Nonpareil, I

As I have mentioned before, I'm currently working on my own OSR-compatible game.  I think my influences will be fairly obvious, but I'm trying to remix them in an interesting way.  There's some recycling of ideas I've played with before, but I think that's inevitable when I'm basically writing a game that consists of all the things that I personally think are cool.

My goal here is not to write anything very sophisticated, or even necessarily something that I'd feel comfortable charging money for.  I'm trying to make something interesting, and hopefully playable.  It's a game that is going to work best with long-term campaign play, where the GM keeps track of months and years and the PCs have regular "down-time" periods.  This is due to a combination of factors:

1. Even low-level PCs will have access to the kinds of resources and considerations more typical of Name-level characters.

2. Characters gain XP and levels in the same way that OSR-fans will be used to, but their Skills train up as a function of in-game time.  They increase at the same rate per week regardless of the characters' activity, but a break of a month here or there to polish up some skills can be worth it if their next adventure promises to be a tough one.

On the other hand, higher-level characters gain more skill points than lower-level characters do, and buying new skills to train costs money, so sitting around for years as some Level 1 dweeb in an attempt to gain a skill-based advantage is a losing strategy.

And now, the Setting:

SETTING

The galaxy is a vast and mostly unexplored place. The dominion of humans covers hundreds of earthlike worlds, whether independent or bound up in one of the Empires. Alien menaces, otherworldly horrors, and simple internal strife threaten everyone. And now, the greatest discovery in the history of space exploration has begun to throw everything into chaos.

***

Humanity ascended into new heights of power when a certain set of technology was combined: Cybernetic amplification systems, quantum neurology, faster-than-light starships, bioengineering, and ansible communications. These things in combination allowed the creation of the Immortals.

An Immortal is a cloned human with Cybernetic Implant (CI) jack in the back of their skull and a lace of superconducting neural assistance hardware woven through their brain. Their CI allows them to control a warship as quickly and precisely as if it were their own body, and in the event of its destruction to transfer their brain-state to a waiting clone. Ansible hardware allows the instantaneous and absolutely secure transmission of information to anywhere in the galaxy, so long as it is tuned to an ansible capable of receiving it. This transfer destroys the ansible when it is used to transfer as much information as is required to rebuild a human brain, but most Immortals don’t mind paying for a new ansible and a new clone if it keeps them alive. A normal ansible is capable of moving a fair amount of data, probably as much as a healthy modern broadband internet connection, without risk of the waveform collapsing and destroying the ansible. An ansible that collapses in this way cannot be repaired. So, there is plenty for video, text, and voice communication. But some things strain even the ludicrous data storage capacity of galactic civilization, such as the quantum information packets that are used for skill software or an Immortal brain-state. Those must be either physically moved (for the former) or suffer the destruction of the sending and receiving ansible (for the latter.)

The use of Immortal starship pilots gave humanity a powerful edge in space warfare. Their ability to download skills and learn them at a vastly greater rate, plus to deploy them without any of the inefficiency or imprecision of normal starship controls, made an experienced Immortal the equal of dozens of mortal crew.

And, as time went on, they grew even beyond that. The whole wealth of space and the entire field of human achievement was open to them. By transferring to younger clones on a regular basis, Immortals did not age. Over the decades, they could use their ability to amass vast skill to become masters of every field of human endeavor. Unstoppable generals, brilliant scientists, experts on every kind of intrigue, captains of industry, lords of finance, and a match for a score of soldiers in personal combat, all of these things rolled into one. There was no stopping them. The greatest of the Immortals, the most ambitious, could not be prevented from taking over whole clusters of star systems, and declaring themselves God-Emperors. As many as a dozen have ascended to heights of power unimaginable to a mundane human. They sit in their palace-complexes deep within planetary cores, with post-singularity minds and hangars full of nanofabrication equipment, plotting unthinkable plots and pursuing incomprehensible goals.

***

The campaign begins twenty-four hours after an ansible signal from a lone deep space exploration frigate began transmitting to every major newsfeed in human civilization. Alyssa Marceaux, Immortal pilot of the Corbeau, had found something unprecedented.

A Dyson sphere, something infinitely far beyond the ability of any known civilization to construct, hanging like a black jewel in the infinite reach of space. The sphere was approximately 2 AU in diameter and spun to have an apparent internal gravity of 1.05g. There was a second inner “sphere,” a complex of gaps and solar collecting shades that produced a day-night cycle on the inner surface. Megastructure cables connected the shades to larger gaps at the north and south poles of the sphere, and transmitted power to whatever technology kept the whole thing running.

