Pardon my silence. Both of my children were born this month, and there’s Easter, and a quarantine, so I’ve been busy. I’m also trying to figure out how to handle polls on multiple patron sites without spending $20 a month on the right to get more than a couple of answers, and I’m behind on my art comissions.
But the real reason I’ve been quiet is that a Patron asked me to work on bounty hunters, and they’re up there with Mystics and Space Knights for “You don’t know how much work you just asked for.” In any case, if you missed it, there’s a preview up for Subscribers and Patrons. One of the reasons it’s taking so long is that there’s a lot of reasonable “factions” and culture-groups that we might associate with bounty hunters and while we’ve worked out a ton of detail on mystics and space knights (and commandos and officers and etc) under the guise of working on philosophies and factions back in iteration 6, we haven’t really touched on bounty hunter or criminal factions yet, which are both things we really need to explore, but we only have so many hours in the day.
Bounty Hunters represent a whole host of interesting puzzles, especially in that they’re natural monster hunters (There’s even a lens for it: “Hired Gun”). A Bounty Hunter naturally specializes in their preferred prey, and so may have means of disposing of particularly troublesome aliens, robots or space monsters that the average person doesn’t have. That is, after all, why you pay them! But if we’re going to introduce Space Witchers, we need to think about monsters which, against, brings me back to a concept I’ve been tinkering with but haven’t had the time to really explore: Epic Psi-Wars. I’ve discussed it before, but the idea is that while running Psi-Wars for normal action heroes is fine (and the premise of many of its more procedural inspirations, such as Killjoys and Star Wars films like Rogue One or Han Solo), you can make the case for Psi-Wars-as-Monster-Hunters, also based on its less procedural inspirations (like the Old Republic or Metabarons). In fact, the Action Genre itself does this, as Monster Hunters Sidekicks points out, as well as the finest action-genre RPG ever written: Nights Black Agents, which clearly illustrates how one migrates from a bog standard action story to a deeper thriller.
Bounty Hunters tend to straddle that line pretty well, especially in a space opera setting. One session, they’re busting some guy out of prison, or taking down a crime boss. The next session, they’re using their specialized knowledge to kill a space vampire. This lets them walk between the world of the smuggler and commando, and the world of the space knight and the mystic. But this also means that in describing Bounty Hunters, I need to describe the things they hunt, and that means tackling some of the monsters of the setting, and that’s taking me awhile. Apologies.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about, and the real point of this post, is that Bounty Hunters make amazing enemies. Raymond Chandler famously said that his preferred technique for spicing up a story was to have two guys kick in the door and start shooting up the place whenever the story got stale. In space opera, the two guys who kick in the door and start shooting the place up are, of course, bounty hunters. They can reasonably show up at any time, they should always present a unique, flavorful challenge, and once you defeat them, you have to ask the question “Who put the mark on my head, and how do I get rid of it?”
Thus, I’ve been thinking about Bounty Hunters as a challenge. I asked one of my friends to see if he could make one, but then I decided that was an unfair challenge, because I wasn’t sure how best to make one myself. It’s not enough to slap some stats together and have a guy shoot at people. I mean, it is, but as we’ll see from the After Action Report of Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt, even a couple of BAD 1 Henchmen backed by 10 or so BAD 1 Mooks are not a serious challenge to starting PCs. We need more than big numbers: we need to think about what makes a bounty hunter a challenging encounter. How can they be difficult and interesting to defeat.
We should be able to finish the following sentence: “This bounty hunter always get his man because…” or “This bounty hunter is unstoppable because…”
It just so happens that on of the PCs, Xerxes, an Asrathi Witch Cat, has Bounty Hunters as enemies, so I thought it might be an interesting exercise to explore how a Bounty Hunter might defeat that specific PC and how we can make it an interesting encounter. Come, and let’s muse together on how to murder on of my PCs.
How to Kill a Witch Cat
So, some background: Xerxes is a Morathi (Witch Cat) pirate. The reason he has a bounty on his head is because he insists on attacking the Empire and stirring up trouble, hence his bounty. The Enemy he has, specifically, is the [-20] version of “Medium group of lesser opponents” which, in that context, suggests a group of 100% point value opponents, so 250-300 or so points; starting Bounty Hunters, then (but reduced to -10 with a “6 or less” frequency of appearance so we don’t have to hassle him all the time). We can easily justify at least one 300 point bounty hunter, which will be our focus.
