Vulgar Engines

Vulgar Engines

A game set in the far future, some time after the rise of a resurgent Neo Roman Empire and its conquest of much of the Solar System, which has imposed its New Latin, slavery and a permanent social gulf in the form of the Patricians of the Empire elite and the Plebeians who encompass all of common and foreign birth. An exodus of humans fleeing the repression and social stratification of the inner system settled around Jupiter. There they discovered the relics of the Visitors and their seemingly magical, reality-altering technology.

The Empire looms at its strongest, enormous and unstoppable, poised to crush the rebels beyond the Belt, but even stronger are the Vulgar Engines, the weapons of those free people who reject the Latin language and its speakers.

The Story So Far

At some point in the late 22nd century, the collapse of major eco-engineering projects on Earth spurred a mass migration into space, towards the terraformed Mars and Venus, and the heavily-built Moon. The failure of projects such as the South Pacific Borehole and the Sahel Condenser resulted in strange weather and massive tectonic activity that crippled many of the developed nations. Traditional axes of power were sundered and national lines that had gone minimally changed in centuries were redrawn in radical new ways, while the New United Nations struggled to maintain some semblance of order in those tumultuous days, collecting emergency rights and a standing army of its own as the era grew ever more tumultuous.

As humanity relocated to space, new identities and nationalities formed in the cosmos. The Moon gave birth to the notions of Lunarians, people born on the Moon. Martian colonists became at first Martian, and then Tharsian, Olympian and Hellasian. Venus saw the rise of nations in the Mare Ovda and the Ishtarans of the continent. As these groups diversified, so did their needs and wants. Scarcity of certain resources and disagreements over terraforming, the acceptance of ever-growing numbers of Terran ecofugees resulted in the people of Tharsis, the most powerful of the Martian city-states and several of its allies to declare war against the increasingly repressive NUN and its peacekeepers in order to take complete Martian sovereignty at gunpoint.

Tharsis eventually lost the war, despite the ruthlessness of its leaders and the resolve of its people. The deployment of weapons of mass destruction- asteroid KKVs- against many of the Earth's oldest cities prompted the creation of substantial and ultimately reckless emergency powers for both the NUN Secretary General and his Brigadier General, effectively co-opting military control of many Earth-based nations in order to win the conflict against Mars. These privileges became permanent due to continued guerrilla warfare on Mars and Venus, and terrorist attacks on the Earth itself, and ultimately enshrined in law when Pierre-Cesare Languedoc, a national of the Gallic Republic and former Brigadier General during the Tharsian War, was elected to the office of Secretary General.

A shrewd but hardline statesman, Languedoc implemented a number of harsh policies that limited the capability of the colonies to wage war, via active disarmament and the enforcement of punitive conscription against aggressive nations in order to limit their manpower. His initial economic policy was egalitarian and liberal, allowing for a resurgent economic growth within the Solar System at large. He was re-elected several times, making increasingly bizarre legislation as time went on, such as allowing individuals to willingly sell themselves into indenture to other legal persons, expanding the reproductive privileges of men and imposing a Latin-derived constructed language of his own creation as the new international lingua franca. His eccentricities grew more severe as he aged, blamed by some on mental illness or degeneration caused by some side-effect of his longevity treatments. Despite this, there was very little resistance when he finally proclaimed himself Emperor Petros I of the Neo Roman Empire under his Aquitani Dynasty.

Society was restructured, with the officials of NUN member states and their families granted status in the patrician class so long as they swore fealty to Petros and the Empire, while all others would become plebeians. Criminals serving sentences would be made slaves, and their terms would have to be paid in labor. Structured as an administrative republic with a vast bureaucracy grandfathered from the NUN's own, the new society discriminated immensely in favor of western men who did not have any genetic or physical deviations.

In response, there was a mass exodus of people to the Moon, and the other planets of the system. The assassination of Petros I resulted in a minor succession crisis that allowed large numbers of people and materiel to be smuggled out past the asteroid belt and towards the Jovian orbit and beyond, but this gap was temporary. Eventually his shrewd and contemptuous youngest son was crowned as the Emperor Hector I, and the stability of the Aquitani Dynasty was all but assured. As the Roman Empire consolidated, the net closed and many escapees were trapped.

