Psi-Wars Wiki Update: Medicine in Psi-Wars and a new primer!

So, the big announcement is I've updated the landing page of the wiki in a big way.  I recently introduced some of my friends to Psi-Wars, and they found it a little difficult to navigate.  I wanted to create more of an essential starting point as the default entry, and here it is: the Psi-Wars Primer. Those more familiar with the Index will find it stripped down and still relatively easy to access. For those familiar with the wiki, you can navigate to both in the side-bar and the top-bar.  I've also updated some of the side-bar and top-bar elements, though not all the scaffolding for the wiki has been removed just yet. 

The other big announcement is the addition of Medicine for Psi-Wars. This took quite some time to get right, and I thought I would discuss some of the finer points of my choices here.

Backer Poll: The Fourth Mithanna

 Yes, even more polls.  You guys seem to like them (though if you need a break let me know) and with the Natives of Kronos (the Menhiri) poll finished and their templates and racial information making good progress, I thought it was a good time to clear the way for another poll I've had on the back of my mind: the Fourth Mithna.

I never really expected the Ranathim aristocracy to be such a hit.  I created three because that seemed like "enough."  But given the positive reaction I got, and the fact that people seem interested in creating their own, I created this poll to offer suggestions and insights into how might go about making your own.

This poll is, like most other polls, open to Companions ($5+) on both Subscribestar and Patreon.  As usual, I hope you enjoy it, and thank you for supporting Psi-Wars.

• The Subscriber Link
• The Patreon Link

Psi-Wars Diseases Part II: Psychic Diseases

 The prime impetus behind my exploration of medicine wasn't just to determine how technological medicine worked, but how it balanced with esoteric medicine in Psi-Wars.  If medicine could cure you of all ills in a day, what benefit could there be of going to a Keleni temple, or seeing a Ranathim Navare healer? Just check in at your local hospital.

Obviously Esoteric Medicine in Psi-Wars is vastly more capable than it is in the real world.  Psychic Healers can wipe away illness with a wave of their hands.  But that only really helps the Keleni. What about other healing traditions, such as that of the Ranathim, which don't have access to miraculous psychic cures? Well, the obvious niche for Esoteric Medicine (and exorcism) is in dealing with psychic diseases.  We've already established this as a thing in Psi-Wars. If ghosts and Broken Communion can afflict you with infectious diseases that only Esoteric Medicine can cure, then surely we have a niche for Esoteric Medicine!  But if that's going to work, we need to establish our psychic diseases in as much detail as we do our physical diseases.

This turned out easier said than done.  I was surprised by the level of detail one can get into when delving into psychic diseases, from diseases that doctor's claim are normal medical conditions that are simply hard to cure, but that quakes claim are easy, to forms of possession and forms of madness. I cobbled them together here in a decent list.

One of the other things that popped out was Corruption itself.  See, Psi-Wars uses the Corruption mechanic of GURPS Horror with Broken Communion.  The idea is that you can slowly ruin yourself as you ruin the world, and the cost of Broken Communion is this Corruption.  But I find in practice players run screaming from even a single point of corruption because maybe it'll reduce their point costs.  That's an acceptable loss in a horror game, but not an action game.  It's also painfully slow.  To lose even a single point would take an average of 6-8 Minor Blessings from Broken Communion, never mind the means people have to cleanse them.  Which makes Corruption a trait to track, often for many, many sessions, and will likely have no dramatic payoff.  What if, instead, we allowed Psychic Diseases to stand-in for Corruption?  You cast some miracles of Broken Communion, go nuts for a session, and then it's done.  You get some cool drama and a consequence, but it's non-permanent.

This also forced me to look, again, at mutations.  I'm surprised how often mutation and transformation comes up in Psi-Wars.  It doesn't seem to be a thing you see as much in Star Wars as, say, 40k.  But then again, I suppose the dark side does "warp people" in Star Wars, just not as freakishly as it does in 40k.  Even so, I had to wrestle with Devouring Taint, whose whole mechanic is faster corruption.  I went with Uncontrollable Transformations into subtle(-ish) mutant racial templates.  Hopefully this seems plausible and fitting.

