Malachite

I want to play as a space alien of my own making in Lancer so bad it makes me look stupid. A big part of this is just my preference for roleplaying as something that is not and never has been human over even humans modified into unrecognizable forms (whether cybernetically, genetically, surgically, etc.)…

…But also, I really, REALLY want to compare and contrast Union from Lancer and the newly-founded Republic of Bequver from The Eating of Names. I have a whole ass crossover AU living rent-free in my head that takes the varsit and plops their civilization into the Lancer timeline such that humans and varsit have been in (very tense) contact since SecComm’s days and the Imperium fell within living memory of 5016u. (I am still undecided about whether to transplant my other aliens into the Lancer setting as well, or if it should just be the varsit.) It has a whole additional prospective Karrakin House consisting of the descendants of varsit refugees who were initially welcomed onto Tilimsan in the waning days of the Imperium until the House of Sand decided there were too many of them and forcibly relocated them to the Dawnline Shore. It has SEVERAL varsit OCs who only exist in that AU. It gives the varsit biological mechs that I’m considering backporting into The Eating of Names’ main canon.

I want to talk about this more with people instead of screaming into the void, but my loved ones who know about The Eating of Names aren’t into Lancer, my few Lancer-enjoying friends don’t know about The Eating of Names (and only one is a close enough friend to have earned the privilege to learn about it, but he’s about to move across the country in like a week), and my social anxiety is afraid that the Lancer server’s OC Cantina and/or Homewritten Lore channels’ regulars would get annoyed or else just not care, especially since I kinda fell off posting in Pilot NET after the Lancer campaign I was playing in got killed RIGHT as we were about to start the final combat mission of the entire campaign. (I’m still sad about that, especially since it kicked my Lancer hyperfixation to the back-burner for a good while, but I really want to reawaken that hyperfixation…)

I have so much hyperfixation brain rot for Lancer and The Elder Scrolls that for the past few days I’ve been sorely tempted to take Alee-Jei, the character from the Skyrim follower mod I’m working on, and make a Lancer build for them. The problem is, Alee-Jei is a conjurer, so they’d probably be a Hydra pilot (or some third-party drone-based frame), and I’m terrible at making drone builds…

…I wonder if there are any third-party HORUS drone/other-summon-like-mechanic frames. That seems like it’d be fitting for an obsessive, hubristic scholar of all things Daedric.

And I do have my paperback copy of Beacon now, so maybe I should build Alee-Jei in Beacon, too… Demonologist is right there lmao.

In my view, the best place to start would be getting either the $25 USD core book PDF or the truncated free version (which contains only player-facing mechanics and has no GM stuff or lore outside of flavor text), and then reading it! I highly recommend the full book if you can afford to get it. The lore is delicious and is one of the reasons I first fell in love with the system, though keep in mind that while Union describes itself as utopian, there wouldn't be any reason for player characters to fight if it truly was a utopia. The same goes for the expansion books, though obviously if you don't know for sure you're going to like/play the system, hold off on those lol. I will also say that the player-facing content for all of Lancer, expansion books included, is free to download as an .lcp file for use with the official companion tool, COMP/CON. You just upload the file to the website and it loads all the content into its compendium for you to peruse at your leisure. I talk more about COMP/CON further down in this post.

I also recommend joining the Pilot.NET Discord server, which is the unofficial-but-kind-of-not Discord server for Lancer and Massif Press-related stuff as a whole. (I say unofficial-but-kind-of-not because, while the server was created unofficially, it has blossomed into a main hub of Lancer stuff, and Tom, Miguel, and other Massif folks are all there.) You can find the server by going into Discord's "Explore Discoverable Servers" tab and searching "pilot net". It's a huge server, so I recommend limiting yourself to a few channels at a time until you get more comfortable if you aren't used to being in big community servers. Personally, I spend most of my time in #oc-cantina (the channel for talking about Lancer OCs), #mech-hangar (the channel for talking about builds), and some of the community/hobby channels like #writing-club and various threads on the server's forum for other TTRPG systems. Pilot.NET has a great community in my experience, very friendly, accepting, and willing to help.

Importantly for your question, it's got LFG roles for GMs to ping when they're looking for players. Note that these roles are exclusively for GMs to ping when looking for players, not for players to ping when looking for GMs, because there are a lot more would-be players than would-be GMs going around. Still, I get pinged for my LFG time zone at least once most days, though depending on your time zone and whether you also grab the community LFG role (which is for things like West Marches and living community-style servers that play Lancer), you may get more or fewer pings.

I would also create a COMP/CON account (it's free). COMP/CON is the official companion tool for Lancer and helps you track everything from gear unlocks to character sheets to combat encounters to additional first- and third-party content for Lancer beyond the core book. You can use COMP/CON without an account, but having one lets you sync your stuff to the cloud, so you can access it across multiple devices and don't lose it when you clear your browser cache.

Oh, and if you want a good resource for learning the system's mechanics and lore, as well as a source of fun builds to try, I highly recommend dragonkid11's YouTube channel. It helped me a ton when I was first trying to grasp how Lancer's balance works, and it manages to present the info in a way that is simultaneously entertaining and informative. The channel also covers other TTRPG systems, too, like Gubat Banwa!

I hope all this is helpful, and that you end up being able to find a Lancer group to play with!