Lancer (Tabletop)
Image: Massif Press

I've always wanted to play tactical mecha combat RPG Lancer, but without a regular tabletop group, I've been out of luck... Until yesterday. I'd had an eye on unofficial (yet blessed by the original creators) adaptation Lancer Tactics for some time, but developers Wickworks just added the secret sauce that made it a must-have in my eyes: In-game mod and mission sharing support.

For the uninitiated, Lancer is one of the most popular tabletop RPGs in recent years - the brain-child of Tom Bloom, author and artist of hit comic series Kill Six Billion Demons. An anime-inspired sci-fi universe wracked by cosmic weirdness and roamed by bands of freelance mech-piloting aces, the titular Lancers. There's high drama, lots of mech customization, and it's all designed to be played in conjunction with external apps to streamline the experience.

It is also famous for having some unhinged mech concepts, such as the quadrupedal Pegasus, armed with an amorphous not-a-gun that changes shape and abilities every time it's rebooted, and a quantum pseudo-weapon that causes (via means unknown) constant damage to any perceived target with no dice involved.

Lancer Tactics was previously a skirmish sandbox - a way to play Lancer's famously involved combat, detached from narrative. Now, players can create custom content of all sorts, ranging from custom mech builds to skirmish maps to story-driven branching campaigns, all made with in-game tools and available with just one click. It's currently exclusive to Itch, but will be coming to Steam as soon as the first official story mode campaign (one of two planned) is ready to roll out.

While single-player only (with no plans for multiplayer - it's not aiming to supplant the tabletop game), Lancer Tactics features almost every rule, feature, and (highly customizable) mech from Massif Press' core book, with just a few NPC templates yet to be finalized. This means that modders have a huge toybox of giant robots to smash together, as well as tools to create complex dialogue sequences and reactive mission scripting. Several campaigns and plenty of one-shot missions have already been uploaded.

Lancer Tactics is coming soon to Steam, but if you really want to jump in now (and give the developers a bigger slice of the profits), you can snag the game now on Itch for $20. The game's mod framework is platform-independent, so Steam and Itch players will be able to share creations freely. And if you want to learn the full tabletop rules (as used in Tactics), there's a free Player's Guide version of the tabletop game which contains everything except for the lore and GM's guide. Seems now's a good time to get into Lancer.