Psi-Wars Wiki Update: Welcome to the Wild Side Edition

• Planetary Peril 
• The Survivor Background
• The Frontier Marshal
  

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.

Wiki Showcase: Aristocratic Lens - The Shinjurai Royal Family

All this week, I've been showcasing the aristocratic background lenses that came in second.  Today, I can show you what came in first: the Shinjurai Royal Family. You can check them out here.

I was pleasantly surprised to see them top the list, though doubtless Mina Shinjurai (who appeared in Tinker Titan Rebel Spy) and the artwork for the Shinjurai Princess helped feed interest.  To me, most of the other aristocrats are fairly obvious outgrowths of what we already know about the setting: we know there is nobility and maradonian aristocracy, and we know there are imperials, and we know there are Ranathim (who presumably have their own aristocracy), but I don't talk too much about the Shinjurai except to discuss them in passing in Neo-Rationalism, so it was interesting to have a chance to explore this fairly unique element of the setting.

One feedback I got early from the Disciples was "Why so much detail?"  The argument wasn't that it was "too much" (when I came back with even more detail, nobody shot it down), rather, why have the Shinjurai at all?  They're just the royalty of a single planet, on par with the Pelian nobility or some Asrathi lord.  Why go into so much detail?

Well, there's a few reasons.  First, as I discussed in my setting design manifesto, settings should be fractal, and doing at least three of every fractal thing creates a real sense of choice.  And so, humanity has been split into three: the Maradonian branch, who act as "space fantasy" and act as the de facto rulers of the setting, the Westerly branch, who act as the "space Westerns" with their cowboys and their "Native Americans," their asteroid miners and their ancient tribal practices.  Together, we can see "high society" and "barbaric hinterlands."  The Shinjurai represent the "Third way," the "space as science fiction" element of the setting.  The Westerly are too fragmented to offer a single, cohesive aristocracy; if they "ruled the Galaxy," they would do it as a thousand little domains.  The Shinjurai, by contrast, represent a real alternative to the Maradonian way for galaxy-spanning dominion, as they ruled the Galaxy once before Alexus Rex, and the modern Valorian Empire, who at least gives lip service to their philosophies.

The Shinjurai royal family represent one linchpin for this sense of unity.  They are a single thing that all Shinjurai across the Galaxy can point to and say "We believe in that," similar to how Australians, Canadians, and all other members of the British Commonwealth can point to the British Royal Family.  They're a symbol of unity among a disunited people, and a symbol of hope that, perhaps, in the future, they could rise to their former place.

This gives them, to me at least, an interesting tension.  They are, in the eyes of many, the people who should be the most powerful people in the Galaxy, but they are some of the least powerful of all the aristocrats shown thus far.  They don't have secret occult oaths, or the legacy of a millennia of psychic engineering.  They have only tradition and knowledge.  They use their soft power to achieve their ends, while being held hostage by the Maradonian nobility and their own people.  They represent a repudiation of Maradonian aristocracy that, themselves, attend the courts and senates of the Maradonian Alliance.  They are chained kings, or bound princesses, if you will.

I also think it's important to have a "dark horse" in your setting.  A setting should have obvious high-points. In Psi-Wars, that's the Empire vs the Alliance, Templars vs Tyrants.  You know about princesses and space knights and commandos and fighter aces, and that's fine.  A setting should have these.  But there should also be something that rewards the player that digs a little deeper, something that's not actually part of the primary struggle of the setting, but still very interesting.  In Star Wars, this might be the Mandalorians or the Nightsisters; in Warhammer 40k, that might be the Tau. In Psi-Wars, this is exemplified by the Shinjurai, who bring an entirely different vibe with them, but one that still fits in the larger themes of the setting.  So, if you want to play as something a little different in Psi-Wars, the Shinjurai offer an interesting option for it.

Wiki Showcase: Aristocratic Lens - The Mithanna

I asked my patrons to vote on which aristocratic lenses they wanted to see, and four options tied for second.  This is the third (and last that I'll discuss here; the fourth was the Last Alexian, which is a Patreon special, available in the Lost book of Houses).

