Dispatches from the Pale Issue 2

The second issue of Dispatches from the Pale is now live. It's got revised and streamlined character creation rules that I really like, and an introduction to Sky Stalwart's world. I know that I posted a few days ago about the importance of sidekicks, and I kept fiddling with using Kirby in this role. 

But I kept thinking of PeeWee Herman - "I'm a loner, Dottie... a rebel".

Sky Stalwart is (very) loosely based on The Odyssey, and the Odyssey is all about how one guy ends up all by himself trying to get home. Having a sidekick makes him 'not on his own' so much. Furthermore, the dynamic of Kirby's personality doesn't create as strong of a contrast with Sky as it does in my drafting with Skye - he simply works better with her. I figure I'll keep that on the back burner for another time. Instead, I gave him a clockwork dragon sidekick. This makes more sense - it is a toy that he made for his son, and he keeps it with him as a reminder of his family. This is more on brand for the character. So, Clockwork the Dragon it is. 

A Sky Stalwart Update

I've been working on all things Sky Stalwart on and off this weekend, and updated a few things. I re-colored him in darker purples (because I liked that better, and it fits his LEGO figure better)... I also added to his Cormorant LEGO set (it's almost done), and created a stat block in Shards, using the streamlined character creation rules I plan to roll out in Dispatches from the Pale #2. I ALSO threw together a sample comic page - this is pretty rough, but I like the vibe, and I might end up re-drawing this as an 'official' page of his comic series. As is, this might be archived as the 'draft' Raymond Alexander did... or something. Anyhow, here's some stuff to look at! (The cockpit has his space helmet, his phase pistol, and a jet pack... the cockpit detaches as a pod for exploration apart from the main ship... it's a whole thing).

Sky Stalwart - The Man Who Fell From Earth; Clever Human Explorer 4

AC 19 | Hits 30 | Feat +10 | Move 3 | Resolve 4d8

Phase Pistol (x4 | +6 | 1d8) (stun setting)

STR 10 (+1) | INT 16 (+2) | WIS 10 (+1) | DEX 10 (+1) | CON 10 (+1) | CHA 12 (+1)

Attack +1; Attribute Focus (INT); Defense +2; Expert (Physics); Fortitude; Gadgeteer; Hacking; Resolute; Vehicles 

Belief: Life should always be protected.

Omni Suit (grants AC +2; acts as enviro suit and vac suit)

Sky Stalwart and the Cormorant

My daughter often tells me I'm a nerd. Well DUH. Here is my initial design for the Cormorant, Sky Stalwart's starship, as well as a custom LEGO minifigure for Sky Stalwart. Sky's minifigure is a combination of Batgirl, a Cedric Diggory head (I think that's who it is), a random bank robber, and Fred from Scooby Doo's hair. I think that the pistol may be too big - he needs either a classic megaphone pistol, or something smaller. I wish I had a purple torso with some yellow accents, but that's something to keep my eye out for...

Now, I just need to make the Cormorant out of LEGO, and I'll be all set...

Sky Stalwart and Messy History

I had something of an 'aha' moment. I was thinking about the 'world' of Shards of Tomorrow, and how much I like how I solved the world of Doc Stalwart / The Stalwart Age by creating a comic that never was. It scratched an itch for me to have a comic series I always wanted to have. I could create a full series of hundreds of comics of an extended storyline, or I could just pretend I did! I chose pretend, and am much the happier for it.

It occurred to me that I could do the exact same thing for the science fiction world I want to craft. I had two competing ideas in my head - a classic two-fisted hero named Sky Stalwart, or a modern, not-manic-pixie-dream-girl-but-also-kindof named Skye Stalwart. One was Doc Stalwart's dad, and the other was his daughter. I couldn't decide which story to pursue...

Then I realized that, thanks to the messy real history of comics, I didn't need to! I keep embracing the idea that the history of publishing is fraught with weird events, behind-the-scenes drama, and outright plagiarism and intellectual theft. Problem solved!

I present to you the science fiction comic strip that never was (except in my imagination)... Sky Stalwart: The Man Who Fell From Earth. My plan is to create the world around the comic strip, and maybe even some sample comic strips, but to not actually make 12,000+ strips. This gives me the chance to 'own' a comic strip that lasted several decades (which I've always wanted) without actually, you know, doing the work of MAKING a comic strip that takes decades to do.

It's called having your cake and devouring it as well. I highly recommend it.