Now only rarely are people allowed to leave beyond the orbit of Mars, banished by decree of the Emperor over some slight. What lives beyond the Belt is a fraction of humanity, exiled or escaped from the Earth. A disparate, disorganized mish-mash of cultures desperately surviving by din of being ignored, for over eighty years since the declaration of the Empire.

Or it would have been, until the discovery of the Visitors and their relics. Now the exiles lead a tremendous technological edge and possess superweapons of tremendous power, with the potential to overthrow the Imperial order.

The Solar System

Mercury

Mercury is the energy capital of the Empire. Its orbit is bristling with arrays of solar collectors and particle accelerators that produce vast amounts of antimatter, the Empire's main strategic advantage over the exiles beyond the Belt. Crawling cities scrape the surface, processing the regolith into thousand-ton iron billets that are fired into orbit via railgun and collected for various construction projects.

Venus

Venus is a fortress, beneath a massive orbital shade that acts as the main fleet headquarters for the Empire's operations in the Mercury-Venus region. The planet itself is placid, bountiful ocean with a pair of continents named Ishtar and Aphrodite. Colonists, predominantly from East Asia and the Pacific Rim settled these mountainous lands and built arrays of terraced farms on the acidic but fertile soil. Later Imperial developments resulted in the creation of luxurious canal cities on island chains in the shallows for the pleasure of the patricians.

Earth

Earth remains the capital of human civilization, however battered. Boreholes carved into the Pacific, Siberia and la Plata regions resulted in major tectonic shifts that destroyed many coastal and island nations, forcing their people to migrate into space. Eastern Siberia, Scandinavia and Canada are the current breadbaskets of the planet, with the increased temperatures turning them into temperate zones with active watersheds. The orbital elevator is still a patchwork project, consisting of 'trees' of solar collection stations at the ends of a number of tethers built at equatorial regions.

Rome was made the capital, with the Emperor having seized the Vatican and much of the surrounding city to use for his pleasure and that of the patricians, while the city proper has expanded to grotesque proportions. Vacuum magrails connect it directly to the orbital elevator in North Africa.

The Moon

The headquarters of the Imperial Navy and the center of industry. Most people live in capped boreholes carved into the lunar regolith, vertical cities that descend dozens of miles downwards through lattices of skyscrapers and terraces.

Mars

Rocky and boreal, Mars has a breathable atmosphere and wintry weather patterns that generally do not lend themselves to colonization. Despite this, a few billion people live beneath domes, mostly members of the exiled Pan-Arab diaspora. Reckless resource exploitation by the Empire has resulted in a slow reversal of terraforming. Mars may return to being an airless desert in around a century if the pace of surface mining doesn't slow and measures aren't taken to reverse the damage.

The Belt

The battleground of the Empire and the exiles it deems 'barbarians'. The people of the Belt sought freedom long before the NUN became the Neo Roman Empire, and have provided a bulwark for the outer system by taking the brunt of Imperial aggression. A few possess Visitor technology and activator genes through various backroom deals with Jovian nations.

Jupiter

The heartland of free human civilization is exactly as harsh as astronomers believed, although many of the Galilean satellites are host to prosperous and safe societies safe from Jupiter's vicious radiation storms. From archeological evidence it's likely the Visitors once had a research station here, possibly built to observe a fledgling humanity.

Saturn

Safer than Jupiter and just as wealthy in volatiles for fuels and weaponry, Visitor colonization was more sparse- likely for the reason that it would be easier to detect. A large cache of relic exists on Titan, making it a hotly-contested planetoid.

Uranus and Beyond

Human attention to the planets beyond Saturn is extremely sparse, with a few small colonies here and there. Pluto is the site of an Imperial surveillance facility observing the Oort Cloud and likely the rest of the Outer System as well.

