Eudaimonia Equipment

Overview

Technical Overview

Much of the technology in Eudaimonia is implausibly sophisticated and powerful, and often barely understood by those who use it. Those first humans who settled and terraformed the planet built technology that outlasted them and will likely outlast all successors on the planet, elegant in its simplicity and durability. Although few of their actual weapons survive to this day, many of their tools have thoroughly lethal applications. Their designs tended to be highly inclusive and versatile, featuring items with many modes, but tended to come in singular pieces and were not made for maintenance or retrofitting.

Contrasted, the devices of the True Human Empire and Mysterious Starfish Aliens make these devices seem plain. THE technology is sleek and ergonomic, and almost excessively modularized. The components of a suit of powered armor and the accompanying assault rifle can easily be prized into different systems on a whim, creating a lighter suit of armor and heavier cannon. Their materials science is slightly inferior to the first wave founders of the planet, in the sense that their weapons are actually destructible to anything less than catastrophic damage, but still amply durable and quite easy to repair. Expert systems called 'muses' often feature into devices larger than little pieces of jewelry and can give even a novice engineer critical step-by-step instructions at any point in a maintenance process.

Less is known about that of the MSA, save that it is substantially more fragile than either the works of the True Human Empire or founders, and seemingly made of biomimicking polymers and smart materials arranged in eerily organic-inspired shapes that lend them an almost living property. Like founder technology, they cannot actually be maintained, but generally heal themselves over time by drawing from ambient resources. Their most disturbing quality is their ability to repurpose themselves according to the will of their operator, quickly changing between multiple forms. Xenoarcheologists who've studied the design of MSA technology theorize that their devices are actually genuinely alive and endowed with subsapient, servile minds.

Natively made technology tends to be substantially poorer than the above, but tends to be easier to keep. Local gunsmithing techniques for example, have recently advanced to the stage of using recoiless rounds that burn a rhetorical smart liquid fuel which automatically adjusts combustion rates to hit implausible ranges and deliver high penetrative power at close ranges. These innovations tend to be inferior to those of non-native technology but their ease of acquisition and low cost makes them worth consideration.

Special Rules

When choosing a piece of equipment, a character must select the producer (i.e.: Founder, THE, MSA or Native). This has numerous in-game effects related to the type of equipment and changes their overall aesthetics.

Weapons

Weapon Tags

• Conceal: The ease of concealment. P allows for easy hiding in a pocket, C underneath street clothes, O beneath an overcoat. N/A items cannot be concealed at all.
• AP: Armor Penetration. A given weapon negates a certain amount of Protection on the target on a successful hit.
• Magazine: Total number of rounds present in a single magazine. The value in parenthesis is the number of shots fired per burst on automatic fire.

Melee

The presence of personal shields and a lack of standardized training regimens or enthusiasm for firearms on Eudaimonia means that melee weapons are ostensibly quite popular. There is substantial xenoarcheological evidence that points to the likelihood that the various other societies to visit the planet also enjoyed melee combat for some reason. Empire propaganda recovered from ships often shows handsome uniformed officers carrying dress sabers instead of the guns they made far more use of, for example.

• Founder: Founder melee weapons are always repurposed from tools and double as such. In addition to the standard indestructibility afforded to most Founder technology, all of their melee weapons actually function as an additional set of non-combat devices regardless of type, such as engineering multitools that reconfigure into swords, cooking apparatuses that work like vicious axes, etc.
• Empire: Empire melee weapons were rare things, and tended to be collapsible devices made of ceramics, fitted with sonic emitters to shear through the pliable armor of MSA drones and infantry. Empire melee weapons always have a conceal rating of P (fitting in a pocket), deal +2 Damage and can always be affixed to a gun as a bayonet.
• Starfish: Starfish weapons are universally made of handles protruding from blocks of greenish transparent polymerase, which buckles and flexes in response to attacks to defend the wearer. A melee weapon made by the MSA has a secondary weapon mode that can be activated reflexively and add +2 Protection versus melee attacks to the wearer. The most popular configuration is a knife that turns into a much larger and more dangerous weapon, to enjoy the benefits of power AND concealment.
• Native: Usually made of alloy or ceramics, Native weapons are cheap and plentiful. A character taking a melee weapon produced on Eudaimonia gets a second one free of charge.

Standard

• Knife: Damage +2, AP 1, Conceal: P

Combat knives are essentially the most common of all melee weapons simply because they have purposes other than maiming people.

• Sword: Damage +5, Conceal: O

Swords are especially popular among the catgirl pirates and Farnesian gentry, who use them to great effect in sword duels.

