Northern Steppe Encounters

 

Fleshing out a region that is still weirdly un-fleshed-out. 

On the southern steppe you may encounter:

Nomad Houses

A 'house', 'family', or 'clan' - terms the nomads use interchangeably. Northern nomad houses are universally mobile horse riding pastoralists, and they ride in extended family groupings. The largest houses are very large, some up to ten or fifteen thousand, but they only very rarely ride together to preserve grazing land. More usually, a group of nomads will be between fifty and two hundred, made up of groups of close family, and presided over by an influential patriarch or matriarch. Every nomad rider has personal loyalty to their immediate kin group, and to their larger house, and warriors, traders, and diplomats will wear the flag-capes of both to signal their political and diplomatic positioning to others. 

Houses are known by the livestock that they keep; either cattle, dogs, or horses. All nomads ride horses, but not all are 'horse houses'. Nomad marriages are typically arranged between houses of different kinds, and each has their associated stereotyped character: cattle people are wealthy, proud, hospitable, and warlike; dog people are practical, clever, aloof, obsessive, sometimes underhanded, make bad enemies; horse people are charming, mercantile, physically attractive, gregarious, sly, and impossible to lie to. 

The nomad houses administer their territories and sometimes engage in limited feuds and border conflicts, but the steppe is currently in a period of relative stability, plenty, and peace. Many Baronials hold ancestral memories of terrible wars against their neighbours, but in the present day trade and cultural exchange are flourishing.

A nomad house will be composed of between fifty and two hundred adult riders, all of whom are capable fighters and especially practiced with the bow. They will be lead by family heads, who each have personal ties of allegiance (often via marriage) to the patriarch or matriarch of the house. The house head will be wealthy, and will keep a retinue of picked troops, who form an armoured and professional corps of fighters around which the rest of the house can organise in times of trouble. If the house produces any Errants, they will typically be outfitted by the largesse of the house head, and more often than not this means that only errants of aristocratic heritage are gifted the star weapons that they are so closely associated with.  

Nomad Rider

HD1, medium cross-hilted straight sword and composite bow, 50/50 unarmoured or light armour, sun goggles, movement: as human, disposition: typically clear-thinking, light hearted, gregarious, and claustrophobic. 

Will personally own two horses, and have access to more via the family's herd.

1 in 3 Riders will be accompanied by a Steppe Hound, who are considered part of the family. 

Steppe Hound

HD1, bite as medium weapon, unarmoured, speed: twice human, disposition: well-trained and well-loved companion animal. Will guard the bodies of downed Nomads to the death.  

If a Hound moves and attack on the same turn their target must test STR or be knocked prone. 

Nomad House Troops

As Nomad Rider, but HD1+1 and wearing medium armour. House troops are elites, and used to preferential treatment. They are easy to offend, and have a keenly developed sense of personal and house dignity. They wear the flag capes of their houses and kin groups, just like errants do.

Patriarch/Matriarch

As Nomad Rider but with between 2 and 4 HD, depending on seniority. Patriarchs and matriarchs are rulers of their territories, and administer these by personal fiat. They are used to being deferred to, and treated with complete obedience and respect. Patriarchs and matriarchs often quested as errants in their youth - 50/50 that they still have access a single star weapon that they used back then. It is considered a mark of prestige and shrewd political acumen to own star weapons that you no longer need to use. 

House Champions

Sometimes, a young errant will not get wisdom on their travels, or will find and preach a wisdom that is incompatible with the expectations of steppe adults: marriage, family, husbandry, and trade. These individuals are treated with a wary type of respect in their clans, and given the title 'champion'. They symbolically 'marry death', a ceremony that involves being buried in the earth for a day and a night, and are often outfitted with more star weapons, at great expense, by the family head. Steppe champions are extremely dangerous personal fighters, and typically become fixers, instructors, and war advisors (and even assassins) to their houses. 

Champions occupy a strange social position at the fringes of their society, and are significantly freed from many of the usual expectations of propriety. Young steppe fighters, from many different houses, are routinely apprenticed to famous champions to learn marksmanship, swordplay, and strategy, and the friendships, crushes, and rivalries of these formative years often go on to define the character of each fresh generation. Enough fall in love with their tutors that social customs and allowances have developed around the relation - something between Greek pederasty and The Secret History - and this is seen as an appropriate, pre-marital sexual and romantic tutelage that unfolds comfortably outside the normal channels. 

Stat House Champions as Patriarch/Matriarchs, who additionally carry d3 star weapons. They are unbreakable, and roll to hit at +1 over what their HD would indicate. Champions are often highly eccentric, superstitious, and fey-minded. They might crossdress, or wear expensive and eye-catching foreign clothing and cosmetics. They are generally treated more like ghosts or spirits than people by the rest of their house, and most of them are used to this and not given to socialising much. A House Champion will nearly always have a companion animal, with even chances of a dog (use the Hound entry above), cat, or raptor bird.

Cats are HD1, have claws as light weapons, unarmoured, speed: twice human, disposition: catty. They move silently, can disappear in grass or shadow, and deal an additional d8 damage from ambush. 

Raptor Birds have 1hp, talons beak as light weapons, unarmoured, flight: as hawk, disposition: proud, swift hunters. They perch on the shoulder when not 'in use'. 

Finally, a House Champion has a 50/50 chance of being accompanied by 2d4 Youngbloods - use the the Steppe Rider stats above. If a Youngblood is killed in battle, d3-1 other Youngbloods (determined randomly) had a crush on them, and will now fight to the death. If the Champion is killed, this is instead d6 Youngbloods. 

Reapers

They call themselves Reapers because they think it sounds intimidating - most people just call them bandits, or scalping, murdering bastards. Reapers are a border phenomenon; Baronials who have grown up near the nomad territories, and who have adopted some of their ways, and developed a strange hybrid culture focused on terror raiding and banditry. Reapers are still recognisably Baronials; they wear tattered and faded finery in the fashions of the capital, and make use of firearms and heavy armour where the nomads would use bows. They ride steppe horses, and ride very well, which is rare in the Barony proper, where heavy infantry are the socially-lauded troop type. Reapers are a perennial thorn in the side of both societies, and the nomads will often work with more settled Baronials to root them out and kill them. 

Reapers have developed a style of raiding that is significantly focused on terror and psychological warfare. They are famous for scalping, mutilating, and torturing captured foes, and for dumping the remains in uncovered mass graves about the border. Reaper bands are widely reviled, but successful groups can become powerful regional players, and there are often unspoken agreements between these successful raider-captains and their neighbours. Reapers make excellent deniable assets if you want to persecute your neighbours without playing hand too obviously. 

There are many romantic and bawdy tales of young Baronials fleeing poverty, debt, or the law by joining bands of Reapers, making masses of coin murdering on the steppe, and retuning home in triumph. The moral instruction in these tales tends to depend on the location of the Baronials telling them - more romantic further north, and less (and more concerned with illustrating the inevitability of their capture and execution) in the south.

Reapers

HD1, medium sabre or warhammer, light armour, sun goggles, movement: human, disposition: mad max raiders. Reapers ride good quality steppe horses, and will usually own two of them each. 1 in 3 carry a pistol, musket, or blunderbuss. 

