It’s been a long Wiki Week! As noted before, the winner for Patreon was Sorcery. The winner for SubscriberStar was House Tan-Shai. I’ve been discussing Sorcery all week, but let me drop the major wiki week updates here and then discuss the design notes after the jump.
For wiki week, we have a pretty clear winner, though the Lithian Language came in close second, at least on the Patreon poll. Given the extent and difficulty of sorcery, though, I suspect putting it on the wiki will take up the whole week. This may surprise you, dear reader, if you’re not a backer, as I’ve been releasing it monthly for quite some time, which is why the Patrons voted for it.
This is a project I’ve been working on quietly for about half a year now, releasing one “college” of magic a month or so, with minor updates. We’re up to about 6 colleges now, and it’s coherent and settled enough that I feel confident releasing it. This will be a multi-part series. You can click the link below and jump straight through it, or keep reading to learn more about how it works and what I changed.
Link to Psi Wars Sorcery
Continue reading “Introducing: Psychic Sorcery”I should get better about posting to the blog when I update the wiki.
We’ve had two wiki weeks since the last update. I’ll just bundle up all the updates here in one spot:
Sidekicks won two months running on Patreon, so there are four more sidekicks for your very low-power Psi-Wars games, or as allies to your PCs.
Other than the doctor, this covers pretty much all the relatively generic sidekicks I have.
Subscribestar chose animal companions in February. This makes me happy, because we finally have some proper bestial allies on the wiki, and I feel like the template I’ve set up to handle this will work well. I’ve focused exclusive on Dog-like aliens, which have their own page now.
(My plan is to follow the Generic Space Bestiary template, and treat look-alike critters as the same animal handling specialty)
I have more. It’s just a matter of getting around to them.
Finally, Subscribestar tied for March, so I broke the tie in favor of psychokinesis, as I’ve been messing with it a lot. I’ve been updating the major psi pages to remove the pure references to the book and replace them with enough reference material to make your character from the wiki exclusively, if necessary, but not so much as to replace the book. That is, I’ve tried to make it more convenient and consistent without violating copyright (I still want you to buy the books, and you still ultimately need them to know how these abilities work).
I’ve also added much expanded pyro- and cryokinesis to psychokinesis.
I keep forgetting to drop these links. Most of my readers follow the Wiki RSS and so just know in advance when things drop.
So, I’ve done it a little differently this time. Before I would pick one or two of the top results and wikify them, but now I think I’m going to take the top Patreon choice and the top SubscribeStar choice and wikify both. Why the difference? Because Subscribers don’t vote as much because there’s few of them, they can’t see what the Patrons are voting on, and they get a sense that they don’t matter. So now, their voice is weighted equal to the Patrons. Not entirely fair, but it seems more workable that way. At least this way, everyone gets what they want (and they usually tend to align anyway).
The top choice for Patrons was Psychometabolism, and it’s up. I might change how I handle rare powers, because they seem rather difficult to find or navigate to, and so most people don’t even realize they exist. But I’ll leave that for another time.
The top SubscribeStar choice was Heavy Weapons, so the Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons have been added to the Weapons page. There’s some little changes that may still need to be made, but at least the core of the material is there.
Finally, as a bonus, I’ve added House Korenno. They’re not especially important, which is why they’re important. I wanted to have a house that highlighted what a minor house might look like, because I notice most people treat my houses as “important” but still want to add some minor house or two, and House Korenno will help guide them through that process.
That’s all the major updates for the wiki this month. See you again for wiki week next month!
Alright, so the winning request for this month was onboarding and I focused on that with my post the other day on how to learn Psi-Wars. But I also tend to envision the Psi-Wars galaxy breaking into several distinct regions each with their own themes, and I’ve wanted to collect topics associated with each specific region in one, easy-to-find place. As usual, my reach exceeds my grasp, and I only got one done, but it’s a start.
You can read the Galactic Core primer here. I’ve also linked it in the Primer.
