How it plays

The engine

It's Lancer underneath

Antiphon runs on Lancer(Massif Press) — the same tactical mech rules, the same level 0–12 math. If you've played Lancer, you already know the engine; the fiction is what changed. Same words, new skin:

You don't need to own or know Lancer to play — your GM brings the rules. This is just so the table knows what's under the hood.

The loop

What a fight, and a session, feels like

You take the field in a Colossus and fight like any Lancer mech — position, weapons, build and spend Resonance. But push too hard and your Fractureturns on you: the exact weakness your character carries, made mechanical. The way through it isn't to play safe — it's the Bond Move.

Across a campaign you climb your Ideals — and the fights, the Fractures, and the choices all feed one arc: becoming the person your Oath says you are, in partnership with a Colossus becoming what it is. You answer what it needs; it answers what you face. Your frame woke wrong, off-key; a frame returned to its true voice is the power the world is going to need — and no one wakes it alone.

The heart

The three faces

• FractureWhat turns against you when you push too hard. Your fault line, made mechanical — and the exact place your power releases from, once you've faced it.
• TransformationThe active gift you channel through song. What flows through you and changes what you can do.
• OathThe earned strength that holds you up. Sworn, lived, renewable — and a cage if you lean on it too long.

You don't get the Oath by avoiding the Fracture. You get it by walking through it. That is the whole game.

The field

Nobody sings alone

An Oath is never only yours. Every one you live feeds a field — of courage, of trust, of connection — that holds up everyone standing in it. And when the whole squad faces their Fractures in the same breath, those Oaths resonate together into something none of you could reach alone. That shared crescendo — the Choir — is often the thing that turns a fight that looked unwinnable.

It's the oldest idea in every story you love — that we are connected, and the connection is a kind of power — taken at its word. You wake your Colossus together. You hold the line together.

The bond

The Pact, the Bond Move, the first words

What binds you to your Colossus is the Pact, deepened through Ideals you must livebefore you may swear them — the table decides when you've earned them. The Bond Move, “Open Your Chest,” clears a Fracture by showing a real wound in the story.

Every Cantor's first words are the same:
“I will wake the stone. I will carry the song. I will release the note.”

The shape of it

A slow burn that ends worlds

This is a human story first, and it builds. Quiet, character-driven sessions — the register of Samurai Champloo or Frieren— that earn their intensity and then land it like a hammer. What starts as one honest moment in a cockpit becomes, mission by mission, something world-ending. Every small beat is whole on its own and feeds the larger one. You won't see how big it gets until you're already in it.

At the table

Fiction-first, and safe

Some of this runs on real-feeling beats — confession, grief, letting go. Safety tools are live every session, and everything is fiction-first: you will never be required to disclose anything real.Your character's secrets count in full.