• Axe: Damage +6, Accuracy -1, Conceal: O

Axes are harder to use effectively than swords due to the way the weight is balanced, but strike harder overall. Handaxes are useful tools, and are often used by loggers in the tropics to harvest bamboo and rosewood for handicrafts.

• Club: Damage +4, AP 1, Conceal: O

Any sufficiently heavy object can double as a club, but well-made hammers, military picks and riot bludgeons are represented by this statline. They require less room to swing than swords and hit almost as hard, making them useful in cramped spaces.

• Staff: Damage +4, Protection 1 (Melee), Reach, Conceal: N/A

Fighting staves are not used heavily on Eudaimonia, though the gondoliers in Farnese (especially young girls) swear by them. These weapons afford the user better protection against people with smaller, sharper weapons.

• Spear: Damage +5, AP 1, Protection 1 (Melee), Reach, Conceal: N/A

Spears are mostly popular among fishermen and the catgirl pirates, who use them to wound crew before boarding. This statline also covers other polearms with modestly sized heads, such as pikes, halberds and billhooks. Thrown harpoons also use these statelines, although they're made as ranged attacks, obviously.

• Great Weapon: Damage +8, AP 2, Accuracy -2, Reach, Conceal: N/A

Greatswords, great axes, scythes, warhammers and all manner of enormous and daft weapons popularized by video games and anime follow this statline.

Modifications

All melee weapons may mount a single modification. The intrinsic bonuses of THE and MSA-produced weapons do not count towards this.

• Defensive: Defensive weapons run the gamut from main gauche swords to actual shields. A defensive weapon trades all Armor Penetration and half of its damage rating (round up) to Protection (Melee). Weapons with an extant Protection Rating such as spears and Starfish-made devices cannot be made Defensive.
• Oversized: Oversized weapons add +2 Damage and 1 AP, being designed for large (Size 3) humanoids. They can be wielded by smaller characters but subject 1 Accuracy in their hands. As a final warning, Great Weapons with this modification might not immediately fit through most doorways.
• Lightweight: Lightweight weapons are easy to use and nearly sing through the air when swung. They lose all AP values and take -1 Damage, but gain +3 Accuracy. Blunt weapons cannot be lightweight, for obvious reasons.
• Elemental Field: Crackling fields of electricity, flaming swords and whirring vibrational fields afford Elemental Weapons +2 Damage rating. On the other hand, don't botch. Empire melee weapons are already considered to have this mod, but do not have the botch penalty due to safety mechanisms.

Firearms

Although formal firearms training is limited outside of the militias levied by some of the larger cities in the archipelagos, guns themselves (and especially old ones) are in abundance. The armories of some wrecked THE and MSA warships never stopped making guns even long after their owners left, meaning that there are some deep caves filled with hundreds or even thousands of mint-condition assault rifles, waiting for someone to find them.

• Founder: Founder ranged weapons tended to be purpose-built for warfare and multimodal. All of their ranged weapons on Eudaimonia are energy weapons (although they also seem to function underwater) that fire orange-red beams with no bloom effect. Founder weapons are self-recharging and accurate, adding +2 Accuracy when firing. Instead of reloading manually, a character simply has to wait one round while some unseen process automatically restores battery charge.
• Empire: Empire firearms technology tended to favor nanofabricated, modular pieces that could easily be customized in the field to suit various purposes. Additionally, all their weapons were collapsible, allowing a soldier to carry the loadout of a full squad on his back at any moment. Empire weapons can have two modifications instead of one, and have their Conceal rating lowered by one step (N/A > O > C > P), to a minimum rating of P.
• Starfish: Starfish weapons fired rounds made of the same strange green polymerase that make extensive use of in their melee weapons, which seemingly erupt into bright green plasmatic explosions on impact. Starfish ranged weapons never run out of ammunition and don't need to reload, a seemingly endless supply of the green polymer extruded from their weapons. In addition, those struck by the rounds are marked with phosphorescent agents that make follow-up tracking or pursuit easier.
• Native: Native weapons are cheap and plentiful, as the tendency goes. Characters who choose firearms produced on Eudaimonia get an additional one for free (or alternatively, a melee weapon). They could even be combined into one ungodly thing.

Sidearms

• Light Pistol: Damage 7, Accuracy +2, Magazine 14, Conceal: P

Light Pistols are the bread and butter of your slick adventurer type, easy to conceal, lightweight and accurate. Light Pistols tend to be the traditional sidearm in almost every military present on the planet.

