Turn-Based Tactics The Lamplighters League - turn-based tactics in pulp 1930s setting from Harebrained Schemes

[Roguey]

Nah I distinctly remember that someone (I think a bald black dude?) that worked on battletech saying that he didn't even give a shit about encounter design and combat in that game. Both the writing and the combat took a nosedive from shadowrun so if its the same managers then at least the good workers left or were working on something else.

You can look at mobygames to see for yourself. They had new hires yes, but the same writer and some of the same designers. Harebrained was small back then. Battletech was their only project.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Battletech was their only project.

Didn't they have that one action roguelite at production at same time?
Or was that earlier?

 

[Roguey]

Battletech was their only project.

Didn't they have that one action roguelite at production at same time?
Or was that earlier?

Necropolis was a small project released in 2016. The two designers that were on it worked on it, Shadowrun, and Battletech.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Dev Diary #1: Game Vision

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the first Dev Diary for The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World. My name is Chris Rogers—I’m the game’s Director and in this first dev diary I wanted to share the inspiration behind the game.

Our vision for The Lamplighters League was always to make a tactical game that featured an ensemble cast of charming rogues, desperate odds, and a larger than life adventure. We wanted the game’s setting to be familiar enough for you to jump right in without a lot of table setting, but keep the flexibility to create unique abilities for our cast and daunting enemies for them to fight.

That led us to our alternate 1932. Behind the scenes, a secret occult war has raged for centuries over control of a mystical tower that has existed since the dawn of time. As the game opens, the enemy has all but won the war. There are no heroes left, the best of the best are dead or gone to ground. It is up to you to assemble the best of the worst—thieves, killers, and scoundrels—for one last ditch campaign to stop the enemy before they can claim the tower for themselves.

It was an ambitious vision, and in order to pull it all off we knew we needed to start somewhere.

Characters, not Units

We started with the characters.

We went to work on early prototypes, building an ensemble cast of Lamplighters who would all have their own unique abilities, their own views on the war they found themselves in, as well their own views on each other. From early on, we wanted The Lamplighters League to be a tactical game where you play characters, not units.

The shipping game features 10 recruitable agents

We love ensemble casts at Harebrained Schemes. There’s something special about seeing a group of characters, each with their own expertise, motivations, desires, and quirks coming together to accomplish a nearly impossible goal. And a squad-based game is a great opportunity to build an ensemble since you get to take charge of your entire team of agents.

In the earliest development of the game we relied on paper prototypes, playing tabletop versions of the game to try out ideas quickly. These were pretty crude, played with 3x5 cards and printed rulesets. Even then we knew that our agents’ fighting abilities, motivations, their visuals, and personality were all intertwined with one another and would need to inform and reinforce each other to make up a great Lamplighter. In the end, those aspects are so connected that it’s difficult to stick to just one aspect of an agent in trying to describe what makes each special.

Ingrid, for example, was one of the earliest characters we prototyped. She was always the femme fatale: icily flirtatious, precise and professional. We could hear her voice in our heads and we knew how she saw the world, but it took iteration to find an ability set that clicked for her. On our paper battlefield, we found that that meant melee, she would be up close and personal… and, as a melee focused character, she would never miss. But shouldn’t the melee character be a big, hulking brute? Yet the best femme fatales always surprise us with their ruthlessness. If you’re playing her effectively she’s often surrounded, finishing off enemy after enemy, more vulnerable, literally, than she first appears… and that might have some resonance with her character as well.

Ingrid doesn’t miss

In addition to their unique ability set, each character has their own innate passive ability that is a key to both their personality and the way they fight. Ingrid, for example, has Killer Instinct; she gets an additional Action Point when she eliminates an enemy, allowing her to string together multiple killing blows with the right coordination and planning—like I said, precise and professional.

Eddie’s pistols can miss, but not when he uses Bullseye

Of course, a great ensemble isn’t about any one character, but how each fits together as a group. We designed your agents to play well off of each other tactically as well as narratively. From the beginning, we wanted recruiting a new Lamplighter to your team to be a big moment in the game because each one adds a whole new playstyle to your arsenal. And as your roster expands, you can find new synergies between your agents.

On the dev team we all have our favorite squads, some of us choose our squads for the pure combo interplay between the agents’ ability sets, and others because they enjoy the narrative interplay of the team.

These two may not like each other but their ability sets compliment each other nicely

Always Pulp, Sometimes Noir, Never Camp

We’ll talk more about your agents in a future dev diary. For now, let’s talk a little about the world they live in.

The Lamplighters League draws inspiration from the pulp adventures of the 20’s and 30’s. Reading those old stories, you come away with this feverish sense that anything might be out there in the shadows. In those pages, there are mysteries and strange threats that rational science can’t fully explain. In The Lamplighters League, you are thrust into just such a conflict. Many of your agents are uninitiated in the ways of the occult world, meaning that they find themselves in the exact same position as you are, coming to terms with the world’s true nature even as they step into the breach.

The Tidespawn are ruthless pack hunters

Meanwhile, your foe, a secret cult that calls themselves the Banished Court, seems to hold all the cards. Each faction of the Court has access to strange and uncanny powers that make them especially dangerous. You won’t have much to counter them at first, just a few agents, and it will be up to you to determine how to do it. Will you pursue a strategy of limiting their progress by harrying them or instead focus on building up your team and searching out the relics you will need to stop them once and for all? Along the way you will rescue allies, destroy evil shrines, raid the enemy’s supplies, and steal from ancient tombs. At some point you will have to face the Court’s powerful Scions on the field, dangerous enemies with incredible and growing power.

