#Currently Unnamed Lancer Module | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

scratching92 · 8 months ago

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So I've been working a bit on my Currently-Unnamed Lancer Module, and I feel I've hit a bit of a wall as of late with regards to what, exactly, I want it to be about.

When I started writing some background for the setting my module takes place in, I basically wanted to hit two particular notes; firstly, that the setting was a former colony that had gained independence (in this case from SecComm). Secondly, that after the revolution, the planet devolved into infighting between the various factions that had participated in that revolution, resulting in on-again-off-again warfare across the planet.

I thought this would be neat to write about because, well, as much as I love a good story of plucky rebels fighting off their oppressors and liberating themselves, I'm also from a country that actually did have, in a certain sense, a bunch of plucky rebels fighting off their oppressors and liberating themselves, and... Well, look. I'm never going to say we were wrong to fight a war of independence, but we did kinda fight a civil war immediately afterwards. Life is just messy like that. And so I wanted to kind of touch upon that sort of thing a little.

But also, after I had written that setting lore, I looked back at my outline and realized it didn't really have much synergy with what I had written, beyond that it was, presumably, one of many wars since that initial collapse into in-fighting amongst the revolutionaries. So I figured "Fair enough. Let's throw out this current outline and draft up something that does!". So I did. And I think the new outline I have is decent! But... Once again, I'm finding myself wondering if my current outline is a little too far in the other direction. I'm worried now that it's no longer about the relationship between the various factions on the planet, but about the planet's general relationship to modern Union (and the complicated relationship between ThirdComm and SecComm, with ThirdComm both being a rejection of SecComm while also in a strange sense an inheritor of it (or, at least, an inheritor of the problems it made)). And it's making me consider throwing out what I've written again.

It's possible I'm just massively overthinking it, and a lot of my problems are just things that are always going to have to be left up to a GM to prep anyway even when working from a pre-written module. I'm planning on running the first session of a playtest pretty soon, so maybe I'll feel different once I've run my current outline with an actual group and it's no longer just abstract ideas on a page. I dunno. I guess we'll see in like... two months or however long it takes me to run this playtest game.

#Lancer RPG #Currently Unnamed Lancer Module #I did actually mention some of this with my playtest group in our session 0 #if nothing else I guess I'll know one way or another if this is working once I've actually run it #maybe I'm expecting a little too much of how much structure you can even impose on something like a TTRPG module #no prep survives first contact with the players and all that #but I do feel a bunch of Lancer modules I've read #whether 1st or 3rd party #have been really good at kind of zeroing in on a particular thematic throughline or idea #and while I don't want to be too much of a perfectionist with my first ever 3rd party module writing #I do want to at least try to hit on certain ideas and themes

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