I was honestly a little surprised to see Ranathim Aristocracy do as well as it did.  I'm glad it did, though, because it gives us a chance to look at some truly alien nobility.  Most of our aristocrats are either human, or only superficially different from human nobility (you could, for example, build an Asrathi noble as a generic aristocrat, but there's nothing in that post that would encourage you to make him different from, say, a Pelian noble).  This gave me a chance to explore a really different sort of aristocracy, to set up some unusual and alien traditions.

One concern I had going into the design of the Mithanna was mounting complexity.  I didn't mind adding more and more houses to Maradonian nobility, because they're a central focus of the game and I expect players will want to see a lot of detail about them.  The Ranathim pose a different problem, as they're explicitly "foreign."  They're the "Red Men of Mars" that John Carter goes and learns about, with their Jeds and Jeddaks and Tharks, or the Klingons with their overly nuanced sense of honor and their unique language. They're meant to feel foreign and exotic, which both means they need a lot of detail, and that people don't care about their detail until they really care about their detail.

So I wanted to make something something that felt weird but didn't actually use any new mechanics.  If you're familiar with the Divine Masks, you're already familiar with Oath Magic (ie, just buying a learned prayer as a straight up trait and slapping an oath modifier on it), so I chose that mechanic as my core focus.  I chose a single oath (the Mithna Edict) as the focus of the characters, the one thing they turn on, then added a handful of ways to customize your characters (a few new oaths, some psychic abilities, a few common traits, etc). 

I felt three houses were enough, though I've heard murmurings of wanting a fourth or making their own, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. With the Maradonian nobility, I could easily see games centered entirely on them.  The Maradonian aristocracy are one of the participants of the central conflict of the setting, and they're a familiar sort of nobility, which allows players to easily understand them.  They could well want to play one and find that the four houses offered aren't enough, hence the Lost Book of Houses.  With the Ranathim Aristocracy, I don't see that nearly as much of a concern.  I see most players experiencing the Umbral Rim as outsiders, and those that want to run a strictly Umbral Rim/Ranathim game are, first, likely to be rare and, second, served already by the great variety of the region.  They can play as a member of one of the three Mithna, or they can play as a Slaver-lord, or they can play as a Gaunt priestess, or they can play as a Trader Merchant-King, or they can play as a Keleni prophet, etc and so on. The region is already rich with variety, so the Mithanna only really need enough variety to lightly outline how they might vary from one another, and then they can be tossed into the wild mish-mash of ideas brewing in the Umbral Rim.

What emerged from my design was, as someone pointed out, very Fae-like.  This wasn't actually intentional (I drew more inspiration from Vampires, especially Vampire: the Masquerade. If you squint, you can even see the Gangrel behind Mithna Galantim), but I can see it.  Like with most things I put into the Umbral Rim, the idea is to create a disorienting set of rules that nobody properly explains to the player, making him feel like an outsider, so that he staggers into insulting one of these and ends up dueling them in some crazy, pulp space opera dueling chamber with a gyrating floor and spike traps, while a Ranathim princess struggles with her feelings for this strangely compelling Earth man and the fact that her Edict forbids her from loving him (unless he does these equally weird, arbitrary things that the princess sighs and rolls her eyes when explaining it to him, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world).  I also had to explain how the aristocrats of a broken empire could still keep their power, given the constant churn of disorder and anarchy in the Umbral Rim.  I think it worked out well.

The dueling, blood-feuds, and the explicit bonds to worlds (such as Galantim ruling an estate on Hekatomb) is based on feedback from the Disciples.  They thought the Mithanna needed more context.

Wiki Showcase: Aristocratic Lens - Maradonian Noble

Ahh, here it is, the one you've likely been waiting for.  Since I started working on the Alliance, I think the Maradonian nobility are second only to Communion itself for interest from the community, thus they likely need no introduction, but here we go anyway: the lingering remnants of a psychic aristocracy, bred to save the Galaxy from some great apocalypse coming in the future, are the main force standing up against the Emperor.  They present themselves as heroic defenders of democracy, while quietly seeking to secure their own power over the galaxy.  The Emperor's empire was founded on removing their aristocracy from the Galaxy and bringing equality with him (though, perhaps, he has not succeeded at that as well as his propagandists say).

