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?

Psi-Wars Mounts

We had a recent discussion on the Discord about cuisine and culture, even getting down into how different circumstances result in different butchery methods (ie, why I can't get the same cuts of beef in the Netherlands that I can in the US).  Someone joked that an "article on Ranathim butchery incoming" which is almost certainly a reference to the fact that I sometimes post very interesting, but perhaps not entirely useful, things to Psi-Wars.

Well, here's another thing nobody asked for: Mounts for Psi-Wars!

As I work on the Frontier Marshal, people are obviously going to want details on what their space cowboys ride. The clear answer is "Repulsor-cycles, or a freaking repulsor-truck.  C'mon." We still have cowboys in the real world and most don't ride horses anymore.  They ride in SUVs.  I suspect Psi-Wars "cowboys" would, realistically, be much the same.

That said, we can't escape the mystique horses still hold for us, and we expect space cowboys to ride horses. After all, we see some sort of space horse in space opera all the time, even in Star Wars. And it makes sense, after a fashion. The creation of trucks and SUVs requires considerable industrial infrastructure that might not yet be in place on a world, but a horse can "live off the land," provided the land has the right climate and resources available.  Frontier Marshals regularly deal with the uncivilized wilds of the far rim, so might have to make do without any vehicles, and thus might have to endure with a mount of some kind.

Alright, well, that seems like sufficient justification. How to handle them?  Well, in practice, I see them working like robots: simple characters that have perhaps 1 minor disadvantage (Easily abstracted away into a -1 HAM clause once per session, if the mount is being difficult), and a quirk (to distinguish your mount from others).  Simple enough.  What sort of mounts should we have? Well!

 

Psi-Wars Monstrous Preview -- The Horrors of the Flesh: the Gaunt

While working on the Saruthim, I had to construct the things with they fought and defeated.  I already had "Gaunt monsters" from back in Iteration 6, but I wanted to update them for Iteration 7.  Alas, I was unable to finish them on time, and I've decided to put most of the "bestiary design" on a back burner for now, so these won't be finished soon, nor wikified for awhile.  However, I thought those interested in the Saruthim might like a sneak peak at the things that the Saruthim fight, thus I've put what I have below, with some of the half-finished material removed.  This is "take it as it is" material.

Into the Labyrinth: the Nerlochs and the God Below

Not every creature of the Labyrinth is Skairosian in origin. Other things have invaded the winding tunnels beneath the surfaces of Labyrinthine Worlds.  They might be elder things from beyond space and time, or they might be the corruptions twisted by the influence of Broken Communion.

The Nerlochs are one such race that lurks in the Labyrinth, coming out of the tunnels for furtive raids to steal sustenance (and recruits) for their God Below.  They'r eoriginally found in GURPS Creatures of the Night 1. I think they're one of the better entries in the Creatures of the Night Series and thematically very appropriate to Psi-Wars.

I would have just pointed you to them and been done with it, but they have some problems fitting into Psi-Wars as written. By default, Nerlochs are clearly designed to be a modern horror that takes on opponents of about 100 points, not sci-fi space knights of 300+ points. Thus, these have been heavily adapted and cleaned up for Psi-Wars.  What's below is a highly specific and highly adapted version of the Nerlochs more suitable for Psi-Wars.  I'd say they were just "inspired" by the original entry, but I wanted to highlight their origins and point you to where they came from, rather than completely erasing the serial number, because I think CotN is a good series worth supporting. Thus, I've completely left off any discussion of Anagon himself, except for hints in the form of the new Children of Anagon.  An appropriate new version of the God Below would probably be much bigger and much more terrifying than what Creatures of the Night lists. So, if you want to know more, check out the book!