The Oort Cloud

Vast and empty, data taken from a cache on Jupiter suggests that the Visitors accidentally left large numbers of inert probes in the Oort Cloud. Although a risky investment, it may be possible to launch expeditions into the cloud to find these, giving the discoverer potent boosts to their research and Visitor materials supplies.

Nation Building

Assign your points to each of the categories until you run out. That'll give you the basis around which to write up the details of your nation.

Modifiers listed apply bonus points towards a particular rank, rather than directly modifying the Rank itself. For example, (Infrastructure +3) means that three bonus points are automatically added to the Infrastructure category, and (Growth -2) means that two points are subtracted from Growth. The player must make up the remainder to gain a new rank; if only part of the point cost is fulfilled; excess points are wasted.

Negative modifiers do not need to be bought up to zero, though values below 0 can be assumed to be particularly exaggerated.

Population

Commune (24 Points to spend): An isolated group with a few hundred members at most, with few aspirations on the outside world until they successfully built their Vulgar Engine. Prosperity and Visitor Adaptation are half-cost.

Minor Enclave (25 Points to spend): A small station with a few thousand aboard, potentially representing a small ethnic group or fringe ideology. Adds +1 to Prosperity, +1 to National Advantages and Visitor Adaptation costs 75% of normal (e.g.: 0/3/6). Minor Enclaves are specialized settlements and additionally may add +75 to base Wealth or Infrastructure, or add 200 Military Support.

Major Enclave (27 Points to spend): A large station with several thousand people aboard, the very largest a space station can get without substantially devoting itself to habitation. Adds +2 to National Advantages. Major Enclaves are fairly specialized settlements and additionally may add +100 to base Wealth or Infrastructure, or add 250 Military Support.

Minor Orbital (30 Points to spend): A station of import with tens of thousands of people aboard living in rotating habitation cylinders or a single large ring or sphere, designed to recreate the environment of the lost Earth. Modern designs might be more splendid and exotic. Adds 30 base wealth and construction rate.

Major Orbital (29 Points to spend): A massive station with hundreds of thousands of residents living in a fully-formed terrascape with discrete towns and cities inside these spaces, a metropolis in space. The largest possible size without being dispersed, 60 base wealth and construction rate, but receives -1 to Prosperity.

Diaspora (27 Points to spend): The remnants of a culture and nation on Earth, banished to the stars or willingly escaped on their own with millions now living spread across several stations. -2 Prosperity, adds 100 base wealth and construction rate and +2 Homeland Support.

National Advantages

Rank 0 (0 points): Your nation has no advantages. Everyone should have something to feel special about :(

Rank 1 (1 point): Your nation has a single National Advantage.

Rank 2 (2 points): Your nation has two National Advantages.

Rank 3 (4 points): Your nation has three National Advantages.

Rank 4 (6 points): Your nation has four National Advantages.

Rank 5 (9 points): Your nation has five National Advantages.

National Disadvantages

This field returns points, instead of costing points.

Rank 0 (0 points): Your nation has no unusual flaws, just the usual minor problems.

Rank 1 (+1 point): Your nation has a single National Disadvantage.

Rank 2 (+2 points): Your nation has two National Disadvantages.

Rank 3 (+3 points): Your nation has three National Disadvantages, plus one chosen by the GM (!)

Rank 4 (+4 points): Your nation is a hellhole; expect to get hammered by whatever the GM feels to throw at you. It is entirely out of your control at this point.

Prosperity

Rank 0 (0): Lacking even the most basic means to produce food and other provisions, and completely exposed to the elements. Your people desperately need to invade the Empire and claim territory, or starvation and ruination from cosmic radiation are all but inevitable. Raids on other colonies is a fact of life. Adds +1 Military Support.

Rank 1 (1): Your people live in austere zero-gravity shelters and subsist off of aeroponics and tasty chemical-laden rations.

Rank 2 (2): Your people live in spin or artificial gravity, eating tasty facsimiles of real food under an artificial sky. At this level population growth begins to hit positives.

