Keleni Revisited

 I've been tinkering a lot behind the scenes on my upcoming playtests and/or campaigns, with more of my focus on my Heist than the Monster Hunter game at the moment.  The Heist on Kronos seems an ideal moment to bring some focus to the Keleni, as they're absolutely one of the races that'll be on Kronos, and I think I have at least one player interested in trying one out.

I've found myself focusing more on aliens lately, especially on their templates, and with the extensive releases of the Menhiri (as a patreon special) and the Mogwai, it might be nice to give the "core races" a more thorough make-over, and this made me look more closely at the Keleni template. It's not bad, but I feel like their practical implementation, how I actually see them playing out has changed since they released.  I thought about rewriting it and just tossing the updated version on the Wiki, but I was pretty sure it would be controversial, and I toyed with the Discord as a means of starting a discussion, but why not just put it on the blog? I think all my readers hit the blog, and only some are active on the wiki or discord.  Plus this will give me a chance to revisit how I think about races with you, which might prove useful.

Mailanka's Brief Primer on Racial Design

Broadly speaking, I tend to break a races mechanical representation out into three parts:

• Their template
• Power-Ups
• Cultural Elements

The point of a core template is what you must have to be a member of that race.  It's what it means to be a member of the race.  Power-Ups are things that many members of the race might have, a direction you can grow your character in, and Cultural Elements are things that most members of the race who grew up in the culture of the race typically have.

To use Elves an example, we might say that the Elf Template has DX +1 [20], Attractive [4], Acute Hearing +1 [2] and Sense of Duty (Nature) [-15].  This means that elves, all elves, have these traits.  That's not to say that there are no elves who are Ugly or who hate Nature, or who are clumsy, but such Elves would be considerable deviations from the norm.

We might say that _many_ elves are magical, or inhumanely beautiful.  We might allow Elves to reach Magery 6 or Appearance (Transcendent).  These aren't required, but they're options you can grow into, and if you met an Elf like this, you wouldn't be terribly surprised. These are power-fups.

We might also expect Elves to speak Elven, and thus have Language (Elven). But this assumes they grew up as elves.  An elf who grew up with human parents, or in an orc slave camp will probably still have +1 DX, be Attractive and have Sense of Duty (Nature), but he wouldn't learn Elven, or know Elven ways.

When it comes to the template, I tend to find I tend to focus on one of two things: core mechanical theme, and flavorful fluff or cosmetic traits.  Most of the points involved in a racial template should be focused on the core mechanic theme, what makes the race interesting to play.  For our elf above, this is presumably the +1 DX and the Sense of Duty (Nature) if we see them primarily as deft archers who protect forests.  

Cosmetic traits represent those that reflect how we imagine the character visually.  They might be Attractive because we think of Elves as pretty, and they might have Acute Hearing to explain their pointed ears.  We should be careful here, and I've been dinged by people before.  You can say "I have pointed ears" as a zero-point feature.  There's no harm in that, and it saves us points.  But my experience is players tend to want to see things on their sheet that are meaningful, that they can interact with, and they want to see these reflected on what they can do in the game.  For example, players might expect that because they have pointed ears, they have superior hearing.  If a race has gleaming eyes, perhaps they see better in the dark.  If they have horns, they should do extra damage on a headbutt.  And so on.  Because these do not focus on the core "gameplay" of the race, the central elements, I tend to favor these being a fraction of the cost of the other traits.  Giving an elf Parabolic Hearing, Acute Hearing +4 and Discriminatory Hearing might all be justified, but then you've made the elves about having amazing hearing.  Given the point-cost investment, you play an elf if you want to have amazing hearing.  If you don't want that to be the core of the race, then reduce all these cosmetic traits to 0, 1 or 2 point traits, as much as possible.

In the end, what we want is a player-facing race.  After all, if you wanted a GM-facing race, you'd just build them as NPC stat-blocks.  The core mechanic should answer the question of "Why would someone play this race?" and "What is their essential experience with this race?" and the cosmetic features should answer the question of "What does this race look like, and how can we efficiently and with minimum point cost illustrate that for the player?"

Keleni Analysis

With that out of the way, let's break down the Keleni template. If you want to follow along, you can see its current state here. Let's do a break down.

