Reminder: Backer Poll on the Fourth Bounty Hunter Lodge

Whenever I introduce a new faction, I like to run a Backer poll on it too. Once the poll is done, I'll cobble together the results, and turn them into a faction that is present in the setting.  Previous polls have resulted in:

• House Tan-Shai
• The Traders
• The current depiction of House Alexus
• The Emperor and his organization
• Domen Khemet and Domen Tarvagant, the competing Death Cults of the Divine Masks religion

Now we have a poll on the Bounty Hunter Lodge.

Of course, my real purpose with these polls isn't to come together and create a particular, cohesive faction. Instead, the intent is to inspire you, to show you some of the things I think about when creating these groups, and to get you to think about creating your own.  Thus, even if you don't want to vote, it might be worth reading over the ideas, just to create your own faction.

The current leaders in the polling are:

• They are located in the Sylvan Spiral
• They primary hunt Communion users (they are "anti-Templars")
• They hunt for money, and only for money
• They are trained experts in Neurolash weaponry
• They are secretive (you don't contact them, they contact you)
• In addition to Bounty Hunters, they make heavy use of Spies
• Unsurprisingly, most of the Galaxy has never heard of these guys.

But there's a lot more nuance than that in the polling results and the comments, and your own vote could change that too. The poll is open to $5+ Backers. If you're such a backer, remember to vote!

• The Patreon Link
• The SubscribeStar Link

Wiki Highlight: Bounty Hunter Lodges

As I was working on Bounty Hunters, I thought about organizations that might support them.  Star Wars has its Bounty Hunter Guild, but I wanted more possible variety than that.  In principle a bounty hunter needn't be part of an organization (and so "rogue" and "independent" hunters are valid options), but I wanted to give Hunters the option of belonging to a dedicated group with an interesting tradition, and why not more than one?  After all, I draw inspiration from the Mandalorian and Killjoys and the Witcher which are all, in their own ways, different traditions of bounty hunting.

Thus was born the idea of Hunting Lodges, something on which to hang the organizational hat of the Bounty Hunter.  The premise here draws more from the Mandalorian and Killjoys than from what I see in the rest of Star Wars: a broker does the work of tracking down the bounty and handling the hassles of payment and exchange, and you can focus on hunting.  Different groups might have access to different resources, areas of influence and secret knowledge to help the Hunter along.

There are four signature Lodges in Psi-Wars:

• The Hydra Lodge, which is just "the generic lodge."  If you want the benefits of being part of a lodge, but don't want to dive into deep lore, this is the Lodge for you.
• The Exilium: diplomatic bounty hunters who handle sensitive assignments and bridge the gap between the Empire and the Alliance, serving neither.
• The Saruthim: an ancient tradition of monster-hunters dating to the First Tyranny, who are experts in a unique parasitic weapon, the Ferthe Dapolor, or the Flesh Carapace.

The fourth signature lodge, with a placeholder name of "Wyrmworks Cleaners" will be the last remnants of the Wyrmwerks corporation located in the Arkhaian Spiral who are experts in defeating the mad-genius AI that their corporation unleashed in their last days, rogue cyborgs and the last remnants of the Anacridian Scourge, who make excellent use of advanced Wyrmwerks technologies, such as Battlesuits.  I need to put more work into the sort of opponents they fight before I can properly put them together.

I'd also like to put together a poll at some point for a fifth bounty hunter lodge, if my Backers are game.

You can see the Lodge descriptions here.

NPC Highlight: Chet Starbeam and his Blazers

Chet Starbeam
The Design Diary

I'm not usually a fan of pre-generated NPCs, as I generally prefer to make bespoke campaigns with my own particular NPCs.  I have noticed, though, that people do make use of them.  They can be a nice way to quickly illustrate a particular element of a setting, and as an immediate encounter.  So, I thought I'd try a new series, wherein I outline an NPC that I've whipped up.  I usually make them for playtests I run, or to make sure a particular template "makes sense."  But they might prove useful to you, so I've created a new entry on the Wiki for them.

Of all the opponents that PCs might meet, I think Bounty Hunters are likely the most universal.  We can justify them fighting just about anyone.  In Jedi: Fallen Order, they sprinkle encounters with Bounty Hunters across the map as your adventure progresses to keep  you on your toes.  Having access to a variety of ready-made bounty hunters, then, could be useful to any Psi-Wars GM as someone to bust in the door and shoot up the place.  After the initial encounter, the PCs can try to piece together who put the bounty on them.

I've started the series with an NPC that I created as part of my "Let's kill Everyone" series, which was designed for the NPCs of the Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt.  We never got to encounter them, but you can use them in your campaign.  The first is Chet Starbeam, celebrity bounty hunter and total bro. I started with him because he is the most generic of the Bounty Hunters I've created, and he makes a nice, fun "first step" into being bounty hunted, as he's not especially difficult to defeat, and can be entertaining to fight.