Whatever approach you choose, The Lamplighters League is always a rip-roaring pulp adventure.

Marteau’s Crossroads project is key to the Court’s plans.

Besides pulp adventures, one of the other key touchstones for us was the wry wit of the noir detectives of the time period. In those books and films, you always feel that the quips and verbal repartee are a way of coping with the looming shadows and sour corruption that threaten to overwhelm the characters. It’s these occasional moments of Noir, the moments when you lose an agent, or they contemplate the dangers they are facing with a fatalist bravado that are some of my personal favorites.

We have often said during development that our game would be “always pulp, sometimes noir, but never camp.” We never wanted to wink at our characters or make fun of the setting for some quick laughs. We have tried to resist the temptation to sacrifice the stakes for you or your characters in favor of a quick poke at our pulp origins.

Infiltration & Combat

In The Lamplighters League, you are outnumbered and outgunned, and instead of conventional soldiers you have a squad of criminals and assassins. You won’t survive by fighting fair, so you better learn to fight dirty.

Early on we knew we had a challenge (which is just a fancy word for a problem): how to give the player the flexibility they needed to plan and execute an ambush quickly. We built a number of prototypes on paper and a couple in-engine, and in the end the clear winner was a hybrid between real-time infiltration and turn-based combat. It was so fast and fun to scout enemy positions, look for advantages, and set up ambushes in real-time. Patrolling enemies added tension to your efforts to find the best place to “go loud,” and, crucially, realtime would give you lots of control and power over how a combat encounter would play out.

Use real-time abilities to help even the odds before you go loud

At its core, The Lamplighters League is a tactical turn-based combat game. A combat encounter plays out quite differently, however, depending on how you choose to approach it during the real-time infiltration phase. Each of your agents has one of three real-time roles and each role has a limited number of “takedowns” that they can use to eliminate enemies before the fight begins. We’ll talk more about that in a future dev diary, too.

At some point you’re going to go loud, whether that’s because it's time to execute your well-planned ambush or because the enemy has discovered you snooping around. Once the enemy is aware of you, the game drops into turn-based combat. We will talk more in-depth about The Lamplighters League’s take on turn-based combat (which is the backbone of the game) in future dev diaries.

What’s Next?
That’s all for now. I hope this quick introduction to the game has given you a better understanding of The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World. Our next two diaries are going to examine our agents in more depth and give you a chance to meet more Lamplighters from our game as well as hear from other voices on our dev team!

 

[Norfleet]

I remember when this site used to be about GAMES, and not VAPORWARE.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I remember when this site used to be about GAMES, and not VAPORWARE.

Were those days when people talked about Grimoire?

 

[Oropay]

Massive dissapointment

 

[jac8awol]

They'll never get another cent out of me after the woke travesty that was Battletech. In fact I'm gonna pirate this and distribute it to my coworkers free of charge just to make sure none of them buy it.

 

[ferratilis]

They should hire John and Brenda Romero. Their expertise on strategy RPGs would really help make this game shine.

Spoiler

 

[Skorpion]

They should hire John and Brenda Romero. Their expertise on strategy RPGs would really help make this game shine.

Spoiler

Now I want a turn-based trpg as one of the sopranos where the tactical layer is mob hits and robbing/getting away and the rpg elements are trying to keep the cops clueless and your wife from divorcing you over your many stripper associates!

 

[ropetight]

They should hire John and Brenda Romero. Their expertise on strategy RPGs would really help make this game shine.

Spoiler

Empire of Sin was quite a letdown, people do burn out in this indutry...
John was out by the time of Daikatana and never came back, Brenda did Wizardry 8 and JA2, I think, but after that I don't remember good game that she wrote/designed.

 

[ropetight]

They should hire John and Brenda Romero. Their expertise on strategy RPGs would really help make this game shine.

Spoiler

Now I want a turn-based trpg as one of the sopranos where the tactical layer is mob hits and robbing/getting away and the rpg elements are trying to keep the cops clueless and your wife from divorcing you over your many stripper associates!

And cunnilingus and psychotherapy as path of demise, as one signature would say.

 

[ferratilis]

Letdown is an understatement, they are almost in lawsuit territory. They stopped patching the game completely, over a year of radio silence, season pass is still being sold even though the second DLC is still unheard of. And they also removed all references to the game from their website, while hiring staff for a new project. People are calling them out for what it is, a scam.

We're talking about a Gangsters rip-off with mediocre nu-XCOM style combat, full of SJW bullshit, with hundreds of bugs. Daikatana seems good in comparison. John should stick to making Sigil 2, then retire while he still has any respect in the industry.

 

[ropetight]

Letdown is an understatement, they are almost in lawsuit territory. They stopped patching the game completely, over a year of radio silence, season pass is still being sold even though the second DLC is still unheard of. And they also removed all references to the game from their website, while hiring staff for a new project. People are calling them out for what it is, a scam.

We're talking about a Gangsters rip-off with mediocre nu-XCOM style combat, full of SJW bullshit, with hundreds of bugs. Daikatana seems good in comparison. John should stick to making Sigil 2, then retire while he still has any respect in the industry.

