with some of the things we’re considering when writing the book — some of those questions — “what is to be done” type stuff”.
Influence and Aesthetic
Luke: So now it’s time to ask you some more obvious questions here, the kind that are maybe sort of a given, but I am sure people are interested in.
Tom & Miguel: Sure
Luke: So, you came to make this and you wanted to make it a Mech RPG, and Miguel you said you had specific ideas of a vision of a science fiction story you wanted to tell, were there other media touchstones that you brought into this
Tom: People ask us about Titanfall, but we hadn’t played Titanfall at the time.
Miguel: A lot of the early buzz was “this is the Titanfall RPG!” but I did not play it until midway though the Kickstarter.
Luke: I think it’s cos people saw these specific types of piloted mechs, and their pilots were with them.
Miguel: Not BattleTech, not Gundam…
Luke: Yeah, so some bits of the lore remind me of like, if somebody wasn’t writing Destiny as a live service game because it has that similar kind of feeling.
Tom: yeah definitely a big influence!
Miguel: Certainly Destiny — we have a healthy respect for the Grimoire writers! I think a lot of the fiction attached to that game, certainly in early drafts.
Tom: we were trying to get one of the Destiny writers on board for Lancer…
Miguel: Yeah Seth Dickinson. Certainly a lot of the … tone. I think a lot of what I wanted the gear fluff to look and sound like was heavily cribbed from Density and has since been edited into our own kind of style, but early on that was very much a big influence. When I was thinking of bigger picture stuff that I wanted to influence the setting and the sort of tone of the setting and the conceits of the setting I was thinking, there’s a science fiction book “The Forever War” Joe Haldeman? It’s in that golden age of Sci-Fi, but I believe he wrote it as a direct response to the book Starship Troopers, not to the movie cos that’s already Verhoeven’s response to the book, but that’s kind of the.. It’s not a key text but in terms of tones and considerations it’s a key text, it’s an Sci-Fi story that was fantastic and in the fantasy sense, and broad in scale and time and scope, but fundamentally focus on how much it sucks to fight the Vietnam war in space. It’s the perspective of people on the ground who are subject to the cruelty empires as they’re acting them out.
Books in that sort of spectrum were things that I really wanted to have a sort of similar tone in early drafts of Lancer. Other texts… I gotta say hard Sci-Fi is never something that captured what I wanted to write with Lancer, so I was reading a lot of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Queneau’s Ninety Nine Exercises in Style — If i had my bookshelf here I could tell you!
But yeah, fiction that I knew if it was in the text people would engage with, I don't think I watched an episode of Gundam until after the Kickstarter. I’m still not really familiar with the mecha genre, or mech genre, so a lot of my touchstones were I dunno, could see it like relating to Neon Genesis Evangelion or one of the Gundams, Titanfall 2 in terms of aesthetics and if people want to have a picture of what a mech might look like — it’s closer to like something in that sort of aesthetic range, but shit… I’m rambling, It’s easier when I have my stack of books right next to me!
Luke: I think mech fiction is pretty weird in general.
Tom: We just didn’t engage with much mech fiction really.
Miguel: We adopted Mechs as an aesthetic. A lot of Lancer was,… maybe it would be a sharper product or a sharper game if we sat down listed out every single thing we wanted to do with it, but a lot of the things that are core setting conceits and concerns are things we came through to the iterative process of drafting it. With Union and mechs and pilots and how death works in the game… NHPs and the ethics around that. Prophet was a really cool comic that I read too, that Tom did a little work on.
Luke: So you were saying you didn’t engage with a lot of mech stuff, but you watched and played some of it back after the Kickstarter, have you gone to any of it after you finished the bulk of Lancer?
Miguel: I did not! I watched Eva cos it came on Netflix.
Tom: EVA SLAPS!
Miguel: So mad that it took until literally 2019 to watch Eva, ‘cos that shit blew mind.
Luke: Yeah I watched it when I was 16, I was obsessed for a while.
Miguel: I wonder what my fiction would have been like if I’d encountered that 15 years ago, but I didn’t but I literally didn’t until it came on Netflix in 2019. Yeah, god, so fucking cool.
Luke: It’s interesting when people write fiction that fans look at point at and look at and say “hey that fits in this box” and the person who wrote it says “what box? I don’t know that box!”