Rank 3 (3): Your society lives in a comfortable, Earth-like environment within which your people may prosper.

Rank 4 (4): The people of your nation struggle to find reasons to actually invade the Earth, and live in splendid luxury. Adds +1 Wealth.

Rank 5 (5): Your society is a utopia where all needs are met and all wants are fulfilled. Unhappiness is abolished. Adds +2 Wealth.

Going beyond the maximum level has no additional benefit.

Wealth

Rank 0 (0): Yours is a pauper nation that was nearly bankrupted by its Engine. Wealth Rating 20

Rank 1 (1): Wealth Rating 45

Rank 2 (2): Wealth Rating 70

Rank 3 (3): Wealth Rating 90

Rank 4 (4): Wealth Rating 110

Rank 5 (5): A major trading power in the Outer System. Wealth Rating 125

Every additional Rank of Economy adds 15 to the Wealth Rating.

Infrastructure

Rank 0 (0): You have the facilities to perhaps maintain and repair starships. It is incredibly unlikely that you built your own Engine- rather it was probably purchased or gifted from another faction. Construction Rating 20

Rank 1 (1): Construction Rating 45

Rank 2 (2): Construction Rating 70

Rank 3 (3): Construction Rating 90

Rank 4 (4): Construction Rating 110

Rank 5 (5): Massive, well developed planetary and spaceborn industry. Construction Rating 125

Every additional Rank of Infrastructure adds 15 to the Construction Rating.

Military Support

Rank 0 (0): Your people simply do not see the value in the deployment of weapons beyond your Vulgar Engine, or perhaps lack the desire to do so. Your non-Engine military is halved for your size.

Rank 1 (1): Recruitment and deployment forces is about normal for your size.

Rank 2 (3): Public perception of your military is extremely positive, and recruitment is strong. You have +50% recruitment of normal.

Rank 3 (5): Your people are frighteningly militaristic and worship their soldiers as heroes. Military size is doubled.

Rank 4 (8): Everyone fights! Nobody quits! Your non-Engine military is 250% of the normal size, and the penalty for going over your limit is an extra 50% every interval instead of a full 100%.

Military Quality

Rank 0 (0): Your troops and crews are disorganized militias of extremely poor quality. The Empire laughs at your army of old men and mewling infants.

Rank 1 (1): Your troops are well-trained and coordinated, and can be counted on to get the job done.

Rank 2 (3): Very little ever goes wrong that can legitimately blamed on human error. Your soldiers are generally respected by the Imperials, who see you as showing your own lesser Roman virtue.

Engine Size

Rank 0 (0): Knight. A standard 'hero unit' vehicle, with 1-4 pilots.

Rank 1 (2): Dragon. A splendid starship or similarly-scaled unit.

Rank 2 (4): Leviathan. That's no moon!

Engine Complexity

Rank 0 (0): Your engine is a simple design. Its metric-adjusting technology is discrete and limited in scope.

Rank 1 (2): Your engine displays the basics of metric-adjustment technology borrowed from the Visitors, allowing for some control over a single physical phenomenon.

Rank 2 (4): Your engine is especially advanced and can effect two types of phenomenon at once. Such machines are widely feared for their versatility, although conflicting systems may create weaknesses if their functions can only be accessed one at a time.

Rank 3 (6): Your engine's design is at the apex, with three metric-adjustment permutations or gimmicks that give it tremendous power and flexibility.

Homeland Support

Rank 0 (0): You are landless pariahs, without ties to the people living under the Imperial thumb. With the gulf of space separating you, espionage actions are likely to take very long or be very slow.

Rank 1 (1): You have some ties, either because very few of your people stayed behind or because you are seen as untrustworthy. Espionage is feasible and information trickles in occasionally.

Rank 2 (2): You have decent ties to several populations living in the Inner System. Your covert options may even include infiltrating the Imperial bureaucracy. Information about daily life in the Empire is common.

Rank 3 (3): Your networks are extremely well developed. You may covertly sponsor insurrections and terror attacks, steal information, sabotage public works and carry out assassinations.

