Mindjammer RPG: Enhancements

This week’s preview of Mindjammer – The Roleplaying Game is a special two-parter, showcasing how we’re using extras to power equipment, and especially the cool genurgic, virtual, and cybernetic / mechanical modifications called enhancements, potentially a key part of your Mindjammer character.

In Fate 3rd edition, the concept of stunts or stunt packages which didn’t directly derive from a single skill was always a little problematic, sitting in an uncomfortable “unofficial space”, usually together with occupations or in an out-of-the-way part of chapters dealing with alien powers. Fate Core, with its immensely flexible Extras rules, brings them back centre stage, removing the overload which previously stunts had to bear. As we’ve touched on in previous previews, Mindjammer uses extras extensively; in fact, there’s an entire chapter dedicated to them.

This week’s first preview is a two page spread from Chapter 7: Extras, showcasing some of the “special abilities” we use in the game. These are “raw” extras, without any kind of descriptive gloss, providing examples of cool things you can do with the extras rules. Drain Energy? Force fields? Hyperintelligence? They’re all there. But – and this is key – they don’t have any “chrome” attached to them. That “Drain Energy” special ability is just a rules element – it could refer to a genurgic power, a technological weapon, or the natural ability of an alien life form. Mindjammer provides a thorough suite of pregenerated special abilities which are used throughout the rules for powers, gear, or abilities, and of course gives you guidelines for creating your own.

So how does that work in practice? That’s where this week’s second preview comes in, showcasing four pages from Chapter 8: Technology. There you can see a small selection of the essays on Mindjammer‘s technological paradigms, followed by the first part of the section on genurgic mods, which are Mindjammer‘s biotechnological augmentations. Take a look at those. On page 120, you can see a couple of mods described – these are the ones which don’t form a direct one-to-one match with the special abilities in Chapter 7. On the following two pages, you can see the full list of genurgic mods available to your organic (flesh and bone) characters; in many cases, they are instances of the Chapter 7 special abilities – examples of the possible forms those abilities can take when implemented via biotech.

The same principle holds throughout the equipment chapter, and indeed applies throughout Mindjammer. In addition to genurgic mods, Chapter 8 contains details of mechanical enhancements (if you have a mechanical synthetic character, such as a robot, sentient starship, etc), virtual enhancements (for use in the Mindscape), improvements to equipment, and of course hypertech – equipment itself, including weapons, armour, vehicles, ships, and so on. You can buy enhancements and equipments for your character using your extras budget, either during character creation or using advancements during play, or you can even create your own, using perhaps your Technical skill, or buy new gear in media res using your Resources. Are you about to embark upon a black ops mission in a war-torn culture about to go critical, and need a haze field, intrusion fold, and a stealth drone to help you out? This chapter shows you how!

That’s it for this week’s preview. We’re approaching the final throes of layout here at Mindjammer Central, and we’re tentatively eyeing early next month to open for pre-orders of the Mindjammer physical version and providing you with the bumper PDF – I’ll keep you posted here and at the Mindjammer Facebook and Google+ pages, as well as at MindjammerPress.com, as those dates become clearer. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please let me know!

Next time, I’ll take a look at the virtual world of Mindjammer – the ubiquitous and powerful Mindscape, and what it means for your character and your Mindjammer game.

 

Happy gaming!

 

Sarah

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This week’s artwork is by the talented Eric Lofgren and Marco Morte.