u/CrimsonTyphoon02

Inspired by flitting through and seeing,

>When a character with Synthetic Muscle Netting is engaged in a grapple with an opponent of equal size, they count as one size larger (i.e. a size 1 mech with SMN grappling another size 1 mech will count as size 2). Does this mean that the character with SMN equipped counts as size 2 for purposes of being rammed, such as if their opponent wanted to ram them to break the grapple?

>No, Synthetic Muscle Netting doesn’t make you count as a bigger size for the purpose of being rammed, only for the purposes of ramming other targets.

Like, if a player of mine is using a Blackbeard, the dedicated grappling mech, with the "make grappling better for smaller mechs" system, and most of their grapple targets can just break out (and actually put themselves in an advantaged position) by ramming them, which is gonna be significantly easier than winning a contested hull check most of the time, I'm calling bullshit. Rejected on the grounds that I think it's dumb.

Hey fellas,

I want to have an encounter in a little bit where the leader of my players’ mercenary squad joins them in the field. Given that, thus far, I’ve characterized him as a practical, logistics-minded guy, I was thinking that a Gilgamesh would suit him.

Now, going all-in on the Gilg license could be fun, but strikes me as a mite uncreative. Anyone have any fun ideas for a 1 LL dip into other licenses?

So, I'm about to start my first longer Lancer game, and as of right now, I've got a party of three, which is the smallest group I've played with yet. I'm having trouble working out what map size would be best.

For instance, for our opening session, I was planning on doing a combat encounter where the gang would be retaking a port from some enemies that were trying to ambush them, and I felt a Control sitrep would fit that theme... but I wasn't sure if four control points would be too many when I've only got three players, and I'm having trouble deciding how large I want the map to be--gun to my head, I was thinking something like 30:25.

As far as builds go, I've got one player in a Sagarmatha with an RPG and a Cyclone Pulse Rifle, a Chomolungma player with all nexus weapons, and an Everest player with a shotgun, pistols, and an AMR.

Both of these episodes are action-focused little shorts following an enhanced human tough guy killing machine in a dark setting going into battle and beating long odds to achieve his mission, but their outlook couldn't be more different.

The 40K episode, And They Shall Know No Fear, is a power fantasy. It's an extremely well-executed power fantasy, and a dark one, but a power fantasy nonetheless. Most of the episode is Space Marines aura farming, wading their way through enemy cultists and monsters like it's another day in the office, killing dudes coming up behind them without even looking at them, dispatching tanks without even breaking their stride (and certainly not looking at the cool explosion going off behind them). Every shot of them is framed to hype them up to the maximum possible extent.

That's not to say that the short's entirely without nuance. Metaurus, the space marine who selected Titus, the protagonist of the Space Marine games, for the Astartes a lifetime ago, is obviously carrying some concerns and regrets surrounding his recruit. The episode opens with a flashback to the day they met, the camera following a young Titus, face caked in blood, dragging a combat knife half the size of his body through a rainy landscape, as Metaurus narrates,

>Humans are born prey. Fragile, afraid. The Imperium selects a chosen few, children we break over decades of conditioning. Purging them of weakness, carving out their fear. Those that survive are reborn with the strength to level cities, to conquer worlds. But power must be controlled. Fear forged into obedience. Into faith.

>Centuries ago, I chose a child filled with pain and rage. A child who had never known fear. What could a soul like that be capable of?

Before we cut back to Metaurus in his command barge, eyes clenched, obviously preoccupied with the thought, as his orders come in on the computer terminal in front of him. He seems significantly less bothered by being ordered on a suicide mission than he does by remembering.

And when, at the episode's climax, a demon launches a psychic attack against Metaurus's squad, that's the pain point it targets. As it invades his mind, Metaurus repeats to himself, clearly upset,

>I chose a child filled with pain and rage.

And the demon responds,

>You chose a child, a child who had never known fear.

As it creates a vision of Titus falling to Chaos and then stabbing Metaurus.

But the episode's answer to these reservations, to the question of what happens when you take a child like that and turn him into a killing machine is, basically, "Dawg, he could end up being so fucking badass, you have no idea. He'd resist psychic influence and kill demons like nobody's business" (which, of course, if you've played the Space Marine games, you'll know is kind of Titus's whole thing). Titus no-sells the psychic attack, rips apart the demon, and drags Metaurus to safety. When Metaurus says,

>Titus. Our duty is done. It's time to go.

Titus responds,

>Not yet, old man.

and moves to face down an entire horde of chaos cultists armed with nothing but a pair of blades.

The way the shot of Titus standing firm against the oncoming horde is framed, even if you aren't familiar with the Space Marine games, you know he's going to win.

The episode ends with a sequence of a young Titus running into the rain, dragging his Space Marine-sized combat knife, heroic music swelling, as Metaurus narrates,

>What could a soul like that be capable of?