I tried to play Empire of Sin soon after release, and it was horrible: Owlcat v1.0 level of game crashing, bad performance and jankiness - and worse.
Haven't tried it since, and sincerely, I'm not that disappointed.

SJW bullshit is expected, since Brenda became great role model for women in gaming; and it was so hard in those dark days of 20th century raging patriarchy, what with all the gatekeeping, glass ceilings and constant abuse/rape that kept the women down.
Shit, those guys that survived WWII have nothing on them.

 

[Squidhead]

Could never get Battletech to run smoothly so I guess these guys can just fuck themselves.

 

[gurugeorge]

Cool concept, loathsome generic cartoony art style.

Goofy-looking sandnigger in the trailer thumbnail doesn't bode well either.

 

[deuxhero]

I'm surprised there's only 10 units, since they all look so generic and impossible to distinguish.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Dev Diary #2: Your Agents

Hi all!

Time for the second Developer’s Diary for The Lamplighters League! You’ve got two of us today: I’m
Patrick Lipo, Lead Designer
and with me is
Campbell Tran, Senior Designer
responsible for a whole bunch of the combat and upgrades in the game.

If you read the last diary you’ve certainly heard one of our credos was “Characters, not Units…” It has been in our DNA since the very start, and it manifests in both how the Agents fit into the story and your gameplay. Each character has their own way of tackling both the infiltration and turn-based battles in each mission.

Finding Your Team
A Lamplighters League campaign kicks off with some core characters to help you get your footing, but once things get rolling it’s up to you to bring new operatives into the fold… which requires you to scour the world for Agents and Allies and bring them back alive.

Search out and recruit the agents you need to stop the Banished Court.

Each week from your Hideout, you can send Agents to locations across the globe, using a resource called Intel to search for new activities of the Banished Court. You can’t be sure what they’ll uncover: perhaps it’s a piece of critical Court infrastructure, maybe the location of a captured Ally who can support you back at your Hideout, or it could be the whereabouts of a new Agent.

These new discoveries appear on your World Map as available missions. If you locate a character who sounds enticing, it’s up to you to send your team of Agents on a mission to retrieve them from enemy territory. Make contact, fight your way out, and you can fly them back to the Hideout to join your team. Welcome to a new set of capabilities, a new approach, a new playstyle! Now you can take that Agent and gear them up for the next mission, or keep them in the wings for searches and special situations. No matter where you are in the campaign, your choice of Agents is the most important one you can make.

Eddie’s Signature, Barrage, can soften up a group of enemies.


Let’s say you have been playing a lot with Eddie Sawyer, the classic gunfighter, a Great War vet turned bank robber. His twin pistols let him target two enemies per attack, spreading the fun around the battlefield. He’s really about pouring ammo into a bunch of enemies, including flashy actions like Light ‘Em Upwhere he can use all his bullets and flush his foes from behind cover. Luckily, he also has passive abilities like Quick Loa, which helps him restore ammo if he scores a critical hit before his guns dry up.

But there’s more to Eddie than that... you’ve got options to make him your own. Spend your skill points wisely, and amp up his potency against a single enemy by unlocking and upgrading his Bullseye ability. Mark targets for followup attacks by Eddie and his companions with Set ‘Em Up. Increase his Crit Chance (and remember, his Quick Load ammo regeneration) with Hit ‘Em Fast
.

To help cement their personal flair, each Agent also has a Signature Ability with limited charges that is tailor made for their special situations. Eddie’s is up-close and personal… a hail of bullets in a deadly arc called Barrage which makes quick work of groups unlucky enough to be caught within it.

Light ‘em Up allows Eddie to mark enemy targets and flush them out of cover so other agents can score easy hits.

As a pistol-packer, he’s going to be better against a crowd than a single strong enemy. When you’re playing Eddie you might find yourself picking fights with groups of weaker foes, trying to pull them together to catch them in range. As someone who needs to get close to a lot of enemies to really shine, he’s also going to be at risk fairly often, so keeping him on his feet takes a little effort. You can help with that by acquiring some body armor from your Supplier, or bringing back a useful weapon mod from a mission that helps Eddie’s ability to make quick kills.

Still, one of the best ways to keep him alive is to pair him with someone who covers his weak points. Maybe you pair him with
Judith Harlow… She’s a driven young engineer who takes to the battlefield with high tech gadgetry and a really big shield. Her style is to use her technology to armor up, bring enemies to her, and shove them around the battlefield. She’s great at building her defenses with Shield Slam
and attracting enemy aggro with her Signature Challenge. If you unlock her passive Ironclad and Unbreakable abilities, then keeping on the offensive will build up her armor rating, making her nearly invincible for the rest of the turn. And for added fun, she can attach Sticky Grenadesto enemies and watch them flee.

Judith’s Fortify can keep other agents alive when they are in the thick of the fight.

Playing with Eddie and Judith together, you can discover all sorts of new kinds of trouble to create. Now you’ve got a bullet-slinger who excels at attacking a lot of characters at once and a walking tank who can safely draw a lot of enemies into the line of fire. Eddie’s multiple attacks makes it easy to set off Judith’s Sticky Grenades once they’re attached to a foe. Judith can use her upgraded Fortify to drop a defensive shield on Eddie that lets him purge himself of Stress damage with every attack… And since Eddie’s fires both pistols with each action, he gets double the effect to boot.

