Psi-Wars Wiki Highlight: February Progress Report

 As usual, I've neglected the blog in favor of the wiki and the discord, as I tend to get a lot of immediate feedback on the discord (plus I'm winding this blog down as I prep to move it to Wordpress, which looks to be stable so far, so I may take the plunge sooner than later).  So the lack of content here doesn't mean I've stopped producing material.  So, let's get into it.

The March of the Slaver Empire

One of the most important, and popular, Psi-Wars races are the Ranathim, and one central conceit is their dead empire. They once ruled a dark part of the Galaxy known as the Umbral Rim, but today, they have been enslaved by another. That's the premise of the Ranathim.

So what is this other race, and what empire do they run? I had tagged them as "Slavers" in my drafts, and the name has stuck around, but I often refer to them as the Temkorathim. They obviously had to rule the Umbral Rim now, right? What were they like? Probably not a major threat, but morally repugnant enough that you'd want to kick them around, even if you never got around to it, but dangerous enough that player characters would find them interesting to adventure in while rescuing Ranathim damsels from a fate worse than death and battling in the gladiatorial arenas of the Slavers. I suspected they would look something like the cinematic depiction of the third-world dictatorship/kleptocracy, like Doctor Doom's Latveria, or Vilena of the Expendables, though probably with even more inferior technology (though not so inferior that characters could steamroll through opposition).

So, in continuing the slow rollout of the Umbral Rim, I released the Oligarchy of Vech, and a Backer-Exclusive supplement that rounded out four of the Council of Seven, including their minions. These were generally well received (though not without some light edit notes). These are follow-ups to last month's Slaver Cartels and the associated backer release. Between them, you should be able to work out quite a lot of Umbral politics, at least between Slavers.

It's not enough to know what they are, but we need to know how they fight, and this section of space is unique enough that we expect a very different technological infrastructure, so I worked on that too!

This month I released Lithian Tech, with is a rolling, unfinished release. This includes weapons, armor and vehicles available in the Umbral Rim, including materiel from Redjack, Orion Arms (which has been around, but is greatly expanded now), and the new Rath Industries, unique to the Oligarchy of Vech. These aren't finished: I need to release the capital ships and ground vehicles from the Umbral Rim, but a highlight of the new vehicles available now are:

• The Flanker-Class Fighter (Orion)
• The High-Roller-Class Battle Yacht (Orion)
• The Pirhana-Class Fighter (Rath)
• The Hammerhead-Class Strike Craft (Rath)
• The Skirmisher-Class Torpedo Corvette (Rath)
• The Toad-Class Heavy Corvette (Rath; really a destroyer)
• The Kodiak-Class Light Cruiser (Redjack; not new to you, but new to the Wiki)

I still need to release ground vehicles, the Mauler, the Spire and the Fugitive, and there's some drafts floating around. I should get to them soon.

Drugs are Bad, Mmmkay?

The Umbral Rim is filled with vice, and drugs are certainly one of them. The Slavers excel at the creation of drugs to addict their victims, and they equip their soldiers with addictive, performance-enhancing drugs. This was an important part of the the Lithian tech release, and something that required some careful balance for future releases (especially since once you have performance enhancing drugs, someone is going to want to use it, and we'll need alchemy/potions at some point for our Inevitable Space Witches).

This also required expanding the Krokuta, who have a special relationship with these drugs. I have all of their unique power sets except Amberdine, which is still in a draft state.

In Memory of the Phoenix Cluster

The backer-led project of the Phoenix Cluster carries on.  The Umbral Rim dominates my attention at the moment, but I did release the last poll result regarding the first Westerly Clan of Phoenix Cluster. The trick here is that I need to write them up, and the other clans, and I'm trying to balance that with this rollout of the Umbral Rim.

Game-On

Both playtests move forward. I did not run Undercity Noir in February, as I was quite ill, but we look good for March.  The other playtest set in the Umbral Rim collapsed under the weight of conflicting schedules, so I recruited a raft of new players for the one player would could consistently make it, and rebooted the campaign.  The Wastes of Dhim now has:

• Raitha Temos, Mithanna Satemo (Ranathim Space Knight), 
• Null Entry, lost Syntech medical robot
• Rena, formerly enslaved Keleni psion afflicted with a dangerous split personality
• Milathum the Devourer, Saruthim Bounty Hunter

 They played through a much more detailed retreat of the first session with quite some success, though naturally some of them required some additional work.

Marching On

For the next month, I'll carry on releasing material. There's obvious things that simply need to make it onto the wiki, such as Krokuta power-ups associated with Amberdine and the remaining Rathian ships. I've been expanding the cultural details of the Umbral Rim and I can edit my material on gladiatorial fights. I also need to clean up what I have on Lithian technology.

I've got some work on Tyrannic space craft which would be nice to get out as a backer release, but it's very much in a draft state (as it involves a lot of new technological design and a rather unique sort of write-up).

I'd also like to do a poll on one new Slaver Cartel for the backers to explore, so you can get a sense of how to build your own.

And finally, I need to write up the five Westerly clans of the Phoenix Cluster, which also involves settling on how I want to write them out.

All of this is tentative, of course, and depends on how much time I have, but we'll see how far we get.

Wiki Highlight: Slaver Cartels

 I've been hard at work on the Umbral Rim and the organizations, technology and monsters native there. I've finally worked out detail on the Slaver Empire and the sort of organizations the Slavers, aka the Temkorathim, naturally form, which I call "Slaver Cartels."  I've described them in detail on the wiki.

For Backers, I've offered up additional details for four sample Cartels, the ones described in the wiki entry itself.  I may eventually release these to the wiki as well, but I feel like the wiki has enough of an information overload and I'm not sure how necessary this level of detail is. But in any case, as a thank you to all $3+ Backers (Fellow Travelers) I have uploaded the Book of Hunger

• The Book of Hunger -- Subscribestar
• The Book of Hunger -- Patreon
  

Wiki Highlight: Aliens!

My, I posted a lot less in December than I thought!  Most of my attention has been on the wiki, and I wanted to finish up the basic alien templates, so people have at least something to work with.  There are more aliens! But this gives a pretty good overview of the aliens of Psi-Wars.  I've added:

I've added:

• The Karkadann, the mutant technologists from the Zero-Template Challenge
• The Vithanni, the blacklit, aura-clad slaved from the Zero-Template Challenge
• The Nehudi, the primal, nature-bound natives of the Sylvan Spiral
• The Sathran, the cannibalistic snake-people from Iteration 5, updated to be more like the Kaa and the Serpent-Lords.
• The Keverlings, adorable-but-dumb beetle workers of the Umbral Rim, and result of a backer poll.

I've also updated:

• The Gaunt, to be a little more forgiving on modifiers
• Slavers, with lots of additional information

You can always find all the details of the aliens of Psi-Wars on a dedicated page here.

Backers can see more of what I've worked on in the backend (Patreon, Subscribestar). 

I don't expect to get more done in December, as it's the holidays and I'll likely be busy, but we'll see where life takes us!

Wiki Update: Dreamy Assassins

 

It's not all been Fun and Space Bestiaries at Mailanka's Musings; I still have a wiki to run, after all, and promises to fulfill to backers.  So I wanted to take a moment to quickly highlight a couple of major updates to the wiki.

