The mooks I’ve created so far have obvious relations to the real world. Troopers, criminals and cops all actually exist, and I’ve largely just replaced real world firearms with blasters and real-world armor with ultra-tech armor. If I have one frustration with Star Wars (and thus Psi-Wars), it is this tendency to keep things “like the real world.” If we’re going to play in a sci-fi setting, I’d like to explore sci-fi concepts. Pirates are my first chance to do that, as they don’t really represent anything that actually exists in the real world. Certainly, we have our own, actual pirates, but the pirates of Psi-Wars must necessarily operate in a unique environment: space.
The Concept of Space Pirates
Like criminals, pirates are less focused on defeating their opponents than in acquiring material gain. This could consist of a ship’s cargo, the ship’s personnel (slaves) or the ship itself. Whatever their focus, this necessitates boarding the ship. Pirates can’t afford to simply blow a ship up, though they might demand the surrender of an enemy ship, but even then, one might expect some resistance from the crew on the ship itself. The tactics necessary for the space battle itself isn’t relevant to this article, so much as the tactics of the boarding crew itself.
Pirates might focus on more than just boarding enemy ships. Pirates could double as low-rent mercenaries or the soldiers of an alien warlord. In a sense, they represent “paramilitary” criminals, and survivalist soldiers.
The basic pirate is the raider. Traditionally, pirates were simply sailors who, when close enough, would just mount an attack. I’d expect space pirates to work the same way: the non-essential crew of a pirate vessel would simply arm up with appropriate weapons and join in the boarding parties. Fighting on a spaceship would be close and personal, and we wouldn’t want to excessively damage the ship or your merchandise, so I’m going with vibro-blades and blaster pistols. Pirates might also wear vaccuum suits of some kind, in case things go catastrophically wrong (or, if the pirates are considered expendable by their captain, they might not).
The next is the marauder. A pirate works because most civilians will be poorly armed. A few men with blasters and vibro-blades are dangerous enough if you’re unarmed. If you’re facing well-armed and professional crewman, say some defensive mercenaries. For that, we need even heavier arms and armor, and more destructive intent. For this, I’d go with a combat hardsuit (or perhaps even space armor), and either a plasma shotgun or a plasma gun. It’s explosive, which could rip apart your loot, but a marauder is someone you send in against the hardest of point of opposition. They represent a cross between heavy troopers and assault troopers as depicted by a crazed space-mercenary. In case you need a marauder to act like a typical boarder, we can give them a vibrosword.
Then we’ll need specialists. Broadly speaking, in addition to typical loot (cargo, the starship itself), pirates might want to get at parts or steal robots, or they might want to enslave the crew itself. For the first, we’ll use engineers, characters armed with explosives, emp weapons and engineering skill. These can double as asteroid miners or repair crew. For the latter, we’ll use slavers, characters armed with either neurolash baton or a neurolash whip, for additional flair.
Tactical Theory
Like criminal gangs and security forces, tactics will vary a great deal from criminal gang to gang. Generally, once the ship has been boarded, all pirates will make a bee-line for the command deck, fighting their way through any opposition. Boarders will make up the bulk of the pirates, subduing any minor opposition, such as crewmen or aggressive passengers, either with threats or violence. Rogue Miners will either replace all boarders, in certain crews, or bolster their numbers as low-rent marauders or assist in cutting through secured doors. Marauders, if they’re present, will hammer any serious points of opposition, spearheading the rest of the boarders.
Saboteurs and Slavers exist to add some interesting spice to pirate encounters. Saboteurs will quickly remove any technological advantage a party might have, while slavers will quickly intimidate and defeat any hirelings the party might have, and threaten the crew directly.
Skill Level Theory
Boarders and Engineers are essentially combat amateurs. Like criminal goons, they’re primary threat is that they have weapons and are willing to use them; they’re skill 10. Slavers are necessarily more professional, though low-risk professionals. They’re skill 12. Finally, Marauders might be skill 12, as we wouldn’t expect pirates to have serious military-grade training, but Marauders represent the most dangerous things a pirate can throw at you, and they regularly face high level risks. Thus, I’d make them skill 15.