With our basis settled, let’s look at what the bounty hunter needs to do: defeat an Asrathi Witch Cat. That might seem like a weirdly specific thing, but I bet there’s call for it. Per the Asrathi backstory, there’s a Pro-Asrathi, anti-Human movement, the “Asrathi Pride,” which hassles the Empire, and tend to look at the Witch Cats with awe and respect. Meanwhile the rest of the galaxy, those that are superstitious at least, tend to fear the Morathi. Thus, people who specialize in killing or capturing Witch Cats actually makes a lot of sense.
So how do you do it? The obvious answer is “Anti-Psi.” After all, Witch Cats are Probability Manipulators, right? That’s how they get their bad reputation, right? Well, partly. They have a deep connection to the Death Path of Broken Communion, which manifests as weird hauntings and curses that randomly manifest around them, hence their reputation for “Bad Luck.” Thus, it’s not enough to be anti-psi, one must know how to defeat Communion. So how do you defeat a Communion Wielder?
All forms of Communion have counter-measures. True Communion can be beaten by forcing your target to violate his own sacredness. Broken Communion can be defeated by “mundane countermeasures,” superstitious protections like charms or circles of salt. Dark Communion can only be beaten by other forms of Communion, which makes it both the weakest form of Communion and, for non-Communion-wielders, the strongest. Fortunately, our opponent doesn’t wield Dark Communion.
The other way to beat a Communion Wielder, at least before my revision, was with Anti-Path modifiers. If your opponent followed a particular path, you just invoked the trappings of its opposite. Said differently, you laid out for communion the story of your opponent’s defeat. If the Righteous Crusader must stand down before the law, then you must become the Law; if the Bound Princess is sacrificed unto the Hungry Beast, then you must become the Hungry Beast, and so on. I’ve removed this as overly complicated, but I clearly need to bring it back in, because it serves a useful role. I just need to think about it. We can at least explore the basics of how such a character would operate.
So, our Hunter would need to know a good bit about Asrathi Culture (especially their funerary customs) to help him recognize a practicing Morathi (as opposed to just a particularly pale or dark Asrathi). He’ll likely be trained in recognizing psychics, or in occultism in general, to know how best to protect himself from luck manipulation powers. In particular, he’ll probably want to simplify. The more chaotic the environment, the more variables, the more “rolls of the dice,” the more likely something, somewhere, will turn up in the Morathi’s favor. Alternatively, you could swamp the Morathi in so much chaos that his little tweaks of fate don’t amount to nearly enough to save him.
To defeat death, the Bounty Hunter needs to at least understand the sorts of superstitions that would prevent Broken Communion from harming him. He can also try to understand the “story” of the Path of Death and either undermine it, or bring it to its natural conclusion. In particular, “Death surrounds the Morathi,” so this aids the Bounty Hunter: those nearest the Morathi have a higher chance of dying, and the Bounty Hunter can just “help it along” to eliminate the Morathi’s companions. Of course, eliminating a Witch Cat’s friends doesn’t help one eliminate, or capture, the Witch Cat. But blackmailing him does! We can contact the Witch Cat, explain that he needs to turn himself in, and suggest that otherwise, the people around him will start dying. There’s nothing that the Witch Cat’s death powers can do to stop that: the whole point of a Witch Cat is to push death along! We need to get the Witch Cat to realize that they’re their own worst enemy, and then surrender to the hunter. Witch Cats that lack compassion can, instead, make enemies around them when the bodies start to mount, especially if it looks like accidents caused by the Witch Cat’s tendency to accidentally kill.
If it comes to a real fight, what sort of weapons is the Hunter best off using? Going over this description, it seems that you want either really, really reliable weapons, or weapons that cause a lot of collateral damage. The latter is much more fun, so let’s look focus on explosive weapons, but not weapons prone to self-destruction (that makes it too easy for the Asrathi to kill you with a curse that forces a critical failure); a Rook & Law “Outlander,” both explosive and Reliable, looks perfect.
So, what traits might this bounty hunter have:
- Will. One of the problems he’ll face will be Fright checks, but many of them will be Cosmic, so Unfazeable and Fearless won’t help him, but Will and Brave might: he might have a healthy respect for death, but be able to ignore it when the chips are down.
- Occultism: He’s more likely to know about superstitions than he is the science of psychic powers. Witch Cats, after all, aren’t very scientific. Hidden Lore (Communion) would be even better, but unlikely for a Bounty Hunter to have.
- Psychology: He needs to focus on wearing the Witch Cat’s psyche down. We need the Morathi to defeat himself. So we need to understand what makes the Witch Cat tick, and how to exploit any psychological loop-holes.