See what you think of him, and I'd love to hear if you think the series would be useful to you, and if there are particular sorts of NPCs you'd like to see.

Template Highlight: the Bounty Hunter

So, I had a poll running on Patreon about which template you guys would like me to wikify next, with a focus on "Rim" templates, though this highlighted to me just how few of the original Rim templates I have left to wikify!  In any case, you guys let me off the hook and chose Bounty Hunter, which was especially easy because it's already done.

What will follow will be a discussion of how the Bounty Hunter template has evolved and what I've added to it. This will kick off "the month of the Bounty Hunter," because one of the reasons I've been so quiet lately is I've been building up material on the Bounty Hunter.  It's still not completely done, but you go to campaign with the material you've written, so here we are!  I have plenty of material to show, so I think we'll be busy for awhile!  But if you'd like to skip all that and just look at the template, here it is:

The Bounty Hunter.

Backer Post: Bounty Hunter Factions Preview 2: the Saruthim

If you wondered why I've been so quiet, it's been because I've been working on this monstrosity.  I've wanted to give Ranathim "ancient bio-mecha" since I first read about them in Pyramid #3/24 and they've been a feature of the Dead Art since Iteration 6. Inspired further by my noodling about a Witcher/Mandalorian faction in my "How to run an RPG" posts, and the idea to explore Bounty Hunter factions as a part of the Bounty Hunter template release, I finally took the time to see what I could come up with.

It turns out to have a lot of moving parts, not all of which I could finish, but I need to shift gears, so I've wrapped up what I could and delivered it to you, dear Patron.  This one is limited to $5+, like the previous update, not because I'm shafting my Fellow Travelers, but because it's not finished and I want some feedback before I release it to the (relatively) more general public, but expect to see it, uh, soon-ish.

This is available to $5+ backers:

• On Patreon
• and on SubscribeStar

If you have feedback, I'd love to see it!

Alright, fine, let's kill Axton Kain too! Bounty Hunter Design Diary addendum

One of my players complained when the Bounty Hunter series ended, as he had hoped I would explore how to defeat all of them.  This isn't a bad idea, actually, as it informs the sorts of things bounty hunters should be able to do. The primary argument against it is a matter of time: how much of my time is better spent building sample bounty hunters vs building out more of the setting?  This isn't a rhetorical question, as I don't know the answer, but I've had to balance it, and it does directly feed into Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt, even if we're unlikely to see these hunters right away.  So, shall we come up with one last bounty hunter to fight the legendary Axton Kain?

Some of my favorite people are bounty hunters -- Greef Karga, the Mandalorian

This isn't an entirely inappropriate question.  Patrons have already seen the current state of the Bounty Hunter document, but one element I've begun to include are Bounty Hunter Lodges, organized groups of bounty hunters, and one of the three I intend to release is the Exilium, a group of hunters deeply embedded into Maradonian society, who have the diplomatic finesse to operate across several borders, including in Imperial Space, without being questioned or sanctioned.  Thus, this asks the question: how do you hunt a Maradonian?

The Maradonian aristocracy aren't Jedi by any stretch.  In some ways, they're far harder to hunt, and in other ways, far easier.  On the one hand, their mastery of psychic power leaves much to be desired when compared to the psychic mastery of the Jedi and they're not elite force swordsmen.  On the other hand, they are all psychic force swordsmen, who also have armies and international influence networks and vast wealth available exclusively to them.  When you fight a space knight, you're not just fighting him,  you're fighting his house, thus you must move with caution.  Presumably, a nobleman with a bounty on his head has been cast out of his house, and thus can be as easily caught as any aristocratic pretender, but this is not always the case, especially in circumstances where a rival has begun placing bounties on a member of the house.

Of course, Axton is a little different: he's not psychic at all, but cybernetic.  He belongs to a House that skirts the line between legitimate aristocracy and pirate-lord empire.  Where the other aristocrats play at being a space knight, he's trained in the Old Ways and has personally knocked genetically augmented super-soldiers off their feet with the full force of his cybernetic body, single-handedly taken on a dozen men and shrugged off plasma shots to his chest.  He's not an easy mark to take down, and still, someone in the Exilium must be able to take down a member of House Kain.

So how would you do it?

Hey guys, let's fight everyone! Bounty Hunter Design Diary Part III

So, as part of my Bounty Hunter designs, I've been picking on one of my Tall Tales players, Xerxes, because he actually has Bounty Hunters as an enemy, so it's fun to tailor some opponents around him. But realistically one would not expect to see every bounty hunter tailored to their target.  Certainly, if bounty hunters realized that a Witch Cat was their target, those who specialize in hunting Witch Cats would pick up their kits and rush out the door to take down their preferred target.  But that anti-cyborg guy needs to put food on the table too.  Sure, he might not be as good at it as the first guy, but he only needs to get lucky, right?