Even in this current iteration, Nerlochs aren't that much of a threat. A well-entrenched commando will mow through them; space knights might have more trouble, as they're in range of those dangerous eldritch talons.  Gunslingers might also suffer, as they tend not to wear a lot of sealed armor.  Ultimately, Nerloch hunting comes down to be able to outsmart them, and standing up to a mob of paralytic talons lead by a hungry, hulking thing-beast. It might be fun to hit a party with a small Nerloch raid of 3-5 nerlochs, and then have the gibbering ghouls following them at a distance, visible only as the glow of their gems, as anticipation mounts for a sudden, major assault of hordes of Nerlochs over some treacherous precipice.

The Skairosian Bestiary Revisited: Shadow Serpents

Along with the Glance Hound, this one didn't get many comments and I suppose that's fair.  What I wanted here was a third critter and I found the phase serpent in DF and it seemed like a nice bit of inspiration that I borrowed.  Originally, the Skairosian hound had a hallucinatory venom, but I just moved it over to the Shadow Serpent and gave it phasing powers and called it a day.  This helps explain alternatives to the source of Akashic deep time, as it might have stemmed from the venom of the Shadow Serpent, which might be showing them visions of possible, alternate futures in a great cacophany of imagery.  I also like the imagery of Labyrinthine Cults engaging in "miraculous" snake handling.

As a threat, this wasn't much of one, because it's pretty hard to justify the fangs of a snake, even one the size of a python, punching through armor.  But based on a suggestion, I went with the idea of ignoring DR entirely, with the excuse that they can "phase" through the armor.  This allows them to have remarkably low damage, which mostly acts as a vehicle for their venom, which is what they're really about.  I also added a constriction attack, but in practice this won't really make them more lethal. They're defensiveness is fine: they're tough enough to hit and touch enough to hurt, but in practice, any well-armed opponent will make short work of a single shadow serpent.  I see their purpose as more of an irritation, a problem to be stacked atop other issues, rather than a singularly terrifying boss-monster.

Given their ability to vanish for 10 seconds at a time, they should have no problem ambushing a commando and punching through their armor with their fangs to give the commando a tough time.  Commandos will fare better against swarms, though. Gunslingers might fair a little better with superior active defenses, and they don't rely on armor anyway, and they might be able to fast draw quickly enough to shoot the serpent before it phases away again.  The space knight may also be able to respond in time to the shadow serpent, and may be able to react to its presence if he's able to detect it psychically, attacking it swiftly once it comes out of the "shadows." A single sweep of a force sword is enough to defeat most shadow serpents, and space knights often have the will to work through a hallucination spell.

The Skairosian Bestiary Revisited: the Glance Hound

To me, the Glance Hound is the Skairosian Monster.  It's inspired by the original "Devil of Perspehone," and is probably closest to my first idea of what was in the labyrinth. Thus, it had to stay.

I've not really buffed the lethality much.  All I've really done is play-up their multi-dimensional nature as justification for increasing their armor divisor to 10.  This means that they still deal an average of 10 damage, but they can punch through up to ~100 DR, making them a potential threat (en masse) against a space knight, and I've kept the "bite-and-twist" concept to allow them to inflict an even more terrifying 17 cutting damage on limbs they've bitten, but I've expanded the idea of Extra Attacks more broadly, so they can also make several attacks with their claws.

I've pulled back from the idea of the Glance Hounds-as-dogs.  My original conception had them vanishing into shadows and clinging to walls, but this made them too much like Aliens and thus too much like the Insectoid, which I also wanted to include.  Well, on reflection, as nice as the Insectoid is, I think the engineers of Jotan would have created something more lethal to the Scourge than to humans, and thus needs a complete rethink.  In a lot of ways, this has allowed the Glance Hound to return to form, making it a stealthy, agile hunter par-excellence. 

The original reason I didn't give them the ITDR of the Faceless Kine or the Shadow Serpent was that if they ground things around them, they shouldn't be partially unreal themselves.  Well, why not make it switchable? They can "ground" shades, but this "grounds" themselves.  This creates an interesting tactical choice: they will always ground themselves around a shade, thus if you can bring them into a fight with shades, they can deal with the shade (and help you deal with it) and also make them easier to deal with.  I'm not sure how interesting it makes them, but it at least justifies both their use as an "anti-shade gargoyle/guard dog" and their ability to cut through armor like butter.

