Why is Psi-Wars Armor So Heavy?

 

Mavrick pointed out on the Discord that Psi-Wars armor seems a bit heavy for its description, and asked why this was.

Generally speaking, Psi-Wars matches Ultra-Tech pretty closely, assuming a Battleweave armor is roughly on par with Energy Cloth with 2/3 the DR for the weight. An Energy Cloth suit is 8 lbs, and a Battleweave bodysuit is 8 lbs. There's a bit of a discrepency in that the Energy Cloth suit covers "all" while the Battleweave body suit covers "body and limbs" and so is slightly heavier, but this is because the values in Ultra-Tech are a little generous when you work out their actual values in the armor design system (they're likely Optimized despite their descriptions depicting them as Fabric), which is what I eventually did. So that's the short answer: based on Ultra-Tech, the values are close enough to correct to not worry about the discrepancy.

Sci-fi "Armor"

But in the conversation, he raised a more interesting point: what does this have to do with clothing? I tend to picture battleweave bodysuits as skin-tight garments that super-heroes or super-spies often wear, that's inexplicably tough because it's the future! This hearkens to works like John Wick, where he can wear what looks like a perfectly ordinary suit yet is magically armored "because technology." This allows the character to blend fashion with protection, which is a hallmark for Psi-Wars, especially maradonian characters.

(As an aside, I worry about this sometimes. There are a few elements in Psi-Wars, such as how Extra-Effort works with psi abilities, and the fact that anyone can have DR "for free" but only if you know about it. They represent little complexities that make sense, but are easy for a newbie to miss, and I hate creating "newb traps" in design. But on the other hand, I imagine most people will imagine their sci-fi character, at least those outside of the planetary romance realms of the Umbral Rim and the Sylvan Spiral, as wearing a full covering, and might be pleased to learn that this provides DR).

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.

Organizing the Psi-Wars Organizations

 So, I paused my grand Umbral Rim rollout to write up some basic corporations, because I've noticed people sometimes ask questions about them and I have those answers and it would be nice if they were on the wiki.  Also notice that despite my best efforts to keep Psi-Wars from devolving into Cyberpunk, it's definitely taking on some elements of that, and that means giant megacorps.  I suspect this is because I "let GURPS be GURPS" and Ultra-Tech + Action skews heavily towards Cyberpunk, and even Star Wars does, once you ditch the movies and go to the EU (which even introduced hackers slicers).

Then I found myself staring at the Patron cost for a Corporation and the rank levels.  And this has been bugging me for awhile.  Way, way back in the day, I argued that Psi-Wars should aim at the 15-point Patron and the 8 Rank structure.  Why? Because this is how Action worked: the Pulling Rank request numbers line up at the 15 point patron level, and GURPS typically settles on an 8 Rank structure by default.  But does this actually make sense?

One of the things I learned from discussing Psi-Wars melee with my community is they tend to like Psi-Wars as full on GURPS Ultra-Tech space opera, where all the numbers are big. People don't wield swords because of a handwave about how it looks on screen, but because they have some sort of crazy, over the top technology that will absolutely destroy you from up close.  They want the aesthetic of space opera, but they want some sort of excuse for it so it has the veneer of plausibility, preferrably in a way that sounds comic-book-awesome.

So ages ago, I whipped up a Patreon special on the scale of the Empire where I muddled through how large the Empire would be. I tend to downplay things from literally millions of stars with trillions of people per star to "just" thousands of stars with millions of people, but you still end up with crazy numbers like multiple fleets of 5-25 multi-billion dollar dreadnoughts, and when I say that, the response is not "Wow, that's unwieldy" but "COOL!"

The question then becomes can Psi-Wars handle more extensive organizations, and should it handle more extensive organizations?

Ugh; Social Traits are the worst when it comes to world building!

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
  

Five Years of Psi-Wars

 It's a new year, so time for a new retrospective!

Oh, and yes, I did get my Wordpress Blog unsuspended.  I'm debating whether it's worth leaving it there.  On the one hand, it's all already there.  On the other hand, eventually I'd want to pay for that.  And do I want to pay for it given the hiccups I've already seen? I'll keep my eye on it. As a friend suggested: given the various stresses in my life, it might be better to worry about what relaxes me (writing posts) and maintain my energy for what needs my attention most (my family, my work) and once that eases up, then I can focus on the proper migration. 

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!

The Guns of Psi-Wars

I'm pretty sure I've banged on about this before, but I've made an effort to include more alien races in Psi-Wars (there will be a post on that soon) and I've been exploring the alternate tech of alien groups like the Ranathim Tyranny and the Mug Atheocracy, which has emphasized the need to explore guns, and my own research has begun to finally bear some fruit.  As a result I've found myself confronted with the core issues with the Guns of Psi-Wars. I'm sure I've discussed this before, but there's new material before, so I apologize if this comes across as repetitive.