• Heavy Pistol: Damage 9, Magazine 10, Conceal: P

Heavy pistols tend to have more kick than light pistols (obviously), but are heavier (also obvious). Gangsters in Laurasia tend to carry heavy pistols due to implants and body armor making their rivals too hard to kill otherwise.

• Hand Cannon: Damage 10, AP 2, Accuracy -1, Magazine 7, Conceal: P

Hand cannons are frequently only seen in the hands of rough customers like the catgirl pirates, who prefer the loud boom and penetrative power and don't mind the tradeoffs.

• Machine Pistol: Damage 12, Accuracy -1, Magazine 30 (5), Conceal: C

High recoil (even from supposedly recoiless native guns) and high fire rates makes machine pistols inaccurate even at close range, although significantly more deadly than other sidearms. Technological advances have made machine pistols and submachine guns functionally identical, so they use the same statlines.

Rifles

• Carbine: Damage 12, Accuracy +1, Magazine 20, Conceal: C

Light rifles used more for sport and hunting follow these statlines. Most of these are compact enough to fit underneath day clothes (albeit uncomfortably).

• Assault Rifle: Damage 14, AP 2, Magazine 50 (10), Conceal: O

Although technology has significantly changed the appearance and power of the assault rifle, its purpose is essentially the same.

• Shotgun: Damage 15, AP 1, Accuracy +1/-1, Magazine 8, Conceal: O

Given the Mysterious Starfish Alien's preference for melee combat, it's not unexpected that both sides of the conflict would have produced weapons seemingly only made for hitting things up close. Shotguns are more accurate at close range but have falloff at a distance.

• Marksman Rifle: Damage 15, AP 3, Accuracy -2/+2, Magazine 12, Conceal: N/A

Cumbersome high-powered rifles meant to be fired while stationary use this statline. Firing from the hip or on the move is difficult and imposes an accuracy penalty, while being stationary and properly propped adds a bonus.

Heavy Weapons

• SAW: Damage 15, AP 4, Accuracy 0/+1, Magazine 240 (30), Conceal: N/A

Squad automatic weapons (such as machineguns and automatic shotguns) are useful for pinning down enemy units, and represented by this statline. They tend to empty quickly under sustained fire, but chew out cover and wound targets rather easily. A SAW is more accurate fired from a stationary position as represented by the second bonus, but not distinctly inaccurate on the move.

• Heavy Rifle Damage 20, AP 5, Accuracy -3/0, Magazine 3, Conceal: N/A

Especially powerful rifles meant to attack light tanks, powered armor and aerial vehicles use this statline. The accuracy penalty applies when not properly braced. Additionally, botching a shot while not properly braced will knock the shooter prone.

• Munitions Launcher Damage 18, AP 1, Accuracy -2, Magazine 1, Conceal: C

Thrown grenades are actually somewhat uncommon in Eudaimonia. Instead, most people (inclined to hurl explosives) use single-shot munitions launchers which fabricate and fire their own ammunition. Area of effect means that the number of targets hit varies depending on the grouping of targets. Munitions Launchers can calibrated to have areas of effect ranging from two to ten meters in diameter.

Modifications

All firearms can have a single modification. THE weapons may be modified twice, but cannot have the same modification.

• Elemental: Elemental ammunition is a novelty that both the MSA and THE enjoyed thoroughly exhausting, having extensively put them to use against one another during the last war. Even the Founders had some experiments to this extent, with electrolaser-like lightning cannons and freezing beams that accelerated Bose-Einstein condensate. Grants an additional +1 damage. Botching is hilarious.
• Smartlink: Smartlinks allow a character to aim from essentially any angle by giving a feed from the weapon's mounted optics directly to the operator's eyes, granting an additional +1 Accuracy.
• Ionolift Stabilizer: Weapons which require bracing can have the penalties for mobile fire reduced with ionolift-based stabilizers. These filmy 'wings' derived from (or examples of) MSA technology halve the usual firing penalty at the cost of reducing damage by 2. Pistols obviously cannot equip Ionolift Stabilizers, and if they could, would look rather silly.
• Expanded Magazine: Boring, but worthwhile. Doubles the ammunition storage of firearms. MSA weapons are obviously incompatible with this modification.
• Disguised: Disguised weapons are usually modified with extraneous components which form a casing that disguises the true nature of the weapon, or gives it easier carry. Cellos which conceal grenade launchers, suitcases which unfurl into sniper rifles- all these things are possible.
• Double-Barreled: An additional barrel adds not-quite twice the firepower. In effect, double-barreled weapons subtract -2 from their Accuracy and add either +3 Damage or add +2 to Rate.