The base material of the sphere’s outer shell was impervious to any attempt to analyze it or even take a sample, so Captain Marceaux gave up on it quickly. A dotting of several thousand “vanes” penetrated from the outside of the sphere to the interior. Each one was a tunnel around a hundred kilometers across the interior and close to a thousand high. That was enough to keep the atmosphere settled around the habitable areas, rather than pouring out into space. Confident in her Immortality so long as she was inside her spaceship, Marceaux emerged from the inner portal of the vane to find an earthlike habitat that covered the entire inner surface of the sphere. Medieval civilizations of human (and inhuman…) peoples dotted a landscape that covered one hundred and seventy nine million times the surface area of old lost Terra. There was more habitable area than the entirety of humanity’s sphere of influence; maybe more than would be found in the entire galaxy combined. (There are five thousand vanes, not counting the larger gaps at the poles, evenly distributed about the surface of the sphere. Each vane therefore serves an area equivalent to about thirty-five thousand earths.)

She seeded micro-probes over the landscape and continued surveying. Every hour, a new update of photographs and scans came in. The locals had strange powers unexplainable by science. There was genetic diversity here beyond anything imaginable. There were nonhuman sapient species found nowhere else in the galaxy so far. There was untapped wealth here beyond measure, both in living space, resources, and information. Marceaux refused to sell the coordinates to a private party or even a government. A crowdfunded request met her ransom of one billion credits in a matter of only hours, deposited into her personal secure credit accounts. She gave the coordinates, officially registered the megastructure with the name Nonpareil, said goodbye, and disappeared from the information net. It has been four hours since transmissions ceased, and it seems that every freebooter, treasure hunter, and ambitious Immortal in the entirety of human civilization is making preparations to travel to those coordinates.

...

Any questions or comments may be directed to the comments section below.

Go Give People Money

The Bundle of Holding outfit is currently selling a nice package of Stars Without Number PDFs.  This is a great chance to donate some money to a food pantry and also get some electronic loot at less than the normal price.

The blog has been quiet because I'm working on my own OSR-compatible game.  I'll be posting about that soon, but I wanted to give any readers a heads-up about the above.

An alternate combat system for SWN, Achievements, and a Campaign Update

Okay, the formatting on this post is weird for some reason...

Alternate Combat System

I'm not actually preparing to implement this in my game, but I thought I'd noodle around with what SWN combat might look like if to-hit was a skill check, and armor functioned as Damage Resistance.  The necessary changes are as follows.

Armor Class starts at zero, and is modified up or down by Dexterity.  A character with 18 Dexterity has an AC of 2, for example. Shields give +1 to AC as appropriate (see the tech level comparisons in the entry on shields).  Field Emitter Panoplies give +4 to AC, and Deflector Arrays give +2.  If you are aware of incoming ranged attacks, you may add your Athletics skill rating to your Armor Class against them.

Armor typically grants Damage Resistance. Damage Resistance is subtracted from damage dealt in combat, but does not protect against falling damage.  TL4 armor may or may not protect against environmental hazards, at the discretion of the Referee.  Damage resistances are as follows:

Leather Jack: 1

Metal Mail: 3

Metal Plate: 5

Armored Undersuit: 2

Woven Body Armor: 3

Combat Field Uniform: 4

Assault Suit: 5

Powered Armor: 6

Field Emitter Panoply: 5

Deflector Array: 4

Advanced weapons still ignore low-tech body armor.  Powered Armor and Field Emitter Panoplies still render the wearer impervious to low-tech weapons.

Range is divided into Point Blank, Short, Normal, and Extreme.  Point Blank is melee range, around a step or two.  Short is up to five meters away.  Normal and Extreme are up to those distances as listed in the book for a given weapon.  The Crude Pistol has no Normal Range; it jumps straight from Short to Extreme.  Point Blank shots are treated as a melee attack, Short range attacks have no modifier, Normal range attacks are at -2 to hit, Extreme range attacks are at -4 to hit.

Melee combat is mutual.  When one character attacks an armed adversary who has reason to expect the attack, they both roll the appropriate skill.  On a tie, neither takes damage.  If the attacker rolls better, he deals damage to the loser.  If the defender rolls better, he deals half his normal damage (round down, but no lower than 1 point) to the attacker.  A character may use Primitive to attack unarmed, although they do not receive the bonuses that the Unarmed skill gives.  A character with Combat/Unarmed of at least 1 is always considered armed and may respond to melee attacks as though having a weapon. Two unarmed characters who are relatively unskilled with unarmed combat can, in fact, flail uselessly at each other for a significant amount of time.

How to Roll to Hit: Roll 2d6 and add your skill and attack bonus, and apply a range modifier if you are using a ranged weapon.  Subtract your opponent's Armor Class.  You hit on an 8+, and deal damage as normal for your weapon, less their armor's Damage Resistance rating.

Special Results: Natural Boxcars ignore enemy armor.