The net result is a creature that doesn't deal much more damage than before, but gets through armor a lot better, is much faster, much harder to spot and more aggressive.  Between its superior active defense and improved accuracy plus some tips on getting around defenses, they'll land more hits than, say, the Faceless Kine.

I think Commandos will find this critter a nightmare to deal with.  Between their stealth and speed, they'll often manage to sneak up on unprepared commandos and thus bypass a lot of their fortifications and defensive positions.  While a single shot from a heavier rifle will be enough to take out a glance-hound-as-henchmen (you need to do ~30 damage), you won't notice them until they're on top of you, and even if you do, they move so fast they'll cover all the ground necessary to get to you in a couple of seconds, and they hunt in packs. So you'll need to take out 4-7 in the time it takes for them to cover ground, and if you don't, your DR 80 or 100 is not enough to keep your limbs from being crippled (they'll deal an average of 17 damage, 7 to 9 of which will go through your DR, and will increase due to cutting to 10-13, which is enough to cripple, or even sever a limb through armor), at which point you're in a heap of trouble.

Gunslingers will fare better.  They can rapidly respond to the sudden appearance of a Glance Hound threat with a quick draw, and their weaponry and their skill with it is good enough to bypass their defenses and they can deal enough damage to hurt a glance hound (a 4d pistol will deal an average of 14 damage, 10 of which will get through their armor, which gets reduced to 5 by their IT:DR; 3 shots is enough to take down a glance hound henchmen, which is pretty easy for a gunslinger to do, provided the Glance Hound doesn't dodge).  The Glance Hound is pretty lethal to the gunslinger, but not much more so than a Commando, and the superior active defense of the Gunslinger might make a big difference unless the Glance Hound can get the drop on them, and "spotting ambushes" is what gunslingers do. If the Glance Hound gets a hit, they only average 10 damage, which is bad, but no worse than being hit by a pistol, unless the Glance Hound bites a limb.

Space Knights will tend to do well against them as well. Their psychic senses will surely warn them of the impending attack, giving them time to prepare, and their force sword is within spitting distance of defeating a Glance Hound in a single stroke.  Most Space Knights are totally capable of handling with the deceptive attacks of the Glance Hounds, and finding a way past the Glance Hounds great defense.  The melee-focus of the Space Knight means that the Glance Hound's speed or tendency to ambush is less of a problem.  In practice, I expect space knights to mow through a pack of Glance Hounds, but they'll be more careful of this version than they were of the last one.

The Skairosian Bestiary Revisted: the Faceless Kine

"I think most powerful foes should be at the very minimum right frightening to even the very tough end of starting scrubs" -Kalzazz

So, my previous version of the Skairosian Bestiary elicited some criticism as being too tame.  This bruised my ego a bit, but I think a lot of good came out of it, including yesterday's post which gave me some much needed perspective.  I also really appreciated getting a sense of what people expected out of monsters of the labyrinth, which is that they are scary.  This makes sense, though: if House Kain uses the Labyrinth as a rite of passage, then we would expect this to be challenging to a starting heroic member of House Kain.  With that in mind, let's revise each of the 4, one at a time, starting with the Faceless Kine.

This one was more popular than I expected, I suppose because it has some good imagery associated with it.  As I was looking for inspiration for additional critters, I decided I needed "the Cattle of Hades," as cows tended to be sacred to ancient peoples (and the Skairos are meant to evoke ancient myth) and we have a long association of cattle and labyrinths.  I struggled with what they would be and how they would function, until I saw a wonderful picture of this eyeless demon-ape thing with great horns.  Ah, there were my cattle.

The real point of the "Cattle of Hades" was that you would want to steal them for some particular reason.  Thus, I settled on their flesh (and especially their hearts) empowering those that ate them.  Naturally, the Skairos would defend them, but they would defend themselves too.