So, let's start with does Psi-Wars need guns? I think it does, and it needs them in the same way that settings it draws inspiration from all have guns too, despite having access to other, better weapon.  Star Wars has projectile rifles despite having blasters; 40k has slug throwers despite having micromissile "bolt" guns; Dune has Maula pistols despite having lasguns. These weapons tend to be either niche weapons meant to get around a particular problem, or they're primitive weapons used by factions that lack access to better weapons.  I particularly want to explore the latter, because the world of clean blasters and elegant, carbide armor is the Valorian Empire and the Galactic Alliance, not the world of post-apocalyptic techno-savages or primitive aliens.  Guns also allow us to deliver warheads down range.  Psi-Wars definitely has guns in a strictly literal sense in the form of grenade launchers, and weapons that fire poison darts certainly fits some factions well.

So, if we have a need for guns, how do we design them, and how do we make them fit? These two questions have plagued me, but I think I finally have some answers.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Rejects

 No, this isn't about a race called "the Rejects." I came up with a bunch of races that didn't make the cut because I couldn't quite make them work. I thought I'd lay them out and discuss some of the ideas that I rejected, because they might prove fruitful to you, dear reader, or they might inspire something with a looser set of restrictions than this fairly harsh challenge.

The Arctic Monkey

Features: Blue Skin [0]; Digitigrade [0]; Infravision [0]; Tail [0] Temperature Range (5° to 60°) [0]

So this was my first scratched-pad example that popped into my head.  Most of it works fine, and it even makes sense: this is a race native to a very cold environment and there are likely to be large temperature gradients, so it has learned to "see" by that temperature gradient. IR vision arguably has less problems with it than Ultravision does, so it could even prove to be a useful, if blurry, feature to have.

I have an issue with temperature range, though. A recurring theme you'll see throughout this series is that features look like disadvantages in the wrong context. It's not to say they're poorly balanced, but if you have a tightly defined set of assumptions about play, the more someone veers outside of that, the more of a problem they will have.  This race isn't too bad: they're mostly going to complain that you need to turn the heating down to the point where humans (Ranathim, Keleni, Karkadann, Mogwai...) start rubbing their arms and complaining that it's cold (Asrathi, Gaunt and Traders, in their space suits, might not mind, though). In an adventure, though, they're going to suffer a lot more in the heat. For example, in 90° requires an HT roll every 30 minutes to not lose one FP; the Arctic Monkey would need the same, but would lose 2 FP every time they failed the roll, and would start to lose fatigue at reasonable temperatures, like 70°.  This isn't so bad, not untenable, and balanced by the fact that they'd be fine when Ranathim are questioning their wardrobe choices.  But it does encourage us to ponder a question:

Who cares?

When's the last time you played Psi-Wars and made people roll HT for the heat?  I've run 4 games now, and only one was ever in an environment where characters might be concerned about heat. Much of a game is going to take place climate controlled environments, and characters have access to climate controlled armor.  And I've been fighting to get people out of armor.  If we made a race of sultry Ice Queens, or truly weird and horrifying creatures from beneath the ice, how are you going to know if they're covered up all the time?  Worse, when it does come up, nobody is going to remember, because it comes up so rarely!

There's a few things we can do to fix this, if we really wanted to focus on it.  First, let's change how this temperature thing works.  I quite like the mechanics of Low-Pressure Lungs, as it's easier to remember bands than it is to remember specific numbers. Humans risk losing 1 fatigue every 30 minutes when t's below 35°, or above 80° (though we can simplify this latter number to 90°).  They suffer a penalty to HT to resist this loss at -10° and lose one additional fatigue for all exertions after it hits 90° and 2 additional fatigue at over 120°.  If we wanted to "shift" our arctic aliens one band colder, that would mean they would be fine likely from about -10° to 35° (45°, rather than 55°); we might say they don't start suffering HT penalties for the cost until -60°, and they suffer the increased fatigue cost from 35° to 80° (55° band rather than 30° band) and then +2 additional fatigue from 90° to 120° and they start to burn after 120°.  Is that a feature? Well, I think technically what you're looking at is a slightly reduced comfort band (a quirk) and a slightly increased "hot" band (maybe a weird variation of Temperature Tolerance as a perk?), so probably a feature, and it's easier to remember: if it's normal for a human, it's hot for an Arctic Monkey, and if it's hot for a human, it's double-hot for an arctic monkey, and it's Cold for a human, it's normal for an Arctic Monkey, et cetera, you get the idea.