Likely Effects

I believe this will make Melee combat potentially uglier, in that damage will usually get dealt to somebody.  Armor functioning as DR will often cause characters to die more slowly, as they are less likely to be taken out in one big hit.  Highly skilled characters (such as Warriors who have moderate levels and substantial weapon skills) will essentially never miss.  Some weapons are simply ineffective against heavy armor.  My answer to this is to play up the ban on wearing armor in civilization.  Nobody should be wearing anything heavier than an armored undersuit in public in civilized places.  The Athletics skill becomes much more valuable.  Low-level characters will have trouble hitting even an unarmored target at long ranges.

Achievements

I'm inspired here by the work of one of the users of the Stars Without Number G+ Group. If you aren't a Google+ user, by the way, it is OSR heaven out there.  Seriously, it's like Facebook for nerd hobbies.  The following is probably something I will implement in my own campaign.  Essentially, giving out some XP awards encourages the PCs to do things, and giving out XP awards for lots of different things encourages them to try more different stuff.  Achievements are much like achievements in videogames.  When you do one, note it down.  If it's an individual XP award, you get it for doing that thing.  If it's a party XP award, the XP goes into the pot and is split among everyone at the end of the adventure.  Any given character or party can only receive an award once, as appropriate to the type of award it is.  I've split the awards into types in order to help make sure that there are lots of different areas where the PCs can get achievement XP, and again encourage them to branch out.

These numbers probably seem fairly high.  That's because I started my PCs out at 4th level, and I wanted them to be large enough to be meaningful.  If you were starting from Level 1, it would be entirely appropriate to cut all these numbers in half.  There are two awards here that grant 1M XP.  Considering that they would both require years of in-game effort and vast fortunes to be expended, I don't consider them imbalanced.  They probably shouldn't even be attempted by characters who aren't around Name Level.

Please note that PCs cannot, in my campaign, level more than once per XP award.  They'll land 1XP short of gaining that next level.

Combat Achievements

Individual

Kill someone using unarmed combat or an improvised weapon: 1,000

Get dropped to 0HP in combat: 1,000

Use a Gunnery weapon in non-starship combat: 1,000

Party

Destroy an armed, spike-drive equipped space vessel in space combat: 10,000

Kill a named adversary of at least 8HD: 5,000

Engage in a car chase that involves exchanging gunfire and making skill checks.  "Car chase" can mean anything from Hovercycles to horses, but not spacecraft:  5,000

Use a nuclear weapon in anger: 10,000

Heist: Carry off a major theft with no shots fired: 10,000

Exploration Achievements

Individual:

Learn a local language unknown to any other PC.  Must happen in play for the award to apply.  This can be a part of gaining Culture/World 0, but it will probably take a few months spent on-planet: 2,000.

Have something significant named after you: 2,000

Party:

Do complete surveys of at least three unexplored star systems.  This involves 24 hours of surveying for each major orbital body, and probably ground excursions to several: 10,000

Name and Colonize an uninhabited world.  A functional Colony includes copious supplies and at least 30,000 inhabitants.  This will be an extraordinarily serious undertaking in terms of time, attention, and resources, as the PCs are expected to take a hands-on role at every step of the operation: 1M

Participate in a terraforming operation in a significant way: 20,000

Make a substantial contribution to the State and the Academe's efforts to regain access to TL5 technology: 20,000.

Spend at least two weeks continuously inhabiting a TL1, TL0, or uninhabited world, without trips back to the spacecraft or similar: 10,000

Medical Achievements

Individual

Revive a PC or NPC reduced to 0 or less using a Lazarus Patch: 1,000

Use Anagathics for two years straight: 3,000

Party

Deliver high-tech medical supplies to a low-tech world, preferably for humanitarian reasons: 5,000

At least one PC obtains a cybernetic implant: 5,000

Setting & Miscellaneous Achievements

Individual

Spend a month living it up.  This means you stay on one world for an entire month, doing not much of anything mechanically relevant.  You might be able to train a single skill concurrent to your vacation time, so long as it's one the Referee agrees is not onerous to learn.  Your lifestyle cost for this month is 3,000Cr, plus extra for Anagathics.  this represents an Elite lifestyle.  This can be done on a low-tech world, but it may require additional effort to make sure your resources translate, and the environment must be appropriately luxurious.  1,000.

Spend a month REALLY living it up.  As above, you must spend the time on one world, doing nothing of much consequence.  Your lifestyle cost for this month is 30,000, plus extra for Anagathics.  This represents a Peerless lifestyle.  Otherwise as above. Attempting this on worlds below TL3 is very difficult.  10,000.

Party

Obtain a brand new starship superior to your prior one, and begin using it as your primary vessel: 10,000

Wreck a TL1 or lower society of at least 100,000 people, or do proportional damage to a larger civilization. 50,000XP.