More to come shortly. I'm excited to design his starship, the Cormorant. I'm excited to delve into some of his most notable storylines. Tolkien once talked about creativity as taking a leaf from the tree of ideas that have already been written and describing your leaf as well as you can. I feel like the leaves of this are already created, and now I just get to go and pull leaves as I will. Fun! 

Concepts in Shards

Here's some stuff I'm thinking of for the next issue of the Dispatches from the Pale...

I was going through the Shards core rules to do some playing, and I was thinking about how some of the concepts I developed for Hack'D would fit nicely in Shards. Specifically, I was thinking about character generation. Shards is very much a class and level game, but Hack'D breaks the concept of classes apart, having each character build from the ground up with tags, tailoring these to fit the character concept. It's a much more free-form approach. As I went through the vocation gifts, general gifts, and talents, I saw that these all fit under the heading of tags well. Instead of 1d4 gifts, alongside a few talents and some vocation gifts, you start with 2d4 tags (so an average of 5), which is pretty close to the previous setup. Mechanically, not much changes, but the flexiblity for character options increases dramatically. 

In the same manner, ethos is replaced with a demeanor (straight out of Hack'D), that guides roleplaying, rather than saying what 'side' you are on. As we know, the good guys aren't always on the same side. You'd then get a +1 to an attribute at levels 2, 4, 6, and a new gift at levels 3 and 5; your new gift would have to be one of the former vocation gifts or talents; you probably don't suddenly learn how to fly, but you could pick up some new contacts or learn how to disarm security systems in your travels. Also, since the armors already have minimum CON requirements, there's no need to add another layer of restriction for armor.

Here's a character using the revised character building ideas:

Gat Parmetheon, 

Honorable Maladorian Bounty Hunter 1
AC 14 | hp 7 | Feat +6 | Move 3 | Resolve 1d8 | 

Blast Pistol (+3/1d6)
     STR 9 (+1); INT 10 (+1); WIS 7; 

     DEX 11 (+1); CON 12 (+1); CHA 8
Attack (+1) | Danger Sense | Heightened Senses | Resolute | Vigor
Blast Pistol (1d6); Sivir Flex Armor 

 
The Maladorian are relatively terran-like, but with exceptional battle senses honed over thousands of years. They are a stoic people, with an entire culture built around warfare and rule by the strong. Their planet is composed of hundreds of city-states that continually wage war with one another.

Kurdesh the Crime Lord for Shards of Tomorrow

I decided that my game needed a crime lord a la Jabba... although I ended up thinking of him more like the Thing meets Kingpin. He's more about business than he is about cruelty. I'd think he'd be a good foil for Eno the Prime Director... each of them goes about his business with cold calculation. For Eno, it's what furthers the causes of bots, while for Kurdesh it is about making money. I kind of see him as the ultimate capitalist. He'd be against the entire guild model, because it seeks monopolies, and he would want as much competition as possible, because that's where he can drive up prices on his end. He'd be more involved in bounty hunting, 'security services' (amoral guns for hire that he coordinates), and smuggling operations. He'd also have a heavy presence in gambling and casinoes, but not as much in things like drugs or 'adult services' such as they are. I might even give him an aversion to these - maybe he lost his daughter to that life, and that is where he'd draw the line. He's a criminal with his own moral code such as it is. I think that makes him a little more interesting. It's also more likely that a 'good guy' like Vex Kalar (he of the Centurians of Gal) is going to have to hold his nose and make a deal to work alongside Kurdesh to accomplish some greater good. He gives more story possibilities this way... 

Dispatches from the Pale #1

I finally finished Dispatches From the Pale #1! It's a newsletter for the Shards of Tomorrow RPG 2E. It's pay what you want, and should give you a sense of what the RPG is about. I like it. Maybe I'll take a break from Hack'D & Slash'D for a bit and start a solo Shards game... my other dice are getting lonely with me spending all my time with the D12s...

Thinking Shards

I keep thumbing through my softcover of Shards of Tomorrow and thinking. I keep seeing opportunities for expansion and adventure. I keep going back to my ideal of a monthly magazine (a la Dragon, of course) of game support material. I keep inching closer to something like that... in the interim, I drew an alien bounty hunter to see how my style is coming along. I love how it keeps getting cleaner and simpler. This guy might be on the 'cover' of whatever that is. Or not. I really have no way of knowing.

Yet.  