Next, I'd want to make the player of the Arctic Monkey think about temperature a lot. I'd give them technology that depends on low temperatures (quantum computers? Superconductors?) or some sort of benefit from natural ambient cold, as opposed to climate-controlled cold (or at least some reason to take the armor off and be subject to natural environmental conditions), and possibly some ability to adjust temperature (Cryokinesis).

That brings us to the second problem with this design: it doesn't really do anything interesting. You're hot everywhere, and you see in IR you look funny. A funny look is already "enough" for a visual medium, but for a game, we want a funny mechanic to emphasize our alien nature.  The proposals for making temperature more important would help, though.

I think if I turned this into a final race, I'd keep the blue skin, the lowered temperature band rather than the weird temperature tolerance, the IR vision and ditch the digitigrade and tail.  Add some temperature mechanic gameplay and I think we'd be alright.  I think blue-skinned, red-eyed people with white-or-black hair would be great.  Put them in the Arkhaian and make them allies of the Empire, perhaps with one achieving great success in the Imperial Navy, I dunno.

The Gasping Maggo-Pillar

Features: Born Biter 1 [0]; Light Exoskeleton [0]; High Pressure Lungs [0]; No Legs (Slithers) [0]; Potential Form [0].

Most of my flailing about with Zero-Template races was an effort to find a truly bizarre and physiologically strange race that I could do for zero points and fit into the Sylvan Spiral.  The zero point No Legs options seemed promising, so I started with Slithers.

"Slithers" would imply something like a naga: the race would still have a head and two arms, but would have a serpentine tail.  However, that also implies a degree of flexibility, or possibly a constriction attack, etc, all of which would cost points, so that was out. Rolls would almost be better, with something like a robot that has a humanoid torso and head atop a ball-structure that it moves around on, but that's not an alien, that's a robot.  

What else could reasonably limit the flexibility of a slitherer?  Well, what if we gave it an exoskeleton? Worms are still highly flexible, but maggots might not be. Can you have a 0-point exoskeleton? Here's what Space has to say:

On small insects (a rigid exoskeleton) is not much different from skin

Hmmm. Okay. Maybe. But it also doesn't cover the costs of much.  If a light exoskeleton justified buying DR and allowed you to avoid sunburn, it's a perk, right? Plus I think most people would imagine at least a DR 1. And in any case, a man-sized maggot is going to be horrifying.  That means a disad, and we can't do that.  What sort of slithering insectoid can we have? Oh, what about a caterpillar? Why must I always go with maggots? Ugh, anyway. They don't really slither so much as have lots and lots of legs, but I think we could arguable wave the difference; it might be a slithering thing that looks like a colorful caterpillar and have nice, soft fuzzy bits that make people go "Aww, I don't feel the immediate urge to murder it."

Born Biter is more me playing with whatever features I could jam on, and High Pressure Lungs might be, I dunno, it comes from a dense jungle world rich in oxygen (explaining its large size). The X-pressure Lungs are another good example of "features that feel like disadvantages" because I've never seen a Psi-Wars game take place in an environment with high atmospheric pressure.  At least you can sort of justify Low-Pressure Lungs by claiming that an asteroid has Trace atmosphere, you can treat it as Very Thin (You'll still suffocate, but you can walk around without a space suit on), and a moon might have Very Thin atmosphere, which you can breath like Thin, so it's plausible that it will come up, but it's implausible that high pressure worlds will come up unless we went out of our way to make them, likely the world the race is from, making them a "Dryad" race that never wants to leave its "Tree."  So, it's neat, but I'd ditch it.

Finally, if we're talking a magg... caterpillar, then we're talking about a larval form. Template Toolkits 2 has an interesting feature called potential form. It means that the character can make a one-way transformation at some point.  Our maggot caterpillar can become a horrifying beautiful fly-demon butterfly.  This means we can push our complex, expensive template down the line.

But why stop at one thing it can become? One interesting concept might be a race with more than two genders. How would that work? I don't know, we could do some research.  There are options like all three need to be involved (very exotic), or you run into things that are all able to breed, but the result of their breeding creates different things (an X and a Y always result in more Xs and Ys, but a Z and an X might result in a Z or a Y, and a Z and a Y might result in a Z or an X).  I seem to remember reading about actual animals that have this sort of construction.  But we might also imagine our race a bit like an ant: after it hits maturity, it morphs into one of the "Castes" of the hive and is permanently in that state: warrior, worker, queen, etc.  So we could give the player a choice of templates to choose from once they mature.