They're primarily tough.  I borrowed the justification for IT:DR from the Madness Dossier (so, hat time Kenneth Hite) as the idea of "partially real" creatures fit the Skairos well.  Between that and their tendency to go Berserk, they're actually really hard to kill, the definition of the "pile of hitpoints" opponent.  This version requires ~600 damage (300 after accounting for ITDR) to kill, but this is slightly toned down from my second try, which was close to 1000 ("Did you bring a isomeric torpedo?" felt excessive for this sort of encounter).  I beefed up the skull armor and the armor in general, as they give off a rhino vibe, and thus particularly heavy skin (roughly on par with someone in heavy battleweave) felt right, and this enormous, impressive crest deserved more impressive DR.  The net effect is that someone with a force sword will deal an average of 23 damage to the body or 14 damage to the face (or 56 damage to the brain), all halved for IT DR (to 12, 7 and 23 respectively; which means you'd need about 13 hits to the brain with a force sword to take down a raging Bull Kine). Of course, this is all the defense they have, as if they berserk, they're not going to actively defend.

They're substantially less impressive on offense.  Their best goring attack will deal ~40 damage (I'm using the new, DF rules for slams here) with an armor divisor of 3.  Against DR 100, that will deal an average of 7 damage (or 14 injury), which is nasty, but that's the best they can do.  However, Psi-Wars is very generous with crushing damage, inflicting 1 point of injury for every 5 absorbed by DR, so I've emphasized this with some additional comments on the attack.  To make it more visceral and impressive, I've added additional notes about its size, including its ability to trample, grapple, throw targets around, and smash them into walls.  These are less lethal (though they average 4 damage per hit to anyone with 20 DR or more), but spectacular and will make it feel more impressive.  At skill 13 (plus a penalty for hitting smaller targets), it won't make deceptive attacks, which makes it fairly trivial to avoid if you have solid defense.

Thus, if Axton Kain faced off against a Faceless Bull Kine, it would mostly involve him carefully defending, with the primary concern being to avoid a grapple.  If it's a one-on-one fight, this should be relatively doable while whittling his target down.  However, if the Bull Kine gets a lucky hit, or other Kine join in the fight, it could go very badly.

Commandos might find this a more pleasing challenge.  They can put a lot of firepower "down range," and thus reasonably pepper a target this big with 3 or so hits per turn that deal between 15 and 25 damage, dealing 50-80 damage per turn (25 to 40 after ITDR), which means the Commando would kill it in 9 to 12 seconds of concentrated fire from a squad-support weapon.  Given the tight confines of the Labyrinth, the Bull Kine would probably be on him in less than that time, and the Commando would lack the additional defenses of the Space Knight, and so would start to take some real damage, but depending on how long he held it off, might be able to finish killing it in the last, hectic moments of combat.

Gunslingers should probably avoid it. None of their specialties will help them here, and their armor tends to protect less well against crushing damage.

What Makes a Good (Ultra-Tech) Monster

After my last post on the Skairosian bestiary, some commenters questioned whether they were "enough" of a threat.  That's a fair question.  I'll be honest, I mostly focused on the themes (Cattle, Guard Dog, Alien Monstrosity, Source of Weird Visions) than I did on specifically making them great encounters, though I did try.  Perhaps I can do better? But if I'm going to do better, we need to think our way through this.  What makes for a good monster to hit our Psi-Wars heroes with?

To answer that, we need to answer several questions:

• Is it dangerous enough?
• Is it fun and unique?
• Does it fit in the setting?

Into the Labyrinth: the Skairosian Bestiary

In addition to time shades, we need an expanded set of animalistic creatures to haunt the Labyrinth.  This takes the previous version of the "Devils of Persephone as space monsters" and expands them to four related entries, allowing greater variety in what characters might encounter, and adding some flavor to the labyrinth.