At their core, Keleni are telepathic pacifists.  They created the religion of psychic pacifism in the setting, thus we expect them to be crystal-wearing, granola-munching space hippies in tune with one another.  Cosmetically they are, as one of my artists put it, sea-elves. They are attractive (to elicit more sympathy from players), and aquatic, to fit with a "flowing" theme of water.

• ST -2 [-10]

This is mostly cosmetic, though I would expect a member of this race not to do well in a bar brawl because they're telepathic pacifists, but also because they're better off relying on psychic attacks.  If they want to knock someone out, they use Mental Stun, rather than their fists.  Being delicate-looking "sea-elves" it also makes sense that they'd be smaller and more slender, hence less ST (and HP).  However, I'm not sure if I like the ST -2.  If you're new here, you no doubt notice that the cost is wrong, but that's because Psi-Wars reprices ST (it's just less valuable in a UT setting). I'm pretty sure they were originally -1 ST, but when I halved the disadvantage cost, I doubled it.  ST 7 is about the ST of a child or 9 or 10 or so, so this puts them about on the same order of ST as a teen girl or a small woman, and barely stronger than the Mogwai.  They also use weapons like staves and have some martial arts, which is odd if they hit with the force of a large child.  ST 9 makes more sense, frankly, but we need to find the points.

• Amphibious [10]; Doesn't Breath (Oxygen Storage x25) [10]; Nictitating Membrane [1]; Vulnerability (Dehydration) [-10]

This is our cosmetic "sea-elf" look with a focus on "the sea."  We say they're an aquatic race, so they should have some aquatic traits, but there's already a few problems here.

First, they are amphibious because making them completely water-oriented is a mistake when games mostly take place on land.  Doesn't Breath comes from a similar place: the ability to breath water is pretty marginal in a setting where you can just don a rebreather for that one underwater session.  But being able to hold your breath for phenomenal periods of time has a lot of utility: you can "breath vacuum" 25 times as long, or you can hold your breath when your enemy makes a gas attack.  Of course, these are completely unnecessary if you have a vacc suit or sealed armor, but that's just the nature of UT settings.  Is it worth it to have these traits when you're sitting around at home? Maybe.

Nictitating Membrane looks like an out-of-date concept.  My original conception gave them more "alien" eyes, with membranes to make them look completely opaque.  The artist didn't do this, and I didn't notice, which says something about how firmly this was set in my mind.  But I also think it's an improvement: we want the Keleni to be a race people can relate to. They fall in love with them, they move to help when an Imperial knocks them to the ground and proceeds to beat them, we argue with them but we still like them as friends, or whatever. Having more "human" eyes, with a visible and differentiated iris and pupil helps a lot.  The only remaining reason to have Nictitating Membrace is to help them see well under water.  For 1 point, perhaps that can stay.

Their Vulnerability represents their plight.  They are a water-based race deprived of their watery worlds.  They often live on dry worlds now, covering their skin to protect it from drying out and cracking.  Much of their "modesty" on their worlds is really about preserving their moisture, rather than a deep cultural need to cover-up.

• Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Bioluminesence [1]; 

The other half of the "sea elf" is the "elf" part, which implies beauty.  They're one of the "pretty" races, the Togruta to the Ranathim Twi'lek, thus Attractive.  But Bioluminescence also helps add to the haunting appeal of this race, as well as hinting at their aquatic nature.

• Telepathy Talent +1 [5]; Telereceive (Shallow) 3 [24]; Pacifism (Reluctant Killer) [-5]; Taboo Traits (Callous, Low Empathy, Oblivious) [0]; Telerecieve (H) IQ-1* [1]-9

Next, they're telepathic.  This is really the meat of the race, the core of what makes them work.  Quite a few things follow from this. They have Telepathy Talent, which "explicitly holds the door open to buying more abilities," and their pacifism and their taboo traits stem from their ability to deeply connect with others.  And we need the trait that ties all of this together: Telerecieve, and their innate telepathic skill.

