Lancer Has Done Things To Me

@rattrapmouse

I hope the author of love bullet knows I adore the series so much that I ordered a copy of the book in Japanese even though I dont know the language very well and nearly cried when I got an extra postcard of the characters

okay the non-american burger absolutism seems to be "on a burger bun = burger" so i have to ask the australians out there: does that mean a yumbo is a burger

I’m making this a separate post because the original is funniest without context, but for real you have no idea how stressful this is. The reason why relates to this post

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Reblog to Save a Life

I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die b

As independent artists making a living from our art, it isn’t enough to just make good art, especially when that art is a TTRPG. TTRPGs are not a respected artform, not even by the primary consumerbase. It’s so dire that it takes us making a lot of long posts just to convince people that TTRPG game design is real at all, that a TTRPG’s rules can be written a certain way on purpose to have intended results.

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy has good game mechanics, on purpose, but having good game mechanics is only actually a selling point to a shockingly small percentage of people who play TTRPGs, so those good game mechanics won’t sell the game, at least not as much as we need to continue operations.

But no matter how good your art is or how respected your artistic medium is, just making good art is not enough to make a living. Because the truth is, art doesn’t make money at all, social media does. The best, most overtly good art in the world only makes as much money as the number of paying customers that you can reach. All the money we make through Eureka is because I’m out here on tumblr busting my ass to get these notes, followers, etc.

Money is tight, we need to finish Eureka, and we need a new release like Silk & Dagger and Death Bed to get multiple major revenue streams and diversify our market reach in order to make more money and, like, pay my bills, but I can’t work on either of those right now, because I have to spend at least one work day a week entirely focused on social media or else no amount of progress on our real projects means anything, because otherwise they won’t sell.

It’s a little bit like being disabled - or rather kind of an extension of being disabled, since if I was more able-bodied I could work a “real” job that has a steady paycheck - my actual survival depends on other people liking me more than anything else, it’s a popularity contest, and not only I’m particularly strong in, as an uncharismatic, abrasive aspie with strong opinions about the very medium art that I work in, in an environment where openly disliking an element of the art that someone else engages with is considered not just a personal, but moral attack.

If you think this actually does make reblogging hot goth elves on tumblr sound pretty stressful, and want me to make enough money to continue to make TTRPGs for a living, there's a bunch that you can do to help even without spending a dime.

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What song is he serenading apollo with (wrong answers only)

How would you add depth and complexity to the culture of the Purview?

Right now, the KTB gets way more attention both because of the two supplements dedicated to it and because the competing noble houses each with its different gimmick and political alignment make it so easy to come up with drama and intrigue.

Meanwhile the Purview seems, both in and out of fiction, flat and uniform. I'm sure its leadership would want to see it and have it seen that way, but given how much it keeps expanding, and therefore adding new cultures to itself, it would have to have a lot of diversity under the hood, even if it would like to pretend otherwise.

I definitely think the Purview has a harder time of it than the KTB, but that's largely because we have a Field Guide to the KTB, whereas the Field Guide to Harrison Armory never got published because of Miguel's non-compete.

There's also the problem that the KTB has this... glamour to it, in both the modern and traditional senses of the word. I've noticed this in a lot of sci-fi properties - that applying the veneer of nobility and monarchy to something can make people forget or forgive its transgressions more easily.

When Harrison Armory, the nationalist corprostate, does imperialist expansion, we can point at it and immediately say "that's a fascism" (even when it's actually... not? Imperialist expansion is always bad but it's not always necessarily fascistic). But somehow, when the KTB do the same or sometimes worse things, like using nanite terror weapons on Free Sanjak, I've noticed people are quicker to make excuses? Like, oh, yeah that's obviously bad but their society works different the KTB are a big place and like of course they're shitty traditionalists and that's really only the Hagiographs and at least the Karrakin have Republican elements who want change and reform and yeah it's bad but aren't Knightly Chivalrous Mechs Just So Gosh Darned Cool?!

I think the nuance of the KTB is also helped by the fact that they're explicitly depicted as non-monolithic. There are ten named Major Houses with their own distinct cultures, politics and homeworlds, and great pains are taken to ensure us that there's multifarious cultures and religions even on an individual world. HA suffers because to some extent it would be more monolithic - it's a nationalist corprostate with only 400 years of history, compared to the KTB's hybrid elective-monarchy neofeudal federation with 10,000.

HA is distinctly American in the way that the nation has become a brand, and a good citizen has to remain on-brand, so things would be more homogenized. To add to that, omninet and blinkgate technology has existed for the whole of HA's lifespan. The unique and distinct cultures of the KTB worlds came about largely because they spent millennia separated from one another by light years. HA has never had this issue, and likely never will. They have the option - and, more importantly, are motivated - to keep a homogenous culture across all of the Purview.

Lancer is fundamentally a game about examining and fighting against unjust structures of power that oppress people but also being larger-than-life heroes that have fun doing it, and the KTB has an innate leg up by virtue of the fact that it has what I'd call a really strong "initial sell:" YOU'RE A SPACE KNIGHT! SPACE KNIGHTS ARE COOL! (PLEASE DON'T EXAMINE SPACEE FEUDALISM!)

To make Harrison Armory compelling, you'd need a similarly strong initial sell for them. And I think I know just the thing.

FOR HUMANITY! FOR LIBERTY! FOR HARRISON! (Please don't examine space nationalism!)

If I were to write the Harrison Armory Field Guide (Tom and Miguel HMU - just kidding. Unless...?), I'd make it BIG and LOUD and OVER THE TOP and OBVIOUS PROPAGANDA with insertions of the actual truth from a HORUS hacker on the side. I'd put Harrison Armory's positioning as "liberators of the galaxy" front and center - "we dive feet-first into hell to save people from tyrants and slavers. We do the work even the UDoJ/HR won't do. Please do not examine our imperialism or social credit system."

oh shit, it's 3/21/23, 32123, palindrome day

seeing a fun correlation between it/she users and lancer players

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