When Judith uses her Challenge Signature ability, weaker characters like the Acolytes are drawn in where Eddie’s Barrage Signature can take them out. Plus, Judith can unlock the ability to shred the tough armor of enemies like the Purifier, making it easier for Eddie’s lighter pistols to punch through their shells.

The more you pair Agents together, the more you can discover ways to combine their abilities to set up something that Campbell likes to call, “The Big Turn.” And we’ll talk more about that idea another day.

Character Combos
So later in the campaign, perhaps you discover someone new you want to try out. For example, perhaps you recruit
Fedir and add him to your team… You take some skill points you earned previously and build him up, decking him out with gear and special artifacts, including some additional upgrades that can enhance all your Agents across the board.

I’ve got a real soft spot for Fedir: a beefy criminal enforcer with a gruff demeanor. He carries a wide-firing shotgun that he can Bludgeon with when it runs out of ammo. Being attacked builds Fedir’s Rage, increasing his potency as he puts himself in harm’s way. Plus, with his Signature Manhandle he can simply pick up and throw people, knocking down enemies he impacts. By pairing up Fedir and Judith, two walking tanks, you’d think they would eat each other’s lunch… but even this match can lead to some delightful combos.

Use Fedir’s Manhandle to toss enemies into each other.

For example, Fedir has an ability called Provoke that causes enemies to assault him, similar to Judith’s Challenge, but, thanks to his Short Fuse passive, Fedir also gains Rage with each incoming attack. Rage benefits from the Rancor ability, leading to more damage and more mobility for a powerful follow-up turn.
While Fedir is attracting everyone’s attacks, Judith can drop her Fortify shield on top of him to further protect him. She can then swoop in with an AoE Shield Slamwhich has the ability to knock down the gathered enemies while giving her temporary extra armor with each hit she deals…

That combo is really awesome but one of my very favorite things about Judith is that she can attach a
Sticky Grenadeto an enemy before Fedir Manhandles them and tosses them into a crowd of enemies… You can imagine the result.

Judith’s Sticky Grenade turns enemies into bombs that Fedir can throw with Manhandle.

More About Characters Next Time!
While we’ve talked a fair amount about some of the characters and their gameplay, we've only touched on what they mean to the story and world of The Lamplighters League. The next diary will introduce you to ourLead Narrative Designer, Jill Scharr, and go deeper into the storytelling side of our Agents, and even more will be revealed about our characters in the weeks to come!

 

[Lemming42]

That all sounds really good. Except maybe for the brief details about the hideout/world map screen, which sounds very Chimera Squad - figure out your optimal team early on and then leave the rest of the shitmunchers back at base to assign them to useless busywork missions.

Probably an unpopular opinion from what I've seen, but I do really like these tactics games based around specific characters with themed sets of abilities.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Dev Diary 3# — Your agents: Stories

Well hey there, all you scoundrels, rogues and misfits. I'm Jill Scharr, Lead Narrative Designer for The Lamplighters League, and today I want to introduce you to just a few of the Agents you'll encounter, recruit and lead to victory. You'll meet a cheerful sniper with a no-nonsense approach to killing; a swordsman whose technique and training borders on the supernatural; and a field medic who is as quick to inflict wounds as to heal them.

The Cheerful Sniper

Purnima Rana is a member of the elite assassins' guild known as the Sanguine Club, where the rich and powerful go to take out hits on each other. She didn't mean to get mixed up in this Tower at the End of the World business. In fact, she was working a job for the League's enemies, the power-hungry Banished Court, when something horrible happened. She realized she had a scruple:

Purnima finds herself on the wrong side of Sanguine Club and The Banished Court, making Locke’s offer look all the better in comparison.

Blackballed by her guild and hunted by a cult on the verge of world domination, Purnima has little choice but to join the Lamplighters League. But, ever the consummate professional, she treats it like any other job, bringing her peerless marksmanship and her unflappable good cheer to bear for the cause.

Count on Purnima to pull off some amazing shots in the field.

Some of Purnima's teammates will wonder: Where does that good cheer come from? And how has it survived a career built on lives ended through the scope of a rifle? But Fedir Volchymorda—you met him in last week's developer diary[forum.paradoxplaza.com]—doesn't wonder. He knows all too well.

Fedir is an ex-mob enforcer; he's the guy you send to put the fear of god into the people who owe you money. Unlike Purnima and her posh guild, his work was brutal, messy, and close to home. He worked for one man for years; she has a new client every few weeks. Yet if you take the two of them on missions together, not only will you get killer combat synergies—set her to soften up targets from a distance while he soaks up damage on the front lines—the two will find out they have a lot to say to each other.

Purnima has a very important question to ask…

The rogues, scoundrels and misfits of the Lamplighters League all come from very different circumstances, but as the campaign unfolds many of them find common ground with each other—sometimes in surprising ways. That was my goal: to build the characters' worldviews, speech patterns and emotional resting states both distinct from, and complementary to, the other voices in the ensemble.

The Supernatural Swordsman

Fedir and Purnima may find their way to the start of a beautiful friendship, but some of your Agents will never get along. Like Fedir and… well, almost anyone else, really. But especially Zhang Jianyi.

You met Jianyi in Dev Diary #1[forum.paradoxplaza.com], where he and Fedir sized each other up. You see, as Fedir pointed out, Jianyi is a traitor. It's a bit rich coming from a brutal mob enforcer whose only good turn in life—fighting for the League—happened entirely by chance, but he's not wrong: Jianyi was a brother of the martial-arts monastery Thousand Snow Mountain, where he learned to surpass normal human limits of speed and strength. He repaid their kindness by stealing the monastery's most powerful artifact and slipping away in the night.