Miguel: I feel like I’ve disappointed so many people like that.
Luke: I think it’s that they reflect similar things? They must speak to something that’s inherent in the genre. A lot of mech fiction touches on similar ideas, and there’s a reason why right? There’s a lot of mech stuff I watched, and there’s things like.. There’s Vision of Escaflowne for example where the mechs are explicitly Knights and they’re powered by dragon hearts?
Luke: Lancer touches on some of these things the mechs have to them… mechs as knights isn’t unique to that programme, or Lancer.
Tom: Man, Miguel and I just.. we just make this stuff to be like… I think we wear these influences on our sleeves. We don’t write to a thing, we don’t write to a specific setting, we just do what we’re gonna do. If it ends up in a certain box or classification then so be it. Our writing styles are both in agreement, writing Sci-Fi or Fantasy is not writing to genre, it’s writing something that’s compelling on its own terms and then it ends up in a genre somehow. It’s a whole thing.
Miguel: Yeah it’s a whole thing. Ours is usually slammed into science fiction, which… it’s undeniable, but genre is a marker that’s applied to it. There’s a lot of shit in Lancer I wouldn’t say is Sci-Fi, but cos it takes place in space 15,000 years from now and there’s robots and pew pew laser…
Tom: it’s speculative in the way that the Sci-Fi I like is. It’s asking a lot of questions, that’s what is interesting about Sci-Fi to me. It’s there cos we like the idea that players can be elevated through this giant war machine yeah? There’s this idea of a big avatar of destruction that you’re piloting and it’s a cool hook for a player.
Miguel: It’s a cool plot device
Tom: We weren’t like “let’s write an Eva RPG” or something, it’s just a cool device, I don’t you should ever try to write to genre y’know?
Miguel: I’m gonna push back against that, genre is a tool, you can either choose to use it in order to perfect the text you’re working or you can ignore it and write something with that label applied. I’d push back a little bit, don’t let yourself be limited by genre unless you find that to be a profitable constraint to adopt.
Tom: Never write to genre! No gods no or masters!
Miguel: Gods and masters if you want!
Luke: I feel like genre can be useful, one of my favourite anime is Hunter x Hunter and…
Tom: Oh god yeah
Luke: …and if you know it’s trying to be a commentary of, Shonen manga, on the surface it’s unabashedly Shonen, but it’s also subverting so much of that genre.
Miguel: I think that knowing what it is, is the most important thing. When we sat down to write Lancer, when I sat down to write the setting and narrative side of the stuff, I knew what I wanted it to be, right? I wanted Lancer to be optimistic but not naïve, I want this thing to be in here because of this, and that’s the best thing you can do. This is somehow getting into a crafts talk right? Don’t sit down and say I want to write Sci-Fi unless you want to converse with the genre specifically like a critique
Tom: Or you have an specific issue with it
Miguel: yeah, I want to write this story, this is what’s important in it, this is what I want to include, and this is what I want to wrestle with at the plot level and the meta level, right? I think that’s what we tried to do with lancer, which is why I so often find myself… I’m gonna try and tie it back to the question, which is why I struggle with picking specific influences and touchstones because I feel like that’s a question about aesthetics, and what it looks like? And that was never something I was thinking. Lancer would work perfectly fine without, from my point of view as a fiction. Most of the fiction I find myself writing outside of the core book was outside of the mech side at all.
Tom: Yeah they’re very incidental
Miguel: So I have trouble sometimes picking what I want to say is a touchstone to answer that question, which I think is a really vital question, y’know people gotta know what it is if they want to play the game, but it’s… I struggle with it.
Luke: It’s certainly important, I see people online pitch Lancer as all the time as “it’s this and this blended together to make this” but when you actually read it there’s a lot of broad things in the setting which feel like they could be cribbed from here and there, and I feel like there are some specific little references to things.
Miguel: I’m sure I’ve stuck a few in a few things here and there. For one of the things Tom literally just lifted from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, right?
Tom: Yep!
Miguel: It’s the Manticore right? People will be like “hey man this is great writing” but I didn’t write that! Some poor dude chiselled that on a slate like 3000 years ago!
Tom: The cool stuff is Miguel does 90% of the lore so when I sneak in 10% flavour or the lore that I work on, everyone congratulates Miguel.
