This week has been the Pacifist Crush update to Psi-Wars. This combined numerous ideas that have been floating around in my mind for awhile now, and over the holidays I paused the rest of my work to advance this. This came in part because I’m introducing a high powered Keleni character and some Templars in my Dhim campaign and I needed some stats and one thing led to another and here we are with a pile of Keleni updates.
Let me begin with a quick overview of what’s publicly available and why, and then we’ll jump into the update you’re really waiting for: Keleni Breathing Styles. This post is getting too long, though, so that will be its own post.
Sasona Samalle
I love Ishin Denshin from Pyramid #3/69 and I knew I wanted to integrate it into Psi-Wars, and I did so as Sasona Samalle (Kelen for “Mind Heart”) back in Iteration 6 before the new Martial Arts upgrade structure. I’ve wanted to introduce it back into the new structure for awhile, but I struggled with its inclusion of not one but two psionic abilities, as those get expensive fast. Maelstrom form showed me the way, though, and I borrowed the concept. The result is now available on the wiki.
I also integrated it into the Space Knight. Of the three “martial artists” they make the most sense. I had thought for awhile they might be Warriors and part of the reason I designed Warriors was as a spot for Keleni stickfighters, but it turns out they really don’t care about damage.
I’ve had some complaints about how violent it is. A lot of this comes from Ishin Denshin, and I’ve debated how true to the original I want to be. I definitely want to keep kicks (because you can kick while using a staff) and rapid strikes: just because Keleni are nice doesn’t mean they can’t fight or that they’ll fight gently. That said, I may change things in the future; someone pointed out a face strike is a better fight-ender for a pacifist than a throat strike, so I may well change that in the future. But in the meantime, we finally have Sasona Samalle up on the wiki!
Communion Blessings
I’ve updated the True Communion page to have Blessings, the ability to grant an advantage to someone else. I noticed as I worked on Sorcery that Divine Favor had none of these, and I found that quite odd. Isn’t bestowing buffs on people the thing we’d expect a cleric to do? In particular, I pondered what Templar teams might look like. Of course, we’ll have the space knight templar who fights, but we might expect their more theologically inclined to companion to buff them. So why didn’t we have any?
So I added some. I only added them to True Communion, though, because Dark Communion is selfish and would never give someone else power. Broken Communion is self-hating, of course, and destructive, and so would actively harm others, but it already has effects that do this.
It’s only a handful, but it already changes the dynamic quite a bit, and provides a template for adding your own variations of the miracle, if you want, I don’t know, the Blessing of the Tao of Communion or something.
The Communion Monk?
I have a prototype Mystic template for the Communion Monk. I’m not entirely happy with it and I might revise it. In particular, I’m not done with the estoric style. The structure is all in place, it’s all the writing around and around and around it that’s taking time. And there’s how best to handle Virtues as well. I had hoped to drop it this week, but I’ll let it lie fallow for a little longer unless you guys are okay with a flawed version. Maybe I should just drop it anyway; better something than nothing.
Mailanka's Musing 