Mutual enemies make for strange allies.

Jianyi has something to prove, and the Lamplighters League is his ticket to proving it. But he doesn't care what Fedir or anyone else thinks of him. Let them have their misgivings. He doesn't owe them an explanation. Arrogant, brooding and standoffish, he knows exactly how good he is with both sword and pistol, and never hesitates to share his opinion, no matter how scathing or brutally honest. Take him on enough missions, and you'll discover the worst part: he's got his reasons for all of it.

That was another guidepost in the concept phase: in the words of Jean Renoir, "The hell of life is, everyone's got their reasons." Our characters are scoundrels, not heroes. Each of them has done horrible things, but they all had their reasons for doing it, and we wanted the player to empathize with, or at least understand, their choices.

On paper, Jianyi was born from the desire to add a swords-wielder to the player's combat toolkit, just as wanting a sniper Agent was the starting point for Purnima. We asked ourselves, what might it look like to fight with a sword in a world of hidden but powerful supernatural forces, and still be able to keep up with bullets and bombs? A swordsman inspired by wuxia stories—full of supernatural feats, conflicting loyalties and characters who push past the limits of human ability—was the perfect fit for the subtle magic and globe-trotting adventure of The Lamplighters League.

Jianyi can slice through enemies with his Steel Tempest signature.
The Angel of Death

We've now introduced you to an assassin and a traitor in addition to the mercenaries, burglars and vigilantes you met in previous Dev Diaries. It's time to talk about the exception that proves the rule, the "good one" in the League: Ana Sofía Rodríguez.

Ana Sofía is a supernaturally gifted field medic, thanks to the training she received while a member of the Magdalite Order, a group of mystics who practice healing magic and swear vows of strict pacifism. A Magdalite would rather die than harm any living thing, even in their own self-defense.


Ana Sofía started out as a Magdalite sister. She isn't one anymore.

Ana Sofia on Overwatch, “Anyone moves, I’ll put them down.”

When the Banished Court raided her convent, stealing medical supplies intended for the poor and needy, Ana Sofía fought back. With the pull of a trigger her world turned upside down: an apostate to the Magdalites and a fugitive from the Court's vindictive justice, she fell back on the stories one of the older sisters used to tell her: stories of the heroic exploits of the Lamplighters League.

Here's a pro tip: take Ana Sofía and Jianyi on missions together. Not only does Jianyi's up-close-and-personal fighting style sometimes leave him hurting for some healing—the two also have a lot in common. Both were raised within close-knit occult orders and trained to perform supernatural feats.

And both of them left those orders in disgrace.

Wildly different journeys, yet with similar beginnings, and both leading to the League.

Always Pulp, Sometimes Noir, Never Camp

You may remember these words from the first development diary[forum.paradoxplaza.com], by Game Director Chris Rogers. For the narrative team, this means that the characters are always grounded and sincere, even when the plot becomes occult and uncanny. It means The Lamplighters League won't wink at you or undercut the stakes with genre-savvy or self-referential jokes.

We know our players are familiar with the archetypes, aesthetics and tropes of 1930s pulp adventures—but our characters aren't. For them the monsters, magic and ingenious new machines are happening in their real lives, with real stakes, and at any given moment, whatever happens next is far from guaranteed.

Just because camp isn't part of the game's DNA doesn't mean we don't have a sense of humor—far from it. Just that the humor comes from the characters' perspectives—not from the way we tell the story.

What we've told you is just the start of Purnima, Jianyi and Ana Sofía's stories. To experience what happens next, as well as meet even more scoundrels, including an occult scholar who prizes knowledge over morality and a young but talented gentleman-thief, consider adding The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World to your Wishlist.

Want to keep the conversation going? People in our alternate take on the 1930s communicated via letters, telegrams and psychic visions, but most of you only have access to two out of the three, so you can drop by the Forum[forum.paradoxplaza.com] or the Discord[discord.gg] to talk to Harebrained Schemes developers and other fans about The Lamplighters League. The bravest among you may even venture to follow us on Twitter.

Jill Scharr
Lead Narrative Designer
Forum: JillScharr

 

[lycanwarrior]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/th...rategy-games-around-and-its-utterly-thrilling

The Lamplighters League pilfers from the finest strategy games around, and it's utterly thrilling​

Relight my fire

As is so often the case in systemic turn-based tactics games, things started to go wrong in my preview session for The Lamplighters League when a nearby torch met a cunningly placed oil slick and erupted into flames. A load of enemies were instantly enveloped in its hot sea of death, as intended, but one of our heroes - the tank-like bruiser Fedir - also ended up getting burned by mistake. As an ex-mob enforcer, he's certainly built to take a few punches, and his abilities are all focused on making him the centre of attention, his attacks growing more powerful as his rage levels continue to grow. "You want him to get attacked," game director Chris Rogers tells me, calling on the phrase 'you wouldn't like him when he's angry' as the basis for Fedir's ability set. But with that extra fire damage he receives, it's just a little too much all at once. He gets knocked down, and the tide of battle quickly goes south.