Reapers who roll max HP are Baronial ex-mercenaries: they have HD1+1, are dressed in heavy armour, carry shields, and always hold firearms. 

All Reapers wear as much jewellery and expensive clothing as they can, and if the PCs loot their bodies after a confrontation they will find d4*10s worth of finery and cosmetics on each corpse. These goods are worth double in the north of the Barony, as long as you can convince the seller that they are authentic 'Reaper wear'. 

Smiths and Smith Houses

Smithing is a sacred profession for the nomads, and smiths are an exception to all of their usual customs. The Star Smiths are the most famous and celebrated, but all metalworking is stems from their art, brings its practitioners into contact with the divine. 

Nomad swords are some of the best in the world - the characteristic long, straight blade and cross guard are markers of quality throughout the world. Most nomad swords are simply well made medium straight swords, but a masterwork made from a celebrated smith might be treated as a +1 sword. Smiths never sell these weapons for money - you will need to get into nonspecific and potentially lifelong debt with them, or cause them to become so to you, to get access to them. 

All smiths live in a Smith House, which is traditionally built atop a mine or the site of a meteor impact. A Smith House is at once a fortification, holy site, demilitarised zone, and gaming house for other nomads, and smiths usually become vastly more wealthy from the patronage of their houses than the selling of their worked goods. Nomad maps note only three types of fixture dotted through the within the broad political territories: watering holes and rivers, burial grounds, including those of past civilisations, and Smith Houses. 

A typical Smith House will look, to a Baronial, like an extremely wealthy walled town. Mostly they are built in local, un-mortared stone - some import timber framing as a signifier of their status. Some Houses are built up enough within their walls that they become a single, massive, continuous building, subdivided into vast guest halls, gaming rooms, kitchens, forges, waterways, gardens, and kitchens. The wealthier the smith, the more prestigious their House - the houses of the Star Smiths are great and beautiful fortifications that rival those of the Baronial Petty Nobility. 

All smiths require access to a flowing waterway, and good quality fuel. Established Houses will already have both in ready supply, but should one of the other be compromised, a smith will pay extremely handsomely to have access reestablished. 

Smiths also keep apprentices; young nomads whose eyes are said to reflect the stars. Unlike the holy people of the ice clans in the south, this does not appear to be literally true, and refers to a specific sort of ungrounded and astral inclination in thought. Apprentice smiths work with mechanisms and firearms, competing to produce 'graduation pieces', and be selected for dream tutelage by the Star Smiths. If called on to defend the House, apprentices can do surprising damage with their strange contraptions. 

Stat smiths as commoners who possess a nearly supernatural facility with the metal that they work. Star Smiths are typically found seated in front of pools of still water, deep in dreaming meditation. They cannot be awoken from these trances, to the point that you can kill them, carve them up, etc. without a response. Killing a Star Smith with earn you the particular ire of a specific Star Person. 

Apprentices sare statted as Nomad Riders without any equipment save their graduation piece. A Graduation piece is a +1 pistol, musket, or blunderbuss with one of the following:

1. Repeating. Can be fired up to three times per attack action, with a -1 to hit per shot already taken that turn. 
2. Silenced. Makes a soft thwwppp sound when fired. The noise won't draw attention.
3. Sighted. If the firer does not move this turn, the star weapon rolls to hit at +1. If they spend a whole turn aiming with it, and don't move on their next turn, then it receives +4 to hit and a +1 expanded crit range that turn. 

In addition: Ghost Stories

Ox Men, Horse Men, Dog Men

N.B. 'Men' here is simply what they are known as, there are plenty of female Ox, Dog, and Horse Men. 

Tall, thin giants who hunt the peripheries and burial grounds of the nomad clans. They are said to live where horses cannot go: in stinking sumps, amidst sharp stony shale cliffs, in caves and pits. They have long fingers and skin like stone. They eat people; especially they eat lost people, or riders who rode their horses to death, or the wounded from battlefields. They are always watching and waiting for the moment to come loping out of the darkness grinning with the pleasure of imagining the meal to come. 

The nomads call them ghosts or spirits or demons or ghouls. 

Steppe Ghost

HD4, x2 long fingered, grasping hands as heavy weapons (If both hit, you are additionally grappled, and take an additional d6 strangulation damage per turn you remain so), armour: as chain, speed: twice human, disposition: lazy, smiling, calculating, utterly without pity. 

Ox Men are proud, bullying, bellicose. They have golden horns growing from their foreheads, and erect golden phalluses between their legs, including females. They are unbreakable, and deal fear damage equal to regular damage when they attack. Any currency that has been owned by an Ox Man is tainted and cursed: you roll on the death and dismemberment table with disadvantage while you carry it, and can only be rid of it by spending it. 

Dog Men are sly and cruel. They run and stalk in total silence, but the alert can always hear the wet sounds that their mouths make as they salivate at though of devouring you. A Dog Man can eat a human corpse in thirty seconds, and will heal to full HP if allowed to do so. They always appear in groups of at least 2d2. Their shit is a deadly poison, and smells so bad that it can stun you if you have less than 10 CON; CON save resists. 

Horse Men are social and personable, though no less dangerous or sociopathic - you can bargain with horse men if you have something they want. They will appear, rarely, leading bands of desperate outlaws in terrible campaigns of wanton slaughter and abandon, they even occasionally come to administer small human settlements. Horse Men can run all day, as fast as their namesake can gallop, without tiring. They also deal quadruple damage instead of double on crits, which represents them kicking your head smoov off. 

Deep Time Nightmares

The further into the steppe interior that you travel, the older and stranger become its hauntings. 

Oliphant Men

Oliphants were an ancient race who fought against the Bird Kings, and who refused alliance with early humans, considering them weak and pitiable. They were exterminated in totality by their foes, and their bones can now be found packing out whole strata of the chemical burials. 

Oliphant Men are terrible to look upon, crowned with both wisdom and kingly wrath. They are HD6, and fight with huge bronze spears (gigantic weapons) which can fire beams of light by reflecting the light of the sun (as longbow +1, only works in bright sunlight). When they speak, humans hear it as a Command, and must save CHAR to resist the compulsion to obey. 

Oliphant Men must be actively disinterred from their chemical burials. They have the disposition of mummies. 

Bird Men

Whence came they? And how were they made? None now know. The most feared and bloodthirsty spirits of the steppe, and terrible to look upon. Tall, thin, proud, vengeful. It is not known if they are birds-become-men, or men who have taken some aspect of death into themselves, and changed. Bird Men fight with ripping talons (as 2x heavy weapons) in place of hands, and terrible great beaks shod in bronze, long and thin like that of a heron. The beak will only ever be used to kill humans, and counts as a vorpal gigantic weapon. If it kills someone, their soul is sucked and slurped messily out of their skull. 

Bird Men appear saturated with gore and the leavings of carrion. If you meet their eyes you must save CHAR or be paralysed with terror. Each is utterly, inexpressibly insane. They each wear d3*100s worth of hammered bronze jewellery about their neck and face. If you run from them they will always catch you. Behind them you can hear the din and clash and roar of terrible battle, and smell its stench. There are swamps in the deeper steppe where the very earth still reeks with poisoned blood and offal from the ancient battles against the Lords of the Universe. 