Rank 4 (4): The people await revolution. Some go as far as sell themselves into concubinage with officials and members of the high court simply to position themselves better for you.

Visitor Adaptation

Rank 0 (0): These changes will take time. Your people only make use of Visitor technology within your Vulgar Engine.

Rank 1 (4): Some advances have begun to percolate. At this level your standard units have the same basic material composition and structure as your Vulgar Engine and incorporate Visitor conveniences like innertialess drives and artificial gravity.

Rank 2 (8): Your society casually incorporates advanced Visitor technology at all levels of design. If your Vulgar Engine possesses any metric alteration effects, your regular units may weakly incorporate any single of them in some way.

National Advantages

Activation Ubiquity

Activation factor for Visitor technology is exceedingly common in your population due to a variety of factors. In practice this means that Visitor technology almost never fails randomly due to the absence of activator genes, and you have a pool of skilled pilots and other crew to replace a lost Vulgar Engine and pilot.

Adapted to [Zone]

Your people have become adept at exploiting the resources of a specific planet or region of space, such as the Belt, the clouds of Jupiter or the Martian wilds. Production via Infrastructure and Wealth are more efficient in relevant zones. In practice, similar environments (Jupiter versus Saturn) will provide lesser but still significant benefits.

Eminence Grise

Your diplomats are skilled and influential, your leaders loved and respected. The Empire accepts your diplomats and may even recognize your statehood, however temporarily.

Engine of Pride

Your Vulgar Engine is not merely seen as a machine, but an emblem of national might and features heavily in your propaganda pieces. Your unit morale is effectively unbreakable on battlefields where your Vulgar Engine is deployed, short of extreme casualties or the loss of your unit.

Frontier Fleet

Rather than a slow-moving habitat, your population is based on a fleet of starships that can move between gravity wells in a matter of weeks or months. While such ships are less durable than a single massive space station, you are substantially more difficult to siege.

Human Plus

Your population freely adopts transhuman technologies such as genetic engineering, cybernetics and pharmacopoeia to improve the state and function of the human being. The effect of this is dependent on your national statline, but in effect your strengths and national advantages are somewhat exaggerated in gameplay.

Prestigious Legacy

You are the successors to a particularly legendary polity or culture, such as China, Persia or the United States. This increases the effectiveness of Homeland Support and gives a semi-random drip of Wealth units from tourism that scales to Prosperity. Additionally, your claims to the ethnic homelands will almost certainly be recognized should you succeed in retaking them.

Load-Bearing State

Your nation are exceptionally important in a single function, allowing them limited immunity from sanctions or aggression because of this. In practice this requires the player choose a function (such as providing Helium-3 fuel) and a region (Mars and the rest of the Inner System, the Oort Cloud, etc) over which they are bearing loads.

Orbital Refrain

Your nation owns a substantial and critical piece of space infrastructure, such as an orbital elevator, megafactories, gas harvesters or a major geo-engineering project. This is built as a 2000-point structure that can have no more than 5% of its cost invested into offensive functions. Owning this facility provides special points for projects, narrative benefits based on the design, as well as a drip of infrastructure or wealth depending on the type. Their production value is based on the utility points invested in them. For obvious reasons the loss of such a facility or its destruction would be devastating to your economy.

Superior [Keyword]

Your country has a particular strength in one general field, improving their effective advancement level by one in it. Broad fields such as 'weapons', 'armor', etc are acceptable.

Toblerone Territory

Your national ethos and production lean heavily towards defense. Defense satellites, cosmofortresses and space minefields are half-cost in production and support burden. Units built at the discount have to be partially disassembled to be shipped across large distances and do not move in tactical combat. Combined with Rebellious Province, you instead receive this benefit to the construction of ground-based fortifications, trench networks and artillery batteries.

Visitor Reclaimers

Your people are experienced at looting Visitor artifacts and putting them to practical usage. Locating and harvesting Visitor relics is of greater benefit to your research apparatus than most.

