Keleni Breathing V — Release

Don’t forget to breathe

The Nameless Monk, Forbidden Kingdom

Alright, the Keleni Breathing post is out and available to all Fellow Travelers ($3+) on both Patreon and SubscribeStar. Thank you for your patience! I wanted to discuss some design notes and hype it up a bit. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed writing it up.

• SubscribeStar Link
• Patreon Link

Some additional notes on the breathing styles. Most martial artists in the Psi-Wars setting will probably study “external” styles first and foremost, so I would treat Keleni styles as advanced topics. They are worked examples of what “Trained by a Master” looks like in Psi-Wars. Second, I wouldn’t treat these like a menu, where characters go through a kung fu brochure, pick out the one they want, and then trundle off to that specific mountain temple to learn that specific style. I would treat them as scattered pieces of lore. There may be many Keleni monks who know the Keleni Breathing foundation, but few who know any of the more advanced concepts. If a deeper tradition exists, it’s likely the only one on the world. Some of the styles might not be known, or may be in the process of being discovered, or perhaps there is a mixed tradition, such as one style as a more advanced option to another style. You can just toss it in as a one-off power up on a scary NPC (to quote one of my players from Dhim “That’s one pissed off gelgathim“), or you can make it central to a kung fu-oriented campaign. The styles are designed to interact and you can mix and match, though a character with a couple of martial arts styles and a deep study of two Keleni breathing styles will easily run you 500 to 700 points. These are advanced characters!

Deciding where and how to use such styles can say a lot about the setting and its traditions. In my campaigns, I have Rage-Breathing available in the Stygian Veil, taught by a captured Keleni masters to some fighters who have converted to True Communion in the Pit, including one Terahastro, an elite pitfighter and former gangster. The rebellion on Covenant is led by a Prophet and has all sorts of fun factors, but they almost certainly have a Keleni Breathing master somewhere, though probably not a member of the rebellion (yet?). They either know Mountain Breathing or Celestial Breathing, possibly both as a single tradition. Dream-Breathing is probably known to the Dark Vigil chapter on Samsara, which they use with the power granted to them by their psychoactive tattoos. But these are just suggestions. You can decide how and where you want to use them. They are, after all, powerful kung fu secrets. While I’ve not required any “secrets” perks, it might be valid to treat certain power-ups as rare enough to require a perk to learn them.

In any case, enjoy, and thank you as always for supporting this project.

Keleni Breathing IV – Rage Breathing

Finally, we always gotta have an evil style, the one stolen from the heroes, the one the elders of the style never want to talk about, the forbidden dark side that the desperate hero embraces and doesn’t realize turns him into the villain until too late.

Or, at least, it’s how I originally conceived of Rage-Breathing. It evolved considerably, and became perhaps the most detailed and my personal favorite (though, man, the amount of work it took). It’s certainly a style that Ranathim (and Krokuta and even humans) can use better than Keleni, but it’s not that Keleni don’t have a lot of bottled rage. It’s not evil, really, it’s about tapping into something primal, instinctive, and dangerous to push ones body to the brink. If Celestial Breathing owes a debt to Dragon Ball Z and this entire thing to Demon Slayers, Rage Breathing draws from Kengan Ashura (though it does borrow one concept from Dragon Ball Super that we will touch on).

Rage Breathing is built around the heart chakra (probably more intensely than any other style is built around a chakra) and is inspired by the element of fire, hence my fire demon picture there. It’s also a rather involved style, so let’s dive in.

Keleni Breathing III – Celestial Breathing

We have our “martial” internal style, and our “psionic” internal style. We obviously need our Communion internal style. This was the last style I wrote, but not the last style I’ll present, and in a lot of ways, it was the easiest. It took a lot of work, but I think the strokes will look obvious to you after you’ve seen them, though there’s some sticking points we’ll get to later.

