Talk:Aberrant: Exile

Gear Prototypes

Legends of the Exalted Ones

Entropic Disruptor
The Entropic Disruptor was a personal-scale sidearm the size of a large heavy pistol, firing entropic bursts bonded to a simple doped-silicon kinetic projectile. The projectiles themselves are smart, loaded with a simple "mind-drive" (telekinetic generator and guiding intellect?) that provides them with insect-level autonomous intelligence. However, under the command of the pistol itself, these projectiles can seek out targets past cover and around corners.

Accuracy +2, Damage 20L [8], AP:10, Range 500, RoF 24, Magazine 24, Mass 12, Min. Str 5, Guided

The entropic burst deals an additional (15 - Target's Stamina) dice of unsoakable lethal damage in a radius of 1m to all objects near the target, and the guidance system subtracts 2 dodge successes from the target.

Rip Field Generator
Rip Field Generators are rifle-sized weapons which create a cylindrical (~10mm diameter) tear through space and time, around which conditions are hostile to anything more complex than rapidly dissipating plasma. The injuries dealt with this weapon are devastating, although most of the problem comes form the secondary effects of the intersected matter flashing into plasma than anything from the generator itself.

Accuracy +0, Damage 16A + Explosion, AP:Special, Range 1000, RoF 30, Magazine 30, Mass 40, Min. Str 8

The weapon ignores Scale and the aggravated damage ignores all soak. The Explosion damage deals 12L [4] multiplied by (Scale + 1) in an Area of (Scale + 1). This damage can be soaked, but halves the initial target's soak (as it originates at least partially inside the target).

Hanging Hooks

• The Coalition are coming to rape and/or kill everyone.

• Assist the Aeon coalition mission
• Save the crippled Leviathan
• Doyen are manipulating the Chromatics.
• Investigate possible cyberkinetic novas in China.
  • +Japan rep
  • China is a surveillance state full of telepaths
• Investigate Bahrain
  • Taint Hazard
• Push over Norsefire
• Investigate Process 412
• Burn the South
  • +Norca rep
  • Taint Hazard
• Loot H-M stuff in Texas

Other Objectives

• Rehabilitate novas on Earth - Aeon may plan for this already, but rape aliens.
• Build up France
• Salvage the Qin
• Some characters want to get formal educations (to keep up with the M-Ints in the party who seem to be driving the plot forward on their own).
• Find out what causes Eufibre rejection, and do it to the Colony - need a nova/aberrant with it for purposes of study.
  • Alternatively, cause that Eufiber to become Vampiric to severely lower its ability to use Quantum effectively.
• Build Whaleship Magetherion. Starship made from various gadgets and a gadget whale (initially modified with Form Manipulation).
  • Find the creator of the Sundogs and ask for research notes. We'll save time.
  • Use samples from the Leviathan (if we rescue it).

Coalition Brainstorming

• A quantum-powered blight to destroy their hardtech (magic bullets not likely to work)
• A quantum-powered plague to destroy their wettech (ditto)
• A giant bomb (known to fail)
• Sic aliens on them
  • Chromatics will be willing but aren't up to the task
  • Qin will probably not be willing
• Fighting them normally (lol)
• All of the above
• Give them what they want but not how they want it.

National Management

Screwball's Ramblings

Rather than doing anything complex, why not simply scale off of China as a reference? Five stats: Resources, Army, Diplomacy, Intelligence and Power. China has all of these at max. Resources is how wealthy a nation is, and is relevant to space power mostly, but also trade and so forth. Army is, in general, planet based military, to include aircraft and ships as well as ground troops. Diplomacy and intelligence are self explanatory. Power is 'national quantum'; it represents how powerful overall your nation is - a nation with a large military and an anaemic economy would not be a top tier power. It should be noted that a high stat doesn't just mean how large an army a state has, for example, but also how good they are at using it. Modern North Korea would have only a middling to low army stat, for example, because despite having a lot of kit, it's generally not very good, and they'd probably be pretty ineffective on the battlefield. All stats except power run from 0 to 10, but any functional state has a minimum rating of 1; 0 is reserved for post-apocalyptic wastelands or totally failed states like France or RL Somalia (or possibly RL France as well! :p).

The power stat is pre set; China, as the pre-eminent human nation has power five (and also maxed stats, because they're the strongest and excellent at everything). The Norca and whatever Africa calls itself, as second tier powers, have power four. Australia would be power three, and tier two would be smaller powers like Britain, Germany and Japan, but Eden without novas would probably slot in here as well. Tier one represents microstates or organisations like the Knights in France, who actually have the capability to muster some military force and can legitimately aspire to being some sort of government, but lack recognition or the sort of broad power base they need to be self-evidently an actual nation.

For the moment, I'm thinking that everybody gets Power x4 dots to spend over their attributes. This leads to great powers being able to do everything, while smaller powers... can't. That, obviously, is why they are smaller powers, because if they could do everything, they'd be great powers!

(No numbers are final).

Resources

This represents the wealth of a nation, whether it be from money, industry, raw materials reserves or technology. It also represents the government budget, but a large budget and a large economy go hand in hand; no matter how wealthy per capita Switzerland might be, it's never going to have the money available that China has.

0: You don't have much of an economy. People barter goods directly, nobody mints coinage, there are basically no laws regulating anything, and any government that claims technical sovereignty over the region collects no tax at all.

1: You're small and poor. Rather than a full sized nation, you're probably a large settlement in somewhere like France, where there's no central government. Compared to a proper country, or even certain wealthy individuals in that country, you might as well not exist, but compared to the other dirt farmers around you, you're hugely affluent. Your 'government' probably consists of whichever gang has the bigger stick at that moment. Total GDP of £5 million, £500,000 cash reserves, £10,000 per week for discretionary spending .

