Posted January 28, 2025 by Valkyrion
I’ve refined my “Core 8” NPCs to the point where I’m confident calling this a full version 1.0.0 (and then some) release! That said, I have 4 more NPCs ready for playtesting: The ruthless Occultist, mindbending Prism, walloping Torrent, and scavenging Vulture.
Without further ado, here are the changes!
{VAL}/Scene, which is used like the {VAL}/Round tag but is instead, well, 1/Scene. It’s for cases where I don’t want the ability to interact with the Limited {VAL} tag.“… until the end of the Anchor’s next turn, until it uses this system again, or until it’s STUNNED, overheated, or destroyed.”
“Regardless of the result, the target cannot take reactions until the end of this turn, and the Hatchet flies 2 spaces away from the target.”
Tags: System, Recharge 4+, Free Action
Effect: The area targeted by the SALAMANDER THERMOBARIC CATAPULT becomes a smokescreen 4 spaces high that provides soft cover against attacks made within or through it. Characters that benefit from this cover are treated as INVISIBLE. This effect lasts until the Napalm uses this system again.
“Expend a charge for the following effect:”
“Allied characters gain IMMUNITY to hostile involuntary movement, and their attacks gain AP against targets within the Zealot’s SENSORS.”
Added rules for the DAZED condition, commonly referred to as “Brace Downside” in the community:
“Due to the force of a particularly powerful attack or effect, a DAZED character cannot take reactions and can only take one quick action – they cannot move normally, take full actions, or take free actions.””
Reduce the self-heat inflicted by the Recharge X+ tag to X - 1 (so Recharge 4/5/6+ inflicts 1/2/3 Heat). Recharge 4+ inflicting 2 Heat at a time made it a little too awkward to use some NPCs, even without PC hackers applying heat pressure. Reducing the cost will hopefully let those NPCs play fluidly while still maintaining a pressure gauge that players can leverage.
New! Sometimes, default OVERCHARGE can lead to incredibly explosive rounds or cause decision paralysis over whether to OVERCHARGE (and how) or not. This alternative rule is intended to streamline rounds by shifting OVERCHARGE’s power away from action quantity towards action quality.
For this optional rule, replace the second paragraph of Overcharge (Lancer, p. 73) with the following:
“After you make an attack roll, skill check, or save and know the result, you can OVERCHARGE your mech, allowing you to reroll the attack roll, skill check, or save once and use the new result. This free action can be taken even when it is not your turn.”
Additionally, replace the last sentence with:
“You take this heat after the action resolves. A rest reduces this counter by one step; spending 1 repair during a rest completely resets the counter. In addition, a FULL REPAIR resets this counter.”
New! Add an alternative rule for Structure Damage:
“When a character takes structure damage, instead of making a structure damage check, the affected character chooses to either be DAZED until the end of their next turn, or to suffer the System Trauma effect from the STRUCTURE DAMAGE TABLE (Lancer, p. 80).”
New! Add an alternative rule for Overheating:
“All characters with a HEAT CAP – PC or NPC – only have 1 STRESS and cannot gain more. When a character reaches their HEAT CAP, they become EXPOSED and OVERHEATED. Any Heat they take beyond their HEAT CAP is instead taken as AP energy damage.”
New! This change makes OVERKILL (Lancer, p. 105) an opt-in ability and consolidates the heat generated to a single amount for the purposes of RESISTANCE to Heat. Replace the text of the OVERKILL tag with:
“When rolling damage with this weapon, you may reroll any damage dice that land on 1. Additional 1s may continue to be rerolled. After damage is applied, the attacker takes Heat equal to the number of dice rerolled.”