Shards Preview - Big Space Battles

I was going to wait until tomorrow until I did another post (since the last one was so meaty), but then I realized that today was the last day of January, and I have done 39 posts this month (all substantial by the way - all killer no filler is the way). I couldn't let it go without getting a 40th in under the wire. I could do my next worldbuilding post, but I'd rather let that simmer for a little bit longer in my subconcious (it's about a 'thin slice' by the way, to whet your appetite, as if it needs whetting). So, I'll go with a preview of something I just wrote for Shards that I really like. I'm not sure why my gaming philosophy is a bit different for this game, but it is. I'm not really trying to write rules - I'm working on a simulation of the source material. How do I mechanically solve the moments I see in my head in the simplest way? I think about the various mass combat rules I've written before, and I thought they were pretty good at the time. There were maybe ten questions you'd ask to build a framework, and then you'd do a series of rolls to determine how combat went. 

This is SO much better. My mass combat rules drafts of the past have always had the actions of the PCs be an important part of the mix. Now, I've realized they are all that really matters. The fight is happening in the background, but the mission the PCs are on has to be central to victory or defeat; the PCs win, and we all win. The PCs lose, and we'll all have to re-group and try again tomorrow (unless everyone is dead. Then maybe not). That said, here are the few paragraphs that solve everything I've solved in about five pages in the past:

***

Big Ships, Space Stations, and Other Set Pieces 

The vehicle rules presume that any starship involved is small enough that it could be destroyed in combat between small numbers of adversaries. When it comes to larger ships, and there are such things (although they are rare), or larger objects in space such as space stations and orbital ports, it is best to view these as locations and set pieces rather than piles of hit points. If the story leads towards their possible destruction, it is better to mechanically solve this in other ways than resorting to figuring out the whole thing’s armor class, shields, hull, and hit points. For example, the heroes lead an assault on a messari battle carrier that comes through a wormhole. That thing is BIG - four kilometers long and filled with messari, but the PC crew has managed to align all of the local guilds to assault that thing. Okay. Rather than working out the statistics for each part of the battle carrier, construct the scenario in another way. 

Once the assault on the carrier begins, the crew’s mission is to disable the carrier’s wormhole navigation system. That system is mounted on the back of the carrier, has an AC of 20, hull of 10, and 50 hit points. The heroes have one turn to do it, and there will be 1D4+1 messari shadowblade interceptors joining combat against the PCs at the beginning of rounds 1, 4, and 7. The dozens of other ships are engaging other messari craft, neutralizing gun positions, and taking part in the larger space battle. It’s all in the background. Each round, 1D4 allies and 1D4 messari gun positions are destroyed. If either gets to 20 total losses, the crew either receives +2 to all future actions (if all enemy gun positions have been destroyed, and your allies are now only engaging interceptors) or suffers -2 to all future actions (as there are now a few more guns and other interceptors at the periphery that are creating distractions). At the end of one turn, either the messari battle carrier starts to collapse under the weight of all of this damage, or it reaches the edge of the wormhole and is able to jump through, escaping to repair and plot its vengeance. This all makes for a more interesting encounter that is easier to manage, and feels as though it has genuine stakes. It makes a big space battle feel different from a skirmish between a few smaller vehicles, because it is. 

 

Vex Solo Play 1

I think I'm ready to play test some starship combat. Let's stat up our centurion, his ship, a few enemies, and see what happens... 

***

Galan Centurion Standard Issue:

• Heavy Phase Pistol (1D8+1 frost damage | STR | STR 9+ required)
• Blast Pistol (1D6) as second weapon (and in case the foe is cold resistant!)
• 2 Bola Grenades
• 2 Medi Pads
• Utility Line
• Nutri Powder
• A Centurion Flex Suit (+2 AC | -1 to sneak attempts)
• Blast Pack.
• Centurion Helmet. This special helmet has a built-in tele link; it has both range goggles and a vent mask that can each be activated with one action; it grants +2 to all Feats against any sensory attack.

Lieutenant Vex Kalar, Centurion of Gal (Myrmidon 2)
    AC 15 | hp 26 | Feat +8 | Move 3 | Resolve 2D8 
    Heavy Phase Pistol (x2 | +4 | 1D8+1 frost damage); Blast Pistol (x1 | +4 | 1D6)
    STR 9 (+1) | INT 7 | WIS 5
    DEX 9 (+1) | CON 13 (+2) | CHA 7
Attack (+1) | Resolute (+1) | Vehicles (+1) 
Intuition: Object Reading | Vigor (soak 1 point per round)

Vex is a sincere, optimistic, and somewhat idealistic young man. Vex has kept his object reading intuition a secret from high command, and has actively worked against developing it. He never wanted to be an intuit; he has always wanted to be a centurion. Awareness of this gift would almost guarantee that he’d be placed in another division, and would not be on combat patrol.