Fund a Prometheus Project and raise the TL of a civilization of at least 100,000 people by 1 Tech Level. 1M.

Make a successful, peaceful trade run, that turns a profit and has no Trouble: 5,000XP.

Successfully smuggle substantial illegal cargo: 5,000.

Social Achievements

Individual

Obtain (permanent) Status 3 within the Academe: 2,000

Appear on a major television or radio show: 3,000

Compete in an important local contest or competition of some kind, and make a creditable showing: 2,000

Party

Build your brand.  Make a concerted and sustained effort to establish your group as a business concern: 10,000

Thwart the purposes of a major planetary government in a conspicuously heroic fashion: 30,000

Gain an NPC of major power and importance as an ally.  Think of high State officials, Navy Admirals, planetary governors, etc: 10,000

Be personally responsible for a major societal shift: 20,000

Maintain a Level 3 Corporate Headquarters, with an appropriate Factor hired and using all 12 Holdings points, for at least a year: 20,000

Campaign Update

The PCs have obtained the services of Spood, a telepathic alien who can translate between them and his own kind.  They are currently marching through the ruined city and causing problems.  They've annihilated a few monsters using their superior TL4 weapons, and the leaders of the alien tribes are rapidly trying to figure out how to point the PCs at their own problems.

During their perambulations, they found a treasure hoard after fighting a nest of Robber Flies (I am using monsters and treasure as per the Rules Cyclopedia.)  This included a number of coins and also an item of jewelry, worth 7,500gp.  I explained to them that this would be a huge deal to the locals of a TL1/TL0 world, but that to them it was worth at most a handful of credits as an item of native artwork.  Gold and gems are worth practically nothing to spacefarers.  See the entry for Trade Metals, SWN Core Book, pg. 40-41.

They have retained it, for possible use as a bribe.

Surprise & Reaction Rolls, Campaign Update

One thing I have not found in the Stars Without Number core book is rules for surprise and reaction.  This is probably because it is a modern, sensible game, and is not intended to deal with multiple random encounters per game-day.  Well, I am not a modern or sensible Referee, and my PCs are often engaged in overland travel or exploration of weird alien complexes, because my specific campaign is D&D In Space, more or less.  So, I am importing my slightly house-ruled Surprise & Reaction Roll rules.  You might think of these as being a clarification more than a real change.

If you are not familiar with old-school D&D, the second-best introduction to these concepts is the D&D Basic Set Rulebook, part of the B/X edition of the grand dame of RPGs.  I'm going to straight-up pimp that product out right here: B/X is the most elegant and well-explained edition of D&D that has ever existed.  That book is five bucks.  Play three or four sessions of it with a DM that uses all of the rules as written (or do it yourself), including encumbrance, turn-counting, light sources, random encounters, reaction rolls, and morale rules, and you will suddenly understand why all those things exist.  If you are like me, you grew up playing D&D and ignored all those rules, and thus thought they were boring and didn't understand why they exist.  You might still hate them after playing that way, but you'll understand how they interact, and it's a much more interesting piece of game design than its usually given credit for.

In any event, I make reference to those rules.

Surprise

This one is the easy one.  When two groups of similar size run into each other, you roll 1d6 for each group.  If either side rolls a 1 or 2, they are surprised for the first round.  I personally don't always roll for this.  If a small group is creeping up on a large and boisterous one, the smaller group will not be surprised, and can probably get a look at the other side.  They may or may not surprise the other side if they actually attempt to attack them.

In the case of surprise, the unsurprised side gets one round of actions, which may or may not be hostile.  If the surprising side successfully uses stealth instead of attacking, or chooses to attempt evasion, the surprised side may never become aware of their presence.

Reaction Rolls

Reaction rolls are of vital importance, because they help make sure you don't have to fight every goddamn thing you meet.  Ignoring these makes old-school dungeon and wilderness adventures much too deadly.  At least half of random encounters should be resolved peacefully, unless your players are actually looking for fights.

The way I handle these is a little different from basic B/X: You do not make a reaction roll until the NPCs or Monsters gain their first opportunity to act.  PCs don't get to know how things are likely to play out until they start playing out.  Further, do not apply any PC's Charisma modifier to the roll until they actually speak to the NPC or monster using a shared language or otherwise usefully communicate.

I prefer to do things this way because it forces the players to make a calculus of how they use a surprise round, for example.  Do they open fire while the getting is good?  Or do they have their Face start talking and apply their bonus?  PCs in SWN will tend not to have quite so large of attribute bonuses available, and the PCs may therefore not have a character handy with a high Charisma bonus.  If someone has substantial skill with Persuade, Leadership, etc., you might go ahead and give them an extra +1 to their charisma modifier when they share a language and can negotiate.

