Phonelobsters Mousetrap

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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Well. Looks like the documents survived the early Summer meltdown nicely enough. Which is nice since I nearly lost 30+ pages of materials I had written up just since the last time these documents happened to be on a peg...

Anyway, I keep missing little things and right now can't be assed to go back to edit them back in. So lets call it a couple of items of “Errata” first.

Small Vehicle Zones and Attack Ranges
Whoops, I suggested that sometimes chariots and carriages and such should be zones of their own. Which really they probably should for a number of reasons.

BUT that means you can't do a casual type ride by swording on a chariot or off the side of a carriage at close range, because technically that is now actually an adjacent zone and technically SHORT range. And we can't have that.

So hereby I implement the “Mobile Zone” range exception. If you are on/in a mobile zone, and you are the pilot, or the pilot is co-operating with your action, and the zone is moving under it's own power without inhibitions then you may perform actions off the edge of the zone and treat yourself as being in the zone the mobile zone is inside of for all Range , LoF and LoS purposes.

The Retrain Action
I wanted to include this but it would look a bit funny, or get lost, turning up in the Training Room descriptions. So. Ah. Yeah.

The Retrain Action takes 1 Strategic Turn. It lets you retrain all your Skill points however you like. It does NOT change which Skill Sets you have unlocked, it does not train a new skill set for unlocking, and it actually CLEARS your current “In Training” skill set slot.

The Retain Action requires you to meet the full Skill Point Cap requirements of the re-allocated skill points. If you do not meet your skill point cap requirements then you regain XP and lose access to those skill points until you DO meet your skill point total.

NOTE: Your first 20 character points MUST be spent on LT Skills. You may NOT retrain them to MT skills later on.
The Retrain Action is important because relatively casual retraining is a good thing in general, because this is an arcane and elaborate system and this is a convenient Opt out for sub par, or simply less liked ability selections, because some later builds may make earlier selections less or more interesting, and because the Retrain action solves a minor dilemma where order of advancement could buy you more or less (or more relevant) Zero Point skill slots.

And Now for even more setting up of foundations.

Defining An Organisation
Organisations are groups of characters that work together to do something. They are of interest because they interact with the Cultures and Peoples rules and the Base Building rules. Basically for the most part by directly using those rules in the same way that player characters do.

So for our purposes “the player characters” are probably an organization, or some sort of organised sub unit of one.

But more commonly organisations will be things like, Religions, Governments, Armies, Mercenary Companies, Bandit Gangs, Other Gangs, Merchant Cartels, Town Councils and so on.

Fortunately for us Organisations are largely made out of Characters, with Skills, and Equipment, and Sites and Buildings. And well, we have rules for basically all that junk already.

Which means you can simply define the organisations in the setting with the rules we already have! A mercenary company is just another group of character's like the players are with their own employees and possessions and skills just like the players.
Always remember, off screen means APPROXIMATE
Just because the organisations of the world use the same rules for building bases, storing wealth, advancing characters, and doing stuff in general as the PC group does, does not mean you need to actually manage and adjudicate all that in full detail.

Off screen organisational and character activity is NOT rolled for, not adjudicated, rarely even described and generally not important.

The “Church of The Space Kraken” are just some cult you have heard of. But if you encounter their cultists... they are characters that adhere to the basic character rules. If you visit their temple, it is built with the same components and works in the same ways as the standard Base Building rules. Think of “on screen” time as a roving magnifying glass. You only describe the details of things, in a manner consistent with the rules, while people are looking at them with a magnifying glass.

Off screen, stuff, should merely exist or change in a manner that could be achieved by the rules. Talking about the fire priestesses of volcano island is FINE if when we DO get around to putting the magnifying glass over them we can use the rules to describe them. Talking about how the Space Kraken Cultists have added a new wing to their temple since the last time the magnifying glass was here is FINE if the addition of that wing potentially COULD have been done using the rules, even if you haven't ACTUALLY been tracking the exact funds and work forces available to the Krakenites.
But for some added bonus information, here are some guidelines.

Organisations and Skills
Importantly organisations have access to skills through the characters that work for them and can train and learn skills just like the player characters. So even if an organisation is associated with a specific culture, and operates within the borders of that culture, and has membership drawn from that culture, and hell, declares itself King over that culture, if it employs some high ranking guy who knows some skill set from some OTHER culture due to his “Adventures” (just like a Player Character) then he can totally teach his subordinates and buddies those skills, acquire related items and supervise the construction of related buildings.

This means that the orginisation of say “The Royal Family of Tiny Island” may well have one or two unique skill sets available to them not normally available to Tiny Islander Culture. Of course it is EASIER for that organisation to train and use local cultural skill sets, so they probably would have a bunch of local skill sets. But it is certainly not a hard rule.

Disorganised Religions
Some religions are just a series of mad old men in robes, one in each village for as far as the eye can see. They may or may not speak to each other, they probably share somewhat similar beliefs, act on a similar agenda, and may even have similar skills, powers and equipment sets. You could probably even get away with stating up a “mad hedge priest” template and using it whenever the players run into one of them.

These guys may well communicate with each other, a bit, especially in a “religious emergency”. They may be friends, they may have a character out there somewhere they regard, vaguely, as a leader. They may have some sort of ramshackle temple home base even a few side kick minions. They MIGHT even be associated with a more organised religion in a more major city or distant Region.

But all in all they largely only hold authority within whatever reach they themselves can achieve with their available resources, or that the community arbitrarily and superstitiously decides to grant them.

Hell in disorganised Religions the priests might not even have any skills from the Priest Skill set they could just as easily be Witches, or even Dancers or something.

Organised Religions
Other religions function a lot like highly organised empires, Because, basically, they are. They may well have a Regional, even Pan Regional hierarchy, a solid command structure, even a promotional career path for their loyal members. They will control resources, maybe even population centres, in some cases even acting as a local government.

More Organised religions are more likely to ACTUALLY train their actual Priests with ACTUAL Priest skill set skills. But that doesn't mean they CAN'T also be Witches or Dancers, or employ them.

While Organised religions are a little LESS likely to have notably differing beliefs about their own faith from village to village as your average Disorganised religion they ARE somewhat prone to schisms and heresies. Which could mean there are some mix of variant rival organised religions (and maybe some disorganised ones) with similar but different beliefs, competing for the faith (and resources) of their regional populations.

The “Goddess Cult” could be an organised religious order of cloaked fertility nuns who hit things with hammers, but have a schism or back woods heretics who run a disorganised religion made up of mad naked plump women who dance in the wheat harvest, AND could have a heretical organised secret cult of spiky armour wearing “blood goddess” anti-paladin girls operating out of the city sewers trying to take over the main faith's base of operations and it's control of the local city and coal mine.

Religions and Gods
One thing religion type organisations may have is GODS. These may just be myths and legends. But they also might actually just be characters.

It is entirely appropriate for a religion’s highest ranking leader (or leaders) to just claim to be deities. They might even have some relevant and appropriate skills.

Alternatively some religions will have large numbers of moderate or even lower rank members that are considered to be “mortal manifestations” of their deity (who may or may not be that higher level character). Even the general priesthood itself could be considered a bunch of mortal manifestations of their deity or religious ideals.

What this rules set DOESN'T particularly advocate is having deities that are “real but not mechanically represented as characters”. Unless they USED to be real, but then died or left or something. Because having “Omnipotent gods in the sky” or whatever is generally a bad thing, so don't do it.

Disorganised Bandits
Some bandits and squatters are just low tier guys who happened to be around and tried to rob you. Or stop you from robbing them. Or something. They generally suck and basically have low tier structures and traits, maybe even low low tier traits (like say, not even being Elite characters). Their organisation is minimal and they are lucky if they have low level named characters.

Organised Bandits
Are basically a lot like the Player Characters during Low Tier or even low Mid Tier. They are almost certainly led by one or more named characters, they have troops, they live in a castle, and they go on adventures. It's just their adventures mostly involve marauding through the Region robbing random Rich passers by. Occasionally they give to the poor, but mostly they don't.

Businesses
It is a tough fantasy world out there. And if you actually want to run a trade post or a market or a factory or a mine (or a complex international network of them). Then you probably need to basically be a wizard with an army, (just like the Player Characters). You build bases at your resources and sit in them with your armed minions plotting take overs of OTHER resources while fighting off bandits, rival businesses and the supposed local King's Tax Army.

Governments
A government could range from some guy who is mayor of a village and a few thugs he is mostly blood related to, to some guy who runs a large number of regions and cities and other important sites within them.

The exact organisational structure of who is in charge of what can vary in a government. It may even involve multiple organisations with an alliance between varying interests such as Religions, Armies and Businesses that support some sort of meta-organisation like an alliance lead by a Monarchy or a Senate or a Round Robin random lottery of the citizenry.

What is important is that Governments need to do two things in order to BE governments.

1) You must have unopposed access to the population they intend to govern (that's unopposed, NOT unshared, if a merchant is running a mining compound in town that DOESN'T stop you from declaring yourself town mayor unless he disputes your action, presumably sending his troops to do so).
2) You must build, man and control an appropriate “government” structure, like a Mayors House or a Throne Room.

Then, whoever does that can declare themselves king, or senator, or keeper of the random lottery box or whatever the crap they want.

And they can collect taxes and issue laws and other fun things.

Armies
Mostly work for governments, but are sometimes mercenary, or both. One notable thing Armies tend to do is occupy important border Choke Points, and send marauding Patrols into their occupied regions to collect taxes and hunt criminals.

Mercenaries
Look a lot like armies, and bandits, and the organisations run by Player Characters. Their most notable quirk though is that they generally try to remain sufficiently legitimate as to be employable and not on the run from the law (at least in their home base regions) and they work in return for money. Small LT mercenary groups will work for Coins, but larger groups will demand things like Treasures, Lands, even Resources.

Schools
Some organisations exist specifically to spread knowledge, though sometimes specifically to spread it to specific narrow minorities. Schools basically operate as a large bases with a lot of lodging for LT named characters and the like. Someone somewhere pays them something to take in untrained LT characters and assist them in training and unlocking LT skill caps. Usually within specific skill fields.

The most common example is a Government funded military or wizard school, that funnels the trained students back out of the School organisation and into the government and it's armies as MT officers.

Defining A Region
We need regions because we need places for Characters, Peoples and Cultures to originate from (and hang around in) and because we need some details that interact with the base building rules.

What Is A Region?
A Region is an abstract large map sized area equivalent to “Zones” from combat scale maps.

A Region is defined primarily by it's interaction with other rules. So for instance a character, using standard means of travel (on foot) can travel one region as a Strategic Action.

Regions also contain Resources and Sites. As well as having a number of other traits.

Resources
A region may have one or more “resources”. These are... things... of value to various cultures (and potentially to player characters and other organisations). Most resources will require some sort of site or structure in order to produce their actual product. Sometimes the same resource may exist multiple times in the same Region, indicating multiple sites and the potential for separate exploitation with multiple mining or farming structures.

Here are some sample resources.
Forest – You can farm it for wood.
Spider Colonies – You can farm it for silk.
Iron Ore – you can mine it for Metal.
Stone – You can mine it for Stone.
Crystals – You can mine nifty Crystals.
Desert Sands – You can mine it for Glass.
Arable Lands – You can farm it for (large amounts of) Food.
Resources are almost place holders
Resources are intended to tie in somewhat with the MT rules. As such right now there aren't all that many resource types or things to do with them.
Often at least some it not all resources in a Region will already be exploited by someone. Often by some armed organisation in control of the region, the site or the culture, but sometimes just by whatever local civilian authority is running a nearby village or town.

Resources can influence the nature of cultural items available in a region or pan region cultural group. While it might be nice to cover that influence here.. too bad, it's in the cultural items section, sort of.

Sites
A “site” is a place you can go to in a Region and do, well, stuff. Generally anywhere you might care to go and do anything (especially anything involving construction and/or combat) is a Site. Resources for instance are also Sites.

Sites are basically just an abstraction for travel rules. But here is a list of site types...
Resource Site – It's where the resource is at. If you build some sort of structure to mine the resource it will usually also be at this site. Often a village, a town, even a city might be built at the site. Certainly fortifications and bases to defend the resource are also commonly found on the site.
Civilian Population – Some sites are simply most notable for being the place where people live. Sometimes a site is just a village, town, or city, and whatever else might happen to be there, like various bases, fortifications, palaces and other organisational occupiers of the site there to either control, exploit or experience the convenience of being near a population centre.
Empty Plot – The site is just a place where someone MIGHT build something. It might be especially interesting in it's topography or something and have cool caves, a babbling brook, or a nice mountain or something else you might want to exploit while building a private secluded castle or palace. In theory a Region might well have a LOT of Empty plots that no one cares about until someone starts asking.
Stronghold – The site is basically only notable because some character or organisation has built a base or palace or something there. Just like an Empty Plot... only it has something in it.
Choke Point – Some regions have one or more choke points. These sites either sit on a border, or “in between” the other sites in the region. In order to travel across that border (or between sites), you MUST pass through the choke point. Bandits and monsters tend to hang out here. Sometimes they build a castle or a palace here and call themselves King of the region or something.
Modern Ruins – Sometimes people build a stronghold, or a town, or even a resource mine, and then abandon it (maybe the resource ran out, or something). These places still have the shells of buildings, maybe some remnant or squatter populations, and maybe some remnant loot or still functioning (or restorable) structures. Modern Ruins are particularly interesting sites for LT characters looking for adventure and loot, or a place to start restoring into an LT/MT base.
Ancient Ruins – Are like modern ruins, only older. Importantly though this means that Ancient Ruins may have been built by a people and/or culture that is DIFFERENT to those currently present in the Region in modern times, possibly even different to ones that have are present ANYWHERE in modern times. Ancient Ruins are particularly interesting because the remnants and scraps of stuff they contain will potentially be from that different culture and it may be a way of making available exciting items, even skill sets (probably in the form of crumbling ancient skill manuals) that aren't otherwise available in that region, or possibly not anywhere nearby.

Travelling Within A Region
When you are “in” a Region you are ALSO “at” one of the Sites within that region. While you are there during your Strategic turns you can do... whatever the hell it is you do, at that Site. However if you WANT to do something with your Strategic Action at some OTHER site within the same Region travelling TO another site in a region during your Strategic Turn is free you do NOT need to spend any time travelling, or rather the time spent travelling is “less than a Strategic Turn” and less by such a large margin you still get to have your Strategic Turn. You can even travel through MULTIPLE sites in the same region while still having your Strategic turn in that region. If you REALLY want to, and assuming the Strategic action isn't kinda tied to a specific location (which most of them SHOULD be).

If the Region has an “inter site” choke point you DO pass through the choke point site on your way to any other sites in the region. And that COULD cause trouble.

Travelling Between Regions
As a strategic action you can just walk to the neighbouring Region. Technically you start at your origin site in your current region. Then move to a destination Site in the next one. Which is notable in case something interesting happens to you at the sites at either end.

If the Region border you pass through has a Choke Point site you DO have to pass through it, and things might happen there.

Travelling Faster
Sometimes you can travel faster. Boats, Horses and Vehicles generally let you travel TWO Regions per Strategic Turn. This works just like performing two normal 1 Region trips in a row, passing through your start Site, a Site in the first Region you pass through, and ending in a destination Site in the second Region (and passing through any Choke Point sites on either or both of the borders you pass through).

Potentially other fun effects like Teleporting could turn up... but whatever that's extra and probably at least MT at that.

Types Of Travel
Potentially there are different... types of travel. So you can travel by land, by sea, by river, by air, or even by tunnels (or tunnelling).

As such you sometimes need a boat, or need to be a fish, or be riding on a fish, in order to travel into some regions or across some borders what with you know, seas and junk.

So seas need to be drawn onto the map so you can indicate if a region is an island surrounded by water (need water capable travel to leave or enter), a coastal region (water capable travel can leave or enter from SOME borders), has a major navigable river (water restricted travel can travel through the region, but only along the river choke point and only to specific destination sites and borders), or is outright just ocean (water capable transport required to go anywhere, and possibly even to stay at a site).

In addition SOME regions may even have undersea locations. Which would require submarines or water breathing to visit.

Flight is a bit more simple, but notably could allow you to avoid some Regional Obstacles, and various potential Choke Point Sites.

Burrowing could have similar effects to flight, but pre-existing tunnel networks would work a lot like Rivers and Choke Point Sites.

Don't even get me going about space travel.

Regional Obstacles
It would not be unreasonable for some Region borders to have outright impassable borders, or borders that require special transport (or access to a hidden or defended Choke Point site, or particular survival skills) in order to travel across them.

So you can totally put a bunch of “mountains so high you need air travel to cross them” or something stupid like that, on your map, if you REALLY want to.

Regional Terrain
It is also handy to have SOME idea of what general regional terrain looks like. Just encase you encounter someone on the road or go looking for empty plots or something. So Regions need to describe their general terrain type, which will then influence the types of maps you get out of them.

Here are some sample terrain types.
Desert
Volcanic Wasteland
Deep Ocean
Jungle
Woodland
Grasslands
Obsidian Craters
Swamp
Hills
Mountains
Glaciers
Mushroom Forests

But really it's a fairly vague attribute so you can just add things like “Cotton Candy Cloud Lands” or something.

Regional Hazards
Just like a Zone can have a slippery floor, a deadly gas cloud and a dangerous pitfall, regions also... can have, well, a slippery floor, a deadly gas cloud and a dangerous pitfall.

Some regions are full of sink holes, clouds of obscuring mists, dangerous acid fogs, pits full of lava, or a wide variety of other things you can fall into and generally get lost in.

While travelling (even between sites) in a region with hazards the hazards get to make an attack on you, to try and get you lost, suck your favourite item into a bottomless peat bog, or fall you down a lava pit or something. If they hit... they do that, possibly wasting your strategic turn while you find your location or crawl out of the lava pit, or possibly just damaging you in case you run into trouble before the strategic turn is over.

Some regional hazards might be associated with specific sites or choke point sites. So you only need to worry about the Lava Pits attacking you if you travel to, from, or through the Lava Mountain Pass choke point on the border, or something.

Some regional hazards, especially site related ones, could potentially be eliminated or reduced with infrastructure. So you can totally build bridges and safety railings around the lava pits if you have the time and money.
Actual Regional Hazard samples!
Here for one night only, some actual regional hazards!

Spooky Mists Undamaging Hazard Deceptive Obfuscating Tricky Social Single-Target Close-Range +4 vs Non-Blind +2 vs Non-Tricky +2 vs Stupid
The region is full of spooky mist all the time. Characters hit by the spooky mist are Lost and end up spending their turn wandering in the mists. Spooky mist deals 1 Normal injury if it hits a Clumsy character. You can also use Spooky Mists as a default profile for other “lost in haze” effects like deserts prone to mirages (add Illusion remove Obfuscating), and Jungles (add Grab effect) or wild briar (remove social add minimum normal damage and maybe Rip)

Hungry Bogs Undamaging Hazard Disarm Grab Strong Single-Target Close-Range +2 vs Non-Strong +2 vs Weak +2 vs Clumsy
This attack ignores Armour, Obfuscatng and Evasive bonuses to defence.
The region is full of dangerous bogs that grab you and steal your boots. Characters hit by the hungry bog are Lost, Grabbed and Disarmed of an item. The disarmed item is then lost in the bog. It MIGHT be recoverable with a minimum 1 Strategic Turn search per item but it has lots of hide bonuses and the bog will attack you while you search. Hungry Bogs Disarms ALL items instead of just one if it hits a Clumsy character. Use this hazard as a template for other similar effects like quick sand, shifting sands, grasping briar nettles and kleptomaniacal monkeys.

Precarious Pit Falls Mistep Hazard Single-Target Close-Range +2 vs Non-Fast -2 vs Fast +4 vs [color]Clumsy[/color]
This attack ignores Armour and Obfuscating bonuses to defence.
Crumbling pit or cliff edges, hidden sink holes or some other major fall hazard plague this region. This hazard should also have a typical pit profile for determining the falling attack and effects (how many zones fallen, material and hardness of pit floor, any spikes or jagged rocks in the bottom, any water, monsters or lava in the bottom, and whether the pit is so hard to get out of that the victim is Lost for the turn).

Mystic Travel Curse Mystic Undamaging Social Magic Deceptive Illusion Hazard Single-Target Close-Range +4 vs Non-Mystic +2 vs Non-Tricky +2 vs [color]Clumsy[/color]
This Region is warded against mere mortals. Attempting to travel in the region is like travelling in an ever shifting psychedelic magic maze. Mystic characters hit by this attack are lost for 1 turn. Non-Mystic characters hit by this attack are Lost then deposited at a specific site tied to this curse at the end of this turn (inside the region, on it's border, or even outside of the region). Clumsy characters (regardless of Mystic Status) hit by this attack are lost, but then could turn up almost anywhere in the world pretty much at random/GMs whim.

Bad River Crossing Undamaging Hazard Grab Strong Single-Target Close-Range +2 vs Non-Strong +2 vs Weak +4 vs [color]Clumsy[/color]
This attack ignores Armour, Obfuscatng and Evasive bonuses to defence.
This region (or choke point site) requires you to cross a wild river in order to continue travelling. If you are hit you are swept away, risking drowning, getting lost, losing items and ending up somewhere way down river. Clumsy characters are likely to lose most if not all of their items in the river. Others might lose one or two, or anything heavy. Actual injuries can occur in some rivers due to water falls (falling damage) or sharp jagged rock spikes in the river. Or both.
Regional Survival Requirements
SOME regions sometimes have special survival requirements. For instance, they may lack easily available food or drinking water (so you need to bring your own, or otherwise specially obtain it for any Strategic Turns you spend there).

Other Regions may have a harsh climate. Typically either Extreme Heat or Extreme Cold that requires you to dress appropriately, and will otherwise attack you in combat time with a persistent hazard of variable severity until you are DEAD.

Some regions just have intermittent climate hazards, which then work more like Regional hazards.

Peoples in Regions with survival requirements either have a Mutation Trait that allows them to survive that climate (Climate Survival) or they have cultural bonus items that help, like rations, water flasks, deep well buildings, fur coats, warming body lotions, big shade hats or whatever ridiculous fantasy crap they find most appropriate for survival in the Snowy Lava Waste Desert.

Regional Marauders
Monsters, Bandits and other characters can try and intercept you during regional travel.

The first method is simple. They can wait at a site (ideally a Choke Point) and declare as a Strategic Action that they are lying in wait. And then when you get there you will encounter them (note, you can also do this yourself). Now “encounter” is a broad term, sure, you are there, they are there, they are waiting for you (or at least someone) but you MIGHT still just sneak right past them. But basically a combat map turns up and interaction of SOME form will occur.

The second method is more complex. Characters can get together in a mob and go marauding the entire Region looking for trouble, as a Strategic Action. Any characters travelling that region (including other marauders) now MIGHT encounter them. The simplest way to emulate this is with a single Sneak action check with a Range Modifier of -5. If it fails the Marauders don't precisely spot you, but they DO happen to stumble across your path and end up NEAR you, and an encounter might begin. Unless the results of their marauding end their action Marauders might encounter any number of travellers or groups or travellers during their marauding, and a traveller might also encounter any number of separate marauder groups during their journey.
How many marauders should there be?
Dunno.

However. It would be a good idea if MOST marauders were actually mobs aligned to Organisations. And then you could trace them back to their source site, blow up their base and prevent future marauder mobs from spawning using basically the same recruitment mechanics player characters use.

Even “The Owl Bears” should probably be some sort of marauding patrol deployed from “Owl Bear Hive” site owned by “The Local Owl Bears” organisation.
Encounter Ranges?
So anyway, assuming you stumble across a manned choke point or a marauder group, what basically happens is everyone rolls Cause A Disturbance actions against each other starting at the maximum ranges at which they can detect each other as they get closer, and presumable someone then succeeds and starts sneaking, waiting, or charging into battle, or something. OR no one succeeds and they eventually by pure chance stop getting closer to each other, the rolls end due to Stealth Persistence and they pass like ships in the night.

Secret Resources and Sites
It is perfectly reasonable that some resources and sites in a Region or on it's border, including potential Choke Points you might need to find in order to pass some bullshit impassable border might be SECRET.

That means those sites are hiding from you using a Hide action. They have fairly arbitrary bonuses and penalties to this action. They only even roll the action if you go pointlessly trying to cross that choke point border OR spend a Strategic Turn searching the region for hidden sites (which you might do for various reasons, not the least of which is looking for cool Empty Plots for your new base building project).

Alternatively if you obtain a map to a hidden site you just plain know where the site is. Which is handy for all those lost ancient ruins and stuff.

Regional Populations
One important aspect of a region is who lives there.

Now. Originally I WAS going to have some fixed population stats and pools for recruiting and... actually it's more detail than required.

When tracking populations we only really care if there are specific Peoples or Cultures there or not.

So a Region itself will have either No Population, or a small list of “Rural Populations” by people and culture, and maybe some “Nomadic” popultions by people and culture.

A Rural Population represents scattered farmers or other land holders.

Nomadic populations represent wandering groups or tribes. Nomadic populations often maraud in whole (usually still small) tribal groups (not necessarily looking for trouble, though they might find it), They also aren't always home, as they may be in other Regions at any given time and should have either a seasonal route mapped in Strategic Turns or a flat “chance of being home” when the recruiters come calling.

A site like a Village, Town or City also has populations, and again basically just lists the peoples and cultures available.

Recruiting People
When you build appropriate housing to place various sorts of recruit characters in you now need to go get some recruits to put in them.

The actual money cost of recruiting is all included in housing and other base facilities. But in order to fill your open recruit slots you need to have a Named Character act as a recruitment officer and spend 1 Strategic Turn at a Site (the base itself is fine) “Recruiting” as their action.

Recruits are then drawn from any Regional Rural or Nomadic populations AND and Urban Populations at the same site.

Recruits don't have any specific skills or items, those generally come from base structures. Even status as elites, civilians, named etc... is based on structures. But your recruit's cultural skill sets can be marginally important and their basic People physical traits can be important. Which means that sometimes you WILL want to recruit the Clawed Amazon Women from the south lands, because THEY have Claws and personal knowledge of the Amazon Pride skill set, and maybe a cultural speciality item or structure you want them to provide.

So you can recruit ANYWHERE, and the recruits will travel back to your base. However rival organisations may wish to prevent recruiting actions. An established rival government in control of a non-rebellious population CAN simply say no. (rebellious under classes and the like tend to ignore governments in this regard). Other organisations may attempt more active means of interrupting your actions or intercepting recruits in transit, so sending the recruiter back home with the recruits might not be a bad idea.

Swapping Recruits
In addition to simple recruiting you CAN replace recruits. So if you decide you DO want to recruit some cool Clawed Amazons or something, you can just fire a bunch of Vanilla Farm Boys or whatever you currently have to make up slots.

But in addition to that if you have multiple Sites you also CAN order existing recruits to MOVE to other sites, allowing you to shuffle around Vanilla Farm Boys and Clawed Amazons and stuff. Though, since they actually travel between sites, you might want to send a named character and maybe some other friends along to keep an eye on them in case they get lost or attacked or something...
No population limits, no rate of recruitment limits, WTF?
While those things would be NICE unfortunately, well, no.

In the end tracking them was too much complexity for too little payout.

If you are happy recruiting from the pool of two and a half vanilla flavoured farm boys or whatever is hanging around in your rural population you can just get your Five Thousand basic recruits from those guys. In one turn.

Yeah I know. Whatever. The alternative appears to generally involve a lot of numbers and the five thousand farm boys in one night scenario shouldn't be TOO likely to hit such extreme scales.
Regional Upgrades
Sometimes you may want to spend your available moneys and such not on buildings for specific sites, but on an entire region. You might say, want to build a road network, or some safety railings around all those god damn lava pits.

Regional upgrades refers to some mechanics from the Base Building section like Work Turns so you might want to read that section first.

Opposing Construction
Any organisation with a presence in the Region can attempt to oppose construction, basically allowing them to turn up on site and encounter your workers (so you might want to send guards or named characters to keep an eye out).

Detecting Construction
Anyone present in a region will normally notice Regional Upgrades being built, unlike building at sites it is basically impossible to keep it secret.

Destroying A Regional Upgrade
Destroying a regional upgrade requires an investment of the same amount of Work Turns as it took to build it, but no other cost and you may allocate non-workers to the task (typically Warriors). Destroying a Regional Upgrade will typically be noticed by anyone in the region, and potentially opposed with outright violence.
Actual Sample Regional Upgrades

Marked Trails
Cost 1 Treasure
WT : 10
Builds signs and simple trails out of culturally appropriate materials. Used to negate the effects of an unpleasant “confusing you until you are lost” type Regional hazard, like Spooky Mists. Characters destroying Marked Trails may opt to instead attempt to secretly (sneak attack against “observers” in region at -5 range penalty by the “group leader” for the project) alter them so that the signs and markings all point the wrong way. Changing the effect of the marked trails to +4 to hit for the “lost” attack instead of negating it.

Secretly Marked Trails
Cost 2 Treasures
WT : 30
Just like Marked Trails only they only work for characters who know the secret sign code. Secretly Marked Trails unlike other similar upgrades can be installed (or attempt to be installed) secretly (sneak attack against “observers” in region at -5 range penalty by the “group leader” for the project). Secret Trails may be detected by characters travelling their Region. And roll the following Hide Action to avoid that, Hide Stealth Tricky Chameleon Obfuscating Deceptive Silent +5 vs Non-Tricky +5 vs Stupid +3 vs Non-Mystic. Once spotted Secret Marked Trails can be “decyphered” by a character who spends one turn doing so. The trails then roll the same hide check against the character, if it misses the Secret Code of the trail has been decyphered, if it hits it remains enigmatic. Multiple secretly marked trails can exist in a region and they can exist with or without Marked Trails which may or may not be sabotaged.

Dirt Roads
Cost : 0 Treasures
WT: 30
Creates simple dirt roads in a region, allowing wheeled vehicles including large ones to move around. Which is handy. Unfortunately the roads tend to develop slippery mud in rainy weather and dangerous cart ruts that can damage wheeled vehicles. The cart ruts are a Regional Hazard triggered against wheeled movement vehicles and characters as follows. Undamaging Sever Knock Ceramic Soft Single-Target Close-Range +X vs All (where X is speed), +4 vs Clumsy +4 vs Non-Fast. On hit the cart rut breaks off a wheel then knocks the vehicle causing it to crash. This effectively knocks most vehicles out of travelling any further, requiring them to be abandoned and potentially ending the drivers movement and Strategic action before it's normal completion (due to ending extended vehicle based Strategic Regional Movement).
Cart Ruts do not appear until 1-4 Strategic Turns after the roads are built. You can keep “rebuilding” the roads to keep them fresh and Rut free, or to simply undo ruts when you encounter them.
Dirt Roads can be designed to all pass through any site in the Region as a Regional Choke Point.

Paved Roads
Cost : 1 Treasure
WT: 60
Creates a network of roads paved with culturally appropriate regionally available materials (usually stone). Which is handy, and doesn't rut up and generally go to crap like Dirt Roads.
Paved Roads can be designed to all pass through any site in the Region as a Regional Choke Point.

Elevated Roads
Cost : 1 Treasure
WT: 90
Like Paved roads (but usually built from Wood or Bone) for swampy or similar regions. An elevated network of roads that among other things allows travellers immunity to Hungry Bogs.
Like Paved Roads may be designed to all past through any site in the Region as a Regional Choke Point.

Bridges
Cost : 1 Treasure
WT: 30
Builds bridges across a Chasm site or a Wild River Crossing type site. Allowing casual crossing with ease.

Regional Safety Railings
Cost : 1 Treasure
WT: 50
Puts safety railings around Pit Fall hazards in the Region preventing constant falling accidents for the population and other travellers.

Rural Housing
Cost : 3 Treasures
WT: 30
Builds housing for a Rural Population to move into and inhabit the region (or for a Nomadic Culture to settle down into). Can be built multiple times but most regions can only really fit 1-3 Rural or Nomadic populations. Handy if you want to colonise a region with farmers. Structures are of course Culturally appropriate, but may be made culturally appropriate to inhabitants instead of constructors if you prefer.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Base Building
In order to fill out some MT gaps as I go, and to reform the LT place holders for base materials here are the rules for building!

Whatsa Base?
Just a generic term for all the different groups of buildings characters or organisations might stack in a pile at a site somewhere. So maybe you call it a Mansion or a Palace or a Castle or a Temple or a Dungeon or a Ruin or whatever. But here we just call them all “Bases”.

Note that more than one Base, possibly owned by more than one organisation CAN be at the same “Site” and if so they technically share the same combat map and abstract “general place you are at during Strategic Time”. The Village of Sand Witch for instance can have Sand Witch Castle, the Temple of the Cult of Ponies, the Village itself run by Mayor Sand Witch and the Rebel Slave HQ somewhere in the Sand Witch village slums.

