Wiki Showcase: the Asrathi

Psi-Wars has always been an "Aliens Everywhere" setting, and one of the things I did to show this was grabbing random templates from any book (in this case, the felinoid template from GURPS basic) and slotting it into the game (as the racial template for Kendra Corleoni).  When it came time to discuss how to design aliens, I naturally returned to the felinoids again for a quick expansion, to show how particular approaches to alien racial design might work in Psi-Wars. In short, I created them as a worked example of what you, dear reader, could do when importing a race into the game.

And that was that.

But over the last few  years, someone would drop me a message about a Psi-Wars game they were running, and a common comment was that someone was playing as a felinoid, especially a "witch cat," the subrace prone to probability manipulation proved quite a popular addition.  I felt a touch guilty that they remained this half baked "I worked on it for a day" set of racial templates without even a proper name, so I slapped the name "Asrathi" (a portmanteau of "Aslan" and "Kilrathi") cryptically on my wiki and hoped people would figure it out.  That was until I announced Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt and someone commented that they'd like to play as, you guessed it, an Asrathi Witch Cat.  So, I ran a poll: how "canon" did they want the Asrathi race? Were they fine with them as some race mentioned on my blog?  Did they want to see the blog details ported to the wiki? Did they want to give them a place on the setting on par with the Ranathim, Keleni or Eldoth?  The answer came back a pretty firm "We definitely want them to get the full treatment on the wiki, but they don't need to be as setting-important as the main three races"

So, I present the Asrathi as a full, "canon" race.  I still see them as fairly minor in the major scheme of things.  They're not the elves or dwarves of the setting, but when you walk into a cantina in a backwater system, in addition to the weird, overly slender bug-girl, and the hulking lizard-guy, and the horny, red-skinned elf-thing, there's a cat person.  This is their story.

I've naturally made a few changes.  A non-exhaustive list includes:

Favoring the DF template over the original GURPS material

I was paging through all the various felinoid templates, and I noticed that Dungeon Fantasy's looked almost exactly like the original GURPS basic template, but removed a lot of stuff that either shouldn't have been there or didn't need to be there, and added a few traits that were fun, like their water phobia.  So the new template folded those changes in. 

I kept Combat Reflexes off for the same reason I did last time: it inflates the cost of the template and most occupational templates that need it already have it.  If you're a commando Asrathi, you have combat reflexes, congratulations.  If there were some way to "stack" combat reflexes in an organic and obvious way, then I would have left it in: an Asrathi Gunslinger might have faster reflexes than most gunslingers, but as it stands, all Gunslingers, Asrathi or otherwise, are pretty equally fast, and so you end up doing something like Asrathi characters cost 40 points, but their occupational templates cost 15 points less? All you really end up doing is creating Asrathi civilians with Combat Reflexes.

ST has been repriced in Psi-Wars, especially Striking ST, and this definitely rebalanced some costs for the template as well, and this had to be integrated into the template.

Integrating Bio-Tech

Bio-Tech has its own felinoid template, the Felicia, though here Pulver pulled no punches and gave us super-powered and super-sexy space cats.  I've integrated a lot of traits there not as core template traits (that would make their template cost a few hundred points) but as "common traits," suggestions for how to build your character.  I did integrate the Felicia's improved Basic Speed trick, though I've allowed you to take "Bestial" instead of "Super horny and anime-esque hungry" if you prefer.

Name all the things

The Felinoids are now "Asrathi."  

The "Predatory Felinoid" is now "Jagarathi," and they have some serious striking ST.  Between their Striking ST and the Primal Rage power-up, they can clock in at 4d-1 cut damage with their claws, but this is in a setting where people regularly wear DR 20 underwear, so it's not nearly as OP as it sounds (but it does mean that they can toss around an average of 2 yards of knockback when they flip out).  Where the standard Asrathi is typically the sexy cat-girl or the cute cat-boy, I wanted room for those who liked the weretiger sort of character and the Jagarathi fit that niche nicely.

I like the name "Witch Cat" well enough, but we need a decent sounding name to fit them, so I've added "Morathi" as an "in-setting" name for them, though I still refer to them as "Witch Cats" in the text.

It's all about the Witch Cats

Given their popularity, in addition to a name, I've dived into them in a little more depth. Now, in addition to people avoiding them for bad luck, we have them as revered by certain segments of the Asrathi population; I've removed their unusual background perk that allows them to access Probability Manipulation (it's a feature, given that Probability Manipulation is now canon) and just left them with their latency.  I've also given them a couple of power-ups that people can take that could represent uncontrolled probability manipulation, lending them a tragic and spooky aura.

I've also created a fully discussion of the Death Walkers and a set of power-ups for them.  For now, this is going to remain as a Patreon Special, because I'm feeling my way through the mystical power-ups and trying some things out.  Once I've got everything ironed out, then expect to see them on the wiki.

A glimpse of cat-culture

We need to see at least a little culture for our race.  But how much?  People often ask me of they have their own language or their own customs.  Upon reflection, I decided that they largely don't.  They're one of those races whose culture has been largely dissolved by the rest of the galaxy.  I've added an "Asrathi Pride" movement, those who seek to recreate the old ways (more akin to the modern neo-pagan revival movement than, say, some arch-conservative group that managed to retain its culture this whole time), for those who want to emphasize the idea of Asrathi as having their own culture, or who want an interesting source of tension between the reactionary Pride and the more culturally diverse Asrathi scattered across the galaxy.

If we're going to have cat people, we need some stand in for catnip, thus "Asrathi Mint" or "Matatabi vine," based on some research into the more obscure versions of catnip.  Naturally, this is a sacred drug, so we need a darker version, something like... skooma!  Only we'll call it "Kuruma" and it'll act a lot like Opium.

Finally, I feel bad for giving the Asrathi claws that they really can't use in a setting where everyone wears DR 20 underwear.  Those claws are there because they're in the core templates that I'm borrowing from, and it's realistic, and it's also realistic that they'd be, ah, situational.  But we can improve that, and an obvious option would be for enhanced cybernetic claws.  I think super-fine carbide claws with an armor divisor of 3 is not unbelievable, but it's also not good enough, but I feel "vibro" claws just aren't going to work.  So, we conjure up some weird form of collapsed silver ("Argentium?") and give it to them as an armor divisor 5 claw with a bonus per die, like super-fine weapons.  Suddenly that 4d-1 turns into a 4d+3 and inflicts some real damage, even against light armor.