If the reaction roll is hostile but not "immediate attack," I'll usually let the PCs make their pitch and then apply any bonus they may have to whatever the original roll was.  This does mean that a party with a good Face character will usually be able to avoid hostilities with random encounters, but I don't see that as a downside.  There's always killer robots, assassins, and bioengineered horrors available if you don't want the PCs to talk their way out of every fight.

Considering the damage numbers in SWN, though, PCs have a lot of motivation to talk their way out of fights, and you should probably usually let them do it.

Campaign Update

The PCs have encountered a quasi-tribe of exiled Lethix living in the eastern district of the ruined city, in the floating domed enclosure that they are currently exploring.  They share no common languages, but the Lethix have an extreme predisposition to Telepathic abilities.  The Lethix group has a sort of telepathic Shaman who has mastered the Level 2 telepathic ability to communicate regardless of language, and he has therefore been conducting negotiations.  Right now, one of the PCs has volunteered to undergo "examination" to determine if they are truly friendly or if they are emissary of "Korgok," some sort of sinister supernatural figure or evil god that the Lethix fear.  

It turns out that "examination" means the Shaman will be digging through the PC's memory in search of where they come from and their purpose.  Since the Lethix are TL1 barbarians with no concept of a universe outside their little domed paradise, this is going to blow his mind.

This is a good step, because the Lethix can tell the PCs a whole lot about what is going on in the area, and thus entangle them in local issues and give them plot hooks.

Other stuff you should read:

Mark Gillham has done an excellent job of writing up his players' attempt at Hard Light, an adventure module for Stars Without Number.  Hard Light is a pretty cool module, and his players sound like pretty cool guys.  

Flare: A Supers Setting Pitch

It starts with the intense, red glow over the rooftops. I'd been walking for hours and was ready to pack it in for the night, but sometimes that's just how the luck breaks. I started running toward where I estimated it had been fired from. Fancy gated community. It wasn't hard to find, there were two black-and-whites and an unmarked in front of one of the houses. You could tell the unmarked from just any other car because it wasn't expensive enough to belong in that neighborhood. I pulled my mask on, a really basic one with just a domino, and opened my jacket so the insignia on my shirt was visible. Then I jumped the fence and came in through the back.

The police were expecting us, of course. They weren't allowed to send up the signal anymore. Technically they weren't even allowed to have them, just in case there'd be a misunderstanding, but the older ones, especially the detectives, especially anyone who had been on the night shift a long time, they had them anyway. It was all very deniable. Wink and a nod law enforcement. Not that what we were doing was really law enforcement.

"Can you find him? Can you find my baby? We can get the money, we'll pay it, but the police say we can't just pay the money, that it doesn't help..." She was wringing her hands right next to me, the mother, and I never knew what to say in situations like this. Did I try to play it up with bravado and maybe make her feel better. Should I try to hedge my bets and be honest? I told her the truth. I told her that I could find any lost or missing thing, and that if her little boy was still alive, we would come back with him or not at all. She broke down crying and I don't know if I said the right thing or not, but it was true and I will always stand by the truth.

I assumed there would be a 'we.' Within ten minutes or so, two more showed up. I knew Lighthouse, but not the other one, who said her name was Staccato. The police showed us what had happened. There in the boy's bedroom, and he wasn't really a baby, from the robots and toy guns I'd say he was eight or nine, there was a shadow under the bed. An umbral darkness, like a hole in the floor. Lighthouse shone a light at it, but the darkness ate it up...no. You could see dust motes. There was a space down there.

I went and knelt down and there was a blackness floating there in the space between the bottom of the bed and where the floor should be. I knew that this was where the boy had gone, that it was the shortest route to him. I put my hand in there, and it was like a doorway into another room. Some kind of dimensional thingy. You never really knew. The wrongness of it was revolting, sickening. Everyone who wasn't a mask had to look away, it was like some weird Escher thing, sitting dark and hungry in the middle of a normal well-lit room. I reached to where the bottom of the bed should be, and there was nothing but dark space. My hand should have been sticking out of the top of the mattress, but from the shoulder on I was in some other place, not a little boy's bedroom at all. The uniforms had all stayed outside the bedroom, couldn't take looking at it and there was no reason to.

The detective was a tall, wiry man, bald with salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He stayed, but had to struggle to keep from throwing up. It took most people that way. He showed me the ransom note. Low seven figures. I didn't get anything that mattered from the note, but he was brave to be here and ashamed that he could do no more than that, so I thanked him and told him he'd been a huge help. That I wanted him to keep the family calm for us. Three was enough, you almost never got more than three, and so Staccato and Lighthouse and me dropped down into the darkness under the bed while the sick, scared, brave detective held the frame up for us. I know that putting even his fingers into that shadow had to be one of the scariest things he had ever done. Most people couldn't have done even that. Normal people, anyway, people who didn't have a second face.