Releasing the Balloon People: Dream Control

Every month, I offer a poll on what Patreon exclusives to release, and once again we have another "rare psionic power", this time an expanded version of Dream Control, which puts us up to three rare psionic powers! 

I worked out Dream Control as part of the creation of House Harrow, as I wanted to explore alternate Psychic Vampires, one that would feel distinct from the Ranathim, so I found myself delving into Dream Theft, but if we're going to have Dream Theft, we might as well get into the rest of the Dream Control powers, and this suggested a willowy, dreamy Maradonian Noble that didn't quite fit what I had in mind for House Harrow. This resulted in them becoming a genetic muddle, with the hidden Orphean bloodline lurking in their mutt DNA.  I also wanted to integrate some of the Labyrinthine imagery, as Akashic oracles seem to often dream of the labyrinth which provides them with insights. This doesn't literally send them to the physical labyrinth, of course: this isn't astral projection, though that's an interesting idea.  

In any case, what came out is what I would consider a fairly modest set of abilities, and one you could use for a character.  Unlike Probability Manipulation or Machine Telepathy, I don't think I've seen anyone take it; it is, after all, fairly niche and largely amounts to telepathy with a less convenient vector.

Assassins

And this is likely the one you've been waiting for.  Assassins could have gone in numerous directions, but I wanted them to be the Space Ninja to the Space Knight's Space Samurai.  Where the Space Knight was mystical, psychic, and focused on defense and forthright defense of the innocent, the Assassin was focused on stealth and murdering targets from the shadows.  This could be done with a blaster rifle from afar, but that feels too easy and not especially ninja like, at least not in the cinematic sense of the ninja. We expect someone who uses nunchucks or kusari or shuriken to defeat their opponents: the cinematic ninja uses exotic weapons, and each ninja is often different, specializing in their own particular weapon.  Shouldn't space ninjas do the same?

The current version of Reaver's Hand

Melee Weapons in Psi-Wars

There's another reason to want to stop and focus on exotic melee weapons: Psi-Wars is a melee oriented game.  Oh, sure, people have blasters and shoot at one another, but they often do it no farther than about 20 yards, often much closer: you can shoot someone in a space port bar, but chances are, with a little effort, they can punch you too.  And the Space Knight is more iconic of Psi-Wars than the Bounty Hunter (though not by that much I think), so as fun as shootouts between bounty hunters and criminal scum would be, so would a duel between a space knight and some weird assassin wielding a strange, alien weapon.  More than that, we expect to see ax-wielding primitive aliens, or gladiators armed with dual alien khopesh and so on.  

So melee weapons matter in Psi-Wars.  Which means I should put some effort in thinking my way through useful melee weapons, and I even wrote a post about it ages ago.  The core conclusion, based on feedback from my readers, was that we needed a solution that made melee weapons awesome.  Rather than just give melee weapons special treatment (though it should be noted that the tight confines of Psi-Wars and other rules do already heavily favor melee weapons), we should make melee weapons that justified their place on an ultra-tech battlefield.  Weapons like the Force Sword and the Neurolash baton already did this. Vibroweapons somewhat justified it, but mostly as a cheap alternative.  What else could justify it?

The answer has been an ongoing series of ideas that have mostly been geared towards assassination, because that was the template I've been working on, but I've been coming up with a mess of ideas, some more practical than others.  As a result, the melee weapon has been slowly broadened out and now has its own specific page.  The biggest change are new rules for weapon breakage, mostly to simplify force swords striking targets, and a heavily updated section on the Psi-Sword (so updated I've considered making it IT its own section).

As noted, this has been mostly geared towards the Assassin so far, but I don't think every melee weapon would necessarily fit the Assassin, who focuses on stealthy, glass cannon, one-hit kills rather than heroic last-stands or battlefield tactics. I also think there are melee weapons, and specialists that would use them, that don't fit as either assassins or space knights.  The staff-wielding, temple-guardians of the Keleni, the gladiators of the Lithian arenas, the spears and war-axes of the Nehudi, the vibro-wire halberds of the Jackalmen of the Umbral Rim, the Pit Fighters of the deep undercity of Kronos and so on.  I think there's room for a Warrior template: if the Assassin is the ultimate realization of a DX-focused melee fighter in Psi-Wars, perhaps the Warrior would tilt the balance more towards ST (though not completely; even the Big Guy of Action 3 had generous DX).  They'd need some work, though, and they're not the focus of today's post.

The Assassin's Weapons

So what do we have for the assassin? I showcased a lot of ideas for backers over the past few months, and these were the ones that stood out and seemed to fit the niche the best... for now.

Monowire

The most successful of the backer posts had to do with my worked version of Monowire Mugging. But where Monowire Mugging focused on the stasis switchblade (which is a very interesting weapon) I wanted to explore the "razor floss" depiction we often see in anime and sci-fi.  The result was the Gossamer Art, which has a strong emphasis on traps, entanglement and strangling people with razor-sharp wire.  Of the new styles, I'd say it's the most unapologetically ninja-like. The rest either borrow elements from other niches or could be used by, for example, a Warrior or a Space Knight in the right context.  The Gossamer Art, though, is a style that only really works for an assassin. It's not great at parrying attacks or attacking a hardened target that's prepared for your attack, though it does deal surprisingly well with groups of (unarmored) opponents.  To me, it also evokes a certain amount of terror: a Gossamer Assassin, and their razor wire, could The current version of Reaver's Handbe lurking anywhere!

The Monowire Whip is an interesting weapon that I hadn't really looked at before. Even Monowire Mugging doesn't really look at the Monowire Whip as a whip. Which is a shame, because there are all sorts of interesting things you can do with a whip.  Hopefully, this art will give that humble weapon a little more attention.

The Ceramic Katana

One of the reasons I started working on melee weapons was to find some way to get a cybersamurai in the game. The proper katana is so embedded in the imagery of space opera and sci-fi that it even managed to make it into Star Wars Visions which featured a Sith Hunter who inexplicably wore sheaths just to maintain the proper image of a katana!  

The core benefit I saw to a proper katana was the ability to apply strength directly, which meant it could reach higher levels of damage than the force sword (well, to a point; ST damage does cap out, after all, at triple the ST value).  Monowire also has an armor divisor of 10, rather than 5, which means it has superior armor penetration, though a monowire sword looks more like a cheese knife than a katana, but we can fudge and call it a monomolecular edged weapon (Nanothorn is probably even more accurate, but I didn't want to mess with corrosive damge). The only remaining problem is that the weapon needs to stand up to the force sword's destructive potential, and we can justify that with some form of beam adapted armor coating the blade.  Why not make Beam Adapted armor if that's an option? Let's not think about that too much right now, other than to note several forms of Psi-Wars armor (like Battleweave) is already optimized for dealing with blasters and force swords. But the result is a sword that can leverage the ST of a genetically engineered super-samurai, or a cyborg, into higher armor penetration than a force sword and can deflect blaster bolts without being destroyed. 

All it needs is a style that teaches its use: Seven Vector Swordsmanship. The "Seven Vectors" is inspired by Musashi's five circles, but used in a Shinjurai-coded context. I originally called it "Seven Vector Kendo" but that overemphasized Japanese origins, and "Seven Vector Swordsmanship" has a nice alliterative quality to it.  It's a deeply traditional style with a great deal of focus on meditation and repetitive, almost ceremonial trademark moves, as one might expect for a largely obsolete art.  I understand that a force sword is a superior melee weapon in most cases, and so Seven Vector Swordsmanship reflects that. It also has a strong emphasis on predicting the outcome of one-on-one combat (predictionism being a signature Shinjurai  trick) and on defeating force swordsmen, which suits the role of an assassin as a Space Knight spoiler.