Centurion X-8 Javelin Interceptor (With Vex Piloting)
    Rel +13 | Ctrl +4 | Speed 3 
    AC 19 | Shields 3D6 (2 zones) | Hull 6 | HD 2D8 (12 hp) 
    Twin-mounted phase cannon (+6 | 4D8)
    -1 die shift for upkeep (2D6) | Full sensor array
 
Muskrat Patrol Ship (with standard pilot 1)
    Rel +11 | Ctrl +3 | Speed 1
    AC 16 | Shields 2D6 (2 zones) | Hull 4 | HD 2D8 (9 hp) 
    Single Blast Cannon (+1 | 4D6) 
 
Playtest 1
 
Vex has been looking for a pair of muskrat patrol ships that have been harassing guild vessels as they enter and leave Banquo’s Tooth. His scanner picks them up and he moves to engage.
 
He hails them, but they try to bluff. It fails. He stops at 3 km from them. When he notices they are activating weapons systems, he does the same. Initiative. He wins. In the first round, he fires once, and each of the enemies fires once. All miss.
 
In round 2, he notes that they are preparing to drop into orbit and try to escape on Banquo’s Tooth. He fires twice, and hits once. His cannon deals 18 damage. The first muskrat's ship soaks 5 in the shields, 4 in the hull, and the remaining 9 to damage. This is the full hit points of the ship, so it is down to 0. The pilot must attempt a control check to keep the ship from careening into the atmosphere. He rolls a 3, and fails. The ship must attempt a reliability check, and gets a natural 1. The ship spins into the atmosphere, and burns up on re-entry. Ouch. The pilot has no chance to eject. The second muskrat uses its action to try and escape, but there aren’t many places to go… He pushes the engine for speed, and gets 2+1 =3. He travels 3 km with this engine fire. Weak sauce.
 
It’s round 3.  The muskrat was able to travel 3 km (now 6 km away), but this is still within the 10 km encounter distance. Vex will take chase, traveling 3 km without effort. He uses his other action to hail the ship again, telling it to stand down. The scavenger piloting it decides to still make a break for it. He pushes his engines, getting 3+1=4 km. He is now 7 km from Vex, so still within encounter distance. Vex fires, getting 19+6=25, and hitting easily. He deals 19 damage; the shields soak 6, the hull soaks 4, and the ship sustains 9 damage, which is again enough to put it at 0. The pilot must attempt a control Feat to crash land, and gets 8+3+6 = 17, so fails. 
 
I roll 1D6+1 for how many rounds until he crashes, and get 3. Vex is going to try and help him. He issues a command to stay in the cabin and lean into Vex’s vapor trail; Vex should be able to guide the craft down so he can make a safe emergency landing; this would be very, very difficult, but he has a lot of resolve. He attempts a CHA check and gets 3 on the die. Nope. The pilot ejects.
 
Vex sighs and follows the falling pilot. It is the beginning of the next turn when the pilot finally lands, his drop chute carrying him into the middle of the Veth Tundra. Ugh. Not good for this dude. There is a 1 in 6 chance that something dangerous is nearby; I roll 1. Yeah. It’s a Mirdan Crystal Wyrm. I guess I need to stat that bad boy up. Here’s a first stab at it:
 
Mirdan Crystal Wyrm (Huge Creature 4)
    AC 19 | HD 8D10 | Feat +10 | Move 6 (burrowing) 
    Bite (x4 | +8 | 4D8) | Ice Breath (8D10 per turn | 10 meter line)
    Burrowing | Immune to Cold 
 
We’ll just go ahead and give him 5 hp on the die, so 40 hit points. 
 
The Wyrm starts 2D20 meters away, and we get 12. That’s close.
 
Order of events: Vex hovers 6 meters up; scavenger pilot lands 3 meters from shadow of the Javelin; wyrm erupts from loose snow 12 meters away from the scavenger. It’s initiative. Vex wins, then the wyrm, then the scavenger. Vex would rather not just kill this thing if it can be avoided, but we’ll have to see. He is just hovering, so he doesn’t need to do anything else, and can fire his cannons twice. He gets 3 and a natural 1. Dang. He attempts a Feat on that natural 1, and gets 14+8=22, so he’s okay. He realizes that he had switched off fire control on his chase, and had to re-energize. Rookie mistake.
 
