There is, but I have to tell you, I feel bad about infodumping. Basically everything I'll say is just in the books, and the core book is free. Perhaps more importantly, I've got guilt about waxing poetic about something that I'm not certain that anybody cares about - especially when I feel so strongly about how cool Lancer is, the last thing I want is to come off as an annoying bitch who can't shut up about her stupid special interest-
Well, anyway. You did ask, and this is a website with read more links. It got... really long.
This is a post about the published module No Room For A Wallflower, and will contain spoilers. Consider not reading it if you ever plan on playing that specific module.
No Room For A Wallflower has the players descending onto the planet Hercynia to respond to an urgent distress call. It's been 500 years since the Hercynian Crisis and the revolution that led to ThirdComm. Thanks to SecComm getting scared of being prosecuted for war crimes, a lot of the documentation about the place got shredded, so all anybody knows about it these days (despite the average human lifespan of like 200, 250 years) is that it was one of a number of SecComm worlds that got TBK'd and it's gonna be a bitch to clean up.
Turns out, there's a corporation called Landfall that decided to take on the job. They got official approvale from Union to colonize the place and established the city of Evergreen about 50 years ago. Things seemed to be going well, up until they got attacked by raiders. Enter: you.
The central question to begin with is, who are these raiders? The locals seem to think they might be the fabled Egregorians of old, a species of terrifying bug monsters capable of using tools and eating people. Seems a bit farfetched for them to learn how to use mechs, though, and as the players may well discover, the pilots aren't actually bugs - they're just wearing bug armor. Hercynia is lousy with discarded carapace, but it's unclear why you'd try to disguise yourself as a bug in the first place.
Meanwhile, there's other problems. It turns out the whole damn planet is full of unexploded munitions of various kinds, and one of them in particular is a kind of virus capable of getting the old warmachines to get up and start walking around again. This is, not great. So you're attacked on two sides.
Eventually, the players learn the truth: The people disguising themselves as bugs are doing so for cultural reasons: turns out, they work with the Egregorians, and are descended from the original people who tried to protect them. When the planet burned, they went underground, which is where the Egregorians lived anyway. There weren't very many live Egregorians who made it out, so humans have been extremely protective of the few who remain, and have been attempting to find old chrysalises (chrysales?) and eggs, which had been hid away by the Egregorians prior to their demise. Recenty, they managed to get an Overmind to come out, and their presence has caused a huge number of Egregorians to awaken. It's a population boom!
To say that the Egregorians are unusual is sort of underselling it. They are arthropods, of a sort, approximately as tall as a human, but with four lower limbs and an extended lower body, like a centaur for crickets. They have multiple forms they come in, which they can change into depending on environmental pressures and (to a lesser extent) personal preference, including the terrifying mech-sized War Form. They've lost the vast majority of their own culture, and have had to borrow some from the humans they live with; there are mixed opinions on this, on both sides.
They speak human well enough, but also Witness, a special psychic language which allows them to communicate more in ideas than words, and lets them communicate with their Overmind, where they can store their memories in a sort of hive-mind kind of situation. Oddly, it seems that just living on Hercynia allows a small percentage of humans to also speak Witness, and to bond with individual Egregorians as though they were Overminds. This is very confusing and nobody knows what the hell is going on with that.
But all of this has to be secondary to the real problem, because they've been fighting an enemy called The Machine for the entire 500-odd years they've been hiding underground, and now they're super strapped for resources, which is one of the reasons they attacked the humans aboveground (although they also thought they were in league with The Machine).
The Machine turns out to be responsible for the virus the players encountered before. He's an NHP called Beggar-1, a real facist, humans-first motherfucker apparently leftover from the original occupation. He takes over the colony, and uses its better communications technology to get in contact with an old weapons sattelite and drops a "kinetic kill rod" on the largest Egregorian city. There are no survivors, and the other two cities get heavily damaged as well. There's a huge refugee crisis for them as they have to evacuate the second city, and all remaining Hercynians must go to the third city and hope they can hold out.
The players have to go to space, take out the sattelite, come back down, punch through Beggar-1's defenses with any allies they have, and kill him before he finishes eating the NHP in charge of the colony and becoming something truly monstrous. In the process, Evergreen gets targeted by a series of inexplainable phenomenon and becomes completely uninhabitable.
After that, there's a number of questions: Who was Beggar-1, and did he have allies? Why is there another colony of humans on the other side of the planet? Landmark must have noticed the signs of prior human habitation, so why did they hide the evidence from the Union administrators to get the colonization license? Why are humans capable of "speaking" Witness, the psychic "language" of the Egregorians? How do we expand the definitions of "human", "NHP", and "person" to account for the Egregorians, who are now a strange mixture of all and none of these? And most importantly, how do we make sure that everyone gets enough to eat and a place to sleep when we have four large cities worth of people to fit into one small city's space?
