Mailanka's Musings

Hacker

Fulfilling my last "Release the Balloon People" poll, I've released the Hacker cross-training power-up. This represents a sea-change in how I'm handling cross-training: instead of treating it like the Specialist Skill-Sets from Action, I'm treating them more like the Cross-Class Templates from DF, though not in the sense of literal cross-class training.  Instead, I generally find I prefer creating a list of things you can further invest in.  Rather than construct a character by picking a base template and 5 or so highly determined micro-templates, I'd rather you picked One Big Template and then One Big Power-Up, because this is conceptually simpler.  You might be a Cyborg + Space Knight or Psychic + Con-Artist. Similarly, I'd rather see Hacker + Assassin.  This also works very well for the "side-kick" templates I've built: you can take a 125 point "mini-template" and grab a 50-point power-up template, and then fill out the other 75-125 points with additional skills and advantages from your template.

In my experience, when I make characters with templates, at some point I already know what I want.  Following the details is nice, but eventually I get it and I'm tearing off on my own.  I suspect less experienced players eventually do the same, and they'll want more things from their advantage list than fits into the default value, more skills than they can afford, etc.  So, I feel like hitting fewer "high concept" templates like this works a lot better for this sort of character creation.

So you can see the Hacker template and the new, updated cross-training templates here.

Bloodsiders

You can check out their organization here and you can check out their mythology here.

 Man, this has been a thing I've been thinking about for literally years now, so it's nice to finally get it down on paper, so to speak.  At last, I have a sketch of the Criminal Organizations of Psi-Wars up and available. Not all of them, of course: rebellions and pirate fleets will (probably) have their own discussion, as will occult conspiracies.

This is one of those posts that leaves me feeling like it's simultaneously "too much" with too many "example" organizations with too much detail included, but at the same time, not enough, as people will doubtlessly want to know more about particular organizations, and want more organizations.  That'll come though.  As an extra treat, Subscribers and Patrons can vote on what organizations I give greater detail to, and later, if the stars align, I'd like to do a poll wherein we create our own criminal organization.

Enjoy!

I’ve been quietly working at criminal elements in Psi-Wars, including the release of the Security Agent Template and the Outcast background.  But what sorts of crimes are we actually committing that the cops need to stop us? While not a strictly necessary thing (crime isn’t so different in Psi-Wars from the ordinary world), thinking about it helped me sort out my thoughts.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive exploration, just a meandering musing on the sorts of crime we might see in the Psi-Wars universe, especially those organized criminals might focus on.  I’m not exactly a law enforcement expert, but if we approach this with a little thought and a focus on the cinematic, I think we’ll make some headway.

Most crimes in Psi-Wars will be familiar to anyone familiar with the 20th century, as that’s the core inspiration for pulp works which, in turn, inspire Psi-Wars. Nonetheless, the “space” part of “space opera” implies some sci-fi considerations, and thus some sci-fi crimes!

I will also note that crime, especially in action films like the Fast and the Furious and various heist films tend to be depicted in a glamorous light.  That glamour quickly fades when you look very close at criminality.  Psi-Wars is, while decidedly salacious, family friendly, so I’ve tried to elide certain realities and not discuss some of the more squeamish aspects of crime, but the implications of certain criminal elements are inescapable.