Part of this required some updated, which include:
In addition, based on a request, I’ve added:
So, every month I have a wiki week poll. The real idea is to force me to finish off and publish some of the notes that are mostly done, lurking around on my hard drive, things like snippets I’ve put together for a game, or something I started and got to 90% and then parked until I could resolve some problem or do some other thing that took far, far too long. But I also offer some options that let me get a bead on the community and how they feel about certain things. For example, if I see a pile of interest suddenly flowing towards sorcery that says something different than alien details. One of those option that consistently comes up is Onboarding, which is anything that might help new GMs and players get started with Psi-Wars. I value this a lot, because I don’t want Psi-Wars to get so arcane nobody but old veterans can play it. It also seems to come up a lot, because Psi-Wars seems to go through cycles of interest. We’ve had a recent spate and crop of new people and it seem they’re feeling a little lost, as Onboarding handily won.
This is hardly the first time it’s happened, and last time I integrated character creation into a cleaner process, and the time before that, I cleaned up the primer. Here we are again. What do new players want? If they knew, they probably wouldn’t need to ask, because they would just go get that thing. One request I’ve seen is “How do you run a Psi-Wars game?” And that’s valid, but I think I want to start a little higher level than that: how do you even read Psi-Wars?
By the way, if you’re one of those newbies (or veterans) that voted for this, and there’s something specific you want, be sure to let me know in a comment or a discord post!
Continue reading “Onboarding: How do I start with Psi-Wars?”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 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).
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.
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.
This winds up Wiki Week. Why am I not buffing the other styles?
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
Continue reading “Wiki Week: The Fell Form Revised”So the winner, by a squeaker, was economic ships, and so I’ve been up to my eyeballs in ships this week, and I think I’m done for awhile. I have two still unpublished, the Serenade-Class Tramp Freighter (I bet you can guess what inspired that), and a Lithian freighter (a translation of the Prosperity), but I’ve had it with ships for a little bit, so they’ll have to wait.
The Arrow-Class LASH Freighter
A direct translation of the Ricardo-Class LASH Freighter from GURPS Spaceships 2, this was such a neat concept I wanted to include it. The idea is you have a ship that goes through FTL but then doesn’t (or hardly) moves through real space, and lets automated shuttles do the real space transportation and receives the next batch and then jumps. I allowed the Arrow to move, but only slowly, and I think it has more utility than I might have expected, as it can transport other ships at higher speeds as well. A neat idea! I put it under the Syntech umbrella (as they love neat ideas that may not be practical, and automation). The price per ton is higher than the Aldeberan, but still comes in under $500 per ton, which makes it surprisingly affordable, more so than I expected. For the name, I went hunting for alternate economists to name it (I usually name the translations in a way that it’s pretty easy to track back to what it was originally), and I found one named Kenneth Arrow. Perhaps not the best name for an economic, rather than military, ship, but it felt fun and cheeky to do.
The Frontiersman-Class Frontier Freighter
In all of my discussion of freighters, I often suggest they would do poorly in space filled with pirates. Okay, well, what sort of freighter would you send to a place full of pirates? GURPS Spacehips 2 would send the Regulus, so I translated it. In this case, I made some minor changes to the armament to better fit the Psi-Wars mechanics, assigned it to Startrodder (they do a lot of your pioneer stuff) and gave it heavy armor rather than a force screen (more to do with how old Startrodder stuff tends to be old). I tend to imagine it in places like the Phoenix cluster, though it might be on the edges of the Glorian Rim too. The Regulus is named after “Large, Bright Stars” but so is the Aldeberan, so I shifted to pioneer themes.
This one is less practical; it clocks in at around $1500 per ton. That gun is expensive! This means it’ll struggle to justify things like livestock and, in practice, it’s “just” a very large tramp freighter. But life on the rim is hard, I guess.