Without further ado:

The Natives of Kronos: Poll Results (and one last poll)

 

Over the last week, my Companions got to vote on what the natives of Kronos would be like.  They've made their voices heard, and the results are available for all Fellow Travelers ($3+) Patrons. I've also written several variant templates based on the poll results, and I'd like your opinion on which direction to go in, so there's one last poll for Fellow Travelers as well as Companions.

As always, thanks for your support, and be sure to leave comments here or in the Discord channel!

• Subscriber Link
• Patron Link

Psi-Wars Diseases Part 1: The Physical Diseases

 Alright, so here's a project I've wanted done for a long time.  This likely isn't complete, as there are several diseases I could include here, and when I rework the psychic diseases and finish up my medicine rules, some of these might change, but the final version will be on the wiki somewhere.

This is essentially a "worked version" of the rules I posted yesterday.  Those rules work fine for a modern world setting, where you can talk about "Cholera" and "the flu" but what about when you're in space? Well, then are we talking the Andromeda Strain or the Purple Polka Dotted Pox?  Some names to toss around might be nice, and how disease shapes the setting might be nice to know as well.

In particular, the Umbral Rim is famous for its diseases.  This comes from the fact that it has filthy aliens in it, but it also comes from the presence of the Gaunt, who often act as carriers, and even have a special trait for it. When I started working on them, I wanted a list of diseases to introduce, but that proved too much work.  Well, now I have it! They can give you anything from the Umbral Pestilence to the Centauri Sniffles!

I've also included "Terminal Illness." I like the idea of a Terminal Illness: there's a dramatic weight to a heroic character that is dying of cancer and knows it.  I do agree with critics of the disadvantage that point out that it hardly matters to  the player when the character dies, as they'll just make a new character and keep playing.  However, having cancer (or leprosy or tuberculosis or AIDS) might shape other things about your character, other disadvantages that you can explore. So the terminal illnesses here treat "time left to live" as a feature: Your character will die at some dramatically appropriate moment that you and the GM both agree to.  But in the meantime he'll have a persistent cough or he'll have open sores or he'll have moments of intense chest pain, etc.  These are just disadvantage bundles to give your character some in-setting disease or illness.

I did need to play with some disadvantages to make this work, though.  The first was Chronic Pain.  I like the idea of it, but I find it limited.  Mild pain is effectively the Moderate Pain affliction, Severe Pain is effectively the Severe Pain affliction, and Agonizing Pain is effectively the Terrible Pain affliction.  With some wiggling around, it seems reasonable to substitute other afflictions: what about a Chronic Cough? That's basically the same as Mild Pain, and so is worth -5 as a base.

The second was Cardiac Stress.  The idea here was that we could treat the limitation as a straight disadvantage.  However, Cardiac Stress assumes the character is using something.  What's he using if we give it to them as a raw disadvantage? Everything? So I said "if you're under stress" and took the limitation value and halved it as a disadvantage value.  It's a back of the envelope guess here.

Nobody Takes Resist Disease

 Quite some time ago, I worked on "Tech Infrastructure" posts for Psi-Wars, small things like how electricity worked or how computers worked. Most of it was in preparation for my stint in GURPS Vehicles.  One of the things that I wanted to work on, but never got around to, was medicine, and awhile back one of my Secret Council urged me to finish that up. With my work on Xen brought to the forefront by a Bounty Hunter poll, I started work on that. And then I ran into a problem.

Disease.

See, Psi-Wars sets at the nexus between sci-fi and fantasy.  On the one hand, it's the sort of setting where you expect to go into a med-lab, get bio-scanned and then sit in a regeneration chamber for an hour.  On the other hand, it's also the sort of setting where you might expect an attractive alien witch-doctor to tend to your wounds with an herbal poultice and by casting the demons out of you.  This meant I needed to explore both how Bio-Tech handles disease, and how the Heal advantage handles disease, whereupon I learned that they handle it in the roughest way possible: there's some penalty and some cost based on very vague guidelines (1 fatigue for "the sniffles" while -15 for "bone marrow cancer.").  In fact, in general, I found all the guidelines on disease to be wildly vague.  You can find about 5 or so defined diseases, and all the rest are left "up to the GM."