Finding A Site
In order to build (or own, or squat in) a base you need to locate it. See the Site rules and Regional travelling rules to find out about some of the details of the just plain getting there bit.

However just finding a site is not always ENOUGH to secure you the ability to build there.

Just Start Building – It's an empty lot, no one is using it, no one with any authority opposes you, and you have some sort of access to materials and workforces through an allied or at least unopposed local population or something. So screw it you can just start building.

I'm taking this – It's not an empty lot. It's a modern or ancient ruin. Maybe with squatters. Maybe it wasn't actually a Modern Ruin until you just er, ruined it, five minutes ago. So yeah. You CAN just conquer a castle, or a pile of crumbling rubble, or even find one empty and declare it yours, and start moving the furniture around as long as you meet similar conditions to Just Start Building.

For Sale or Rent – Some sites belong to organisations, or have nearby organisations that WOULD oppose you, or limit access to workers and materials, but are more than happy to SELL you the site, maybe even with some buildings, maybe even staffed. Pricing for land is, unclear. It could be a flat price, a rental price, or only given out to close friends or in return for major favours, or even be merely loaned as part of joining an organisation. However. Almost certainly there should be some initial cost (at least in adventure form) that is at least in some way remotely appropriate for the value of any actual structures on the site.

By Right Of Conquest – Sometimes organisations and populations are just plain going to oppose you. That site is THEIRS or maybe they just hate you. It's pretty simple, you just have to defeat them and take the site by force (or more creative means, whatever). To then develop the site further you will need to remove whatever opposing forces are preventing you from accessing local resources or workforces, one by one if you need to. And it probably wouldn't hurt in that process to take those resources and secure those populations under your control.

When occupying a new base by force, or even as a gift/rental accomodation your characters should probably (each individually) spend at least 1 Strategic turn to “clean up and settle in” before benefiting from the base in any way.

Mapping And Layout
Base building rules very importantly rely on the “Size” attribute of Zones.

When you start building your base the GM absolutely NEEDS to draw up a map of the Site, or at least the part you intend to start building on, with noted zone Size attributes (and other interesting zone traits, hazards, and other details).

And for a site intended for construction some zones should be BIG.

Large boring empty zones should often exceed 100 Size. In part specifically in order to interact nicely with base construction.

Remapping Zones
Construction (and other events) can modify maps and should potentially SPLIT zones (or combine them). It is important that Size ratings should be CONSERVED. Splitting or joining a zone never adds or removes total Size rating, it only moves it around. Even building a big 50 size room inside a 100 size space JUST ends up with 50 outside space and a zone inside it with 50 inside space.

However also things like say, building a low garden wall, or surrounding a zone partly with rooms, might lead to the OPTION of splitting off a zone without specifically building a room out of it. Players in particular might ask to somehow alter the topography of the site and the layout of it's zones in this and other manners. And you should probably let them. Encouraging players to interact with the zone rules and granting them control of the layout of their base is important for letting them interact with the game, own the site and plant their defence strategies.

Implied Zone Space
Zone space ratings however are sometimes more than they appear. For instance. 100 Zone space in an open field is fine. But what happens if you build a vertical tower that goes like, way up in the air! Or worse, what happens if it also has a massive subterranean basement!

Well. Above the field and bellow the field are IMPLIED ZONES. They may be as big (or being largely boring sky and deep earth zones EVEN BIGGER than the field itself) and have their OWN size ratings that upper and lower stories can eat away at.

Room Space
You are going to be doing two main things with space when building bases.

1) Creating Indoor space. You build a structure, and it has an inside, it's basically a shell of walls and roofs and floors of some kind. It doesn't do much on it's own other than physically represent a bunch of structural furniture.
2) Furnishing Indoor or Outdoor space with rooms and other facilities. Everything else you build, like barracks, private gardens, training areas and so on use up space inside or outside. And require certain amounts of certain types (often indoor) space to be “used up” by the room. Room space is still THERE for characters to walk around in, but it is allocated to the room for base administration purposes.

Building Materials
Many buildings will require you to have access to certain raw materials. You can only build your Stone Castle... if you have access to a Stone Resource.

In order to have access to a Resource you need to meet certain conditions.
1) Must know of the location of a Site with the Resource.
2) That site must have appropriate facilities to harvest the resource.
3) You must own those facilities OR the organisation that does own them must PERMIT you to access them.
4) The resource then needs to be shipped to your construction site without being intercepted by Marauders or something.

Step 1 is handled by Regional Travel and Site discovery stuff.
Step 2 is handled by Base Building rules.
Step 3 requires you to own the site or make a deal. Some such sites will always (or at least usually) grant access as part of operating as a profitable business. Others will be owned by organisations that may well demand, well, anything. You might need to send a character to talk, or an Army to talk with more force.
Step 4 happens automatically and rapidly, so rapidly that we may have to exceed the speeds inter-regional movement is normally capable of (since actually mapping routes over time would generally be kinda sucky). You can allocate characters to perform the Strategic action “Guard Supplies” to guard the shipped goods en route allowing them to be there in the event of bandits or something.

Building material requirements for structures will be listed in their descriptions.

Base Staff
You are going to have a certain number of NPCs that just live in, or work in, your base. They come in various flavours. And it is slightly important to know who is who.

Workers – Workers build things and sometimes maintain some facilities. They are pretty sucky at fighting and anything much other than running the kitchens and building the new pleasure gardens.
Warriors – Are guards and soldiers. They exist primarily to guard your base, though they are also potentially available to be drawn away and taken camping in the wilderness to attack some other base or something. Numerous base structures will grant them abilities and equipment.
Leisure – Leisure staff are primarily tasked with increasing the luxury of your base, as servants, concubines and other ornaments. However they CAN be upgraded with (some) equipment and skills from base facilities and can fall into roles as secondary or specialist guards and spies.
Extras – A few other marginal NPC types may inhabit your base, like squad leaders, healers and other bits and pieces.
Named NPCs – You can through various means and for various reasons recruit named NPCs as sort of “minor officers” for your organisation.
The PCs – The PCs themselves of course inhabit bases and have special rules regarding their movements and interaction with the base, which in turn provides them with housing, training and luxury requirements.

Recruiting Named NPCs
Recruiting a named NPC is not as easy as recruiting unnamed NPCs. Generally it takes a 1 Turn Strategic action to simply MEET a homeless NPC (assuming there IS one in your Region or at your Site). And you then will have to cut an entirely arbitrary deal in either payment, facilities offered, social negotiations or whatever to convince them to work for you.

Work Turns (WT)
When building structures at your base you will note that the various items have costs in “WT” or “Work Turns”. 1 Work Turn is how much labour a single Worker can provide to a construction project during 1 Strategic Turn. And if for example you have 10 Workers they can contribute 10 WT per Strategic Turn and will complete construction of a 30 WT project for you within 3 Strategic Turns.

Workers allocated to other tasks at your base (like maintaining kitchens or something) are NOT available to contribute Work Turns to a project. Workers only contribute ONE WT each PER strategic turn to ONE project at a time, they may NOT work on two projects at once.

Free Workers
If you have NO workers of your own available then whoever you buy your construction materials from will build your stuff for you. But they will only provide minimal workers.

So (only if you have LESS available workers of your own) you get (up to) 5 “Temporary” Workers who will camp out on your site and build things for you. And that number increases to (up to) 10 if you are at the Site of a Town or City.

Skill Sets and Construction Knowledge
Many buildings are associated with specific skill sets, or specific cultural specialities.

In order to build a structure you MUST either have the (entire) work force consist of workers who originate from a culture with access to the related skill set or the related cultural speciality.

OR you must have a Named Character allocate their Strategic actions to directing the work force constructing the building, and then that named character may use THEIR personal Skill Set knowledge OR related cultural skill set knowledge to determine what can be constructed.

Yes you can hire travelling NPCs and the like to do this for you. If you trust them, and if they turn up. They will often however require lodgings of some form while providing project direction.

Wings and Ownership
It may on various occasions be USEFUL to break your base up into arbitrary sections for various effects. Any section of base divided in this manner is a “Wing”.

So you can have a “Wing” that is open to public visitors. You can have a “Wing” that specifically “belongs” to one of the PCs. You can have a “Wing” that is hidden behind a secret door and is not even known to most of your staff.

Wings are simply arbitrary organisational tools I strongly SUGGEST you use. You COULD go around determining public access limitations or ownership or guard patrol protocols or a dozen other stupid things on a room by room basis, it's just EASIER if you clump them together in Wings.

Also you get to say things like “I live in the East Wing, or “Golden Treasure Palace” Wing”. And why would you not want to say that?

Ownership
Ownership is a particular important aspect of rooms and impacts directly on various mechanics, most notably Luxury allocation, as some rooms will specifically only provide benefits to a single “owner” or some similar limitation.

Ownership is effectively arbitrary and characters CAN allocate ownership to some other character as a “gift”. It isn't important where the money came from or who built it, just who then officially “owns” it according to the inhabitants of the base.
This month it's MY turn to own the concubine treasure palace, I need to level up again!
Uh oh. So you build a bunch of rooms that say “1 Owner gets +1 Luxury”.

Then you just gift all the rooms in one go to one PC. They allocate skill points. They give away all the rooms to the next PC and so on.

That's largely bad for the game. A little bit of room shuffling wouldn't HURT but a lot would be, well... really REALLY bad and counter to the fundamental goals of the luxury treasure palace concept.

So. The most notable emergency counter to this is. Once “ownership” of a room has been allocated and it's effects have applied to a character, the ownership CAN be changed but ONLY at the cost of removing the effects.

Now we have already established that a character who loses access to their luxury treasure palace retains spent skill points so that means that if you take (or are given) say, their Concubine Pleasure Garden or something, you DON'T get to use it's luxury points because [/i]somewhere[/i] out there some other guy “still has them”.

That other guy then STOPS having them by dying or by performing a Retrain action. Freeing the Concubine Pleasure Garden to once again allocate it's luxury.

This has added side benefits in making it more important to destructively and inefficiently loot rather than simply occupy enemy bases, and to ensure that you DO kill off the “owners” of a base properly before taking it (and having interesting loyalty/pay off effects if they get away and plot revenge).
Mobile Bases, Mobile Sites
In order to represent some things, like large boats and flying islands. We kinda want to do some Mobile Base stuff.

Mobile bases are fairly simple. They are a Site that can travel to other sites and regions in the same manner as characters and vehicles do. They may even have combat speeds similar to some vehicles.

The implications of mobile bases are potentially more serious. Letting someone pull up their roots and move their castle to all the places they want to go while certainly convenient might be a little problematic. At the very least it needs to be a trade off of SOME sort, so mobile bases may have additional requirements, costs, and size limitations. Because that MIGHT manage to make it a harder choice to opt for a mobile base over a stationary one if the stationary one could be cheaper and bigger.

Mobile base options are (planned to be) represented in various Skill Set documents as part of this upgrade and post version of the rule set.

Bases and Secrecy
Bases have... secrets. And you may want to keep them. But bases are big, and staff are hanging around gossiping and dusting your mantle pieces and stuff. So we may want to know, a bit, about base secrecy.

Hiding your entire Base
You can in fact attempt to have a secret base. It helps (a lot) to start with a base or site that no one happens to know or care about already.

You may then attempt to lead construction of the base such that it is disguised, or somehow hard to see from various approaches. So you can put it at a funny angle on the back side of a mountain, or just dig a big secret hole in the ground and call it a “dungeon”, or you can refurbish the interior of a ruin and try and keep the outside looking “abandoned”.

And if you have a mobile base you can totally just try parking it behind a hill or an island. Which while sometimes less effective than elaborate stationary camouflage methods is generally cheaper and more adaptable to events.

Hiding a mobile base is basically a Hide or Sneak action directed by a lead character with whatever (quite possibly arbitrary) modifiers for size of the base and whatever it is “hiding behind” etc...

Other means of hiding bases involve various structures (or other base building options) like Secret Doors and Camouflaged Buildings and Fake Front Businesses which are available with certain skill sets.

Hiding Parts Of Your Base
Anything that can hide a whole base can also hide PART of a base. So for instance, you might have a second rate low MT base provided by an organisation you are a member of, like say “The Gullible Church of Saint Oblivious”, but hidden behind a secret door in the main hall fire place is the access to a hidden underground extension with bonus luxury, advanced staff and all sorts of secret treasure vaults.

Partial base secrecy can be applied by partitioning “secret wings” behind broad “secrecy” base options, or by building specific rooms that are individually secret, like a secret treasure vault, which may appear generally as options available from certain skill sets etc...

Not Hidden, Just Secret
You may also want MANY of the things you build that AREN'T specifically “hidden” to be secret. For instance, you may want to just not tell everyone what the internal layout of your private residence and treasure vault wing happens to be, thus for instance, not revealing the precise position of where you sleep, where you bathe and where you keep your greatest treasure.

This sort of information is generally concealed by using wings and public access limitations, which are mentioned a little later on.

Secrecy And Staff
Unfortunately for your plans to keep things secret, you have NPCs in your base and they might notice stuff. Like that time you had them tunnel out a massive treasure vault complex inside the mountain out the back yard and seal it off behind a secret door.

The trick is in controlling that knowledge, and controlling your staff. A lot of this plays into public access and staff loyalty rules.

But there are some specific measures you can take.

Don't Use Temporary Workers – Temporary Workers are free and helpful. But they wander away when you are done and could potentially tell ANYONE about the stuff they know. As part of a measure to prevent this if you use Temporary Workers to build housing for permanent Workers, you can have the Temporary Workers immediately join you as a permanent work force.

Keep Your Staff Happy – Once your workers aren't wandering off to distant sites telling everyone about their day then it's all about keeping them happy and loyal. Which revolves around the Staff Loyalty rules.

Kill Everyone Who Knows – No more than two men can keep a secret, and then only if one of them dies. You can just hunt down and kill your own workers and staff who know whatever it is you want to hide. This is, highly effective at destroying potential information leaks, but can tend to arbitrarily lower OTHER staff loyalty values, and may anger local populations and organisations, causing recruiting pools to dry up and maybe even making organisations hostile to you (or if none are available causing whole new organisations to be formed by angry relatives and citizens solely tasking those rebel organisations with being angry with you).

Golden Retirements – You can also retire all the staff who know and then MASSIVELY pay them off. You can spend 1 Treasure and allocate a named Character for 1 Strategic turn to perform a round of “golden retirements” firing any amount of staff and sending them off with a large pile of cash. These staff scatter far and wide, but do so anonymously and with a +10 Loyalty bonus from whatever they had when you retired them.

But Always Remember, Information Wants To Be Known – You can bribe or kill everyone who knows about the secret treasure vault behind the fire place in your bedroom. But you probably employ a hand maid to, er, clean your bedroom. And she might accidentally discover the secret door you might not even KNOW she knows. She might tell the OTHER maids. They might tell their cousins. Etc... Even if you remove all knowledge of stuff one way or another you STILL might have information leak out. And this uses the Base Security rules.

Regulating Base Access
Sometimes you want to let, well, outsiders, into your base. And that means you may want to control their movements by determining that SOME parts of your base are “off limits” to various groups of people.

Limiting Access – First of all while you CAN just declare the Concubine Pleasure Garden as being off limits to the general public this largely doesn't stop the general public from wandering in. You actually NEED things like, well, Walls, and Gates and Guarded Gates, and maybe locks and patrols to actually keep people out. Generally surrounding a room or wing with Walls and placing a Gate Room or Secret Doors on all the access points should be enough to allow you to genuinely enforce your decisions about access limits.

Public Access – Sometimes you WANT random Joes to walk into parts of your base. Many Government facilities NEED to be accessible to the public or they won't work. In addition sometimes it is USEFUL to be able to step out into the “public wing” gardens and just talk to, or kidnap, random local civilians or foreign tourists. In addition anywhere OUTSIDE of boundaries that allow you to enforce access limitations is generally assumed to automatically BE public access anyway.

Guest Access – Allows you to allocate specific areas that are only accessible by approved “guests”. It is useful to have guest areas with guest rooms for profit, cover, diplomacy, and attracting travellers with useful skills you might want to pay them to train you or your staff with.

Private Access – Some areas of your base may be areas you only want yourself and your authorised staff to enter, you may even limit some groups of staff from coming in. You may even limit other named PCs who own other portions of the base from coming in.

Super Private Access – Some areas of your base might be off limits to EVERYONE including ALL staff. Except you. Hell you might even specify that even YOU aren't allowed in.

Special Exceptions – You set up your access limitations and you potentially can breach them. Just because you told your staff that your private rooms are private access only doesn't mean you CAN'T let the Dragon Prince visit them, it just means you need to tell everyone that he is allowed in, ideally while accompanying him personally.

Conditional Entry - You MAY set limitations on access beyond broad categories. It is possible to declare that a specific person named Jeff who you dislike is not allowed to enter and STILL consider an area “public access”. You can tell your staff Jeff is allowed in, but to secretly notify you when he comes in, and it is STILL public access. You can have them log all entries and exits, you can have them search people, confiscate weapons, or turn away armed visitors at the gates, and so on. Notably however if you turn away say, specific peoples or cultures from a public access area as a group then THEY don't count as having “public access” which can result in them not being “governed” by your government buildings and such...

Entry Is Free... – You MAY wish to allocate SOME areas as having specific security limitations for LEAVING them. Public access areas CAN be set up to allow anyone to enter but to have staff search those who exit. Or alternatively only authorised people may leave at all (ie, a prison).

Responding To Breaches – You may order your staff to respond in whatever manner you prefer to breaches of access limitations. Ranging from quietly informing superiors or gently trying to suggest conformity to outright armed kill on sight. Very importantly though you should ALSO inform them on how to respond regarding Alarm. Even in a Kill On Sight scenario you need to tell your staff if they should be raising a general alarm or not, on sight or on sight of forces of a certain magnitude or so on.

Base Security
Base security is one of the ways used to determine if information has leaked out of your base already or to determine what information staff within your base know (especially if they aren't SUPPOSED to know).

Base Security is basically a number that is added to the Hide checks of hidden... things or information... in your base. You can increase it by locking things behind guarded gates and so on.

When determining if knowledge of say, the secret door in your bedroom, is public or not, roll a hide check against the person seeking the information, and add your base security bonus.

When determining if your hand maid who isn't supposed to know about the secret door does know, do the same thing.

Staff Loyalty
Staff loyalty is meant to be a sort of short cut to help determine generally how accessible your staff are to being suborned. Both for loyalty and general questions of basic physical accessibility.

Suborn Staff Action
So the main thing that makes this work is the abstracted Suborn Staff action, which you may attempt as a Strategic Action.

Staff leave your base. They visit friends, go shopping, hang around town, or just wander in the wilderness or whatever. This means an opposing character at your Site might find them and use them against you.

The Suborn action is what this is about. It allows a Named Character to roll an undamaging special social attack (any type) against your staff's social defence, with a bonus to the social defence of your staff loyalty bonus. On a success they merely FIND one or more staff of the sort they were looking for somewhere accessible to them outside of your base boundaries/security measures.

Results of A Successful Suborn Action
On it's own the suborn action does nothing. The attacking character basically just STARTS AN ENCOUNTER with the staff they find. They can then use this encounter to socially attack, or physically attack your staff. Seeking typically to either create a double agent, steal a uniform as a disguise, or gather information known to the staff member.

Improving Staff Loyalty
Is generally done with base facilities. But the GM can probably also offer small (possibly temporary) subjective modifiers (bonuses AND penalties) based on events. Like say, killing your work force to hide knowledge of your secret treasure vault location.

Other Infiltration Risks
Now staff suborning and it's tie in to loyalty are one thing. But there are OTHER forms of infiltration that CAN occur.

When you use Temporary Workers, when you Recruit staff, when you accept Guests or Diplomats or visitors, any of them might be infiltrators no suborn action required. (though various social, stealth or disguise actions might be needed).

So it is worth noting that there are circumstances when you open up the risk of importing infiltrators, even whole gangs of them, into your base. You should probably not try to Recruit a bunch of dancing girl Liesure workers from Ninja Region when you just angered the Ninja Lords for instance, because they will permit your recruit attempt, and provide you with a bunch of dancing Ninja Girl Infiltrators.

Character Drift Rules
Bases are a KEY aspect of game play.

Attempting to infiltrate, examine, or attack a base is covered in various ways by the existing rules.

And a great deal of what characters will do is attack bases, or have their base attacked.

But a very important detail I want to emphasise is where named characters are when this happens.

When a “combat time” encounter begins (stealth, infiltration, outright attack, surprise diplomatic visit, whatever), regardless of whether this encounter becomes immediately apparent to guards or not, all unprepared Named characters at the base site must determine where they are and what they are doing.

This is done using the Drift mechanic.

Drift is a ticketing system where you basically stick a bunch of location “tickets” into a hat and pull out one to determine where you were and what you were doing when things happened. But it's emulated with a roll on an open ended table. Various, things, especially rooms can add or modify tickets to your drift table for specific characters. In the long run each character should probably maintain a list of any modifications to the standard drift table that apply to them in their home.

Drift And Base Security
Once you determine drift during an “event” the information as to where characters are is subject to the limits of Base Security and staff knowledge. Some staff will KNOW when you are bathing, or might be able to make a check against base security to find out. Similarly Ninjas and the like might be able to find out where you are at with a similar check at the beginning of the event.

Waiting For the Right Moment
Sometimes an assassin or infiltrator might want a SPECIFIC Drift result to come up.

Assuming they have access to your base they can spend the Strategic Turn lying in wait. ALL Drift ticket results are expected to turn up at one or more points during a Strategic Turn.

The infiltrator must roll ONE appropriate stealth or disguise check (based on their infiltration method) to remain hidden for the Strategic Turn. If they fail then THEY may have to roll drift to determine where THEY are in the enemy base when their cover slips!

They then roll a check against Base Security based on the targeted drift result for ONE targeted character. If they succeed then they time their attack to CORRECTLY match that drift result for that character. If they fail they THINK they are timing it correctly, but instead the targeted character rolls Drift normally.

Regardless of the success of the primary action, other named characters at the base roll up their drift results as well. The infiltrator may roll against additional Base Security checks to determine their locations to, and may then decide to do... whatever based on the success or failure of those rolls and the information gained from the successful ones. Remembering that they have to do the whole process again NEXT strategic turn (or flee) if they don't strike now.

Managing Drift
Default drift results can be harsh. Being in the bath when the ninja assassins strike is harsh. It is especially harsh when you do your bathing in the undefended local river outside of your base compound and it's security cordon.

So you should build the things that control WHERE you turn up when certain drift results are rolled. So you should build a private bath room, behind multiple layers of base defence or AT LEAST behind some walls, so that when the ninjas turn up at the edge of your base they have to sneak or fight through all that stuff before getting to you, and with any luck alert will propagate to your location with time to spare for you to put on some armour and weapons.

More so you should hire some bathing attendants or something to stand around in your bath with you and protect you from ninjas, or alternatively, to help you rapidly equip with items in the event of receiving and alert about approaching ninjas.

The same goes for most other drift results, there ARE things you can build and do in order to mitigate, alter and control locations, equipment status and likely re-equip and response times for basically all Drift results, many of them do other things as well and you may find yourself influencing drift as a by-product of buying luxury and other rooms.

Default Drift Ticket List
Roll a d? (closest die size table fits in, default is 1d8) Reroll all “off chart” rolls

1) Wandering – Select a random wandering site. Default- Outside, Town, Corridors. Equipment – Casual (Wandering)
2) Recreation – Select random recreation site. Default – Staff Housing, Town, Outside. Equipment – Casual or Special
3) Training – Select random training site. Default – Any Training Room, Outside. Equipment – Battle (Training)
4) Sleeping – Asleep in owned room (or default). Default – Any Barracks, Outside, Town. Equipment – None (Sleeping)
5) Bathing – Bathing at owned bathing site (or default). Default – Outside. Equipment – None (Bathing)
6) Working – Location and equipment determined largely by current ST Action.
7) Good Trait Related – Location determined by your Good Trait
Fast – Acrobatics, Default – On the Roof, Equipment – Casual (Wandering) + Balance related?
Strong – Weight Lifting, Default – Any Training Room, Equipment – Casual (Resting) + Weight Lifting Related?
Tough – Endurance Training, Special – Injured (random), Default – Outside, Equipment – Battle (Training)
Energetic – Out Running Special – Spent Energy (random) Default – Outside, Equipment – Casual (Wandering) + ?
Pretty – Bathing, dressing, posing, Default – Outside, Equipment – None (Bathing) + something pretty to try on?
Genius – Researching, Default – Town, Equipment – Casual (Wandering) + research topic relevant?
8) Bad Trait Related - Location determined by your Bad Trait
Slow – Lost, Default – Town, Outside (far away), Equipment – Casual (Wandering) + long distance travel gear?
Weak – Stuck, Default – Any storage room with a sticky door, under a heavy piece of furniture, inside a cabinet or trunk, Equipment – Randomised (reroll, could be anything). Special – Spent Energy (Random)
Clumsy – Bottom of the Well, Default – Outside, the bottom of any fall hazards, under a pile of furniture. Equipment – Randomised (reroll, could be anything). Special – Injured (Random)
Fragile – Receiving Medical Care, Default – Private Room or Staff Housing, Equipment – None (Sleeping) or None (Bathing) Special – Spent Energy (Random) and Injured (Random). High chance of medical assistance being present.
Feeble – Sleeping Like The Dead, Special Location/Equipment – Could happen ANYWHERE reroll for another drift, then fall asleep while doing it. Special – Very very hard to wake up or notice anything, up to and including being kidnapped.
Decadent – Admiring Beauty, Default – Nearest Pretty Character or Item or both, Equipment – Casual (Social) or None (Social). Special – Already distracted, very very hard to notice anything non-pretty around them.
Cowardly – Hiding, Default – Anywhere, Equipment – Battle, Special – Is hiding somewhere inaccessible and possibly defensible. May well refuse to come out and face anything scary.
Stupid – Confused. Special Location and Equipment. Reroll twice. You get the location of one roll, and the items of the second. And the specials of both.

Drift Equipment
Drift equipment falls into several categories and sub headings. These categories limit available equipment a character might have on their person on certain drift results.

Battle – You can have weapons and armour and crazy stuff. Anything you might take with you when you knowingly go to attack someone.
Battle (Training) – Training is a little different to just plain “anything goes” battle. When training you often don't get out ALL your best gear and wear it all out at once. So training equipment is all your cheapo LT style options and MAYBE just the barest minimum MT gear to train ONE aspect of your skills.
Casual – Casual gear is whatever gear you wear when you do NOT expect combat. And indeed want people around you to also not expect combat. So clothing rather than armour and minimal or no weaponry, possibly some minor concealed weaponry.
Casual (Wandering) – Casual gear for more extensive wandering around with slightly higher risks. Because you are wandering father afield and may encounter trouble it may include some minor LT weapon or armour options, but only one or two at most.
Casual (Social) – Casual gear with the inclusion of whatever social tools you have. So this one lets you bring your pretty ball gown with your all your social bonuses on it.
None – Nothing, not even clothes. You just plain have nothing at all. This is what you wear when for some reason you didn't get to wear/carry anything when ninjas suddenly attacked.
None (Bathing) – You only get whatever you wear or carry into the bath. Which is basically nothing. However you can have some limited items within relatively easy reach of your bath. So it is not unreasonable to have some clothes, maybe even a minor LT weapon, and certainly a towel handy.
None (Sleeping) – You only get what you sleep with. Which is usually nothing or some sort of pyjamas. Like bathing however you may have some limited items within easy reach, like a minor LT weapon stuck under your pillow or some casual clothes laid out for the next morning.

Other And Bonus Items – Drift item restrictions are a bit fuzzy, sometimes special exceptions and variations are allowed as long as they fit within the context of the drift result for that character. If it seems especially reasonable you might take a Boar Spear with you while wandering the Boar Forest just near your backyard then you certainly may in fact do so.
What's New?
OK. So this stuff has some new material and some “old” material. Drift was basically already completed. So was the base construction and security/loyalty stuff.

Regional sites and travel was notably re-written and completed.

Regional Hazards were old, Regional Marauding was completed from vapors and Regional Upgrades is new.

Organisations while largely vague and fluffy seemed somehow necessary and was added new.

The most notable CHANGE from old material was that previously Regions had population limits by culture, people and staff type for recruiting limitations.

This was sorta nice because you wanted to say “this region is out of warriors, you need to upgrade your local population or go recruit in some other region to get more!”.

But it was bad because you had to track FIVE MILLION numbers to do that. More streamlined one number population mechanics where you derived specific results like Warrior caps in simple ways... were still pretty complex and already ruled out previously.

In the end as already mentioned, just not doing that seemed generally better. You STILL will want to recruit warriors and workers and the odd named officer from foreign lands for Culture and People effects anyway and that is considered good enough damnit.

Also new is the bit not added yet. Which is essentially an extension of the earlier furniture rules with some actual statted up descriptions for walls, floors, and pieces of buildings for you to make your combat maps out of and interact with when players start smashing the walls and floors up.

It also ties in with the Peoples and Cultures section and is currently "under construction". I've been working on a few bits in combination and ahead of it, but it's basically up next...
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Basic Architecture Options
Bases are made out of Furniture objects, like walls and floors. They are furnished with more Furniture stuff like tables, chairs, curtains and so on.

The base options you construct are generally described in costs, requirements and effects. Often lacking in details about furniture layout and contents.

This is partly deliberate. Because the walls, floors, and other pieces of furniture rely strongly on the Cultural Architectural styles and available Resources of the builders.

Listed here are a set of basic architectural styles based on resources and themes and some minor architectural quirks.

Some other architectural styles (or enhancements to existing ones) may come from later skill sets.

IMPORTANT NOTE Architectural styles include some of the MOST BASIC and vital buildings you will want to build. The Structure and Fortified Structure options that create indoor space, a vital base resource spent on furnished rooms and facilities are found primarily here.

For ease of administration purposes, once you have paid the treasure and work costs of those sorts of buildings you may allocate, re-arrange and even reserve the creation of the full amount of space until later as you allocate various indoor rooms to that space.

Stairs, Ladders, Ramps, And things
Unless a culture is particularly keen on flat ground and single story buildings they one way or another include some form of architecture for moving up and down within a multi layer structure or up a slope.

Ropes and Ladders
Cost : Free
WT : Free
Space : None
Ropes and ladders allow vertical Climbing movement without a Climb check. However a character knocked off a ladder will Fall, and a character climbing a ladder is semi-immobile while on the ladder (cannot perform move actions except ones on the path of the ladder, can only target things on the ladder with Close-Range actions).

Ropes and ladders generally have 1 Max Injury and appropriate material/hardness keywords. Commonly they are made of wood but almost any material is usable.

Some ladders are made out of niches cut into walls (and have no hit points of their own). Ladders commonly are placed in make shift open shafts (with no safety railings) while waiting for proper stairs to be built.

Stairs and Ramps
Cost : Free
WT : 10 per vertical level
Space : Variable (allocate what you like)
For our purposes the rules treat Ramps and Stairs identically. Stairs effectively are a sloped zone that joins a lower level zone to a higher level zone. Stairs use the same profile for defence as an internal wall of the same material. Stair zones often join onto more stair zones. Stairs (or ramps) also double as a 'Ramp Effect' that causes a Knocked character to slide down the ramp, and potentially causes “falling down the stairs” type damage (which is a Falling Damage attack with half the distance fallen counted towards the attack). Running and Charging on stairs is hard and characters who attempt a Speed, Run, Charge or Close-Range attack action on Stairs or Ramps trigger a zone hazard that attacks them...
Trip On The Stairs Misstep Hazard Undamaging Knock Single-Target Close-Range +X vs Speed (where X equals Speed) +2 vs Run +2 vs Charge +2 vs Non-Fast +2 vs Slow +4 vs Clumsy

Precarious Stairs
Some cultures and architects like extra steep stairs, or some ruins have worn and crumbly stairs. These stairs trigger their Trip on the Stairs hazard attack on ANY Move action on their surface.

External Stairs
Some cultures or architects favour building their stairs OUTSIDE of buildings. This is particularly exciting if they also have a strong aversion to safety railings, in which case the stairs are likely to have a mistep hazard for a fall off the edge AS WELL as potential to fall down the stairs.

Spiral Stairs
Spiral stairs are a stair option for cultures and architects that actually work almost exactly like normal stairs, but let you stack them in a tighter more vertically aligned manner which also happens to block LoS between many of the zones in the same stairway with the stairs themselves.

Switch Back Stairs
A stair case that leads to a flat zone that has a stair case that switches back the other way again. A common arrangement of stairs among many cultures, blocks LoS between many stair zones in the same stair case, and also (may) reduce the potential distance fallen down the stairs due to the switch backs and flat zones (especially combined with walls or safety railings).