I chose Telerecieve (Shallow) 1 because it was as cheap as I could get Keleni telepathy, but it poses a variety of problems.  First, it allows _all_ Keleni to read one another's minds up to a few yards away.  This is cool, as it allows de facto silent communication between Keleni.  A Keleni group can "coordinate" and they can also read your intentions in battle.  This becomes their schtick: you play a Keleni to access telerecieve.

But it poses a few problems.  First, if the can just read one another's minds, why do they have language? If this is an innate trait, why wouldn't they just think at one another and let the other read them?  You might say "Well, maybe it's exhausting" but it isn't.  And if you touch one another, you get something like a +4 to your roll, buffing your default roll to a 13 or less, which means a handshake = perfect communication.  A second problem is that it doesn't really contribute to their care of others.  Yes, they can read your mind if they wish, which means they understand your intentions and your reasoning, but they have to want to.  There's no intuitive, automatic "seeing the inherent humanity of others" that the rest of their traits imply.

It's also not really that interesting.  What's the difference between a Keleni, and a human who dumped 50 points into Telepathy? Both use Telepathy, but in contrast with the Ranathim who have a fairly unique mechanic, there's no real difference between Keleni telepathy and the human's telepathy.

Inherent Empathy might make more sense. If they can always sense your emotions, read your intentions in a coarse, emotional sense, then they're always confronted with your inherent humanity. It would also be a lot cheaper.  It would likely run something like this: Empathy (Telepathy -10%) [14] and remove our need for a skill.

Unfortunately, that also removes our more interesting Keleni tricks.  We expect Keleni to bridge barriers with universal communication, or to walk up to someone, place their hands upon them, and read their inmost thoughts.  I personally imagine Keleni with a variety of "inherit" telepathic abilities.  The obvious solution here is just treat it as power-ups, but these run into a problem, because saying "Look, just buy more Telepathy" removes a lot of flavor.  Perhaps we see them having Telespeak, Deep Probe, and Empathy innately, but not Mental Illusions or Suggestion; they can get those, of course, but we expect more Keleni to have a few specific abilities.

What if we gave them a new power.  This is a little bit cheesy, but go with me here.  All Keleni have some sort of inherit Empathy.  We might give it a Nuisance Effect where they mirror the emotions of those they touch (based on the nuisance effect from Drain Emotion, that's probably -5%), so if a Keleni girl that you're really into touches you, not only does she feel your interest in her, she feels it, as though she felt that way about you too.

Then we give it new levels.  Keleni start with level 1 by default, but they can extra effort into the higher levels, or buy them to do it more reliably. So they can read minds with some additional focus, but it's exhausting.  Perhaps they can even perform a Mental Probe, but it will wipe them out.  This means they effectively combine unique forms of Emotion Sense, Telespeak, Telereceive and Mind Probe into a single power.  This gives them a slightly more nuanced version of Telepathy.  It might look like this:

Keleni Telepathy: 13/21/41/63/69/87/108
(Costs if we account for level 1 being "free": 8/28/50/56/74/95

Statistics 

• Level 1 is Empathy (Nuisance Effect, if touching the target mirror the strongest emotion felt -5%; Telepathy -10%) [13]; 
• Level 2 Mind Reading (Accessiblity, Projected Thoughts Only -20%; Contact Agent -30%; Link +10%; Melee Attack, C, -30%; Telecommunication -20%; Telepathy -10%) [6], Telesend (Contact Agent -30%; Link +10%, Melee Attack, C, -30%; Telepathy -10%) [12] and Empathy as an alternate ability [3].
• Level 3 removes removes the projected thoughts limitation and telecommunication from Mind Reading [9] with Telesend unchanged [12], Empathy as an alternative ability [3] and adds Mind Probe (Contact Agent -30%, Telepathy -10%) [12].
• Level 4 removes Contact Agent and and Replaces Melee Attack with Short Ranged 1 for Mind Read and and Short-Ranged 2 for Telesend [24+24]
• Level 5 removes Short Range 1 from Mind Reading [27] and drops Telesend to Short Range 1 [27]
• Level 6 adds Long Range 1 to Mind Reading [42] and removes Short Range from Telesend [30]
• Level 7 ugrades Long Range to 2 for Mind Reading [48] and adds Long Range 1 to Telesend [45]