***

The way it happened to me is not the way it happens for everybody. I think it's always different. But I've been around the block enough times that I've actually talked to some of the others. Real Talk, not just terse discussion or whispered conference. So I guess the following is a pastiche of themes I've heard repeated and things that I believed enough to write them down.

You have to live in a city. Nobody has ever heard a of a mask from a rural area. You have to feel like some inchoate thing is missing from your life, like there's a part of you that just isn't there. You need to fast, and make a dark room and line the walls with mirrors, and light it with only a candle. No sunlight. No clocks. Nobody should know you are there and nobody should be checking on you. You have to watch the mirrors, from at least one dawn to the next dawn. Eventually you'll see your other face in the mirror. It might take a few tries, a few whole entire days spent staring at yourself, hungry and thirsty, never looking at your watch or taking a break to go to the bathroom and not dozing off. It's going to seem like a huge waste of time and it takes a big leap of faith to make it work, but eventually you might see your second face.

Making your second face is hard. It takes time and craft skills, and you have to actually get it right and not just slop something together and hope for the best. You'll know when it's right. It might take weeks or months. I know a guy who had to learn to work leather. You can't have someone else do it for you, and if you've never sewed a stitch in your life you'll have to, but by now you'll know if it's working or not.

Then you have to take it out and walk at night. Go where the road takes you. Follow the wind. Listen to the secret voices in the cemeteries and sit under overpasses with the old homeless folk. Don't talk. Watch, and listen. If you practice martial arts in the park that's okay. If you try to learn parkour, that's okay. But go somewhere new every night, and listen and watch instead of talking and being seen. Don't take a phone with you, no radio, no money, no ID, no weapons. Nothing more than a small flashlight and your mask. If people see you're wearing it, they won't bother you. People who spend a lot of time out at night know what it means, and they won't bother you.

Eventually, you'll see your first Flare. Go where it came from. Introduce yourself to whoever else appears, but keep it short. Names, how long you've been out at night, and tell them you haven't found your power yet. They may give you a hard time or dismiss you, but they aren't allowed to keep you from trying. Whatever situation is in front of you, set the wrong things right. Do your best. Your power will appear when you need it, and when it does you will know what it does and how to use it. Not before.

Your second face will give you a shield against the fear, and when your mask is on you you can wrestle with the horrors of the night. The black-eyed children, the backwards walking man, Bloody Mary, shadow people, the madmen and the asylum escapees and the inventors. Your power may seem a paltry thing, but it's not really the power that makes you able to stand when others would flee or fall.

Be brave. Be just, and fear not.

***

Over time, I learned the others that lived in my city. They called me Seeker, though I didn't pick that name myself. I met Shift, who was small and soft-spoken and polite, but who could do miraculous, impossible things sometimes (and other times could not so much as light a match without striking it on the box.) Staccato's power was that she knew how to fight. At first no one believed this was a power, but one night she challenged five other masks to put her to the test, and not one single blow landed on her. I wasn't there for that, but I knew she was a true mask after she stepped into the shadow with me. Crag had the strength of ten. Breathe would heal from any injury, with wounds sealing up before your eyes. Lighthouse could shine lights, bright enough to blind and enough to find your way in any dark. Squeeze could fit through any opening that air could pass through. Love only ever wore a red bandana across the top of his head, with holes cut for eyes. It was barely a mask at all, but nobody could remember a time that Love wasn't answering the call, with the ability to look at you and know what you wanted. Love had been out longer than anyone, and then one day disappeared and was not seen again. We plant climbing roses for Love, but we do not speak his name. Bone could touch a thing and see its past, Walker could take you on roads no one else could know, Pitch could be both heavy and light, and Cup could put things away in a secret place and draw them out again at need. Most masks do learn to fight, eventually, and some get frighteningly good at at the problems we can resolve with fists, but it's not your fists that make you walk into the dark when you should turn around and run home and throw your mask in the fire and never talk about it again.

***

One night the signal went up from a neighborhood. I came to find Crag and Walker already waiting. A monster that came in dreams to hurt people was preying on the neighborhood, night after night. The monster hid in nightmares, but with Walker to lead and Seeker to find there was nowhere in this world or any other that it could have hidden. We circled through alleys and dilapidated sheds, up trees and across roofs to crawl through attic windows, but Walker found a path to Dream and we tracked the monster to its lair. Crag wrestled with it like Jacob wrestling with an Angel, and eventually with his hands he broke it. We left Dream through a different way, and came out in a far part of the city a week after we had left.