Bird Men are said to haunt these places.

Serpent Men

Serpent Men look like people. You will know what they are when they grasp you and you feel their hideous, bone-snapping strength. Then you will really see them. 

Serpent Men know things about you and the people that you love, and will shout the most hideous obscenities, and the most private intimacies. This is unbelievably demoralising for most people - unless your ears are stopped up with wax or similar you take d10 fear damage each turn you fight a Serpent Man.

The words of a Serpent Man expose you to a random disease. This is true whether you hear them directly, or read their writing, or listen to a recording or an echo: the words of a Serpent Man always carry contagion.  

The Ice Clans

 

The Southern Nomads inhabit the steppe country that girds the end of the world. Beyond their territories lie blasted polar wastes: black rock, white snow, blue ice, and a sun that drives people mad.  

There are people who live there, and to their northern brethren they are holy people, closer to the sky and the stars than any other. 

They say that if you look into their eyes you can see, buried deep within, the gigantic wheeling of the constellations, the glittering arcs of cosmic bodies, the frozen void space that is the home of the sacred progenitors of cognition. 

The men and women of the Ice Clans are tall and rangy. They eat only meat and blubber, and they do not work metal, though some will carry knives and other steel and iron necessaries traded with their northern neighbours. They are stereotyped as direct, simple minded, and prone to casual violence. Their reputation with other nomads is something like that of the Mountaineers to the Baronials -  simple, honest, pious, wrathful, fey. 

Trepanning is nearly universal, and cannibalism is widely practiced - the Ice Clans take a equivocal stance to meat and sustenance. When they raid they fight with axes, picks, and bows. To pursue them onto the wastes is death. 

In game, stat Ice Clans as Southern Nomads with HD1+1, and access to light armour at best (no shields). All members of an Ice Clan band will be trepanned, and as such will have access to a single gift from this list. 

Sky-Gazers

A strange type of holy person, solitary and detached even by the standards of the southerners. Sky-Gazers move from clan to clan on vast circular pilgrimages across the ice. Each walks the orbit of a celestial body, whose interests they claim to represent on the terrestrial surface. Sky-Gazers speak rarely, and when they do it is usually in declamatory hate-poetry against sentient life. The Ice Clans treat them with reverence and fear, and provide them with food and shelter during their endless elliptical wandering. 

Sky-Gazers are conduits, like Mentats. Unlike Mentats, who maintain a degree of autonomy, a Sky-Gazer is nearly literally instrumentalised by the power that they serve. The Star People can use a Sky-Gazer's eyes to look out into our world, from a human point of reference. The Star People mostly have no need for or interest in the vision mechanics of a human, but they can hijack Star-Gazers to use like camera puppets to facilitate this when they wish to. 

Unlike the frightening but mostly incidental contact that most nomads have with the Star People, a Sky-Gazer can expose you to their terrible vision-consciousness directly. 

In game terms, a Sky-Gazer is an Ice Clansman or Clanswoman with a gaze attack that deals 2d10 psychic damage to a single creature that they can see, or d6 psychic damage to everything they can see. 

Unlike most gaze attacks, blinding yourself, closing your eyes, and using mirrors as reflectors has no effect. The 'gaze' is actually just a video camera feed to the being that is causing the damage, and that being does not give a shit about mirrors, or whether you can see it. 

The bodies of those slain in this manner disappear.

The eyeballs of a Sky-Gazer have strange properties. If you place them inside the sockets of a corpse, they will 'beam' the last things that the corpse saw in reverse, from from moment of its death, like a projector. Like a projector, this is useless if you don't have a surface to project onto, and it can also be used as a bright, directional light source. The video feed will play backwards for the exact amount of time since the Sky-Gazer's eyes were removed from their head.

If you implant a Sky-Gazer's eyes into a living body, they immediately become a feral ghoul-like thing bent on the destruction of all sentient life. If you do this to a PC, they immediately become an insane and dangerous NPC and their player must roll a new character. The Southern Nomads call these things devils or abominations. The hostility of the astral minds must be channelled through its appropriate agents - when the Gazers are slain and their eyes taken, it is only right that punishment be visited on those responsible. 

An Abomination is HD2+1 (or the HD they had in life, whichever is higher), x2 hands-like-claws as light weapons that deal cold damage, unarmoured but takes -1 damage from weapons, movement: human, disposition: clever and motivated serial killer. 

They constantly intone hate poetry in the language of the stars. They are unbreakable, and impossible to reason with. Northern Nomads kill them on sight, but Southerners and Ice Clans will instead attempt to restrain and 'keep' them as honoured guests. 

What this usually means is a gagged and bound ghoul-thing propped at the head of the communal table, given the choicest cuts and the best liquor, which it will not be able to touch, much less eat, and everybody present trying their best to avoid looking at its terrible, straining, bulging face. 

Stairs to the Sky

When the nighted heavens are draped in coloured fire it is said that one might find a stairway up into the strange cities and territories that can sometimes be seen behind the shimmering curtains of light. The stairways are made of glass or ice or starlight - the stories differ. They will deliver you into a Dreamland utterly unlike the one you know. Travel up into and then back from these strange passages is how Sky-Gazers are made. Many young, pious nomads go in search of them, and many are the frozen corpses of those searchers littering the ice floes. 

Mobile Fortresses

A persistent myth in the Southern territories. The Mobile Fortresses are said to be built from star metal, and excavated from solid core ice over hundreds of years by chosen Ice Clans. Those who are able to excavate them after decades and centuries of labour are said to be biding their time, waiting for the end of the world, which they will bring about with their terrible engines. 

Mobile Fortresses might have legs, tracks, they might fly, they might burrow beneath the earth. There are a hundred different stories. They are built from strange iridescent metal, and they effect subtle changes on their inhabitants, who grow taller, more slender, more terrible and more beautiful. 

None can truthfully claim to have seen one.

A Mobile Fortress is a dungeon like any other, and must be navigated like one. It will always have a heart and a brain (usually in rooms close to the centre), and if either are destroyed it will be 'killed'. You might consider using this dungeon as a template that can be reskinned. 

A Mobile Fortress is inhabited by Star Children, which are what remains of Ice Clans whose ancestors spent centuries in the holy work of excavation by hand.

Star Children are long limbed, slender, flexible, vibrating, with strange reflective skin and terrible eyes and faces. They are said to be beautiful, and they are said to be monsters, perversions of the human form.  

Star Child

HD3, armed with an invisible heat sabre (medium weapon, +1 fire damage, invisible blade makes defending against it difficult - heat sabres roll to hit at +2) and empathy (see below), unarmoured, but perfectly reflective skin confers immunity to psychic, radiation, and fire damage. Movement: like an octopus and a cockroach walking around using a mostly human skeleton. Disposition: curious, capricious, unpredictable. 

Star Children do not eat, drink, or sleep, and do not (or cannot) speak. They can share emotions and simple concepts (friendly, distressed, 'over there', go away) via telepathy if you look into their eyes, or if they touch your bare skin with theirs. 

If they want to kill you, they can use this innate ability to 'link' enemies together such that what one feels, all feel. In game terms, every enemy that falls under the gaze of a Star Child takes the damage that every other enemy under the gaze takes. Blinding yourself against gaze attacks works as normal, and a mirror will additionally subject the Star Child to the effect. 