This is neat, but I'm not sure how nice this is when it comes to gameplay. In practice, you're just delaying your choice of alien race, and then choosing one later on. If you knew up front that you wanted to play a maggo-pillar queen why not, just, play a maggo-pillar queen right off the bat?  There's some narrative tension to be gained from the change, especially if the player has no control ("Let's roll to see what you become") but whatever benefits you get are lost once the change has happened (and a random change has, uh, some potential downsides as far as player experience is concerned).

I think a more interesting mechanic might be a race that can change its form at will.  Perhaps they cocoon for a day, and when they come out, they're in an upgraded form that can only last for so long before they tire, sleep and revert to their original form. This becomes like an intense, physical form of spell-preparation, where you know what you want, what you plan, and you build for it, but once you're set, you're committed.  But only for awhile, and then you can play with something else.

This concept arguably encroaches on the schticks of the Vikuthim or the Ithin-Kor, but I think there's enough room for multiple shape-changing bug-things, given different bug forms.

Incidentally, one concept I toyed with and discarded was this, from Template Toolkits 2:

If a race has a mouth, as most biological races do, and its parts offer more extensibility, flexibility, and opposability than do human mouthparts (e.g., a parrot’s beak and tongue), this can be pressed into service as an arm, usually Short and with No Physical Attack

"Is that maggo-pillar holding a blaster in its mouth? Can it shoot like that? Oh he just threw the safety with his side mandible. He's... gargling something threatening around the gun, I think we better listen to... whatever it is he's saying."

If I had points, I'd be so tempted to have an armless maggo-pillar with a crazy flexible mouth that has the sort of precision and dexterity to pick locks, fire blasters, type on a computer (leaving wet, sticky keys), etc.

The Deep-Song Walrus-Man

Features: Doesn't Breath (Gills) [0]; Semi-Aquatic [0]; Subsonic Speech [0]

Did you know a Tritonoid morphology is a feature? You can be a fish with a man's body for zero points.  Of course, this is useless in most Psi-Wars games, because the action generally doesn't take place in the water.  Doesn't Breath (Gills) isn't such a problem: we can give the character some sort of water-breathing apparatus to walk around in the air. But being unable to walk on land is a problem.  Semi-Aquatic allows it, though.  The character would have a lower half of not a fish, but a seal: walking its four flipper-legs.  Well, waddling.  It would average a ground-move of 1. But hey, water-move of 5!  Finally, subsonic speech is a feature if it's the only thing you can do. Does that give you Subsonic hearing [5] or [0] for free? I don't know. I hope not the latter.

The problem? Nobody would play this thing. This is the prime example of "feature as free disadvantage." You swap water for air, but air comes up a lot more than water.  You swap sea for land, but land comes up more than sea.  You swap the subsonic for the sonic, but that just means you can talk to the Menhiri and nobody else.  Good job! It's possible you can't even hear humans!

There's some interesting ideas in a race that breaths a different medium than humans do. It's not the end of the world to give them a breathing apparatus, like the Kel Dor from Star Wars, and it just becomes part of their aesthetic. But this does mean that they have a vulnerability nobody else does (their gas mask) and how often will this be reversed, so that they'll be in an environment where they can breath, but nobody else can? We could introduce such environments, but then we're introducing such environments and it's another thing to track. It's also another reason for everyone to be in armor all the time.  I'd also want the character to get something out of their unique atmosphere. Water, thus, is a more plausible option.

But I can't see the rest working.  There's no hook to intrigue a player other than "Water!" and it's more hassle than it's worth.

The Void Dancer

Secondary Characteristics: SM +1 [0]; 

Features: Doesn't Breath (Anaerobic) [0]; Native Gravity 0g [0]; Native Pressure 0 atm [0]; Signals (Vague) [0]

So it seems possible to have "Doesn't breath" without needing any air at all (again, Template Toolkit 2), and you seem to be able to define your own native pressure and gravity. Zero-G natives are certainly acceptable. Is 0 atm permissible? Can you be "native" to vacuum?  That might seem like "vacuum support" for free, but we can suggest that the race would really struggle in atmosphere: if we treated as "Trace Pressure Lungs" then they would treat Very Thin as Dense (breathable, but with difficulty), Thin as Very Dense (It could potentially visit a Vithani girlfriend, but it would need a resperator) and Normal atmosphere as crushingly heavy Super Dense. That seems plausible.

Signals (Vague) is from Template Toolkits 2: the race is able to flash a light or change color in a way to communicate with others of its kind, but it does so in a way that's not as good as proper speech.  This makes it a feature, and explains how they can "talk" in space.  

