Legionnaire

Union’s revolutionary project faces countless threats from within and without. War rages in the outlying territories of the Orion Arm, and humanity continues to wrestle with the legacy of imperialism, cultural hegemony, and anthropocentric ideologies.

Human wealth, military power, and the post-capital utopia of the Core worlds have been built - at least in part - upon the back of advanced machine intelligences known as non-human persons, or NHPs. These strange entities are used as administrators, companions, and legionnaires throughout Union space, and their personhood and rights are the source of fierce political and philosophical debate.

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Legionnaire is a third party supplement for the Lancer tabletop roleplaying game by Massif Press. Legionnaire contains a deep dive into the lore behind NHPs: the setting's equivalent of AI. The book also provides extensive GM tools to support the inclusion of NHPs in your games, and a number player options for use in campaigns.

Features

• An exploration of the origins and metaphysics of NHPs, their binding and shackling, and the strange science behind their creation
• A look at the social, philosophical, political, and religious movements that surround NHPs, Union's doctrine for and restrictions on their use, and the cultural position they occupy in Union society
• An accounting of notable events in the development and history of NHPs in the two millennia since the Deimos Event
• Expanded lore and details on related entities - gestalts and fleet legions, advanced artificial intelligences, Aunic Souls, eidolons, and more
• A guide to creating NHPs as characters, including roleplaying advice, naming conventions, and a generator for creating NPCs
• Five detailed NPCs you can add to your campaigns, each with their own conflicts and dramas and sets of mission hooks to bring them in contact with your PCs
• A set of twenty burdens detailing strange psychological or metaphysical effects you can apply to your PCs or use as inspiration for roleplaying cascading NHPs
• Advice on creating missions involving NHPs, from using NHPs as antagonists or villains, to GMing in some of Lancer's stranger environments - including legionspace, null blink areas, metavaults, and more
• Extensive advice on roleplaying a cascading NHP and handling it in mech combat, including more specific detail on how each of the eleven first-party NHPs so far released typically cascade
• Three highly detailed Flashpoint scenarios for use in creating campaigns, with a strong core of setting detail and options for escalation as the campaign continues.
  • Flashpoint: Liberté follows the consequences of Horizon Collective radicals abducting a key administrative NHP on a war-torn world.
  • Flashpoint: Elektrodaimonium focuses on the aftermath of a Deimos incursion over a highly religious, isolated world and its subsequent introduction to the wider galaxy.
  • Flashpoint: AH MUZEN CAB details the discovery of a metavault as Union forces clash with the Aun Ascendancy during the Second Distal War.
• Rules for allowing player characters to play NHPs - non-intrusive, extensively playtested, and integrated with existing systems in the Lancer Core Rulebook and Field Guide to the Karrakin Trade Baronies.
• Six new backgrounds specifically designed for NHP pilots
• Seven pieces of new pilot gear relating to NHPs, including gear that specifically supports playing an NHP pilot
• Two new talent trees: Legionnaire is a talent that focuses on hacking and systemic combat, while Shadowcloaked provides esoteric defensive options related to legionspace
• Four new NHP systems for use as exotic gear - the egotistical dragonslayer MARDUK, the manifestation specialist INANNA, the thanatologically-troubling ERESHKIGAL, and the necromantic puppetmaster NERGAL.
• A new NPC template, the insidious Puppeteer - designed to represent a cascading NHP or other strange entity that controls minions to do its bidding

Development and Release

Legionnaire was successfully funded on Kickstarter at the beginning of 2023 after an intense period of development and playtesting, and was published shortly thereafter. Legionnaire has received praise from across the Lancer community (including from Massif Press), has been nominated for several awards, and is one of the top selling Lancer third party releases.

COMP/CON data for Legionnaire is freely available to everyone. You can download the free LCP under the Demo section of this page, and install it via COMP/CON's Content Manager tool.