I created the Maradonian aristocracy for a few reasons, but primarily I wanted real opposition to the Empire.  Star Wars presents the rebellion as a plucky group of rag-tag farmers and adventurers who just happen to have their own fleet. This is based on a very optimistic and romantic notion of what a "rebellion" looks like.  To be sure, the American revolution saw the Americans with their own fleet, and the American civil war likewise saw the Confederation sport their own fleet, but in both cases, these were fully fledged states waging war on one another, rather than a band of guerrillas.  You need shipyards and workers to maintain a fleet, you need training grounds to train your pilots, you need to perform exercises to get your fleet to work well with one another.  George Lucas based a lot of his vision of the rebellion on a romantic view of the Viet Cong, but they didn't need to fight naval battles on the scale of what we saw on WW2 and, even if they did, they had the backing of a state (North Korea, which itself had the backing of China).

So, if you want to have large, sweeping naval battles in space, you need a state.  If Psi-Wars is WW2, and the Empire is Germany, then the Alliance is Britain.  Other good inspirations would be Napoleon vs the monarchies of Europe, or the aristocratic arm of the Roman civil war that led to the rise of Augustus Caesar.

I also created them because we need space princesses.  Space opera is based heavily on the "fiction of the day," and the fiction of the day that inspired works like Star Wars were fantasy works and, especially, the Ruritanian Romance, stories that involve swashbuckling adventures in small, valley kingdoms with very 19th century aristocrats. One needn't look that hard at Star Wars, with its princesses and heroic space knights rushing to rescue them from a grasping, napoleonic Empire.  We like stories about prim princesses who need a good scolding, or who heroically rebel against their gilded cage, or princes who seek to earn their father's favor and who must bear the crushing responsibilities of the state and the needs of the people at a tender, youthful age.  And, of course, everyone must know how to duel.

To make such an aristocracy work, we need to embed them in the setting and create a mythology around them. In large part, aristocracy is built on mythology, the story that some people are better than others, and that they're the better people.  They trace ancient, prestigious lineages, and they explain that their bloodline gives them greater right to rule. In Psi-Wars, we manifest this with their eugenic bloodlines and their ancestor veneration.  This gives them a reason to be picky about whom they marry, or to look down their noses at one another ("Bloodline purity 0? Seriously? Were your parents even trying to retain their dignity, or did they just give up when they decided to have you?"). Their heritage as space knights gives them a reason to retain their martial lineage, but the lack lack of warfare has turned it into something ceremonial, a game that focused duelists seek to win, rather than a way of war.

Thus, if you're thinking of Psi-Wars Aristocracy, chances are, you're thinking of one of them.  So, check them out here.  If you find my varieties of aristocracy confusing, just ignore the rest and focus on these, because they're the ones people seem to know best. Currently, I have four houses, four lineages.  You can make your own, and I have four more available in the Lost Book of Houses if you're a patron.

Wiki Showcase: the Aristocratic Background Lens - The Imperial Heir

When my Patrons voted for the Aristocratic Lens to be the focus of the month, I asked them what optional lenses they'd like to see focused on, and we had a four way tie for second.  The Imperial Heir was the second of those tied for second.

So, what's it like to play the second most important person in the Galaxy?  You can't play as the Emperor of course (right? I mean, that would be silly), but why not one of his children? 

Star Wars never really talked about imperial succession, because it was interested in having a tightly constrained narrative that it could wrap up with a bow: find the Emperor, kill the Emperor, the galaxy is saved.  Hooray!  But we have the luxury of exploring these possibilities.  We can have an imperial prince or princess and a convoluted race for succession if the Emperor ever actually dies, including which person gets backed to be the next in power.

Like the Corporate Heir from yesterday, the Imperial Heir is not powerful in their own right, but because of who they're deeply connected with.  Just as we can look to real-world corporate heirs, we can look to the children of real-world dictators and see what they might be like: spoiled, with nobody in their empire willing to say no to them, though sometimes, they come to see the plight of their people and may act as a sort of hero figure (or be set up as one by their father's very clever propaganda arm).