Shafts
Cost : Free
WT : Free
Space : Variable (allocate what you like)
Stair wells, ladder shafts, and elevators require simple holes between floor levels. These are described as “shafts”. A shaft costs you nothing to make bar the space of open hole in the floor zones on various levels that you allocate to it within existing structures. Cultures with excessive amounts of levitation or flight might favour simple shafts as their only and complete vertical ascension architectural achievement.
Chutes and Slides
Cost : Free
WT : 5 per vertical level
Space : Variable (allocate what you like)
A Ramp or Shaft designed explicitly for downward sliding motion. May have a built in water slide! (assuming you have the plumbing). It's basically a zone built exclusively for it's Ramp effect. Generally Slides and Chutes are designed to mitigate or eliminate falling damage translating it to gentler halts or some horizontal motion. But they don't HAVE to...

Elevators
Cost and details aren't covered here. But mechanical or magical societies may have access to other vertical base traversal structures that somewhat resemble elevators (or vacuum tubes?). Just letting you know.

Ledges Edges and Railing Styles
Safety Railings
Safety railings come for free with various edges, like flat roof tops, balconies, shafts and stairs. IF the architect or culture actually thinks they are warranted. And some cultures selectively (or entirely) dislike using them. Those that do use Railing type furniture that has half the max injuries of an internal wall of the same material. See the furniture section for more details.

No Safety Railings
Some cultures think that high balconies and external stairways and stuff are awesome and safety railings just get in the way of an excellent view and Darwinian evolution. They just opt not to add safety railings to their edge hazards, thus creating potential misstep hazards in the zones with such unprotected edges. Tripping over an edge is normally triggered by Run, Charge or Speed actions in the effected zone.
Trip Over Edge Undamaging Mistep Hazard Throw Single-Target Close-Range +X vs Speed (where X equals Speed) +2 vs Run +2 vs Charge +2 vs Non-Fast +2 vs Slow +4 vs Clumsy On a hit this effect moves the victim out off the edge, they then fall at the beginning of their action in the NEXT turn.

Precarious Edges
Some cultures, or crumbling ruins left by them, have such narrow ledges, sloped ledges, crumbly ledges or generally somehow extra precarious ledges that they trigger Trip Over Edge effects on ANY Move action. Some are SO bad they just attack you every turn even if you DON'T perform any trigger actions.

External Balconies
This culture just LOVES external balconies. And will stick some on any external wall creating approximately +20 external balcony space (in total) for every 100 internal space (or +20%) of above ground floor structure (some cultures even build entertaining ground floor balconies or patios). Balconies typically have access through a doorway directly to interior zones of some form. They are EXTRA exciting among cultures that also use ledges, or that DON'T use safety railings!

Internal Balconies
Just like external ones but they get applied to the interior walls of rooms more than one zone high. They base their +20% balcony space on the amount of empty internal “high ceiling” space rather than the total internal space.

External Ledges
Some cultures like to built bits of ledges for guttering, or construction aids, or just general ornamentation. These ledges rarely ever have railings, and are usually excessively narrow to the point of precarious. They typically have a total space about equal to 20% of the internal space they wrap around and are added free on the outside of each story, or sometimes every second or third story. In some rare cultures External Ledges have ramp or stair like effects, possibly even wrapping all the way around and up a tower like a very narrow spiral ramp way.

Roof Styles
Flat Roofs
Generally used in regions without heavy rain or snow. Allows use of the roof space as open external floor space for outdoor activities. Favourite places for sunbathing, archery and drying the linens. Extra fun without safety railings. They come free with any structure with a roof on it.

Sloped Roofs
Used to make snow, rain, and ninjas slide off your roof top without damaging it. Often combined with water catching guttering, or ninja catching spikes. Sloped Roofs are typically just a Ramp effect made out of a Floor/Roof material. Though they may often also be Precarious. They come free with any structure with a roof on it.

Crenelations
Those lumpy castle bits you hide behind. Basically a Safety Railing designed specifically for taking cover behind as a low wall. Come free with Fortified structures, if the culture is into the whole Crenelation stylings.

Doors and Windows
Open Windows
When glass is not readily available but shuttering is not required (or too expensive) a culture just cuts little window holes to look out of, let light in and shoot arrows through. Open windows are a window effect, but are also commonly designed to have size limitations and may well be small and easily crowded.

Shuttered Windows
A window hole with a door on it, usually wood, sometimes metal or something else. The door allows the window to be closed, possibly even weakly locked.

Glass Windows
A window hole with glass in it, might still be shuttered. The glass may or may not be open-able, but can be seen through and easily broken.

Paper Windows
Paper or cloth windows let in light and maybe air, but are not so easily seen through applying an Obfuscating 3 style effect. They are rarely open-able but usually very easily broken or fired through. They may or may not also have shutters.

Mesh Windows
A mesh like wall furniture object acting as a window. Can be seen and fired through, but is resistent to movement and may be up to as hard as a wall of the same type to break through.

Open Doors
Some cultures take open doors policies to extremes and save money on building construction by not putting doors in their doorway holes. This may be selective, say only on unimportant internal doorways, or may extend to everything including the public bath house and front castle gates.

Closed Doors
Doors made out of internal wall material. They have the same max injuries and defences as “half a wall” or the amount by which you would need to damage an internal wall in order to “smash through”.

Reinforced Doors
Doors made out of a reinforced material. They have the same max injuries and defences as “half a wall” but this time are based off the “Fortified” verison of their wall material type.

Draw Bridge
A door, usually big, often long, that can drop down to form a bridge like zone across some sort of pit or moat. Can also be used as a makeshift weapon to perform a roof collapse like attack by dropping it open onto victims in the zone it lands on when opened.

Portcullis
A door, usually reinforced, often sharp and metal with spikes on, that can drop down to split a zone or prevent characters from entering, possibly by allowing a makeshift damaging Pin attack using the door as a weapon.

Spikes and Stuff
Spikes are handy for a variety of cosmetic and practical purposes. Spikes are especially popular with Metal Architecture fanatics. Basically all spike options are free, and may be made of various materials (wood, bone, crystal, glass, metal, stone) as available.

Pit Spikes
Placed at the bottom of a pit, or other fall hazard these add a Devastating +1 effect and their Weapon + Material keywords to the Falling Damage attack when characters fall onto them (or are thrown onto them).

Railing Spikes
Some cultures like Railing Spikes, so their safety railings aren't so dangerously safe. Railing Spikes do two things, act as Pit Spikes if you fall on them, or fall with you and act as pit spikes being fallen onto if you smash through the railing and fall off the edge.

Spiked Doors
Spiked doors have a spike like weapon on them, anyone who attacks the door with a Close-Range action, or is thrown onto it, is attacked by the spikes as a triggered hazard.
Spike Attack Weapon ? Spear Slow Single-Target Close-Range and +3 vs Weak +3 vs Big +3 vs Non-Strong. Where ? Is the spike material type and hardness keywords.

Spiked Walls
Work just like spiked doors, only on walls!

Spiked Furniture
Work just like spiked railings or spiked doors, so you can throw people onto a spiked table and cause a Spike Attack against them. However when used as a makeshift weapon the table itself does not have the same profile as the Spike Attack (though it might be better than a standard table).

Spike Carpet
Cost : 1 Treasure
WT: 5
Space : up to 3 zones of 10 Space each.
Fills a zone (or several) with tiny spikes in the floor. Potentially retractable by a Switch of some form. Basically a form of trap hazard.
Weapon ? Caltrop Weak Single-Target Close-Range and +3 vs Bare footed +3 vs Weak +3 vs Non-Fast. Where ? Is the spike material type and hardness keywords.
Spike Carpet fills a zone and acts as a hazard triggered by any Move or Close-Range action in or through the zone.

Spike Stakes
Cost : 2 Treasures
WT: 15
Space : up to 3 zones of 30 Space each.
Fills a zone (or several) with giant spikes in the floor. Potentially retractable by a Switch of some form. Basically a form of trap hazard targetting cavalry and giants and stuff.
Weapon ? Caltrop Spear Big Strong Single-Target Close-Range and +3 vs Bare footed +X vs Speed +3 vs Big. Where ? Is the spike material type and hardness keywords. Where X is the Speed of the moving target. Spike Stakes fills a zone and acts as a hazard triggered by any Move or Close-Range action performed by a Big character in or through the zone.

Composite Architectural Style
While some cultures engage in strict single style architectural designs most actually use a composite style.

This means they may specifically combine Wooden Floors, Paper Internal Walls, Tile Roofs and Metal Spiked Railings etc...

A composite style is easy enough to define, just mix and match bits from the other styles.

Tunnelling Architecture
A particularly common style of architecture for basements, escape tunnels and additional bits, many cultures with other architectural styles also have access to some or all tunnelling options. And tunnelling includes some basic representation of dirt and bed rock floors so even “the wilderness” uses it to some degree. A few cultures however use tunnelling as their PRIMARY architectural style and basically hollow out the earth for pretty much ALL their buildings, maybe they pull out a bit of stone, dirt or wood for their doors and occasional refill job.

Dirt Tunnels
Cost: 1 Treasure
WT: 20
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Must be dug into soft soils like Dirt, Mud or Clay

Simple tunnels under the ground, soft dirt like ground. Nice and cheap.

Sand Tunnels
Cost: 3 Treasures
WT: 30
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Must be dug into sand or dry shifting soils.

Sand is much harder to tunnel into while preventing collapse, so it costs a bunch extra.

Stone Tunnels
Cost: 2 Treasures
WT: 60
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Must be dug into solid stone or similar hard soils.

Stone is more expensive to tunnel and slower to work with.

Solid Dirt Furniture Soft Ceramic Armour 4 1 Max Injury per 1 Space
Solid Dirt is a “The Ground” type surface (though it can be used for walls and floors). Thinner internal walls in complex tunnel layouts use Dirt Walls or Dirt Fortifications from the Dirt Architectural style. The internal space refereed to in the injuries stat is the space in the “subterranean zone” under or behind the dirt surface that separates the hollow zone from the underground. If damaged the solid dirt creates potential craters of equal space to the damage dealt. This can create hole or crater like mini zones if it exceeds about 5 Space, possibly even breaking through to other underground pockets at that stage or later. Damage exceeding the total injuries of the zone destroys it entirely and may result in things falling down. Damage to a dirt zone raises a Dust cloud effect that lasts until the end of the next turn (see Clouds in LoS). If a dirt ceiling is damaged it causes falling damage on a number of targets bellow equal to the number of injuries in damage dealt to it. If a dirt ceiling collapses entirely it attacks all targets bellow and adds a Pin effect trapping them under loose fallen dirt.

Solid Sand
Works exactly like Solid Dirt actually. Identical down to the keywords.

Solid Stone Furniture Hard Ceramic Armour 8 2 Max Injury per 1 Space
Works just like Solid Dirt but with differing keyword and bonuses and more resistant to damage.

Tunnel Supports Hard ? Column Furniture Armour 6 Max Injury's 2
Where ? is an appropriate material and hardness for a column support, which could be anything really.
Tunnelled rooms of larger than 10 Size need at least 1 Tunnel Support per 10 space. If destroyed the tunnel support will cause 10 space of ceiling to collapse. Tunnel supports are free.

Reinforced Tunnel Supports Hard ? Column Furniture Armour 8 Max Injury's 3
Where ? is an appropriate material and hardness for a column support, which could be anything really.
Work just like Tunnel Supports but are slightly tougher. Adds +1 Treasure cost to the construction of a Dirt Tunnels, Sand Tunnels or Stone Tunnels type super structure.

Weakened Tunnel Supports Hard ? Column Furniture Armour 4 Max Injury's 1
Where ? is an appropriate material and hardness for a column support, which could be anything really.
Ancient tunnel supports tend to be sorta fragile. Any physical attack that misses a target in zone with Weakened Tunnel Supports rerolls against a random Weakened Tunnel Support target. Clumsy characters always add a random Weakened Tunnel Support as an extra target any time they attack into, from, or through a Zone with Weakened Tunnel Supports with a physical attack.

Lined Walls
Some tunnels have additional internal lining on the walls, basically having the walls, floors and ceilings of another structure type, like Stone Structure or Wood Structure. This is handy because it means you now have to break through those to damage and interact with the actual tunnel exteriors itself (or if you break in from the exterior you need to still get through the internal lining). Lined walls are represented by just buying another structure type and putting it IN your Tunnel structure.

Fill Piles
Whenever you build Tunnels you displace an equal space worth of fill, which usually ends up as a big pile near the tunnel entrance somewhere. This fill can be used to make a Structure or Fortification in certain circumstances (no effect on Dirt other than being a way to get rid of it, Stone makes the Stone Resource temporarily available during construction, Sand can be used to make glass structures, but still requires access to a Glass Works). Otherwise you can expend +30 WT to have your workers displace and distribute the unsightly and attention drawing piles from one Tunnels structure.

Wooden Architectural Style
This culture builds things mostly out of Wood.

Wooden Structure
Cost: 1 Treasure
WT: 30
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Wood resource.

Standard buildings with floors, walls roofs etc... of Wood.

Fortified Wooden Structure
Cost: 2 Treasures
WT: 60
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Wood resource.
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Wooden walls. Internal partitions are still regular style floors and walls.

Wooden Walls Hard Flesh Wall Furniture Armour 4 Max Injury's 4
Wooden Walls is the stat line used for all internal and “weak” external wooden walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (2 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Reinforced Wooden Walls Hard Flesh Wall Furniture Armour 8 Max Injury's 6
Wooden Walls is the stat line used for all specially described “fortified” wooden walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (3 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Stilts
A somewhat common option among cultures with Wooden architecture that build in Swamps or the like is to build all their structures on Stilts. This effectively creates a sub level zone under the floor between it and the ground (or swamp, lake or whatever) full of just columns that hold up the floor. These columns work exactly like Tunnel Supports from the Tunnelling Architecture set.

Dirt Architecture
Some cultures like to build things out of dirt, mud, or mud brick. It's certainly cheap and readily available and dirt mines are, well, basically everywhere and they don't ask much (if anything) for their product.

Dirt Structure
Cost: 1 Treasure
WT: 20
Space : creates 100 indoor space

Standard buildings with floors, walls roofs etc... of Dirt.

Fortified Dirt Structure
Cost: 2 Treasures
WT: 40
Space : creates 100 indoor space
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Dirt walls. Internal partitions are still regular style floors and walls.

Dirt Walls Soft Ceramic Wall Furniture Armour 4 Max Injury's 3
Dirt Walls is the stat line used for all internal and “weak” external Dirt walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (2 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Reinforced Dirt Walls Soft Ceramic Wall Furniture Armour 8 Max Injury's 5
Reinforced Dirt Walls is the stat line used for all specially described “fortified” Dirt walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (3 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Bone Architecture
Later on Bone architecture may get more interesting with necromantic skill sets or something. But for now if you build your house out of giant bones the actual stat lines and costs involved are basically identical to Wood. Only you need access to bone mines instead of lumber mills.

Stone Architecture
Stone Structure
Cost: 1 Treasure
WT: 40
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Stone resource.

Standard buildings with floors, walls roofs etc... of Stone.

Fortified Stone Structure
Cost: 3 Treasures
WT: 60
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Stone resource.
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Stone walls. Internal partitions are still regular style floors and walls.

Stone Walls Hard Ceramic Wall Furniture Armour 5 Max Injury's 6
Stone Walls is the stat line used for all internal and “weak” external stone walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (3 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Reinforced Stone Walls Hard Ceramic Wall Furniture Armour 9 Max Injury's 8
Stone Walls is the stat line used for all specially described “fortified” stone walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (4 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Metal Architecture
Metal Structure
Cost: 3 Treasure
WT: 40
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to TWO harvested Metal resources.

Standard buildings with floors, walls roofs etc... of solid god damn metal!

Fortified Metal Structure
Cost: 5 Treasures
WT: 80
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to THREE harvested Metal resources!
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Metal walls. Internal partitions are still regular style floors and walls.

Metal Walls Hard Metal Wall Furniture Armour 6 Max Injury's 6
Metal Walls is the stat line used for all internal and “weak” external Metal walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (3 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Reinforced Stone Walls Hard Metal Wall Furniture Armour 10 Max Injury's 9
Reinforced Metal Walls is the stat line used for all specially described “fortified” Metal walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (5 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”.

Paper and Cloth Architecture
Some cultures like to build out of cloth, silk or paper. It's fragile, but cheap to repair and kinda airy. Typically their structures ALSO involve support beams, floors and roofs of OTHER material types (commonly wood) to do all the heavy lifting and basically only walls are paper or cloth. And even then if they want FORTIFIED walls they shop from other material types too.

Paper Structure
Cost: 1 Treasure
WT: 20
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Wood or Silk resource (and possibly access to Wood or other resource for support structure).

A building with Paper or Cloth walls of some form. Often has wooden supports, floors and ceilings (or some other non-paper material).

Fortified Paper Structure
Cost: 2 Treasures
WT: 60
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Stone, Wood and maybe Silk resource.
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Stone walls. Internal partitions are Paper walls and internal wooden Floors.

Paper Walls Soft Cloth Wall Furniture Armour 3 Max Injury's 2
Paper walls hide wooden (or other) Support columns. The walls themselves hold nothing up. They are cheap to repair and easy to smash through, and can be shot through with projectiles pretty much freely (baring LoS limitations). This description also represents cloth and silk walls. You can break through a Paper wall by dealing 1 Injury to it, OR by succeeding in an Escape attack against it. Because they are so weak.

Transparent Paper Walls
Some paper or cloth walls are gossamer see through silky stuff. Which is pretty. They do not block LoS but do apply an Obfuscating 3 defence effect.

Crystal Architecture
For cultures with access to and appreciation of shiny Crystal construction resources.

Crystal Structure
Cost: 2 Treasures
WT: 40
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Crystal resource.

Standard buildings with floors, walls roofs etc... of cool fantasy crystals.

Fortified Crystal Structure
Cost: 4 Treasures
WT: 60
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Stone resource.
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Crystal walls. Internal partitions are still regular style floors and walls.

Crystal Walls Hard Ceramic Magic Mystic Wall Furniture Armour 5 Max Injury's 6
Crystal Walls is the stat line used for all internal and “weak” external Crystal walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (3 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”. Note that the main difference of Crystal and Stone is that Crystal is Magic and Mystic (and interacts with magic things differently and more firmly)... and costs more.

Reinforced Crystal Walls Hard Ceramic Magic Mystic Wall Furniture Armour 9 Max Injury's 8
Crystal Walls is the stat line used for all specially described “fortified” Crystal walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (4 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”. Note that the main difference of Crystal and Stone is that Crystal is Magic and Mystic (and interacts with magic things differently and more firmly)... and costs more.

Transparent Crystal
Crystal structures like walls and such MAY be made Transparent or Translucent. Not blocking LoS and offering between 0 and 3 points of Obfuscating defence effect depending on how transparent they are made. Some can even be made to have variable Transparency settings changeable by Mystic characters.

Crystal Glass
Glass type window and other structures can be built out of Crystal instead. Causing them to cost more (+1 Treasure cost IF they have a listed Treasure cost more than “free”) and add +1 Max Injury, Magic and Mystic to their defence profile.

Glass Architecture
Building out of Glass is cool. Now some cultures outright live in glass houses. But many like simple glass windows or the occasional Glass Atrium roof or something.

Collapsing Glass
When large glass roofs, walls or attriums collapse on things they add the Sever keyword to their collapse damage attack. The same goes for cases where characters are thrown through or onto glass walls and furniture IF they take damage from the throw AND break the glass furniture in the process.

Glass Windows Hard Ceramic Weak Armour 2 1 Max Injury.
The most basic glass furniture item is the window. It is not a wall. It is transparent and see through, but it does block movement (and sort of) blocks LoF. You can attempt to move through, or even attack through glass windows. Doing so triggers an additional attack roll targetting the window, if it damages the window (typically destroying it) then you may continue the attack/move beyond the window. On a miss the window repels your movement or attack which then ends.

Glass Structure
Cost: 1 Treasure
WT: 40
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Sand/Glass resource.

Standard buildings with floors, walls roofs etc... of Glass!

Fortified Glass Structure
Cost: 3 Treasures
WT: 60
Space : creates 100 indoor space
Requires: Requires access to a harvested Sand/Glass resource.
This building has all it's external walls and floors made out of Fortified instead of regular Glass walls. Internal partitions are still regular style floors and walls.

Glass Walls Hard Ceramic Wall Furniture Armour 3 Max Injury's 4
Glass Walls is the stat line used for all internal and “weak” external Glass walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (2 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”. Glass walls are typically Transparent and do not block LoS. Glass Walls apply the Collapsing Glass effect.

Reinforced Glass Walls Hard Ceramic Wall Furniture Armour 7 Max Injury's 7
Reinforced Glass Walls is the stat line used for all specially described “fortified” Glass walls, floors and ceilings. Remember the removal of all walls can cause a ceiling to collapse and dealing ½ damage to a wall (4 injuries) is enough to “punch a hole through”. Glass walls are typically Transparent and do not block LoS. Glass Walls apply the Collapsing Glass effect.

Opaque Obsidian
As a cultural or resource variant some architecture styles may use burnt or coloured obsidian or other opaque glass. Losing the Transparency effect. But at no additional cost or changes. Typically this is NOT done for windows or Glass Atrium Roofs.

Glass Atrium Roof
Cost: 1 Treasure per 20 Space of modified room.
WT: +1 per 20 Space of modified room.
Space: None, Modifies a room
Requires: Access to Glass/Sand harvested resource.
Bonus : A character who has a Glass Atrium Roof on at least one room that provides them with Luxury also gains +1 Luxury. A character who has Glass Atrium Roofs on ALL the rooms that provide them with Luxury gains +2 Luxury.
Modifies the roof (and possibly upper level walls) of the room turning them into regular Glass Walls.
Everyone loves a glass atrium roof. Very luxurious. Tends to collapse and cut your arm off, and lets in Ninjas and Battle Wizards and other rabble when it does, but then maybe the garden with the glass atrium roof is the one you keep your fire breathing tigers in.

Ruined Architecture
Some architecture styles already mention some possible variations of crumbling or ruined fragile versions of structures, but we need some more, so here are some Ruined Architecture modifiers for, well, ruins.

Weakened Structure
Modifies a wall, floor or ceiling with less than normal Max Injuries.

Holed Structure
Adds openings and damage to a wall or floor or similar as if a character had attacked it and damaged it enough to “punch through”.

Fragile Structure
Any damaging physical attack in the zone also attacks this wall, floor, or roof, as a free additional target.

Crumbling Floor
Any time a character performs a Move action or Close-Range attack through or into this zone (or is thrown in) on this floor surface the floor (or sometimes a wall or roof) takes 1 Point of Injury damage and may collapse under the character.

Other Architectures, Meat, Insects, Illusions, Live Plants, Lies
Just a reminder that other architecture things should be added, hopefully in the Skill Set notes, possibly in the cultural specialities section, and certainly in any “campaign setting” add on material.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Peoples And Cultures Is Large And Complex!
And it is indeed. There are a great deal of options and details to go into. If you REALLY wanted to you could sit down with this stuff and spend... probably far TOO long writing up even a single character's associated background details!

Part of the supposed point of this system is to try and make some things like character creation LESS painful.

Well. First of this material is a tool kit. You don't have to use it ALL. You don't have to use it all on the spot much of the People and Culture generation can be done in advance. You can even generate some large chunks of this stuff retrospectively or even in game We can find out what the cultural Skill Sets of Jimmy's background culture are when we first run into caring about them we can even do that one skill set at a time.

In addition if you say “typical fantasy universe human” is your character and it's background. An option I always do like to encourage, you just side stepped well more than half this stuff. Even if you just want a BIT of added flavour you could totally do that with like ONE People Trait and ONE Cultural Specialty item or theme.

And just for laughs I'm including some ridiculous random tables you can use if you just can't manage to make decisions.
Cultures and Peoples, What's New?
OK so cultures and peoples is probably the among the most heavily edited sections so far in this process compared to it's state prior to posting.

The traits in the Peoples section were largely there (in a different layout with some alterations and additions).

However there also used to be a specific “Monster” skill set that had a few of the bigger Peoples traits in, and the old Peoples traits were due to no particular reason restricted primarily to 0 point abilities and the rest went into Monster, which had special “partially unlocked for partially monstrous guys anyway” conditions and... well... what was the point? You might as well just have it all laid out how it is and it ends up better and less confusing at the same time.

The Culture stuff was significantly muddled with and the Cultural Item list is basically almost entirely new, since there were initially only a tiny handful of sample cultural item options.

Cultural Quirks and Architecture were largely there, but got a bit of a light shuffling up.

“Completing” or at least continuing the Cultures and Peoples document up to this stage was a delay in posting it, but it also provided a lot more interesting stuff to post, and provided me with what may be one of the biggest additions to my material that I'm going to get out of this colossal waste of time posting stuff in this thread.

So I hope you enjoy it and stop trying to pick Immaterial as your character's mutation trait you bastards.
Peoples and Cultures
OK so we need to be able to define two things about characters backgrounds (and related setting elements).

1) Physical appearance an gross physical variations like wings and junk.
2) Cultural traits like Ethnic dress, preferred weapons and skills and such.

And... that's what this section is about.

Defining A People
So in the formal terminology of this system a “People” is some large group of relatively similar looking... people. A bunch of humans or humanoids with various appearance traits, and since this is fantasy, potentially some notable “other” traits.

Which means you get to pick a bunch of traits off the Appearance list and the Mutations lists (and possibly the Injury traits lists) and define that as the “typical” appearance of a newly defined people. You can even select a few variant appearance or mutation traits and declare that they are “notable minority” traits, so for instance some minority of People X happens to be born with “Extra Arms” or something.

You also need to pick some very basic options about the basic keywords of any people (see the Basic Metabolism Traitss section and the Size Traits section).

You should also give that people a name, and then consider associating one or more Regions and Cultures with that people.

Describing An Individual
When you describe an individual from any particular background the “People” that they came from only gives you a typical template of their appearance and mutation traits. It is perfectly possible that they might vary from the typical appearance and body layout of their people in a number of ways, by individual variation, mixed parentage, the dabbling of mad science, or strange destiny. Whatever. So an individual character CAN end up picking variant appearance, injury and mutation traits rather than being “typical” for their People.

How Much does a Trait Cost?
Appearance Traits and Mutation Traits selected from the following lists are FREE. And in theory you could pick a BIG PILE OF THEM. I mean, ideally you will show SOME restraint.

But the general idea is that a trait from either list, on it's own is either fairly neutral or even just a teeny bit bad for over all effect on character power.

However many traits offer upgrade Skills that you can invest in with listed costs in Skill Points. Any character with the matching base trait may take appropriate upgrade skills in the same manner that they can invest in any unlocked Skills available to their character during skill advancement.

The general idea being that your gross physical humanoid traits CAN give you nice stuff but you DO generally need to actually PAY a fair price for that nice stuff before it becomes active.

Basic Metabolism Traits
Every character/people in the world must pick a “metabolism” basic keyword for their basic keyword list.

The options at present are...
Animal
Plant
Mechanical
Undead

You should pick ONE of those. At a stretch two of them might be permissible for some sort of half dead or cybernetic people or something, but actually picking two is probably generally disadvantagous so unless a character gets something for doing that, like, I dunno, an extra 0 Point skill selection or something, then it sucks.

You also need to define the Body Material of your people/character.

You need to pick ONE hardness option.
Hard
Soft
Or Neither (rubbery) but, generally neither probably shouldn't be permitted.
And possibly at a stetch...

You also need to pick the material type of your body. Current options are...
Flesh (also commonly used with differing hardness for some plant materials, wood, insect shell, bone, etc...)
Metal
Ceramic (also commonly used for Glass, Dirt, Clay, Crystal and Stone)
Plastic (also used for leathery stuff, some plant materials, etc...)
Energy For I dunno, fire elementals and junk I guess.
Mental For Peoples who are the figments of other Peoples imaginations

You again should probably only choose ONE material type, you COULD pick more but again, as with basic metabolisms, having more is generally a bad thing to have.

The system for the most part makes the assumption that the vast majority of Peoples and characters in the world are in fact just Animals with Soft Flesh bodies.

Mystical Peoples!
The support isn't entirely complete yet, but you CAN also choose to just give an entire people the Mystic Keyword. For instance, all the Peoples of the Fairy race being Mystic would hardly be unusual.

The better way to do this would be to use the Mystical Creature trait from the Mutations traits.

It's probably a good idea though to then still give their Culture at least one of the “I'm Magic” profession themed skill sets ANYWAY. And probably some other magic skill sets too.

Size Traits
Your people/character also needs to have a SIZE. There are four sizes in the rules...

Small
Normal Sized
Big
Capital

Capital sized things... cannot be attacked directly and work more off the Building mechanics than as characters. So that option is (for now) right out.

The system generally assumes the majority of peoples and characters in the world are Normal Sized.

Being Small and Big has some minor implications with fitting into limited sized zones and such (see Zone Size mechanics for details). But if you do pick Small or Big they also have the following additional effects on your character.

Small Sized Combat Modifiers
Adds Small 2 to your Normal Defence keywords list.
Your “Unarmed Attack” adds Small
Note : All Normal Attacks with the Small keyword add -2 vs Big and +2 vs Small

Big Sized Combat Modifiers
Adds Big 2 to your Normal Defence keywords list.
Your “Unarmed Attack” adds Big
Note : All Normal Attacks with the Big keyword add -2 vs Small and +2 vs Big
How do those numbers work out?
OK so this means you end up with what effectively amounts to the following relationships.

Small is +0 vs Normal
Small is -4 vs Big
Big is +0 vs Normal
Big is -4 vs Small
Normal is -2 vs Small
Normal is -2 vs Big
Normal is +0 vs Normal

The question is... is this right? Over all this sort of adds up. And it means there are smallish advantages and disadvantages in each of the size match ups.

In the long run it is not entirely clear how well this will work out. But, it needed to do something.
Size and Items
Small and Big characters need appropriately sized items, and may need to have items specially made for them with the added Small and Big keywords (most places that provide items can provide smaller or bigger versions of the same items at the same price).

In particular worn items, especially clothes, armours, boots, gloves and hats need to be matching size categories to the wearer.

In addition...

Small characters cannot use Big weapons/held items, and need to use 2 hands to hold/use a Normal sized item. They can use/hold a Small item in one hand.

Normal sized characters can use a Normal sized OR small sized item in one hand, and a Big item in 2 hands.

Big characters cannot use Small sized items in their hands but can use Normal or Big sized items in 1 hand.

Note : A small character using a Normal Sized weapon in two hands is making a Normal Sized attack when they attack with it. Yes this DOES allow them to bypass size bonuses/penalties to attacks somewhat. Same with other characters and various other sized weapons.

Appearance Traits
Appearance traits are the less notably variable physical traits of a humanoid, things like being blonde or kinda fat. They are less likely to dramatically effect a character, are more likely to do nothing much at all. Individuals are more likely to have minor appearance variations from their People's typical appearance and less likely to have major mutation differences from their typical peoples mutation traits, etc...

But over all the separation of People traits into Appearance and Mutation traits, is fairly arbitrary and kinda meaningless. Thing of it as a random bullshit guideline.

Hair – Pick a hair colour, pick a texture, pick a general level of hirsuteness. Pick something only appropriate for fantasy worlds, like electric purple. Go for outright baldness instead, whatever. Does basically nothing

Big Hair – If your hair is big enough it gets in your way and causes you to suffer -1 to social defence due to inhibited awareness.
(0 Point upgrade) Big Hair Defence - It also gets in the way of enemy physical attacks, and you get +1 to normal defence.

Eyes – Plenty of options in shape and colour, including weird fictional ones but again, basically does nothing.

Skin – Pick a colour, pick a funky colour. Pick a texture. Pick a pattern. Have some freckles. Whatever. Does nothing.

Pointy Ears – Or other funny shapes. Does nothing.

Lizard Ears – Does nothing. Look a lot like having no ears, but still work like ears.

Lizard Lips – Does nothing.

Lumpy Forehead – Does nothing.

Funny Numbers of Fingers or Toes – Or funny shapes and stuff. Does nothing.

Fat – Kinda fat, may have difficulty fitting into some clothings and armours without custom fits (no extra cost available in all good retail stores).
(0 Point upgrade) Very Fat - Character is so plump it gains +1 Max Injury and -1 Max Energy

Lithe – Kinda skinny, may have difficulty fitting into some clothings and armours without custom fits (no extra cost available in all good retail stores)
(0 Point upgrade) Very Lithe So very lithe or wiry as to apply -1 Max Injury and +1 Max Energy.

