Draft:Massif Press

Massif Press is a publisher of tabletop role-playing games established in 2019 by Tom Bloom (author of webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons) and Miguel Lopez. Massif Press is best known as the publisher of the tabletop game Lancer, in addition to the games Battlegroup and ICON, and science fiction stories set in the Lancer universe.

Lancer
Lancer is a tabletop role-playing game in which players take the role of mech pilots in a "mud and lasers" science fiction setting with an optimistic worldview. It was published in 2019 following a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter. A second game in the Lancer universe, named Battlegroup, was released in 2022 exclusively on the Role VTT platform, in which players take the role of fleet commanders engaged in spaceship combat. A fantasy tactics game named ICON is in open development.

Supplements for Lancer have primarily focused on fleshing out unique regions of the game's universe, or providing adventure narratives for groups playing the game. These include:


 * Lancer: The Long Rim (2020) Miguel Lopez & Tom Bloom
 * No Room for a Wallflower, Act 1 (2020) Miguel Lopez & Tom Bloom
 * Field Guide: The Karrakin Trade Baronies (2022) Miguel Lopez & Tom Bloom
 * Operation Solstice Rain (2023) Kai Tave
 * Dustgrave (2023) Ralf Ziegler
 * Siren's Song, A Mountain's Remorse (2023) Trey Joiner
 * Operation Winter Scar (2024) Kai Tave
 * Shadow of the Wolf (2024) Katherine Stark

Massif Press used Lancer to support various charitable efforts in 2020, including COVID-19 relief and as part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

In 2021, planned work on three additional supplements (Field Guide to Harrison Armory, Field Guide to the Aun Ecumene, and No Room for a Wallflower, Act 2 was put on indefinite hold due to lead narrative designer Miguel Lopez's employment with Wizards of the Coast. The majority of subsequent releases were written by other authors.

In 2023, Massif Press announced a reprint of the Lancer core rulebook in association with Dark Horse Comics, expected to release in June 2024. Chase Carter writing for Dicebreaker described the collaboration as a "big deal" in the TTRPG industry, noting that Dark Horse have "the kind of distribution connections most non-Wizards of the Coast publishers can only dream about."

Fiction
Massif Press additionally publishes several collections of short fiction set in the Lancer universe:


 * Master Teacher, Lyceum, Open Hand (2020) Miguel Lopez
 * This One That One (2020) Miguel Lopez

ENNIE Awards Controversy
In 2020, Massif Press withdrew Lancer from the ENNIE Awards after being nominated for Best Electronic Book in protest over the organization granting a Gold award in the 2017 Adventure category to a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure titled Blood in the Chocolate, which was widely described as 'offensive' and 'simply ridiculous' by press, industry members and the publisher itself. The module was later disowned by its author, who apologized for the book's racist depictions and sexual assault used for shock value and "unaccepted" the award. The ENNIE Awards committee declined to retroactively remove the award, claiming that doing so would "negate the will of the gaming community", and Lancer was removed as a nominee.