Star Child Astral Raider

What remains of clan champions and leaders.

As Star Child above, but HD4, possessing four additional invisible arms, two invisible heat sabres, and an invisible Star Weapon, rolled for on the usual tables. This Star Weapon does not have ammunition as usual, and usually contains a single shot which immediately recharges under starlight.  

Astral Raiders can 'flick' their skin from reflective to Vantablack or Vantawhite at will. Vantablack renders them immune to cold damage and needing to breath, and Vantawhite confers AC as plate and confers resistance to normal weapon attacks (half damage). 

Star Child Projector Captain

As Star Child above, but HD5, and possessing the gaze attack of a Sky-Gazer. A Projector Captain's gaze attack has a 360 degree area of effect. 

Projector Captains are completely invisible, and can see invisibility. They can make other objects permanently invisible by painting them with their blood. 

They can confer the ability to see invisibility to, or blind, others who they are able to touch skin-to-skin. Both of these conditions are permanent, and can be resisted with a CHAR save, although the Projector Captain can attempt to do so again next turn as long as the skin-to-skin contact is maintained. 

If you drink their blood, your soul will henceforth be invisible to beings that would otherwise be able to sense it.

AFFRAYER

 

The last entry in the trilogy of vaguely scifi capsule games. 

CW: A whole heaping of utopian fascist aesthetics, as is appropriate to the genre. 

All images taken in situ at the Wallace Collection in London. 

You are a teenager, or maybe in your early twenties. Your home is under threat - actually the whole planet is under threat, everything you love, everyone you know, all of their small human dramas - and so you have joined the military as a volunteer, to defend everyone, all of this. 

They gave you a sharp blue uniform, and six months of training on their bases on the moon. The battlefields that will decide the fate of every human will not be on earth. Your training is with the weapon, the body, which is really two bodies, one hot and one cold - but we will come back to this later. 

While you train you get to know the other volunteers. They are people of all kinds, from every class and age and nation imaginable. They are the whole world, and they bring with them its chaos and its human dignity. You all speak Common, of course, just like your parents did. Training with the body is gruelling, but the military have lots of practice making people like you into soldiers. 

When you are ready, you and your section (who you have come to love, in your way - they are soldiers of the universal polis, whose spoil is our common birthright, and they are red-handed and red-eyed killers, like you) will be attached to great relativistic sling engines and fired out to blasted airless warzones deep inside the territory of the enemy. 

Watch them in the minutes before the drop. They are calm, checking equipment and diagnostic screens, turned away from you, the contours of their faces just visible in the soft light of the instruments, insulated by their competence. They seem ageless this way; painted icons; terrible angels holding burning invisible swords. In these empty moments you love them all, and your love is wide, unmoored from any particularity (their faces are all so alike), and you love yourself too because you are one of them, caught up in the great, anonymous choir that will sing ruin or victory; now, in this moment and for all time; now, thirty seconds to drop; you wait for the call from your captain, it will come, now; ten seconds, now... 

The empty air rushing past and the roar of the thrusters beneath you and the whine of your terrible weapons, your apocalyptic weapons, which scream while they reduce the world beneath you to smoke and fire and glass, as they wipe your enemies away; your enemies are chaff before you and the others. You are angels. Carriers of the terrible sword that cleaves what is eternal from what cannot to allowed to survive, that makes your declaration to history, for all time. 

But your foes are terrible too. They are the dragon, the one without grace, the one without shame, with a hundred heads and a thousand catching claws. You can kill a hundred million of them and the rest will erupt from the earth to drag you down, to tear you to pieces. Keep firing then. Keep firing, and be quick about your murderous business. 

Your missions are simple: meat grinder, kill 'em all, search and destroy. Everyone has a punch chute back to the sling craft, which activates once the mission is complete. Only once the mission is complete; there were too many pilots punching early, too many objectives failed, too many bad futures in the simulations...

If you are lucky you will be sent home to earth, to a fate uncertain, hundreds or thousands of years into the relative future. If you are unlucky there will still be work to do here and now. The wait for new orders can be weeks or months. The probe heads have not yet developed the means by which to attack sling craft, so you will be safe for a time, even bored, which when it happens seems nearly unaccountable.

PILOTS

You have two bodies, the cold body and the hot body. The cold body is the one that sits in the machine shop, gorgeously at rest; the one that you can tune and amend to your design. 

The hot body is the one that drops, autoguns blaring their staccato retort, flares blossoming from the shoulders in ribbons of fire, thrusters burning the earth to glass, scorched and vibrating and killing and coming to pieces under its terrible acceleration. 

The pilot is not quite a body at all, more like a mind, or a shadow, or a hallucination. A pilot is more attuned to the COLD or the HEAT, with repercussions in the rules to follow. When you create your character, this is your first choice. 

The second regards the other players in your game, henceforth your squad. You all know each other, there is a good chance you all like each other. Choose at max one person on the squad that you don't like: this can be cold disdain, a personality clash, or even open hatred, but it will never get in the way of your professionalism - you are soldiers, and you rely on one another in combat. You still trust this person with your life. Choose any number of squad mates that you desire, and any number you are in love with.

This is the description of your pilot. A tendency towards COLD or HEAT, and a web of monodirectional relations with your squad mates. Your squad is made up of other PCs, in whose webs you will feature in various ways.

THE COLD BODY

The terrible weapon that you have been trained to use. It rests in the hangar, attended by technicians and specialists who will maintain and outfit it to your specifications. 

The cold body starts with:

• A frame, with 10 integrity (or 11 if your tendency is towards COLD). If this drops to zero the pilot is killed: crushed and maimed as the steel shell deforms, burned to death in reactor leaks, transpierced by kinetics that defeated the armour, torn into pieces by the force of explosions, simply vaporised. There are a million ways to die inside the body.
• Four integrated point-defence rotary autocannons, each with rounds for ten turns of continuous fire. When fired on the probe head swarms each autocannon deals d4[1000] casualties per turn of fire to a max range of 8km, or 2d4[1000] within 3km. 
• Thrusters that can hurl it around the battlespace like a missile - this can be used defensively, to get you out of harm’s way, or offensively, crashing down amidst the thickest frays atop a column of plasma. You get infinite jumps, but at anything lower than 10 integrity, you must spend a single point of integrity to make each jump. Whenever you land or take off using your thrusters, everything within 3km is disintegrated by the plasma backblast. Each jump has a maximum range of 30km. 

You have five requisition points to build it out from the following list. You cannot take mulitples of single options unless they are marked as Light Weapons. If your tendency is towards COLD, you can upgrade three of these options (and can spend multiple upgrades on a single option), if HOT you may only upgrade one. Requisition from the Specials category can only be taken by pilots with a COLD tendency. 

For each successful mission you complete, you are awarded requisition - usually one, maybe more if your performance was exemplary. 