So, we should have at least one "generic" bounty hunter.  This also makes it useful since you, dear reader, are unlikely to need a bounty hunter who specializes in hunting Witch Cats.  Thus, of the three-ish hunters I've proposed this week, this is the one you're most likely to actually use.

But what to do?  Every hunter needs a schtick, and our first one already melds excess collateral damage with precision planning.  Our second one melds melee excellence with a sympathetic character.  Every hunter should feel different enough that they represent a unique challenge for the PC, so ours should feel different.

Well!  I've been discussing Bounty Hunters with some of my Patrons, and Gentleman Gamer suggested that most bounty hunters are "either bosses or groups of mooks." I corrected him on the latter: you're unlikely to see a group of mooks.  "Why?" he asked.  Well, the real reason is that we expect to see highly competent loners doing these tasks, and that it's hard to pay an entire crew off of the sorts of bounties most people collect.  But that just means its rare, so why not have a bounty hunter with a group of mooks at his disposal?  It offers some unique opportunities: when searching for the character, his posse can canvas an area as a group and when they close in for the kill (er, capture), they can "beat" the target towards the primary hunter, like dogs in a hunt.  Gentleman Gamer went on to muse about drones, robot dogs and Shinjurai hunters, and I'm not going to dismiss any of those as ideas.  There's an entire world of hunters we could be making.  I'm going to focus, for now, on a guy who uses human mooks to help him fight.

Hey Guys, Let's Annoy the Witch Cat: Bounty Hunters Design Diary Part II

Yesterday, in an effort to keep the blog from being empty and giving the impression that I'm not busy behind the scenes, I unveiled some of my thoughts on making an interesting and rather tailored challenge for a character who took Bounty Hunters as an enemy.  The point, of course, is not to single him out for having the temerity to take the Enemy disadvantage, but to use his Enemy disadvantage as a spring board to create some interesting NPCs, because I expect you'll want to feature Bounty Hunters in your campaigns too, and why not have some ready, on-hand ones, even if these are rather specific.

But not every game is D&D, and even D&D doesn't really benefit from making every single encounter as lethal as possible.  Yes, we can treat Bounty Hunters as random Boss encounters, but  we don't have to.  An encounter, especially with something as "random" as a broad and general group of ill-defined enemies, offers us opportunities to explore and reveal some things about the setting.  Not every enemy needs to be lethal.  Some can really suck.  A weak opponent not only reveals something about the world, but makes the game feel less like a mechanical series of ever more difficult encounters and more like a real world to interact with.  And an inept enemy creates an interesting set of choices.  Sure, you could just, you know, kill them, but are you the sort of person who would do that? Or you can leave them alive to threaten you further and eventually they might get lucky.  Or you can try to talk them out of killing you.  But suddenly, you have a more interesting set of choices beyond just "kill or be killed."

So, I propose we introduce a bounty hunter or, actually, a team of bounty hunters that isn't constructed to be a thoroughly dangerous opponent, but an interesting NPC encounter that happens to involve a strong desire to kill you. I want to introduce a "newbie" bounty hunter.

Hey guys, let's kill the Witch Cat

Pardon my silence.  Both of my children were born this month, and there's Easter, and a quarantine, so I've been busy.  I'm also trying to figure out how to handle polls on multiple patron sites without spending $20 a month on the right to get more than a couple of answers, and I'm behind on my art comissions.

But the real reason I've been quiet is that a Patron asked me to work on bounty hunters, and they're up there with Mystics and Space Knights for "You don't know how much work you just asked for." In any case, if you missed it, there's a preview up for Subscribers and Patrons. One of the reasons it's taking so long is that there's a lot of reasonable "factions" and culture-groups that we might associate with bounty hunters and while we've worked out a ton of detail on mystics and space knights (and commandos and officers and etc) under the guise of working on philosophies and factions back in iteration 6, we haven't really touched on bounty hunter or criminal factions yet, which are both things we really need to explore, but we only have so many hours in the day.

Bounty Hunters represent a whole host of interesting puzzles, especially in that they're natural monster hunters (There's even a lens for it: "Hired Gun"). A Bounty Hunter naturally specializes in their preferred prey, and so may have means of disposing of particularly troublesome aliens, robots or space monsters that the average person doesn't have.  That is, after all, why you pay them!  But if we're going to introduce Space Witchers, we need to think about monsters which, against, brings me back to a concept I've been tinkering with but haven't had the time to really explore: Epic Psi-Wars. I've discussed it before, but the idea is that while running Psi-Wars for normal action heroes is fine (and the premise of many of its more procedural inspirations, such as Killjoys and Star Wars films like Rogue One or Han Solo), you can make the case for Psi-Wars-as-Monster-Hunters, also based on its less procedural inspirations (like the Old Republic or Metabarons).  In fact, the Action Genre itself does this, as Monster Hunters Sidekicks points out, as well as the finest action-genre RPG ever written: Nights Black Agents, which clearly illustrates how one migrates from a bog standard action story to a deeper thriller.

