Here’s a blast from the past you probably weren’t expecting! I don’t think I’ve touched this one since iteration 4. Neo-Rationalism doubles as the Dune-esque “extreme human training as magic” and it’s something I’ve wanted to revisit often. I’ve touched on it with some Neo-Rational martial arts, but they should have applications outside of just combat, and one that has weighed on my mind for a long time is that of a social engineering style.
I’ve also been considering the concept of the Shinjurai Companion for a long time. It occurred to me sometime around the beginning of Iteration 7 that if anyone would take an extremely pragmatic approach to sex and romance, it would be the Shinjurai, who might even treat it as a momentary bother, a biological need to be quickly sated and removed to allow for higher thought to continue. But the more I dove into the idea, the more obvious it became that they would behave a lot like geisha or the Companions of Firefly (which are just sci-fi geisha): companions and conversational partners that help Shinjurai nerds get over their nervousness and talk to a girl (or a boy). Slather some super-science social skills atop that, and you get this social badass with a painted face who is three steps ahead of you, and would double as a great spy.
So anyone who has paid attention has seen references to the idea: it gets two quick references in the Galactic Federation Culture, I mention it in the Primer, and a such an NPC shows up in Undercity Noir (though the current players never found her). Of course, you can reference an idea without making it explicit, but as I worked on Khedu, the poll suggested they might have a human working for them and they might be exceptionally manipulative, and they might be good at diplomacy. What better way to do that than to give some Ranathim companion training? How crazy would that be? But to do that, I’d need to have the entire style available. I also recently concluded such a character would make a great NPC for a particular PC in the Wanderers of Dhim, which added extra urgency to it.
It went through a few iterations. The earliest as much more obviously a courtesan style, but I didn’t like it for several reasons. First, Companions aren’t courtesans. They make great courtesans, but they’re not actually courtesans. Second, I like the idea of it being a broader neo-rational concept that companions have exploited to create their own art. When it was first conceived, it worked in some more generalized way, and what Shinjurai Companions do is some sort of offshoot of the original idea. This also suited the idea of these Zangian Slave-Envoys better: if they were just courtesans, then they’re just vamping foreign officials, but if they have a broader skillset, they can be manipulating them, with their beauty as only one of many arrows in their quiver.
So I dove back in time and dug up Zeb Lancaster’s Psycho-Social Analytics and updated it to fit into this broader framework, and then layered on some Shinjurai Personas, because people love those. The result is a huge, perhaps overly broad style, but I think it captures the flexibility and power of what the Shinjurai can do when they decide to manipulate you, it gives Companions more tools than just romance and conversation, it’s useful for other character types, and it makes the Slave-Envoys more interesting. Lancastrian Dialected, Zeb’s work, becomes almost a footnote, but it was always a sort of a cultish psuedo-scientology, which has only niche applications outside of one creepy evil NPC, so this broadens the style.
Of course, I can’t have Psycho-Social Analytics without giving you the chance to play a Shinjurai Companion, or to have one as an ally. It mostly amounts to “make a worked example of someone who has the style.” So I also created a side-kick template for them. Frankly, I think I could give them a full 300-point template, but I hesitate for a few reasons. First, that’s very niche. Second, I imagine most players would imagine a typical Shinjurai Companion as a less potent character than a full spy, space knight or bounty hunter, and you could even think of her a specialized subset of the Con-Artist. Finally, it gives a player who wants to play as a Shinjurai Companion the room to greatly expand her (or him) with even more elements of the style, psychic powers, cybernetics, etc.
This style and the Sidekick Template are available as previews for all Fellow Travelers ($3+ backers). If you’re a backer, check it out!
Mailanka's Musing 