***

One night the signal went up from a mansion on the edge of town. Love and Shift met me there, and the man who sent the signal up was waiting by his car, his family in their pajamas waiting inside. They had moved into the house and found it haunted, and if we couldn't drive the ghosts away, they would never sleep a night there again. The ghosts had not hurt them, and I think they couldn't have, but not everything has to be about deadly danger. The sound of sobbing came from their closets at night and they awoke to find a man with hate in his eyes sitting on their chests so they couldn't move. Doors slammed open and shut at all hours, and the family had the wide and staring eyes of people being driven from their sanity.

We agreed to drive the ghosts away if we could, and they thanked us for coming. All that night and until the dawn, we did our best to unravel the haunting as though it were a knot we could untie. An awful man, the kind of monster that only an ordinary man could be, had tormented the people around him and killed a few of them, then himself. His hatred, wherever it came from, could not be exhausted, and they were all forced to replay the scenes of their lives like broken records. We could not touch them or speak to them, but Love could read their hearts and I could find their hidden journals and secret passages and the old bones hidden under the koi pond. And then, an hour before dawn, we saw the ghost of a lovely young woman with features like a china doll, ready to repeat the last moments of her life and die under the knife of her fiancee. It was only an image, a spider could not have hung a web on them. But Shift reached out, and grabbed her spectral wrist, and jerked her through life and death and time and back into the world. She was there, twenty years old and alive as you or me, a hundred years away from her proper time and trembling like a leaf.

Shift could do impossible things, sometimes, and the haunting burned away like dew in the morning. The young woman had no proper place in the world, but we told the family who lived in her home that our price for our help was that they help her, and they did. She lives there with them still, and strong people find it in themselves to make their own place in the world. She hosts a talk radio program now, and she keeps company with the lonely souls who call in every night from midnight to four AM. I have personal knowledge of ten people she has talked down from committing suicide.

***

One night the signal went up from a park in the center of the city. A groundskeeper was in the grip of a nameless fear, and could barely leave his shed after the power went out suddenly. I think he was wise to trust himself, when he saw shadows moving in the moonlight and there had been no wind. There were things in the secret heart of the park that night, things for which I could not find a name. Pitch leaped from branch to branch like a squirrel, and moments later stood on the ground as immovable as a monolith. The things came for us, but Breath stood against them and could not be killed, and Pitch knew how to use fists and feet. We drove them back with torches, and though we were wounded they fled. We did not defeat the things in the park, but they have not returned, and perhaps they will not.

Local Specialties I, Campaign Update

Because my campaign setting is still so small (there are fewer than 20 known systems), it's still feasible for me to give every named system its own feel. One of the ways I'm doing that is by giving different planets their own local specialty goods, things that are only available from there.  I don't have one for every system yet, but I hope to eventually.  Frankly, I'm having a much easier time coming up with local specialties for TL4 cultures.  It's tough to come up with something for lower-tech societies that can't be trivially produced at higher TLs.

The following are the Local Specialties I have so far.

1. As mentioned in prior posts, the Nyx Cluster makes the best anagathics available, by far.

2. Wolf is the home of Spacekea.  They make prefabricated structures and colonization supplies.  You can get a modular, lightly fortified manor house packed up into thirty tons of cargo space, for example.  It comes complete with everything but food.  They make even larger prefabricated facilities available by special order.  They also make low-maintenance fusion plants and similar supplies.

3. Anumati is the cyberpunk planet.  They make mass quantities of cybernetics (an expensive type of medical supply) and also the best personal entertainment products.  If you travel there personally, the cost to install cybernetics is much less.  They also produce a special cybernetic item, the Gibson Interface.  This is a port in the user's skull that allows them to interface directly with a computer, and enter a VR interface useful for hacking.

4. Inari is a world that is for cultural reasons almost entirely vegetarian. They make fantastic hydroponics equipment, and their biggest export is the Laughing Buddha Modular Hydroponic Farm. It weighs only 20 tons when packed, and when installed it can provide food, purified water, and air for up to 300 people indefinitely. It's expensive, at 100,000 credits, but easy to maintain and incredibly reliable.

5. Towers is a corrupt shit-hole of a world. For that reason, it has produced a brutal signature weapon.

Balrog Laser Pistol: This is a bulky, inaccurate laser weapon preferred by thugs and degenerates all across Towers. It has a range of 50/100, deals 2d4 damage and takes two Type A energy cells. It has a magazine of 12 and is capable of burst fire. Like all energy weapons, it is +1 to hit.  600cr.

Towers is also preparing to start producing a mass-market heavy fighter craft intended to challenge the military supremacy of State technology.

6. Tenebrous is only partially colonized, but they are TL4.  The local product is a crude, extremely unsafe vehicle called a Gravpogo.  The Gravpogo is a single-passenger vehicle that looks something like a cross between a hovercycle and a pogo stick.  A user with no skill can operate a Gravpogo, but it does use the Vehicle/Grav skill if checks are necessary.  