National Disadvantages

Cursed by Space

Your people have been made sickly, weak and infirm by exposure to the rigors of prolonged habitation in space. In practice this has the effect of exaggerating the consequences of any other negative traits you have, as well as any low-rated statistics.

Client State

Your society is not sovereign, and lives under the thumb of another. You may be recently conquered by the Empire, slaved to the system of another exodite group. You provide 25% of your Wealth and Infrastructure production to your master, and your Vulgar Engine is almost certainly a secret. Cannot be taken with Engine of Pride and Rebellious Province.

Engine of Disaster

Something went wrong with your engine. It crackles, it howls. Pilots die frequently at the controls, or are driven insane with rage. Sometimes the plating buckles and twists open to reveal oozing viscera, tangled wires or furious plasma conduits. Your Vulgar Engine is functionally uncontrollable save for choosing when and where it will be deployed- but on the bright side is exceptionally difficult to defeat.

Gundamjack

Rather than building an Engine yourselves, you're upstarts who stole one from a rival nation. Select one other player nation as the target of your theft. During Engine generation, the Infrastructure or Wealth bonus is derived from their statistics rather than yours. You may still make the deferment of production and go into debt to improve it appropriately, although the expense is made on your end even if the bonus applied is theirs. For obvious reasons this will sour international relations.

Inferior [Keyword]

Your country has a particular weakness in a broad field, such as weapons, electronics, etc, making them operate at one rank lower in that field.

Islands in Space

Your nation is split into many parts rather than centralized to a single region or habitat cluster, making sustained defense during a war difficult at best and impossible at worst without strong allies in the region. Divide your nation into several pieces and split your Wealth and Infrastructure production between them, assigning one as your capital. As a consolation, each non-capital sector gains +2 Wealth and Infrastructure production per parts you have (so a nation broken into 5 pieces gains +10 on 4 of its regions). This is obviously incompatible with Frontier Fleet and Rebellious Province.

Pariah State

Thanks to some past (or current) actions, your state is quite unpopular among the greater community of nations. Most others will treat you with suspicion and bad assumptions are paramount.

Rebellious Province

Your nation is not an exodite orbital or enclave, but one of the Inner System's provinces on the heartland worlds of Venus, Earth and Mars, or a satellite like the Moon or the Mars Trojans. This starts you in a state of war with the Empire, which will not accept your sovereignty unless absolutely pressed and leaves you effectively surrounded on all sides. This trait is also incompatible with any rank of Visitor Adaptation at game start- shipping functioning Visitor equipment and institutional knowledge to Mars or Venus in meaningful numbers is exceedingly difficult with the Imperial fleet's control of space travel, if not impossible.

Sole Activator

Your Visitor Activation factors are held within the hands of a single family, perhaps even a single person. This means that their deaths would result in your tech level instantly regressing to Imperial norms, while much of your infrastructure may cease functioning.

Visitor Cultists

Your people do not believe in appropriating the tools of the Visitors for their own ends. You receive no benefit for looting relics for materials or technology to upgrade your Vulgar Engine, but begin play with knowledge of at least a dozen relic sites which you are compelled to defend. Holding these in the long term may provide benefits.

Militaries

Command

All nations have a certain ability to support fleets of warships and armies of ground troops, derived from their Population and the Military. This is their Command, and military units fill it at a 1:1 ratio. Due to the cost of large militaries, when a nation's military exceeds its support, all prices are increased by 100%. If a nation's military exceeds more than twice its support, all prices by increased by 200%. For every additional multiple of a nation's base support, cost increases by another 100%.

If the nation is at war and has suffered sufficient losses that its military is less than half of its support level, all military items cost half as much.

All nations begin with half of their maximum Command to fill out with starting units. There actually is no hard limit on numbers produced after the game begins- it is generally assumed that a) traditional forces are not uniquely powerful enough to pose a threat to a Vulgar Engine, even with overwhelming numbers b) automation will fill gaps, allowing even a nation of a few hundred to field a vast fleet of drone starships if they eventually accrue the resources to do so.

The base ratings listed bellow may be increased or decreased depending on the Military Support stat.