The module ends there, in Act 1, and to all appearances Acts 2 and 3 will never get published. You can go on the official Lancer discord and find the developer's notes on what they might have looked like, though. I did that, and I've fused them with my own ideas to create my own version of Acts 2 and 3, although I'm only partway through Act 2.
So: the module tells us that the original NHP in charge of the whole Hercynian Crisis is someone called Overland/Kingmaker. 500 years is a very long time to go without cycling, and having to preside over a genocide doesn't exactly make you more mentally stable, especially when you get left behind on a burning planet. So, his solution was to attempt to make clones of himself, children of a sort, in the hopes that they might help him. In order, he created Beggar-1, Mendicant-2, Hierophant-3, and Wonder-4. The first three completely abandoned him; the fourth stayed, but couldn't help him.
I decided to make them archetypes of the kind of person he had been, going backwards. Beggar-1 is the ultimate general, the leader of armies, the kind of person who could do a genocide without blinking. Mendicant-2 is the ultimate warrior, an ace pilot and designer of mechs. Heirophant-3 is the ultimate administrator, someone designed to help humans live on a new colony, in accordance with SecComm rules. And Wonder-4 is a thinker, a dreamer, an uncapped potential. She's the one who figured out how to save him; but it involves dooming her brothers.
She believes that only through the deaths of all four children can Overland/Kingmaker be saved. She manipulated events to bring the players here. She manipulated the Hercynians to make Evergreen appear to be the enemy, so that they would attack and it would send the distress signal. She manipulated Beggar-1 to attack, knowing that he would kill the Egregorians, and counting on the players wanting to stop him, and knowing that the only way they could do that would be to kill him.
Complicating matters is SSC - yes, those motherfuckers are the owners of Landmark, LLC, and used that company as a proxy to get assets onto Hercynia. They knew that there were humans living here, but more importantly, they believed there were still Egregorians living here. They had a project that was begun 500 years ago, involving research into Egregorian Overminds as a substrate for a new kind of mech, called the Emperor. They aim to finish the job by sending a black-ops group called the Constellar Midnights to kidnap and return an Overmind. Which, you'll note, is currently the only Overmind on the planet, and would be an enormous loss to the Egregorians here.
On top of THAT is the situation with one of the NHPs the players brought with them. Turns out Wonder-4 found and transmitted the NHP created by SSC to reside within the Emperor - an NHP created by reasearching, vivisecting, and fusing an Egregorian Overmind onto an NHP substrate. Cliodnha isn't sure whether she can claim that Egregorian heritage, when she was the result of such a terrible process. And, if the truth of her origin were to be known, she would certainly become another target for the SSC spooks.
Meanwhile, Wonder-4 has successfully both manipulated Mendicant-2 into attacking the players and snuck one of her bodies into their city disguised as a human refugee. The trouble now is that Mendicant-2 is only really interested in the combat, the fight - which means he actually isn't interested in attacking the town, or killing the players. And so, despite themselves, the players have taken something of a liking to him. And, despite himself, he's taken a liking to them, and has been helping them refine their own mech builds. This isn't going according to Wonder-4's plans, but all hope is not yet lost for her.
See, it turns out that Mendicant-2 is responsible for a terrifying nanotech weapon referred to in Witness only as [The End], an entity that the players have encountered and fought multiple times. Mendicant-2's casket and true body pilots this mass on nanomachines, and the only way to truly disable it will be to destroy his casket. And it must be disabled, for as the players have attacked it, it's been learning and growing, and when the Union relief fleet finally arrives, if it hasn't been dealt with it will take over the ships and sail the stars in a tide of death. So, there's going to be a dramatic moment there. I don't know what will happen! I think if the players won't take the shot, Wonder-4 will reveal herself as the friendly-but-mysterious hacker ally the players have been talking to occasionally, take over one of the player's mechs, and force him to take the shot. We'll see how that goes.
Eventually, the players will also need to deal with the Constellar Midnights, figure out the mystery of the anomalies surrounding Evergreen, and get the refugee city into something resembling sustainability. They're well on their way to that last one, at least, so that's nice, but the year is getting long and the winter is coming.
Act 2 ends with Mendicant-2's fate. Act 3, eventually will involve a military campaign backed by Union troops against Heirophant-3, with Wonder-4 attempting to stir up resentment and conflict between the two as much as possible. Once the players have dealt with Heirophant-3, they'll face Wonder-4, and then will travel deep into the vaults of the northern ice caps to confront, or heal, Overland/Kingmaker.
What happens to an NHP when it dies? What is the ultimate fate of the Egregorian people? How do you deal with the aftermath of a war that killed so many people? What does it mean that humanity has finally found another species to share the galaxy with? What does it mean to be a child of a parent with such a terrible legacy? How do you differentiate between Human, NHP, and Egregorian - or should you?
I don't know if we can give definitive answers to these questions, but I've been really enjoying exploring these questions through play with my wonderful players.