Celestial Breathing when it came to Chakras, I based it on the idea of the “Crown” chakra, though inspired by the idea of “air” element, I thought about connecting it to the throat chakra, and the singing of hymns and such, but I think in the end the crowning chakra makes the most sense, as that’s associated with ones connection to the universe, which neatly captures what Communion is.

Keleni Breathing II – Dream Breathing

This continues the breathing styles post from yesterday, a focus on four variants of Keleni internal martial arts. Today, we’ll look at the second, which was actually the first I ever created long before Keleni breathing was even a thing. It’s my least favorite of the styles, and the one I struggled the most to name. It’s not that it’s a bad style, it’s just “a worked example of psychometabolism” which is fine, and very valuable, but I’m not sure what makes it especially unique compared to any other style that teaches psychometabolism. It’s not a bad style, it’s just that I personally wish it had a little more sizzle.

Back when I first outlined the Templars, I described “Sacred Body Mastery” which was a study of psychometabolism. It was always something I wanted to explore and emphasize. Obviously, Templars would be able to study their psychic power, often at the feet of Keleni, and become faster, tougher, stronger and heal faster. And Ranathim, who also have access to psychometabolism, should be able to do the same. Sounds a lot like the premise behind Keleni Breathing styles, no? So there had to be a psychometablism in the breathing styles.

Symbolically, Dream Breathing integrates the “Third Eye” Chakra, of course. The other styles are “Earth, Air and Fire” based, so Dream Breathing probably gets Water by default, which does fit the sort of self-control aspect and the shifting of internal energies as well.

Keleni Breathing Styles: Introduction and Mountain Breathing

Okay, here we go.

I tend to believe that having a power structure adds a lot to a GURPS game. Players want to know what they can buy, and want to have goals to build their characters to. GURPS has these, but in more of a general sense: yes, you can buy Trained By a Master or Enhanced Time Sense or another level of Karate or Power-Blow, but players seek variety and things that feel exciting and grounded in the setting. Sometimes they want very unique elements, like DR that that requires focus to maintain, or super luck under very specific circumstances. Players can design this with their GM, but this can be a long drawn process; if the players design it themselves, they risk looking “twinky.” By having a pre-defined set of interesting powers, players can find inspiration in the power set, and freely take “twinky” powers that are GM approved and feel very clever when they build (GM-pre-approved) combos of interesting powers and explore the power sets you designed.

I’ve wanted a power-set like this for ages. When True Communion first dropped, it came with “Sacred Body Mastery,” a psychometabolism style designed to help Templars be generically better fighters, and was one of the special techniques of the Dark Vigil chapter. I’ve not done a lot of focus on these non-combat styles and, today, we’ll fix that.

I had intended for this post to be the release post, but it turned into a preview post instead, because this is taking forever to write. The full release will come once the previews are out.

The Pacifist Crush Update

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.

Wiki Week Martial Arts Update 3: The Rest

Alright, in addition to finally fixing Maelstrom and upgrading the Fell Form, I wanted to touch on some of the old standbys. These don’t need as much help, but I’ve had some complaints about them and I wanted to address them.

This update covers

• The Destructive Form
• The Graceful Form
• The Simple Form

The Destructive Form

The new version of the Destructive Form is here.

The Destructive Form is fine. It relies on Beats and unarmed strikes to trigger stuns. This is enough to keep it competitive, even in a DB heavy environment. The Master level had a mistake in it that I had missed. I think I previously resolved it with Striking ST 4, but that’s probably excessive, so I trimmed that back to 1 and gave it more Intimidation and two levels of:

Shocking Stun: For every 2 points of injury in excess of the injury required to inflict a Major Wound applies a -1 penalty to the HT roll to resist Stun and Knockdown. This is in addition to any other penalties. The maximum penalty is -2 per level of this perk; 2 levels of this perk is a suggested maximum.

This makes the stuns it inflicts more meaningful and more likely to connect. It doesn’t make stunning worse, but in retrospect, stun also triggers knock down, which is also bad. Either way, they tend to be fight enders.