In truth, I played no part in this downfall. Rogers was in the control cockpit for this one, showing me exactly how Harebrained Schemes' latest game actually works. It's quite a different proposition from their last game, Battletech, and in this quite literal trial by fire, studio head and co-founder Mitch Gitelman actually pulled a dollar out of his pocket at one point and put a bet on whether Rogers would make it out alive. He certainly had his work cut out for him. Rogers won that dollar, and here's how the game's emphasis on deep, customisable character builds set him up for success.




The Lamplighters League starts in your team's hideout, a hub screen where your ten agents hang out between missions. You'll only have three to start with, mind, which you can pick from individually or let the game's randomiser choose for you. The rest you'll need to find and recruit out on the map, which is currently being controlled by three evil factions in this alternate 1930s cold war: the Castro, the Marteau and the Strum. Each has their own goal - Castro's trying to raise an eldritch god, Marteau is obsessed with exploiting weird science for profit, while the Strum are totalitarian raiders looking for lost artefacts to bring the whole world to heel - and a dial meter to go with it. When these dials reach 100%, the world is lost and it's game over - although not without giving players a last ditch mission attempt to try and foil the enemy's plans and bring them back under control.


These Lamplighters aren't your ordinary batch of heroes, however. As publisher Paradox Interactive revealed earlier this month, you're working with "the best of the worst" in this grid-based strategy game, as the best of the best were all biffed to high heaven in World War I. As such, you're bringing together a band of thieves and bandits, balancing the need to recruit new people to your team, find allies to help you get more resources to go on off-screen search expeditions, and stealing each faction's precious treasures in a series of well-planned (or chaotic) heists in order to sabotage their world domination plans.

Your hideout will gradually become busier and more crowded as you recruit more agents in the field.
In my preview session, we had the aforementioned Fedir, warrior nun healer Anna Sophia, and cult assassin Celestine who, rather like Hard West 2's Flynn, uses dark magic for the greater good, albeit at a cost to herself. Naturally, each character has their own abilities and individual skill trees to dig into, but you'll be able to give them special bits of gear and consumable items to help them in battle. So far, so XCOM-like. But the real kicker comes in the form of 40 tarot cards that can be used to give your heroes unique abilities and passives, allowing you to "put together your way of playing," says Rogers.

"This plays a little bit looser than [Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3]. Our stealth gameplay is more like the opening gambit."

Missions being in real-time, giving you space to roam the procedurally generated map (as long as you remain undetected, that is), get a lay of the land and plan your combat attacks. It calls to mind Mimimi's stealth strategy games Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun, but Rogers tells me "this plays a little bit looser than that" and that it won't be "quite as punishing" (although try telling that to Fedir). "You'll make mistakes, kind of recover and play through the tactical stuff," he says. "Our stealth gameplay is more like the opening gambit."

To demonstrate, Rogers picks off a few goons guarding a nearby radio tower with each character's special real-time ability. Fedir has a powerful charge attack, while Anna can throw lures to distract guards to look in a certain direction. Celestine, on the other hand, is better at sneaking, cutting the awareness circle around an enemy's feet in half, allowing her to creep up from behind without being noticed. These all have limited charges, Rogers tells me, so don't expect to be able to take out the entire map without getting into a fight.

"A lot of the world is procedurally-generated," says Gitelman, "so we're not exactly sure what's about to happen. Sometimes different enemies will appear, different enemy group sizes, different cover, different pick-ups, things like that."

The Undrawn Hand lets you add special tarot cards to each character build.
The size and type of an enemy group is only one part of the puzzle, though. Each enemy also has their own individual armour and stress levels, which you'll need to break both of to do mega damage. Some of the guards onscreen have an armour of 18 or 20, so we already know they're going to be tough to takedown, but stress is only accumulated when they're attacked - and when they reach maximum stress, they're effectively staggered for a turn so you can really lay into them. You'll need to be careful, though, as the same rules apply to you, so you'll need to keep your weaker characters out of harm's way behind a plentiful supply of full and half-height cover.

If one of your party does get stress broken, however, then they'll pick up a card that has a negative effect. "The idea is that that last mission was too much for them and they picked up this kind of traumatic effect," says Rogers. "A character might become reckless and they'll not be able to hit anything unless they're out of cover. Or they might become cowards. They all have gameplay effects, and they're pretty bad. You can choose to fight with them, like they're working through it, and you'll get a reward. Or you can rest them for a little bit and the card will go away."

The little details
The creation of Lamplighters' ten agents was a close collaboration between Harebrained Schemes' designers and narrative teams. They started with some basic tropes - "We need a big sort of bruiser guy, right?" - which the narrative team then fleshed out with back stories - "What if he was a Russian mob enforcer who's covered in scars?" Those concepts then go to the designers, who build on them further - "What if, when he gets enraged, he can deal more damage and stuff like that." It's the "little details," Rogers says, that allow the design team to turn them into mechanics, "and that's cool as hell. It's one of the reasons why creating our own IP allows for that."
At first, these break cards make me think of the scars you can gain in XCOM: Chimera Squad, which lets you turn negative effects gained in battle into more positive traits for your veteran soldiers through additional training. But it sounds like there's going to be a bit more risk-reward at play in Lamplighters, with players having more agency over how they decide to proceed. "If a character can't take good shots because there's a big penalty to shoot from cover, it's up to you. Do you want to go out there and stand in the open and take good shots? Or do you just have to carry that character through to the next mission?"