Commune: 200 points

Minor Enclave: 300 points

Major Enclave: 450 points

Minor Orbital: 650 points

Major Orbital: 900 points

Diaspora: 1200 points

Military design

All military units (both Regiments and Warships) are built up from a pool of points equal to their purchase cost. These points must be distributed among various attributes which determine how the unit performs. Note that in general, as larger craft or vehicles are slower, for every 3 points of cost there is the equivalent of a -1 to speed - for those who want to make destroyer-speed battleships, you know how much speed you need to stuff in. Inertialless drives used by Visitor relics are less affected by mass than regular craft, applying a -1 penalty every 5 points at Visitor Adaptation 1 and a -1 penalty every 6 points at rank 2 of the same.

Particularly cheap ground and space units can be organized into Divisions or Squadrons, respectively. These have a maximum cost of 10 each, ignore the speed penalty from increased cost and are made up not of single ships (or relatively small groups of troops/vehicles), but a number of small units. This is to allow for a greater amount of customization on the bottom end.

Standard attributes (with some subtypes):

Firepower

Air Defense

Torpedoes

Defenses

Stealth

Speed

Fighter Complement

Bomber Complement

Electronics

Jamming

Survey Equipment

Morale

Morale is a special attribute attached to all military units in Vulgar Engines, representing training, discipline and esprit de corps. Higher-morale units will not only be more effective but also be less likely to break. Morale is an attribute as with other units. Every unit produced receives 10 free Morale points to spend on the attribute proper or any sensible subtypes. It is possible to spend more on training in regular build- unlike regular unit generation morale expenditures do not provide a speed penalty (overtrained ship crews are not substantially weightier). Subtypes are flexible, with more flavorful descriptions encouraged with types like "Impetuous" preferable over "Improved Initiative".

Military quality increases this to 15 and 20 at rank 2 and 3 respectively. The Human Plus advantage adds another 5, and allows for subtypes representing improved mental or physical capabilities. Superior [Type] traits based on a specific class or type such as [Destroyers]/[Battleships]/[Infantry] also boost the morale of the affected unit type (if applicable) by 5, although Superior [Engines] and technical-based enhancements obviously do not.

Vulgar Engines use standard morale build. Engines of Pride have 20 base morale (before Quality and Human Plus bonuses), and Engines of Disaster have 0 but do not experience any negative effects from low morale. Additionally, both types automatically apply their morale traits over friendly units on the same field.

Morale and example subtypes:

Morale

Discipline

Jungle Fighting

Guerrilla

Enhanced Physique

Improved Initiative

Military costs

Example Ground Regiments

Light Infantry Division: 4

Marines: 3

Light Battlemechs: 3

Heavy Battlemechs: 6

Super Battlemechs: 12

Land Dreadnought: 20

Example Warships

Destroyer Squadron: 6

Cruiser: 10

Capital Ship: 30

The Engines

Vulgar Engines are weapons that make use of the Visitor's strongly reality-editing technology to create platforms of unprecedented power and flexibility. Incorporating Visitor alloys makes them magnitudes more durable than craft in comparable sizes, and their ability to emit high-energy defensive fields, reinforce their surface integrity or otherwise bolster their defenses exacerbates the defensive advantage. Offensively, many are not conventionally armed but instead use advanced spatial manipulation to damage or destroy enemy units.

Their statlines are represented identically to regular military units, with some special rules:

• The points available to build a Vulgar Engine are based on the Engine Size statistic.
• Vulgar engines have special powers: 'gimmicks' which are tricks and equipment that enhance their capabilities and 'metric alteration', which are physics-editing properties with which Vulgar Engines can influence the battlefield.
• Gimmicks are purchased using the build points which are derived from national statistics like specialized ratings of a specific attribute (i.e. "Remote Beam Drones" are a Firepower specialty).
• Metric alterations are limited in options: a Vulgar Engine has a limit defined by the Engine Complexity level chosen at nation creation.
• Every nation begins with only one Vulgar Engine, constructing a second one is a major project with a variable cost depending on the intended design and a variety of factors within the builder's nation.