Second, I wanted to emphasize the use of Stuns by the Destructive Form as well as how scary it is, so I’ve given it a new form of Rapier Wit.

Rapier Wit (Threatening): This trait works like Rapier Wit, except it replaces Public Speaking with Intimidation, and replaces the -2 if your opponent has Clueless or No Sense of Humor with -1 per level of Fearlessness your opponent has. Consider using the limitation of once per encounter per opponent suggested by GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. 5 points.

I like DF’s rule about “once per opponent per encounter” so I made sure to include it.

The final problem with the Destructive Form is that it’s a little too good. It doesn’t need a nerf, but some GMs are reluctant to use it. It’s a classic “villainous” style, and watching the PCs get their limbs lopped off might be overkill for some groups. I’ve addressed this with a couple of optional rules for handling the Destructive Form in groups that want to give characters plot armor, or groups that make heavy use of Flesh Wounds to remove severed limbs from the equation.

Gap in the Plot Armor: Whenever the character attacks an opponent with “plot armor” that the GM doesn’t want killed, dismembered or maimed, the maximum damage the character is allowed to inflict increases by 1, and all deceptive attacks by the character apply an additional -1. In addition, any time the character would dismember, maim or kill a character with an attack and the GM or player disallows it by fiat, through special options, or through the expensive of impulse buys, the character gains 1 impulse buy point. No more than one impulse buy point may be gained this way per session.

Retroactive Stun Reverberation: If the damage roll, after applying for DR and conditions like injury tolerance, indicate a Major Wound has been inflicted, and he target of that wound uses some means to mitigate that wound (Flesh Wound, TV Action Violence, etc), they must still check for Stunning or Knockdown at all the same penalties for the original wound (eg -5 for a head injury).

Graceful Form

You can find the Graceful Form update here.

As a general rule, I’ve tried to focus on less popular styles, but Graceful is an exception, because I see people use it. Still, given the discussion of “Free Acrobatic Feints” I wanted to introduce one. It’s really the only change to Graceful From. I had hoped to integrate it into Trickster’s Step, but now it’s its own move.

Dazzling Runaround: Prerequisite: Acrobatic Feints. If the character inflicts a Runaround Penalty on an opponent (-2 to defense due to moving to their side or rear hexes), they also gain the benefit of a free Acrobatic Feint against their opponent.

The Simple Form

You can find the Simple Form update here.

I’m not sure if the Simple Form qualifies as “unpopular.” I’ve never seen it used, but people seem to discuss it often, especially the Formless Deception. So naturally I decided to make it stronger! I wanted to experiment with the idea of the Feinting Floor, and so I’ve integrated it into the Formless Deception. That probably makes it even more desirable and it was already a killer app for the style, but it’s the only other style that really uses Feints, and Swift has better tricks for ripping open defenses.

After thinking on it, I’ve decided to integrate all of Feinting Floor into a single perk. It doesn’t help on defense, it only helps on successful feints, and it gives +1 to +3 under very specific circumstances, so it seems like a perk.

Feinting Floor: If making a successful feint, always apply at least a -4 to the opponent’s defense as a result of a feint. That is, success by 1, 2 or 3 apply a -4 to the opponent’s defense. This has no impact on Feints with a margin of 4+.

I also had some thoughts about Trademark Moves, and while I don’t think it makes the style more powerful, it might make it more interesting and certainly fits with the themes. Defeat the Form came because I swore overuse of Trademark moves triggered bonuses to defense from opponents, but I couldn’t find it, so I created a more specific one. The rest are just really specific examples of Trade-mark tied Secret Style perks.

Defeat the Form: After seeing a Trademark Move performed once, the character may declare that Trademark Move “defeated” and gains a +1 to defend against all attacks from that Trademark Move for the rest of the encounter. The character may only “defeat” one Trademark Move per encounter.