Giant Cleavage – Generally only applies to female characters... or maybe not, it can be weird and sometimes just rather overweight out there. Requires special clothing and armour to fit your chest area (no extra purchase cost, available in all good retail stores).
(0 Points Upgrade) Deep Cleavage - Gain an extra Pocket Slot in your giant cleavage. You gain +4 vs Male (or opposite gender) when attempting to conceal items in your Giant Cleavage pocket.
(1 Point Upgrade) Cleavage Surprise - If you pull an item out of your Giant Cleavage pocket and attack with it you can expend 1 Energy to treat all Male (or opposite gender) targets who did not previously detect the concealed item as Unready, regardless of other context/status. Presumably you attempt some sort of Assassinate attack.

Other- Consider more unlisted options AVAILABLE BY REQUEST. These options are us much experimental templates as anything and are almost certainly not a comprehensive list.
No, wait... Giant Boobs?
Yeah. That's right. Big Boobs (well, “Giant Cleavage”) is a descriptive thing you can do, and a descriptive thing you can do that comes with a mechanical reward. Yes you do have to pay for that reward with actual skill points. So no it's not THAT rewarding.

Yes you ARE being bribed to have big boobs on your girl character, no you AREN'T being bribed so much you are forced to do it. No it isn't a big deal to “miss out” by not being big boobed, or for that matter not being female, in your descriptive fluff. Yes you can then spend the same points on other things AS GOOD or possibly even BETTER from other sources. You could be flying with wings or stabbing things with swords more effectively or something.

On the whole the Giant Cleavage Trait is actually kinda the TEMPLATE a lot of the “People” stuff runs off. Interesting but not utterly “unmissable” options tied as small rewards to having some sort of distinctive fluffy description trait. Giant Cleavage (and the Fat and Lithe traits) rack in at about the most minor physical variations that seemed viable as having potential for actual mechanical rewards. And those mechanical rewards both reward you for having a descriptive trait, and let you remind everyone from time to time when you pull a battle axe out of your cleavage or fall over from injuries one turn earlier/later because you are so skinny/chunky.

No really though, Giant Boobs?
And of course there is the OTHER thing about that, yeah, boobies. I'm writing this game, and I want to include some things in it which are very slightly “adult” (hell not much more than PG13, or hell, rather more “juvenile” than “adult”). Giant Cleavage is among the first of these things. Later on there will be skimpy clothing, Pants which fall off. Skills that make your pants fall off for fun and profit. Dancing girls, concubines, and a skill set revolving around seduction. Among other odds and ends.

And no, this doesn't make the game into FATAL. Having big boobs and an war hammer hidden in your cleavage, being a dancing assassin in light gossamer veils you use as a distracting ablative armour strip tease in combat, or being a barbarian manazon nudist spear man wearing only some sun tan oil and a distinct ignorance of homoerotic subtext is NOT the same as the depths FATAL sank to.

But it MIGHT be a little wrong for some gamers. Whatever. I'm tailoring this for me and my players, and we still have enough teenager left in our withered mummified corpses to find topless amazon warrior women with big boobies totally awesome.
Mutation Traits
Mutation traits are the more extreme options for physical variation. They let you put together crazy humanoid or semi-humanoid species of various sorts with a wide variety of... interesting traits.

I'm a Mutant You are a mutant, either personally or as a People. You might mutate some more.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Still Mutating - You qualify for the upgrade skills of ANY mutation or appearance traits. When you take the upgrade you then also gain the base trait itself.

Alternate Form Doesn't do anything much until you upgrade it.
(0 Point Upgrade) - You have two different physical forms. You must define your forms clearly and in advance when taking this power (and/or incrementally with future mutations) placing your various People traits in one or both of your fixed forms. You may change between the two forms as an action. Change may cause you to drop, damage, destroy or disarm items worn or held in some manner related to the differences in the forms. You can take this ability multiple times to gain a different form each time. When buying trait upgrade skills you only pay once for the same skill even if it applies to only one, some, or all of your forms.

Camouflage Patterns – Character has special camouflage skin patterns like leopard spots or zebra stripes.
(0 point Upgrade) Skin Camouflager - Gets a +2 vs Non-Blind bonus and Chameleon on Hide and Sneak actions, but only in the terrain/background type matching their skin patterns and only if all clothing and big items they have equipped are of matching Camouflage or are Transparent or Chameleon.

Chameleon Skin – Character has skin that can change color (and maybe texture). They can make pretty colors and patterns!
(1 Point Upgrade) Chameleon Camouflager - Gets a +4 vs Non-Blind bonus and Chameleon on Hide and Sneak actions, and even on Disguise actions to mimic the appearance of skin tight clothing or worn items. But only if all clothing and big items they have equipped are of background matching Camouflage or are Transparent or Chameleon.

Transparent Flesh – Character is basically see through. You can look down their cleavage and see the inside of the back of their underwear.
(1 Point Upgrade) Transparent Body - Gets a +4 vs Non-Blind bonus and Chameleon on Hide and Sneak actions. But only if all clothing and big items they have equipped are of background matching Camouflage or are Transparent or Chameleon.

Wet Skin – You are an amphibian or a fish or something, you need to have your skin wet all the time or you will DIE (eventually). Grab attacks also suffer a -2 penalty against you when you are wet (which you generally try to be).
(0 Points Upgrade) Dry Safe - OK so now you won't DIE if you aren't wet all the time. But it's still uncomfortably crackly and flaky, and you lose your anti grab effect when you are dry.

Dry Clean Only – You are desert reptile or an arid elemental or something, if your skin ends up wet for any extended period you will DIE (eventually). When you are Dry you also gain +2 to your Grab attacks.
(0 Points Upgrade) Wash Safe - OK so now you won't DIE if you soak for too long. But it's still uncomfortably flaky and soluble, and you lose your grab bonus when you are wet.

Shedding Skin – You shed your skin like a snake.
(2 Points Upgrade) Empty Husk – You may, once per Strategic Turn, shed your skin as a Perfect-Block action applying your Defence keywords along with Decoy. The blocked attack STILL fully applies to your shed skin, which probably dies since it has 0 Max Injuries (not that it's really alive anyway), but no longer applies against you. On your next turn you may ignore Alert on any observers if attempting a stealth action to say, hide or sneak away. Notably when you shed your skin you leave behind all your worn and equipped items on your skin. This could be problematic.
(0 Points Upgrade) Pried From Your Husk – You may expend 1 Energy per hand to keep items from your hands in your hands rather than leaving them behind with your skin when you use Empty Husk.

I'm Melting! – Actually, any contact with water will slowly melt and kill you! Contact with water is, for you, exactly like Contact with Fire. And has the exact same attack profile as On Fire attacks.
(0 Points Upgrade) I'm Not A Witch! – This is a copy of the I'm not a witch Skill from the Witchery skill set. You can take this skill, and instantly unlock the Witchery skill set along with it as a free skill set unlock, just for having I'm Melting, because it's a witch thing.

My Only Weakness! – Pick a material (Metal, Flesh, Ceramic, Energy, Magic) you are naturally weak to it and any attack using that material gains Devastating +1 against you and your kind.
(0 Points Upgrade) Immortal To All Other Wounds – Attacks by any other means other than your weakness material cannot actually kill you or deal permanent damage to you. You can heal (using long term strategic time natural healing) any injury effect including death as long as it wasn't dealt by your weakness. You are also immune to Kill injuries that aren't dealt by attacks using your weakness material.
(0 Points Upgrade) Invulnerable To All Other Injuries – You can spend 1 Energy per 1 Block to block normal injuries originating from any Non-Strong attack unless that attack has your weakness material.
Sure it's nice to have a hole werewolves and silver (well, any metal, whatever) mechanic, but actually, it's sorta a minor opening for abuse, I mean, for instance, combined with some other notable defensive immunity, like that trouble maker Immaterial...
Climate Survival – Your people come from some mad Region where it was too hot, too cold, too dry or too short on food. You are immune to the regional hazard type effects of one of those things, and yes, that potentially means you don't need to eat (normally) or drink (normally) or something. And yes, this one IS actually free. But it is also specific and kinda bullshit.

Fire Resistant – You are oddly resistant to Fire in a purely non-mechanical manner.
(0 Points Upgrade) Fire Proof – You can expend 1 Energy per 1 Block vs injuries originating from any Non-Strong attack with the Fire keyword.

Cold Resistant – You are oddly resistant to Cold in a purely non-mechanical manner.
(0 Points Upgrade) Cold Proof – You can expend 1 Energy per 1 Block vs injuries originating from any Non-Strong attack with the Cold keyword.

Electro Resistant – You are oddly resistant to Electricity in a purely non-mechanical manner.
(0 Points Upgrade) Electro Proof – You can expend 1 Energy per 1 Block vs injuries originating from any Non-Strong attack with the Electro keyword.

Acid Resistant – You are oddly resistant to Acid in a purely non-mechanical manner.
(0 Points Upgrade) Acid Proof – You can expend 1 Energy per 1 Block vs injuries originating from any Non-Strong attack with the Acid keyword.

Poison Resistant – You are oddly resistant to Poison in a purely non-mechanical manner.
(0 Points Upgrade) Poison Proof – You can expend 1 Energy per 1 Block vs injuries originating from any Non-Strong attack with the Poison keyword.
(0 Points Upgrade) Drug Proof – You are immune to Poison related penalties and non injury effects.
Redundant Elemental Resistance Abilities?
One decision that had to be made with this material was things like this. Do abilities that resemble actual regular skills have a place?

Or should people just go and get the regular skill.

It isn't easy to answer. The resistance abilities here are a tiny bit different to the similar abilities in the actual skill sets. They potentially have a place instead of or in addition to those abilities. And are neither so good as to be crucial nor so bad as to be a poor thing to stack together. Or at least... hopefully that's how it is...

In all honesty setting the bar on this one is hard. And there are probably more abilities that should have similar equivalents hitting the Peoples traits lists. But, well. Whatever.
Dangerously Explosive – You have a tendency to explode. If defeated by a Fire attack, or if you are On Fire when you are defeated you will explode (during your action next turn). Your explosion attack will have your defence keywords and +4 vs All, and Fire Energy Blast Close-Range Multi-Target(All in 1). Exploding will tend to severely damage, destroy and at least scatter your equipped items, and tends to be highly fatal.
(0 Points Upgrade) Unpredictably Volatile – You can simply choose to explode as an action, or in response to any Normal Attack defeat. It's probably a net loss.
(0 Points Upgrade) Safety Trigger – You can choose not to explode despite defeat by Fire or while On Fire.
(1 Points Upgrade) Unexploded – A number of turns after exploding equal to your Max Injuries you will return to life and full health, and heck, be standing upright. Note that your gear is probably still scattered or destroyed when you revive. While regenerating opposing characters may observe what you are doing and can prevent your regeneration with a simple 1 turn Close-Range action with no roll! Other characters may later unprevent your prevented regeneration with a similar Close-Range no roll 1 turn action. If you stay prevented for too long you will (eventually) be unable to regenerate and will die properly.
Dangerously Explosive A stupid and poorly written ability?
Well. Very possibly. It seemed like fun at the time.

In all honesty it is a bit of a non-ability, if not outright weakness combined with a sort of free (or at least cheap) mediocre self resurrection mechanic. All in all the attack isn't all that powerful, the disadvantages more than make up for the sheer cheapness of the whole thing, and the resurrection has sufficiently poor utility and notable disadvantages that it's hardly a big deal.
Immaterial – You are immaterial. You cannot actually touch physical characters and items and they cannot touch you. You are outright immune to purely physical attacks and can only interact with the world (and be interacted with) by effects attacks or items that are Social Mental Energy Magic or Mystic (yes the last one is mystic, yeah, that means a wizard or a fairy can just hit you over the head with an otherwise regular physical club, but you also get to punch them back too). Probably best taken with characters that have Energy or Mental body material types.
(1 Point Upgrade) Passes Through Walls – You can add Fly to your movement for 1 Turn for 1 Energy, and during that turn you also pass through physical barriers and obstacles freely and without effect, including walls, floors, roofs etc...
Immaterial is a bit of a trouble maker, as you can see. Clearly a lot of loose ends there, and a potential for some awesome power. Pick some magic attack abilities and much of what you do isn't especially impacted and yet you get to be basically immune to half the universe. Throw on some defenses particularly tailored against those few things that DO interact with you, and... well... Probably shouldn't even have written it. Oh well.
Mystical Creature – You or your people are naturally magical creatures by their very nature. You are admitted into all the clubs that only Fairies are normally allowed to enter.
(0 Point Upgrade) – I'm A Mystical Creature – Add Mystic to your basic keyword list. You can now interact with Mystical stuff and can use magical powers freely.

Fur Coat – Character is covered in Fur, thick shaggy fur.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Shaggy Fur Coat – When wearing nothing else you may “equip” your own fur as a Main Clothing Item (cannot be disarmed, 1 Equip action to activate or deactivate filling your main clothing slot) It has Cloth Robe and Obfuscating 2. You may expend your fur coat with Torn Shirt for a block when it is your main clothing item.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Layered Fur - Increase your Shaggy Fur Coat Obfuscating bonus by +1, you may expend your shaggy fur coat for Torn Shirt an extra time, removing the Layered Fur bonus first. You may take Layered Fur up to twice, creating a sort of Ablative fur armour.

Scales – You have fancy snake, lizard, fish or other scales on (or for) your skin.
(0 Point Upgrade) Armour Scales – Add the following to your Body Materials Plastic Tight Light and Armour 2. Yes this means you basically always get that armour bonus as long as you wear partial or no clothing/armour and it lets you use various skills like Tight armour and Light Acrobatics and stuff. Yes this is rather good. No you can't expend it for torn shirt.

Armour Plates – You have very large hard scales, or exo-skeletal plates or something.
(0 Point Upgrade) - Heavy Bone Plates – Add the following to your Body Materials Hard Heavy Plate Armour 4 as long as your body keywords apply you count as being in Heavy armour, you may not Run or Charge and you Sink in water. (Plate Armoured skill set has some ways of reducing this penalty).
(2 Point Upgrade) - Ablative Bone Plates – If your Armour Plates armour bonus from Heavy Bone Plates is applying to your defence you may expend it with Torn Shirt and may do so up to twice for 2 blocks. The first Expenditure reduces the armour bonus to Armour 2, the second reduces it to zero fully expending your Armour Plates.
(0 Point Upgrade) - Shedding Bone Plates – If you fully expend your Bone Plates with Ablative Bone Plates you remove all benefits and keywords granted by Heavy Bone Plates as the plates shed completely from your body. You can also remove each layer of your bone plates separately as 1 turn Equip actions. Removing the first layer, by torn shirt OR Equip allows you to remove the Heavy keyword, if you want to.

Bone Shield – You have a single large boney plate that works a lot like a shield. Usually this modifies or fills a Head or Hand slot (or at least a pocket slot). You may treat this as a Hard Shield Weapon item made out of your body materials if not equipping something else in its slot (if you even CAN equip something else in the modified/used slot, which you probably can't or at least need a modified item in order to do). No there are no flat bonuses for this, nor upgrades. But having a Shield and Weapon item handy all the time is useful for certain Skills.

Skeletal – You are like, a skeleton, scarecrow made of sticks or really skinny insect or something. Commonly combined with being undead, mechanical and made out of something like bone, wood or metal. Oddly for a Mutation Trait this one doesn't actually DO anything.
Couldn't think of a reasonable upgrade, no really
Jelly Flesh – You are have the overall consistency and lack of obvious internal organs and bones similar to that of a jelly fish or strange gelatinous ooze like creature. Due to your strong resemblance to jello stuff slices through you like you were butter. Sword, Axe and Whip attacks all gain Devastating +1 against you. But Hammer, Spear, Sonic and Projectile attacks deal 1 less damage to you (applied on hit, reduction effects Damage Cap application).
(0 Point Upgrade) – Boneless Blob – Gain +3 bonus to all miscellaneous attempts to squeeze into or out of things (including restraints), may count as Small when squeezing into stuff or crowding into a zone (regardless of usual size).
(0 Point Upgrade) – No Obvious Vital Organs – Immune to Kill effects from physical attacks.

Disembowelled – You have no vital organs, maybe they were removed and stored in a jar, maybe you fed them to your cat, your evil necromantic cat.
(0 Point Upgrade) – No Obvious Vital Organs – Immune to Kill effects from physical attacks.

Elemental Flesh – Ideally your body is made out of Energy to take this trait. But maybe not. You are wreathed in some sort of Energy, maybe Fire, Cold, Electro, or one of the other standard Energy types. It doesn't DO anything, except make your body into a moderate light source which if your body material applies to defence glows applying a Brightness 2 penalty to your own stealth actions and radiating a Shadows 0 maximum light source into your zone.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Actually that's Darkness thanks – Actually your energy type is Shadows and you instead apply a Shadows 2 bonus to your Stealth actions as long as your Body keywords apply to your normal defence, no light source. In fact you are a Shadows +1 Darkness source in your zone.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Burning Flesh – Your energy is potent and applies the effects of the appropriate Elemental weapon/attack upgrade skill from the matching elemental magic LT Skill Set to your unarmed attacks.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Elemental Affinity – Upgrades from Burning Flesh, now you just outright learn the skill it conditionally emulates and instantly unlock the matching skill set for free.

Elemental Hair – Your hair is a cool mass of crackly burny elemental energy or something. Does exactly the same thing as Elemental Flesh in that it makes your hair into light source if you don't wear a hat applying a Brightness 2 penalty to your own stealth actions and radiating a Shadows 0 maximum light source into your zone.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Actually that's Darkness thanks – Actually your hair energy type is Shadows and you instead apply a Shadows 2 bonus to your Stealth actions as long as your Body keywords apply to your normal defence, no light source. In fact you are a Shadows +1 Darkness source in your zone. If combined with the same option from Elemental Flesh you don't get any increase to your own Shadows bonus, but you do radiate an extra +1 to your Shadows darkness source.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Big Elemental Hair[/i] If not wearing a hat your giant glowing writhing elemental hair grants you Obfuscating 2 on your normal defence.

Serpent Hair – Your hair is a mass of angry (or possibly friendly, they have moods) Medusa type snakes.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Snake Whips – Your snake hair counts as an equipped attack when you are not wearing a hat. It has Body Whip Accurate Smart Light Weak Close-Range Single-Target +3 vs Evasive and may count as Weapon OR Unarmed your choice. You may expend 1 Energy to make an Off Hand attack with it once per turn (even if you have already used it).
(1 Point Upgrade) – Poisonous Hair Snakes – Your snake hair has a Poison effect on it's attacks, if it deals any injuries (after blocks) to an Animal or Plant target the target suffers 1 additional Injury due to poison during their NEXT turn, this injury ignores damage cap effects on the turn that it applies, but does not stack with similar delayed Poison injuries.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Big Snake Hair[/i] If not wearing a hat your writhing snake hair grants you Obfuscating 2 on your normal defence.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Long Snake Hair[/i] Your Snake Whips attacks may be made with Short-Range.

Extra Breasts – And probably a bunch of them. Generally applies (or only notably applies) to female characters only, or again, maybe not... Doesn't do anything other than make you look like a mutant wild mammal freak and cause you to bounce in uncomfortably complex ways while running.
(0 Points upgrade) Whenever you perform a Run action in Skimpy or Partial clothing/armour (or less) observing opposite gender targets with LoS on your character are drained of 1 Energy point.

Covered In Spikes – Your body has a bunch of spikes on it in various places. May require specially fitted clothes and armours (available in all good retail stores, at no extra price).
(0 Point Upgrade) – Monster Spikes - Your monstrous body is covered in monstrous spikes. Your Spikes, if not covered, are an equipped attack with Unarmed Body Hard Wrestle Escape and +3 vs Weak. You can expend 1 Energy to make an attack with your spikes once per turn as an off hand attack (even if you have used them already).
(0 Point Upgrade) – Spearing Spikes – Your spike attacks add Spear and +2 vs Big.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Spike Explosion – You can expend your spikes in order to make an explosive spike attack with them that adds Blast Multi-Target(All Bar Self). Expended spikes are a “special injury” that cannot be blocked. If you heal the injury your spikes return to normal function.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Pinning Spikes Your spike explosion adds a Pin effect with your Spike keywords and Armour 4 on it's defence.

Eyeless – For whatever reason you lack eyes. You apply -4 and Blind to your social defence. You also suffer the standard Blindness limitations to actions (no LoS to targets further than Close-Range). But you are immune to all further blind effects and take no normal defence penalty for being blind.
(0 Point Upgrade) Eyeless Sight - You remove the blind penalty from your social defence for being blind, but retain the keyword, which is handy because now you are somewhat significantly resistant to a number of visual stealth and disguise tricks. You also can “see” clearly in poor or no light conditions and ignore Bright and Shadow effects (but not smoke, fog or clouds).

Missing Eye – You are missing an eye or some portion of your original eyes. You suffer an additional -1 Range penalty to all attacks you make at Short Range and longer. You can wear Eye Patches without feeling silly and may wear prosthetic eye items.
Bonus Cultural Items – If this is a cultural trait (pirates I guess?) the culture gains prosthetic eyes and eye patches as a cultural bonus item.

Cannot See Without Your Glasses – Without glasses or a monocle or something equipped you suffer the standard penalties for being Blind (See Eyeless).
Bonus Cultural Item- If this is a cultural trait culture gains Glasses or Monocles as a cultural bonus item.

Extra Eyes – You have more than the usual pair of eyes, somewhere about your person.
(0 Point Upgrade) Multiple Vision - As long as you are not Blind you gain Vision 2 to Social Defence.

Night Eyes – You can see well in the dark in a purely non-mechanical manner.
(0 Point Upgrade) Night Vision - Add Night Vision to your Social Defence, ignoring Shadow and darkness based bonuses to stealth attacks against you.

Penetrating Vision – Lets you spy through peoples clothing, but not enough for any mechanical benefits.
(0 Point Upgrade) X-Ray Vision -- 0 Point Upgrade – Ignore clothing based bonuses to item concealment and apply a -2 penalty to Conceal attacks made against you. Ignore Cloud effects on your LoS and attacks. See through Cloth and paper type walls and barriers. Spend 1 Energy to see through other solid barriers for 1 turn, gaining LoS (but rarely LoF) through stone, wood and stuff, but not through Metal.

Energy Vision – You have freaky glowing eyes full of dangerous energies... works exactly like Energy Breath only you shoot stuff out of your eyes instead of your mouth.

Eye Stalks – You have freaky eye stalks they might be retractable to look normal... or not.
(0 Point Upgrade) Long Eye Stalks – Your Eye-Stalks can stretch out to short Range. Allowing you to draw LoS from any zone in Short-Range, handy for seeing around corners and such.

Deaf – Adds -2 and Deaf
to your social defence. Loud effects do not apply penalties to Stealth actions attempted against you, but neither do Silent effects apply bonuses against you. At least you are immune to further deafening.
(0 Point Upgrade) Vibrational Hearing – Remove the defense penalty for being Deaf, but retain the Deaf keyword itself. You still ignore Loud and Silent effects.

Exceptionally Long Ears – You have giant long ears like some sort of rabbit elf or something. May require specially fitted hats and helmets (no extra cost, available in all good retail stores).
(0 Point Upgrade) Sharpened Ears - Add Sonar 2 to your Social Defence.

Antennae – You have insect antennae or other mysterious bobbly sensory organs.
(0 Point Upgrade) Active Antennae- Add Sonar 2 to your Social Defence.

Sixth Senses – You have a bad feeling about this.
(0 Point Upgrade) Extrasensory - Add Magic 2 to your Social Defence.

Big Lungs – You have fantastic lungs. You take super deep breaths, you might need specially fitted chest wear to accommodate the inflation and deflation (available in all good retail stores at no extra cost)
(0 Points Upgrade) Breath Capacity - Now you can hold your breath indefinitely at no Energy cost as long as you have greater than 0 Energy.

Gills – You have gills or something like that, you can breath freely under water. But cannot breath air.
(0 Points Upgrade) Air breather - Now you can breath air again. I doubt you even held your breath five seconds before taking this one...

Giraffe Neck – (0 Point To Activate) Freakishly long necked like a giraffe, you ignore 1 point of all range penalties to attacks AND to social defence against stealth. But social attacks against also ignore 1 point of range penalty against you.
Cultural Bonus Item - If typical People trait their culture typically adds Neck Brace (Plated Armour) and Neck Rings (cultural item) as a bonus cultural item.

Tongue-less – You lack a tongue (or possibly even a mouth, or maybe just a voice). You suffer double all range penalties to social attacks.
(0 Point Upgrade) Body Language - You can communicate without making sound (+4 to misc attempts to secretly communicate) and ignore all range penalties to social attacks against targets with line of sight to you.

Flexible Tongue – You have a freakishly long and dexterous tongue It might even be forked like a snake's.
(0 Point upgrade) Prehensile tongue Your mouth/tongue is a hidden Hand, you can hide small items in your mouth while holding them (+4 to Conceal) and you can actually use your tongue like a Hand slot in all other respects, including using it to fight with a sword or something.
(0 Point Upgrade) Whip Tongue – Tongue is a fully functional whip, allowing an Unarmed Body Whip Light Weak attack with it for +3 vs Evasive You may make an Off Hand attack with your Whip Tongue at the cost of 1 Energy if you have not yet used your Whip Tongue attack this turn.
(0 Point Upgrade) Long Tongue – Your Whip or Prehensile tongue is very long and may add Short Range to all it's effects/actions (including using swords or other items “in hand”, even useful for shooting around a nearby corner, assuming you can guess or see targets.
(0 Point Upgrade) Very Long Tongue – Your long tongue is even longer, and may add Long Range to it's actions.
(1 Point Upgrade) Strong Tongue - You can expend 1 Energy to add Grab or Disarm to your tongue attack on hit. A tongue based grab at longer than close range causes a “leash” effect on the Grab, and you can attempt a Throw action to move the target and when you do so may move them to you, or you may pull yourself to them as a Move Run or even as a Charge action. And yes you can (especially with Very Long Tongue) use this to grapel on to far away furniture objects and then pull yourself in. And yes you get these benefits on ANY grab with your tongue, including ones made with the default undamaging Grab special attack.

Energy Breath – You exhale traces of one of the Energy types, like fire or acid or music, it doesn't DO anything.
(? Points) – Blaster Breath - take the appropriate Blaster type skill from the matching Energy type LT skill set at the standard price. You spit it out of your mouth. You also unlock the entire skill set for free and can spend points on further skills from that set. You do NOT need to meet the usual Mystic requirements for the skill set.

Swallower – You can swallow an abnormal amount of things.
(0 Point Upgrade) Internal Pouch – You basically have an extra 2 pockets where you can store swallowed things. Gaining a +6 bonus to Conceal them and against pick pocket attempts, but it functions as additional Back Pack Slots so it takes a while to get things in and out.
(0 Point Upgrade) Swallow Whole – On a hit with an Unarmed attack at Close-Range or at any Range with a Strong Tongue Throw if the attack has Grab you may instead of just grabbing your target you may Swallow it whole! Swallow is an upgraded Grab effect, that grabs the target and puts it inside your monster belly. It applies similar limitations and effects to grab, but also completely places the target inside you shielding them from the outside world. In addition your defence against a swallowed character is a modified variant of your normal defence with no item or agility benefits (just you Body material defences basically) with a bonus Body +3 (yes that does stack with any existing body bonus). If you have no other stomach based attacks you can still attack a swallowed character with a basic unequipped unarmed attack, and do so at +2 vs All. You can perform this action as an Off Hand attack once per turn for 1 Energy, you MAY perform special attacks, notably Disarm with this attack. You can regurgitate a character as an action (or as a Throw attack), if you succeed in a disarm attack you can selectively regurgitate a character's items as part of that action.
(0 Point Upgrade) Selective Digestion – You gain +3 vs All to any internal stomach attacks with the Disarm keyword. You can disarm worn items on a swallowed target with a single successful disarm regardless of Equip time requirements. Disarmed items are spat out with an up to 1 zone throw effect.
(1 Point Upgrade) Digestion – Add Acid and +3 vs Flesh to your internal Stomach unarmed attacks. If you remove a swallowed target from combat you can regurgitate all their items and regain 1 Energy OR heal 1 Injury in the Resource phase.

Sharp Bite – You have sharp pointy teeth.
(0 Point Upgrade) Dangerous Bite – Your mouth is an equipped attack with Body Bite Wrestle unarmed attack +2 vs Flesh.
(0 Point Upgrade) Ripping Bite – Your bite attack gains +2 vs Soft Expend 1 Energy on hit to add Rip to your bite attack.
(0 point upgrade) Strong Bite - Bite attack gains +2 vs Weak Expend 1 Energy on hit to add Grab to your bite attack.
(0 Point Upgrade) Tusked Bite - Bite attack gains +4 vs Big Expend 1 Energy on hit to add Knock to your bite attack.

Extra Heads – You have extra heads. Maybe just one, maybe more. They aren't separate characters or anything, but they do let you wear additional hats.
(0 Point Upgrade) Expendable Heads – You are not outright immune to the effects of Decapitate attacks, but each only removes one head and you don't get removed from combat or killed until you lose all of them.
(0 Point Upgrade) Off Hand Heads – Any head related attacks you have (Energy Breath, Eye Beams, Bite attacks, or appropriately equipped attack hats, or just unarmed head buts) can be made as an Off Hand attack with any “unused” head for 1 Energy per head.

Siamese Twins – You don't have two heads, you are two (or at a dangerous stretch of the mechanics, more) characters fused together. Each has one head and some share of their fused body's various limbs. Each character has their own traits and gets an action each turn, but they share the same position and add their Max Injuries and Max Energy together and share a single pool. While they do get separate actions the body can only perform ONE (or one normal character's worth of) standard or special move action per turn. There is a pretty good chance individual twins DON'T have a full standard humanoid's worth of limbs in their share of the body but that's basically down to layout issues.
(0 Point Upgrade) Detachable Twins – Through means unknown, and an action by one of the twins, the characters can actually separate and hop away with their share of the body and do things separately. And then rejoin with an action later. On separation injuries and expended energy is split however they care to split it (even if that KO's a twin) and if they cannot agree (in the rather odd case of actually having separate players playing conjoined characters, which is not recommended) then the damage split is as even as possible. If they remain detached for too long the twins will DIE.
(0 Point Upgrade) Exchangeable Twins – A detached Twin can instead attach to a helpless or willing normal character (possibly requiring some amputations of the victim to make them match the missing twin). This can even attach to (and revive) a recently deceased or defeated character. This might result in a cultural market for new twins if it is a broad people trait.

Magical Twins – You have a magical identical twin, somewhere and share feelings and superstitions with them.
(0 Point Upgrade) One Mind, Two Bodies – You have only one pool of Max Injuries, and Max Energy, but each gains +1. This pool is shared between TWO identical bodies you control with one shared mind/character. The bodies may have differing equipment, each gets an action every turn. Special injuries only apply to specific bodies and are not shared in a pool like standard injuries, but social defeats and effects apply to both bodies. At a stretch this upgrade could be taken multiple times, but it's kinda abusable and probably shouldn't be taken beyond a total of three bodies (and just for kicks lets make it cost +1 Point for each upgrade beyond the first).
(0 Point Upgrade) Replacement Twin – If something has killed or otherwise permanently removed a twin from your one mind two bodies effect you can, as a Strategic action turn a willing or helpless character into your new spare twin body slave thingy.
(2 Point Upgrade) Disposable Twin – If your twin bodies are sharing the same zone you can apply a Perfect-Block to attacks effecting all bar one of your bodies, all injuries then apply to the remaining body which may NOT use further blocks AND which is then ALSO “expended” (and usually killed). This effect cuts the disposable twin body off from the shared injuries pool, saving the other twin or twins. Restoring the expended twin can only be done by means of effects that would normally restore or heal a standard character suffering from similar effects, or potentially by using 'Replacement Twin”.

Split Personality – You have an extra personality. Your spare personality is someone else who takes over in certain situations. Possibly just at night, or on the full moon, or when you get scared or angry or something. It has all your same skills and traits.
(0 Point Upgrade) – A Whole Different Person – Your Split Personality is an entirely different character with potentially totally different Skill investments, or even different unlocked skill sets. Or at least it shares the same body so it has your basic People Traits (but possibly different upgrade investments, other than this one, which it takes too) and any damage or Energy expenditures are retained when you switch places. Switching places takes 1 Action. As separate characters you may need to have separate support for LT skill cap advancment and MT Luxury advancement.
(0 Point Upgrade) – With An Alternate Form Your alternate personality also changes your bodies appearance and possibly it's People type Mutation and Injury traits. Just like the Upgraded Alternate Form trait would.

Headless – For whatever reason your people don't have heads. You have no Hat slot but you are immune to Decapitate injuries.

