(NOTE: This is a review/rant piece of Lancer's setting (or lack there of) and NOT a review of its gameplay)
Mecha has existed in a strange place in the west for some time now. Throughout the 80s and especially the 90s, it was the face of anime, each year bringing a new landmark in the genre for us to enjoy such as Patlabor, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Armored Trooper VOTOMs, and of course, the Gundam franchise. But its popularirty began to fizzle in the 2000s, although it was by no means dead. Shows like Gundam Seed and Gundam 00 brought their franchise into the new millennium, and many experimental shows like Gun X Sword and Eureka Seven brought fresh ideas into the genre.
Then the 2010s came, and with it came the gradual decline of the genre. It's ignorant to have called it dead, but it's reasomable to see why someone would. Aldnoah Zero and Break Blade barely made waves, and Gundam was in a rough state with the nonsesical Reconguista In G and botched Gundam AGE, before being rescued by Iron Blooded Orphans in 2015. Mecha still existed in the mecha genre, but it was primarily defined by Titanfall and a couple Armored Core games early in the decade. This has, unfortunately, barely changed, although media like Armored Core 6 and Witch From Mercury did bring the genre to new audiences.
However, the subject of this article is a certain rpg by writer Miguel Lopez-Hall and artist Tom Bloom, better known as the creator of the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons. This game is known as Lancer. Everyone's favorite indie darling, garnering praise by many for nearly a decade, and for good reason. Solid mechanics, gritty combat, very customizable mechs, and a setting that i admittedly do find rather unique in the TTRPG landscape, as few go for its blend of a hopeful future where your mech's AI is a lobotomized copy of Cthulhu.
However, there is a key issue i have with its setting that undermines whatever positive qualities it has.
The setting sucks. The setting sucks a lot.
The setting is, frankly, a poorly executed attempt at something that could have been very interesting if not for one reason, and one reason only, that being the author's little darling, Union.
Union functions as the main protagonist of Lancer, an interstellar alliance and utopia consisting of Earth (renamed "Cradle"), the Solar System, and a vaguely defined amount of core or "Metropolitan" worlds. We get a rather detailed look into the workings of Union, from its emergence of a planet wide collapse known as the Fall to the three incarnations of its government, as well as its bureaucracy, major parties, and political leanings.
The timeline spans thousands of years, from the one thousand years it took to launch generation ships due to the gradual ecological and social collapse of Earth, to the one thousand and four hundred years since Union's founding of meandering until they eventually reestablished communications, to mere centuries of nothing happening until eventually we get the rise of Union, where we get to know every inch of its bureaucracy, including very preachy text about the evil of money.
I hope you see my problems with Union already, and how it reflects on the setting as a whole. For a game where the typical party will be something like the crew of the Argama fighting against the Titans, or a crew of mercs fighting for the highest bidder, the game spends far too long praising Union, a nation that most parties will probably not even hail from.
Instead of getting important information on the conflict zones of the galaxy, we get to know that Union has Nazis in its government for some reason. Instead of getting to know about major societies outside of the major powers, we get to know that Union is the best place to live.
Everything is about Union. As such, since the book is mostly dedicated to glazing Union and bemoaning those poor helpless savages who still use money, you have to extrapolate off of the comparative crumbs you get about the three major corporations, the nazi-esque Harrison Armory, the profit-driven IPS-Northstar, and the eugenics focused Smith-Shimano Corporation, as well as the hacker/ group/death cult/whatever you feel like, Horus, alongside the Dune-esque Karroken Trade Baronies and the vaguely defined theocracy of the Aun'ic Ascendancy. (There's something to be said about Union is the only nation that is mostly good on a moral scale).
You are also given constant pandering to the game's mostly leftist audience, such as the very smug way in which it describes the concept of money. (Examples include "...the word "economy" is only understood as a historical, antiquated concept, only to be used when interacting with Diasporan worlds."), or its constant affirming that Union is right, Union is correct. I am a lefitst, let me make that clear, but i don't like being pandered to.
So that leaves you, the GM, to come up with entire solar systems full of content, or attempt to extrapolate off of what little is told to you in the core rulebook. Your game will, as I have stated already, probably not focused on Union, let alone anything of these nations.
Basically, you are tasked to build a Mecha anime from the author's political fetish turned into a space opera. Union as a tool would be far more effective if it was a recently established power, a beacon of hope instead of this all-powerful, unexamined good. Especially when it allies itself with the Karroken Trade Baronies, the Dune-esque feudal monarchy with industrialized slavery, but it's ok because... well it's ok.
All of this is also made moot when the lead writer, Miguel Lopez-Hall, instead of working on the promised Harrison Armory and Aunic Ascedency books, decided instead to get a job at Wizards of the Coast, the same company that called the Pinkertons on someone who accidentally got a yet-unreleased box set. The same company that tried to restructure the OGL 3 years ago so it could make a profit on the then-booming third party content scene. (Did i mention that Lancer is quite popular amongst people who despise 5e). But it's ok because Lancer is pro-communist on paper.
Now, on a more positive note, the game itself still works great for mecha action, despite everything i said above, let's just hope soon that more mecha games will flood the market with better written settings.
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