- Diplomacy: You’re never going to Intimidate a Witch Cat: they’ve seen some shit. But you might be able to talk them into seeing reason. You might also go with Fast-Talk. Note, though, they’re likely to have high Will, so the point of this is to carefully lay out what they need to do and why; influence attempts will likely fail (though not as badly as Intimidation), especially if backed up by Psychology. Given that Xerxes is a pirate, Streetwise might work as well. Savoir-Faire is unlikely be interesting: not many Asrathi Kings.
- Asrathi Cultural Skills: If your goal is the manipulation of the Asrathi, it doesn’t hurt to know some of their theology or their basic cultural norms, to act as complementary bonuses to your manipulation attempts.
- Traps: In addition to basic, functional combat skill, the Bounty Hunter will want to set things up so people die and it looks like the Asrathi did it. This will push his allies away from him and help him make enemies. Traps can go wrong, of course, especially with Morathi luck working against them, but with enough of them, you can start to make a difference. It also puts you far away from the scene of the action when the Witch Cat’s luck starts to attack the traps.
- Hand to Hand Skills: the final moments are almost certainly going to go to fisticuffs, as Asrathi have claws and excellent striking strength and will likely use both. You don’t have to be an expert karateka, but having a decent guard against claws and being able to execute a Judo Parry would be nice.
- Foresight: If you’re going to be the sort of person who lays out lots of traps, it would make sense that you tend to think ahead a lot. Where a Witch Cat relies on Serendipity to save him, this Hunter will need to rely on his wits.
- Luck: It wouldn’t hurt to be lucky. A Morathi’s probability manipulation powers will wreak havoc on unlucky characters or characters with only normal luck. A very lucky person might just get enough lucky breaks to survive the bad luck hurled at them.
- Delusions (Superstitious): A character who regularly fights against the forces of Broken Communion is probably better off being slightly paranoid than not paranoid. After all, maybe tossing some salt over your shoulder, or wearing a talisman won’t help, but it won’t hurt either and it might help. Paranoid might not be a bad trait either.
- Callous: If you’re going to be killing random people to get at one Witch Cat, you’re an asshole, and you need to be okay with that. You probably need to be a cold and calculating asshole, though, not a maniacal, sadistic one, because the latter has too many opportunities for things to go wrong which the Witch Cat’s luck will exploit. Bloodlust might be okay too, but probably not Bully or Sadism and certainly not Overconfidence!
- Intolerance (Asrathi): This is not strictly necessary, but pretty likely: if you make a living hunting down Asrathi, you’re probably not their biggest fans. A general intolerance of “Witches” might also work.
For race, the most likely candidates to fit this profile are Asrathi, Ranathim or Human. Asrathi, of course, already have all the requisite cultural traits, and have a pretty good understanding of what a Witch Cat is, and thus how best to defeat them. They’re unlikely to be intolerant of their own kind (but it’s not impossible). The Ranathim deal with evil forms of Communion all the damn time, and tend to be superstitious, and thus might reasonably have quite a few of the listed skills and traits. They tend to be less “cool and collected” though, being driven by their passions, and they often find themselves saddled with bad luck for violating an oath, which creates an opportunity for the Witch Cat to exploit. A human who has been at the wrong end of the Asrathi Pride movement might plausibly hate the Asrathi, and the “cold, calculating hunter” is a human specialty. Of the three variants of mankind, it definitely wouldn’t be a Shinjurai (they look down their noses at superstition). Maradonian might be possible, but he doesn’t really fit the above profile. But a Westerly could be superstitious enough, and be close enough to the Asrathi to see their dark side. They’re also the most likely to use an “Outlander” plasma carbine, so what we’re looking at is a human space cowboy who likes to think ahead and trap his prey, like a real hunter.
Thus, at the end of the day, we have a plasma shotgun wielding space cowboy who wears a lot of talismans and is superstitious and is deeply familiar with the imagery of death. He carefully studies his prey and asks around about them, builds a psychological profile, then begins to create “accidents” around the target to spook them and their comrades, and then finds some way to contact them, from a distance, to force a surrender. During the final confrontation, he peppers the area with traps that will cause a ton of collateral damage and death, and wields his shotgun and his unarmed skills to take out the outmaneuvered Asrathi. He likely prefers to kill his prey rather than capture them (no chains or anti-psi collar is going to stop Broken Communion), but if pressed, he has some sigils or something that suppress the ghostly power of broken communion.
Most of Xerxes’ skills are 14-16 (he’s got higher, but they’re all in space combat stuff). BAD 5 would be enough to flatten him to a coin flip without overwhelming him, and is a plausible skill level for a 250-300 point Bounty Hunter
Mailanka's Musing 