Decapitated – For whatever reason (probably necromancy or mutation magic) your people have detachable heads. Decapitate injuries do remove your head, but do not remove you from combat or otherwise hurt you (unless your head isn't re-attached for an extended period of time). This can have oddly disjoint effects on your LoS and your point of origin for actions.
(0 point Upgrade) Independent Head - you can separate your head and body and may expend 1 Energy to have them perform separate actions (effectively gaining an “off hand” action with your independent head). Of course there isn't much a head can do on it's own, except maybe magic and social attacks...
(0 point Upgrade) Body Swap – You can re-attach your head (or someone else can re-attach your head) to a different fresh headless body as a Magic Heal 1 turn action, even if that body lacked this trait. Doing so causes your old body to die, though if you switch back soon enough it will revive. A handy way to come back from the dead, also might allow you to pick up some physical Appearance or Mutation traits, and potentially marginally assist with some disguises.
(? Point Upgrade) Body Memory – You can invest some points (and zero points selections) into “body memory” this lets you use skills (either regular skills or People traits) that your body had prior to you being attached to it with Body Swap or Exchangeable limbs.
Cultural Bonus Items - If typical People trait culture potentially adds headless bodies as a cultural bonus item for sale in it's markets (highly variable price based on quality etc...)

Dismembered – For whatever reason (it's still probably necromancy) your people have detachable limbs and bits. You can cure any Severed Limb effects by attaching the severed limb (or someone else's severed limb) and waiting 1 ST
(0 points Upgrade) Exchangeable Limbs - you can attach severed limbs and bits (your own or others) to your body, especially in place of severed limbs or bits, as a Magic Heal 1 turn action. If you also have Decapitated you can do this with your head too.
(? Point Upgrade) Body Memory – You can invest some points (and zero points selections) into “body memory” this lets you use skills (either regular skills or People traits) that your limb had prior to you being attached to you with Body Swap or Exchangeable Limbs.
Cultural Bonus Item - If typical People trait culture potentially adds various dismembered limbs as a cultural bonus item for sale in it's markets (highly variable price based on quality etc...)

Boneless – Must have a Soft body material to take this quirk. You are immune to special bone breaking attacks (rather rare) and may squeeze into unusually small spaces.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Boneless Blob – Gain +3 bonus to all miscellaneous attempts to squeeze into or out of things (including restraints), may count as Small when squeezing into stuff or crowding into a zone (regardless of usual size).

Stilt Legs – You have abnormally long legs, you may need specially fitted legging/pants items (available at no extra cost at all good retail stores).
(0 Point Upgrade) Stilt Walker - You may run +1 zone when performing a Run or Charge action.
At the cost of 1 Energy you may add Jump to your movement for 1 turn. However all Knock attacks against you gain +3 attack.
Cultural Bonus Item - If Typical People Trait the culture often adds Leg Braces (plated armour) as a bonus cultural item.

Extra Legs – If your legs are damaged or disabled you limit movement differently to normal bipeds. Basically you are more resistant to leg severing and disabling effects, because you have 4 legs to break before you run out.
(0 Points Upgrade) Four Legged - As a Parry action that automatically succeeds you may expend your action for the turn to cancel a Knock effect against you.

Quadrupedal – Having outright four legs and no arms is achieved by combining the Extra Legs and the No Arms traits. Nothing to see here, move right along.

Hooved – You have hoofs instead of feet. You cannot wear shoe items unless they are made for hoofed characters (available in all good retail stores at no extra cost). If you use your feet for unarmed attacks they use Hard instead of your normal body material hardness type.
(1 Point Upgrade) You can make off hand unarmed attacks with your hooves once a turn for 1 Energy once a turn (even if already used). You may add Knock to Unarmed attacks made with your hooves for 1 Energy (on Hit).

Winged – You have some basically non-functional wings as extra limbs. You may need specially fitted clothing and armour (in all good retail stores, no extra cost).
(0 Points Upgrade) – Glider – You can add Glide to your movement as long as your wings function.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Flier – You may add Fly to your movement as long as you move at least 1 Zone during the turn.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Hover - You may add Fly to your movement when you do not perform Move actions.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Eagle Dive – You may choose to fall while Flying and add Driver to a Charge attack at the cost of All Energy Minimum 1. Your attack now applies the attack and damage bonus from Falling Attack based on the distance you fell. If you hit (before parry) then no falling damage is applied to you (having transferred it to your target instead), if you miss then the Falling Attack is applied against you.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Fast Wings – You have vehicle style movement traits that allow you to Fly with Min Speed 2, Max Speed 4, Accelerate 2 and Brake 1. You may expend additional 0 Skill Point Upgrades to increase any of those numbers by +1 (or decrease Min Speed by 1).

Fins – You have fins or flippers they are handy for swimming granting a +3 bonus to Swim checks.
(0 Points to activate) Swimming Fins - you can add Swim to your movement for free, negating various Swimming penalties and preventing the need for some Swim checks.
(0 Point Upgrade) Fast Fins - You have a body arrangement that lets you swim at unusually high speeds. You lose the basic Run action in water but instead have a Swim movement with Max Speed of 4, Accelerate 1, and Brake 1. You may purchase further 0 point upgrades to increase any of those attributes by 1 point per 0 point skill slot.

No Legs – You have no legs. Presumably you have some other means of movement. Otherwise, you act as a character with all their leg limbs disabled. And that sucks. Oh but you get +1 pocket slot. As a consolation prize for being unable to wear boots any more.
(0 Points Upgrade) – Footsie Hands – Your hands can double as feet. But you cannot use a hand as a hand slot while it is being a foot.

Hand Like Feet – You have arms for legs or perhaps hands for feet? Or both or something similar. May require custom footwear.
(0 Point Upgrade) Handy Feet- lets you use your feet as hand slots, though any foot not being used as a hand cannot then be used as a foot during the same turn (effectively applying temporary penalties similar to having a disabled or removed leg or foot).

Hand Like Feet – You have legs for arm or perhaps feet for hands? Or both or something similar. May require custom handwear.
(0 Point Upgrade) Footsie Hands- Your hands can double as feet. But you cannot use a hand as a hand slot while it is being a foot. Combine with Handy Feet for confusing shenanigans.

Missing Leg – You are missing a leg. You need to wear a prosthetic leg or you will suffer the penalties for a disabled limb. You can take this quirk as many times as you have legs.
(0 Points to activate) Disposable Leg - You can expend your peg leg to block 1 Injury, the block has your peg leg's item keywords.
Bonus Cultural Item – If this is a People trait (pirates I guess?) the culture gains prosthetic legs as a cultural bonus item.

Frog Legs – You have springy bouncy bounding legs. Also potentially usable (or partially usable) for other jumpy themes, including using Frog Absorbers for cats paws to do the whole cats on four feet thing and such.
(0 Point upgrade) Leap Frog - Spend 1 Energy to add Jump to your movement for 1 turn.
(1 Point upgrade) Can Of Beans - add Jump to your movement for free all the time.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Frog Stomp – You may after falling movement add Driver to a Charge attack at the cost of All Energy Minimum 1. Your attack now applies the attack and damage bonus from Falling Attack based on the distance you fell. If you hit (before parry) then no falling damage is applied to you (having transferred it to your target instead), if you miss then the Falling Attack is applied against you.
(1 Point Upgrade) – Frog Absorbers – You are immune to falling damage. You regain 1 Energy in the Resource phase of any turn in which Falling Damage tried to apply to you.

Gecko Pads – You have soft fleshy graspy paw like bits on your hands and/or your feet or some equivalent climbing aid like claws or something. +3 to Climb checks.
(0 Point Upgrade) Sticky Feet - You may add Climb to your movement at will.
(0 Point Upgrade) Sneaky Feet – When bare footed you add +2 vs Non-Deaf and Silent to your Hide and Sneak actions.

Galloping Legs – You trot around like a horse.
(0 Point Upgrade) Horse Speed - You have a body arrangement that lets you gallop like a horse travelling at unusually high speeds. You lose the basic Run action but instead have a Max Speed of 3, Accelerate 1, and Brake 1.
(0 Point Upgrade) Improved Horse Speed – You can take this upgrade multiple times. Each time you increase your choice out of one of your Horse Speed; Max Speed, Accelerate or Brake attributes by 1 Point.

Imma Pony – You have the Steed keyword. You can easily carry 1 (or possibly more) passengers like a horse or an elephant does. Having the steed keyword also interacts with various skills, sometimes in good ways sometimes in bad ways.

Burrowing Paws – You are sort of mole like in some way. You dig through stuff. You get a +3 bonus to miscellaneous “dig a hole”P checks, no one cares. Yet.
(2 Points Upgrade) – Burrower – You can burrow underground using Burrow movement. Burrowing through harder ground, like stone, requires the expenditure of 1 Energy per turn or if you have 0 Energy can be done once before resting (like running costs). When using other forms of movement if you attempt to move through a Ceramic barrier you can expend 1 Energy to burrow through it automatically.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Dirt Shark – You can burrow at a shallow depth in a zone with a ground type floor without moving to the adjacent underground zone. Doing so grants you a Armour +2 to normal defence and adds the material type keywords of the ground to your defence. It also however applies a -2 penalty to your attacks. This method does not make you invisible, you are in fact very obvious due to the churned humped up moving lumps of soil and the disturbed soil track you leave behind you (no net mechanical bonus or penalty to hiding and stuff).
(0 Point Upgrade) Ant Lion - If you make a charge attack from a subterranean zone to a target on the surface you gain +3 vs All bonus to the attack.
(0 Point Upgrade) Trembly Sense – If you are burrowing you can trace LoS (but not LoF) into (but not through) ceramic materials you are in contiguous contact with. You also have LoS to things in contact with the surfaces of those materials (so you can see things standing on the ground you are under, but not flying above it). Simple things like a heavy straw floor on top of the dirt CAN interfere.

Tail For Legs – Lose your legs slot/feet and get a big snaky tail instead. Still lets you walk just as well. Gain a +3 to Climbing and Swimming checks from your tail.
(0 Point Upgrade) Swimming Snake Tail - Add Swim to your movement freely in water to swim without any penalty.
(0 Point Upgrade) Climbing Snake Tail - Add Climb to your movement freely.
(0 Point Upgrade) Prehensile Snake Tail – Your Snake Tail acts as a usable Hand slot.
(0 Point Upgrade) Big Prehensile Snake Tail – Your Snake Tail hand slot is one size larger than you are (normal if you are small, big if you are normal, and... er... big if you are big). This also adds Big to any unarmed attacks made with your snake tail.
(0 Point Upgrade) Lashing Snake Tail – Your snake tail becomes an available attack with Unarmed Whip Body Single-Target Close-Range and +3 vs Evasive.
(0 Point Upgrade) Long Snake Tail – Your snake tail is Short-Ranged in length letting you make unarmed attacks with it at Short-Range and use items held in a Prehensile tail with the origin at Short-Range.
(1 Point Upgrade) Club Snake Tail – Your snake tail has a big bone club on the end, it might also rattle. This upgrades lashing tail with Hammer +2 vs Small and you may expend 1 Energy on hit to add Knock.
(0 Point Upgrade) Spiked Snake Tail - Your lashing tail attack gains +2 vs Soft Expend 1 Energy on hit to add Rip to your bite attack.
(0 Point Upgrade) Constricting Snake Tail - Your lashing tail attack may add Grab for 1 Energy on hit.

Bonus Tail – You have a tail sprouting from the base of your spine, this is in addition to your legs (or whatever) unlike the Tail For Legs trait. Your bonus tail EITHER grants you +3 to Climb checks OR +3 to Swim Checks. You may upgrade your Bonus Tail with any of the upgrades from Tail For Legs EXCEPT Big Prehensile Snake Tail and Climbing Snake Tail.

Extra Arms – You have some extra arms. Little useless ones. Or maybe you don't but you have a general biological tendency to maybe grow some soon. Take the upgrade fast so this trait isn't so stupid...
(0 Points to activate) Extra Arms - character loses 2 pocket slots and gains 2 Hand slots.
(1 Points to activate) More Extra Arms – and then you can have 2 more arms/hand slots, but lose 2 Back-Pack slots.

Extra Arms?
Well, OK. So extra arms is... interesting. Trading Pocket Slots for hand slots isn't actually altogether that good extra hands are NICE but they don't precisely do much on their own, and there only so many off hand weapons and items that end up mattering and often other resources like Energy costs are going to limit their simultaneous use anyway.

But if gross physical variation from the humanoid standard was going to be in the Mutation Traits list extra arms was a must, and indeed one of the standards. And I think it's in a pretty good place actually. Certainly better than, say, the highly, HIGHLY, dubious twins traits...


No Arms – You have no hand slots, and probably no arms either. But you gain 2 Pocket slots, cannot be taken with Extra Arms, CAN be taken with Quadrupedal.
(0 Points Upgrade) Handy Feet - lets you use your feet as hand slots, though any foot not being used as a hand cannot then be used as a foot during the same turn (effectively applying temporary penalties similar to having a disabled or removed leg or foot).
(0 Points Upgrade) Handy Mouth - lets you use your head as hand slots, though you generally cannot do so while wearing a hat.
(1 Points Upgrade) Powerful Legs – As a compensation for the lack of hands your legs are powerful and strong. Any attacks made with your legs (opting to use them for unarmed attacks and kicks, using weapons strapped to your feet or boots or something) always add Strong and can add Devastating +1 on hit at the cost of 1 Energy on hit. If you are already a Strong Good Trait character this also applies you base Strong upgrade to leg attacks.

Normal Humanoid? Screw it I'm a No Arms, Quadrupedal with Handy Feet!
I just lost two hands, gained 4 hands, gained 2 pockets and gained two legs!

Well, yeah, but you also suffer moderate movement limitations while using any of your hands...

Stacking the various limb variations into odd piles is (partially) intended, and generally hoped to give results which while appropriately different (like the no armed handy footed quadruped and it's odd benefits and limitations) are over all not TOO far off the normal equipment limitations to be dangerously unbalancing.


Claws – Claws, you have them, on your fingers, on your toes etc... Combine with no hands for a character that has claw like paws that lack opposable digits. Gain a +3 Climb bonus for having Claws, assuming your claws are properly exposed for use.
(0 Point Upgrade) Clawed Hands – Your Hand slots (or upper paw slots if you went with claws and no hands) when bare and empty count as an available equipped weapon with Unarmed Body Claw Weak +2 vs Flesh and if BOTH are bare they count as ONE available weapon which adds Multi-Attack x2. Which, yes, means that for one action/off hand attack you get TWO attacks with them. Also if you have not used your hand claws this turn you may expend 1 Energy to make an Off Hand attack with them.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Clawed Feet -Exactly like Hand Claws except they apply to your feet instead, includes the multi-attack thing.
(0 Point Upgrade) – Ripping Claws - Your claw attacks gain +2 vs Soft Expend 1 Energy on hit to add Rip to your claw attack (yes this could apply the benefit twice thanks to multi-attack, yes on hit can mean after you roll BOTH attacks).
(0 point upgrade) Stronger Claws – Removes Weak from Claw attack basic profile.
(1 Point Upgrade) Fast Claws – Basic Claw attack profiles add Fast.
(1 Point Upgrade) Pincer Claws – Limits glove options, possibly requires modified held items. Modifies Claw attack profiles with +2 vs Hard and Expend 1 Energy on hit (before parry, before block) to add Grab to your pincer attack (again potentially applies to two claws for the price of 1 with the MultiAttack effect).

Missing Hand – You are missing a hand. You can only use prosthetic hand items in that hand slot.
(0 points Upgrade) Disposable Hand - you can expend your prosthetic hand item to block one injury, the block uses item keywords.
Bonus Cultural Item – If this is a cultural trait (pirates I guess?) the culture gains prosthetic hands as a cultural bonus item.

Horns – You have one or more horns. On your head. Cool. May limit hat options to custom fits or even none at all.
(0 Points Upgrade) – Uni-Horn - allows you to use your horny head as an available attack with Weapon Spear Hard Body which gains +3 vs All when you Charge with it. Your horn attack applies Body keywords but substitutes Hard for the normal hardness keyword. Expend 1 Energy on hit to add Knock to your horn attack.

Tentacles – You have some tentacles. Possibly in place of some other missing limbs.
(0 Points Upgrade) Tentacles for Arms – You don't have arms or hands, you have tentacles instead... that work just like arms or hands. But qualify for some other stuff. Unarmed attacks with your arms add the Whip keyword.
(0 Points Upgrade) Tentacles for Arms – You don't have legs or feet, you have tentacles instead... that work just like legs or feet. But qualify for some other stuff. Unarmed attacks with your legs add the Whip keyword.
(0 Points Upgrade) Extra Tentacles – Lose 2 Pockets and gain 2 Tentacle arms. They work just like the arms from Tentacles for Arms.
(1 Point Upgrade) More Extra Tentacles – Lose 2 Back Pack Slots to gain two MORE tentacle arms (or legs) requires that you take Extra Tentacles first.
(1 Point Upgrade) Even More Extra Tentacles – Lose 2 more Back Pack slots and gain to more tentacle arms (or legs) requires that you take More Extra Tentacles First.
(0 Point upgrade) Tentacle For A Head – Your head isn't a just a head, it's an additional Arm Tentacle. It can no longer wear hats.
(0 Point Upgrade) Tentacles for a Torso – You don't have a Main Clothing or Armour slot, but you DO have 2 more Tentacle arms (or tentacle legs).
(0 Point Upgrade) Swimming Tentacles - Add Swim to your movement freely in water to swim without any penalty.
(0 Point Upgrade) Climbing Tentacles - Add Climb to your movement freely.
(0 Point Upgrade) Lashing Tentaclesl – Your tentacles EACH become an available attack with Unarmed Whip Body Single-Target Close-Range and +2 vs Evasive.
(0 Point Upgrade) Long Tentaclesl – Your tentacles all can work at Short-Ranged length letting you make unarmed attacks at Short-Range and use items held in them with the origin at Short-Range.
(0 Point Upgrade) Constricting Tentacles - Your tentacles attack may add Grab for 1 Energy on hit.
(1 Point Upgrade) Tentacle Storm – You can use all your tentacles together for a single tentacle unarmed or lashing tentacles attack which has Multi-Attack x? Where ? Is the number of tentacles. You can also instead expend 1 Energy before roll to remove the Multi-Attack benefit and change to Multi-Target(All Bar Self In Range).

Monstrous Vitality – You heal well from almost anything. In the long term (over numerous Strategic Turns) you regrow basically anything and rarely ever actually die from mere combat trauma.
(1 Point Upgrade) - You have such awesome monstrous health that each turn in the resource phase if you are suffering any Standard Injuries you MUST spend 1 Energy to heal one of them. If you are suffering a KO or Kill injury it MUST instead be used to heal that injury at the cost of All Energy Minimum 1. This ability applies even if you are unconscious, “killed” or removed from combat.

Other- Consider more unlisted options AVAILABLE BY REQUEST. These options are us much experimental templates as anything and are almost certainly not a comprehensive list.

And What's With The Off Hand Attacks?
So a very basic general skill is “Off Hand Attacker” it costs 1 point and applies to like EVERYTHING. And in SOME cases for Off Hand Attacks granted willy nilly by some natural weapon type traits it makes the off hand attack they grant REDUNDANT.

This is in fact kinda intended. The off hand bonuses for natural attacks are lesser versions of the basic Off Hand Attacker given out as minor bonus prizes. Some natural attacks SPECIFICALLY have Off Hand attacks worded in such a way that they are different to Off hand attacker and COULD even be stacked with it. That is also intended as a slightly LARGER minor bonus prize.

Now whether those two sorts of minor bonus prizes are justified, or if they are then determining if they are aksi in the right places is a harder question to answer...

But what if I take 1 Million of these?
There isn't an upper limit or guideline on what numbers or combinations traits are acceptable or not. Or a lower limit for that matter. The general idea being that the upgrade points costs will sort it all out in the end.

But even without that you COULD end up with a... confusing and sorta stupid character. (hell even some of these traits on their own will achieve that). This is considered a largely unavoidable side effect of a points based customisable system, outweighed by the benefits and mildly ameliorated by those already mentioned upgrade costs. Ultimately trying to reign it in further is only likely to do more harm than good at this stage.

So how ARE you meant to use these?
Well if you look you will note that many of these powers while not always “must haves” tend to fall into two categories, either a small nice perk you could do without but will add a bit of colour to your character/people (oh hey, I got gills, yeah, whatever).

Or a potential major trait that is going to all on it's own massively influence your entire character's career (hey look, No Arms, imma gonna kick you to death with my strong legs).

While many abilities have a minor disadvantage built in... the only thing you EVER get in return for the disadvantages is very specific narrow benefits from the same upgradable trait. Hopefully avoiding as much of the “Color Blind Swordsman” issues normally associated with any sort of selectable “disadvantages” traded for real power. Strong Legs is really nice and you might stick it on ANY character, but it's only available on some sucker with no arms you don't get to trade being colour blind for it.

I mean sure, there are still clearly dangerous trade off possibilities entirely WITHIN some trait selections, the most notable being that asshole Immaterial, but well, screw it. Right now I'd rather it be in with it's flaws than out on it's ear.

But anyway, the idea is you pick some relatively sane combination of traits, or hell, even as few as none at all. You get things for doing that, and maybe even significant things, but not unfair or even unmissable things. I mean hell, you CAN be the race of fire breathing elves... or you just be an elf fire witch with regular skills and the difference is relatively negligible.


Injury Traits
Another source of gross physical traits that could influence the body related abilities of your character is various sorts of physical trauma experienced due to events in your background.

Sure your PEOPLE have two arms and two legs and happen to be basically humans (with sharp teeth). But you personally happen to have one “Missing Hand” because some bastard cut it off.

Injury Traits are also useful because in actual game play some bastard might cut your hand off, and while there are certainly ways to stick your hand back on (or ways to try to deny it really fell off in the first place) you might end up (or melodramatically choose to end up) missing a hand on your character. And it would be nice to get something back for that. So long term or permanent injuries should probably immediately apply the most similar appropriate Mutation or Injury trait or whatever, opening up opportunities for taking Upgrade skills that will make up for some of the effects of the injury (again, with Missing Hand and it's upgrade for instance).

Injury traits CAN just be Appearance and Mutation traits. Certainly any of the “missing bits” Mutation traits like Missing Hand or No Arms would certainly be appropriate Injury traits. But in a fantasy world where it is entirely possible that a wizard did it in all honesty having four arms, extra breasts, a snakes tail and hair that is made of fire COULD just be the unfortunate side affects of your character's time hanging around (or being defeated by) the wrong sort of people.

As such for now there ISN'T an injury traits list to select from. The injury traits list is ACTUALLY just the other two traits lists AGAIN but this time with the addition that either “a wizard did it” or “a guy with an axe did it”, or you know, some other horrible incident in your character past (or future).

Couldn't Decide with your Brains? Radomly Generate People with this insane Spoiler...
Okay so it doesn't differentiate People and Individuals, just roll your damn individual then DECIDE which bits originate from their people, if you must FLIP A COIN for each result to see if it is people or individual specific! Damnit!

Remember kids, random generation is only for madmen and the desperately indecisive!

Metabolism! Roll 1d10
1-5) Animal
6-7) Plant
8) Mechanical
9) Undead
10) Mystic + Reroll

Body Material Type! Roll 1d10
1-5) Flesh
6) Metal
7) Ceramic
8) Plastic
9) Energy
10) Mental

Body Material Consistency! Roll 1d10
1-7) Soft
8-9) Hard
10) Rubbery

Why those weightings? Why the hell not? It's god damn random, you shouldn't be rolling at all! Also 1d10? Every other damn thing in this system is a 1d20, what next 1d14s?

Size Me! Roll 1d10
1) Small
2-9)Normal Sized
10) Big

Oh Hey A gender Roll for the morbidly indecisive! Roll 1d10
1-4) Male
5-9) Female
10) Neither
I refuse to make you roll for sexuality, decide or you get stuck with “default”.
And yes that is more girls, I didn't want give Neither more than a 1 in 10 chance and someone had to take 1 for the team.


”Normal” Hair! Roll 1d20
1) Bald and Shiny
2) Bald and Stubbly
3) Mohawks! (Technicolor)
4) Bowl Cuts (Dirt Farmer Chesnut Rainbow Selection)
5) Super Long (Blond, Black or Auburn)
6) Frizzy (Black, Ginger, Tiger Striped)
7) Curly Mop (Mousy, Straw Blond, Actual Strawberry Red, Electric Blue)
8) Ringlets (Platinum Blond, Platinum Silver, Platinum Ebony)
9) Braids (Partially bald, Chocolate, Vanilla, Caramel)
10) Bell Cut (Rainbows, Leopard Spots, Brown, Blond, Ivory)
11) 1970's Floofy Woman Hair (Pleather, Mushroom, Toadstool)
12) Afro (Regular, Extra Strong)
13) Bun with Pins In (Ebony, Ivory, Both)
14) Big Pony Tail (Pony Brown, Pony Tawny, Pony Zebra)
15) Double Pig Tails (Startling Blond, Threatening Ebony, Actual Candy Cane Striped)
16) Double Buns (School Mistress Grey, School Teacher Teak, Headmistress Purple)
17) Bee Hive (Honey Blond, Waxy White, Bee Stripes)
18) Spiky (Anime Purple, Anime Black, Anime Explosion)
19) Wild and Messy (Wilderness Girl Brown, Jungle Jim Green, Wild Man of Borneo)
20) Big Hair Version, Reroll (no baldies)
Any hair results can be supplemented, modified or rendered irrelevant by related Mutation or Cultural item rolls, like “No Head” or “Wigs”.

”Normal” Eyes! Roll 1d20
1) Brown
2) Blue
3) Green
4) Red
5) Yellow
6) Purple
7) Orange
8) White
9) Pink
10) Black
11) Pupil Free (reroll 1d10 on this table for color)
12) Striped Iris (reroll 1d10 twice on this table for color)
13) Extra Big (reroll 1d12 on this table)
14) Beady Small (reroll 1d12 on this table)
15) Slanted up on the outside (reroll 1d12 on this table)
16) Slanted down on the outside (reroll 1d12 on this table)
17) Double Lidded (reroll 1d12 on this table)
18) Super Long Lashes (reroll 1d20 on this table, repeated 18s just make the lashes bigger!)
19) No Lashes (reroll 1d20 on this table)
20) Side ways eye lids (reroll 1d20 on this table)

”Normal” Skins ! Roll 1d20
1) Ivory
2) Ebony
3) Pale Flesh
4) Pale with Freckles
5) Pale with Leopard Spots
6) Tiger
7) Zebra
8) Olive
9) Tan
10) Chocolate
11) Orange
12) Red
13) Green
14) Blue
15) Metallic (Gold, Silver, Bronze)
16) Pale with Rainbow Blush
17) Glittery Flecks and a Reroll
18) Double Combo (reroll twice)
19) Triple Patchwork (reroll three times)
20) Other you bastard, OTHER!

”Normal” Ears! Roll 1d10
1-3) Human style
4-6) Pointy
8) Long with Bobbles on
9) Lizard Ears
10) Other ahahahahaha thought a random table would save you? WHAT NOW!?!

”Normal” Body Shape, now for Humanoids! Roll 1d10
1) Short
2-3) Eh you don't mention it in your description
4) Muscles!
5) Voluptuous for girls, Broad Shouldered for boys
6-7) Fat
8-9) Lithe
10) Tall

”Normal” Other Features Roll 1d20 as many times as you feel like, or 1d4 times if you feel like it
1) Thin lipped
2) Fat lipped
3) Perty Face
4) Lantern Jawed
5) Watery Eyed
6) Suspicious Looking
7) Heroic looking
8) Friendly looking
9) Sexy looking
10) Skittish looking
11) Looking about looking
12) Less Fingers than a human
13) Less toes than a human
14) More thumbs than a human
15) Long Fingers and Toes
16) Lumpy Forehead
17) Big Head
18) Buck Teeth
19) Plump Cheeks
20) Urgly

The “Do I Have Giant Boobs?” Multi Part Quiz (because it doesn't deserve it, and neither do you for turning to tables)
Q1 : Am I a Girl? Y (goto Q2), N (goto Q3)
Q2 : Do I have the Fat Trait? Y (goto Q6), N (goto Q7)
Q3 : Do I have the Fat trait? Y (goto Q4), N (goto Q5)
Q4 : Roll 1d10 ? 1-9 (Regular sized), 10 (Take the Giant Cleavage Trait)
Q5 : Am I a Mutant? Y (goto Q4), N (Regular Sized)
Q6: Roll 1d10 ? 1-9 (Take the Giant Cleavage Trait) 10 (Regular Sized)
Q7: Do I have the Lithe Trait? Y (goto Q4), N (goto Q8)
Q8) Did I roll up “Voluptuous” as a random other feature or otherwise select it? Q1 : Y (Goto Q9), N (goto Q10)
Q9 : Roll 1d10 ? 1-3 (Regular sized), 4-10 (Take the Giant Cleavage Trait)
Q10 : Roll 1d10 ? 1-8 (Regular sized), 9-10 (Take the Giant Cleavage Trait)


And really kids, if you haven't figured out that random generation is bad TURN BACK NOW!

Am I a Mutant? Roll 1d10
1-4) I'm basically human, I don't roll on the Mutation Traits tables at all.
5-7) I'm just a bit interesting shaped, I Roll on the Forehead Alien table.
8-9) I'm a serious Monster, I roll on the Monstrous Thing table.
10) I'm a god damn monster KILL ME!, I roll on the Gurgle Gurgle Aaargh! Table.

Forehead Alien Table! Roll 1d20
1) I could burst any second... Take I'm A Mutant and later on reroll starting on the Am I a Mutant? Table and turn into that.
2) I'm a Were... thingy... Take Alternate Form and Reroll on the Am I A Mutant? Table
3) I'm a Camouflage Bandit, Take Camouflage Patterns
4) I'm Karma Chameleon! Deny all knowledge of Boy George and take Chameleon Skin, Roll 1d10 on an Odd take Gecko pads, Roll 1d10 on 9+ take Shedding Skin
5) I'm See Through! Take Transparent Flesh, roll a 1d20 on a 1-5 take Jelly Flesh, on a 20 take Immaterial
6) I'm just tough. Pick either a Resistance trait, Climate Survival, I'm Melting or My Only Weakness. Yes, PICK or just roll with even chance, damn you. Or throw this away and reroll from scratch on the Am I A Mutant Table.
7) I'm a Magical Mystical Fairy Yay! Take Mystical Creature and then Reroll starting back from Am I A Mutant?
8) I am the Lizard King! Take Scales. Roll 1d10 on a 7-8 take Claws, on a 9 take Sharp Teeth, on a 10 take both. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Energy Breath (Venom).
9) I got me some Devil Horns! Take Horns. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Hooves. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Wings. Roll 1d10 on a 6-10 take Bonus Tail. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Energy Breath. Roll a 1d10 on a 10 take Energy Vision. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Mystical Creature. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Stilt Legs. Roll a 1d10 on a 9-10 take Extra Legs. Roll a 1d10 on a 9-10 take Extra Arms. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Giant Cleavage or Multiple Breasts, or Both.
10) My Hair Is On Fire! Roll a 1d10, on a 1-7 take Elemental Hair, on a 8-10 take Elemental Hair AND Elemental Flesh. Roll 1d10 on a 9 take Energy Vision, on a 10 take Energy Breath.
11) Medusa Baby Medusa! Take Snake Hair. Roll a 1d10 on a 8 take Bonus Tail, on a 9 take Tail for legs on a 10 take Tail for Legs and No Arms.
12) Excessively Mammalian. Take Extra breasts, if you are a boy, take undeveloped extra breasts, if you feel cheated take either Giant Cleavage or reroll from scratch on Am I A Mutant and add it on top of this.
13) I'm Blind! Roll 1d10 On a 1-6 take Cannot See Without My Glasses, on a 7-10 take Eyeless. If that seems unfair keep it but also start again on Am I A Mutant?
14) Eye Eye! Roll 1d10, 1-3 Eye-Stalks, 4-5 Energy Vision, 6-7 Night Eyes, 8-9 Extra Eyes 10 Penetrating Vision.
15) Eh? Roll 1d10 on a 1 take Deaf, on a 8-9 take Antennae, on a 10 take Sixth Sense otherwise take Exceptionally Long Ears. If that feels inadequate keep it and reroll starting from Am I A Mutant?
16) Mouthy. Roll a 1d10 on a 9-10 take Girraf Neck, roll 1d10 on a 10 take Big Lungs, Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Sharp Teeth, roll 1d10 on a 1 take Tongue-less, on a 8 take Flexible Tongue, on a 9 take Swallower, on a 10 take Flexible Tongue and Swallower. And if that isn't enough add a new roll starting from Am I A Mutant?
17) Brainless Bimbo! Take Headless
18) Leggy. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Stilt Legs, Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Hooves, Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Extra Legs, roll a 1d10 on a 8-10 take No Arms. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Imma Pony.
19) Wings Bitches! Take Winged.
20) Extra Arms! Take Extra Arms. Unless you already have No Arms, then take Horns. If you get extra arms Roll a 1d10 on a 6-10 also take Handy Feet. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take No Legs.