Master the Form: Once per encounter per level of Master the Form they have, the character gains an additional +1 all rolls made during a Trademark move they use. The same Trademark Move cannot benefit from Master the form more than once per encounter (it must be a different Trademark Move each time). This perk is leveled, but may not be purchased more times than the character has Trademark moves.

Master the Formless: Once per encounter per level of Master the Formless, the character may apply a -1 to their opponent’s Defense or apply a +1 to their own defense roll provided they used no Trademark move. This perk is leveled, but may not be purchased more times than the character has Trademark moves.

I also removed Warding Parry (Did it ever do anything?) and bumped Cede Ground to +2 judo parry on retreats. +1 parry on all retreats might be more interesting, though, thinking on it.

What about…

This winds up Wiki Week. Why am I not buffing the other styles?

• The Swift Form: This style is already really good at ripping apart high defense values, and has a ton of tools to do so. It also gained Countless Ribbons of Light recently, which is a killer app on par with the Formless Deception.
• Knightly Force Swordsmanship: I didn’t really look into it, but I see this one taken a lot, and its use is more battlefield tactical than dueling focused. It’s less about using your shield to defeat a specific opponent, and more about tanking an entire group of enemies, which it does just fine.
• The Serene Form: This is already a very popular style that I’ve seen taken over and over again. It’s very useful at its core purpose, which is adapting to a variety of situations and deflecting blaster fire, and I’ve already integrated a dazzling draw into it. I wouldn’t mind an upgrade to Contemplate Endings, but Imperceptible Draw and the Eternal Now already make this a ridiculously effective style.

Wiki Week: The Fell Form Revised

So, wiki week continues with some tweaks and improvements on styles meant to improve how various force sword forms handle crazy defense twinkery that’s possible in Psi-Wars. At the risk of those proving me right for a “laser-like focus” on the Umbral Rim, I wanted to clean up at least one more Umbral Rim style before moving on: the Furious Form. It’s a style that’s struggled with a focus and identity outside of “Cool Lithian Ninjas, I guess.” The original style tried to do too many things, like Maelstrom, but I think I’ve narrowed it down enough that they can start to be really effective.

The updated version is available here: Sefelka Sonostrum: the Fell Form

Wiki Week: Maelstrom Form

So, this week is dedicated to updating some Force Sword Forms, and there’s one that really bugs me, because it was basically non-functional until now: Maelstrom Form. This style integrated several core concepts. First, it’s the style for people who want to be cool like Kreia from KOTOR 2, and it also integrates some of the style ideas that were memed around 10 years ago about how to use the Force to make your lightsaber combat even better. In short, it was intended to be the style that “casters” used, rather than the “fighter” styles of the other forms.

It should be fixed and functional now, though it turned out to be quite a complex topic. You can check it out here: Maelstrom Form.

The rest will be a discussion of what I changed and why.

Musings on Defenses in Psi-Wars

It’s wiki week and the Backers of spoken. It’s gonna be martial arts. Because all I do is martial arts. To be fair, though, they’re pretty popular, and they do a lot to highlight how the setting works, or how fighters might interact. Also, I keep thinking of new ones, a lot of which are mostly created for a single character, and then someone in a game asks to learn it, and I wonder if I should publish a finished version and then I dread the degree of writing it takes (I get why GURPS Martial Arts are originally written that way, because a list of stats is way easier to write than flavor and deep tactical discussion and structure, even if the latter is way more rewarding).

I offered a martial arts update on the wiki because there’s been a lot of discussion of a few specific martial arts and probably because I’ve hinted at my half-finished Combat Breakpoints article from ages ago. Mostly, I think the martial arts are fine as written, but there’s a few niggling things I’d like to fix (so if you’re reading this and you have a complaint or question about a martial art, now is the time to bring it up, because it will have my focus this week). But on top of rewriting some of Maelstrom Form and Fell Form, I’d also like to take this opportunity to start introducing a few concepts I’ve been toying with, and these are the point of today’s article.