Is it really an Assassin Art, though? Well, we tend to imagine ninjas as wielding katanas, so in that sense, yes. It also has an emphasis on one-on-one combat, which is ideal for an assassin, and it's a silent and dark weapon, which is useful for an assassin. Some have pointed out that it could stand to have a "disappear" trick, though I have a harder time justifying it for seven vector than I did for Combat Geometrics, as it's more focused on small scale combat rather than analyzing the sight-paths of everyone in a room.  So, yes, a warrior or a variant space knight could certainly stand to use Seven Vector Swordmanship, but that's not a deal breaker for including it on an Assassin.  After all, more than one character template can use a martial art.

The Psi Blade

It's a shame that the force sword is already the ideal assassin's weapon -- Shinanoki

Far in the past, I made Janura, a martial art for the Keleni inspired primarily by the Sicarii zealots of the last days of the Roman Occupation of Judea, but also by the Hashashin and the Assassins of Assassin's Creed: a style of brazen, daylight murder that risks the martyrdom of the assassin and has strong, religious connotations to it.  It was largely for this style that I included the Psi-Bade, the shorter Psi-Sword, in Psi-Wars at all. The Janura on the wiki is mostly just a power-up update of the old Iteration 6 version.  We have a Janura user in Undercity Noir, so there have been updates based on his feedback too.

Some people have pointed out that Sefelka Sonostra, the martial art of the Lithian Satemo, would make a great assassin martial art, and that's true!  It's actually my intention to include it in the Assassin Template at some point.  I'd like to do a small pass on the style first.  As noted with Seven Vector Swordsmanship, it's possible for a martial art to be available to more than one template.  The only real problem with Sefelka Sonostra is that it relies on you having psychic powers to power its precognitive defense, which the Assassin isn't guaranteed to have.

Psychic Vampirism

Of course, some assassins will have psychic powers!  I've always liked the idea of a psychic assassin, and the Ranathim, with their innate psychic vampirism, seem especially adept at it.  Christopher Rice wrote a psychic martial art for Psychic Vampirism and I, as a backer, got it, and I loved it. It deserved a power-up suite!  Which I gave it, here. It deserved to be in Psi-Wars itself, but it proved too unwieldy to do as written, and it's not practical to expect someone to emphasize every aspect of Chris's work.  So, as with other examples of me borrowing inspiration from his material, my final version got "cut up." In particular I focused on Reave itself, rather than grappling, steal life, etc.  The result is very much a Death Touch style. I have one move in the style that still references Chris's original and I claim for the style itself, for the original composition, that you need Chris's stuff. This isn't strictly true, as what I've done branches off from his original content and does some new things.  But please don't fault me for trying to funnel traffic towards one of the creators who regularly very useful material to Psi-Wars!

The current version of Reaver's Hand is an attempt to integrate the power directly into the martial art, as opposed to requiring you to get it before buying the style.  That makes it more self-contained.  I may expand on this with other styles too, so that a psionic martial art is actually its listed cost: if a 300-point assassin can be an Adept of one style, he can be an Adept of Reaver's Hand as well without needing to go hunt down the points for Reave on its own.  It's also different from the backer version, which emphasized pressure points and pressure secrets, which is still a concept I like very much, but it pulled the style in too many directions and required me to make questionable mechanics, such as perks that were probably okay, but mostly in the context of the character already possessing a means to bypass armor and if that means exists, why not just use that means, rather than trying to justify making other skills useful? Alas, this probably means we'll never see Pressure Points or Pressure Secrets see use in Psi-Wars because a psionic power is better and more appropriate, but that's also rather the nature of Psi_Wars and its emphasis on advantages over magical skills.

But What About...

Backers have been treated to the Nuclear Knives of Acheron, and some people on the discord may have heard rumors of Sliverblade, aka the "Riddick can kill you with a teacup" style.  I have others too. These four are where the Assassin begins, but it won't be the end. When will I get to them? I don't know, my plate is pretty full, and the Assassin has taken long enough, and these styles take a long time to write, and I didn't want to slow down the release of the Assassin. But I do intend to revisit them!

The Assassin

So here we have it: the Assassin. With this release, we have only the Spy, Commando and Mystic to catch up to the original Iteration 5 templates.  Templates like Occultist or Warrior may come later.

The point of the assassin is, of course, to showcase these exotic weapons and to combine it with stealth.  There's really not much more to the character than that, other than the ability to think ahead, trap foes, and possibly to be gorgeous for no real reason (If you can see the assassin to know how hot she is, she's not doing her job! But the "sexy ninja" is a time-honored tradition by this point, I suppose, and Psi-Wars unabashedly embraces the naughty aesthetic of old pulp novel covers, so I can hardly complain about sexy ninjas. It likely comes from eyebrow-waggling discussions of a ninja's flexibility, or perhaps some vague assertions that they might seduce their target to get close to them to kill them).

I've had some complaints about the "Pet Ninja." No, they don't murder your space dog or space cat.  I've often heard the term "pet" applied to a character who is devoted to a particular character, and very useful to that character: "Your pet bounty hunter" or "your pet assassin." Assassins seem the most likely to find themselves in this role, answering directly to some powerful character, and I created a lens to reference that.  I've also heard the term "pocket" to describe that sort of character too, so I might change it to that, but for now, I like the term.

Phoenix Cluster Poll 2 -- Refinement

 So, last months poll for the new Poll-Driven setting element, the Phoenix Cluster, is finished. All Backers can read the results here:

• SubscribeStar
• Patreon

Of course, the point of this is to be a series of polls. And, as always, once a poll is done, I'm often left with as many questions as answers, but we've at least narrowed down the nature of the Phoenix Cluster. In this month's poll, we'll fine tune some specifics of the broader setting, including:

• Where exactly the Phoenix Cluster is located and with what systems does it have a special relationship
• What unusual astronomical features it has
• What are some of the governments that make up the Phoenix Confederacy?
• What is the nature of the Westerly Clans?
• What the current situation of the tumultuous religions of the constellation is?
• What sort of aliens can you find in the cluster?
• Who were the ancient aliens that once occupied this region of space?
• When did the extra-galactic aliens finally arrive at the Cluster?
• When did particular major events happen?
• Who is the Disruptive Heretic and what made her so Disruptive?

$5+ ("Companion") backers can vote on the poll here:

• SubscribeStar
• Patreon

A Brainstorming on Psi-Wars Animals

 I mentioned blog discipline recently, and what I mostly meant was not discussing what I'm actually doing.  Some of it is because it's behind the scenes stuff for Undercity Noir, so I can't very well talk about that, but there's a lot of bits that will certainly end up on the wiki at some point, so why not talk about those some?

In this case, I've been tinkering with animals.

The Problems with Space Animals

These are a bit of a bane for me.  I've discussed them before, but in brief, and the rubber-to-the-road reality of beasties in Psi-Wars is tricky.

First, there's the fact that most of them are meaningless as encounters.  A tiger is already a questionable threat to a starting DF character; they're not a threat at all to an average Action character... provided they have their gun on hand (Catch them unarmed in the jungle, and then we might talk).  To a Psi-Wars commando, a tiger is a joke.  The poor thing can't even hurt him.