Armor

Keywords

• Conceal: As with weapons, armor can sometimes be concealed under other items of clothing. Unlike weapons, Conceal P does not mean that it fits in a pocket, but that it is literally undetectable on even a naked character.
• Protection: Armor adds a Protection rating to the user equal to the value listed. It is possible to wear multiple kinds of armor, but only the highest value stacks. Bonuses to melee Protection from certain weapons stack with armor.
• Penalty: Heavier armor penalizes Grace and Power rolls related to physical activity, up to and including melee combat and shooting a weapon from the hip. Firing while stationary in heavy armor does not apply the listed penalty.
• Buffer: Buffer grants a character additional Willpower levels against physical (but not mental or social) attacks equal to the value listed. Because nearly all examples of armor in Eudaimonia are self-regenerating, powered or made of highly modularized components, Buffer refreshes at each new scene.
• Bypass: Beyond tactical armor, most suits of armor have openings and gaps in their protective surfaces. Hitting these is a called shot with a dice penalty equal to the Bypass rating of the armor.

Personal

• Founder: Made of elegantly sculpted alternating layers of self-healing metamaterials and nanocrystaline alloys, Founder body armor is nearly impervious to damage and tended to make its wearers comparably tough. Founder armor adds +1 Protection and +4 Buffer to its wearer.
• Empire: Empire body armor tended to be hard and modular, made for rapid retrofitting in the field. Instead of having a single modification, armor produced by the THE has three modifications, which can be cycled at any point.
• Starfish: The Starfish Aliens have no examples of body armor that can be worn by human beings, and in fact tended to dislike girding their already combat-optimized forms in armor. Instead, they made use of invisible personal shields designed to disperse ranged attacks but did little to inhibit slower-moving melee attacks. Starfish armor has +1 Bypass rating and gains +2 Protection versus ranged weapons, but has halved Protection versus melee weapons.
• Native: Although it tends to have a slightly hodgepodge look, Native armor is usually made of incredibly light composites and polymers that make it easy to move in at the cost of protectiveness. The Penalty rating rating of all armor is reduced by 2 and the Protection reduced by 1.

Protective Clothing

• Armored Overcoat: Protection: 2, Penalty: -0, Bypass: -1, Buffer: 1, Conceal: N/A

Armored overcoats tend to consist of simple weather clothing reinforced with hard fibers to ward off knives and light ballistic plates. Even the Starfish had equivalent designs, wearing cloaks of color-matching and radar-fooling chameleon polymer threaded with shield emitters.

• Smart Clothes: Protection: 3, Penalty: -0, Bypass: -2, Buffer: 2, Conceal: P* (Varies)

If it weren't for the fact that over half of the colonists on Eudaimonia were largely content to spend most of their time in swimwear, Smart Clothes would probably be the predominant form of clothing on the planet. Made of form-shifting fabrics and polymers on a flexible powered frame, these outfits can assume a number of appearances from gravity-defying dresses to more conservative fare- or even actual swimwear.

• Crash Suit: Protection: 3, Penalty: -0, Bypass: -2, Buffer: 3, Conceal: C

Crash suits are essentially civilian body armor designed for athletes, made of layers of sheer-thickening fluids and piezohardened sheets that harden and brace when subject to stresses, all in a skintight package. Modern diving suits also make use of this statline.

Body Armor

• Armored Vest: Protection: 4, Penalty: -1, Bypass: -1, Buffer: 4, Conceal: C

Armored vests and their equivalents were generally worn by rear-echelon members of the THE and MSA militaries. They are popular among paramilitary types and light militias, but have a hard time standing up to heavy fire.

• Combat Armor: Protection: 6, Penalty: -2, Bypass: -3, Buffer: 6, Conceal: O

The True Human Empire made extensive use of full suits of combat armor, often extensively modified with electronics and other amenities. This statline represents any unpowered or semi-powered suit of armor that covers the entire body. It is possibly to go without a helmet for a more heroic appearance, but this decreases the Bypass and Buffer ratings by 1.

Tactical Armor

Sometimes called powered armor, tactical armor is the very apex of infantry combat technologies seen on Eudaimonia. Fully self-contained suits of powered armor with fully integrated weapon systems, as well as flight packs, landing systems and a slew of electronics for the execution of asymmetric warfare. This section as no equipment stated out because I just want everyone to know these things exist.

There's no way in hell I'm letting any of the starting PCs have enormous pauldron armor from the get-go.