These creatures are all part of the path of the "Other" and fairly good examples of the high weirdness I expect it to cover.  I've also included the first treatment of Animal Handling yet in Psi-Wars.  I see Animal Handling in psi-wars as covering entire clades rather than individual species because the galaxy is already far too broad.  Thus, we might expect one animal handling skill to cover all "earth" animals, and we now have one covering all Skairosian beasts.  Having the details to a clade (even if it's only 4 critters) certainly helps illustrate how this will work.

Wiki Showcase: Broken Communion

The last form of Communion to cover is Broken Communion, or "Psychosis Communion," the communion that arises from shared insanity and the attempts by the human mind to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Broken Communion is, perhaps, the most complex of the forms of Communion.  Where True Communion embraces community and selflessness and Dark Communion embraces chaos and selfishness, Broken Communion embodies self-destructiveness, weirdness and mounting horror. It represents psychic powers as unnatural force, a peeling back the skin of the world to show the monsters within.  As such, it festers and writhes in its own self-horror.  Those who use Broken Communion become changed by it, but also change the world; they cannot control what they become, they cannot control what they spawn, and Broken Communion itself controls nothing.  Things happen, sometimes for a reason, sometimes in ways that defy logic.

Broken Communion is a great "go-to" for forbidden powers, power that "costs your soul," or as a rich mine for horrors.  Be sure to check out the additional articles detailing Psychic Diseases, Corruption Metatraits, and the Ghosts of Broken Communion.  You can check it all out here.

Patreon Special: Sample Broken Communion Ghosts

Yesterday, I released a document on Broken Communion ghosts, including the means of creating your own. I want to follow this up with a few sample ghosts, in part to test how such rules work and make sure that I have all necessary pieces in place, and also to offer you, dear reader, an idea of what such ghosts might look like.  Naturally, any of these can be dropped into your Psi-Wars game, but they can also be adjusted and used in a horror or Monster Hunters game.

This is a publicly available document, available for free and it should be fairly easy to divine how these ghosts are intended to work, but if you're not yet a patron and would like a better understanding of the system behind their creation, the design document is available to all $1 patrons, and can be accessed via the link above.

If you're a patron, check it out.  If you're not a patron, you can still check it out!  And enjoy.

Patreon Special: Space Ghosts Revisited

Ghost Cvlt by Ramsesmelendez

When I first dove into Communion itself, I wanted to break up the simplistic duality of “good and evil” that Star Wars offered. I don’t necessarily object to “good and evil,” I just find that it can sharply limit the sort of stories GMs might want to tell or what sorts of characters people want to play. I conceived of Broken Communion as the crux of that change, as it introduced something that both “Good” and “Evil” could face off against, (the “Ugly” of “the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”), or something that could redefine “evil.” What’s worse, someone who is selfish but mostly hurts themselves, or a broken person who hurts others without meaning to? I wanted Broken Communion to offer both a terrible evil to fight, and a terrible pain to heal, creating a tension that was neither really evil, nor really good, but still a potential problem.

The core of that “problem” would be in its effects on the psionic characters who interacted with it the most. Those who wielded it would find themselves corrupted by it, and those who entered areas sacred to Broken Communion would find their psychic powers twisted by it. I also suggested that Broken Communion, unlike other forms of Communion, might “create miracles on its own.” In principle, any form of Communion might do this (Miracles “just happen” all the time), but Broken Communion seemed especially prone to doing that.

I left the details up to the GM, but the theme of “haunting” definitely arose from the ideas in Broken Communion and the nature of its miracles. Where True Communion had themes of the holy and sacred and Dark Communion had themes of fantasy-esque “cool evil,” with raging orcs and demonic seductresses and dark wizards, Broken Communion had distinctly horrific imagery. The haunted spaceship, the mass grave, or the terrifying jungle full of stalking, squamous things might all be places steeped in Broken Communion. But I left the details of this up to the GM.