Space Opera lets us get around that somewhat.  After all, if there's a space tiger, you just assume it's about as much of a threat to you as a tiger would be to a fantasy character.  This is, after all, a redress of tropes: a space knight is just a space opera reskin of a knight, and so a space tiger is just a space opera reskin of a tiger.  But as noted before, the expectation in Psi-Wars is that we at least pay some lip service to physics, at least offer some technobabble as to why something works the way it does.  For example, we expect that a 2 lb rat will not have ST 100.  They might in Supers, or even Fantasy, but not in Space Opera, at least not without some excuse ("Their natural tactile TK").  If a serpent can deflect blaster fire with its scales, what the hell are those scales made out of? We have to have answers.

Once we have answered those questions, we need to stop and figure out how people ever got out of the stone-age.  If an alien race developed on a world of giant, armored space mammoths that can go toe-to-toe with a tank, why would they also develop tanks? Either the mammoths would have killed them all or demolished their civilizations, or the race would have domesticated these space mammoths and use them as tanks. In a sense, Avatar is totally correct: if that's what your wildlife looks like, then you can have a TL 0+10 society based on your master of the planetary biosphere alone.

Once we feel we've answered that question well enough, then we must turn our eye to how did they get here? If I say that Moros has giant space centipedes of doom, that's fine and totally allowed. But what if you're not on Moros? Then you can't encounter one.  And that's also fine, but that sharply limits the utility of a bestiary.  If I create 20 neat critters for Moros, then when you got to Sarai or Samsara, then those 20 critters just disappear and I've wasted my time.  Better would be to create creatures we can use in a variety of places.  So, how do they move around?

In essence, these are questions of utility ("why do they matter?") and complexity ("I don't want to create or memorize an entire world's worth of critters per planet, no matter how realistic it is").  There are also questions of thematic integrity.  Setting aside the realism of "several unique clades per planet," we would expect that when various races go to the stars, they bring something of their biosphere with them, so we can start to define the setting's animals in terms of specific ecosystems we want to explore.  The Tamjaran (Keleni) Clade. The Stygian (Ranathim) Clade.  The Glorian (Human) Clade and so on.  Not everything necessarily needs to be bound to a specific race, of course: there are worlds or regions with sufficiently interesting creatures that they're worth of independent discussion: The Arcadian Clade; the Zirata Clade; the Leviathan clade; the Hekatombian clade. But how do we define these as distinct without either getting too far from the familiar and without crossing our wires too much. How many flavors of space dog and space cow can we have before it's too much?

"Hey, I didn't know I needed that!"

 So, I finished the third session of Undercity Noir a week early, as one of the players couldn't make it on the normal day.  We finally met the client and his girlfriend, and the introduction is finally finished, and the players have been released into the world.  But an interesting thing happened during the negotiation: "I didn't know (X) was such an important skill!"

GURPS has this at the best of times: because it has so many skills, people can easily overlook them. However, these characters were built from templates, and I checked, and all the traits they were asking for were present. And one of the characters had all of them, because he followed his template closely and so he just had them without realizing they would be so useful, and the result was a rather amusing moment where the Bounty Hunter sighed and started to explain to the Con-Artist how to do her job. But in a sense, it fit.  So this felt more like players realizing certain skills had more value than they realized, not that they didn't realize they were options.

Will

I think they realized this was important, given how many successfully resisted the Keleni Telepathy of the femme fatale, but I just want to point out to anyone poking at Psi-Wars that Will is very useful in a psionic game.  I know, seems obvious, but I've had it come up in previous playtests.  I'm not saying you should jack your Will up to 20 on every character, but I am saying you'd get your points worth if you did.

Psychology

So this was the core trait that surprised people.  I had set up meeting the contact as a mini-action scenario (as I like to run the first few sessions as sort of a preparation of how the game will actually play out) and so when it came time to collect all the clues and plan how best to negotiate with the target, I noted that Psychology was one of the skills they could use for this, which I thought made sense, and also caused quite a scramble. Which surprised me, because Psychology is one of the most popular skills in my games, but I sense most players come at this from a different context.

I tend to build my games as very NPC heavy, with layers and layers of intrigue and mystery.  I do this for several reasons, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that I cut my narrative teeth on anime, romances and dramas.  I just like large casts of colorful NPCs with detailed and nuanced motivations.  And in particular, in a Heist, there's a major clash of personalities.  It's not just "the cops" that are coming after you, but a specific detective; there are rival gangs, and they have specific leaders; there's always some new guy added to the crew after the fact, and you need to assess if a good fit; there's the target of the heist, who has a specific personality and blindspots.  Having psychology allows you to construct a profile, to learn the context of why people do what they do. If you combine it with Empathy or Body Language, you know what they are feeling and why. So with players familiar with my games, it seems to come up a lot. I'm not saying it's a must have, just that people knew to my games seem surprised at how useful it is.

Holdout

This might actually be missing from some templates, but this came up very quickly, and it makes sense. A lot of previous playtests have been about soldiers or space knights who walk around in full armor, but this is in a city with lots of Imperial Security, lots of camera, lots of angry gangsters.  Carrying a holdout blaster or a force sword into a club carries a lot more risks, and rewards, than it does in most games.  So this has been quite a schooling for me in how holdout works.

Observation

I see some people complain about Observation.  When do you use it? When don't you? For some of them, it feels redundant if you have Perception.  But to me, Observation is about picking out details discretely. It's also about picking out pertinent elements of something, such as when you "case a joint." It's also cheaper than Perception, so to me it's always been a no-brainer, but I'm surprised by the number of people who don't have it in my group.

Running, Climbing and Jumping

It didn't come up in this session, but like with Psychology, I think a lot of players skip these.  After all, your ability to run really comes down to your Basic Move, Climbing seems pretty niche, and Jumping can default to DX if strictly necessary, so in the intense prioritizing that most PCs will do, while Acrobatics gets a vigorous nod, these parkour skills get less of one.  When is it going to come up, after all?

In Action, they come up all the time.  Action is about chase scenes, and chase scenes use these skills. Sure you can drive too, but there's always a point when you'll want to run.  This didn't actually come up this session, but the previous session and I think I already mentioned it in my thoughts on that session, as this pleased the player who took them, and they really made a difference: the Bounty Hunter who had minimal investment couldn't keep up, but the Assassin with maximum parkour not only caught up to the target, despite having a very late start, he managed to cut her off before the Bounty Hunter arrived. That tickled him pink.  I mention this more because if you're a budding Action player, be aware of the value of parkour skills!

I think if I finish my Cinematic Chase Framework, that'll help people more intuitively integrate chase scenes, as there's a lot of details in chase scenes that can get lost in the "Look just roll Running until it's obvious who will win." Getting a little help in creating the sort of dynamic chase scenes we see in action movies will make the utility of Climbing, Jumping and Acrobatics in chase scenes more obvious.

Thoughts on Campaign Framework Skills

I'll leave you with one last observation I've had with people interfacing with campaign frameworks in general.  In my experience, most GURPS players learn to tune out the garbage and focus on what matters. GURPS itself encourages this, because you can't even use Beam Weapons in a fantasy game, or Magery in a "Hard" Sci-Fi game.  Thus learning to filter the useful from the useless is a very important skill in a veteran GURPS player.

