When I last asked the community for what Template they wanted wikified, they chose the Frontier Marshal. I found that an interesting choice, given its intersection between law enforcement, gunslinging and wilderness adventure. I spend most of last month (and the first half of this month) working on the gunslinging part. The last half of this month has been on the wilderness part.
See, the Frontier Marshal is the ranger of Psi-Wars. He's a skilled ranged combatant, but he applies that skill while out in the wilderness. He rides his steed over the plains and the desert, but a grim man on a boat in a swamp with a rifle resting on his shoulder is as much a Frontier Marshal. They represent the sort of character that understands the wilderness, and the people that live in it. They share this a bit with the Bounty Hunter: they're a liminal class that walks the boundary of rim and core, but in their case, it is civilization and wilderness
This naturally meant I had to explore the wilderness rules. I've actually had them sitting around, updated somewhat, since Iteration 5, and I had most of them written out already. Thus, this turned into a review, especially as I referenced them for my updates to the Frontier Marshal. Satisfied with them, the Planetary Peril rules now on the wiki.
Once I had those in hand, the next question I needed resolved is what sort of traits I wanted for survivors to have. This turned into a natural review of the Survivor background. In previous iterations, I included a few additional traits associated with a particular form of survival, and I intended to expand that further this time, but I found that overwrought and instead I turned into creating a set of advice for players. I also experimented with a new concept: "Where am I from?" Before, the backgrounds could afford to be vague: you were an aristocrat from some lineage, or a survivor from some world. Now we have setting specifics, so you can be an aristocrat from this lineage, and now you can be a survivor from this world. Let me know if you like the idea. You can find the Survivor (and the Primitive, the more important aspect of the backround IMO) here.
At last, the Frontier Marshal. I integrated a cut down set of survivor traits here, bundled in the "power-ups" from the previous iteration and integrated the gunslinger styles and offered some advice. The biggest change, of course, is integration into the setting. What is a frontier marshal and how do they differ from group to group? I've included 4. The generic Frontier Marshal remains what he was: a generic lawman on a generic world answering to some higher authority (the Alliance or the Empire) to enforce the law on less sophisticated locals. But for more specific marshals, we now have the Maradonian Reeve, the Shinjurai conservationist and the Westerly Rim-Walker. The Reeve and the Conservationist focus more on preserving nature, and more closely resemble the modern, real-world ranger. The Reeve protects the lands of his lord, while the conservationist protects regions set aside by interstellar law as nature preserves. The Rim-Walker is shifts back to the more cowboy nature of the role, and changes the template into semi-legendary figure of Westerly lore: wandering gunslingers who make use of their powerful blaster fu to set the law right. They're technically not Law Enforcement, but so many people treat them as law enforcement that they often get a pass from the governing powers.
There were three lenses I considered and discarded. The Frontiersman would be a a generic "gunslinger from the wilderness," someone without any law enforcement or rank. I still like the idea, but it starts to feel like excessive detail to discuss it (basically, just spend your 30 points for your lens on your advantages; done). I considered a Guide, or a Tribal Guide: someone who knows the wilderness and will agree to guide people on a safari, or join up with someone else. I still like this idea, but a generic guide doesn't have that much setting them apart, and a Tribal guide would be very different skill-wise, so perhaps best left until I'm farther along with such cultural groups. Finally, I considered a Ranathim "Beast master" who would go into the nature preserves of world like Hekatomb or Sarai and find the great beasts there and capture them for use in the gladiatorial arenas. An interesting concept, but a very different one when it came to combat and very focused on the Ranathim, so I parked it for now. The four I've had feel like they cover enough ground to make the concept work without watering it down too much.
And with those three, we have a glimpse into the more wild parts of Psi-Wars. I still have a lot of unfinished material (such as some rough drafts on some space monsters), but it's time to move onto the next expansion of Psi-Wars, particularly the criminal world.