Weaponry

• Assault Rifle. Deals 2d8[1000] casualties per turn, to a range of 10km. Ammunition: 10 turns of fire. Light Weapon. Upgraded: ammunition for 15 rounds or range to 15km. 
• DMR. Deals 1000 casualties per shot fired, per turn, to a range of 30km. Can be set to fire once, or three times, per turn. If fired once, and the hot body has not moved this turn, can be used to kill a Leaderform (see below) within range. This can only be done once per turn, no matter how many DMRs you are holding. Light Weapon. Ammunition: 15 rounds. Upgrade: holds 30 rounds or range increased to: 60 km. 
• Shotgun. Deals d8[1000] casualties per turn to a range of 10km, 2d8[1000] within 5km, or 3d8[1000] within 3km. Light Weapon. Ammunition: 10 rounds. Upgrade: Ammunition: 30 or stepping each range profile up by 2km. 
• Rotary Cannon. deals 3d8[1000] to a range of 20km. Cannot be fired in the same turn as a jump. Ammunition: 20 rounds of fire. Upgrades: 40 rounds of fire or range to 25km. 
• Plasma Lance. Lays down an AOE in a 90 degree cone, 5km long. Destroys everything in the AOE. Ammunition: five rounds. Upgrades: ammunition for ten rounds or range of cone to 8km long or the AOE gets Destroyer. 
• Artillery. Targets a point within 40km (no LOS required), then lays down an AOE with a 2km radius. Fire is accurate to within 10 - [integrity] km. Everything inside the radius is destroyed. Cannot be fired on the same turn as jumping. Can fire up to three rounds per turn. Ammunition: 15 rounds. Upgrades: Target point range increases to 50km or ammunition to 30 rounds. 
• Mines. Lay down a number of mines between 1 and 3. If enemies path over this square, place an AOE of 3 x [number of mines] km, and destroy everything caught in the blast. Ammunition: 12 mines. Upgrades: add Destroyer to the AOE or upgrade ammunition to 24 mines. 
• Atomics. Targets a point on the map, at any range (no LOS required), then lays down an AOE with a 10km radius and Destroyer. Everything inside the radius is destroyed. All hot bodies on the map take a point of integrity damage when an Atomic goes off. 1 round. Upgrades: 15km radius or 3 rounds. 

For the above:

• Light Weapon means that the gun can be held and fired in one hand. You may take multiples of these weapons and fire both on your turn, if you wish. 
• Destroyer means that even very tough opponents, which would usually take sustained fire to bring down, are destroyed if they fall under the AOE. 

Defensive Installations

• Armour. +2 Integrity. Cannot be taken more than thrice. Upgrade: +4 integrity. 
• Shielding. You no longer lose integrity for jumping, until you are reduced to 5 integrity, after which point you lose 1 point for jumps as usual. You do not suffer integrity damage from atomics use unless you are below 5 integrity. Cannot be taken more than once. Upgrade: the 5 integrity thresholds are lowered to 3 integrity. 
• Flares. You are not targetable by enemy fire while flares are firing - if you are the closest target they will still shoot at you, and the shots will be wasted. You may fire them for free, and they function until the beginning of your next turn. You have enough flares for three rounds. Upgrade: enough flares for six rounds.

Specials

• Range Finders. All range bands are increased by +2km. Can be taken more than once. No upgrades available. 
• Sedative Injectors. You auto-pass a single panic check. Cannot be taken more than once, but contains infinite uses. You must declare use before rolling a panic check. No upgrades available. At the mission end, roll a d6. If the result is less than the number of Sedative Injectors used, your pilot is dead on arrival at the sling craft. 
• Advanced Thrusters. Your thruster jump range is increased by 2km. Can be taken more than once. Upgrade: you can make a 'jump' in place once per turn to boost dodge out of the line of fire of incoming projectiles. This costs you integrity as normal, and nullifies a single ranged attack. You can boost dodge a number of times per turn equal to upgraded Advanced Thrusters.

THE HOT BODY

Once you jump in, the only way out is through. 

Play takes place on a topographic map, 100km x 100km. You will see emergence points and Engines marked on the map, as well as elevation information as per usual for topo maps. 

You may drop into any square you wish, and you destroy everything within 3km when you do so, as though you just jumped to it (you did, from orbit). 

Each turn is composed of a Comms cycle, an Orders cycle, a Computation cycle, and an Enemy Movements cycle. 

The Comms cycle is simple. You have a timed window in which to discuss your plans and declare intentions with your squad mates. This might be an open discord chat, a channel set aside for the purpose, or anything else. Each turn's Comms cycle is usually one minute long. Be explicit, clear, and efficient with your intentions and instructions - friendly fire is a killer. 

Pilots with a tendency towards HEAT get an extra minute of comms. 

A note about the comms cycle: during a battle, you are not able to communicate with one another in universe outside of the comms cycle. This is a high trust covenant thing that players will need to buy into for this game to work.

After the Comms cycle, the Orders cycle begins. All pilots give their orders to the DM - generally jump instructions with coordinates, and weapons firing solutions, either on landing, or from their current position if not jumping. These orders are not visible to other players. The game consists in making your plans, then inputting your orders, and hoping that everyone has the same plan in mind. 

The DM will then compute turns, per the plans submitted, update the map that everyone has access to, and calculate damage on enemies and friendlies, if any. 

Players caught in AOE suffer d6 damage to their integrity. Players caught by Destroyer weapons are vaporised. 

Finally, the DM will take the turn for the enemy (as described below), and calculate any appropriate damage against player bodies, before starting the turn cycle anew. 

PLAYER ORDERS

Each turn declare whether you want to jump, then assign targets to your weapons. Nearly all weapons (artillery and atomics are the exceptions) require LOS to fire. This means that there is no intervening terrain if you draw a straight line from you to your target. You can choose to land on any specific elevation inside the square you jump into, but you cannot change this elevation once you have chosen it without moving or jumping on your next turn.

For each point of integrity below five, your jumps will scatter than many potential kms. 

Other than jumping, your mobility at the scale of the map is limited. Your hot body can jump and sprint extremely quickly for a machine of such size and weight, but this will still only move you 1km per turn at max. 

Your four integrated autocannons will fire on the nearest targets automatically unless you override them manually, or switch the system off (this can be done per gun if you wish, say, to conserve ammunition). 

All other weapons are targeted by you. You can fire as many weapons as you want each turn, provided you have the hands to do so. Artillery, mines, and atomics do not require hands to fire. Rotary cannons and plasma launchers require two.

Every time a player dies, your body takes five or more integrity damage in a single turn, or a swarm reaches you, you must test for panic. You roll a d6, with a -1 for each of the following:

• Players killed.
• Panic tests already failed.
• Any of your weapons are out of ammunition (this only applies once, even with multiple weapons dry). 
• Each additional player who has failed a panic test this turn. 

If the number is 0 or below, you panic for a second and forfeit your next turn entirely. 

If someone you hate is not panicking, you may choose not to panic. 

If someone you desire is panicking, you may choose not to panic. 

These bonuses can only be used once (twice if your pilot tendency is towards HEAT) per mission, per person. 

You have a +1 to panic rolls per person you love who is still alive. You have a -1 to panic roles per person that you love who has been killed. 

PROBE HEAD SWARMS

The main forces of the enemy, poorly understood by earth scientists and only glimpsed in flashes and snatches by pilots in combat. The probe head swarms travel from system to system extinguishing stars. Their great terrestrial engines facilitate their travel across galaxies - these are typically your main targets. Without the engines, the swarms are unable to project outwards to the energy sources that they use to sustain themselves - they will starve, or go into hibernation, or suspended animation, or something. Whatever this state is, it renders them non-threats to the earth of the distant future. 