Clearly, whatever it is, it's fucking AWESOME.

This is exactly the kind of character the unnamed mecha pilot protagonist of the Armored Core short, Asset Management, thinks he is. And, to be fair to him, he is an ace. Over the course of the episode, he takes out five enemy ACs in a single mission, winning first a two-on-one and then a three-on-one encounter. In the cockpit, he's kind of That Guy.

And it doesn't matter, because the episode is about how utterly pathetic and broken he is as a human being.

The episode opens with him tweaking out alone in the corner of a bar, clocking a guy in the face for coming up to try to start a friendly conversation and only avoiding a fight because the mysterious schizo Voice in his head tells him to stand down and the owner of the bar talks down the dude that the protagonist punched. The protagonist pouts, "I don't like it here anymore," stomps out of the bar, and immediately steals a cigarette out of another dude's mouth and gets shoved face-first into the snow for it. He rolls over on his back and takes a drag without even getting up.

The Voice tells him,

>You need to even out.

And he responds,

>So I can fit in? None of those fucks are anything like me.

See, he's special. He's different. He's an augmented human, made to pilot. Nobody's like him. As he derisively tells the Voice when she tells him that he should find his people, "Everybody like me is dead." He draws a sense of superiority from his solitude, 'cuz it reinforces his whole bitter, jaded, tough-guy persona.

And yet, he's still so desperately lonely that when the Voice shuts up for a few seconds, he begs for her return, sounding like a child on the verge of tears:

>Come back. I don't want to be alone here.

But, as it turns out, he isn't as unique as he imagined himself to be. The other pilots he fought throughout the episode were also augmented, and part of the reason he was able to beat them is because they were hesitant to kill another person like them. He opens up the cockpit of the last intact enemy AC to see another auged pilot like him reaching out and asking for help.

As the Voice tells him,

>They're your people.

And, in a beautiful and hilariously unsubtle shot obviously alluding to The Creation of Adam, the protagonist slowly reaches out towards this other person like him, this chance at understanding and human connection... and crushes his skull.

You get a close-up of the protagonist's sweat-stained face, which then match cuts into his AC's as it recedes into the shadow until only its glowing red eyes are visible, as he says to himself,

>Nobody's like me.

And the Voice replies,

>That's right. Nobody's like us.

The short is a wonderful little portrait of a pathetic man, a man who has been so broken through his "enhancement" into a killing machine that he can't even bring himself to choose to be better. As Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from the Underground

>In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.

The protagonist is miserable in his isolation, and he makes his bitterness known in every smart-ass barb, but wallowing in it affirms his identity. And at the end of the day, he likes the unchallenging stability of that misery. So, he chooses to snuff out a life to preserve his ego and paycheck rather than take a chance at human connection.

Becoming a Cool Violence Guy has irreparably separated him from humanity.

It's a far cry from how the 40k short presents its Space Marines. Even when they're expected to die, it's as part of a Glorious Cause. There's meaning and community in it. Metaurus's crew lines up to see his squad off to their leap into hell. The battle barge, firing an orbital barrage at his squad's current position, tells them, "Die well, brothers." Titus stands alone at the end, but does it to protect Metaurus.

The titles kind of encapsulate their respective outlooks: And They Shall Know No Fear vaunts its killing machines, whatever reservations it may have about them; Asset Management tells you that making a man into a killing machine reduces him to, well, an asset, a thing to be manipulated.

Both of these episodes are action-focused little shorts following an enhanced human tough guy killing machine in a dark setting going into battle and beating long odds to achieve his mission, but their outlook couldn't be more different.

The 40K episode, And They Shall Know No Fear, is a power fantasy. It's an extremely well-executed power fantasy, and a dark one, but a power fantasy nonetheless. Most of the episode is Space Marines aura farming, wading their way through enemy cultists and monsters like it's another day in the office, killing dudes coming up behind them without even looking at them, dispatching tanks without even breaking their stride (and certainly not looking at the cool explosion going off behind them). Every shot of them is framed to hype them up to the maximum possible extent.

That's not to say that the short's entirely without nuance. Metaurus, the space marine who selected Titus, the protagonist of the Space Marine games, for the Astartes a lifetime ago, is obviously carrying some concerns and regrets surrounding his recruit. The episode opens with a flashback to the day they met, the camera following a young Titus, face caked in blood, dragging a combat knife half the size of his body through a rainy landscape, as Metaurus narrates,

>Humans are born prey. Fragile, afraid. The Imperium selects a chosen few, children we break over decades of conditioning. Purging them of weakness, carving out their fear. Those that survive are reborn with the strength to level cities, to conquer worlds. But power must be controlled. Fear forged into obedience. Into faith.

>Centuries ago, I chose a child filled with pain and rage. A child who had never known fear. What could a soul like that be capable of?

