Tag Archives: let me tell you about my character

[00.00] Introducing Convergence

After an 11-month drought, I’m finally getting TTRPG player time again. Paladin, one of my old gaming crew from Lexington, is running a Lancer campaign for me and NLP. I haven’t gotten to play a Paladin campaign in well over a decade, and he and NLP are both fantastic storytellers, so this is a rare treat. With their permission, I’m opening another campaign log for this story.

(If you’re not familiar with Lancer, the fan wiki is good for general orientation. Start at https://lancer.wiki.gg/wiki/LANCER before shifting focus to the subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/)

The setting is Tu’rosa, a system outside Union-controlled space on the fringe of the Orion Arm. It’s been settled for several centuries, though much of its original settling empire has been lost to history. It was never intended to be a garden world – just a planetary strip mine. When the empire’s interstellar trade imploded, so too did the polity. Tu’rosa has been clawing its way back up ever since.

Tu’rosa is currently a candidate for Union integration. A diplomatic mission and a cultural contact team are on-planet – but there’s some concern about memetic contamination. The world is under UIB-run interdiction, with nothing allowed off planet except data that’s been vetted by an oversight NHP. The mission is receiving periodic one-way supply drops, routed through the closest Union station, Lai Leng, about four years’ nearlight travel away.

Most of Tu’rosa’s populace supports Union integration, but the minority that does not is both vocal and fractious. It’s not quite to the level of insurgency, but it’s moved beyond political agitation.

Into this mix are dropped the PCs. Unofficially, they’re deployed as mech support for the 501st Exploratory Guards, the mechanized infantry unit that provides security for the on-planet Union presence. Their actual chain of command is UIB’s interdiction enforcement mission. But… allegedly, they were deployed to relieve a previous UIB team. Everyone on planet believes this was accomplished, but the PCs have no memory of that. Their mission briefing/sealed orders packet also has a missing section, despite still passing all data validation tests.

So who are our PCs?

I’m running Glyndwr “Glen” Shaw, callsign Editor.

Glen is a first-generation native of Annwn, a colony world settled in 4953U by the revived cryosleep passengers of a millennium-old slowboat. Annwn was rediscovered in 4984U, when Glen was four years old, by a Harrison Armory-affiliated scout ship. Corporate exploitation quickly followed, and in 4988U, HA attempted to claim the world via gunboat diplomacy. The subsequent occupation and insurgency burned for a decade.

Glen was 18 when Union lifted HA’s boot off his homeworld’s neck by way of a DOJ/HR intervention in 4998U. Legally a minor until the last months of the occupation, he was one of several thousand youthful Annwn freedom fighters who presented a thorny problem for ThirdComm policymakers. Technically, he and his fellow “Tomshones” were child soldiers, but Union investigators encountered unsurprising difficulties in finding any planetary authorities upon whom to pin the blame. DOJ/HR’s eventual solution was to offer assimilation-focused psychotherapy as a pathway toward subsidized off-world secondary schooling, with the intent that the Tomshones thus educated would return to Annwn to raise its social harmony indices and technology gradients.

Glen’s original intent was to return to his family’s terraforming collective, and he majored in planetology (and minored in agribusiness and culinary arts) at the University of Tharsis. However, he felt a certain obligation – not uncommon among the Tomshones – toward ThirdComm, particularly the DOJ/HR and Navy forces that were Union’s face during the Liberation. It’s possible that the assimilation therapy didn’t entirely take (or perhaps took at precisely the intended level, a cynic would say), because Glen was just one of the statistically-improbable number of Tomshones who enlisted in the UN within a few years of leaving Annwn.

Initially trained as a marine infantry scout, Glen cross-branched to mechanized chassis after three years of service. After completing pilot training, he spent the following half-decade in the marine detachment supporting DOJ/HR Liberator Team Yubari. His last promotion and completion of the NCO course (and his second degree in conflict science) came with a reassignment to the 501st Exploratory Guards – a convenient cover for his actual UIB mission.

Glen is a competent enough shooter both in and out of the cockpit. His insurgent childhood and his recon experience predispose him toward asymmetrical warfare. When mounted, he prefers to operate in the classic cavalry model of highly mobile reconnaissance and raiding. However, UIB has no shortage of shooters. Glen’s real value to the organization lies in his ability to not look or act like a soldier and his intuitive ability to connect his operator-level picture with the Bureau’s policy-level needs.

At LL0, Glen rides Dyrnwyn, an Everest chassis mounting an assault rifle, paired light nexuses, and a heavy charged blade. My build intent is a mobile, stealthy striker.

NLP is playing Ilias Vale, callsign Echo.

Ilias is an NHP specialist who got his start in the grey-market tech exchanges. He was recruited (or “recruited”) into Union’s NHP research programs. Whether through trauma, infosec training, or algorithm influence, Ilias maintains a mental trust ladder for systems, sources, and people, assuming deception as a matter of course. If he were foolish enough to have an identifying tattoo, it would read, “trust but verify.”

Ilias is accompanied by Janus, an electronic warfare support NHP that Ilias instantiated himself. At LL0, Ilias and Janus ride Mobius, an Everest chassis carrying a heavy nexus, an assault rifle, and paired thermal pistols. NLP’s build intent is hacking with secondary striker capability.

Fireball Magnet

From 2017 to 2021, I was involved in a more-or-less-weekly D&D 5e campaign. It was the best pick-up group I’ve ever had – the GM put out a solicitation for players on the Roll20.net forums and all of us tagged in. One guy dropped after a half-dozen sessions but the rest stayed with it for the whole time, from 1st level all the way to 17th.

PC death was always on the table, but I somehow managed to have one of two original PCs who survived to the end of the campaign (and the other sacrificed himself in the final session to pull off a world-saving magical deed). This was because I was running Tiashash, a dragonborn barbarian/fighter who, by the end of the campaign, and with the help of “top half of the hit die” and “reroll level-up hit die with inspiration” house rules, was approaching 250 hit points.

One of the other long-running PCs – the other original-party survivor, in fact – was Rimble, a gnome wizard. We pretty quickly figured out that our DM also house-ruled that damage resistance would stack – half-damage from one effect and half-damage from a second effect equaled quarter-damage. This enabled some interesting tactics, like Tiashash raging, running hell-bent-for-leather into a group of enemies, getting their attention, and then standing there while Rimble dropped a max-level fireball on him. Invariably, between the rage and advantage on Reflex saves, Tiashash would be standing there, slightly smoking, at the center of a pile of smoldering corpses.

I think it took until 14th or 15th level for Tiashash to actually go down to zero hit points from anything, and that was the DM basically saying “enough of this shit” and hammering him with psychic damage.