Monstrous Thing! Roll 1d20
1) I could Explode Any Second! Take Dangerously Explosive
2) I am the Yeti. Take Fur Coat. Roll 1d10, on a 10 take Sharp Teeth, Roll 1d10 on a 7-10 take Claws.
3) I am the Crab Man! Take Armour Plated, roll a 1d10 on a 5-10 take Claws, roll a 1d10 on a 10 take Quadrupedal, roll a 1d10 on a 5-10 take Bone Shield.
4) I'm a Spike Monster! Take Covered In Spikes.
5) I'm a Fish Monster! Take Gills and Fins. Roll 1d10 on a on a 8 take Claws, 9 take sharp teeth, 10 take Claws and Sharp Teeth. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take No Legs, Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Swallower. Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Scales. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Wet Skin.
6) I'm a Lizard Monster! Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Chameleon Skin, Roll 1d10 on an 8 Claws, 9 Sharp Teeth, 10 Both. Roll 1d10 on 5-10 take Scales. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Shedding Skin. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Dry Clean Only. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Gecko Pads. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Quadrupedal, Handy Feet and No Arms. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Bonus Tail.
7) I'm A Rabbit Monster! Take Exceptionally Long Ears and Frog Legs. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Burrowing Paws. Roll a 1d0 on a 10 take No Arms (useless paws for hands?). Roll 1d10 on an 8 take Claws on a 9 take Sharp Teeth on a 10 take both. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Multiple Breasts.
8) I'm Magical Twins! Take Magical Twins. Roll a 1d10, on a 10 keep the Twins then reroll from scratch on I'm A Mutant.
9) I'm Siamese Twins! Take Siamese Twins. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Extra Arms to help make up the extra limbs you may need.
10) I'm a Necromantic Plastic Surgery Nightmare! Take Decapitated and Dismembered. Trade up for better parts as you go!
11) I'm A Frog Monster! Take Frog Legs, Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Swallower, Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Flexible Tonge, Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Gecko Pads, Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Wet Skin. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Sharp Teeth. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Fins and Gills.
12) I'm A Snake Monster! Take Tail For Legs. Roll 1d10 on a 6-10 take No Arms, Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Snake Hair, Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Scales, Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Sharp Teeth. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Swallower, Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Flexible Tongue. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Chameleon Skin. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Shedding Skin. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Dry Clean Only.
13) I'm A Cow Monster! Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Giant Cleavage (opt out if a boy). Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Multiple Breasts (opt out if a boy), Roll 1d10 on a 2-10 take Horns. Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Hooves. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Extra Legs. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Bonus Tail. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Monstrous Vitality. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Tongue-less.
14) I'm A Tentacle Monster! Take Tentacles. Lots of them! Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Monstrous Vitality. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Disembowelled, roll 1d10 on a 7-10 take Eye Stalks, roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Boneless Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Wet Skin.
15) I'm A Cat Monster! Take Claws and Sharp Teeth. Roll 1d10 on a 6-10 take Gecko Pads. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Extra Breasts. Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Exceptionally Long Ears. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take No Arms (paws for hands). Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Bonus Tail. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Extra Arms for no reason.
16) I'm A Turtle Monster! Take Armour Plated. Take Fins. Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Gills. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Wet Skin. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Monstrous Vitality. Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Spikes. Roll 1d10 on a 8-10 take Horns.
17) I AM IMMORTAL! Take Monstrous Vitality. If that isn't enough for you keep it and reroll from scratch on the Am I A Monster table.
18) I'm an Eye Monster! Take Extra Eyes. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take 6th Sense. Roll 1d10 On an 8 take Energy Vision, on a 9 take it twice, on a ten take it three times. Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take Eye Stalks. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Penetrating Vision, Roll 1d10 on a 5-10 take night Vision Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Antennae. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take No Arms. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take No Legs. Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Wet Skin.
19) I'm a Horse Monster! Take Hooves. Take Galloping Legs. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Imma Pony, Roll 1d10 on a 10 take Quadrupedal, on a 5-9 take Extra Legs. Roll 1d10 on a 9-10 take Horns.
20) I dunno What I Am? Other! Thats right Other ahhahahahahaha! Not even “other options” the actual Other entry from the mutant traits list, yes that one, the one that isn't written ahahahahahah!

Gurgle Gurgle Aaargh! Roll 1d10
1-4 Roll Twice on the Forehead Alien Table and add it together
5-6 Roll once on the Forehead Alien Table and once on the Monstrous Thing Table.
7-8 Roll twice on the Monstrous Thing Table
9 Roll twice on the monstrous thing table and once on the forehead alien table.
10 Toll twice on both tables!

Background Injuries Traits...
Roll 2d4-5 then if the result is positive Roll 1d20 that many times on the following table.
1) Off colour streak in hair due to being suddenly surprised at band camp.
2) Off colour eye and a Split Personality trait due to deceased child hood partial brain+eye organ donor twin.
3) A few missing fingers due to a Pony related incident.
4) A bisecting scar down (nearly) the middle of your body and a Siamese Twin sewn on where half your torso used to be due to a dramatic Canoeing accident and an emergency double rescue by a passing mad shaman.
5) Got bitten by a monster, turned into a monster, roll once on the Monstrous Thing table.
6) A bonus tail you grew after being cursed by a mad gypsy woman.
7) Some Horns you grew because you lied too much (or too poorly) in a place sacred to the horned god.
8) Take Hooves and Roll 1d10 (7-10 take Stilt Legs too) after you received an emergency leg transplant from a Pony or Fawn or something.
9) Prayed to the Earth Goddess for success in love, turned into a girl if you weren't already, grew a Giant Cleavage and roll 1d10 on a 6 plus you ended up with Multiple Breasts. In general not specifically what you had actually asked for.
10) Lost a hand in a farming accident. Take Missing Hand
11) Lost bot arms in an industrial loom accident. Take No Arms.
12) Lost a leg in a mining accident. Take Missing Leg.
13) Lost both legs in an extra high stakes game of strip poker. Take No Legs.
14) Ran With Scissors. Take Eyeless.
15) Sold your eye for wisdom, never got paid. Take Missing Eye.
16) Lied to an imperial official. Take Tongue-less.
17) Mixed magical medications. Take I'm A Mutant and later on roll on Am I A Mutant (and keep doing so until you get a result other than “no”).
18) You died. You got Better. Change your Metabolism to Undead.
19) A wizard did it. Roll one extra time on the Forehead alien table.
20) A bunch of wizards did it. Roll on the Gurgle Gurgle Aaargh! Table.
OKAY! Lets try this puppy out...

Character 1 Is a...

Animal, Flesh, Soft, Normal Sized, Female.
She is bald and stubbly.
Her beady small eyes are bright Green
Her skin is gleaming Ebony black
Her ears are long with bobbles on the ends.
She is cute and plump (rolled up Fat).
But bucks the odds on the quiz and has NOT got a giant cleavage.
She also has just two fingers on each hand.
But also two thumbs on each hand.
And her fingers are abnormally long.
She also has cute Plump Cheeks (yes that was 4 on the 1d4 for “other normal traits”
She is a “Serious Monster”
and she is a Necromantic Plastic Surgery Nightmare with Decapitated and Dismembered, who can switch her head, body and limbs with the remains of other humanoids.
And Personally she has led a charmed life and not suffered any notable injuries that have further altered her body.

Cutting that up into People Traits and Individual ones isn't hard and the majority of them end up being how her people look (funny hands, ebony skin, plump but not busty etc..) and maybe some of it is just her (poorly shaved head, cute plump cheeks).

This is a fairly acceptable result. Basically a human forehead alien with funky skin and cartoon alien fingers. The Frankenstein plastic surgery thing is a powerful and definitive trait, but not lost in too much of a jumble.

I will call her people the Necrostien Elves. And she will be called Ms Cheeks.

Lets go again!

This time its...
Oooh a Plant, made of Soft, Plastic like material.
And is Normal sized.
And Female again. You wouldn't think that weighting would throw it so hard...
With wild messy Jungle Jim Green hair.
And eerie whitish eyes.
And Tiger coloured skin.
With Pointy ears.
Her figure and build is merely average for a human woman. With no special cleavage.
She also gets 4 rolls on the other normal features list (ugh), for...
Watery Eyes
Heroic Looking
Big Headed
and Looking About Looking (darting eyes?)
She turns out to be yet ANOTHER serious monster, against the odds.
And is in fact a Tentacle Monster with Tentacles, Disembowelled and Boneless
Personally in her background she had TWO body changing experiences...
She lied to an imperial officer and had her tongue removed as punishment.
And she lost a leg in a mining accident.

This is a less great result. It was probably rolling fine right up until the mining accident though. Then maybe a bit too much. Still, tentacle plant girl, yeah, no internal organs or bones, yeah, and maybe a missing tongue due to a criminal record, sure.

I will call her planty people the Octo-Tigers and call her Mousy the Silent. I will ret con her lost leg and say it didn't happen.

Lets go AGAIN!
Animal, Flesh, Hard, Normal Sized
Hm? A shelled insect or hard skinned doll like animal something?
Female, again (maybe it's the dice?)
Big pony Tail in Pony Brown
Super Long Lashed Eyes in hot Pink
Ivory Skin
Normal humany ears
Lithe figure, not giant cleavaged.
AGAIN with 4 traits on the Other Features...
Perty Faced
Fat Lipped
Fat Lipped again (very fat lipped?)
Friendly Looking
And rolls up “I'm A God Damn Monster Kill Me!”... really, I mean it's not like normal human was HARD to get on one of these three examples... but that's what random tables do for you...
Is going to end up with 1 Roll on Forehead Alien and 1 Roll on Monstrous Thing...
She ends up With Penetrating Vision and Horns
And also with Horse Monster for Hooves, Galloping Legs, and Extra Legs, and Horns again (does that even work?)
Through her personal history she suffered no less than two horrible maiming events... (again, I hate you random tables)
When she lost all four of her legs in a high stakes game of strip poker.
And Ran with Scissors, taking Eyeless (and how that even interacts with Penetrating Vision is a dangerously ill-defined mystery).

Well you see that was going fine, its some sort of cute (hard) ivory doll girl thingy, then BAM she is a double horned x-ray vision centauress. Which wihile perhaps a little off track was acceptable... then BAM No legs and blind as a bat just to spit in the face of everything that (apparently) defines her people.

I will call her people the Toy Centaurs. Ret con the ludicrously large lips out of existence and retcon BOTH her tragic accidental Injury traits out of existence. I will then also retcon the colour of her pony tail to “Pink” and she will look like a hideously “perty” my little pony centaur called Pink Eye.

Right. So basically while the results are... OK...ish... they needed some kicking in the nuts, indeed MORE kicking in the nuts would have been nice since NO ONE ended up getting less mutanty than “rather a bit”, and that's exactly what's so wrong about randomized tables, extreme results happened, more people rolled the same results at various steps than might be desirable etc...

But in a decision based emergency you COULD use these tables. But better yet you could use them with about five kinds of fudging of the results. In practice while someone may have a hard time deciding if they should write in “Bald” on their character description or not they find it very easy to say “hell no, can't I reroll please!” if they don't like it. And since the rolls are only there as an OPTION for players who just can't decide to just choose the results, which they are totally allowed to, it is entirely reasonable to let them reroll as much as they want fudge the results and make outright contrary decisions. Because they didn't NEED to roll in the first place and you ideally don't even WANT them to!

So lets do it ONE MORE TIME, but this time with a player who just rerolls until they get what they like.

Undead? Hell I'm one off Mystic, I'll be Mystic and Reroll...
Mystic, Animal, Energy? Nah, reroll that...
Mystic, Animal, Flesh, Hard? Hell no, Animals are Soft. Mystic Animal Flesh Soft.
Right. Small Sized? Hell no. I'm Normal Sized.
Another Girl. Whatever.
A Rainbows Coloured bell shaped hair cut. Okaay...
Oooh pale skin with a Rainbow blush. Nice match on the bell hair.
Brown eyes. Hm. Doesn't work with the hair and blush, REROLL! Red Eyes. Nice.
Human style ears.
Fat? Ms Cheeks is already Fat and in the same party. This one is rerolling, Lithe? No there is a lithe girl on the random generated party already. Reroll. Tall? Don't like Tall for no reason this five minutes. Reroll. Muscles.... hm... Ok I can work with that. She has muscles.
She does the giant boobs quiz and gets “No” and likes it that way, (doesn't want to interfere with all the rainbows and muscles)
4 Traits on extra normal traits? Again? Hell no she doesn't want double fat lips like the last generated character ended up retconning. She'll roll as much as she likes on the table...
Suspicious, no, reroll, Looking About Looking, AGAIN, hell no, More thumbs, no, its been done, Heroic, no, been done, Fat Lipped, HELL NO.
Screw it, she has NO FURTHER notable identifying features.
She gets “Forehead Alien” on the mutant table. She isn't sure she wouldn't prefer to just NOT roll on it at all... but she will see her result first...
She gets Were Thingy, sounds interesting, she rolls more to see where it is going, uh uh, she were thingies into a God Damn Monster Kill Me thing... well, it's an optional alternative form, she will see where it goes...
Her alternative form is a 1 Forehead Alien Roll 1 Monstrous Thing Roll...
She gets Brainless Bimbo for No Head, hrm...
and Siamese Twins??? So... she Were Thingies into a headless version of herself that then divides into two characters which half a share of her body each?
Hell no, that's dumb. She gives the Were Thingy another chance and redoes the two last rolls.
She gets Devil Horns, for Horns, Hooves, Bonus Tail, Mystical Creature, and Extra Arms. So she turns into a multi armed devil girl...
But she also gets... Snake Monster, no trys again, sreveral times. Doesn't like ANY combos.
She settles on just Were Thingying into a devil girl with extra arms, hooves, horns and a whippy tail. That's cool.
She then wrangles into her potential injury history... and gets NONE and likes it.

So she is a muscular magical rainbow were-succubus or something. Nice. And why? Because she kicked the random tables in the nuts and ran away with her favourite results only. Her people will be the feared mutant Rainbow Were-Demons and she will be known as Lefty Two Arms.

That's enough messing about with the random bullshit generators. Far too many rainbow colour mutants. Don't do this at home!
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Placeholder!

The cultures part of peoples and cultures is going to go here. But that one is getting some serious time in the shop so...
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Post by rampaging-poet »

So it's been about a year now... How has this been going? I take it from your recent thread about organic character development you'll be re-vamping skills slightly (if only by grouping them better). Did you get any further with the Peoples and Cultures rules?

Also, I wrote an Inspiration Pad Pro 3 implementation of the random character table you loathed writing so much. The code is here. Copy and paste it into a text file and open the file in Inspiration Pad Pro 3 to run it.
It has a few quirks, like setting a bunch of boolean variables it never checks and walking though the giant boob quiz step by step, but it works.
I wasn't sure whether the roll for mutation later options were supposed to be during creation or during play, so it doesn't roll them. It would be easy enough to queue up additional rolls at the end though.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Well current status is basically.

All LT skill sets and LT skill set items are complete, there are rather a lot.

I completely redid the random people generator and have a maybe 90% complete random culture generator. They generate some horrific but mildly hilarious bullshit.

The cultures notes are not complete, but all that's left are basically about 20 or so religious cult modifiers. So there is a HUGE chunk of entirely terrible random junk for cultural options.

Some small changes to core rules and a mild reform and rewrite of construction and base building along with some additions and small changes to people traits.

Oh and all the base buildings and structure options associated with all LT sets are complete.

The current stage of the project is to write up those last 20 religious cults, fix up the tail end of the ludicrously giant and dysfunctional random culture generator for emergency use only, and move straight on to starting Mid Tier skill sets, items and buildings.

All of this in open office format documents. Converting it to BB code is a big giant hassle for my preferred use of lots of bolding, font sizes and font colour.

So that's the status report. If anyone is super keen I'll find a way of making some document files directly available to you along with a post about some notable changes and more current critiques I have of the system as it currently stands.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

New Updated Material
Ah, screw it someone's been asking stuff again so here is some more updates on the materials.

Between the last update and now I've been doing another revision of the existing LT skills and items materials into a new briefer punchier format more useful for direct cut and pasting to make useful NPC resources and other short lists for myself.

Which is bad because it means some stuff needs updating. But super good because I've mostly done that and it also means about 1/3 or maybe even ¼ of the raw text material to slog through and convert for BB code.

There are some notable revisions to at least mention first though.

The BIG GIANT NUMBER CHANGE
There is one change that REALLY needs to be noted.

I've made a fairly drastic change to the basic Normal Defence bonus. Instead of collecting all your normal defence bonuses and adding 10... you now collect all your normal defence bonuses and add a mere 5. Attacks were missing too much and it was too easy to push normal defences off the scale, there wasn't really room to further reduce defence bonuses.

I'd known I might do this since early in the system, and the change has been in the system and tested and revised for a few times so all the new skill and item material is hopefully well balanced to account for it.

Oh, and Social Defence is still like it used to be, all your social defence bonuses, +10, and +5 Alert if you are alert.

Lots of small revisions...
OK so I've revised and changed the peoples mutation skills and such like 5 times. But it looks close enough so I'm leaving you with the old material for now.

Similarly there have been some very minor changes during revision to things like specific good and bad traits and various basic action options. But again, only very small almost cosmetic revisions, so, again, screw it the old stuff is close enough and you can live with it.

Possible Upcoming Changes to Skill Set Unlocking
I'm considering changing skill set unlocking/advancement rules. I have already removed the whole special unlock requirement and bonus text. Currently you just need training access and to spend an ST training. Looking towards moving to a more dynamic less needlessly restrictive in play skill set unlock set up.

Main Clothing Slot and Item Layering
OK so I think this has gotten more formalised and standardised through various revisions of items and skills.

So you have ONE item slot for your main clothing/armour. But you can wear more than one item in it. Items in that slot (and in the cloak slot, sometimes in others) can sort of “layer” to form your final defence profile of bonuses and keywords.

Without any items you use your skill based bonuses and your basic and body keywords. So most characters are Body Animal Flesh Soft and have maybe a skill based bonus like Fast 4 on their NDef.

You stick on a normal clothing or armour item and you add any bonuses it might provide like say, Armour 4, and REPLACE your body keywords with the material keywords of the item, like Hard Metal Armour.

You stick on an item with Partial and it applies its bonuses and keywords AND you still apply your Body keywords.

Without special items or skills you can wear a bunch of items layered in this manner, but without special options you only get 1 torn shirt out of it and 1 defence profile.

By default the layers go from bottom to top...
Oils and Paints
Underwear
Clothing or Light Armour
Armour or Heavy Clothing
Cloak (goes in cloak slot not main clothing slot)

But in practice you can take various skills or items that may insert additional layers.

Also in practice you can take various skills or items that make these layers significantly more useful, including, but not limited to characters that do ablative armour tricks where they throw off layers to gain additional torn shirt blocks by exposing an undamaged lower layer of clothing or armour.

Skill Section Layout
The layout for the skill section will be basically as follows.

Skill Set Title
Maybe some extra text.
X (skill title) skill text


Where X is a number, and that number is the cost of the skill in skill points. That cost will commonly be 0.
Skill text will often refer to NDef (normal defence) and SDef (social defence)
Skill text has been cut short hard for cutting and pasting (and general space) mostly this makes it an easier read, but it could easily make some things a bit confusing. Sorry about that.
I use more bolding and coloured keyword text in my original documents, I will be letting that slip a lot in skill text in this version just because I couldn't be assed putting in BB code colour changes and bolding everywhere.

LT Skill Sets
These are the skills and skill sets accessible to LT characters.

General Skills
The general skill set is unlocked and available to all characters and does not count as an unlocked background skill set. It has a number of skills in it I just wanted everyone to have access to. Mostly bullshit skill tax stuff like raw number bonuses and basic item proficiencies.
God damn Double Zero Skill
OK this skill is a real hacky piece of crap. I admit it. But sometimes, especially early in a character's LT career, they are going to want more 0 point skills than they want actual skills with positive skill points costs. So this is a way where you can spend 1 skill point and get 2 total zero points skills instead of the 1 skill point and get 1x 1 point skill and 1x 0 point skill.

Yes this ties in with the whole thing where 0 point skills were a bad idea and a poorly implemented mechanic. Buy 1 get one free has been surprisingly hard going to explain in practice. I'd safely call it a failed and problematic mechanic, but removing it at this stage is hard to do, and the damn thing is still performing a role I'm hard pressed to find a substitute for that is any less problematic.

Oh, and remember, retraining is pretty cheap and readily accessible to everyone, so taking Double Zero skill is generally considered to be a potentially temporary affair for a lot of characters.
1 Double Zero Skill +1x0 Point Skill selection
0 Weapon Skill +3 vs All to Weapon attacks
0 Projectile Skill +3 vs All to Projectile attacks
0 Unarmed Skill +3 vs All to Unarmed attacks
0 Complex Clothing Skill Complex Worn items at no penalty, and Very Complex at -2 penalty.
0 Very Complex Clothing Skill Complex and Very Complex Worn items at no Penalty. [Requires Complex Clothing Skill]
0 Complex Weapon Skill Complex Weapons at no penalty, Very complex at -2 Penalty
0 Very Complex Weapon Skill Complex and Very Complex Weapons at No Penalty, [Requires Complex Weapon Skill]
0 Off Hand Attacker 1E for off hand attack with equipped option not used yet this turn.
[NOTE: May only take One Variant of Socially Developed - ]
0 Socially Developed Educated 2 to SDef. Educated to Social attacks
0 Socially Developed Ignorant 2 to SDef. Ignorant to Social attacks
0 Socially Developed Strict 2 to SDef. Strict to Social attacks
0 Socially Developed Naughty 2 to SDef. Naughty to Social attacks
0 Socially Developed Posh 2 to SDef. Posh to Social attacks
0 Socially Developed Common 2 to SDef. Common to Social attacks
0 Class Warfare +4 vs (oppose socially developed keyword) to Social attacks. [Requires Socially Developed]
0 Class Traitor +4 vs (your own socially developped keyword) to Social attacks. [Requires Socially Developed]
0 Class Dominance +2 vs (all socially developed keywords other than own and opposed) to Social attacks.[Needs Socially Developed]
0 Climbing Skill +3 to all Climbing checks [This skill is crap pick another]
0 Swimming Skill optionally add Swim to movement, negating swimming penalties and gaining +3 to Swim checks.
0 Lock Cracker +3 to pick locks and mess with mechanical stuff
0 Escapology +3 to all attempts miscellaneous rolls to break out of restraints, confined spaces and prisons.
0 Wilderness Survival +3 to all Wilderness Survival checks, find food and water with no check in easy regions
0 Quick Attacks +3 vs Slow to Normal Attacks, [Requires Fast or Energetic Good Trait]
0 Mighty Attacks +3 vs Weak to Normal Attacks. [Requires Strong or Tough Good Trait]
0 Beautiful Attacks +2 vs Decadent to Normal AND Social Attacks. [Requires Pretty Good Trait]
0 Intelligent Attacks +1 vs Non-Tricky And +1 vs Stupid to Normal and Social Attacks. [Requires Tricky Good Trait]
0 Blaster Rings Use 1 Blaster Ring item (at a time) to upgrade a blaster attack.
0 More Blaster Rings Use up to 2 Blaster Ring items (at a time) to upgrade a blaster attack. [Requires Blaster Rings]
some other obvious critiques of general skills
OK so here is what I actually like from general skills. Weapon Skill, Projectile Skill, Unarmed Skill, those work out pretty damn good. The complex and very complex proficiency skills I think I like.

Almost everything else here I feel is in some way a bit of a hack. They work out. But are somehow imperfect or shoddy. Some bits, like say, Climbing Skill or the various Mighty Attacks etc... skills are really dodgy and perhaps should just be culled.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

LT Weaponry Skills
Some skill sets associated with various attack types. Primarily provide attack options, but there is more in there. Still, most characters will want at least one of these, unless they are leaning more towards a bit of a blaster wizard (and even then may want both).

Each set is supposed to be pretty OK on its own. But you can combo them with each other, and with skills from other skill sets, for various notable benefits, and they are (supposed) to be written to accommodate and encourage that.

Melee Weaponry
Its the swordy mc sword guy set. For swording things.
0 Weapon Draw If unopposed in zone pick up or shift weapons at no equip cost during resource phase.
1 Weapon Block Expend ALL helf/Ready Weapon items Gain one block each or 2 blocks each for two handed items.
OR Expend 1 or more Shield items for one block each (2 blocks each if two handed).
1 Off Hand Weapon During basic attack get 1 free off hand attack with a Weapon. +1 off hand attack for 1E each per weapon per turn.
1 Weapon Flurry 1E to upgrade a Weapon attack to Multi-Target(All Bar Self in 1)
0 Selective Flurry Weapon Flurry and Flurrious Charge are “Up to all bar self” instead of All Bar Self. [Requires Weapon Flurry]
0 Flurrious Charge May Charge and Weapon Flurry at the same time, targeting All Bar Self in All Zones passed through while moving. [Requires Weapon Flurry]
1 Armed Guard During Guard may make Close-Range Weapon attack vs each target that moves into or out of zone. Attack gains Parry and negates attempts to bypass the guard on hit ending and cancelling the targets action. If this grants no attacks gain a Weapon attack in the Refund phase.
1 Weapon Trick 1E (Before Attack OR On Hit, even if you miss) may make a normal Basic Attack with a Close-Range weapon AND make any undamaging special attack (typically Disarm, Knock, Grab, Parry, or Escape) with the same weapon.
1 Killing Blow All Energy Min 1 Before Attack upgrade Weapon attack to add Kill to this attack
2 Weapon Breaker Strike Expend used Weapon item (on hit) for +3 vs All, Devastating +1 to Weapon attack using that item.

Thrown Weaponry
A set for people to throw daggers and darts and spears and boomerangs and swords and hammers and...
0 Weapon Draw If unopposed in zone pick up or shift weapons at no equip cost during resource phase.
1 Boomeranger on miss with Boomerang thrown attack item may return to you. On HIT with Boomerang thrown attack Expend 1E to have item return to you OR add Chaining and draw a new LoF and range starting from the target and make an additional Basic Attack with the weapon on an additional target, on hit or miss the boomerang can then return to your hand, on hits it may instead continue chaining to other targets. Parries can cancel hits in the chain but do not prevent the chaining effect on hit.
0 Sword Chucker may add Thrown, Long-Range and Double-Range Penalties to any Close-Range Weapon attack.
1 Spear Pin 1E may modify Spear Basic Attack into a Special attack with Pin added. Applies spear attack profile as pin defence.
1 Throw barrage may throw up to ALL same profile ready throwable weapons as a single Special Attack action.
1E for Multi-Target X (X is number of items thrown) OR All Energy Min 1 for Multi-Attack x X (X is number of items thrown).
1 Power Throw All Energy Min 0 Before Attack a Thrown Weapon Basic attack to a Special Attack adds Devastating +1, Knock and Throw. Throws target 1 zone minimum or number of zones equal to the margin of success of the attack! Adds another +1 Devastating if it throws the target into Hard wall or barrier without breaking through it (attacks barriers or obstacle characters first)

Light Weaponry
A bit of an odd set, intended for daggery, darty, small weaponry using types. Probably best mixed with thrown or melee weaponry or both.
0 Weapon Draw If unopposed in zone pick up or shift weapons at no equip cost during resource phase.
1 Weapon Trick1E (Before Attack OR On Hit, even if you miss) may make a normal Basic Attack with a Close-Range weapon AND make any undamaging special attack (typically Disarm, Knock, Grab, Parry, or Escape) with the same weapon.
1 Throw barrage may throw up to ALL same profile ready throwable weapons as a single Special Attack action.
1E for Multi-Target X (X is number of items thrown) OR All Energy Min 1 for Multi-Attack x X (X is number of items thrown).
1 Off Hand Light Weapon +1 extra off hand attack with an unused Light weapon once per turn. +1E per extra off hand light weapon attack once per weapon each turn.
1 Light Escape may add Wrestle and Escape to any of your Light weapon attacks.
1 Light Rending On hit, after parry, with Close-Range Weapon or Unarmed attack expend 1E to make an off hand attack with a light weapon This is a Special Attack adding Devastating +X where X is the number of Close-Range Weapon or Unarmed attacks that you have already hit the target with.
2 Light Opportunist If a target misses you, may make an off hand attack against them with any Light Weapon. On hit you may expend 1 Energy to add Stun making them Unready on their next turn
1 Fast Light Weaponry 1E to Add Fast to attack with Light Weapon. Or 1E for Very fast with Fast Good Trait or a Fast Light Weapon item. Or All Energy Min 1 for Very Fast with Energetic good trait.

Heavy Weaponry
A set hastily added during the last revision to try and make bigger weapons more exciting and fill in a gap at the other end of the scale to the light set. May be best mixed with others.
0 Heavy Weapon Handling No extra time to equip a heavy weapon do no sink while carrying a heavy weapon.
1 Weapon Block Expend ALL helf/Ready Weapon items Gain one block each or 2 blocks each for two handed items.
OR Expend 1 or more Shield items for one block each (2 blocks each if two handed).
1 Heavy Swipe 1E to upgrade a Heavy Weapon attack to Multi-Target(All Bar Self in 1) 0E cost if using a Big weapon and adding Slow to the attack.
1 Wrecking Bowl Can add Thrown and Long Range to any Heavy Weapon attack. Can spend All Energy Min 0 to upgrade to Multi-Target(All Bar Self in LoF)
1 Bisecting Blow All Energy Min 1 Before Attack upgrade Heavy Weapon attack to add Bisect to this attack
1 Chopper may apply -2 vs all before attack to add Sever to any Heavy Weapon attack. Yes this is potentially additional to the axes.
1 Heavy Power may add Slow before attack to add Devastating +1 to your Heavy Weapon attack.
1 Heavy Charge may add +1 Movement and Throw Devastating +1 to any Charge OR Driver attack made with a Heavy Weapon.
1 Heavy Impalement on hit with a heavy weapon disarm the weapon and leave it impaled in victim, applying a pin effect with the weapon item (and Armour 4) and causing the weapon to roll a free attack on the victim that is Stacking (ignoring/adding to damage cap) when the weapon is later removed or the pin broken (unless the weapon is expended/destroyed/damaged first).
1 Heavy Cleavage on any defeat, wall hole, sever, decapitate or bisect result with a heavy weapon you gain a free additional attack with that heavy weapon.

Projectile Weaponry
For guns, bows, crossbows and things that shoot stuff and other things and stuff.
0 Speedy Aim Removes on copy of Slow from projectile Weapon attacks.
2 Projectile Block Expend 1 Ammo for 1 Block with your equipped/ready Projectile weapon. Block has projectile attack keywords and Weak. May be used to block attacks against other targets if you have LoF to the LoF of the attack
2 Suppressing Fire Expend 1 Ammo with a Projectile Weapon at the start of the turn. No action cost. Whenever anyone in your LoF performs a Close-Range action on another target or a Move action you gain 1 Basic attack against them with your Projectile Weapon (counts as having ammo). Gain attack in refund phase if not triggered.
1 Off Hand Shot +1 free basic attack with a projectile weapon if making a basic projectile attack as you action. +1E per +1 extra projectile attack once per weapon per turn after that.
1 Pinned Item 1E to modify Projectile Basic Attack into Special Attack, adds Undamaging and Pin to the attack
Attack can only target a character with at least one worn, held or carried item. This pin targets an item. Victim may break the pin by removing/dropping the item, or expending the item.
1 Covering Fire 1E (before roll) to modify a Projectile Basic Attack to a Special attack and add Parry to the attack (cancels single attack/action on hit).
1 Aimed Shot All Energy Min 1, Changes basic attack with Projectile to a special attack, adds Slow and Devastating +X where X is ½ the range penalty on the attack (rounded up) to a maximum of +4. The range penalty used is standard ranged penalty before modifiers.
User is Unready on next turn after attempting an Aimed Shot.
1 Head Shot 1E before attack. You target the head of a single target with your projectile or thrown attack. This ignores armours and only targets their body materials and any item keywords of worn head gear. If the target wears a helmet of a similar type to their armour/clothing it applies the same defence bonuses as the main item. This attack gains Critical and adds Decapitate on a natural 19-20.
0 Called Shot 1E before attack. You target a specific area of a single target with your projectile or thrown attack. If the target wears partial armour you may select to target only the armoured or only the unarmoured areas or any combination of exposed layers. This attack gains Critical and adds Kill on a natural19-20.
1 Extremity Shot 1E before attack. You target a single target's hand, foot or other limb with your projectile or thrown attack. This only applies the keywords and defences of items on the limb/extremity (same defence as main clothing if similar materials/type) This attack gains Critical and adds Sever targetting the specific extremity on a natural 17-20.