Technological Detail
In many ways, we’d expect pirates to resemble criminals, albeit with heavier weaponry and vacuum suits.
The Vibro-Blade
Setting aside the obvious space-cutlass imagery, the intent behind equipping pirates with vibro-blades is that they’re cheaper than blaster and less likely to create collateral damage, while more than good enough to cut through most forms of armor, including most battleweave vests and the less well-armored parts of light combat hardsuits. We don’t need to choose any specific or unique form of vibro-blade.
Blasters and Plasma Weapons
The old blaster pistol, designed for criminal goons, works pretty well here too. The pistol, of course, is a superior weapon to a vibro-blade but there’s a chance that it will miss and inflict collateral damage on something, which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t use it, but it becomes a secondary weapon, something to use when you’re sure it’s safe, or when you’re hard pressed.
A plasma weapon might seem to be an even worse weapon for the purposes of collateral damage than a blaster pistol, but it’s a remarkably cheap weapon for the amount of firepower it offers. A variety of plasma weapons could serve well as back-up weapons, and their explosive nature makes them great for blowing doors open.
Specialist Gear
Miners will obviously use demolition charges and plasma torches to do their work. The fusion torch from Ultra-Tech seems good enough (I note that it’s only reach C, but that seems errata, so I’ll include reach 1). To deal with robots and electronics, they’ll deploy EMP grenades. For slavers, the existing neurolash options are perfectly fine.
Armor
We could simply give our pirates vacc suits, but they’ll fail the first time they go into combat. So, instead, we’ll give them a battleweave armored battlesuit. We don’t have actual rules for that, but we can extrapolate out to 30 points of DR, which gives us roughly the same armor as a heavy battleweave vest.
A heavy combat hardsuit makes perfect sense for our mauraders and engineers, but we wouldn’t expect them to be as advanced or capable as those of Imperial Troopers. However, Imperial Troopers have heavy hardsuit armor with the advanced option, making it twice as expensive and 2/3 the weight. If we reverse engineer that, we can get “less advanced” armor that costs $5,000 and weighs 45 lbs for the same protection.
In all cases the armor and vacuum suits comes equipped with a communication device, but the helments do notfeature HUD or Infra-Red: they’re simple space helmets. Most pirates also carry lighting devices and electronic cuffs (to take prisoners with).
Pirates
All the following minions have been created in such a way that they’ll fit on two sides of an A6, so you should be able to print 4 per page. I have greatly reduced their complexity even further, so that most characters are virtually identical. Note that the listed tactics aren’t the only moves possible, just a helper for some of the more complex actions these characters might undertake.
Pirate Raider
| ST 11 | HP 11 | Speed 5 |
| DX 10 | Will 10/12 | Move: 5 (4) |
| IQ 10 | Per 10 | |
| HT 10 | FP 10 | SM +0 |
|
Dodge 8 (7)
|
Parry 8
|
DR: 30
|
Pirate Engineer
| ST 12 | HP 12 | Speed 5 |
| DX 10 | Will 11 | Move: 5 (2) |
| IQ 11 | Per 11 | |
| HT 10 | FP 10 | SM +0 |
|
Dodge 8 (4)
|
Parry 8
|
DR: 100/60
|
Pirate Slaver
| ST 11 | HP 11 | Speed 5.25 |
| DX 10 | Will 10/12 | Move: 5 (4) |
| IQ 10 | Per 10 | |
| HT 11 | FP 11 | SM +0 |
|
Dodge 8 (7)
|
Parry 8
|
DR: 30
|
Neurolash Brutality (13):Move up to 2 yards and make an All-Out (Determined, +4) attack for your opponent’s vitals (-3). Your opponent defends normally. If you hit, inflict 1d-3 cr damage and HT-10(5) neurolash affliction. Any damage that inflicts shock requires a roll for stunning. You may not defend.
Pirate Marauder
| ST 15 | HP 15 | Speed 5.5 |
| DX 10 | Will 10/12 | Move: 5 (3) |
| IQ 10 | Per 10 | |
| HT 12 | FP 12 | SM +0 |
|
Dodge 9 (7)
|
Parry 11
|
DR: 100/60
|
Mailanka's Musing 