Engine Design

As with the design of regular units, Vulgar Engines are roughly represented with statlines to demonstrate their overall competencies. However, all have a special attribute called 'Alteration' which represents the overall force, precision and area of effect of their reality-editing apparatus. Area Control allows for more effective influence over a broad terrain, as well as the range. Flux determines the offensive power of these effects. Utility reflects the precision and non-combat applicability of alteration effects, as well as the power and usefulness of strictly non-offensive powers such as faster-than-light travel. Gimmicks may be permutations of any of an Engine's physics-editing alterations or independent specialties- they differ from those or regular craft by din of having more fanciful names and (usually) higher ratings.

Each starting Vulgar Engine receives a potential bonus to construction points based on Infrastructure or Wealth (player choice), to better reflect each state that built it. It is possible to gain more points by going into 'debt', deferring a full Quarter's Wealth or Infrastructure production to add the bonus to a unit's point's value (20% for Knights, 40% for Dragons and 50% for Leviathans). There is no hard limit on points gained this way, although the debt is applied even to Wealth and Infrastructure acquired through trade, tribute or conquest.

Ranks of Visitor Adaptation also increase the points gained: infrastructure becomes that much more efficient at constructing engines of war based on recovered alien technology. At Rank 2 units gain +10% to the production bonus and any debts taken on, and at Rank 3 this value is increased to +20%. Note this this bonus only applies to nations who have built their own Vulgar Engines.

Firepower

Air Defense

Torpedoes

Defenses

Stealth

Speed

Fighter Complement

Bomber Complement

Electronics

Jamming

Survey Equipment

Alteration

Area Control

Flux

Utility

Knight-class Vulgar Engines

Knight-class Vulgar Engines are usually tank or fighter-sized craft, although mecha are popular in the Mars and Jupiter regions. They have an initial base of 100 points to spend and suffer no speed penalty. A nation may add 20% of their Wealth or Infrastructure production to their spending pool.

Dragon-class Vulgar Engines

Dragon-class Vulgar Engines are usually starships, although massive single-pilot humanoid craft or AI-operated land battleships are sometimes built at this scale. They have an initial base of 200 points and may aspect two ways: Dragons of the East receive no speed penalties, while Dragons of the West receive a -33 Speed penalty that increases at a rate of 1 per 6 extra points over the base but also receive their speed penalty in bonus Defense or Defense subtypes/quirks. A nation may add 40% of their Wealth or Infrastructure production to their spending pool.

Leviathan-class Vulgar Engines

Leviathan-class Vulgar Engines are behemoths of the battlefields, star forts mistaken for small moons and capable of housing entire populations, massive super dreadnoughts and the like. They have an initial base of 350 points and begin with a -70 point Speed penalty that increases by 1 for every 5 points. A nation may add 50% of their Wealth or Infrastructure production to their spending pool.

Quirks

Vulgar Engines are not made equal, and sometimes have a variety of factors involving their construction. Some are prohibitively expensive to operate, now house the full population of the nation or any number of other circumstances. Each Quirk adds a full stack of the Wealth/Infrastructure bonus, varying by class, to the unit. These must be legitimate flaws, not just gimmes, however. They may be hypothetically stacked but each time gives diminishing returns. e.g.: Upgrading a 10% production cost to deploy requires an increase to 30% to receive another pip of bonus Wealth or Infrastructure percentage, and then 60% and finally 100% for the next two.

Example Quirks might include:

• Deploying into combat costs 10% of quarterly Wealth production.
• Repairs after deployment costs 10% of quarterly Infrastructure production.
• Requires a thick cladding of ice to function: if this is evaporated the unit rapidly overheats and stops functioning.
• The unit's special defensive field has a major Achilles Heel that can be exploited in tactical encounters.
• The fortress' exhaust system has a vulnerability that can be exploited to destroy it in a single shot.
• The unit's profile features a vulnerable radome, which can be easily destroyed to blind it and make its ICBM launcher useless.