I have found, though, from the feedback of my fans, that many of you don’t really like this “leave the details up to the GM” mentality. It’s rife through GURPS, especially in books that don’t really succeed, while books that make those details much more explicit, including catalog books like GURPS Magic, or campaign frameworks like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, tend to do really well. In retrospect, this makes sense: if you knew how to do it, you would, and you could ignore any details I give you that you dislike. If you can’t, a vague suggestion is of no help, but a highly detailed discussion of how it might work helps a great deal. Thus, it’s better to favor too much detail over not enough (provided that detail doesn’t become mandatory).

Thus, I came upon the handle of ghosts.

Patreon Post: the Gaunt (and the Dead Art preview)

When the Ranathim fought their great and terrible war with the "Monolith," they stole the secrets of Necro-Psi (and more here) and used them to forge an army of half-living constructs made of "synthetic flesh" that they called the "Tarvathim," but the rest of the Galaxy now calls the Gaunt.  The forbidden secrets of their construction have largely been lost (but not entirely!), and without their masters around to rule them, the hideous Gaunt have dispersed throughout the galaxy, struggling to eke out an existence in a galaxy that recoils from them in disgust, and when one of the ancient "True Tarvathim," immortal constructs built at the dawn of that terrible war, arrive in a community of the Gaunt, their lesser kindred flock to them, looking for leadership.

The Gaunt are a new PC race option, one deeply tied to the Ranathim, with extreme survivability balanced by unpleasant appearance (not to mention smell!) and psionic susceptibility.  The True Tarvathim are a new PC race option for players who want to try something ancient and terrifying, or for GMs who want to unleash an ancient horror upon the galaxy.

Both (and a Dead Arts preview, for context; it'll be available on this blog at the end of the month) are available now to all $3+ patrons on my patreon.  If you're a patron, enjoy! If not, as with all previews, these will eventually come out, but if you want to see them now, I'd love to have you.

Space Ghost! Psionic Space Monsters in Psi-Wars

WoooOOOoooo

I've already touched on psionic space monsters this week but I want to address ghosts.  Star Wars definitely features ghosts, as seen above, though they're rarely of the spooky sort found in GURPS Horror.  However, I hadn't bothered with them thus far because without unique skills, the typical action hero can't deal well with ghosts.  This isn't Monster Hunters!

But the more I've dealt with Communion, the more obvious it is to me that ghosts and broken communion go hand-in-hand.  Broken communion seeps into places and haunts them, turning them into monstrous places full of spookiness.  Communion itself not only bears an imprint of all human minds, but it resonates with the powerful legends of people who embody archetypes.  If you find the tomb of an undying Mystic Tyrant, it seems highly appropriate that he would still haunt his tomb, if only because people would expect it to be true, and their expectation will make that true.

But how to do I handle space ghosts when Psi-Wars characters lack any skills necessary to deal with them?

The Tiniest Space Monster: Space Disease

Star Wars draws its inspiration from the sort of stories where one can always punch ones opponents in the face.  That would seem to preclude disease, but Star Wars also draws a great deal of inspiration from history, and plague has always been a major mover and shaker in the annals of history.  Furthermore, Action has an entire section on dealing with major breakouts.  Of course, Action features a medic while Psi-Wars doesn't, but Psi-Wars does have Psionic healing and mystics who can easily specialize in it.  Furthermore, disease is definitely an issue when wandering around in jungles, so disease already has a presence in Psi-Wars, and thus it might be worth exploring further.

Star Wars actually features one disease already (at least, in the Old Republic): Rakghoul Plague.  The Expanded Universe makes references to a variety of diseases, including imperial bioweapons. It also has a great list of possible diseases on wookiepedia, most of which I've never heard of, but this is illustrative: Star Wars tends to treat disease as either a plot device, or a bit of color.

I think we should follow suite.  The point of Psi-Wars isn't to solve the mystery of the disease, as it might be in Heroes of the Galactic Frontier, but to deal with the fallout. Heroes will do one of the following:

• Show compassion to the afflicted
• Race against the clock to prevent a major breakout from occurring
• Deal with a minor, inconvenient disease in a location appropriate to disease.