A swarm is composed of hundreds of millions of enemy soldiers. When hot bodies start crashing down out of atmosphere, the probe heads begin their swarming behaviour in defence of the engines. 

A probe head swarm has an emergence point. There will usually be about as many emergence point as there are hot bodies on mission. 

Probe heads start pouring out of the emergence point, and advance at a rate of d6km per turn towards the nearest threat that they detect. This leave behind a 'trail' of swarm bodies - swarms advance like long tentacles on the map. If a 6 is rolled, the swarm splits into two, which both advance 3km towards the nearest threat - the second swarm splits from whatever point on the swarm 'tentacle' is closest to a PC. 

As the swarm is wounded and pushed back, it will start to 'wake up', resulting in more d6s rolled for advance rates per turn (also resulting in more splitting). These points are detailed below, under Leaderforms. 

Weapon damage is given in number of 1000s of probe heads destroyed. For each 1000 killed, the swarm is pushed back one kilometre. Swarms can only be pushed back this way to a maximum of the maximum range of the weapon firing, measured from the point it was fired from. 

If a probe head swarm reaches a player, their hot body immediately loses d6 integrity, with a +1 for each time the swarm has 'woken up'. 

Artillery and other AOEs can obliterate large sections of probe head swarms behind their actually mobile 'front'. When this happens, the swarm is immobilised until the back line of the swarm catches up to its now isolated front elements. Swarms prioritise moving towards isolated elements and enemy hot bodies equally - they will move towards whatever is closest. 

Fighting probe heads is like damming rivers. You will never be able to kill all of them. You are in a race against time. 

LEADERFORMS

Each probe head swarm is directed by a Leaderform. It is located at the furthest edge of the swarm. On each emergence, and each splitting of the swarm, roll on the table below to determine the type of Leaderform. 

Leaderforms are typically invulnerable to weapons fire - the exceptions are Destroyer AOEs, and DMRs. 

If a swarm's Leaderform is destroyed it is effectively isolated, as per the rules given above for AOE weapons. Another Leaderform will pick it up soon, and when it does its own swarm immediately advances d6km. 

Leaderforms:

1. Horror. While this Leaderform is on the map, all panic rolls are at an additional -1. 
2. Ranged. Fires on the closest body within 40km as it moves, dealing d3 points of integrity per turn. 
3. Slaver. Adds +1 to its swarming movement rolls. 
4. Alarmer. Adds an additional 'Wake Up' counter to the swarm if killed. 
5. Tank. Absorbs d6[1000] casualties per turn for its swarm. 
6. Critical. Explodes when killed, per the rules for Atomics. 

ENGINES

This is the player objective - you are here to cripple and destroy projection engines, such that the probe heads will be unable to make their movements across the galaxies. 

Each map will have a set number of engines (and map 'difficulty' will usually directly correlate to the number of engines you have to destroy). Each engine will be built from a number of components (each kms long) that will need to be destroyed, generally in sequence, to turn them critical. Most engine components will have an integrity score like your hot body, which is reduced by your weapons as normal (1000 probes heads of damage is = to one integrity for this purpose). Destroyer AOEs will delete them the same as they do everything else. 

For each engine destroyed, the swarm will Wake Up, and roll an additional d6 on their swarm movement rolls. 

DOWN TIME

If you survive your mission, you will punch the chute and exfil back to the sling ship. 

You and your surviving squad mates have a few months to kill time and swap spit.

You may choose to mix your web of relationships as you wish, and are encouraged to RP any changes.  

DEGRADER: after action report, new findings, continuations, etc.

 

I have finally run a game, breaking the long hiatus. It wasn't a Barony thing - it was DEGRADER, a small, tight, nasty, adversarial pbp wargame focused on sniper characters who use sensor arrays and scifi super guns to respectively locate and then summarily instagib one another. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: beloved Archon has recently written up a DEGRADER extraction shooter map, much to my delight. It is excellent, and you can find it here. 

These were the map we played on:

The ground level, no ceilings.

The catwalks and fluid tanks above, suspended by chains.

I think the playtest went very well. There are some large caveats to that statement, which I'll get into, but by and large the concept worked as planned.

• The mixture of very low info about other player movements (DEGRADER is played in nearly pitch darkness), ultra high lethality (players were routinely deleted from across the map without any warning), and ignorance around the potential patterns and fields of enemy sensor use built a horrible, paranoid little combat space, in which people were try to manoeuvre and jockey for advantage as best they could with limited information. Exactly the vibe that I was aiming for in the writeup. 
• The core loop of sensors spreading across the map, locating ping of heat/movement/noise/heartbeats etc., and the the Superlative Weapons doings their thing, worked great. The specifics were not as clean or tuned as they could have been, and there will be many changes here (specially on sensors and their usability) for the second test, but in the broad abstract, this worked as well as I could have hoped for. 
• People seemed to enjoy it! I think that everyone who played had a good time with it. The two players who got fucked over by DM error were understandably salty - in a game this unforgivably zero sum DM error is a really big deal - but both have expressed interest in try V2 of this thing. I have extremely forgiving players, whom I love :')
• The flavour of play was good. Grimy, desperate, industrial, mediated hyper cat-and-mouse. Good. 
• It was also pretty fun to DM, although quite involved. I used dungeon scrawl to put together the maps, and then powerpoint to compute player turns. It took some time, but it was gratifying to see all the moving pieces come together. In play it looked something like this:

The shot heard 'round the world.

With five of these players running around, laying their gear down, trying to maximise coverage, trying to spoof noise or heartbeats, throwing C4 at one another, setting triplines and other traps, it became a pretty lively and complex little play space. 

A quick blow by blow of the three main 'phases' of the playtest:

• Phase One: Setup. Players laying down sensors, getting their bearings, listening for movement, laying snares and explosives, and generally exhibiting appropriate levels of extreme paranoia. Marked in particular by BIRCH-2-4 (played by the lovely Archon) laying down an absolutely ridiculous penetrating heat scanner that covered nearly a quarter of the map, and wiring it up in their little sensor nest. This scanner picked up Falconer on the second turn, and then Revenant the turn after that, which resulted in the first shot and kill of the game, which in turn lead into the insanity of phase two. 
• Phase Two: BIRCH takes the shot on Revenant, taking first blood. By absolute coincidence, COCKROACH happens to switch on their particle sensor and point it at BIRCH that same turn, giving them a useable ping with which to fire in turn. CUPID lobs c4 down into the room that BIRCH fired from, but since BIRCH moved after firing they are just out of the kill zone. This doesn't save BIRCH from COCKROACH's pistol shot - they become the second casualty. As all of this is going down, Falconer uses a grapple line to ascend to the catwalks on the second level, and make a fateful decision to lay down a movement sensor by hand instead of using their device catapult. This means that CUPID strays directly in the sensor zone on the turn that she makes to throw her bomb down range, which then results in her getting shot in the back by Falconer. The C4 on her rig is detonated, and Falconer is only 5ft from the kill radius - they make their save against the shrapnel, and phase two is ended, leaving only two surviving Degraders: Falconer, and COCKROACH.
• Phase Three: both surviving Degraders now have useless pistols that need recharging, and no idea where the other is outside of extremely vague directions. COCKROACH spends their time laying down spoofers in the vent system that they occupy, while Falconer belays back down to ground level, sprints to a charging station for their pistol, and sets a drone with a very long range directional heat scanner. They sends the drone up, and hover it slowly towards the other side of the map where COCKROACH is sneaking away from the carnage of phase two using the vents. Ultimately, Falconer's drone catches COCKROACH in the vent, and COCKROACH is killed by Falconers pistol shot. 