What it in effect means is that our gangly, strange void-walker would need to be in a space suit to be in a normal environment, but could skitter about free outside of the ship.  That's... not the worst mechanic.  Vacuum happens, so its traits don't completely isolate it from the game.  However, I don't really see a sufficient upside to make it an intriguing character, and most void-based characters or races aren't built like this.  We might expect instead a race that had Doesn't Breath of either the Oxygen Storage variety or it just straight-up doesn't need to breath, and Vacuum support, so it can enter a spaceship just fine without a suit.  We might also expect some form of space-based propulsion, so it can maneuver around in space too.

The idea of a space-based race seems fine to me, it's just not something I'd do with features.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Herne, the Forest-Walkers

Rumors and whispers had long swirled through the colonist population of Arcadius that the world was inhabited. Finally, when Sovereign fell, the Herne revealed themselves and spoke in flawless Galactic Common: "Our season has come." They sought and gained a seat on the Alliance Senate and the recognition of the Viscontess of Arcadius.  Now, their hunters serve as rangers and footman in her forces, and they've even begun to travel the stars.

The Herne tower over most humans at 7' to 9', but with no more mass, giving them a long, stretched-out appearance.  Their long arms end with three-fingered hands, and their lean, digitigrade legs end in slender hooves. A long, thin tail sways sinuously behind them.  They have long faces with flat nose that ends in a triangular, moist rhinarium and have narrow mouths which, combined, give them the appearance of a very flat muzzle.  Their large eyes take in everything with a patient gaze, and their ears are long and end in square tips. The Herne, like humans, are mostly covered in skin, but all Herne have a tuft of fur on the tip of their tail, and many males have shaggy hair on the bottom of their legs and their forearms and a thick ruff over their head and completely covering their neck, like a great mane. Females have less hair, with just enough atop their head to resemble a short, cute "pixie" cut of hair.

Herne coloration varies with the seasons.  In summer, their hair takes on a rich, golden hue similar to the color of Arcadian foliage, and their skin deepens to a rich and dappled mohagony. A Herne in the grip of its summer colors is sometimes called a Goldback Herne.  By winter, as the snows begin to fall, their hair turns silver and their skin fades to a dappled ivory. A Herne in the grip of its summer colors is sometimes called a Silverback Herne. The specifics vary from Herne to Herne: some grow darker in summer or lighter in winter, and the nature of their dappling and patterns vary, but the seasonal nature remains a constant, and their seasonality is deeply tied to the conditions on Arcadius.

The seasons of Arcadius change more than just the coloration of the Herne.  Their personalities change with it.  By summer, they grow congenial and gather together in great groups.  For them, summer is a time of merriment and holiday, and the celebrate the abundance of Arcadius.  As cold of winter chills their world, though, they grow taciturn, territorial and isolationist, scattering out over their world.  Many Herne are naturally psychic as well, and this seasonality affects their powers.  By summer, their powers benefit one another, while by winter, they become nightmarish warriors and dangerous hunters.

The Herne have become an unremarkable sight on Arcadius, but they remain novel in the Alliance.  The arrival of the Arcadian Viscontess with her lanky, alien bodyguard causes quite a stir every year at Atrium still. But their hunters have begun to spread and participate in the wars of the Alliance.  The first Herne recently fell in battle against the Empire.  Exactly why they chose this time to reveal themselves is unknown, but the truth likely lies in their religion and its connections to Arcadius.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Vithani, the Star-Children of the Umbral Fringe

 

Few humans have even heard of the Vithani, and fewer still have laid eyes upon a Vithani slave, much less enjoyed their company. The brutal slavers of the Umbral Rim covet them, but since the Dark Cataclysm cut their world off from the rest of the galaxy, they've had to make do with the population of the Vithani that remain in the galaxy, and their fragile biology paired with their fraught personal lives means they tend to meet untimely ends, and their number slowly, but steadily, dwindles.

The Vithani share the same humanoid body-plan that most humanoids of the galaxy, but with a slighter build and more gracile features. They have remarkable coloration, however, with inky black skin, freckled with patterns of small diamond or square "spots" of white, white lips and long, white hair.  Some have different colors, and they may have a deep violet and very dark blue skin, or they might have a bright magenta coloration to their hair, spots and lips, or a vivid, neon-blue or brilliant crimson hue.  These spots sometimes chart out recognizable patterns, like stars in the night sky, hence their nickname of Star-Children.

The Vithani come from a star within the globular cluster just beyond the Umbral Rim.  Their world has very thin air and retains little light even by day, when their star appears to be but the brightest of a great collection of vivid, beautiful stars. They have evolved to see by this starlight, and stripped of starlight or sunlight, they are blind, and the full sunlight of more daylight worlds can blind them.  They have evolved to breath the refined, celestial air of their world, and they labor under the thicker air that blankets most worlds.