The Delta-Class Shuttle was inspired by the Alpha-Class shuttle in GURPS Spaceships 2, but with some modifications and stripped down somewhat and adapted to Psi-Wars mechanics. Specifically, it flies like a plane, though it has some contragravity assistance. The Ranger was entirely new, and inspired by the “Phantom” from Star Wars Rebels. I had noticed that the Regulus had a shuttle bay, and that made sense: farms aren’t going to have massive cargo processing facilities, so the shuttle carts the grain up and down, but there may be pirates, so they’d have weapons and armor, then you get something that looks like the Phantom.
One eagle-eyed reader noted they had the same price while the Ranger was better. Actually, the Ranger is closer to $1.6 mil and the Delta is about 1.45 mil, so there’s a difference, but I imagine most people are fine with rounding, especially since Westerly tech tends to get a -10% discount (Startrodder and Redjack have “more bang for your buck” than other corporations). The Ranger also has bigger wings that take up more room and requires a longer take-off than the Delta, and this matters, but they tend to fall below the radar of most gamers, so I’m fine with the Ranger being a better shuttle than the Delta for adventurers, but I don’t expect players are going to shop much around for what shuttle they’re going to get. I don’t imagine players are going to care much at all about any of these economic ships, honestly. I could be wrong, though.
The Turbo came late, as I was working on the Yachts and it occurred to me that rich people wouldn’t want a generic Delta or a stinky Ranger. They’d want something cool, and I remembered the racing ship from the Expanse. I could imagine someone with plenty of money paying top dollar for a shuttle with fighter engines on it, and so the Turbo was born! Frankly, the Drifter is better if you want to maximize your speed, but the Turbo can carry your sportscar and a couple of attractive you want to impress with your spoilers and red paintjob, while the Drifter is just stripped down speed.
After the discussion of slow travel speeds, it occured to me that people buying yachts are doing so because they’re willing to pay top dollar for the fastest travel times. So, I’ve upgraded 4 yachts, the Prestige-Pattern Shuttle, the Ronin-Pattern Battle Yacht and the High Roller. The only real change in all three was a rating 3 hyperdrive, which sometimes raised costs (Well, it always raised costs, but sometimes I had arbitrarily rounded up, and the cost was sometimes too small to notice) or required additional mass.
Wait, that was 3. What was the fourth? Oh, of course, the ever popular Nomad. I did more than just upgrade the speed of it, because obviously it needs to be able to be the fastest ship in the galaxy, so yes, you can get Rating 4 on it. But I also did a more thorough and careful examination of the modules and carefully audited each one; this resulted in some changes, but everything should be clear now.
The Taj-Mahal class yacht from Spaceships 2 is one of my favorites. I used it all the way back in iteration 3, and I believe it showed up in some of my “playtests.” I had forgotten about the Taj Mahal Black. That might be an interesting option to build out later. Anyway, it was an old friend I wanted to bring back as a surprise culmination to this wiki-week. I needed a corporation to attach it to, and it doesn’t feel quite like an ARC or Syntech ship, and it’s too nice for Stellar Dynamics (which are tediously boring and generic), so I conjured up Grand Federal LLC, a corporation that worked primarily for the upper classes of the old Galactic Federation, a sort of non-Maradonian ARC that was subsumed into/destroy by the Imperial Combine, giving these ships a little bit of a sense of the nostalgia I feel for them given their early inclusions in the Psi-Wars canon.
Hardly, but it’s all I have for now. As I said, I also have a Lithian freighter based on the Prosperity, the Serenade-Class Tramp Frighter, and a few more yacht ideas. A cut down, Syntech corporate executive “private jet” yacht would be nice, and I feel like the Empire needs an elite, high speed corvette for jetting around troubleshooters, auditors and imperial knights more than ever, but I’ve been up to my eyeballs in spreadsheets for the past couple of weeks and I’ve fallen behind in other things so I’m going to stop here.
Happy wiki week!
Summer vacation is over, at last, so I’m finally getting my life back to some extent. I did post some wikiweek updates, but not quite as much as I hoped. Here’s some highlights!
Continue reading “Wiki Week Updates for August”
Mailanka's Musing 