2: You're a larger town with an official government of some sort, albeit probably a fantastically corrupt one. There's some effort to provide public services like schooling and police, but they're rudimentary at best. Some areas might even have electric lighting at night! Total GDP of $10 million, £1.5 million in cash reserves and £100,000 a week for discretionary spending.

3: You're actually something resembling a nation, although probably lack international recognition. Maybe you've managed to carve out or unify a small empire in what's left of France, or you're a rebellious province from a larger nation. Whatever the case, you control multiple settlements, police trade between them and attempt to provide at least rudimentary education and public order throughout your territory. The Merovingian Knights go here. Total GDP of £50 million, £5 million in cash reserves and £250,000 a week for discretionary spending.

4: You're actually something recognisable as a nation. However, you're still not recognised as such by the international community. Total GDP of £100 million, £10 million in cash reserves and £500,000 a week in discretionary spending.

5: You actively aspire to gain recognition as part of the international community, but for whatever reason, you have not yet acquired it. Nevertheless, 'real' nations can and do accept your negotiators, you issue documents like passports and visas and some nations might actually have recognised you already. The RL Palestinian Authority would fit here. GDP of £500 million, £25 million in cash reserves and £1 million a week for discretionary spending.

6: Not only are you recognisable as a nation, you're recognised as a nation. You have a seat in the UN General Assembly, you can send diplomats and actually have them be recognised as diplomats and granted diplomatic immunity, you can conclude treaties and all the other things nations do. You're the poorest of the poor amongst 'real' nations, however, and are often dismissed as a compete hellhole. Total GDP of £1 billion, £50 million in cash reserves and £4 million in weekly discretionary spending.

7:

8:

9:

10:

Peel

Observations & Thoughts:

• A state provides: Resources, Followers, Contacts, Sanctum(s), obviously Citizenship, and other things. However, a character cannot muster the full power of his state at any one time, and the proportion he can decreases with increasing state size.
• Resources already expands to the national scale; Followers do not. Maybe they should above 5?
• There is a difference between prosperity due to a singular good ruler and prosperity due to good institutions. The former needs constant investment from the ruler (the PC), the latter does not (or not as much). However, the former is much easier to create and to enhance to 'nova levels'.
• The rules should primarily govern what a state provides for the character, with maybe some simple rules for interorganisational conflict. Aberrant is a game about singular heroes, not armies.
• A state has ratings for Size, Prosperity and (Morale and/or Coherency).
• The scale should peak at several billions (for world governments) and bottom out at a few thousand (for towns in the post-apocalyptic wasteland created by letting PCs run a world government). Obviously, it is not linear.

BM's Thoughts and other Garbage

• Easiest way to handle armies with Aberrant is to go the RoTK route - military forces are built around an individual character, and that character's stats are used for resolution, with minor modifications due to the nature, size, and training of troops. This is easy to implement, as simple to resolve as character combat, but requires a bit of SoD.
• For states, focus on the basics; population, economy, technology base, military. WW systems thrive on the basics - this isn't a nation game, it's a character game with nations as an auxiliary. 1 to 5 scales are all we need.
• Equate nation stats to attribute categories (physical, mental, social), with Abilities to govern more specific details like technology, national skill focus, etc.

An example scale:

Population: The number of warm bodies a nation has. 1 represents a town or two, or a highly decentralized population, while 5 represents a city state of extreme density. deals with workforce, and military pool. Can be scaled easily depending on what is acceptable (I assume small states for the purpose of ease). Nation equivalent of Physical stats.

Abilities: Medical, Labour, Military, Hunting, Agriculture

Infrastructure: The nation's general buildup of facilities, reflects on technology and learned skills as well as cultural buildup. 1 means unwashed, illiterate masses squatting in hovels and yurts; 5 means post-modern levels of buildings, bright/dark future, etc. The equivalent of Mental stats.

Abilities: Architecture, Technology (subsections?), Education, Arts, Sciences

Stability: The centralization and solidity of government within the nation; how much people see themselves as a single body and how easily they respond to central authority, whatever it may be. 1 means disconnected and somewhat warring villages, 5 means a strong well-policed nation. The equivalent of Social stats.

Abilities: Democracy, Police, Propaganda, Media, Diplomacy, Trade

M-stats for these three are tricky - they'd represent superscience modification, cloning, transgene therapies, or non-human populations. Bioroids and such. They require nova science to create. Probably better to handle them as seperate 'power' stats.

Nation XP might be a Thing (though it may not be gained just through play - perhaps only through use of Instruction or the Super-science rules?)

Process 418 Side Effects

Whenever someone affected by 418 gains Permanent Taint, roll 1d10, consult this table.

1: Process 418 fails catastrophically. The Nova gains 1 Permanent Taint and loses 5 Permanent Quantum Pool.

2-3: Failure! The Nova gains a point of Taint.

4-5: Side Effects! Gain a cosmetic aberration and lose 4 Quantum pool. The Nova does not gain the point of Taint.

6-7: Side Effects! Lose 3 Quantum Pool. The Nova does not gain the point of Taint.

8-9: Process 418 works as intended. The Nova does not gain the point of taint.

10: Process 418 works as (un)intended. The Nova does not gain the point of taint. He/she does, however, gain 2 XP worth of body modifications.

Vegas Novas

Vegas Novas should be built on 35-60 NP, and are 2060s vintage, i.e. they don't get any Trinity-era technology. Post them here.

• Aka Oni, Former XWF champ and model.