But part of the process of creating a Campaign Framework is pre-filtering the skills that exist, and adding additional utility to the skills that remain. Once this happens, another element of GURPS starts to rear its head: its emphasis of subtle utility. GURPS has a tendency to narrow down and focus on all the possible things a skill (or advantage) can do, and then emphasize those.  For example, in a typical White Wolf game, Brawl is the skill you use to punch people, and Medicine is the skill you use to heal people.  GURPS, by contrast, introduces a ton of nitty gritty techniques for Brawl and differentiates it into three different skills to determine exactly how you fight; Medicine breaks out into Diagnosis, Physician, Surgery, etc, and one begins to realize the power of knowing exactly what's gone wrong with someone's health, how to prescribe exactly the right dose, and how and when to use surgery to fix issues.  GURPS brings these nuanced details into view a lot better than other games, which can take some people by surprise, as they tend to dismiss a lot of GURPS skills as one-note or niche when it turns out, especially in a Campaign Framework, they can have a lot of value. This is not meant as a defense of the GURPS skill system (it can be exhausting to work with sometimes), just as an observation of what I notice happens with players when they interact with the details of a Campaign Framework.

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.

Backer Post: The Daemons of the Deep Engine

 

This turned into a longer project than I expected.  When I began Undercity Noir, one player wanted to play as a Zathan, a Ranathim Sorcerer, with connections to the Deep Engine, the monumental, necromantic infrastructure left over by the fallen Eldoth race. (Yeah, this is pretty "insider baseball"). But he didn't want to mess with Dimensional Induction, he went straight for a Daemonic Contact.  That is, he wanted one of the sentient servitors of the Deep Engine to act as his interface with the Deep Engine. Rather than risk exposure to the corrupting power of the Deep Engine itself, he'd ask the Daemon to do it.

"But I need some details on what Daemons are like."

Hence a month of working on this.  I dove into some of my weirder sources, and came up with at least three ideas.  Oh, but technically I'd need to cover military protocols, oh and more than one security daemon would be nice, oh and how did they handle transits between Deep Engine sites? Oh and I forgot Zathare daemons! Oh, and what about Corrupted Daemons!  And shouldn't you be able to fight them? And do you have to invest in them to interact with them? The result blew up from a quick three samples to a full treatise on the topic and ELEVEN daemons.

• The Carrion Lord: A surveillance daemon tasked with commanding, maintaining and building the the Ash Crows of the Deep Engine.
• The Cyber-Angel: A zathare daemon that exploits the Deep Engine to hack into physical computer systems, but has been corrupted with a messianic complex.
• The Knight of the Black Sun: A bored military daemon who once monitored the materiel of the Eldothic Union as well as commanded some its engines of mass destruction.
• The Lady of the Symoblic Donative: A vain daemon tasked with handling transactions and issuing Deep Coins.
• The Lethean Archivist: A data-collecting daemon that will exchange valuable information for memories.
• The Mysterious Stranger: A zathare daemon dedicated to helping sorcerers evade the security of the Deep Engine and, sometimes, to find love.
• The Slender Sentinel of Nightmares: A former security daemon now monstrously corrupted by the false Exarch, the Orphan King
• The Sorcerers’ Nemesis: A paranoid daemon tasked with securing the Deep Engine for zathan sorcerer infiltration.
• The Star Weaver: An overzealous daemon tasked with governing the transportation networks of the Deep Engine.
• The Unconquerable Wyrm: A zathare daemon that defeats the security of the Deep Engine through sheer, brute force.
• The White Magistrate: A corrupted security daemon once tasked with cleaning up necrokinetic overflow, but now uses its position to command the ghosts and dark gods that arise from broken Deep Engine sites.

I've been drip-feeding this to my backers for awhile, to give them a sense of momentum, but it's ready now.  You can read the entire work if you're a $3+ Patron and Subscriber. It clocks in at a bit more than 20k words. Once again, thank you to all my backers!

• Daemons of the Deep Engine (SubscribeStar)
• Daemons of the Deep Engine (Patreon)

Wiki Highlight: Federation Remnant Culture (Galactic Culture)

 The winner of this month's "Release the Balloon People" poll was Federation Remnant Culture, a lengthy document detailing the "standard" Galactic Culture of Psi-Wars.

I wanted to write it for a few reasons.  First, whenever I read up on a sci-fi game, I find myself at a loss as to how the world works.  With a fantasy setting, I assume it works like every fantasy novel ever written unless told otherwise (for example, I do not need to be told that taverns exist or how they work). For games set in the modern world, I can draw on real world experiences and cultures (and likewise, I can research historical settings).  But when it comes to sci-fi settings, I need to be grounded in how the day-to-day life works. Do kids go to school in Trinity: Aeon? What's a day of work look like in Transhuman Space? What does romance look like in Eclipse Phase? How do people dress in Sufficiently Advanced? And so on.

The answer to these questions in Psi-Wars are "pretty much just like you'd expect," and I wanted to emphasize that, to set the reader's mind at ease. Psi-Wars is to space opera what D&D is to fantasy, after-all, but I find it helps to be told that explicitly, so I don't have to worry.

That said, there are almost certainly in-universe things that tend to be very specific that players would like the option of name-dropping.  What TV shows do people watch in Psi-Wars? What drink does Space James Bond what shaken, rather than stirred? What game does a smuggler get caught cheating at? In principle, these don't matter: the character likes some TV show, the spy likes some drink, and the smuggler plays some game, and we can abstract this away (Current Affairs (Pop Culture), Connoisseur (Alcohol) or Gambling) but players often like to name-drop.  So the last section of culture mostly references these things and consists of a variety of names and simple concepts and some traits that a player might tie into them.

I released it as a draft to my backers rather than on the wiki because the real reason I wrote it was to settle on a baseline before I started writing Lithian culture, which is the next big project (and likely most important non-standard culture in the setting), and I wanted to know what I was contrasting it with, and what topics I should cover.  So I wanted that written up, and then once I had Lithian culture written up, I could compare, contrast and edit them to work better.  But once my backers overwhelmingly chose this as an option, I realized they're probably right: I can always go back in and edit Federation Remnant culture, it's extremely useful already, and it's going to serve as inspiration and a foundation for Lithian culture anyway.

So, I hope you enjoy it.  You can read it here.

Wiki Highlight: the Psion Template

 As one of Christopher Rice's patrons, I can participate in a regular poll where he releases on of his patreon specials to his blog.  I really appreciate it, and I thought it might be a nice option to do on my own blog, given how many of my specials are explicitly just previews: material that's likely useful or interesting, but isn't yet ready for the prime time for one reason or the other.  However, some tend to collect there for no particular reason, so I thought I'd offer to let people release one, and this month they chose The Psion Template.

Assassins: A Backer Roundup

 I'm terrible at advertising my Patreon/Subscribestar pages. In part, it's because I'm not really doing this for the money, and I feel like I'm sending around a collection plate every time I post advertisements for it, and that's not really the intention. It feels awkward.  I also tend to go long periods (though rarely more than a month) without posting to them, as I'm busy with the wiki or setting up a playtest, which is still content, just not exclusive content, but I think this turns some people away.  

Sometimes I create burst of content that ends on Patreon and/or Subscribestar and then I don't advertise it, because most of my backers are on discord and see it, and because I'm lazy so it doesn't always get on the Blog.  Even so, perhaps you're interested in supporting me or in seeing this content, but you want to know what you're getting, so I thought I'd draw your attention to it.

