Wiki Highlight: Hackers and Bloodsiders

It's been a rough month for my health, and Undercity Noir has dominated my attention, but my blog discipline has been slipping.  My apologies for that.  Even so, I do have more material on the wiki. In case you missed it, or wanted some "Creator commentary" here we go.

Hacker

Fulfilling my last "Release the Balloon People" poll, I've released the Hacker cross-training power-up. This represents a sea-change in how I'm handling cross-training: instead of treating it like the Specialist Skill-Sets from Action, I'm treating them more like the Cross-Class Templates from DF, though not in the sense of literal cross-class training.  Instead, I generally find I prefer creating a list of things you can further invest in.  Rather than construct a character by picking a base template and 5 or so highly determined micro-templates, I'd rather you picked One Big Template and then One Big Power-Up, because this is conceptually simpler.  You might be a Cyborg + Space Knight or Psychic + Con-Artist. Similarly, I'd rather see Hacker + Assassin.  This also works very well for the "side-kick" templates I've built: you can take a 125 point "mini-template" and grab a 50-point power-up template, and then fill out the other 75-125 points with additional skills and advantages from your template.

In my experience, when I make characters with templates, at some point I already know what I want.  Following the details is nice, but eventually I get it and I'm tearing off on my own.  I suspect less experienced players eventually do the same, and they'll want more things from their advantage list than fits into the default value, more skills than they can afford, etc.  So, I feel like hitting fewer "high concept" templates like this works a lot better for this sort of character creation.

So you can see the Hacker template and the new, updated cross-training templates here.

Bloodsiders

So quite some time ago, I released a list of criminal organizations in Psi-Wars, and offered up a poll for who you wanted detailed first, and the House of Bastards won handily, so naturally I did the Bloodsiders first.  Why? Because they were pertinent to Undercity Noir and half the characters took some sort of relationship with them so they needed to be expanded.  The result took more time than I expected, mostly because of their Mythos.  They have street magic that's steeped in their superstitions and urban folklore, so I needed to create the set of stories and oaths they would acquire from this.  This makes it a "minor philosophy," and largely a subset of the Divine Masks.

The Undercity Bloodsiders are descendants of refugees from the Umbral Rim who gathered together to form new bonds in the crowded undercity of Kronos.  They recreated their own vision of the culture of the Umbral Rim in those mean streets, and the resulting criminal gang is a savage group of bloodthirsty punks with a fixation on the occult and their own strange tales of the Undercity.

You can check out their organization here and you can check out their mythology here.