Lancer is a brain worm, and 50,000 people have it
What is the community doing over there? A lot, apparently!
Ever since it was crowdfunded in 2019, Lancer has been an ubiquitous presence in TTRPG conversations — maybe never in the centre, but hovering off somewhere to the side. Talking about mechs is the trap card, and have you checked out Lancer is the follow-up. Even people who don’t know anything else about the game tend to know two things: it’s by the artist behind long-running comic series, Kill 6 Billion Demons, and it’s got that capital-C Crunch. Both are true: combat takes a long time, and co-creator Tom Bloom does draw some bizarre and delightful giant robots.
But those two facts together suggest nothing beyond a niche game. It’s hard to understand how big Lancer has become since its publication. Pilot.Net, the official unofficial hub of the game, has more than 58,000 members, making it one of the largest (if not the largest) Discord focused on a single game that’s not Dungeons & Dragons. MCDM has 46,000 members at the time of writing, and the largest Pathfinder one I can find has 39,000. That’s a crumb of context but, given the diffuse nature of the RPG audience, it’s a useful crumb.
Massif Press, founded by Bloom and writer-designer Miguel Lopez-Hall, has published only a trickle of supplements for the game. There’s a couple of setting books, a handful of tight scenarios, and one long campaign, No Room For A Wallflower. This slow pace was at least partly due to the fact that Lopez was a full-time employee of Wizards of the Coast until recently, working under a non-compete clause, and Bloom was juggling at least two other projects, including other RPGs like religious trauma simulator Cain and the in-progress fantastic tactics game, ICON. But Lancer’s audience isn’t parched by any means. They’ve been continuously quenched by a stream of third-party publications and other forms of enterprising fan labor.
Katherine Stark is the creator of Legionnaire, which is one of those third-party Lancer supplements that everyone more or less treats as canon now. Which is both a testament to its quality but also the specific niche it identified that needed filling. Fitted between the nuts and bolts of Lancer’s setting, there is the idea of NHPs, or non-human persons. The term already speaks volumes: these are people, but they are not the same kind of people as us.