Miguel: People do that for the art too, they’re like “Miguel the lines are perfect!”
Tom: Haha!
Miguel: They don’t. They don’t do that…
Tom: It’s good, Miguel sets such a great tone with stuff that I don’t have to do a lot of work with stuff. I shove stuff in that I think has to be in there. Miguel writes like a fairly military Sci-Fi stuff and I write a lot of weird odd ball shit that gets in there around the edges, to add a bit of flavour and a little colour
Luke: It works really well.
Tom: It does, Miguel writes the heavy well written shits, and I’ll be like “I put a monkey with a beer on the cover of this one! Check it out!”
Luke: As an aside there’s a great essay on Evangelion by Gretchen Felker-Martin, called Born From The Red Soil.. there’s this idea of mechs as “unlimited power” , but there’s this idea in the article that Eva is this grand inversion of that, Gundams are too I guess, you psychically link to them, but for Eva’s it’s even stronger, it then becomes a fiction of “unlimited vulnerability” that the mech’s are such an extensions of the person, they’re such a big horrible thing that they make the person inside not less vulnerable, but more vulnerable.
Miguel: Yeah I mean the pilots inside of mechs in Lancer are at their most vulnerable too, if they weren’t player characters in the setting they’d probably die, they have that hanging over them.
Luke: I just loved her way of articulating that sentiment.
Miguel: Yeah that sounds fascinating.
Luke: So to take from what Miguel just said, when you were talking touchstones, I wanted to talk about the most striking parts of Lancer to anyone who sees any of it on twitter, is the art, because that’s straight in your eyeballs before you have to do any reading.
Can you talk a little bit, Tom, about how you got into art, and the influences that you draw into your art for Lancer, and if you want to be more specific at the tail end… did you have a plan for what the four CorproStates were going to be, and did they come from specific fiction or specific ideas? I know KSBD mixes so many cultural references into that … well I dunno what you studied to get to where you got.
Tom: Yeah, well I like a lot of like French 70s and 80s SciFi stuff, I love Moebius. He’s basically my god. That’s where Lopez and I match up on our aesthetic sense. Him and I are way into that sort of French…
Miguel: Franco Belgian Sci-Fi.
Tom: Yeah that’s really where a lot of that aesthetic sits, Phillipe Druillet, Moebius, Chirusco, who else is there… there’s a bunch more, frickin’ Giménez and Jodorwsky stuff, just weird 80s sci fi comics. I love that stuff, and it’s been hugely influential on me, as has its derivatives. A lot of manga too, that’s where it comes from.
For Lancer specifically I didn’t have any specific influence in mind for the mechs. I wasn’t thinking of drawing a “mech” when I was drawing them, if that makes any sense? I wasn’t like “today I’ll draw them like this specific mech” I just wanted to ground them in the sense of them being very mechanical but also very humaniform, like people get weirded out by the fact that mechs in Lancer they look like big people? They have toes and fingers, they don’t look outwardly mechanical, they don’t look like the BattleTech mechs, which I hate, hate the design on them, they look so boxy — they look like tanks. There’s the other level of stuff like Gundam, I like Gundam a lot cos it’s a little grounded, but Gundams still have this sort of weird extraneous Sci-Fi looking thing to them which I’m not sure I am a huge fan of.
I wanted stuff to be a little bit functional, even if you’re looking at the weird stuff like HORUS, you can still also be like “that’s a gun, that’s the cockpit there” and I also wanted them to have very recognisable silhouettes, I’m love visual design stuff so it was really important for all the four mech corps to have their own sort of visual identity.
IPSN (Inter-Planetary Shipping — Northstar) is sort of the Terrans from Starcraft I think is the aesthetic, they’re the space truckers — they have very mechanical square designs and functional stuff. HORUS are mechs that were designed maybe by an alien, like insectile weird bullshit, like maybe not designed by people but by programs. We had this idea for HORUS early on that the mechs could look like anything, they didn’t have a specific look, and I loved that idea but we can’t do that for visual design. They have to have some unifying theme here that people can recognise just for design purposes, but they have that weird fractal design to them that hints at that: Your Gorgon could look totally different to someone else’s Gorgon.
Smith Shimano Corpro is like the Lamborghini of mech manufactures, so all their stuff is very based on sports cars and jet engines and stuff. It’s also vaguely psychosexual, it’s very svelte looking, if you wanted to date one of the mechs you’d probably date an SSC mech.