Thus, we can break diseases down into three broad categories:

• Troublesome afflictions that do not kill the victim but nonetheless result in his misery and social isolation, like Leprosy.
• A spectacularly lethal weapon that, should be it be unleashed, will doom an entire world (like weaponized Ebola or other nightmare-inducing thriller bioweapons)
• Inconvenient background flavor (like "Swamp fever").

BYOSM: Bring Your Own Space Monsters: the Psi-Wars Edition

Pyramid #3-27: Monsters in Space has a fantastic article called "Aliens on Hand."  The idea behind the article is that with a quick shuffling of deck of cards, you can randomly generate a monster at the drop of a hat.  This is perfect for Psi-Wars, as the problem we face right now is not knowing what random craziness to throw against our heroes.  However, we run into the problem described yesterday, which is that these space monsters are calibrated for substantially less competent heroes, and less technological heroes, than the characters in Psi-Wars.  This works fine for creating relatively mundane threats, but will not adequately oppose a fully trained Space Knight, or a well-armed Commando.

The intention in this article isn't necessarily to rewrite the ideas in "Aliens on Hand," but to re-calibrate them.  If we know what sorts of threats will reasonably phase our heroes, we can rewrite a few key elements of the article to create monsters that will appropriately challenge them.  This has the added benefit of focusing our minds on what sorts of threats our heroes should face.  So far we've "balanced" the game on technological considerations and skill level, but how do you balance an opponent who uses no technology at all?

When this article his finished, we'll have an updated version of "Aliens on Hand" to generate our monsters randomly, and that's good, but the real benefit will be the thought we put into the process.  After all, while randomly generated monsters might be useful if you're in a pinch, ideally you'd want tightly focused and well-designed creatures in your final setting. "Aliens on Hand," and any work we do to improve it, will ultimately serve as a guidelines on how to create appropriate and interesting threats for your heroes.

I want to re-iterate that this article is not going to cover realistic space monsters, but threatening space monsters.  Presumably there are space-tigers and space hyenas and whatever and they're scary to other animals or to toddlers who wander out into the wild, but they're not the sorts of threats that keep a Psi-Wars PC up at night.  The intent of this article is to write monsters that will make a PC sweat, and that will interest him tactically, rather than ecologically (though bonus points if you can do that too!)

Space Monsters. Alien Beasts and Psi-Wars

Star Wars is loaded to the gills with space monsters.  A New Hope features whatever tendril thing that was in the Death Star trash compactor, The Empire Strikes Back features the wampa beast and some great swamp creature that spits out R2-D2.  The Return of the Jedi features the Great Sarlacc and the Rancor, which is probably the epitome of a Star Wars space-monster.

Star Wars isn't alone.  People have been fighting space monsters in movies since they were first put to film.  John Carter fought crazed plant-men and 4-armed white gorillas on Barsoom. Doctor Who has fought countless weird space creatures over his many travels.  Flash Gordon had to deal with lion-men and constrictor plants.  Quite a bit of sci-fi, especially after Lovecraft, turned towards horror elements, treating space monsters as monsters, and the works of H.R. Giger have left an indelible mark on what people expect a space monster to look like.

Heroes in adventure fiction have been fighting crazy monsters since the dawn of adventure fiction.  The Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, two tales from the dawn of their respective literary traditions, both feature heroes battling monsters, and some mythologies start with the death of a great monster, at the hands of a celebrated god, as the creation of the world.  Thus monsters and their defeat at the hands of heroes have a definite resonance with the human psyche, and thus has a place in our heroic Psi-Wars.

So, where do we get started?  GURPS already has a few resources for Space Monsters, including GURPS Space, the GURPS Space Bestiary, GURPS Horror, GURPS Monster Hunters 5, and Pyramid #3-27, Monsters in Space.