Unarmed Combat
The set for people who punch or kick or bite things.
I'd say unarmed combat is the skill/item set I'm still most displeased with, out of the weapony type skill sets. It really needs some more work.

Oh, and there are probably some pretty hard assumptions here about how equipped attack options and unarmed attack options work that may or may not be properly covered on this thread. If its a problem, er, ask?
0 Off Hand Unarmed Strike Count as equipped with one extra “hand” unarmed attack per empty hand slot. When making basic unarmed attack gain +1 off hand unarmed basic attack. +1E per additional unarmed basic attack per unarmed option per turn.
1 Kicker Skill Count as equipped with one extra “legs” unarmed attack per pair of legs. Removes Undamaging from Knock with legs
1 Wrestler Skill may make Grab and Escape special Unarmed attacks removing Undamaging. May add Wrestle to Unarmed attacks.
1 Throw Skill may make Unarmed Basic Attack into a Special Attack adding Throw . May throw into other targets for additional attack.
1 Open Palm Skill may add Disarm on hit with a hand based unarmed attack for 1E. If you disarm a weapon (after parry) with this attack may immediately equip it in a free hand slot and then may make an attack with the weapon immediately.
1 Silent Death Grip +2 vs All with Unarmed Assassinate attacks. MAY add Silent to Unarmed attacks, may try to hide when silent
1 Unarmed Flurry 1E before Close-Range Unarmed Basic attack to make it Special attack Multi-Target(All Bar Self)
1 Un-Armed Guard on Guard action may make Unarmed attack against each target that attempts to move into or out of your zone.
This attack gains Throw and allows you to throw the targets around as you see fit. Make unarmed attack in refund phase if not triggered
2 Quivering Palm All Energy Min1 Before Attack upgrade Unarmed Basic attack to Special Attack.
Once on any turn AFTER this attack hits you may perform an action (or spend 1E as an “off hand action”) to automatically apply a KO or Kill injury to the target. May not use (or lose or injure) the same Unarmed option (or hand?) while maintaining this effect. If you are hit with a Parry, this effect ends. Effect grants you a +4 vs All bonus to Scary actions against the target while maintained.
2 Unarmed Block May expend Unarmed Options/Weapons 1 per block. If applying to body parts effectively counts as a sever injury.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

LT Pants Skills
Skill Sets related to things you wear, or not. Primary source of a lot of defensive stuff.

No Clothes
Nudity!
Yep. First thing on the pants skill lists is no pants. Kind of obvious in retrospect, but also a bit, I don't know, just plain wrong?

Well regardless this skill set is actually surprisingly important and versatile. It's useful as hell for various exhibitionistic or alarmingly strippy builds. Which is... well I can't decide whether that is terrible or brilliant. But it's also got a whole lot of staple skills which are super useful for monsters and other things that also don't use wearing armoured pants as their main defence strategy, and is basically fully compatible with tiny pants wearing oiled muscular barbarians and such.

And considering there is like a one in eight chance of being caught in a bath when ninjas attack your house almost anyone might want to consider investing in some basic defence bonuses from this set once they start getting more skill points than they know what to do with.
The skill set for things that use not wearing stuff as their main line of defense against other stuff.
0 Sculpted Nudity Pretty 1 to NDef and SDef when naked or wearing only Skimpy items.
0 Naked Mobility may Run without Energy cost when naked or wearing only Skimpy items.
0 Torn and Revealed If non-skimpy armour or clothing items are fully expended add Skimpy to item for abilities that care.
0 Ripped Off Disarm fully expended non-heavy clothing or light armour at no action cost.
1 Revealing Energy If you become naked from skimpy/more or skimpy from more during a turn then gain +1E each in resource phase.
0 Casual Nudity Increases your Evasive +1 and Pretty +1 to NDef and SDef while naked or skimpy only. Nudity considered normal.
0 No Pockets When naked or Skimpy gain +2 vs all to conceal items in pockets and back pack slots.
0 Naked Defence When naked or Skimpy gain Evasive 4 to NDef
1 Naked Body Slam +2 vs Non-Armour with Unarmed attacks that use your Body while Naked or Skimpy 1 Free off hand naked body slam once per turn, and +1 more per 1E
1 Naked Energy +1 Max Energy while naked or skimpy AND regain +1E to fill additional Max E.
1 Nude Wrestling add Wrestle to any action if naked, or by expending and disarming any clothing or armour item you are wearing
1 Naked Evasion Block If naked or skimpy 1E per 1 Block against Slow, block uses Evasive Weak and body keywords AND
expend “nudity” as clothing item for Torn Shirt. This is a special injury which prevents counting as naked or Skimpy
0 Lotion Block May expend (and optionally disarm) Oil and Paints layer items for Torn Shirts ONLY when they are top layer.
1 Partial Lotion Block May expend (and optionally disarm) Oil and Paints items for Torn Shirt, ONLY when part of partial top layer.

Light Armour
A skill set for characters that wear super light armour, or just throw on some pants and a shirt and call it a day.
0 Light Mobility may Run at no energy cost in Non-Heavy Clothing, or Light Armour, or nothing.
0 Torn Loose Fully expended non light armour counts as light and loses heavy.
0 Light Defence gain Evasive 4 to NDef when wearing Non-Heavy Clothing or Light Armour. (but not when naked)
0 Light Armour Layering wear a Light Armour item in your Armour layer OR in your Clothing Layer. Benefits from layer shedding skills
1 Light Evasion Block In only Non-Heavy Clothing or only Light Armour 1E per 1 Block vs Slow attack block is Evasive and your body and clothing/armour keywords.
1 Light Escape optionally add Evasive Undamaging Knock Escape +3 vs All, to a basic close range attack as a Special Attack action. Also add Wrestle for 1E or by expending clothing/armour item. May be applied to free escape attacks gained from Guards etc.

Partial Armour
The skill set for people that are really into armour that shows a hell of a lot of midriff.
0 Partial Armour Mobility Don't Sink in partial armours. Can Expend Partial armour to run at no cost. Can expend non partial armour for run if you have Partially Torn.
0 Partial Defence Evasive 3 to NDef when wearing a Partial main armour/clothing item/Top Layer.
1 Partially Torn Expend a non-partial Armour or Clothing item, without expending it, adds Partial instead, reduces any armour bonus -1
1 Partial Wrestling may add Wrestle and optionally Escape to any close range attack by expending and optionally disarming any Partial clothing or armour item, or at 1E cost if in Partial clothing/armour. Partially torn allows use with non-partial expended items.
1 Selective Combined Defence “On hit” 1E forgo your Armour bonus & item keywords from a partial armour item. Adding Evasive +2. OR forgo your Evasive bonus & remove Body keywords while using a partial armour item. Adding Armour +2
2 Armour Bash Amour, Helmet, Boots and Gauntlets (if Armour items) count as equipped weapon or unarmed attacks. Off hand with unused armour bash 1E each. Helm and Shield Knock on hit for 1E, Gauntlet Grab or Disarm 1E on hit.

Tight Armour
A set for cat suited leather clad "rogues".
0 Flexible Armour Mobility may Run at no cost & May ignore first 3 zones of falling when wearing Tight armour or clothing.
0 Flexible Defence Armour+1 and Evasive 2 to NDef when wearing any Tight armour or clothing
0 Cat Suit Fall While in Tight armour or clothing 1E or expend tight item to negate a Falling damage attack (on hit).
1 Elastic Jump 1E while in Tight armour or clothing, or expend Tight item (and optionally disarm it), to add Jump
1 Tight Skin Layering Equip extra layer of tight armour/clothing over any other skimpy or light clothing/armour. Remove layer optionally at no cost if expended. Expended upper layer may still be disarmed for costs of Elastic Jump, Cat Suit Fall, Elastic Escape or Hide/Decoy from Inglatable Decoy Skin (but no the perfect block option).
1 Elastic Escape While in Tight clothing or armour, may add Wrestle and Escape +2 vs All to any attack
If the attack fails, or before attack, may expend (and optionally disarm) Tight item to automatically succeed an undamaging escape.
1 Elastic Evasion Block While in Tight clothing or armour, 1 EW
Expend 1 Energy per 1 Block against a Slow attack this block uses Evasive and your body or clothing/armour keywords.
2 Inflatable Decoy Skin Expend AND Disarm Tight item for Evasive Obfuscating Decoy PerfectBlock against any Non-Fast attack. Hide and Sneak next turn ignoring ALERT. OR perform as a Decoy type Hide/Parry action.

Chain Armour
A set that for some reason had to exist.
0 Chainmail Mobility Do not sink in Chain. May expend Chain in place of energy to fuel a Run action.
0 Chainmail Defence Armour+1 and Obfuscating 2 to NDef when wearing a Chain main armour or clothing item.
1 Chain Shirt Layering May wear extra chain shirt layer under another armour item (including another chain shirt) Shirt layer may be torn with upper layer still equipped if upper layer is expended.
1 Chain Wrestling may add Wrestle and optionally Escape to close range attack by expending Chain item worn, or for 1E if you are wearing Chain. Optionally may disarm the item to have it add Pin (on hit) using itself and it's bonuses (if not expended) for pin defence.
1 Chainmail Net You may disarm a Chain item to make extra Thrown Weapon Pin Undamaging ShortRange SingleTarget attack with item keywords. The attack “pins” using chainmail items defence (as if you were wearing it, including skill bonuses). Expended item may be used, but it loses defence bonuses as normal. Also may make Chainmail nets with chain items you disarm from other targets for free on disarm success.
2 Adaptive Chain Block While in Chain 1E per Block against a Slow attack block uses Obfuscating and chain item keywords.
OR Expend 1E per Block against a Weak attack block uses chain item keywords.

Plated Armour
Armour made out of big bits of metal. All the cool kids are doing it.
0 Plate Armour Mobility Can Run and Charge actions in plate
0 Improved Armour Plating Armour +1 to NDef from a Plate armour/clothing item
0 Ablative Armour Plating additional torn shirt function on Additional Armour Plating and similar items
2 Plated Deflection Block when in Plate 1E per Block vs Weak block uses Plate item keywords. Or Expend a worn main Plate item to gain 2 Blocks using item keywords. Or Both
2 Armour Bash Amour, Helmet, Boots and Gauntlets (if Armour items) count as equipped weapon or unarmed attacks. Off hand with unused armour bash 1E each. Helm and Shield Knock on hit for 1E, Gauntlet Grab or Disarm 1E on hit.
1 Plated Escap You may expend a plate armour item to add Wrestle Escape to any action.
0 Improved Plated Block When you fully expend a plate main clothing/armour item, it grants an additional Block (so normally 2 instead of 1).
0 Shared Plate Block You may use blocks related to plate armour to block any attack you are in LoF of, not just attacks targeting you.
1 Plate Shell Decoy Expend and abandon your Plate armour as a Perfect Block, then take the number of turns it normally takes you to disarm the armour, during which you are effectively hiding (at +6 vs all ignoring alert) and treat observers as not alert if you sneak/hide on your exit turn. Note this decoy may NOT be used as a decoy parry.

Robes
For people that put on a frilly dress and insist that it's appropriate combat attire. Or in other words "Wizards" and "The Pope".
0 Robed Mobility run for free if in non-heavy Robe or Skirt, or a Cloak (heavy or not). May run & charge in Heavy robes and skirts.
0 Alice's Parachute in Cloak, Robe or Skirt may negate falling damage attacks (before the roll), and at 1E, or expend a Cloak, Robe or Skirt item, gain Glide and either not fall at all, or to glide in a controlled partially downwards direction.
0 Cloaked Defence in Cloak, Robe, or Skirt gain Obfuscating 2 on NDef. If it is primary clothing item gain Obfuscating 3 instead.
0 Bell Of The Ball Pretty +1 to SDef & NDef in Cloak, Robe, or Skirt item. May use Torn Shirt and with Social when expending cloak, robe or skirt items.
1 Concealed Skirt Strike in Robes Cloaks or Skirts Obfuscating +3 vs Evasive on unarmed or Light weapon attacks, Assassinate attacks, and attacks with items/weapons successfully concealed by your robe/skirts until this turn.
1E before attack to treat any target that failed to detect a concealed skirt attack as Unready
1 Cloth Net disarm a Robe, Cloak or Skirt to make a free additional Thrown Undamaging Weapon Obfuscating Pin ShortRange SingleTarget attack (+4 vs Evasive) with item keywords. Pins with item keywords and defences. You CAN use expended item, but it loses bonuses. May make this attack free as extra attack any time you disarm such an item for any reason including other costs and with items you disarm from other targets with your attacks.
0 Robe Layering Disarm any Heavy Clothing item or Cloak, Robe or Skirt item any time at no cost. Presumably used mostly for layers.
1 Skirt Layering Lets you use 2x Layered Skirt items. May take this skill multiple timesfor 2 additional skirts per use.
1 Robed Wrestling may add Wrestle and optionally Escape to close range attack by disarming any Robe/Cloak or Skirt clothing or armour item you are wearing. Works with cloth net. May be used with expended items.
2 Cloak Decoy on a Sneak or Hide action you may disarm a Skirt, Robe or Cloak item for a Decoy hide/parry effect to ignore Alert. Characters effected MAY continue to attack and interact with the decoy, if they do attack it then it is also automatically expended in addition to being disarmed.

Heavy Armour
For people that like armour, but bigger and heavier. Handy especially for combining for Plate and Robe users, maybe Chainmail too.
0 Heavy Defence gain Armour +1 or Armour 2 (your choice) when top layer has Heavy.
2 Heavy Block When in Heavy 1E to cancel ALL Non-Strong effects of types Knock, Throw, Pin, Grab, or which otherwise move you for the rest of this turn (may be triggered on Hit) as a Parry effect ALSO spend 1E Per Block vs Non-Heavy attacks with Projectile, Weapon or Unarmed
1 Unresponsive Heavy Block Expend heavy items or item upgrades for blocks EVEN when Unready
0 Emergency Eject Whenever you disarm from a Heavy Armour or clothing suit, you MAY then Move up to 2 Zones (before additional bonuses) and add Jump. You may opt to use this ability with expended items, or when an item is expended or disarmed by any effect. This ability has no direct action cost. This effect also adds Escape and Wrestle to it's movement (but not to other actions)
1 Heavy Layering Wear additional Heavy armour or clothing layer over standard non-heavy armour or clothing. When expended ceases to be top layer even if not shed.

Shield Use
For people who just want to carry a shield. Probably best mixed with at least one other primary Pants related skill set.
0 Shield Defence Armour+ 2 and item keywords to NDef with at least one Shield item in a hand (or otherwise in a ready weapon slot).
0 Moar Shield Defence Armour +1 and item keywords for each additional ready shield beyond the first. And for 2 handed shields.
1 Weapon Block Expend ALL helf/Ready Weapon items Gain one block each or 2 blocks each for two handed items.
OR Expend 1 or more Shield items for one block each (2 blocks each if two handed).
0 Sword Chucker may add Thrown, Long-Range and Double-Range Penalties to any Close-Range Weapon attack.
2 Armour Bash Amour, Helmet, Boots and Gauntlets (if Armour items) count as equipped weapon or unarmed attacks. Off hand with unused armour bash 1E each. Helm and Shield Knock on hit for 1E, Gauntlet Grab or Disarm 1E on hit.
1 Shield Wall As an action (potentially On Hit as a sort of auto parry) double the defence bonus you gain from your shields.
0 Quick Shields Your shields are super fast. Remove slow and add Fast to your Shield Wall action. [Requires Shield Wall]
1 Drop Shields Each time you drop a shield item (including expended items and involuntary or cost based disarms) you may equip an available item from a pocket or other slot in it's place and make a free off hand attack with it. You may drop shields at no action cost to trigger this. You may equip more shields with this.
1 Shield Roll You can shield wall, roll for +1 Move and a Charge action attacking with a shield item as a single action. MUST move at least 2 zones to attack. [Requires Shield Wall]
2 Shield Opportunist Free attack in Refunds with Shield item against any target that misses you with an attack. For 1E on hit this attack gains Undamging and Disarm or Knock
Again these sets are really handy to have. Almost everyone should take at least one. Maybe two, especially if they took Heavy Armour or Shield Use.

Characters looking to build especially invulnerable builds might like to consider stacking up elaborate multi-skill set based builds. Where they transition from heavier armour defences down to lighter ones with various combos of ablative skills/items.

Earlier revisions of the skills/items made that REALLY easy, and pretty much loaded it all onto a cheap single skill in No Clothes, that meant that virtually EVERYONE wanted that skill and EVERYONE was a full ablative stripper to some degree because, why the hell not it was cheap as dirt. This was problematic. And put the game at risk of being some sort of stripper farce. Which is totally bad, only characters with the Dancer skill set were supposed to be doing THAT...

This revision (and the one prior) hopefully has reduced that, and to pull of the ablative thing now you would need to collect a number of skills and items from various sources. Anyone can pull of a single layer or so of ablative stuff fairly easily with an item or a skill from their main specialty, but its a specialist (but possible, and hopefully well costed) build to go through the full russian doll routine from top to bottom.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

LT Social Skills
The social skill sets. Characters could build without them, or specialise with a social skill set as their primary offensive role. But it's probably best to mix in a social skill set with other alternative roles for a balanced functional character, and they can interact in very useful ways with numerous other skill sets (especially sneaky and assassination related stuff).
I'm still not entirely happy with social skill sets. I think they need a few more options in general, and I still don't quiet like my basic social targetting mechanic and the multi target attack skills that interact with it.
Terrorism
For scaring fools.
0 Destroy all Cowards +3 vs Cowardly to ALL attacks (social and normal)
0 Laugh at Cowards 1E per Block against Cowardly attacks. block has Social Scary Mental may used vs social or normal attacks.
0 Frightening Add +2 vs All to all your Scary social attacks.
1 Mass Terror 1E before attack to ignore multi-target penalty on Scary Social attack. If you have normal injuries may ignore mutli-target penalty on scary social attacks in 1 zone per injury at no cost.
1 Overwhelming Terror 1E on hit to ignore Alert on Scary social attack. Or may expend clothing, armour or weapon for same.
1 Combined Terror Requires Mass Terror and Overwhelming Terror. Do both for 1E. Pay 1E to make a scary attack once per turn off hand.
1 Selective Terror Scary social attacks change from MultiTarget( All in X) to MultiTarget(UP TO all in X).
2 Aura Of Terror 1E to make a Scary Parry vs anyone attacking you, cancelling all actions on hit. Need not have knowledge of attack. Ignores alert when triggered by assassinations.
1 Boo! 1E to make a Distract or Parry social special attack with Scary once per turn as an Off Hand attack.
1 Loosened Grips Scary social attacks may add Disarm.
1 Paralysing Fear may Prevent Alarm using Scary social attacks. But only for 1 turn. When making a Scary Parry or Prevent Alarm may add Stun. Causing Unready on targets next turn.
1 Surprising Heart Attack may make a Scary social attack against a single Unready target as a special attack adding Assassinate and KO or Kill, +3 vs All against any target with only 1 remaining Injury.

Friendliness
For friending fools.
0 I Come In Peace! Changes default Friendly, +3 vs All if you appear unarmed +0 vs All if you appear armed
0 Voluntary Disarmament may voluntarily disarm any threatening items as part of a friendly social attack and count as unarmed
1 Joint Disarmament May apply voluntary disarmament on up to all threatening items and any other items to add X times Disarms to your friendly attack (and make it undamaging), which is the same number of disarms you applied to yourself [Requires Voluntary Disarmament]
0 Class Unity +1 vs X to all your Friendly attacks. Where X is ALL the Socially Developed keywords EXCEPT the one opposed to you. [Requires Socially Developed]
0 Friendly +2 vs All to all your Friendly attacks.
1 Group Friendship 1E before Friendly social attack to ignore multi target penalty. And when making multi target Friendly attacks may change Multi-Target to “Up To” instead of “All”.
1 Overwhelming Kindness on Friendly attack 1E (on hit) to ignore Alert. Lose own Alert to ignore Alert for all social attacks for 1 turn
1 Combined Friendship Requires Group Friendship and Overwhelming Kindness. Do both at once for 1E. And 1E once per turn for off hand Friendly social attack.
0 Don't Panic! Suffer no “failed stealth” penalty to friendly Prevent Alarm
0 Surprisingly Friendly +2 vs All to friendly Social Surprise
2 Gentle Innocence 1E to make a Friendly Parry attack against anyone attempting to attack you, cancelling all actions on hit. Even if unaware. If triggered by assassinations target is not Alert.

Seduction
For seducing fools.
0 Decadent Plaything +2 vs Decadent to all your normal AND social attacks.
0 Untouched By Decadence 1 block per 1E vs Decadent. block has Social Seductive Mental and can apply vs social and normal
0 Seductive +2 vs All to all Seductive attacks
0 Gender Appeal +2 vs (opposite gender) to all Seductive attacks
0 Broad Appeal Change Gender Appeal bonus (if any) to +2 vs All. Suffer no Inappropriate gender penalty.
0 Ageless Appeal Suffer no Inappropriate age penalty.
0 Boundless Appeal Suffer no Inappropriate species penalty.
1 Mass Seduction on Seductive Social attack ignore multi target penalty for 1E. May disarm worn items to ignore multi target penalties in 1 zone per item.
2 Overwhelming Beauty on Seductive attack 1E to ignore Alert. When naked or Skimpy may ignore Alert on targets when making ANY social attacks.
1 Double Seduction Requires Overwhelming Beauty and Mass Seduction. Does both for 1E. 1E for an off hand seductive attack each turn.
2 Breathtaking Beauty 1E to make Seductive Parry attack against anyone attacking you, cancelling all actions on hit. Even if you are unaware. If triggered by assassination target is not Alert.
0 Surprisingly Seductive +2 vs All to Seductive Social Surprise
0 Highly Distracting +3 vs All to seductive Distract attempts
0 Alarmingly Attractive no penalty for being equipped for combat on Seductive Prevent Alarm
1 Loosened Clothing on Seductive social attack may add Disarm. For free, vs worn items only.


Trickery
For fooling fools.
0 Manipulator of Fools +1 vs Non-Tricky, +1 vs Stupid to all normal AND social attacks.
0 Trickster +2 vs All to all Deceptive attacks.
0 Immune to Idiocy 1 block per 1E vs Stupid. Block has Social Deceptive Mental and can apply vs social and normal attacks.
1 Mass Deception on Deceive attack ignore multi target penalties for 1E. Note selective attack with Up To not All targetting.
1 Layers of Deception may make a Deceptive social attack against a target you have already defeated with Deception who is still effected (or was until THIS TURN) and may treat them as having only 1 remaining social injury when doing so (effectively defeating them with one unblocked hit on a success).
0 Class Charlatan 1E to change your selected option from Socially Developed. [Requires Socially Developed]
2 Overwhelming Lies on Deceptive attack you may pay 1E to ignore Alert. Ignore Alert for any social attack when targeting a character still suffering a social injury from one of your prior Social attacks.
1 Lies Lies Lies Requires Overwhelming Lies and Mass Deception. Does both for 1E. 1E once a turn for off hand deceptive attack.
0 Master Of Disguise +2 vs all to Disguise actions
3 Deceptive Substitution As action, or off hand attack for 1E once a turn, may make Deceptive attack with Undamaging Obfuscating Scaling and Parry this attack ignores Alert. On a success your victim's attack may substitutes 1 target +1 (if multi target) per margin of success of your choice. Attack then rerolls vs new targets. May be used vs normal or social.

Anti-Social
For pretending you are opting out of the social stuff.
0 No! Me Smash You! +3 vs All to non-social attacks vs any character that makes a social attack against you this turn.
0 Very Anti-Social +3 to SDef whenever targeted by Social attacks. But NOT stealth attacks.
0 Social Disruption Prevents Multi Target Penalty form being ignored if you are a target of a social attack.
1 Unnerving Alertness Prevents Ignore Alert on social attacks against you.
0 Actual Class Warfare +2 vs X to all Non-Social attacks. Where X is your opposed Socially Developed keyword on targets SDef. [Requires Socially Developed]
0 Actual Class Traitor +2 vs X to all Non-Social attacks. Where X is your keyword from Socially Developed on targets SDef.
[Requires Socially Developed]
0 I Hate Those Guys +2 vs X to all Non-Social attacks. Where X is the any keyword from Socially Developed on targets SDef. Hate Those Guys requires you to select the keyword when taking the skill, may take multiple times for multiple keywords.
[Requires Socially Developed]
3 Socially Oblivious 1E you can negate any social “effect” on hit. 1E per block vs any Social injury. All Energy Min 1 for a perfect block vs any social attack.
Social skill sets do not combo especially nicely with each other, though there are some potential limited combo benefits. Very limited. But they DO combo very nicely with skill sets from outside of the social skill sets. Plenty of the “class/proffession” skill sets have some interaction with social stuff.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

OK so I still have like 12 more pages of skill sets, including all the magic ones, all the classy ones, and the crappy tacked on ones to put up and then the items related to all the skill sets.

But I'm bored of this cutting and pasting for now.

Feel free to post. You know. All you ravenous hordes of people clearly eager to read and comment...

...any second now...

...all none of you...

...Well anyway. If by some miracle more than zero posts interrupt things I'll just edit stuff about so that it all fits nice. So, free reign or whatever.
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Post by mean_liar »

Have you actually compiled this into a single document?
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Post by PhoneLobster »

I keep this in several document files. So i have a core rules, a skills document, an items document, a buildings document and the "extra cultural items and junk" document. I print them out and keep them as loose sheets of paper and give them out so people can keep pages with skill sets and items relevant to their character.

So no. I don't have this compiled in a single document. Not sure why I would want to.
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Post by mean_liar »

PhoneLobster wrote:So no. I don't have this compiled in a single document. Not sure why I would want to.
Because it's a better format for sharing it with other people?

...nah, that's crazy talk. Keep handin' out those loose pieces of paper. THAT's the way to do it.

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Post by PhoneLobster »

mean_liar wrote:Because it's a better format for sharing it with other people?
Er, no it isn't. At the table having people be able to keep only the reference material relevant to them with no additional clutter is by far superior to handing them one giant bound book.

Between play having to reference several document files instead of one is not particularly problematic as long as it is clearly defined what materials are in which. So skills document, items document, etc...

As for sharing things on here. I offered to just plain upload some documents at an accessible location and no one could be assed. And I fully understand that because the best format for sharing these sorts of materials here is to actually directly post the text, because even downloading and viewing one document is a hassle compared to just reading some posts right here.

So why you suddenly feel inclined to complain I don't have this collated into one single document file confuses me. What do you want? I could spend 5 minutes and cut and paste it all into one giant mess of a document like less practiced less practical home brewers produce. But what the hell would be the point when it's actually more accessible in virtually every respect if I don't do that?
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Post by rampaging-poet »

One giant document is worse for sharing physically, but much better for sharing electronically. If you copy + Paste everything, export to PDF, and make it available for download somewhere, we can all see the entire ruleset and easily copy the current version.

I don't know what word processing software you're using, but OpenOffice has something called a Master Document that's basically a compilation of other files. If you create a master document linking all of your reference documents in a sane order, you can just periodically export a PDF of the entire system without having to copy and paste everything manually each time.

As for the skills themselves, there seem to be a lot of skill tax number boosters like Improved [maneuver] in D&D 3. They're all zero-point skills so it's not like they take away from the character's ability to do cool things, but they were the kind of thing that made tripping etc. impossible for the non-specialized in D&D. For example, anyone the uses a shield would be retarded not to take Shield Defence ASAP and you basically need Weapon/Projectile/Unarmed Skill if you plan to attack with those things. Most of the other skills look pretty good.
It's good that manoeuvring in armour comes free with abilities using that armour (via 0-point skill to run without without penalty).
Seduction is loaded with awesome 0-point skills, but because they're all good for anyone using Seduction the choice of which to actually won't always be clear. That said, unless you've gone out of your way to play a lolita or supermodel grandma Broad Appeal seems much more likely to apply than Ageless Appeal. Evaluation of Broad Appeal vs. Boundless Appeal depends on how strictly people stick to dating within their species. Can a player assume that most mammalian humanoids will be attracted to all other mammalian humanoid species, leaving Boundless Appeal for humans that want to seduce snake people and vice-versa?
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

rampaging-poet wrote:export to PDF
OK that I can safely say there is no way in hell of happening. I really hate the PDF format.

What I may do at some point is throw the document files up for direct access. But really, putting them up in the form of posts is by far better, people (potentially) actually read and discus it in a direct forum readable format.

Unfortunately looks like today just filled up and I'm not going to have time to do more cut and pasting OR upload documents right now. Especially since I'm wasting my last free five minutes writing this post.
a lot of skill tax number boosters like Improved [maneuver] in D&D 3. They're all zero-point skills so it's not like they take away from the character's ability to do cool things,
That's pretty much what the zero point skills are there for.

I understand the problems and with skill tax abilities like those... but, players want them. They want to say "I have weapon skill! yay!" and I really don't mind throwing them in as skill tax options at the zero point cost. And they do perform a valuable role in the game, they help differentiate trained and untrained characters within a speciality, and yes, they can push people off various scales, but I have tried to be at least a little careful with the numbers there.
Seduction is loaded with awesome
How did I know it was going to go straight to that. Terrorism had some good skills in too you know. But anyway...
but because they're all good for anyone using Seduction the choice of which to actually won't always be clear.
Not too concerned with that.
That said, unless you've gone out of your way to play a lolita or supermodel grandma Broad Appeal seems much more likely to apply than Ageless Appeal.
Yeah... I'm not too sure how happy I am with even having Ageless appeal in the game. I mean it's largely meaningless and doesn't really go around creating lolita stuff on it's own, but I feel even the tiny encouragement it provides for that is probably too much. But yeah. Broad Appeal and Boundless Appeal should be way better. Situations where you are seducing Grandpa (grandpas are hard to seduce by non-grandmas, for some reason) will be far less common than cross species or cross gender preference. And hopefully situations involving any kind of lolita basically non-existent. So yeah. Those are better.

As for how much interspecies penalties kick in... sadly it's basically undefined. So consider it more a "Free pass to prevent the GM dicking with me about Elves not liking Dwarves" just as much as it is the ability to seduce a Yeti with a Yaunti.

Of course the penalties involved in all three of those abilities are pretty damn tiny anyway. So it's really all minor skill tax territory and of much less significance than say that ability in Terrorism that disarms people (or the one that stuns them) or the ability in Seduction that disrobes targets.

Or at least that is the general idea.
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Post by rampaging-poet »

I only suggested PDF because most people will have a PDF reader of some sort. It's just a convenient way to export everything to one file while maintaining your current structure. There's probably other options. If you're not doing anything too crazy even export to RTF or HTML would work. Or just zip up all the documents. Just about anything would be better than copy+paste+format. Still, it's you're choice how you upload it.

My comments about Seduction weren't intended as criticism. Everything there being equally good is a good thing. Taking a look at Terrorism, it does have some neat abilities. Actually, all the social skillsets have at least one skill that I would seriously consider when making a tank or assassin. I'll have to look at the character generation rules and starting skill points again, then make up a few sample characters to get the hang of things.

I forgot to mention this in my last post, but the repeated mentions of clothing damage as a core mechanic and the skill rules for stacking armour are really reminding me of the anime Dog Days. Theoretically, anyone who gets injured turns into an immobile ball. In practice, anyone important expends their clothing instead of taking damage and surrenders when they run out. This also isn't criticism, I'm just noting a similarity.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

rampaging-poet wrote:I forgot to mention this in my last post, but the repeated mentions of clothing damage as a core mechanic and the skill rules for stacking armour are really reminding me of the anime Dog Days. Theoretically, anyone who gets injured turns into an immobile ball. In practice, anyone important expends their clothing instead of taking damage and surrenders when they run out. This also isn't criticism, I'm just noting a similarity.
Well that's a general upshot of trying to make items in general into a dynamic resource and the elaboration on the basic captain kirk "Torn Shirt" ability available to all named characters.

And in practice the way it plays out is that experienced players actually treat their normal injuries as the expendable resource and happily take normal damage freely as long as it doesn't finish them, and save their clothing or armour based blocks for either preventing the last hit that finishes them or preventing special injuries like one hit kills or the loss of limbs etc...

It's a very helpful mechanic in a lot of ways. Because, among other things, it means that a rather a lot of attacks can throw around severed limb damage and the like without the PCs ending up as multiple amputees.

There is something somehow much more exciting and interesting about being able to say "the villain hacks your arm off with an axe" and then have the player say "no he didn't, he tore my fancy shirt!" compared to, well, just not doing the arm hacking off thing in the first place.

I worry that it all gives an image of being a bit strippy. Which is fine for SOME characters, but not cool for others. But hopefully the changes to ablative build strategies make actual clothing stripping ablative characters a bit more of a niche thing as originally intended.