I've been working on material for the Undercity Noir playtest, set on Kronos, and this has created quite a burst of content, mostly focused on psychic powers, assassins, exotic weapons and hackers.  All of this is available on the $3+ tier except for a poll which is available to anyone.  Of course, anyone who subscribes gets access to my entire back catalog, if there's something in there that interests you.

Patreon or Subscribestar?

Chances are, if you're thinking about subscribing, you're thinking Patreon, and that's fine. But I also have Subscribestar (both because some of my backers asked for it, and because keeping all of my eggs in of one basket is not especially resilient).  The chief problem with Subscribestar, though, is that I currently only have 2 subscribers, and I need 5 before they'll let me pull my money or do other things.  So if you have no preference, if all things are the same to you, consider Subscribestar, though note that it's slightly less convenient as it doesn't use Paypal.  I will probably run a recruitment drive later this month to see if I can persuade enough people to sign up or swap over to start pulling my money from it. If you'd rather Patreon, though, that's fine.  I'm honestly glad to have anyone.

If you're interested in joining either service, you can follow the links in the "So you want to support this blog" sidebar, or you can just click through on what interests you and I'm sure the site will help you figure out what you need to figure out.  If you'd rather just give me some money for one-time access rather than set-up a long term relationship, hit me up in discordn or e-mail me and I'm sure we can work something out.

The Content Update

New Templates

The Psion Template: If there was ever a place with an excess of psychics, it's Kronos, with its weird spires and alien population. Psychics in Psi-Wars are closer to the characters from Push or to low-key X-men than the classic depiction of Force-wielders of Star Wars, and so I felt a template exclusively associated with them would be a nice way of emphasizing it.  I created the Psychic Power-Up packages in part to support them. This content likely won't be exclusive for long, as it's winning a poll for being released to the wiki.

• The Subscribestar Link
• Patreon Link

The Assassin Template: This is from all the way back in Iteration 4, I believe.  The idea of the Assassin was always to be a space ninja, closer to the Action 4 Ninja or Weapon Master than the Action 1 Assassin.  The problem in Iteration 7+ is that we need proper martial arts for them to explore, and exploring that has been much of my focus for the past few months.  Thus, I've been preparing for this particular template.  It still needs more work, mostly in tightening up the martial arts, so it'll be awhile before this gets on the wiki, but you can check out the rough draft of it now.

• Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

The Mechanic and the Hacker: I've been tinkering with expanding an idea I introduced before (but many people seem to have missed, so it might be worth revisiting) with half-cost "sidekick" templates for niche concept that don't fit full adventurers.  I'm also toying with "Cross-trained" skillset packages, and we needed a Hacker skillset that someone could slather over the Criminal template, so I worked on that too.  You can find previews of both at the link.

• The Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

New Martial Arts and Weapons

Awhile ago, I pondered how best to handle melee weapons that weren't force swords.  See, run-of-the-mill vibro just doesn't cut it.  The exotic weapons of the assassins would need to occupy their own niche, or they would need to be extraordinarily powerful in some highly specific way.  The overwhelming consensus on my discord agreed with this, so I've been brainstorming a variety of weapons and martial arts that the assassin could deploy when engaging in the brutal art of murder.  These aren't complete yet, mostly rough drafts and thoughts, and when they're finished, they'll end up on the wiki, but for now, if you want to see them in advance, here they are. They're especially useful if you want to play as an Assassin.

The Nuclear Knife: the poison-metal blade of Dungeon Fantasy inspired my first weapon.  I thought as I read it that it sounded a bit like polonium, but nobody would make a knife out of polonium, right? Well, why not? The Blight Blades of Acheron draw inspiration from that idea, but slather on some space-fantasy-tech radiation powered by both the metal and energy cells within the blade to create a unique weapon that is fantastically lethal, and as dangerous to the wielder as the target.

• Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

The Ceramic Katana: One reason I struggle with non-melee force swords is physical swords, especially the katana, occupy a legitimate place in the sci-fi settings, but how could they possibly compete with a force sword? Arguably, they couldn't, but there are some possible niches they could exploit that the force sword couldn't.  This explores more than just such a weapon, but also explores what might happen if you take the tactical math of Combat Calculus and Shineido and apply it to the ancient art of Kendo.

• Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

The Monowire Whip: This isn't really a new weapon, as it's just there in GURPS Basic.  However, it's a weapon I have previously discarded as "not very Star Wars."  However, Psi-Wars has evolved into a setting that can support more cyberpunk tropes, and so I think the monowire whip could fit well.  I've come up with a power-up martial art inspired by (but not the same as) Monowire Mugging from Pyramid #3/9.

• Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

The Killing Arts of the Umbral Rim: Iteration 6 features "Janura," a Keleni assassination technique inspired by the real-world Sicarii, Assassin's Creed, and elements of the Keleni culture.  All it really needed was an update to a power-up structure. While I was at it, I thought I might return to Reaver's Hand, a set of power-ups I made when Christopher Rice's patreon special dropped.  The style that came out is pretty different from what he did (my power is different too), and I think this one is still evolving, as I stumbled across some interesting ideas, and received some interesting criticisms, while working on this one.  You can find both at the link.

• Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

Setting Material

Mithna Zatharos: Ages ago, I had a poll for "the Fourth Mithna," a noble house of the Ranathim.  Mithna Temos won, and is on the wiki now.  But I really wanted to explore the Witch-Kings of Kronos, as they would really fit into the adventure I was prepping. I came up with my own material, a "false Mithna" that used sorcery to steal the secrets of aristocracy from the other Mithna of the Ranathim Tyranny.  This one is a little complicated, and you'll need some knowledge of the Deep Engine to fully understand it.

• Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

Polls

Release the Balloon People: Christopher Rice has a regular poll, "Release the Balloon People" where you can vote on a Patreon special and have it released on his blog.  It's a nice concept and I love the name, and it's especially appropriate for Psi-Wars as most of the backer material are previews rather than exclusives, so this is more about getting material out sooner than later.  This is open to all Patrons, so if you're curious what you can get for $1, this is where you start. But act soon! I think the poll ends in the next couple of days.

• The Subscribestar Link
• The Patreon Link

Wiki Spotlight: Hacking in Psi-Wars (with Backer Special Preview)

 

Hacking has turned out to be much more important than I originally thought it would when I first put together Psi-Wars back in Iteration 1.  If you watch Star Wars, or even most Space Opera out there, Hackers don't play much of a role.  After all, Space Opera is action where square-jawed heroes punch evil warlords in the jaw and rescue the scantily clad damsel; the pallid nerds who hide from the sun in their basement while hacking even corporations is something more appropriate to Cyberpunk.

But I should have known better.  "Slicer" is a major concept in pretty much every Star Wars RPG I've come across, and indeed I'm pretty sure the term comes from the extended universe, and if you pay attention, there's actually a ton of hacking being done in the Star Wars films, it's just generally by robots. I had originally pushed that concept onto robots, but in practice, I find that it becomes pretty central to the action.  Because all security systems are controlled by a computer, the easiest way to bypass systems is to find a terminal and just hack the systems (open the door, disable the cameras, etc).  This makes the hacking robot much too important to leave to just an NPC, and much too interesting to deny to players.  So, we need hackers.