None of Rogers' characters have such a debilitating effect in this mission, but he chooses to keep all three out in the open for a surprisingly long time, using long-range attacks to gradually chip away at enemy health bars as they descend from all angles. The first order of the day is for Celestine to possess a super strong mummy monster, turning one of the most powerful enemies on the board to our advantage. There are two percentages you'll need to be aware of when firing off attacks - the first is your chance to hit, and the second, golden figure is your chance to crit, Rogers tells me, the latter of which is resolutely stuck at zero for most of the encounter's opening salvo.

But Celestine is a character whose entire deal is to pile on stress, and with Fedir drawing all punches and bullets into his brawny chest, she's then free to deal out her debuffs from behind. Anna Sophia's SMG, meanwhile, lets her attack twice in the same action point - a blessing when normally each character only gets two per turn. And even when she misses, the enemy's stress meter still creeps a little bit higher.




But if you stick to The Lamplighters League's default pair of action points, you're missing out on half the fun. Much like Marvel's Midnight Suns, Gears Tactics and other recent strategy greats, what you're really driving at in Lamplighters is what Gitelman calls "the big turn". That is, stretching your well of action points as far as they'll go in order to maximise the number of attacks you can perform each and every turn.

Anna Sophia, for example, currently has a rare relic equipped that gives her another AP every time she heals somebody. Combine that with her once-per-mission signature ability for a massive AOE heal, and you'll be positively rolling in the stuff if you get everyone within range. Rogers says this relic is something players will have to "work really hard for" in the final game, but in this instance, it's just the ticket he needs to let him perform another heal on our friend Fedir, who's been knocked down after taking too much damage in the unexpected fire breakout. Fedir himself also has attacks with various secondary effects that kick in when he's properly enraged, such as allowing him to heal for the amount of damage he puts out. But here Rogers has also given him a special tarot card that lets him heal even further.

Together, Rogers manages to get himself out of a pretty tight spot, but the fun's not over yet. This particular map has also spawned a reinforcements tower, which is about to send in another wave of enemies to the fray. Luckily, Anna's signature heal has also recharged Fedir's throw, allowing him to knock down a bunch of stragglers for another turn to help keep them at bay. This opens up a stress break for one of them, and Rogers' eyes light up.

"Okay, this is really great because Celestine, she - " He stops, realising he's one AP short of being in range to execute his plan. "What would have been really cool about this," he laughs, "is that Celestine's signature [Coup De Grace], because she feeds on stress, we could have recharged her signature if we could get to that guy and keep the big turn going. As it is," he sighs, "sometimes I think you don’t want to overthink it too much and you just want to start shooting."

Agents can move around in real-time when enemies aren't aware of them, but battles will ensue the moment they're discovered.
He lets rips with Anna's SMG, but the numbers just aren't in his favour. Anna goes down properly this time - not just a knockout - and needs to be revived in order to get back in the fray. Rogers says characters can be downed and picked back up twice per mission, but if they get mullered a third time, they'll be captured by the enemy and you'll lose them back to the map. On the game's default difficulty, you'll be able to find them again and break them back out of their temporary prisons, but if you're playing on Ironman, "that's it," he says, conjuring terrible flashbacks of XCOM and Fire Emblem's permadeath.

It's not looking good for Anna right now, though, as one of the reinforcements that have just arrived is a magister, who can summon even more enemies if they're not dealt with quickly. "We're doing great. This is going to be fine," Rogers says frantically. Gitelman suggests possessing the magister, but once again Rogers is too far away right now. "If I wait a turn, I'm not sure I'm going to get another one!" he despairs.

Alas, before Rogers can plan his next move, my own curse of another upcoming GDC appointment kicks in and I have to leave before I can see the mission through. Rogers still has eight enemies to take down when I depart, and I get them to promise to tell me how it pans out. Incredibly, most missions have two of these big encounters, according to Rogers, and I'm left wondering how on earth he'll get through the next one unscathed, if indeed he manages to emerge victorious from this first one. Admittedly, this particular mission is from "deep" within the game, hence its difficulty, but there's a potential third battle on the cards here as well thanks to a free-roaming boss character. These are known as Scions, and you'll encounter them multiple times throughout the game. To begin with, you'll most likely want to run away from them given their superior strength, but if you manage to defeat them, they'll be removed from play for a while. "When they come back, they'll be stronger," says Rogers. "And they'll remember you," adds Gitelman, revealing a light, Nemesis System-style twist to make fights feel more dramatic on the second go.

Very well played, sir.
For now, though, I leave Rogers and Gitelman to duel over their one dollar bet. I wished I could have stayed to see what happened next, if only because when I open my emails the next morning, I have a message from them with a photo (see right) of Rogers standing proudly in front of the TV with his no-doubt hard-won dollar, signed and dated by Gitelman. There is now only one enemy remaining onscreen, with Celestine finally poised to instant-kill them with her Coup de Grace finisher ability. It also looks like another fire broke out at some point, leaving the cobblestones charred and black around the arena. I have no idea how he did it, but man alive, I sure can't wait to try it all for myself when The Lamplighters League comes to Steam and the Epic Games Store "soon".

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/this-tactic...-mashing-up-indiana-jones-the-mummy-and-xcom/

This tactics game is going all-in on pulp classics, mashing up Indiana Jones, The Mummy, and XCOM to make something surprisingly original​

In The Lamplighters League, you lead a secret group of scoundrels fighting against an occult army in the 1930s.