Of course, playing such a character isn't cheap (60 points! For the basics!) but that's to be expected. The ability to throw a tantrum, and then get your own dreadnought for your birthday, is a pretty powerful one. And the GM needs to be careful if allowing this, as the campaign can quickly become about the Imperial Heir, which isn't necessarily a problem, but it's not the sort of character you just chuck into a campaign without working out some of the details first.  But if you want to play that sort of campaign, you have the tools to do so here.

Background Lens Revisited: Aristocracy

Maradonian Lady,
Art by Kriz Villacis
Owned by Daniel Dover

For September, my Patrons voted to revisit the Aristocratic Background Lens.  This turned out to be fairly labor intensive (I had hoped to do one background and one template in the month; I was unable to do a template).  This makes sense, though, because aristocrats tend to be deeply tied to the setting, and they've also been one of the more popular elements of Psi-Wars.

For most people following Psi-Wars, "aristocrat" is likely synonymous with "Maradonian Noble." After all, they're the core of the Alliance, which is one of the core factions of the setting.  But what I want to do with the aristocrats is break them out in to several possible options, to offer some additional nuance. This will give you some insight into the politics of the galaxy, as well as some ideas for how you could make some new, unique lineages of nobles.  I've already posted the setting elements of two of these: the Ranathim Mithanna and the Shinjurai royal family, but the point of today's post is to give you the tools for any aristocrat: Asrathi high-born, Westerly tribal royalty, Pelian nobility, or Lithian potentates and warlords.  The Galaxy is huge, so all the worked examples should be seen as drops in the bucket compared to the possible variety found within the Galaxy at large.

You can check out the Generic Aristocrat background lens on the wiki.  Over the course of the week, I'll try to release the other, more specific lenses to the wiki as well.

New Background Lens: Sequestered

Sequestered 20 points

You have lived a life of isolation, one in which you were prepared to be something. You might have spent years as a monk, or been the chosen messiah of a cult, or you might have been ruthlessly trained to be the galaxy’s greatest assassin. You’ve learned an enormous amount of highly focused knowledge, but your social skills have suffered. You don’t really understand how the world outside of your temple or dojo really works.

Skills: Savoir-Faire (Dojo or Temple) (E) IQ+1 [2].

Additional Skills: Another 18 points chosen from among Hidden Lore (Any appropriate) (A) IQ [2], History (H) IQ-1 [2], Judo (H) DX-1 [2], Karate (H) DX-1 [2], Literature (H) IQ-1 [2], Meditation (H) Will-1 [2], Mind Block (A) Will [2], Philosophy (H) IQ-1 [2], Religious Ritual (H) IQ-1 [2], Teaching (A) IQ [2], Theology (H) IQ-1 [2], or increase any lens skill by one level for 2 points, or two levels for 6 points.

Additional Traits: You may also spend your remaining lens points, or some of your template advantage points on improved Claim to Hospitality (Cult, Temple, Dojo) [varies], Clerical Investment [5], Contact (Fellow cultist, monk or martial artist, skill 15, 18 or 21, 9 or less somewhat reliable) [2, 3 or 4], Contact Group (Cult, Temple or Dojo, Skill 15, 18 or 21, 6 or less, somewhat reliable) [5, 8, 10], Higher Purpose (Varies) [5], Religious Rank [5/level], Patron (Cult, temple or order) [varies], Title [1], or any remaining points on an appropriate martial arts or psionic style of your choice.


Optional Disadvantages: Add the following disadvantage options to your template: Clueless [-10], Code of Honor (Varies), Delusions (False beliefs about the world) [varies], Disciplines of Faith (Ritualism or Mysticism) [-5 or -10], Duty (To Order or Cult, 9 or less, 12 or less, 15 or less) [-5 to -15], Easy to Read [-10], Enemies (Former Order/Cult, Watcher or Hunter, 6 or less) [Varies], Fanaticism [-15], Gullible [-10*], Honesty [-10*], Oblivious [-5], Pacifism (Any!) [Varies], Truthfulness [-5*], Vow (Any; Poverty, Chastity or Silence are common) [Varies],