Gravpogo: Speed 1, Armor 1, HP 5.  Alternately, the GM can treat a gravpogo like a piece of worn equipment.  In that case, any hit that reduces the pilot below 10HP disables the gravpogo immediately.  The gravpogo's advantages are thus: It weighs only 125 kilos, and eight of them can be carried in one ton of cargo space.  It can take off and land from essentially anywhere, and is small enough to lean in the corner of a bar.    They can fly to essentially any height that a normal aircraft can reach, although you take your life in your hands if you do so.  They are cheap, at only 1,000 credits apiece.  The user should be advised that the gravpogo has no electronics beyond a utility light welded onto the front as a headlamp.  They don't need a key to start and can be stolen casually.  They do not have map software, GPS, a compass, a speedometer or altimeter.  There is a warning light that flashes when you only have five minutes or so of power left rather than a gauge.

Campaign Update

The PCs have chosen to investigate a floating city.  The city is an ovoid, 60 kilometers across the long axis and 40 kilometers across the short.  There has been no sign of intelligent habitation, but the internal biosphere is active and compatible so far with human life, and automated landing control guided their ship in and opened the airlock doors for them.  So far, they have borrowed a local hovercraft to travel around inside the dome.  It's a huge expanse of water with large islands scattered through it. During their journey to the largest island, they were attacked by bio-engineered armored shark-beasts.  The PCs were unscathed, but the monsters took a few bites out of the hovercraft.  It is now deemed inadvisable for them to attempt to return to the ship without finding a way to ensure with certainty that the hovercraft is not eaten out from under them hundreds of yards away from the shore.  

Rook, the AI henchwoman, is still manning the ship, and is in radio and video contact with the party.  As of right now, the PCs are going to explore the interior of the island.  I have informed the players that they need to begin tracking of grenades, ammunition, power cells, and rations.

Things could get interesting.

Aging & Hegemony, Part II

The following is the aging table I intend to use for this campaign, and probably in the future.

14 or less: Characters this young do not appear on-screen in my campaigns.
17 or less: -1 Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.
18 to 35: No modifiers.  If for some reason a character started younger than 18, remove the above penalties.
36 to 50: -1 Con & Dex.  +1 Intelligence & Wisdom.
51-60: -1 Con, Dex, & Str.  +1 Wisdom & Charisma.
61-70:  -1 Con, Dex, & Str.
71-80: -1 Con, Dex, & Str.
80+: Knock off a point of a randomly-selected attribute every year until one attribute is reduced to zero and they die.

A few notes:
PCs may not select the age they start, out of some kind of bid to get bonuses to mental attributes.  The starting campaign age is defined randomly as in my prior post. Penalties accrue according to biological age, bonuses accrue according to chronological age. Thus, a character who begins taking anagathics at the age of 21 will have all the mental attribute bonuses before they ever suffer any negative aging effects.  All changes after the age of 35 are cumulative. Attributes should probably be capped at 18, unless the GM wants to consider the effects of moderately superhuman mental capabilities.

The preceding are written for use by PCs, who I assume have healthy and active lives rather than sitting around watching TV and eating potato chips, and who access excellent medical care when needed.  The GM is encouraged to do whatever they want with NPCs, who may not age as well.  PCs who attempt to live on planets of lower tech-levels without access to TL4 medical care may suffer more serious problems than attribute penalties in their seventies and eighties.

Rejuvenation Treatment:

The other prong of life extension is the rejuvenation treatment.  This is available at only a handful of clinics in the Nyx Cluster, and the actual details of the treatment are kept completely secret.  The patient is kept under sedation for long periods over the course of a month or two of treatment, and have very little knowledge of what is actually done to them.  

Access to the procedure is equally strictly controlled by the government, the State, and the Academe.  A prospective patient is advised to be in good standing with the powers that be (a bit of status ala the Reputation Economy in Transhuman Tech is advisable!) and to have 4MCr in ready cash.

Any given patient can only undergo rejuvenation treatment once.  This is a matter of the procedure failing rather than unwillingness on the part of the clinic's sponsors.  It simply knocks 40 years off the patient's biological age, removing any accrued penalties and restoring them to the image of youthful health and vigor.  At the time of treatment, the GM should roll 1d6+20.  That is the minimum biological age to which the patient will be reduced to.  There is little point in attempting rejuvenation treatment until one feels the enervating effects of age.

Rejuvenation treatment is completely compatible with anagathics.  A person who starts taking anagathics young and keeps them up throughout the entire course of their life (they have no effect before the patient reaches their early twenties), receives a rejuvenation treatment in their late sixties, and then continues to take angathics...that person could enjoy a very long and healthy life.

Of course, doing so represents an expense beyond the dreams of the typical citizen of the State, and also requires substantial service to hegemonic extraplanetary powers.