Finally, a strategy game with immolated, magical mummies for me to throw grenades at.

The Lamplighters League (Steam page(opens in new tab)) is an XCOM-alike from the the creators of Shadowrun: Hong Kong and BattleTech, so it's no surprise that it makes a good first impression. But as I sat down to be one of the first in the world to see it last week, I wasn't expecting how much Lamplighters' pulp-inspired, Indiana Jones/The Mummy/League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mid-war setting feels welcome in a somewhat crowded genre.

You're not running a paramilitary organization like XCOM: the League is made up of 10 named, recruited characters who interact in voiced conversations, can be captured if you fail a mission, and are mechanically bespoke. Célestine is a femme-fatale flapper who's sold her soul in order to gain occult powers, like a hypnosis feat that turns enemies into temp teammates. Fedir is an ex-mob enforcer Russian who gets stronger as he takes damage. Engineer Judith Harlow uses a shield and gadgets to draw aggro and build up a separate health bar of protective armor. "Every character fights really differently" and has their own skill tree, says Chris Rogers, game director on Lamplighters.

Thieves, criminals, assassins, smugglers—they're not the best of the best, but "the best of the worst," as studio head and co-founder Mitch Gitelman describes them. From my hour spent seeing them, I think that the 10 characters will avoid the trap of trying to recreate Indiana Jones or another iconic figure; they're more like a 1932 Suicide Squad, minus the superpowers. More characters are seemingly on the way post-release.

"The Lamplighters League is made by a team who loves turn-based tactics games and wants to build on the way players connect to their squads," says Gitelman. "By focusing on unique characters and the pulps' sense of adventure, we hope to weave personality and narrative into our characters' in-game abilities and the way they play, and welcome folks to the new world we've created."

Cloak and dagger​

One of the other major distinctions between Lamplighters and its genre peers is that it isn't fully turn-based: a real-time infiltration phase precedes missions. Controlling your three-character squad as a little troupe, you freely wander the same map you eventually perform combat on, sort of like a top-down action game.

Individual or small groups of enemies patrol the map or stand guard, each emanating an awareness ring that represents Lamplighters' light stealth system. "Each of our characters has a limited number of real-time takedowns that they can use to sort of soften up the enemy," says Rogers. Choosing which troublesome enemies to pick off is part of the opening phase, as is the work of scouting and positioning your trio. Sometimes there'll be environmental actions you can take, like smashing through a crumbling wall to open up a flank. You're setting the table for the turn-based fight to follow, a twist I like.

Outside of these tactical missions, Lamplighters plays out like XCOM's globe-spanning whack-a-mole, with a world map, divided into regions, fought over by three houses of The Banished Court, the occult organization you're battling over the course of the campaign. Heist missions contain major story beats and can reward you with artifacts that characters can equip, while character recruitment, rescue missions (which appear after you lose someone in a mission), and other tasks populate the globe. Each of those Banished Court factions is making independent progress, achieving permanent upgrades for themselves if you let them do evil unimpeded. And a little bit like XCOM's Avatar project, if a faction reaches 100% progress on its scheme it'll trigger a last-stand style mission to see if your heroes can prevent a game over.

I walked away from my short demo of Lamplighters optimistic about its place in the genre. Its soft-but-serious art design is effective, with the UI reflecting art deco details of the time and characters looking stylized but not cartoonish. The disappointment of Empire of Sin by Romero Games (also published by Paradox) created a little skepticism about how portable XCOM was as a template, but Lamplighters is clearly only using XCOMbat as a starting point, unafraid to introduce new ideas (allies and enemies also accumulate stress), putting welcome spin on what we've been playing since 2012.

 

[dsndo]

There are not words that can adequately describe how much I despise tactical games with set pre-made characters.

It's funny because I also came into this thread to voice the same opinion and also found my words to be lacking. No permadeath = no buy. If there is no risk of death there is no tension and if there's no tension I'm just a grown man playing with virtual action figures. The most memorable video game characters from the past 10 years for me have been ones that originated from random character generation systems that went onto lead short, brutish but actually meaningful lives in Crusader Kings, BattleBrothers and X-Com. There hasn't been a single video game character written by a "professional writer" that I didn't immediately forget upon turning the game off.

 

[ArchAngel]

There are not words that can adequately describe how much I despise tactical games with set pre-made characters.

It's funny because I also came into this thread to voice the same opinion and also found my words to be lacking. No permadeath = no buy. If there is no risk of death there is no tension and if there's no tension I'm just a grown man playing with virtual action figures. The most memorable video game characters from the past 10 years for me have been ones that originated from random character generation systems that went onto lead short, brutish but actually meaningful lives in Crusader Kings, BattleBrothers and X-Com. There hasn't been a single video game character written by a "professional writer" that I didn't immediately forget upon turning the game off.

More precise description would be you are watching an interactive movie.

 

[v1c70r14]

Lol, the diversity of the crew has reached new limits. Looks like you get a tranny in there even.

Nothing screams 1930s pulp adventure like troons

Since Infinitron "citation needed" me.

I honestly can't tell. Looks like a bearded female, but I guess it could be a male, considering the body. But then you have the hair, it looks like it has the hair in a bun in a typical Asian style. You decide.

Out of all the things you complain about you make it about the azn looking like an oriental wizard you'd find on a pulp cover? Just give him long nails and a silk robe instead of a Western shirt and it is shockingly close to the source material.