Template Highlight: the Bounty Hunter

So, I had a poll running on Patreon about which template you guys would like me to wikify next, with a focus on "Rim" templates, though this highlighted to me just how few of the original Rim templates I have left to wikify!  In any case, you guys let me off the hook and chose Bounty Hunter, which was especially easy because it's already done.

What will follow will be a discussion of how the Bounty Hunter template has evolved and what I've added to it. This will kick off "the month of the Bounty Hunter," because one of the reasons I've been so quiet lately is I've been building up material on the Bounty Hunter.  It's still not completely done, but you go to campaign with the material you've written, so here we are!  I have plenty of material to show, so I think we'll be busy for awhile!  But if you'd like to skip all that and just look at the template, here it is:

The Bounty Hunter.

Building the Bounty Hunter Up

I started work at the request of a Patron, who mentioned he was starting up a campaign, and wanted "Bounty Hunters, Assassins and Psi-Hunters," which touched on several major issues I've had with that specific trio.

Assassins are increasingly tricky.  They're really more of a "martial artist" template, "the Space Ninja," but I've seen a lot of calls for martial artists (gladiators, temple guards, Keleni stick-fighters) which may or may not fit the idea of an Assassin, so I've parked them on the back burner while I rethink martial arts other than force swordsmanship.

The Psi-Hunter speaks to an "overtemplating" problem that Patron Mavrick likes to point out: just because something is a valid concept doesn't mean it's a valid template.  For example, what is a Psi-Hunter but a bounty hunter or an assassin with a focus on fighting psis?

This just leaves us with the Bounty Hunter, which I've always felt was a perfectly valid concept for Psi-Wars.  Partially, this comes from our Star Wars DNA, where the other cool concept has always been the Bounty Hunter.  But more than that, the division between "core and rim" always interested me, and I've drawn a lot of inspiration from other Bounty Hunter works, like Killjoys, for Psi-Wars. Killjoys really highlights a very interesting approach to Bounty Hunting, which is be a cute, pitiable girl who vamps her target until he's drunk and tired and then arrest him without a shot fired and collect your reward.  This got built into my original Bounty Hunter template, in part because the first Bounty Hunter was a cute cat girl (and the only actual in-game bounty hunter I've run thus far was a cute girl, though I don't think she actually had Appearance).

However, I wanted to expand this out, especially after being exposed to the Witcher (finally) and I realized that he, too, was essentially a Bounty Hunter, just of a different sort.  If we have anti-psi Psi-Hunters, and sexy bounty hunters going after criminals, and big tough not-Mandalorian brutes, why not monster hunters too?

This led me to the idea of Know Thy Enemy lenses, encouraging the player to realize that not all Bounty Hunters are made equal, and that there are lots of things one might bounty hunt.  This also means that we now have two major candidates for "epic" campaigns.  We already know that Space Knights tend to shake the universe with their street-level super-abilities as they wage conspiracy wars on one another; that's part of the genre.  But this also means that we might expect them to hire elite Bounty Hunters to take one another out, or if you have a monstrous infestation, you might hire a Bounty Hunter to deal with it.

This is probably the single greatest culprit for my slowdown.  I've been working endlessly on not just the Labyrinth recently, but also various other monsters and opponents, which is something I imagine I could dump a year into.  Perhaps I should park all of this and treat it to a later revision, which means we'll come back to the Bounty Hunter.

Building Bounty Hunters as Encounters

But this also encouraged me to think about something else.  Fortunately for me, one of my players in Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt (now finished) had a Bounty Hunter enemy, and he chose a group, so this encouraged me to think of ways to defeat him.  This is something you see in some games, such as Jedi: Fallen Order, where the game will hit you with a variety of possible bounty hunters as you play through the game, like random encounters with mini-bosses.  Bounty Hunters make an excellent "and suddenly, a guy kicks in the door and starts shooting up the place," and this made me think about not just defeating monsters and bad guys, but how to use Bounty Hunters to defeat PCs, which has made the Know Thy Enemy an interesting exercise, especially since it forced me to rethink a couple elements of the template (such as the addition of the Witch Hunter, which needs some supporting mechanics).

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll see about getting some of the behind-the-scene bounty hunters out and ready for play.

Building the Bounty Hunter Out

One of my core goals with Psi-Wars is to build a highly playable setting, and for RPGs, that often involves specialization.  Specialization allows PCs to differentiate themselves from one another, but it also allows the GM to differentiate opponents.  Movies often simplify things that an RPG needs to complicate.

I've done this with Space Knights.  Star Wars has the Jedi, but Psi-Wars has the Templars and the Maradonian Space Knight (and the Akashic Knight), and the Ranathim Satemo, and the Templars and Maradonians have sub-groups (The various Chapters and Houses), creating variation within variation! We also expand out the "Sith" to include "Tyrants" and their various conspiracies and (again) the Satemo.

Why not do the same with Bounty Hunters? Star Wars has one vague "guild" and one real tradition (the Mandalorians).  Why not create more for Psi-Wars? So I've added the concept of the Lodge: a group of unique hunters bound by a particular goal and a form of training.  I'll be dropping the Lodge-as-organization soon, and highlighting some different sorts of bounty hunters soon.