The Harrison Armory mechs are all influenced by brutalist architecture, as well as me looking at very geometric, heavy, solid shapes. I definitely had very strong design aesthetics for all of them. I like design that emphasises ideas over brute functionality.
I hate this trend in costume design and in prop design and design in general recently in media, which I think the Marvel Movies are kind of responsible for, cos they’ve pushed this thing where like… functional design of Captain America’s suit must like a thing that could be a real military outfit. It has worked to a degree, it’s well done, it’s just carried over to a lot of other mediums, and Sci-Fi media where everything becomes too realistic. We’re not looking at something that is a costume anymore, that’s designed to be appealing and have a good aesthetic, something that’s evocative. Did you see the new Dune movie costumes?
Luke: Yeah.
Tom: Oh god! I hate them! I hate them so much! We could have had Jodorowsky’s Dune which was crazy colourful bullshit, and Dune is kind of like this Medieval story in space basically, so the fact you’re sticking with this really very safe boring looking military Sci-Fi…
Miguel: Everyone looks like a fascist in it.
Tom: Yeah rather than like what you could have gone with which is colourful medieval influence… you want stuff that is evocative, evocative design is important to me, it’s always been important in my art. It's the same in Lancer, I was trying to be really evocative with the covers and stuff, I was trying to go with a real 80s movie poster vibe, like OG Star Wars vibe, like Noriyoshi Ohrai if you’ve ever seen any of his Godzilla stuff.
Luke: The whole like functional design thing just reminds me of… I keep going back to 40k. Last year there was a recent Space Marine release that was really tactical military style…
Tom: Yeah man, it’s so lame!
Luke: But there’s a a new release that’s gone back to the older stuff, big knightley shields and skeletons on the front of them, it’s pointless but it’s 40k.
Miguel: Beautiful.
Tom: That’s the thing, not to digress into 40k too much, but 40k is emblematic of that — it grew out of people reading 2000ad comics, Judge Dredd.
Miguel: Heavy Metal…
Tom: Yeah reading Heavy Metal magazine, making a comic that was about Space Catholic Fascists Imperium in the future, it’s all super tongue in cheek, very English, very like “look at all these Nazi catholic school boys and Nazi warrior monks” and you were never supposed to think they were good guys, there was no indication of that, but it’s slipped into this like… functionality over aesthetics, people started to like take the canon of it and sort of take it seriously, and that always leaves a bad taste in my… art should be evocative man, if I want to see 40k I want to see a Battle Nun with a flamethrower with 80s metal hair
Miguel: What Tom is saying is that as soon as 40k stopped being horny, it started being way more fash!
Tom: But it should be horny! It’s a little bit horny, know what i’m saying?
Luke: As someone that’s gone back to it with 8th edition, it’s weird that they definitely nod to the past more than they did for a good 10 years, but I’ve found out that old faces like Jes Goodwin and John Blance do 90% of all the background design
Tom: Really?
Luke: Stuff that people look at and go “oh this is boring modern GW” it’s still very Blanchian.
Tom: Yeah, really?
Luke: Yeah people look at like, new fantasy stuff like Stormcast and go “oh these are just fantasy Space Marines!” but John Blanche designed all of those. I guess what happens if you want to make miniatures out of Blanche’s art you have to saw off the edges to make them work. I mean I have all my gunpla and GW stuff on my desk and I feel the HORUS stuff looks maybe a little like Yoji Shinkawa’s stuff from ZOE, and maybe you’d get a kick out of them — they skate out of the ground on these tiny pinpoint contact zones….
Tom: Little weird stuff like that, yeah, I do like some of those Japanese style mecha designs cos they are very evocative, I do like Titanfall a lot too cos their mechs are very functional, they look like big machines and they have an evocative design too, they have strong silhouettes. I fall off when it gets a little too functional, or a little too overly gribbly, a lot of the Gundam doesn’t do it for me it gets too silly.
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Thanks for reading! Apologies if the ending is a bit flat because the real ending is over in the Dicebreaker interview, which you should go and read, but I hope this huge text dump elucidated some stuff for you, or was generally just interesting!
*All uncredited art by Thomas Parkinson-Morgan