Bounty Hunters tend to straddle that line pretty well, especially in a space opera setting.  One session, they're busting some guy out of prison, or taking down a crime  boss.  The next session, they're using their specialized knowledge to kill a space vampire.  This lets them walk between the world of the smuggler and commando, and the world of the space knight and the mystic.  But this also means that in describing Bounty Hunters, I need to describe the things they hunt, and that means tackling some of the monsters of the setting, and that's taking me awhile.  Apologies.

The other thing I've been thinking about, and the real point of this post, is that Bounty Hunters make amazing enemies.  Raymond Chandler famously said that his preferred technique for spicing up a story was to have two guys kick in the door and start shooting up the place whenever the story got stale.  In space opera, the two guys who kick in the door and start shooting the place up are, of course, bounty hunters.  They can reasonably show up at any time, they should always present a unique, flavorful challenge, and once you defeat them, you have to ask the question "Who put the mark on my head, and how do I get rid of it?"

Thus, I've been thinking about Bounty Hunters as a challenge.  I asked one of my friends to see if he could make one, but then I decided that was an unfair challenge, because I wasn't sure how best to make one myself. It's not enough to slap some stats together and have a guy shoot at people.  I mean, it is, but as we'll see from the After Action Report of Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt, even a couple of BAD 1 Henchmen backed by 10 or so BAD 1 Mooks are not a serious challenge to starting PCs. We need more than big numbers: we need to think about what makes a bounty hunter a challenging encounter.  How can they be difficult and interesting to defeat.

We should be able to finish the following sentence: "This bounty hunter always get his man because..." or "This bounty hunter is unstoppable because..."

It just so happens that on of the PCs, Xerxes, an Asrathi Witch Cat, has Bounty Hunters as enemies, so I thought it might be an interesting exercise to explore how a Bounty Hunter might defeat that specific PC and how we can make it an interesting encounter. Come, and let's muse together on how to murder on of my PCs.

Kendra Corleoni, Escaped Slave, Felinoid Bounty Hunter

Now that we have a more finished version of the Bounty Hunter, we can expand Kendra to a full 300 points.  Felinoid is already 35, so I chose to simply expand her existing Bounty Hunter/Slave/Felinoid advantages for another 15 points to round out the character.  Thus, we can finally see Kendra without her race really slowing her down.  With those extra points, I've been able to expand on her slave background (evidently she was held by some snake-like civilization called the Slithians) and note her own race as a cultural familiarity/language, meaning she's the most diverse of our characters when it comes to interacting with aliens.  I also have the points to really give her the pistol-slinging badassness that we've wanted for her since iteration 1, giving her an astonishing Beam Weapons (Pistol) of 19, including full-rate Dual Weapon combat and Fast Firing, meaning she can really lay down some firepower if she's so inclined.

This is probably the close to the very final version of her.

Bounty Hunter 4.0

Bounty Hunter 4.0: 250 points

The Bounty Hunter has been pretty thoroughly edited by this point. Her niche is finding people and getting them out. This makes her excellent at unarmed combat, shifting from unarmed combat rapidly to pistols, and hunting down one’s prey in an urban environment. Most of these skills are already 15-16, including pistols, which seems a bit low, but she has the option of upgrading her pistol combat to 18, and I’ve rounded out the template already with some martial arts options. The additional 10 points of combat perks and techniques ensures that the bounty hunter is a top-notch combatant.

Further exploration of martial arts is the most obvious power-up, but this doesn’t need explicit exploration (she just takes a martial arts power-up). Instead, we should focus a little more intently on alternate depictions of a bounty hunter. Initially, I had included the “Imposter” talent and the “Stalker” talent. The stalker was meant to trap their bounty through cunning strategems, which still seems like a good idea, but steps a little too much on the toes of the Frontier marshal. I enjoyed the idea of the Imposter mainly from the sense of a femme fatale, a “cute” and “harmless” girl who comes close to her target through her attractiveness, then suddenly unveils her combat lethality at the last moment. This allows for the Femme Fatale power-up. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the image of Boba Fett as a bounty hunter: A heavily armed and armored mercenary who uses overwhelming force to take his opponent out. This gives us the Heavy Hunter power-up. Finally, we need to catch our prey, and the Bounty Hunter excels at spaceship mobility, but why not also enjoy some contragravity excellence?