Anyway I decided to squeeze in some late copy pasting. Here is the magic skills section...
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Post by PhoneLobster »

LT Magic Skills
Skill sets for shooting five kinds of magic energy at people.
Magic Skill Sets and Mystic power sources
Magical skill sets, which are basically these ones, can only be used by a character who has Mystic on their basic keyword list, or who has a magical power source item (usually a Battery item of the matching type, with a charge held in it). This is a bit of an annoying little requirement, but it adds a bit of flavor and some potential build trade offs early and strategies to do with denying/disarming power sources and such.

Pretty much anyone can get mystic onto their basic keyword list at the cost of unlocking any of the magical classy skill sets and buying a single 0 point skill. Magical battery items are only mildly pricey and common to all magic skill set related item groups.
I am not entirely sure I'm happy with the way I set up blaster attacks. Currently a Blaster attack sort of flat out gives a bonus comparable to things like “weapon skill” as part of it's profile, can slightly enhance its upgrades if used in conjuction with a wand (and be used as an inferior form without a skill if you have a wand), and can gain bonuses comparable to weapon item bonuses through use of the Blaster Rings skills and items. But at least it's a bit different in function and flavor to swords... but I'm not sure its in a good enough way.

I am VERY not sure I'm happy with the attack enhancer abilities. The ones where you have a skill that lets you tack on your electro effects and bonuses to a sword attack etc... Those are super hacky, but sort of important.
Electromancy
Zap things with lightning.
1 Electro Shocker Enhance a normal attack for Electro Energy Magic Enhance +2 vs Metal +3 vs Grabbedby you) or Grabbing(you)
1 Electro Blaster Energy Electro Magic Weak Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Metal
1E for MultiTarget(Up to 5)
2 Electro Stunner Electro attacks gain Parry (cancel all actions on hit) 1E Before attack to add Stun to Electro attack.
1 Magnetic Disarm add Disarm against Metal or Energy items for 1E (on hit) to Electro attack. May stack 1E per disarm added.
When using this skill may also optionally add Undamaging. May also levitate disarmed metal or energy items back to hand or pocket.
1 Electro Chaining 1E (on hit) your Electro attack gain Chaining (short range, copies are single target, but still chaining).
1 Magnetic Guidance Electro attacks get Guided and limited Smart (automatically targets metal, metal wearing or metal holding)
1 Magnetic Levitation If you Min 1 Energy or a magical Electro power source item with a charge you may Glide instead of falling
1E or Electro compatible battery charge to add Fly to movement
1 Teleporting Zap On hit with Electro attack expend All Energy Minimum 1 to teleport yourself to the same zone as your target (or teleport your target to your zone). May choose to add Grab and teleport to the location grabbing the target.
1 Magnetic Shield 1E per Block against Non-Strong Metal and Non-Strong Energy
1E per Block against Electro attacks REGARDLESS of strong This block has Magic Energy Electro Weak

Cryomancy
Freeze things with ice.

NOTE: Frozen Being frozen makes a character add Frozen Immobile Unready Hard Armour+4 to their NDef profile in their next turn. They are totally immobilised, largely unable to move and act, and lose all Evasive bonuses to defence among other things. It's a lot like a stun effect, but a little stranger and more elaborate with the armour boost and evasive loss.
0 Anti Freeze Immune to Freeze effects.
1 Cold Hands Enhance Normal attack with Cold Energy Magic Enhance and +2 vs Body
1 Cold Blaster Energy Cold Magic Weak Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Body 1E (on hit) Devastating +1 and trait bonuses. 1E (before attack roll) for Close-Range and Multi-Target(All bar self)
2 Freezer may add Freeze to Cold attacks on hit for 1E. Freeze causes Frozen Immobile Unready Hard Armour+4 next turn on target. Extend duration on all active Freeze effects in your zone and any zones you target with Cold attacks by 1 additional turn for 1E.
1 Heat Seeking Cold attacks get Guided and limited Smart that automatically targets the hottest thing it finds.
1 Ice Wall As an action or for 1E, Create 1 Ice Wall +1 per extra 1E. Magic Energy Cold Wall Hard Ceramic Slow Undamaging Short-Range Multi-Target(All) -2 vs Fast +2 vs Non-Evasive +4 vs Slow Characters hit are positioned either side of the wall by the attacker, missed pick their own side. The wall has Magic Energy Cold Ceramic Hard Furniture 5 Transparent Armour 4 Total Defence 14, 4 Max Injuries. An unblocked Crack destroys ice walls outright.
Anyone with Ice Wall in Short-Range may expend 1E per Block to block damage to an ice wall caused by non-Strong attacks UNLESS those attacks have Fire or Crack.
0 Cold Feet may move freely on ice or snow surfaces without triggering slip, trip slide or fall hazards, or fragility effects etc...
may count as having Climb on movement for moving on any ice or snow surfaces. 1E to add Climb to your movement
1 Ice Shield 1Energy per Block vs Non-Strong Projectile and Non-Strong Energy attacks.
1E per Block vst Cold attacks REGARDLESS of strong. Block has Magic Energy Cold Weak

Pyromancy
Burn things with fire

[NOTE] On Fire Energy Fire Destructive Short-Range Multi-Target(Special) +2 vs Plastic +2 vs Flesh +2 vs Furniture +2 vs Oil Ignores Evasive, Obfuscating and Armour.
This is the ongoing attack effect of being on fire which is applied by any successful Fire attack and making it's own automatic attack in the next turn at the start of the burning character/item's action. Basically on a hit the already on fire character is damaged, and set on fire again for next turn. On a miss the ongoing On Fire effect will expire.
This attack targets the character that is On Fire AND one other random target who is NOT already On Fire at Close-Range or if there are NO such targets at close range then one such random target at Short-Range. Randomised targets include furniture such as walls and floors, but excludes furniture items made out of purely non-flammable materials.

[NOTE] Oil to the Flame any Fire attack gains devastating +1 for each target it hits with Oil on it's defence. ALSO NOTE You cannot use Oil to block an injury from FIRE! Yes this is the only mention of that, yes I should point this out more...

[NOTE] Putting Out a Fire A character can spend an action to put out an object or consenting character that is on fire within close range (including themselves). This actions succeeds automatically and also negates the full injuries and effects of the On Fire attack the character suffers during the same turn (but not any other Fire based attacks that hit them that turn).
Water also puts out a fire. Any character that moves into any significant amount or flow of water is put out automatically. Any character that is IN such amounts of water is immune to the on fire special injury from Fire attacks, but is not immune or even resistant to the rest of the attack.

1 Burn Burn Burn 1E at start of turn. All On Fire attacks in LoS this turn gain Magic +4 vs All and Chaining such that each hit causes On Fire to chain to an additional single target (of your choice) within short range.
1 Fuelled By Flame ignore 1 Injury from a single Fire attack for free each turn. before Injury Cap If hit by any Fire attack (after parry) regain +1E in the Resource phase that turn.
0 I'm On Fire set yourself On Fire with no blocking at the beginning of a turn for 1E. Then when your action comes around that same turn you will suffer an On Fire attack. You may opt for any Fire attack including On Fire to automatically hit you without a roll.
1 Burning Hands Enhance Normal attack with Fire Energy Magic Enhance and +2 vs Plastic +2 vs Flesh +2 vs Furniture +2 vs Oil to attack.
1 Fire Blaster Energy Fire Magic Weak Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +2 vs Plastic +2 vs Flesh +2 vs Furniture +2 vs Oil
1E (before attack) for Undamaging and Multi-Target(all in 1 target zone)
1 Smart Sparks Fire attacks get Guided and limited Smart that automatically targets oil,explosives or largest most flammable target.
1 Flaming Rocket 1E to add Fly to movement. may opt for this to cause you to catch On Fire. If you are already On Fire you may add Glide to movement or add Fly and levitate stationary.
1 Explosive Teleport All Energy Min 1 apply the default undamaging/multitarget upgrade effect to a Fire Blaster attack. In addition to that regardless of the attack's success you will be teleported to the targeted zone. The fire blaster attack will also target you.
1 Fire Shield 1E per Block vs Non-Strong Projectile and Non-Strong Energy attacks.
1E per Block against Fire attacks REGARDLESS of strong. Block has Magic Energy Fire Weak

Kinetomancy
Smash things with invisible physical force.
0 Invisible Fingers use hands (or objects in hands) at Short Range to extend grip beyond normal. Further extend this range (for all hands for 1 turn) by +1 zone per 1E
1 The Invisible Hand gain Two Hand slots. The hands are invisible TK force.
1 Kinetic Levitation Wile with 1 Energy or a magical TK compatible power source with charge may Glide to levitate or drift. 1E to Fly
1 Augmented Force Enhance Normal attack with Magic TK Strong Enhance +2 vs All, 1E on hit add Throw
1 Kinetic Blaster Energy Magic TK Long-Range Single-Target +4 vs All -2 vs Magic 1E before attack Multi-Target(all in 1 zone)
1E (on hit) add Throw
1 Demolisher TK attacks gain Devastating +1 vs Furniture and may add more damage at Devastating +1 per 1 E on hit.
1 Gravitational Guidance attacks get Guided and limited Smart that automatically targets the heaviest object (TK, Heavy, size)
2 Gravitational Driver All Energy min 1 May first choose to “fall” in any direction, then make a TK basic attack into a Driver attack (min Devastating +1). If attack hits do not take falling damage
1 Impact Shield When using a Driver attack on miss take maximum of 1 Injury from backfire falling damage.
1E per Block vs Falling damage, from structures collapsing, and from Driver enhancement effects.
2 Kinetic Shield 1E per Block vs Weak Weapon, Weak Unarmed or Non-Strong Projectile attacks
All Energy Min 1 to PerfectBlock all physical force attacks (Weapon Unarmed, Projectile and TK) Block has Magic Energy TK

Sonomancy
Yell at things.
0 Speaker add Loud to Social attack to ignore range penalties.
0 Sonar Senses add Sonar 3 to SDef. Loud stealth actions do not get any Ranged bonus vs you. Unless deafened ignore the basic status effects of being Blind other than keyword and benefits.
0 Deafening add Deafening to sonic attacks or ANY loud action. If it is an attack then it deafens anything it hits. Deafening is a special normal injury. The causes Deaf, victim ignores the effect of the Loud keyword, victim to treats ALL actions as Silent and loses Sonar
0 Sonic Levitation All uses are Loud may Glide instead of falling. May walk on water and similar fluids, may walk on fragile surfaces
1E to add Fly to movement
0 Magical Song may add Magic and +2 vs Non-Mystic to Seductive and Scary social attacks.
1 Screaming Sword Enhance Normal attack with Magic Sonic Energy Loud Enhance +2 vs Hard 1E on hit add Crack
1 Sonic Blaster Energy Magic Sonic Weak Energy Loud Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Hard 1E before attack Multi-Target(all in 1 zone), 1E on hit to add Crack
1 Sonic Demolisher Sonic attacks gain Devastating +1 and a free Crack vs Furniture + Hard
1 Sonar Guidance Sonic attacks get Guided and limited Smart that automatically targets the loudest object (worst stealth checks?)
1 Banshee Gale Sonic attacks may add Rip AND Crack AND Destructive on hit at the cost of All Energy Min 1.
2 Sonic Shield 1E per Block vs non-Fast Hard attacks and non-Fast Energy attacks. 1E per block against ANY Sonic attack. Block has Magic Energy Sonic

Venomancy
Poison things, or dissolve them in acid, or both.
Ok the whole venom blaster/acid blaster thing is a big mess and really I should split this whole thing and do a Venomancy and and Solumancy set separately well, maybe on next revision...
0 Poisonous Blood when normal injured (after blocks) may make a free Poison attack (Venom touch, Venom Blaster, Venom Cloud) in the next turn during your action, even if removed from combat. Attack gains +3 vs All if triggered by Sever, Dismember, Decapitate, Bisect, or Kill. If you take multiple injuries this effect may trigger multiple times in one turn.
0 Poison Immunity may opt to be immune to all Poison effects and the damage from Poison based attacks including your own.
1 Venom Touch Enhance Normal attack with Magic Poison Enhance and +2 vs Animal +2 vs Plant
1E Before Attack,add Kill or KO This bonus injury is Poison based and only works against Animal and/or Plant targets.
1 Venom Blaster Energy Magic Poison Weak Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +2 vs Animal +2 vs Plant
1E Before Attack,add Kill or KO This bonus injury is Poison based and only works against Animal and/or Plant targets.
1 Venom Cloud 1 Cloud as an action, or 1 Cloud for 1E cost (may pay multiple times in 1 turn with or without the action). Placed as short range or in contiguous cloud. Starts attacking as a Venom Blaster hazard next turn. Applied upgrades on placement are permanent. Ignores Evasive and Obfuscating defence on targets that stay entire turn in cloud.
1 Paralytic Poison Mod Poison attacks 1E on hit for Parry (cancel all actions on hit) and Stun. This bonus effect is Poison based and only works against Animal and/or Plant targets.
1 Mind Poison may modify poison attacks to be Silent and Undamaging. Instead apply a special poison based drugged injury (only works on Animal and/or Plant targets) that applies a -4 penalty to the target's SDef. Does not stack and is invisible and silent even in cloud form, even hits do not cause Alert.
1 Acidic Venom may modify poison attacks into Acid attacks instead. Removing Poison, and default bonuses, and all poison effects and adding Acid +2 vs All (only if using Venom Blaster or Venom Cloud) +2 vs Cloth +2 vs Flesh -2 vs Ceramic
1E On hit (or before attack for Clouds) add Devastating +1.
1 Softening Acid 1E On hit with Acid additional special softening injury that reduces the targets NDef by -4. Does not stack.
1 Dissolving Acids 1E On hit acid attacks may add Break AND Destructive. Only works on items made of Cloth, Flesh, Metal or Plastic.
2 Venom Shield 1E per Block vs non-Strong Plant or Animal, 1E per block vs ANY Poison or Acid, block has Magic Poison Acid

Shadowmancy
Kill things with shadow puppetry.
0 Shrouded in zone with Shadow gain Obfuscating X on your NDef where X is Shadow rating of the zone.
1 Shadow Teleport 1E teleport between any zones with Shadow rating 3 or 4 as if they were adjacent during a move action.
0 Shadow Sight Characters attempting stealth actions against you do not benefit from Shadow bonuses.
1 Shadow Shot may add Magic to an attack and draw your LoS/LoF and measure range “skipping” or “teleporting” between zones with Shadow rating 3 or 4.
1 Shadows Deepen As an action, or for 1E may increase the Shadow rating of any zone in LoS by 3 points. This action is Silent
1 Personal Shadows You radiate a bonus Shadow rating equal to current Energy points.
1 Frightening Shadows may add the Shadow rating of the zone you are in as a bonus vs all to Scary, Deceptive and Seductive Social attacks
1 Shadow Strike Enhance Normal attack with Magic Scary Cold Enhance and +X vs All +2 vs Cowardly X is the Shadow rating of the zone the target is in. 1E on hit Multi-Attack(all in 1 bar self).
If this attack hits any targets successfully (after parry) the Shadows Rating in that zone will increase by 1 point per target next turn
1 Shadow Blaster Magic Scary Cold Weak Energy Guided Long-Range Single-Target +X vs All +2 vs Cowardly
X is the Shadow rating of the zone the target is in.
This attack is guided and MAY also add limited Smart that automatically targets the first Cowardly or zone with a cowardly target.
1E on hit Multi-target(all in 1 bar self).
If this attack hits any targets successfully (after parry) the Shadows Rating in that zone will increase by 1 point per target next turn
2 Shadow Shield 1E per Block vs Non-Strong Energy and Non-Magic Cowardly attacks. Block has Magic Energy Cold Scary

Illuminomancy
Shoot things with sparkles.
0 Bedazzling in zone with Bright gain Obfuscating X on your NDef where X is Bright rating of the zone.
0 Blinding Light character may ignore Bright rating penalties to their Stealth and disguise actions. For 1E (on hit) they may instead add Brightness ratings as a bonus (+X vs Non-Blind) to their stealth or disguise action.
1 Dazzling Teleport 1E teleports between any zones with Bright rating 3 or 4 as if they were adjacent during a move action.
1 Brightness Grows As an action, or for 1E increase the Bright rating of any zone in LoS by 3 points This action is Silent
1 Personal Brightness Your radiates Brightness rating equal to their current Energy points.
0 Revealing Light Use Action OR 1E For the entire turn all attempts at Scary, Seductive, or Deceptive actions with LoS of this character now suffer a penalty to their attack equal to the Bright rating of the zone they are in. This is additional to any existing penalty.
1 Dazzling Light may add Bright rating of zone you are in as bonus vs all on Friendly, Deceptive and Seductive Social attacks
1 Bright Strike Enhance Normal Attack with Magic Energy Enhance and +X vs All +2 vs Weak X is the Bright rating of the zone the target is in.
1E on hit add Fire +2 vs Oil
1E on hit add Blind. Blind is a special injury preventing longer than close range actions, reduces LoS, adds Blind -3 to their NDef and S Def
1Energy on hit Multi-Attack(all in 1 bar self).
If this attack hits any targets successfully (after parry) the Brightness Rating in that zone will increase by 1 point per target next turn
1 Bright Blaster Magic Energy Weak Guided Long-Range Single-Target +X vs All +2 vs Weak X is the Bright rating of the zone the target is in.
This attack is guided and MAY also add a limited Smart effect that automatically targets something in the darkest zone it finds.
1E on hit add Fire +2 vs Oil
1E on hit add Blind. Blind is a special injury preventing longer than close range actions, reduces LoS, adds Blind -3 to their NDef and S Def
1Energy on hit Multi-target(all in 1 bar self).
If this attack hits any targets successfully (after parry) the Brightness Rating in that zone will increase by 1 point per target next turn
2 Bright Shield 1E per Block vs Non-Strong Energy and Non-Magic Deceptive or Seductive or Scary attacks.block has Magic Energy Fire Social

Hydromancy
Water fight!
0 Water Walker may add Swim to their movement, negating swimming penalties, +3 to Swim checks. AND may walk on water if you have more than 0 Energy.
0 Water Breathing Breath in water, immune to drowning effects.
1 Watery Teleport 1E to teleport between any zones in LoS flooded with swimmable Water as if they were adjacent during a move
0 Drowning Waters Drowning Attacks caused by water in LoS gain +2 vs All and double consecutive turns bonus.
1 Fog Cloud As an action or for 1E fill your zone or cloud contiguous zone with a harmless water mist Cloud effect, +1E per additional zone.
0 Fog Sight immune to LoS limitations and the Obfuscation bonus from Cloud effects.
1 Cloud Walker may treat Clouds as either water you can swim through (with the full benefits of the Swim keyword) or as surfaces you can climb or walk on.
1 Sea Breeze As an action or for 1E effect 1 zone +1 per 1E extra to disperse or move a cloud effect 1 zone. Takes effect next turn.
1 Drowning Fog as action or 1E all Fog Clouds in your LoS act like zones full of water for breathing/Drowning Attack effects.
1 Flooding Rains As an action or for 1E half fill your zone or any water contigous zone with water. If it is already half full of water you can COMPLETELY fill it with water. Or at same cost cause all Fog Clouds in your zone and contigious with it to apply this effect once each, and then optionally once again at the cost of dispersing the clouds. The waters are “held in place” by magic, but can be released to drain, or flood knocking things over or collapsing floors etc... at the creators option or if the creator is removed from combat.
1 Hydro Strike Enhance Normal Attack with Magic Energy Whip Soft Guided Smart Enhance +2 vs Evasive
1E on hit add Drown to this attack, this causes any target hit (after parry) to immediately suffer a Drowning Attack.
1 Hydro Blaster Magic Energy Weak Soft Guided Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Evasive
1E before attack Multi-target(up to 5).
1E on hit add Drown to this attack, this causes any target hit (after parry) to immediately suffer a Drowning Attack.
2 Water Shield 1E per Block vs Non-Strong Energy and Non-Strong Projectile
Block does not work vs Electro but can block even Strong Fire block has Magic Energy

Petramancy
Throw rocks at stuff.
2 Burrower Burrow through soft ground or 1E per turn or Exhaust at 0E to burrow through hard. Includes moving through walls while using other movement modes.
0 Trembly Sense If burrowing you can trace LoS (but not LoF) into (but not through) ceramic materials you are in contiguous contact with. You also have LoS to things in contact with the surfaces of those materials
1 Dig If you can Burrow you can leave behind a tunnel usable by other characters. Can build permanent tunnels in ST time. As an Action or 1E dig a hole starting at Close-Range in any ceramic ground or barrier of up to 20 Size +20 per extra 1E. This is typically 1 zone per 20 size. Pits dug under or near characters etc... become standard fall hazards starting next turn.
1 Stone Wall As action or for 1E create a stone wall at up to Short-Range of 1 zone size +1 per extra 1E, attacks as, Magic Ceramic Hard Wall Slow Undamaging Short-Range Multi-Target(All) -2 vs Fast +2 vs Non-Evasive +4 vs Slow Characters hit are positioned in either side at the attackers preference, those missed position themselves The wall itself hasMagic Ceramic Hard Furniture 5 Armour 6 Total Defence 16, 5 Max Injuries.
1 Stone Strike Enhance Normal Attack with Magic Strong Hard Ceramic Enhance +2 vs Slow
1E on hit add Throw and Knock to this attack.
1 Stone Blaster Magic Hard Ceramic Strong Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Armour
1E before attack Multi-Target(All in 1).
1E before attack also creates a single zone of Stone Wall in the target zone (see Stone Wall ability for details).
1E on hit add Throw and Knock
1 Avalanche may add Pin to Stone Strike and Stone Blaster. Pinning things under stone wall defence stats.
1 Medusa Blaster Magic Energy Weak Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +2 vs Non-Blind
1E before attack change to Petrfiy and Undamaging
1 Stone Shield 1E per Block vs Non-Strong normal attacks. Block has Magic Hard Ceramic

Hortimancy
Throw flowers at your enemies.
2 Burrower Burrow through soft ground or 1E per turn or Exhaust at 0E to burrow through hard. Includes moving through walls while using other movement modes.
0 Trembly Sense If burrowing you can trace LoS (but not LoF) into (but not through) ceramic materials you are in contiguous contact with. You also have LoS to things in contact with the surfaces of those materials
0 Bramble Feet may move freely on plant or planted surfaces without triggering hazards, or fragility. May count as having Climb on your movement for moving on any vertical or upside down plant or planted surfaces.
1E to add Climb to movement
1 Thorn Wall As action or for 1E create magical wall of thorns (starting) at up to Short-Range. Magic Flesh Hard Wall Slow Short-Range Multi-Target(All) -2 vs Fast +2 vs Non-Evasive +4 vs Slow Characters hit by this attack are positioned in relation to the wall at the attackers preference, those missed are positioned by their own preference.
Wall Has - Magic Flesh Hard Furniture 5 Armour 4 Total Defence 14, 3 Max Injuries.
Thorn wall structures can have Spikes on them, see the Spike Architecture options.
A character with Thorn Wall can expend their action or 1E during their action to heal a damage thorn wall (or more than one if extra energy is spent) in LoS up to 1 Injury +1 Injury per additional 1 E spent.
1 Thorn Strike Enhance Normal attack with Magic Flesh Hard Guided Smart Enhance and +2 vs Soft 1E on hit add Pin or Grab
1 Thorn Blaster Magic Hard Flesh Guided Smart Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Soft
1E before attack Multi-Attack(Up to 5). 1E on hit add Pin or Grab (may opperate like a grapnel hook with a line).
1 Ripping Thorns may on any natural roll of 19-20 OR (or both at once) for 1E on any roll add Rip to a Thorn Blaster, Thorn Strike, Thorn Weapon, or Impaling Bramble Weapon or even a Flowers attack.
1 Flowers Magic Social Poison Guided Smart Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs Animal or Plant This attack may be Seductive or Friendly but not both, pick one before Attack, apply usual standard modifiers for that attack type (armed or disarmed modifier for friendly, inappropriate target modifiers for seductive).
1E before attack Multi-Attack(All in 1) with no Multi-Target penalty.
1E on hit add Pin or Grab to this attack.
1 Root As Action or for 1E render yourself immobile (restricts actions) and root into the ground. Remove any Evasive bonus to NDef but add Armour +4. End this state at the beginning of any subsequent turn. Until you do heal either +1E or 1 Injury each turn in Resource phase as a Magic Heal
1 Thorn Shield 1E per Block against Weak normal and social attacks. block has Magic Social Flesh

Necromancy
Throw death at people until they get knocked out the other side of it.
God damnit this set has some stupidly good stuff in it. Yeah OK Fresh Meat and Death Too May Die might be like WAY too good... well... yeah may need some work
2 Weak Spirit Form 1E or your Action change your body material keywords to Energy Magic and become an insubstantial ghost for the whole turn.While immaterial. Cannot touch, attack, hold, wear or interact with items or characters unless they are Social, Mental, Energy, Magic, or Mystic You may extend this effect to your items at the cost of 1E.
You may opt to delay falling and remain stationary while immaterial.
While Immaterial 1E to gain Fly on movement
You may pass through walls and may opt to pass through floors and ceilings and any other solid objects.
0 Life Sense At the cost of your Action or 1E you gain LoS on all Animal, Plant, Mystic and Undead characters and items THROUGH any and all barriers that lack any of those keywords.
0 Death Too May Die You must not be Undead and must be a Plant or Animal to take this skill. Return from the dead as fullly healed undead one turn later. Check details in full description.
0 Death Sculptor Long term character modifier
2 Fresh Meat As Action and for 1E animate all the bodies of physically defeated characters WITH THE SAME CHARACTER PROFILE in a single zone at short range. These bodies are animated with all their old traits and current gear but modify their basic keywords to remove Animal and Plant and add Undead. This effect only applies to Animal and/or Plant targets and is reversible/healable if applied to characters that were merely unconscious. Animating bodies heals them of all KO, Kill and Standard injuries, but does not restore energy or heal damaged items, while it does not heal sever, bisect or decapitate injuries the animated bodies are not removed from combat by the ongoing effect of such injuries from PRIOR to animation (but are NOT immune to being removed from combat by such injuries received AFTER animation). Animated bodies are mindless creatures under the direct command of the animator. This ability is a Magic Heal effect
1 Vampiric Strike Enhance Normal Attack with Magic Enhance Energy +2 vs Flesh
If this attack damages at least one Animal or Plant target (after blocks) then in the same resource phase MUST gain +1 Energy, or as a Magic Heal heal 1 standard injury, if possible.
If you have Fresh Meat then if this attack defeats any Animal or Plant targets you may expend 1E at the start of the next turn to raise them all as Undead
1 Death Blaster Magic Weak Energy Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +2 vs Flesh 1E before attack Multi-target(All In 1).
If this attack damages at least one Animal or Plant target (after blocks) then in the same resource phase MUST gain +1 Energy, or as a Magic Heal heal 1 standard injury, if possible.
If you have Fresh Meat then if this attack defeats any Animal or Plant targets you may expend 1E at the start of the next turn to raise them all as Undead
3 Undead Pawns Expend 1E. You may now expend up to any number of your active controlled Undead characters 1 per Block to block injuries from any Normal Attack they fall into the LoF for.

Healing
Throw healing at people.
I like the healing set, it does good things in good ways and has good effects on the game... but I still fear that it just costs too many damn skill points to do it with...
0 Emergency Treatment as Magic Heal Close-Range Action heal long term only effects of a Kill or Sever injury of 3 turns or less age. +3 injury age per 1E, +1 Injury per 1E
0 Simple Cures As Magic Heal Close-Range Action cure the common cold...
1 Healing Spell As Magic Heal Short-Range Action heal a single target 1 Standard injury. +1 Injury per 1E.
0 Heal Thy Self As Magic Heal effect Free Action during your normal action 1E to heal 1 Standard Injury self. Or as action for no E cost.
1 Heal Any Thing As Magic Heal Close-Range Action All Energy min 1 to Fully repair a damaged or expended item. With Arise you may equip the item onto yourself or a willing/helpless character immediately.
1 Revival Use Heal Thy Self as free action for 1E even if removed from combat.
0 Arise! When using Heal actions effects can stand up a character as part of the heal action.
1 Life And Limb Healing Can fully heal KO, Kill or Sever injuries taken on the previous turn instead of normal standard injuries with a healing effect. +1 turn injury age per 1E.
0 Healing Aura For 1 E change a magic heal action to MultiTarget(all in one zone).
1 Special Healing Can heal Social Mental Fire Frozen Poison Disease Blind Deaf and other Special Injuries in place of normal standard injuries during a heal action.

Mind Control
Throw mind control at people
The social skill set that isnt. I feel this needs more options, it didn't get the revamp/overhall the real social skill sets did and I feel it suffers somewhat for it
0 Mind Reader Special Deception attack (Magic Undamaging Mental Short-Range Single-Target) To read thoughts. On success margin 0 target is aware of success. On fail margin 10 target is aware of failure.
0 Mental Mind Magic 2 and Mental to SDef
0 Mind Trick +2 vs Non-Magic to all Stealth actions.
2 Mind Control Energy Magic Social Mind-Control Weak Long-Range Single-Target +4 vs All +2 vs Stupid -2 vs Magic -2 vs Mystic, 1E before attack Multi-Target(up to 5 in one zone) with no penalty for multiple targets.
0 Mind Link -1Max Energy per telepathically linked target.
3 Pawn Block 1E to expend any number of mind controlled victims 1 victim per block to block any attack they are within LoF of.

Illusion
Throw holograms at your enemies.
OK illusion is still VERY poorly written in a lot of respects, especially Summon Illusion itself. But it does do a lot of things and tie in with the basic social mechanics fairly nicely to do a lot of them in a formalized way... it just still feels like a hacky mess while it does it and needs more options and clarifications
1 Illusory Invisibility May add Magic Illusion Transparent +4 vs Non-Blind to Hide and Sneak. Only changes body and limited items equal to current Energy also made transparent.
1 Illusory Disguises Add Magic Illusion +5 vs Non-Blind to Disguise actions. Does not stack with other masks/uniforms.
2 Summon Illusions Summon Illusions for 1E and -1Max E while maintained. This is a special Deception attack Magic Illusion Undamaging Disguise Multi-Target(All who can see it bar self) +2 vs Non-Magic +2 vs Stupid +2 vs Non-Tricky +2 vs Non-Mystic ignores Alert ignores multi-target penaltiy. REVERSES range penalties into bonus to attack. To appear to be an object or character.
Social attack with illusions as action or for 1E as an off hand attack, however once started the illusion may continue making the same attack/action for consecutive turns at no further cost. Modify illusion social attacks with Magic Illusion +2 vs Non-Magic -2 vs Tricky -2 vs Mystic And summoner skills.
2 Illusory Decoy All Energy min 1 to gain a Perfect block or Decoy hide/parry with Magic Illusion Decoy +2 vs Non-Magic -2 vs Tricky -2 vs Mystic

Transmogromancy
Throw mutagenic energy at your enemies and turn them into friendly... things...
And if illusion is bad and needs work Transmogromancy REALLY needs work... REALLY.
0 Mutant Pockets Pockets on body get +5 to conceal attempts but makes item unusable while hidden (unhide or hide at no action cost)
1 Transformational Disguises As Close-Range action for 1E add Magic +5 vs All to attempts to Disguise yourself (or a helpless or willing character, or an unattended item) into some other creature or thing. Does not stack with other masks/uniforms. Disguise effect is persistent until reversed with same action or a special injury heal.
2 Transformational Blast Magic Mutate Temporary Energy Weak Long-Range Single-Target +2 vs All +3 vs Non-Magic +3 vs Weak
1E Before Attack Multi-Target(All in 1 zone bar self)
1E (on hit) remove Temporary add Undamaging Sever (special mutation sever)
Normal injuries are temporary and heal if target is defeated by transformation. Defeated targets may be transformed freely and may be converted to mutant allies.
0 Body Sculptor Sculpt and create characters in strategic game time.
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codeGlaze
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Post by codeGlaze »

Sorry to sidetrack again, but why is it that you hate the PDF format?
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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar »

I was just looking for one file to download and read; I find reading the posts difficult.
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codeGlaze
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Post by codeGlaze »

mean_liar wrote:I was just looking for one file to download and read; I find reading the posts difficult.
Same for me.
I'm not by any means trying to criticize the posts (keep em coming), but I might try to translate it to a different format so I can consume it more easily.
PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

codeGlaze wrote:Sorry to sidetrack again, but why is it that you hate the PDF format?
Everything.

It's sloppy, inefficient, unstable and propriety. The actual adobe products it was intended for, including the free reader are terribad.

But anyway. I'll throw some dosuments up shortly. It IS easier to read them in some ways, more bolding and color on the keywords. But I gotta go right now.
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