This is how it went down in play. There were several mistakes that I made in running, which had major deleterious effects on the game. 

• The first and larger systemic problem was that I calculated the directional cones wrong: I used corner to corner counting to calculate their range, which resulted in very large triangles of coverage - hugely more area that the more appropriate 'pie slice' shape would have generated. I realised this early on, but had already calculated several turns using the bad method, and didn't want to retroactively change the rules of the game mid-play. This directly lead to two early pings, and more generally shaped the game meta exclusively around long range, directional, penetrating scanners - with this setup they were really the only winning move. Lots to learn from this (breakdown further down this post), but in the first instance calculating as pie slices would make a large difference in efficacy. My apologies to Revenant and his player AntiTime for getting them killed this way - I was looking forward to seeing what a knife Degrader could do, and they never got the chance to find out. 
• The second large mistake was in the final confrontation. The arena took place in an environment without ceilings, which meant that Falconer's overhead drone had an extremely broad AOE and very high efficacy. When they passed over COCKROACH's location, I awarded them the ping which ended the game, forgetting that COCKROACH was hidden in a vent that absolutely did have a ceiling. Falconer's sensors were not penetrating, and so should not have pinged COCKROACH, rendering the official final result moot. A huge shame, and something I blame myself for. Apologies to COCKROACH and their player Locheil - you deserved a better sendoff!

Outside of these two discrete errors in resolution, there were lots of things that became clear in play, and which will be tightened up for the next round. 

• The first and most obvious takeaway is that penetrating long range scanners are very clearly superior to other options inside these rules. Penetration generally is ludicrously overpowered, and I have several ideas about how to change this for a new version. Thanks to the team of observers in the Observation Deck for chatting through these with me over the last few days!
• Related: the large numbers of scanners, spoofers, and bandwidths on which people can be detected leads to some unsatisfying gameplay: in order for spoofers to be effective, they need to correspond to the scanner type your enemies are using. Since you are making a blind guess at this, they are almost not worth using at all - what you really want to be doing is laying down your own scanner grids more quickly and comprehensively than your enemies. This is not ideal and also has an arbitrary character (inside a ruleset that is already heavily based on arbitrary lethality). You need to have some counterplay.  
• The big change would be reducing the number of sensors, or including more broadly useful, multi spectrum sensors. Combined with depowered penetration, this will hopefully lead to a situation where pings are less binary, and where overlapping sensor fields is important. 
• Data and power cables don't need to be different - finicky in a bad way. 
• Radio and hacking frequencies didn't come up at all - neither did console relays. Would like to find a way to get these better integrated so that this sort of thing becomes a viable strategy. Some of this may be that everyone died before encountering anyone else kit, so no one ever got the chance to switch frequencies. 
• Players should get the map before they pick loadouts. This one is super obvious but didn't make it into this round. A no brainer. 
• The map generally needs to be way way smaller for movement ranges like this. The map we played on was pretty accurate to an irl factory floor, which makes a bad match for a deathmatch between stealth operatives sneaking 20ft per turn. The next round will be in a series of cramped, labyrinthine, borderline domestic spaces, which I think will suit the scale of operations much better. It will also give the knife Degraders more to do than simply sprinting towards pings with a hope and a prayer.
• Related to the above: the map needs way more interactive stuff on it. This one had tanks of fluid and machines than ran variously hot, loud, and kinetic. None of this made any difference at all for the game: the machine were static, which meant that anything moving on any sensor at all was either a spoofer or a player. Good to introduce more noise onto the maps. Sensors generally being less precise will help with this. 

I think that's the breakdown? A V2 of the rules, and a new map/game will be coming soon I hope. 

If you'd like to play, or follow along in the observer deck, reach out to me on the purple or phloxservers o7 o7 o7

DEGRADER post-postscript, notes, gear list

 

Some more working notes and ideas hatched in conversation with the magnificent phloxserver, mostly with Grek and Archon. Following on from this, this, and this. 

Heartbeat and Particle sensors

Heartbeat is hard to spoof, and only keys off Degraders (there's nothing else in the zone with a heartbeat), but has a tight ranged and no penetration. Particle sensors are specifically designed to pick up the emissions that accompany the firing of Superlative weaponry - if you fire Da Big Gun (or the Superlative Pistol, or use a Superlative Knife), you emit these particles for 3 - 5 turns (duration is hidden from you). Particle sensors have far better range than heartbeat sensors. 

Superlative Knife is a flare!

You can use your superlative knife as a flare in your hand if you want! All Superlative weapons are wired into your rig, so you can't throw it. I can't think of a reason someone would want to do this, but you can totally do it!

New Kit: Device Catapult

A torsion powered launcher, capable of launching sensors and other devices along with a sticky payload (a 'goo bomb' in the vernacular). In practice this allow Degraders to shoot their devices in a straight line and have them stick to surfaces without damage.

The Catapult takes up 1INV, can only fire devices of 1/3 INV size or smaller, and must fire them alongside a goo bomb (each of these is an additional 1/10 INV). 

A sensor fired by the catapult functions as normal. If set to scan in a directional cone, that cone always points back toward the firer - this protects the instruments. 

If you shoot another degrader with the device catapult, it does no damage but the target immediately makes a loud noise ping. 

Ghoul Degraders

They do not exist! Degraders are people/cyborgs but they are not gross enough to set off particle sensors. Your Degrader can be hot if you wish it. 

Drone Manipulators

A piloted drone has manipulators on it, and can do anything you can do with your hands. You still can't give the drone your Superlative weaponry, or expect it to fight with a combat knife (it can use the beretta just fine). 

Camera Feed

Your rig can support live viewing of a single camera feed at a time while you go about your turn. 

Movement, Throwing

A Degrader moves 30ft normally, 20ft sneakily, or 60ft at a sprint. 

A Degrader can huck 1 INV worth of gear/explosives/whatever 30ft, and less than this 60ft, with good accuracy. You can't throw something that's bigger than 1 INV. 

Explosives

Explosives are lethal when detonated, to a range of 50ft x INV slots worth of C4. They are dangerous at double this range (1 in 6 chance of death). Interposing cover downgrades both of these one 'step' - lethal to dangerous, dangerous to not dangerous. Degrader rigs are rated for shrapnel but you never want to be fucking around with explosives. 

Explosives destroy terrain by the reasonable fiat of the DM. A Degrader setting off a planned demolition may ask for a breakdown of what they can expect it to accomplish. 

Explosives held in the inventory of a Degrader hit by Superlative weaponry detonate immediately. 

Sensor Upgrades

Sensors always start at 1/3 INV, and all upgrades (penetrating, cascading, better range, better power reqs) upgrade this INV cost, from 1/3 > 1 INV > 2 INV > 5 INV. 