Their relationship with the stars does not end with their appearance and their ability to see so well by starlight: it shapes their very lives! The Vithani have an intensely strong relationship with fate and fortune, and it is written in the stars, and in their stars. Almost all Vithani have a Destiny of some kind, and when it affects them, it affects them much more keenly than it affects other races. They mastered astrology to better understand how the shape of the stars affected their lives. This can make them powerful if their astrologies point to fortunate destinies, but it spells their doom when the stars are misaligned.

Finally, while many describe the Vithani as "magical" or "naturally psychic," this isn't exactly true. Instead, the have a unique relationship with psionic abilities: all Vithani that are strong-willed and beautiful are also naturally powerful with psychic abilities; Vithani that are weak-willed and ugly have little facility with psychic power. Those who have studied them are not sure why these things correlate, and have only noted that they do.

The explorers of the First Tyranny found a navigable hyperspatial route to the Vithani cluster and discovered their world.  The Vithani themselves had not yet discovered star travel, but were technological enough to forestall any Ranathim invasion and held off the Tyranny, who turned to a strategy of trade and espionage until they unlocked the secret of Vithani astrology.  With that stolen secret, they learned the fates of the Vithani and struck at the darkest hour of the race, easily conquering them.  The rarified princes and princess of the Star-Children became the slaves of the Ranathim, and so it remained until the Dark Cataclysm rewrote the hyperspatial map of the Umbral Rim, and cut off all contact with the Vithani cluster.  The Vithani slaves left in the Umbral Rim like to think the natives isolated in their cluster have long since thrown off their masters and live free lives.

Today, the Vithani can mostly be found as rare treasures held in the collections of wealthy slavers.  Free Vithani do roam the galaxy, either having liberated themselves, or descended from those slaves who escaped and set up small, isolated colonies on remote moons with thin, gauzy atmospheres. When they travel, they often pass themselves off as rare cousins of the Keleni, to whom they bear a passing resemblance, when they bother to explain themselves at all.  Generally, like all Vithani, they are compelled to follow their fate and lead interesting lives of danger and adventure.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Karkadann, the Withering Satraps of the Arkhaian

 

The Karkadann are among the oldest aliens known among the Arkhaian reaches, and for a time, were considered by archaeologists to be a candidate for the progenitor of the lost "Monolith" civilization that dominated the galactic core millennia before the Alexian crusades, but it has since been proven they were but a client race of that elder race, and one of the heirs to that culture.

The Karakadann evolved on a hellish world, the Eclipse World of Dann deep in the Arkahaian Spiral. A red star rages and roils at the center of their star system, bathing their world in burning, cleansing radiation that would make it impossible for life to take hold were it not for an odd orbital coincidence: their world is close enough to its star to be tidally locked, and a large moon rests between Dann and its star, fixed at a lagrange point. This moon casts a considerable, permanent "shadow" on the world, a narrow one that's completely radiation free, and then a fainter "shadow" from which life is partially shielded from radiation.  Life took hold in those shadows, evolving to survive that harsh radiation and push farther out into the insidious glare of their hateful parent star. Their world is filled with live evolved to survive the intense radiation, such as the white kudzu of Dann.  

The Karkadann resemble humanity, with a body plan unremarkable among humanoids of the galaxy.  They are hairless and have flat faces with slits in place of a nose and holes where their ears would be, though this does not seem to have negatively impacted either sense. They have rugose skin, typically white, grey or deep brown in color, marked with naturally occurring striping or geometric patterns in red, black or white, including a characteristic stripe running over the top of their head present in all members of the race. A secondary lens covers their eyes, obscuring their irises and pupils with a film of milky white or, less common, black or red.

The Karkadann, like all life on Dann, have unique adaptions to the hostile, irradiated environment. Under the constant assualt of radiation, their genomes evolved to rapidly reconstitute themselves, but the sheer bulk of reconstitution results in genetic errors: mutation.  When these mutations are benign or even beneficial, their immune system leaves them, but when they become cancerous, their immune system  isolates and destroys the cells and all nearby cells, just be sure.  Aggressive errors can result in a runaway biological war raging within the Karkadann body that destroys the cancerous body part.  This results in the Withering, where a part of the Karkadann's body goes through intense pain and then suddenly loses all feeling and withers away, like a dead leaf on a branch, and then falls away.  Fortunately, Karkadann physiology is very tolerant of cybernetic implants, allowing them to replace lost body parts this way.  A side-effect of the Withering is that the Karkadann do not age the way other humanoids do: if they can keep replacing their body parts, they can potentially live forever, though in practice after a few hundred years, the Withering takes their brains and they finally die.

