For people who are not in the know Lancer is a mecha tabletop rpg, set in a universe vaguely similar to that of Ian Banks' Culture novels. Basically after a global warming induced collapse and a millennia long dark age people of Earth got their shit together, achieved fully automated gay space luxury communism and forcefully brought a bunch of worlds colonized by people (there no aliens) that escaped Earth before shit hit the fan into the fold. Then after this lead to a whole bunch of war crimes there was a bit of a coup and now the Union exercies a gentler touch. Oh, and everyone uses 10 meter tall humanoid robots in combat for some reason.
The system is supposedly really cool and a bunch of guys in my group are excited about the whole thing. The problem is that I'm not much of a mecha guy (I love NGE and Gurren Lagann like everyone else), so I was kinda drawing a blank trying to come up with a plot.
Then, it hit me. If it's a game about communist warriors, why not mine communist military history for ideas? Focus the on a communist revolution against feudalism on the periphery (there are Dune-style noble houses in the setting), player characters sent clandestinely to help with the civil war by the Union, which doesn't want to engage in open intervention. Sorta like a Spanish Civil War thing with International Brigades. Mix in Russian Civil War with Intervention, Kronstadt, handwringing about what to do with the nobles.
Also annoy the players by referencing Soviet movies and songs about civil war and revolution people here in Russia know since childhood.
What do you guys think? I need ideas! Any interesting historical combat situations to recreate? Tricky conundrums to throw at the heroes? Books and movies to use as inspiration?
I'm not super familiar with that setting, but it seems like there's a certain degree of decentralization (at least around the periphery) if you've got feudalism and noble houses. So, how about having some planet (or region within a planet) that's essentially formed an autonomous commune of sorts, and managed to stay under the radar since they're far away from any semblance of central authority? But they come into conflict with some other faction - maybe some noble house based on a planet in the same system decides there's valuable resources to be exploited, or the central government starts trying to reassert itself (or both at the same time, and the central government has to both deal with its own unruly nobles and the space-commune).
Don't know how exactly the mech technology in the setting works, but perhaps you could have your protagonists be a militia on the side of the commune, who have to make do with outdated tech, maybe even improvise combat mechs by taking ones meant for more industrial purposes (like mining, or construction) and strapping guns to them, like the mech equivalent of a technical. Or maybe they could be a mercenary unit that gets hired to fight the commune, but ends up joining them and turning their fancy high-tech mechs on their former employers.