There's another problem with hacking, which is what made me reluctant to give it much of a treatment: a lot of RPGs that have hacking in them treat it as an entire subgame.  You must invest a ton of resources and time into hacking, and whenever hacking comes up, it takes a big chunk of the game.  I definitely didn't want that: Psi-Wars is a game about space knights dueling, not about a deep exploration of cyberspace that takes an hour.  Fortunately, Action handles this nicely: you just spend an hour and roll Computer Hacking; done.  The only problem with this is we lose some individualization: all hackers have high levels of hacking and everything else (nerdy computer, mischievous anarchist, calculating criminal).  GURPS Cyberpunk (at least as per Pyramid) gets around this with techniques, but those techniques assume the sort of deep investment in cyberspace that I want to avoid.  So I came up with something else: inspired by the magic perks, I thought we could spice up the gameplay with some player-activated perks.  Rather than worry about a ton of details, we just have our base system, and the player can introduce complexity via little bonuses that, ideally, don't take up too much time.

So, where do we get our hackers? Do we have a hacker template? That feels a bit big for me.  The Spy could certainly be a hacker, but that's just one of the spies many skills. So, instead, a skillset feels more reasonable to me, especially if we slather it over something like the Criminal Sidekick Template that I put up on Patreon awhile ago. This left me thinking about Skillsets, as I've been exploring them as an optional set of power-ups, but the more I mess with them, the more it feels like they should be more like the 50-point cross-class templates from Dungeon Fantasy than the Skillsets of Action.  The Action Skillsets are just a slightly chunkier way to build a character.  You can do that, but it tends to blur niche, which isn't necessarily a problem (and not something I worry about in Psi-Wars) and I find that the general thrust of Psi-Wars tends indelibly towards a sort of specialization: if you're psychic, you could easily invest 100+ points in psychic powers; if you're a space knight, you could easily invest 100+ points in your force swordsmanship.  Couldn't skillsets work in a similar way? So I'm going to try an approach of a "50 point" lens, where there's 25 points of minimum investment and 25 additional discretionary points, to allow a little more variety among the characters, and to create a list of things a player might invest in, if they want to dump another 50 points into a particular skillset specialization.

Of course, all of this was inspired by the Undercity Noir adventure, as we have at least one Hacker in the mix (and, I noticed, a lot of NPC hackers as sysads).  Thus, I wanted to get this out sooner than later.

The biggest change made to gear and the hacking rules is the removal of "superior" hacking gear that grants a bonus.  As I worked on the rules (especially using the surprisingly superior Thinking Machine rules which I had previously unfairly dismissed) I noticed that the typical computer that players would hack would ultimately be mainframes, which meant you need a pretty powerful machine to even attempt to hack.  This also eliminates one of my complaints with UT, which is that money can buy skill and character traits.  Now, your ability to hack is determined entirely by skill, not the wealth necessary to buy superior hacking hardware.

• The slightly updated hacking rules are found here
• The hacker gear is found here
• The Hacker skillset is going to be a Backer Exclusive for now, with a bonus "Mechanic" sidekick template.
• SubscribeStar
• Patreon

Wiki Highlight: Psychic Vampirism Power-Ups

 

I've been pretty busy behind the scenes working on Undercity Noir; the PCs are beginning to come together, but I feel like I'm still behind on a lot of elements.  One of those elements was psychic power-ups.  I wanted to have both Psychic Healing and Psychic Vampirism up, as the Ranathim and Keleni were going to feature prominently in the one-shot (though I didn't realize how prominently until I saw the proposed PCs), but my goodness are these power-up sets exhausting and time-consuming.

Why Psychic Vampirism and Psychic Healing? You're not buying the Keleni/Ranathim argument above? Well, I find that the act of writing material teaches you how to write better material.  The best RPG material of an edition tends to come more towards the end, rather than the beginning.  If I started with beloved abilities like Telepathy and ESP and ended with abilities most people don't care about, like Psychic Healing, then the most loving detail and cool ideas would end up in the least used abilities, so I'm trying to "learn the ropes" with these less popular abilities.

Psychic Vampirism was especially frustrating, as it forced me to confront overpriced afflictions, deal with weird, overly broad detection abilities, and a difficult cost structure that puts most "work horse" Psychic Vampirism beyond the budget of casual, minor psychics. In particular, I still find myself struggling with Power Theft and working that into more affordable categories.  Sure, I know, some people point out that if something is powerful, it should cost a lot of points, but a lot of people like the "Zero to Hero" journey of discovery their psychic powers and then slowly unlocking their abilities with them.  The cheapest you can possibly get for Steal Power is 55 points, which means you go from Weak Latent Psi (Psychic Vampirism) to absolutely minimum Steal Power with a little skill in about 12 sessions at 5 CP per session (which is pretty generous) without getting anything else.  There's a reason I break down upgrades down into 25 point chunks, and a lot of people still find that overly chunky.  So I'd like to break down Steal Power too, if I can.

I ran out of time.  I wanted to have more Rare Powers (Karmic Theft and Unstable Power Theft) but the end of the month is racing up at me, and it's better to have something than nothing.  I can always go back and add some more abilities.

You can check out the new psychic vampirism power-ups here.

More Kronos Musings: Geography

Now that we know something of its history, what does it look like today? I generally don't like "island worlds" though on some level it's unavoidable. Most games can't handle one fully detailed world (Earth) and even your most far ranging fantasy games rarely escape a single continent. Still, we can add a few more details than just "one city." Nonetheless, let's start with one city.

Wiki Highlight: Psionic Gear

 "Did we ever decide what Psi-Tech was available in Psi-Wars?"
"It varies from tradition to tradition, from world to world."
"Yeah, sure, all technology does that.  But, like, what can my psychic character buy for Undercity Noir?"
"I... uh..."

That's a good question.  What Psi-Tech is available? To be sure, there are highly specific items, such as memory crystals or resonance staves, that relate to a single group or culture.  But broadly speaking, what can people get?

So I sat down to think about this, and I came up with the following psychic tech as fundamental to Psi-Wars:

Psychic Testing Gear: Obviously, you need Zener cards and weird EM sensors that go beep and white noise machines that one can attempt to hear voices in, etc.

Psi-Damper Collars: We need a way to capture rogue psis, so we need Psi-Damper collars.  This one combines the neuronic restraint with the electronic collar for a full suite.  There's also a helmet for that cool, cyberpunk psi-look of a rogue psi in a helmet that covers their eyes to prevent them from using their evil eye on you.

Mind Shields: Obviously, people will want to protect themselves from psychic attack.  Rather than a lame helmet, let's go with a mask. I've also added the mini mind shield, because the idea of someone shielding themselves with a token or a jewel is cool.  I've not included Mind Shield Circuitry: it exists in Psi-Wars, but you get it as part of a pre-built helmet, generally.

Sensory Deprivation Chambers: More of an Akashic thing, but anyone can use them, and it's a signature of Psi-Wars that reminds you that the "magic" of Psi-Wars is closer to cold-war psychic powers than it so the space magic of Star Wars.

Psi-Amplifiers

This is what it's really about, isn't it? So let's give it its own section.  The headband is the go-to default, but I tend to see the headband as more of a crest however; while it didn't make it into the final art of the Maradonian lady, a crest or halo behind her head was in the art notes.