The wyrm has a decision to make; it can eat the easy little morsel, or try to crack this ship open and see what’s inside. Odds will be against Vex; I roll 4. He goes for the easy meal, and chases the scavenger, who is freaking out. He is able to easily cross the distance and gets 3 bites. Uh oh. He hits with the first bite, and swallows the little scavenger dude whole.
 
Vex realizes that engaging this creature is no longer justified, and decides instead to investigate the crash site. He leaves behind a circling and still hungry Mirdan Crystal Wyrm. If he wanted to, he could hover maybe half a km up and hit it with gunfire until it died or went aground. That would be needlessly destructive. He also knows that several members of his platoon would do that without qualm. The thought bothers him.
 
He turns his ship to the ruins of the crashed Muskrat. He might still be able to salvage something from its flight logs.
 
Notes:

• Chase rules work really well. By getting movement rates down to single digits for the most part, I am able to use 1D6 to reconcile most chases; if you have speed 8 and you are chasing a craft with speed 2, you will catch it, but it depends on how long it takes. If you have speed 8 and the other craft has speed 6, you are probably going to catch it, but if it rolls well and you don’t, it might be able to get away.
• I can’t always tell how much is my intuitive understanding of what I want the rules to do versus what the rules actually tell you, but the rules framed everything out well enough. I was able to improvise quite a bit, but always knew which ability or modifier would govern whatever I was trying to do. I didn’t have to ask too many questions; again, I’ve been tinkering with this system for a long time, so I don’t know how much of that is my own experience just kicking in, and I’m not sure how a newer GM might reconcile these situations. 
• I like it that a starship's stat block changes based on who's piloting them. A good pilot in a bad ship is still going to be able to do more than a bad pilot in the same ship would. 
• Starship combat is deadly; Vex is flying a superior craft against basic interceptors; he is a more experienced and capable pilot; he should be able to do that. There are a lot of ships that get one-shotted in space battles. Small interceptors with limited options should be exploding all over the place.

Let's Make a Creature!

I finished the draft of the creature generation rules. Then I rolled up a creature. Then I drew it based on what I'd generated. This is so weird and specific yet also just flippin' awesome alien bug goodness. I mean, this is something I never would have come up with if I didn't have the random generator. Love this so much...

***

Example of Creature Generation:

·       For form, I roll 1D6 and get [4]. This is insectoid in some way.

·       For level, I roll 1D20 and get [12]. This creature is level 2. One 1D4 I get [4], so it has AC 16. On 1D6 I get [6], so it will be the regular 4 HD variety of level 2. On the 1D4 I get [3], so it has a Feat modifier of +9.

·       For its size, I roll 1D10 and get [9], which added to its level x2 [2x2=4] gives a result of 13; this is a large creature with D8 for hit points. For its move, I roll 1D6 and get [6] +2 = 8. It’s a fast critter. Its main attack (a bite?) deals 2D6 damage. I roll 1D6 and get 1. Wow. It has a second attack. I decide that the second attack will be maybe a tail or something that deals damage on a -1 die shift, so it will be 2D4 damage instead of 2D6. 

·       I roll for gifts and get [2]. Rolling randomly for gifts (page xx), I get invulnerable and energy reflection (rolling randomly, I get gravity). For invulnerable, I roll [4]; this creature will soak the first 4 points of damage it suffers every round. I decide to tinker with the gravity reflection a bit to make more sense for this creature. It has that second attack, so I’m going to tie this to the gravity reflection. It can neutralize gravity by pointing its antennae at a foe and emitting an intuitive wave that impacts the gravity affecting that creature, but any intuit using a pull action against this creature may have that turned back on them; it’s a rare situation, but it could happen. I think I’m ready to throw together a stat block for this thing. I will use the word gravitation and an online anagram maker to get… gan vitiator. That is so much cooler than I expected.

Gan Vitiator (Large Creature 2)

      AC 16 | HD 4D8 | Feat +9 | Move 8 

      Bite (x3 | +4 | 2D6); Antennae Strike (x1 | +4 | 2D4 | + see below)

      Invulnerable (4); Gravity (pull) reflection

The 4-meter-long gan vitiator lives amid dry wastes. It appears like an elongated beetle with thin antennae. Once per round, it strikes a target up to 4 meters away with its antennae. The target of a successful antennae attack must attempt a Feat or be pulled towards the gan vitiator; the next bite attack against that creature is made at +2. Any gravity (pull) attack against the gan vitiator allows the creature to attempt a Feat; if successful, the vitiator ignores the attack; on a natural 20, the attack is reflected back upon the attacker.