In effect, at level 1, they can read your emotions; at level 2, they can read your projected thoughts and send you projected thoughts, but only if touching skin-to-skin.  At level 3, when touching a target, they can read their thoughts direct, and plunge more deeply, as well as communicating directly.  At level 4+, they act like the best of Telereceive (Shallow) at -1 level, and Telesend at -1 level.  This is expensive, of course, but not much more expensive than high levels of Telespeak.  It also allows any casual Keleni to telepathically communicate by touch with Extra Effort (-4 will and 2 fatigue), or deep read you with a touch (-4 will and 4 fatigue) or communicate silently across a distance (-4 will and 6 fatigue).  I think I'd be happier if mind probing was more "costly" than mind reading at a distance, which was how I wrote it first, but this lets us follow the normal Telerecieve and Telesend ranges without requiring weird shenanigans.  And this lets us get much of the same effect we had before, and add some additional flavor for a net reduction of 11 points.

It would use a Keleni Telepathy (IQ/H) skill.

• Ancestral Recall [14];

This one is tricky.  The idea here was that all Keleni have a special bond with their ancestors, which helps explain their intuitive understand of Communion as uniting all sapients, because between their telepathy and their connection with their ancestors, broadening that connection with Communion feels like an obvious step.

But this might be excessive.  First, it's very expensive.  Second, while I find Racial Memory vague, it means that every Keleni, from the most dutiful of daughter to the most prodigal of son, feels that sense of deep deja vu and even a flash of memory of their ancestor. This might be better as a power-up, but then we lose that sense of "all Keleni have some sort of connection to their ancestors, no matter how subtle"

Perhaps, though, this would be better as a perk.  Again, I find Racial Memory vague; as written, it seems to imply that you only feel a vague sense of deja vu.  If so, it's wildly overpriced; it should provide as much utility as Oracle or Intuition.  It does suggest that one can interpret it, so it may be that the deja vu comes with some information.  For example, if Racial Memory triggers with a weapon, you might get the sense if that weapon belonged to your ancestor, or if it threatened your ancestor, or what other association it might have, some "vague" information.

A perk version, Ancestral Bond, might look something like a cross between the Buzz and Exposition Sense: when you encounter something that had a strong association with your ancestors, you can roll IQ to sense that there was a connection, but you gain no additional information. If additional information would serve the plot (as per Exposition Sense) or the character rolls a critical success, the GM gives some vague clues as to what that connection might be.  This would make it slightly limited version of Exposition Sense (only for ancestors) with a modest buff to make up for that limtiation. Characters who want to expand this can do so with an Ancestral Recall power as a power-up.

• Psychic Healing Talent +1 [5]

Finally, we have a slightly odd one, but necessary.  The Psychic Healing Talent opens the door to more Psychic Healing, which means that your best psychic healers are typically Keleni, and that most of their medicine would be through psychic healing.  But per the rules on Communion, if you have Psychic Healing, you cannot gain Dark Communion or Broken Communion.  Thus, this talent helps shape the Keleni: by default, they cannot connect to the other forms of Communion, which explains their disdain for the races that can, and their fear over races like Humanity and the Asrathi learning the Ways of Communion, as it opens them up to temptations that the Keleni do not experience.

An Alternate Keleni Template

So, if we compile the ideas above, we get something like the template below, at a mere 30 points, which trims 20 points off their cost.  I'd love feedback on it, and if you liked the Keleni, or played as them, I'd love to hear about your experiences with them.

Point cost: 30 points

Attributes: ST -1 [-5]

Advantages: Amphibious [10]; Ancestral Bond [1], Appearance (Attractive) [4]; Bioluminesence [1]; Doesn’t Breath (Oxygen Storage x25) [10]; Keleni Telepathy 1 [13]; Nictitating Membrane 1 [1]; Psychic Healing Talent +1 [5]; Telepathy Talent +1 [5];

Features: Taboo Traits (Callous, Low Empathy, Oblivious) [0]. May reach Telepathy Talent +5 [0]; May reach Psychic Healing Talent +5 [0].

Disadvantages: Pacifism (Reluctant Killer) [-5], Vulnerability (Occasional, Dehydration, 2x; Fatigue only -50%) [-10]

Skills: Keleni Telepathy (H) IQ-1* [1]-9