However, I noticed in the Psi-Tech notes that the rules for the amplifiers is that they halve the cost of extra-effort, which is no doubt why our resident psychic was so insistent on knowing if they're available.  Alas, I don't think I can allow this particular rule, because the rules for Psi-Tech never assumed you were going to be using Godlike Extra Effort, and I think that might break the rules. I can, however, add ER to them, integrating psychotronic batteries into the design.

Of course, if we're going to talk about different traditions, why not several different amplifiers? I've created the default "maradonian crown" added a wild, psychic super-collar/harness that's battery powered, a gauntlet drawn from Pyramid #3/69, and a Ranathim crown.  They have slightly different rules for where the ER comes from, but in all cases, it's about 10 points, or enough for 5 techniques or increasing your godlike extra effort up to 5 times.  I'm not sure how well that'll play out, but we'll see.  The prices are a bit high, but they're based on psychotronic batteries costing $10,000, a headband clocking in at $6000 (or a helmet clocking in at $25,000), and then adjustments either for an inferior product, variant ER regeneration rules, and styling, and then capped about about $25,000 because that's one signature gear point.

All of this together should cover our bases and give players a few things to play with.  You can check them out here.

More Kronos Musings: History

 So, quite some time ago, I announced a playtest, a heist; we did a poll, and Kronos won out.  I expect it did so because it's an interesting, alien world set in the midst of an otherwise human dominated part of space, and that's pretty much all we knew about it at the time.  I believe I've made some musings on it before, but let's do another iterative cycle on it, where I simply walk through some basic logic, and what I need to make it an interesting heist location.

I was originally going to post the whole thing at once, but it turned out to be way too big for me to handle, so here it is in the first chunk.

What is Kronos? Why is Kronos?

So, let's start with why Kronos even ended up in the Psi-Wars atlas.  One of the things that irritates me about a lot of space history is the timelessness of it.  Star Wars is the worst, of course, with Coruscant being a big, urban capital world for basically all of galactic history, at least as far back as the Old Republic.  This would be like deciding that Rome was the capital of the world for all time, when it wasn't even the capital of Rome for the entire history of the Roman empire! Things move, they change, and they get left behind.  I wanted to express that, and to acknowledge the slow shift in power from the alien empires that made up the early history of the Psi-Wars galaxy.  Once upon a time, the power of the galaxy lay centered more towards the "eastern" half of the galactic core, around Kronos, between the Umbral Rim of the Ranathim, and the Arkhaian Spiral of the Eldoth.  Then came the Alexian Crusades and the conquest of the galaxy by humanity, and the center of power shifted to the "West" of the galactic core, closer to the Glorian Rim of humanity, and Sovereign.  This makes Kronos "the old capital."

So, in a sense, Kronos has always been a historical world.  It's had a few name changes, from Chronos (time) to Cronus (the titan, the king of the bygone age) to Kronos (an aptly confusing blend of the two), all meant to represent this notion of Kronos as a world deeply embedded in the history of the setting.  Thus, it's most distinguishing feature is that it featured strongly in, and retains features of, previous eras, making it something of a time capsule world.

But I don't want to go too far in that direction.  We often freeze locations in history based on a preferred narrative perspective.  I think Egypt suffers the most from it: when we discuss Egypt, most people immediately think of the pyramids, mummies, great monuments to bygone eras, the nile, palm trees, etc.  But this was _but one moment in time_ and from a very long time ago, once that was trumpeted wildly in the early 20th century, a moment in time that has set a lot of the tone of pop culture. But Egypt has been many, many things since, from a seat of Greek power to the breadbasket of the Roman empire, to one of the most important regions for Christianity to a seat of power of the Muslim world, home to Saladin and the Ismaili sect that later spawned the Hashashin, to the home of the Mamluks, and I could go on and on. I wanted Kronos to feel like that: it was not some world frozen in a single era, but one that had accumulated history, like layers of dust, over the eons, and you could see all of them every day, such as being in Egypt, with the pyramids at your back, a coptic church before you, and hearing the Islamic call to prayer.

Backer Preview -- The Psion Template Draft

The more I’ve messed with Psi-Wars, the more obvious it is to me that psionics is different from the Force. The Force is closer to magic: A jedi doesn’t use his power, he calls upon the force to perform a task for him. In principle, this means any force user can perform any feat, and we see this often in the films, where a Jedi with no dark-side training will wield the powers of the dark side powered only by their rage. This suggests that “unique” powers should not be possible. We do see unique powers, but they’re never adequately explained, sometimes described as “rare gifts.”

Psi-Wars uses a different approach: people have their psychic power, and this grants access to Communion, which means they have the room for a quirky, unique power as a gateway to the more universal power. While most psionic abilities are fairly similar (TK-Grab is TK-Grab) there should still be room for weird and unique powers (“I kill people in their dreams!”). The more we go down this route, the more the Psis of Psi-Wars look less like Jedi and more like the characters from Push, or the X-men.

This template is an attempt to embrace that character aesthetic. It isn’t the Mystic template: while you can make a fortune teller or a healer with this, the idea is more of a strictly sci-fi feeling psychic character, typically a kid whose strange powers have erupted, or a powerful psychic on the run from the conspiracy, etc. There is some crossover with other psychic templates: some of the innovations with Secrets, Enemies and Licenses should be ported over to Space Knights, and this should be balanced and contrasted with Mystics, and I’m not sure where edge cases, such as Zathare sorcerers should go. However, this is a good start, and we can start exploring the idea now, and solidify it more fully later.

This is a Backer Post for Fellow Travelers ($3+)

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Wiki Highlight: the Criminal Organizations of Psi-Wars

 Man, this has been a thing I've been thinking about for literally years now, so it's nice to finally get it down on paper, so to speak.  At last, I have a sketch of the Criminal Organizations of Psi-Wars up and available. Not all of them, of course: rebellions and pirate fleets will (probably) have their own discussion, as will occult conspiracies.

This is one of those posts that leaves me feeling like it's simultaneously "too much" with too many "example" organizations with too much detail included, but at the same time, not enough, as people will doubtlessly want to know more about particular organizations, and want more organizations.  That'll come though.  As an extra treat, Subscribers and Patrons can vote on what organizations I give greater detail to, and later, if the stars align, I'd like to do a poll wherein we create our own criminal organization.

Enjoy!

Crime in Psi-Wars

I’ve been quietly working at criminal elements in Psi-Wars, including the release of the Security Agent Template and the Outcast background.  But what sorts of crimes are we actually committing that the cops need to stop us? While not a strictly necessary thing (crime isn’t so different in Psi-Wars from the ordinary world), thinking about it helped me sort out my thoughts.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive exploration, just a meandering musing on the sorts of crime we might see in the Psi-Wars universe, especially those organized criminals might focus on.  I’m not exactly a law enforcement expert, but if we approach this with a little thought and a focus on the cinematic, I think we’ll make some headway.

Most crimes in Psi-Wars will be familiar to anyone familiar with the 20th century, as that’s the core inspiration for pulp works which, in turn, inspire Psi-Wars. Nonetheless, the “space” part of “space opera” implies some sci-fi considerations, and thus some sci-fi crimes!

I will also note that crime, especially in action films like the Fast and the Furious and various heist films tend to be depicted in a glamorous light.  That glamour quickly fades when you look very close at criminality.  Psi-Wars is, while decidedly salacious, family friendly, so I’ve tried to elide certain realities and not discuss some of the more squeamish aspects of crime, but the implications of certain criminal elements are inescapable.