The Karkadann genome poses another, societal problem.  Even if they do not experience the Withering, they may experience mutation.  Unfortunate Karkadann exposed to radiation may begin to develop strange features, such as claws or additional limbs, additional eyes, bony spurs, or even psychic powers. These mutations come with personality changes and slow, inevitable devolution.  In some ways, the Withering is kinder, as it lets the Karkadann die, while mutation slowly turns it into a monster. The far reaches of the Arkhaian Spiral is haunted by Karkadann marauders, mutated into gibbering cannibals and running ships with open fission drives to further power their mutations.

Proper, civilized Karkadann rule the Technocracy of Dann, a minor empire found between the Refugee Empire of the Telas Constellation and the Cybernetic Union of the Borean Stars. It has endured since before the Alexian Crusades: during this ancient time it ruled a vast swathe of the Arkhaian, purchased cybernetics from the Traders and the Shinjurai merchant princes, and wielded what Eldothic technology their masters had left them with.  They remained unconquered throughout the Alexian Dynasty and had cordial, if distant, relations with the Galactic Federation.  The Scourge greatly diminished it, though, and scattered entire fleets far from where regular medical intervention could prevent the spread of mutation. Today, a much smaller Technocracy remains ostensibly independent and allows representatives from the Cybernetic Union and the Alliance both in its court, but it sides most often with the Cybernetic Union.  Roving remnant fleets filled with mutated Karkadann haunt the Telas Constellation and the Akrhaian Gap, spreading fear wherever they go.

The Zero Template Race Challenge

...(A race) which has culture and “common advantages/disadvantages” and maybe unique technology…but without having a template at all. That would also solve the weird situation with humans being the only “normal” race, without a template, when all races in the setting are different, but not all have enough biological difference to require different templates... The point is that a race can have no template and not be just humans-with-a-different-paint-job, but be meaningfully different. -- Lord Buss

I've had to butcher and stitch together the quote a bit, as it was scattered across a conversation and in a specific, Psi-Wars context, so my apologies if some of the meaning is lost, but it inspired me, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.  First, I want to talk about what I think Lord Buss is asking for and where there are problems with it, but after establishing those constraints, I want to attempt to explore the surprisingly interesting puzzle that his request poses.

First, let's narrow down the request itself, and the intent of the request.  First, the core idea here is to have an alien race that is alien but has no defined template, as none is needed. I don't believe the idea is to just ignore the requirements of a template.  The idea here is to create a race that doesn't need a template, despite obviously being alien.  He proposes to get around this constraint by offering up associated elements that aren't part of the template itself. For example, a faerie race might all have Magery, but some might have the option of buying Wild Mana Generator.  Similarly, a race might have access to language and culture and technology that the rest of the galaxy doesn't (or, at least, doesn't commonly use).  Finally, you could associate them with "mechanically irrelevant features" such as wildly coloration, hairlessness, three genders, etc.

This request is not for a zero-point template.  A zero-point template might allow for, for example, DX+4 and IQ-4, which certainly a violation of the spirit of the request.  Zero-point templates can be quite complex!  It's not asking for low complexity, or low absolute cost zero-point templates: a race that all has a perk and a quirk would violate the request too.  Finally, they can't even have features. Features require a template too, they're just the most extreme example of "low absolute cost zero-point templates." The request is for a race that has no template, but is clearly alien.

The intent of the request seems aimed at normalizing humanity.  The point is that the races of Psi-Wars tend to be positive in cost, often quite expensive, and humans are not.  This creates a weird situation where the galactic average ST or IQ or HT is higher than the human norm. By having at least a few races that are mechanically identical to humans out of the gate, you bring that average back closer to humanity. It might also be about reducing mechanical complexity. After all, what Lord Buss describes isn't really that far from a zabrak or a twi'lek: the humanoid races of Star Wars mostly amount to "person-with-a-paint-job." There's no reason to make every race a deep investment in system mechanics.  Finally, it would also simplify the race creation process, making the race design a lot cheaper for the GM, which would allow a proliferation of races.

So, can it be done?

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:

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A Sorcerous Obsession

 

Sometimes, I just can't get something out of my head.  Back in the good ol' days of the blog, it would end up as a blog series.  Lately, since I need to curate my material more, I hesitate to just brainstorm on the blog, but perhaps that's a bad approach.  After all, the point of this blog is to blather on in a way that gets my juices flowing, which helps me to think, and helps you to think about your own setting, and often starts a conversation. So while this post may or may not result in some changes to Psi-Wars, it will be useful for me to get some thoughts straightened out, and perhaps to inspire you as well, dear reader.  Consider this less of an "article" and more a musing.