You can also lower this size by one by downgrading their power requirements one step: from light > standard, or from standard > heavy. 

Frequencies

If you set it to a frequency, you rig will auto display all devices that are also on that frequency. A big deal if you discover a device with someone else's frequency, plug it in, and see that they are wearing 5 INV of explosives with detonators primed. 

Team Deathmatch

NEW GAME MODE UNLOCKED. You win if your team are the last ones standing. You don't know who your teammates are and have no capacity to communicate with them, except for a single message that you can write at the start of play, which will be delivered to them by the DM before deployment. 

Both teams have unique insignia on their rigs, and a new 'step' in the close combat altercation rules is introduced: 'check insignia'. If you take this step and the other Degrader does not, you lose automatically. If you both take it, you are both rewarded with knowledge of the insignia worn, and may assess your next actions accordingly. 

Degraders can remove insignia, wear false insignia taken from enemy corpses, etc., at their discretion. 

All Degraders can attach a single charm to their insignia on character creation, like a backpack charm. This has no effect on play, but will be noticed at the 'check insignia' step of a close combat altercation. It may also make your Degrader happy, or comfort them in the field :) 

&c. It's a stressful job!

Thoughts About Immersion

I was thinking last night about Sam's Cataphracts maxim: the immersion that comes from having the player's activity correspond very tightly to the character's actions. In Cataphracts this is writing missives - a military commander irl is mostly sending instructions out and waiting for reports to come back, and doing exactly this in a Cataphracts game means that those games have an absurdly high level of immersion in play, certainly higher than any other game I have ever been a part of. 

I would like for degrader to feel similarly (sadly not possible to run in real time, which would lean into this) - since what you are mostly doing is interacting with UIs and the binary, on/off logics of sensor feedback, the very radically artificial medium of Discord PbP is actually formally appropriate to the fiction. That's the idea anyway; we'll see how it works in practice. 

KIT LIST

By default you have:

• Your Rig, with a frequency rolled on a d1000.
• Your Superlative Rifle.
• Your beretta and combat knife.
• Wire snips for cutting wire to length.
• Leetl screwdrivers and other hand tools for wiring things in.

In addition:

Gear

• 100ft of power cable (1 INV)
• 100ft of data cable (1 INV)
• Device Catapult (1 INV)
• Goo Bomb (1/10 INV each)
• Plastic Explosives (in whatever quantity you wish. Maximum of 1 detonator per 1/3 INV of explosives)
• Mechanical Tripwires (max 20ft long, 1/3 INV each)
• Laser Tripwires (no maximum length, power reqs: low, 1/3rd INV each).
• Batteries (either 1/3 INV or 1 INV).  
• Drone! Quadcopter that you can pilot by wire or radio. 2 INV, 1 of which is the Drone's INV to carry other kit. 
• Flares: lots of light and heat. 1/3 INV each. 
• Glowsticks: a little bit of light, no heat. 1/10 INV each. 
• Smoke Grenades: release visibility occluding smoke in a large area (typically around 80ftx80ft). Smoke lasts 3 - 5 turns. 1/3 INV each. 
• Console. Basically a relay, that can receive wired or radio data, and output it into wired or radio, on a different frequency if desired. Has a screen by default. 1/3 INV, power req: low.
• Traversal Gear. A catch all for kit that will make your navigation of the space easier. Examples might include rappelling or climbing gear, bolt cutters, crowbars, fire retardant or acid proof cloaks, etc. etc. By default takes 1 INV and gives you a specific situational advantage in the usual tactical infinity ways - the DM may specify that a particular thing takes more or less INV at their discretion. Feel free to pitch your DM if you have something specific in mind!

Sensors (all 1/3 INV without upgrades)

• Movement. By default: range 80ft (radial) 160ft (directional), power: standard, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading 20ft, range: +40ft, power: low, penetration: high. 
• Heat. By default: range 80ft (radial) 160ft (directional), power: standard, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading 20ft, range: +40ft, power: low, penetration: high. 
• Sound. By default: range 60ft (radial) 120ft (directional), power: standard, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading: 20ft, range: +20ft, power: low, penetration: high. 
• Electrics. By default: range 60ft (radial) 120ft (directional), power: standard, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading: 20ft, range: +20ft, power: low, penetration: high. 
• Heartbeat. By default: range 20ft (radial) 40ft (directional), power: high, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading: 10ft, range: +10ft, power: standard, penetration: high. 
• Particle. By default: range 60ft (radial) 120ft (directional), power: high, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading: 20ft, range: +20ft, power: standard, penetration: high. 

Active Projectors (1/3 INV without upgrades, same upgrades available as scanners)

• Lidar. By default: range 60ft (radial) 120ft (directional), power: standard, penetration: N/A. Upgrades: cascading: 20ft, range: +10ft, power: low.
• Scrambler. By default: range 20ft (radial) 40ft (directional), power: high, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading: 20ft, range: +10ft, power: standard, penetration: high.
• Jammer. By default: range 20ft (radial) 40ft (directional), power: high, penetration: low. Upgrades: cascading: 20ft, range: +10ft, power: standard, penetration: high.
• Camera. Special. Range: visual range, power: standard, penetration: N/A. Upgrades: power: low. 
• Lighting. Special. Range: 30ft for low power, 60ft for standard power, 100ft for high power. Radial by default, but can be set to illuminate in a cone (no change to lighting power).

Spoofers (1/3 INV without upgrades. Upgrades step INV 'up' one level, downgrades 'down' one level, minimum 1/10 INV) 

• Noise. By default: immobile, makes soft noise, power reqs: low. Upgrades: makes loud noise, mobile (set to move in a straight line, or pilot-able by wire or radio). Downgrades: mechanical (no power reqs, only functions for 3 turns after setting), power reqs: standard. 
• Heat. By default: immobile, generates heat, power reqs: standard. Upgrades: mobile (set to move in a straight line, or pilot-able by wire or radio), power reqs low. Downgrades: mechanical (no power reqs, only functions for 3 turns after setting), power reqs: standard. You can also use flares.
• Movement. By default: immobile, but triggers movement sensors (lol), power reqs: low. Upgrades: mobile (set to move in a straight line, or pilot-able by wire or radio - note that all mobile objects will trigger movement sensors by default). Downgrades: mechanical (no power reqs, only functions for 3 turns after setting), power reqs: standard. .
• Electrics. immobile, spoofs electrics sensors, power reqs: low. Upgrades: mobile (set to move in a straight line, or pilot-able by wire or radio). Downgrades: mechanical (no power reqs, only functions for 3 turns after setting). Note that all sensors and other electrical devices will trigger electrics sensors by default, power reqs: standard. 
• Heartbeat. By default: immobile, spoofs heartbeat sensors, power reqs: low. Upgrades; mobile (set to move in a straight line, or pilot-able by wire or radio). Downgrades: mechanical (no power reqs, only functions for 3 turns after setting), power reqs: standard. 
• Particle. By default: immobile, spoofs particle sensors, power reqs: standard. Upgrades; mobile (set to move in a straight line, or pilot-able by wire or radio). Downgrades: mechanical (no power reqs, only functions for 3 turns after setting), power reqs: high.