      Drinking blood from a dead gan vitiator’s heart forces the drinker to attempt a CON check. Failure means that the drinker falls ill for 1D4 hours, suffering -1 to all action attempts. Success grants the drinker the intuit push ability for 1D6 turns. Gan vitiator blood loses its potency 24 hours after being extracted, and this pure heart blood may only be extracted from a dead gan vitiator. For some cultures living near gan vitiator hunting grounds, this is used as a test of adulthood, and becomes a requirement of tribal membership. Gan vitiators build nests in shallow, rocky holes, and females will produce 2D4 offspring once per year.

Pure Energy

I thought I'd take a break from the worldbuilding posts and get back to some game design stuff. My pets had me up at 3 in the morning (the cats really, really wanted to get into that closet), and I had some time to think. I roughed out some ideas around how energies work, and I'm really happy with how this all came together. I have been thinking that one of the things that this game needs more than the supers game (or the fantasy game... or an ants game...) is some logic and at least pseudo-scientific thinking behind the whole thing. I have already discussed how this game is not science fiction, but that doesn't mean that science isn't at least pretending to be part of it. Over night, I thought about the idea of fantastic science: it looks and sounds a little like science, but it is not beholden to any of the actual rules of science. This is the backbone of technology in this universe. I was thinking about opposing pairs of energies, and I think I got it down to eight relatively simple energies (four opposing pairs). I came up with fantastic science reasons why some work better than others, and why some are used how they are, and this little write up gives the entire universe of the game much more veracity. This is well worth dedicating a page of the game to, because it gives insight into the larger universe. You kind of know how the engine of your starship works, which makes tinkering with it and roleplaying around it much richer. You have to change your void filters, because those are going to get full of dark energy and start messing up other systems. That's what void energy does. 

Here are my current notes on these energies:

***

The foundational energies include concussive (blast) and electro (shock) energies. These are popular and in significant use. Blast energy is cheap, easily produced, and is the simplest energy to control, although it is the least malleable. It is produced from blast fields, which are naturally-occurring cosmic phenomena appearing as clouds in space filled with this energy.  Larger clouds often become the centers of space stations that contain the cloud, and the planet Banquo II has a dense blast cloud at its core. Blast is the go-to energy choice for weapons and engine systems. Electro (shock) energy is cheap and easy to produce, but has fewer military applications than blast energy. While it is popular for civilian purposes, it has limited use in powering vehicles and weapons. While blast energy has found most of its uses in ranged weapons and engine systems, shock energy still drives most basic systems, communications, and many melee weapons, where its energy is easier to control. Despite many attempts to master them, shock ranged weapons have proven inconsistent and difficult to use. Recent advances have been able to create shock energy from blast energy with zero energy loss, which has been instrumental to the growth of Banquo II.

The phase energies include cryo and thermo. Cryo (frost) energy is difficult to produce and expensive. Thermo energy is easier to produce than cryo energy, but can be costly to contain and transport. Because both energies use phase technology, devices using them bring added expense and power to the design.Phase weapons deal +1 die shift damage compared to blast weapons, but cost 10x as much, and require INT 9+ to tinker. Phase engines are typically 25% more powerful than blast engines, but with the 10x additional cost to purchase, and a +1 die shift to all maintenance costs.

The pulse energies include radiation and void. Radiation (light) moves along a variety of wavelengths, while void (dark) energy moves directly across those wavelengths, shattering them. Pulse weapons deal +2 die shifts damage compared to blast weapons, but cost 25x as much, and require INT 13+ to tinker. Pulse engines are typically 50% more powerful than blast engines, but at 25x the cost and a +2 die shift to the maintenance costs, few can afford the upgrade. Void energy is inherently destructive, and generally only the messari are corrupt enough to wield it.

The natural energies include gravity (pull) and kinetics (push). These have proven incredibly difficult to weaponize, and most efforts to produce weapons systems around these energies have been abandoned. However, push energy has been vital to the development of skim technology for vehicles (which relies on emitting hundreds of minor kinetic pulses every second), allowing vehicles to hover. On the other hand, pull technology has allowed for the development of ubiquitous air travel, with gravity dampening systems that allow vehicles to travel through atmospheres virtually ignoring the effects of gravity. Additionally, some intuits have learned how to manipulate and shape both pull and push energies.