My schedule has been wonky, so Wiki Week got pushed back a week! Maybe next month I’ll outline my schedule, so you know what’s coming.
“Wiki Clean-Up: Newbie Onboarding” won the wiki week poll for July. Given the number of new people I’m seeing flowing in, and the sudden press for questions on character creation, I thought it might be nice to sit down and explain the precise process of character creation in Psi-Wars, since there’s a lot of assumptions that the Psi-Wars community just casually makes that most newbies aren’t aware of, such as the common 300-point value, the existence of trait lists, or how power-ups work.
So, to help with this, I re-organized the character creation material, fully ported in the trait lists from previous iterations and updated them slightly, and integrated all of it into a single article that links to the various elements, so if you’re running a Psi-Wars game, you can just point a new player to this single article, and it will walk them through the process. The Primer also points new players to the Character Creation article now.
I also cleaned up the house rules, to bring them all under one article, as they were far too scattered before. This new structure should help organize such information moving forward too.
Iteration 5 Documents
I’ve been bombarded over the past few months by requests to access the Iteration 5 documents on my Google Drive. I’ve put up a new access point, in case my Google Drive goes down (which is likely will, because I’m less a fan of Google than I used to be). I’ll try to update the links sooner than later, but for now, you can find Iteration 5 documents on the wiki (there are links in the Primer). But you can also find them here:
The Saruthim Update
Saruthim popularity remains quite high (I’m quite proud of their success), but I’ve received some feedback and requests that I wanted to fulfill.
First, I’ve noticed most people neglect elements of the transformation process and regularly push back against the time it takes. People don’t want to wait 1d seconds to transform, they want it to take a single turn, tops, and I notice players tend to conveniently forget the 4 HP cost, which felt excessive to me anyway. So I’ve reduced the cost to 1 HP, and adjusted the build slightly, which actually reduced the cost! Then I added a Saruthim upgrade that allows them to manifest the armor in a single turn with no HP cost. It’s expensive! But Saruthim players don’t seem to mind.
In Wanderers of Dhim, I had a player ask for “partial transformation.” Of course, at some point we just have to admit that Pulver’s possession designs are just Alternate Form with extra steps, but okay. How do we handle accessing an internal Ally for a little bit of help, rather than fully manifesting the ally? Well, how about a Modular ability similar to Epigenetics? I’ve reduced the modular swap time to 1d seconds per ability, and made it an alternate ability to the Carapace Bond and Ally, because if you’re manifesting just an arm blade, you’re not using your carapace (specifically, you are, just in a different way). The cost turned out surprisingly affordable, and it made my other Saruthim player sit up and notice. I’m not sure how useful it really is, but they’re happy.
It wasn’t a specific request, but I’ve seen a few people in the Psi-Wars community complain about Extra Life, and I think they have a point. Penalizing a player 25 points to keep playing the same character rather than rolling up a new one seems harsh and pointlessly antagonistic. So instead, I updated Parasitic Restoration to use Unkillable 1 instead, with some achilles heels (kill the carapace, kill the saruthim, that sort of thing), and an arbitrary aftermath effect that mimics the deleterious effects of Extra Life, but more temporarily (you might have Amnesia or neurological disorder for awhile, but only as long as the GM finds it interesting, then you’re back to full fighting strength). The result is a touch more expensive, but frankly cleaner than using Extra Life.
I also cleaned up the Gifts of Flesh in general. I’m a fan of the Racial Gifts perk, but in retrospect, being heavily invested in an expensive trait like Symbiotic Carapace Bond should be plenty to fulfill a prerequisite. So, in addition to the Parasitic Carapace being reduced in cost, the Saruthim lens is itself just slightly cheaper.
Finally, I’ve had a request to make the Saruthim better ghost-hunters. The result is a new Mind Sliver set: Shadows. It makes use of Necrokinesis with a focus on Animakinesis and Umbrakinesis, with a little light counter-psi strategies and tools, and the result is a great “shadow ninja” power set.
I’ve had further requests, mostly around the Miasma set, but I ran out of time. I also saw requests for necrocrafted “cybernetics,” which I actually have notes on, and there’s a mess of Gaunt stuff that I really should finish updating. But again, I ran out of time.
As usual, Patrons will be able to choose the next wiki week in the first week of the month, so sometime next week. Thanks as always for supporting this project!
Mailanka's Musing 