This isn't the first time I've wrestled with disease.  I had a backer who commissioned a treatise on disease, which ended up as a backer bonus for those who want a disease system.  But as I worked on handling disease in Psi-Wars, I noticed something:

Nobody Takes Resist Disease

Backer Poll: the Natives of Kronos

Long ago, the Eldoth conquered  the natives of Kronos and burned out their homeworld to create the  despair, death and tragedy necessary to fuel an installation of their  Deep Engine.  The world of Kronos became the center of their operations  in the galactic center, and the rest of the galaxy moved on.

But what were the inhabitants  of Kronos like? Were they dreadful and strange creatures, mysterious and  aloof that none missed? Or were they beloved sages or scholars whose  destruction shook the faith of the rest of the galaxy?  What legacy did  they leave? Why do we care what they were like today? Do tourists gawk  at their monuments? Do archaeologists seek to piece together their  secrets? Do the modern citizens of Kronos cower from their ghosts?

Our next playtest will probably take place on Kronos, in the galactic core.  I've created a poll where you, my dear Companions, can decide what the inhabitants of Kronos were like, and even if some still exist!  The poll is a Google Forms poll, and you can find the link on your appropriate backer site:

• Subscribestar Poll
• Patreon Poll

Thanks as always for backing me, and please, enjoy!

The Mogwai: the Techno-Monkeys of the Arkhaian Spiral

Back when I first laid out what sort of aliens I wanted in Psi-Wars, I set out the broader "diagram" of what niches races would fit.  The core races, the Eldoth, Keleni and Ranathim all illustrated some profoundly important aspect of the setting; you cannot really have Psi-Wars as a cohesive setting without them.  Other races matter less, but still fit important niches.

I wanted to have "comedic" races, silly races that made players laugh or helped relieve tension in the game; while not a wildly popular set of races in Psi-Wars, you can see their use in the form of the Ewoks, Jawas, the Gungans and the Ardennians/Lantero (who rally should be a single species).  These tend to be smaller, cuter races, so they're non-threatening and can afford to be "silly" in a way that the "serious" races cannot.

I also needed races for the Arkhaian Spiral, whose theme is "Technology."  I knew I wanted a race that practiced Ergokinesis, but I wanted a different take on Ergokinesis than what House Grimshaw had: rather than a dread race that shoots lightning, I wanted a technologically savvy race that used its power to gain an intuitive understanding of engineers.  I code named them "Techno-goblins," and imagined them occupying a similar niche to gnomes in most fantasy games.

With the need to expand Cronus Kronos, I wanted to add the races of the Arkhaian Spiral to Kronos so it didn't feel like Umbral-Rim-Lite.  The point of Kronos is to mash up the alien races of all the parts of the galaxy into one place, thus these "Techno-Goblins" needed to be detailed.

And now they are: the Mogwai of the Arkhaian Spiral, and with them, a new "rare" power, Machine Telepathy

Brainstorming Cronus

 I have an impending playtest wherein we will play a heist in Psi-Wars.  This is intended to shake out the civilian/criminal/law enforcement elements of the game, and while I'd like to run it in the next couple of months, it might turn out to be more work than that.

As usual, when I decide to run a session, I turn my eye towards the setting.  Grist got more detail with Tinker Titan Rebel Spy, and the Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt gave attention to the Orochi belt.  We have lots of places I could run a heist, so I ran a poll for the playtest group, and they tied between Samsara and Cronus, and it looks like we'll be doing Chronos Cronus.

I thought I'd be a little more public about my thought-processes for what Cronus would look like, rather than hiding all of my work, as the point of this blog is to watch my process.  And the first step when detailing a world is to stop and talk about "everything that you know" and figure out what questions you need to ask about it.

Everything that follows are just my musings as I noodle around as to what this world might look like in detail.  If you want to discuss it, to complain about it, to argue against it, or to advocate for particular elements, feel free!  This is a creative process, after all.