So here it goes: The though I can't get out of my head is "Does Psi-Wars need magic?"

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?

Patreon Poll: The Phoenix Cluster -- Part I

 

Are there plans to add parts of the Galactic Fringe to the Atlas, or otherwise add areas of Westerly influence to the setting? I know to some extent it's supposed to be "fill in the blank" But I think the setting struggles somewhat with a lack of properly Westerly settings, outside of the asteroid belts (which is a different type of Westerly)

-- Mavrick

EDIT: Quick aside, but speaking of polls, if you're a backer, we have the monthly Release the Balloon People on Patreon and Subscribestar. Vote on what you'd like to see added to the wiki!

The Westerly are an interesting ethnicity in Psi-Wars, and one that I'd like to revisit in more detail as I explore their culture, but they pose a bit of a problem in exploring.  In a lot of ways, they fit the "Barbarian" niche of the setting, not in the sense that they are primitive, but that much of history was written not by powerful men ensconced in towers with legions of scribes writing their every deed, but often by "hard men of the desert," great waves of resilient, "uncivilized" men who hard learned to survive in the shatterzones beyond imperial reach.  A lot of history fades from view as we move beyond the gates of the cities that civilization so loved, but that doesn't mean the people beyond those gates didn't matter.  They mattered a lot.

The Westerly exist on the low end of the political power spectrum. They are the tribesman of desert worlds, the crochety miners in asteroid belts, and the religious pilgrims of remote worlds on the edges of civilization.  They don't seek to rule, and they don't create heroic conquerors with amazing psychic powers or technological prowess to whom paeans will be sung for centuries to come.  The result, though, is that just as they fade from the view of history, they fade from your view.  If you read this blog, or frequent the wiki or the discord, you can likely name at least one Maradonian Great House, and probably several; you can likely name at least one major Shinjurai world, and perhaps even discuss some of the features of their royal family.  But you probably can't name any Westerly tribe, or a miner clan of Grist, or even a single name of a major Westerly figure.

I had intended to flesh them out more as I got to the specifics of planets, as that's where they tend to "live," not writing their name in the stars, but in the soil of the worlds they inhabit.  But I might never really get to any of these worlds.  I mean, it's been years, and I've barely detailed a few worlds.  So far, I've mostly succeeded at painting broad pictures of the galaxy.  Perhaps I need to paint a broad picture of the Westerly, or give them a place where there culture is so obviously dominant that we can afford to discuss the broader strokes of Westerly culture in a way that makes it easier to discuss the Westerly more broadly.

But such a place already exists!  It's the Phoenix Cluster.  I had always envisioned at least three major regions in the Galactic Fringe, beyond the edges of the galaxy: the Draco Super-Constellation (the home of the draconic Mug), some place from which the Scourge staged their invasion and in which they can still be found, and the Phoenix Cluster.  I originally imagined the Phoenix Cluster as beyond the Glorian Rim, with the world of Exile as a "bridging point" between it and the Rogue Stars. I pictured them as a stand-in for Space America in a WW2 metaphor, where the Alliance was Space Europe and Cybernetic Union as Space Russia. They even showed up as a mention in the Fourth Templar Chapter poll (which was a bit of a disaster).  But if there was ever a part of the galaxy dominated by the Westerly, it would be that one.

Why haven't I gotten to it? Well, I wanted to detail the rest of the galaxy first, but that seems to be taking too long and I'm getting caught up in details as I seem to not heed my own advice against getting bogged down in details when there's broader work that hasn't been done yet. So why not detail it now?

And while I'm detailing it, why not do it together? In a lot of ways, the Fringe is the place for players to stick massive chunks of the setting in if they want.  If you want your own space empire, or an ancient and fractured kingdom that's slowly dying, with little relation to the rest of the galaxy, the Fringe is the place to do it.  So if there was ever a place for audience input, it's out on the edges of the galaxy, where we're more free to play.  I also feel like I've not had many polls lately, and I could probably milk it for a few months, because you can't do a single poll on an entire region.  But that would be great, because we could explore lots of elements of setting building, and have an entire section of the setting that was poll driven and that addressed this lack of the Westerly, and introduced a rather important political playing piece as well.

So, this will be a multi-part set of polls, with the first today. I'll try to do the rest monthly, as we revisit previous poll entries to get more clarity, or expand on parts of the setting.  The most likely result of this will be simple entries on the Galactic Atlas, but we'll see how complicated it gets. The link should appear in your applicable backer site.

"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.