Before we cut back to Metaurus in his command barge, eyes clenched, obviously preoccupied with the thought, as his orders come in on the computer terminal in front of him. He seems significantly less bothered by being ordered on a suicide mission than he does by remembering.

And when, at the episode's climax, a demon launches a psychic attack against Metaurus's squad, that's the pain point it targets. As it invades his mind, Metaurus repeats to himself, clearly upset,

>I chose a child filled with pain and rage.

And the demon responds,

>You chose a child, a child who had never known fear.

As it creates a vision of Titus falling to Chaos and then stabbing Metaurus.

But the episode's answer to these reservations, to the question of what happens when you take a child like that and turn him into a killing machine is, basically, "Dawg, he could end up being so fucking badass, you have no idea. He'd resist psychic influence and kill demons like nobody's business" (which, of course, if you've played the Space Marine games, you'll know is kind of Titus's whole thing). Titus no-sells the psychic attack, rips apart the demon, and drags Metaurus to safety. When Metaurus says,

>Titus. Our duty is done. It's time to go.

Titus responds,

>Not yet, old man.

and moves to face down an entire horde of chaos cultists armed with nothing but a pair of blades.

The way the shot of Titus standing firm against the oncoming horde is framed, even if you aren't familiar with the Space Marine games, you know he's going to win.

The episode ends with a sequence of a young Titus running into the rain, dragging his Space Marine-sized combat knife, heroic music swelling, as Metaurus narrates,

>What could a soul like that be capable of?

Clearly, whatever it is, it's fucking AWESOME.

This is exactly the kind of character the unnamed mecha pilot protagonist of the Armored Core short, Asset Management, thinks he is. And, to be fair to him, he is an ace. Over the course of the episode, he takes out five enemy ACs in a single mission, winning first a two-on-one and then a three-on-one encounter. In the cockpit, he's kind of That Guy.

And it doesn't matter, because the episode is about how utterly pathetic and broken he is as a human being.

The episode opens with him tweaking out alone in the corner of a bar, clocking a guy in the face for coming up to try to start a friendly conversation and only avoiding a fight because the mysterious schizo Voice in his head tells him to stand down and the owner of the bar talks down the dude that the protagonist punched. The protagonist pouts, "I don't like it here anymore," stomps out of the bar, and immediately steals a cigarette out of another dude's mouth and gets shoved face-first into the snow for it. He rolls over on his back and takes a drag without even getting up.

The Voice tells him,

>You need to even out.

And he responds,

>So I can fit in? None of those fucks are anything like me.

See, he's special. He's different. He's an augmented human, made to pilot. Nobody's like him. As he derisively tells the Voice when she tells him that he should find his people, "Everybody like me is dead." He draws a sense of superiority from his solitude, 'cuz it reinforces his whole bitter, jaded, tough-guy persona.

And yet, he's still so desperately lonely that when the Voice shuts up for a few seconds, he begs for her return, sounding like a child on the verge of tears:

>Come back. I don't want to be alone here.

But, as it turns out, he isn't as unique as he imagined himself to be. The other pilots he fought throughout the episode were also augmented, and part of the reason he was able to beat them is because they were hesitant to kill another person like them. He opens up the cockpit of the last intact enemy AC to see another auged pilot like him reaching out and asking for help.

As the Voice tells him,

>They're your people.

And, in a beautiful and hilariously unsubtle shot obviously alluding to The Creation of Adam, the protagonist slowly reaches out towards this other person like him, this chance at understanding and human connection... and crushes his skull.

You get a close-up of the protagonist's sweat-stained face, which then match cuts into his AC's as it recedes into the shadow until only its glowing red eyes are visible, as he says to himself,

>Nobody's like me.

And the Voice replies,

>That's right. Nobody's like us.

The short is a wonderful little portrait of a pathetic man, a man who has been so broken through his "enhancement" into a killing machine that he can't even bring himself to choose to be better. As Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from the Underground

>In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.

The protagonist is miserable in his isolation, and he makes his bitterness known in every smart-ass barb, but wallowing in it reaffirms his identity. And at the end of the day, he like the unchallenging stability of that misery. So, he chooses to snuff out a life to preserve his ego and paycheck rather than take a chance at human connection.

Becoming a Cool Violence Guy has irreparably separated him from humanity.

It's a far cry from how the 40k short presents its Space Marines. Even when they're expected to die, it's as part of a Glorious Cause. There's meaning and community in it. Metaurus's crew lines up to see his squad off to their leap into hell. The battle barge, firing an orbital barrage at his squad's current position, tells them, "Die well, brothers." Titus stands alone at the end, but does it to protect Metaurus.

The titles kind of encapsulate their respective outlooks: And They Shall Know No Fear vaunts its killing machines, whatever reservations it may have about them; Asset Management tells you that making a man into a killing machine reduces him to, well, an asset, a thing to be manipulated.