One of the best decisions I made when I ran my last Lancer campaign was putting together a faction roster. Instead of making new bespoke NPCs for every single combat, I made a list of 9 NPC "builds" that I always drew from when putting together a combat against forces from a specific faction.
My public faction roster in Foundry looked like this:
In my campaign, the base enemy roster (sans scan data) was provided to a player as the result of a Gather Information downtime action.
Implementing this roster had a number of immediately tangible benefits:
It made the Scan action significantly more useful. It's a bit of a meme in the Lancer community that nobody ever Scans. This immediately changed once my players realized they would see the same NPC builds over and over throughout the campaign. Implementing a player-visible faction roster means your players can then start building a Pokedex enemy mech list to flip through once they see stuff that they recognize and have their stats and abilities at the ready. I knew the dossier was working when my Blackbeard player (with its tiny range-5 Sensors) chose to Scan instead of Skirmish a nearby Assault.
It rewarded player mastery. When I first started my campaign, I made new NPCs and game mechanics for every combat, but my players quickly felt like too many new things were being hurled at them every time we started an encounter, making it impossible to actually learn and build mastery. Using consistent enemy NPC builds meant that players could learn more effective strategies against the faction (e.g. if you're going to shoot a Grunt Bastion with Sharanga missiles on your Monarch, make sure you consume Lock-On to enable Seeking Payload to overcome Armor). Moreover, they could make intelligent mech build choices during Full Rests knowing the sorts of challenges they are likely to face.
It significantly simplified combat prep. It's way easier to put together a set of enemy forces when I have a smaller pre-made menu to choose from, instead of the entire swath of NPCs and optionals to choose from. Having 9 options to pick from lasted me a surprisingly long time, and I rarely felt like my options were getting tired as I mixed and matched NPC compositions. Adding Grunt, Elite, Veteran, and Commander templates to different builds at different times to represent cannon fodder and field officers also helped spice things up and keep things interesting.
It made important, named characters stand out. The real secret sauce with faction rosters is when you ignore them. Get your players accustomed to seeing the same frames over and over, and then hit them with a Big Bad piloting some weird shit they've never seen before. That's a pretty awesome moment, and keeps faction rosters fresh for longer knowing you can pair them with off-roster builds from time to time at important moments.
Building your own Faction Rosters
Let's build some rosters!
Step 1: Select NPC Classes
I recommend starting with the basic mix of 10-12 classes representing all five Roles to ensure you have good variety to pull from:
3 Strikers: Oftentimes the "star" or "main problem" of a given enemy composition
1 Artillery: Most factions do well to only have one good long-range option with well-known strengths and weaknesses
2 Defenders: Good options for your go-to grunts
2 Controllers: Powerful options for keeping the battle interesting
2 Supports: Force multipliers to boost a faction's weaknesses
When selecting classes, pay special mind toward what the vibe of this faction is. Are they subtle? Direct? Sneaky? Do they rely on raw power to achieve their ends, or roundabout means? How do they bolster their own strategic weaknesses? Class composition selection will go a longer way toward giving your faction flavor than applying a blanket template will (looking at you, Pirate/RPV).
Step 2: Assign 2 optional features per NPC to make a "build"
NPC optional features the spice of your composition. If you have multiple factions in your campaign, the selection of optional features is what will easily allow you to have multiple classes represented in different factions. You can go a bit wild here too, taking features from across different classes or even templates to make something cool and flavorful.
Example: An Assault with Underslung Grenade Launcher + Micro-Missile Barrage will feel a lot different than an Assault with High-Impact Rounds + Auto-Targeting.
Step 3: Give each build an evocative name
NPC mech build designations are both a flavorful way to communicate the vibe of the faction to the players as well as a handy way for you and your players to easily refer to a given NPC build.
Example: Taking the two builds above, I might call the first Assault a Grenadier (lots of high explosive AOE attacks) and the second assault a Rifleman (precise single-target attacker). Now, the term "Grenadier" means something useful to myself and to my players, more than just "Assault" which could be ambiguous in a situation where two factions each have an Assault.
Example Faction Rosters
Here are six example rosters I've put together. Take them and stick them in your own game!
Have you made some cool faction rosters of your own? Feel free to share them!
In other news, my module, The Demon of Dogwater Gulch, is nearing completion! The WIP version is still up for free, and playable from start to finish, but I’m really looking forward to everyone seeing the final product! The current plan is to have it on sale for $4.99 with community copies available once it’s done. It’s been a very fun experience!
Thanks for reading Gordian Blade! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
