Smeagolicious

HROT, a boomer shooter set in a Soviet-era Czechoslovakia after some unspecified disaster, just released. I've seen some gameplay and read generally favorable reviews and quite like the Soviet industrial retro shooter aesthetic. Only thing that put me off is the (expected) litany of anticommunist reviews & general fan sentiment surrounding it. A slower, more Quake like shooter among the library of (very good!) fast paced boomer shooters is welcome.

It also has a funny horse in a gas mask! I thought it looked neat, has anybody played it or the demo?

It is available from the developers here:

massif-press.itch.io

The basic rules are available for free, or you can toss some support the devs’s way for the full version. Don’t worry, you can get a plenty of mileage out of the base game, and they’re not just paywalling all the cool stuff.

The game itself - You play elite mech pilots, the eponymous “Lancers”, under the galactic Union, a post-scarcity, post-capital body that spans hundreds of worlds. Outside the Union, however, still remain the remnants of fascism and unscrupulous capital, with various corporate states, cults, and fascist/imperial chauvinist holdouts claiming many systems outside its influence.

Lancer’s got mech combat, FALGSC, fighting unscrupulous space fascist corpro-states, fighting the corpro-states alongside striking miners, physically striking said corporate stooges with heavily modified mining mechs. What’s not to like?

If the idea of an RPG about revolutionaries in giant mechs taking the fight to slavers, corporations, and fascists with the use of physics defying armor and weaponry appeals to you, check it out.

(one of the writers also wrote kill six billion demons, which I’ve heard a lot of praise for but never read)

Lastly, I’ve included the foreword, which I found EXTREMELY refreshing for a tabletop game book:

“In this book there are some fraught, difficult, or other‐ wise uncomfortable themes and content discussed. Lancer takes place in a setting recovering from millennia of cruel anthrochauvinist rule – a fascist, imperial, Earth-first ideology that had little time, space, or care to acknowledge beings or perspect‐ ives that ran counter to their didactic tyranny.

We want to acknowledge that many phenomena and acts touched on in Lancer – slavery, exploitation, racism, directed hate, genocide, the stealing of indigenous land – are real phenomena, are ongoing acts of injustice and cruelty, and are not simply “fantasy" or “interesting devices” to use in a roleplaying game. Their inclusion in Lancer is by no means a flippant choice, intended to be read as endorsement, or idle thought.

We think it important also to acknowledge that both Tom and I are writing from the perspective of straight, cis, able-bodied men. When writing Lancer, we wanted to create a setting where humanity is – in the narrative present – at once in a state of utopia and working to affect it. We imagine that Union isn’t burdened by the same cultural definitions of gender that oppress and malign so many people who live under the umbrella of capitalism and empire and, as such, there is a wide spectrum of expression and identity in Union and among its constituent worlds.

At the risk of enacting further violence by depicting worlds and cultures where there are regressive or discriminatory stances on gender baked-in, we have decided not to codify in the rules how players may express themselves – please do note that this absence of canonical definition is absolutely not meant to be read as exclusion, but is meant instead to avoid flattening all possible stories into one “canon” definition of what it means to be gendered, transgender, nonbinary – to have a body in Lancer. We encourage you to play your characters how you see them, and consider them to be in-canon.

We hope that you create narratives and characters that stand against terrible abuses and prejudices. Lancer features no easy aliens to pass these transgressions upon, only other human beings; humanity alone are the architects of terrible cruelties, but we can also be the architects of better, more just futures and presents. [...]

We believe that ideas of liberation, of radical antifascism and anti-hate, can begin around the table with friends and end in the streets, at the ballot box, and in all of our hearts. Sometimes around the table with friends is the only place where liberation – where fighting back – can happen. This does not diminish the impact that it can have.

That’s why we made Lancer: to help people fight back, if nowhere else then around the table with friends.

In solidarity, Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan”