Category: Uncharted Worlds: Far Beyond Humanity

Far Beyond Humanity Career Week

Day 7 – Augmented

#FBHCareers  

Huzzah, the 7th and final day of the Career Preview Week ends with Augmented, the career that should have been second if I had gone in alphabetical order!

Anywho, the Augmented career has been around for a long while. Those of you who played/read early Beta versions of UW may remember the old Cybernetic career.

Confession time: when doing layout for UW, I forgot to swap out the career symbol for Cybernetic, and instead kept it for the Technocrat. Whoops.

So why name it Augmented rather than Cybernetic? Partly because I wanted the option of gene-modding as a secondary “explanation” for this career, but mostly because of the Robotic Origin.

The Skills are a bit more combat-ish, though Better is just about as all-encompassing applicability as you can get. The implementation of Faster is interesting to me, because it’s theoretically 100% narrative that can have some pretty big impacts on the mechanical flow of the game.

[Edit] OH! I’m looking for suggestions for a second Augmented workspace. I’m drawing a blank.

Tomorrow: General Origins design discussion!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c0tz83dxjee5gp6/Career%20-%20Augmented.pdf?dl=0

Far Beyond Humanity Career Week

Day 6 – Xenologist

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This was a bit of a surprise career. It hadn’t really been planned, it just kinda grew organically while thinking up Skills for other careers. Turns out to be one of the more flexible careers I’ve made, pairing well with diplomatic/commercial style Archetypes without alienating (hah) the broader adventuring set.

The development of Accustomed inspired a new “global” rule about living in an alien society (you have to make Cramped Quarters checks regularly in order to keep fitting in).

Adaptive is one of those “solid” Skills; not flashy, but creates new and interesting narrative opportunities.

I hope Trinkets isn’t too confusing. I just really like the idea of a “-1” Cargo of such useless trash that it would penalize you to try to sell it. Like, a cargo container full of the alien equivalent of lava lamps, bobbleheads and Rolox watches. I might just flip it to a free Class 0 Cargo, just to save confusion.

The Linguist skill is also known as “the Daniel Jackson”.

Tomorrow: The Augmented

https://www.dropbox.com/s/24ngij5c63d9vzh/Career%20-%20Xenologist.pdf?dl=0

Far Beyond Humanity Career Week

Day 5 – Psychic

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The Psychic was ostensibly the most difficult career to create, and went through a number of iterations before I was even ready to commit it to page. Like Kinetic, the Psychic career has some mighty big shoes to fill in regards to recreating popular sci-fi. Star Wars, and Star Trek, and Babylon 5, and Farscape and, and, and.

I ended up with too many skills. The community here on G+ was a big help with feedback and suggestions; hopefully this latest version hits the right notes for this very essential Career.

Precognition was, of course, the most complex one. While I really did like the other popular implementation that leveraged xp triggers, it felt very… unstable? Precarious? Like it would topple over very easily. This version of Precog is less elegant but more solid. Plus it gets the player to tell everyone a “what if” story, which is a plus in my book.

I ended up folding Telepathy and Empathy into one, and re-formatting it. Pretty happy the way it turned out, they lacked punch by themselves.

I clarified the wording of Probe and Suggestion to make their application and usage very distinct from one another.

Not 100% sure about the workspaces, but I really couldn’t come up with anything more fitting. Dollars to donuts I’ll come up with something brilliant a few months after FBH is published. -_-

Tomorrow: The Xenologist

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iq9r2cliaijakz0/Career%20-%20Psychic.pdf?dl=0

Far Beyond Humanity Career Week

Day 4 – Kinetic

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So this is probably the only career that I haven’t previewed before now. The Kinetic career has a lot riding on it; it needed to encompass so many sci fi tropes while remaining please-don’t-sue-me levels of plausibly deniable.

That said, implementing such a powerful career was rather interesting. Do I restrict, adding extra text and rules in order to ‘balance’? Or do I trust that, as a narrative game, the players will embrace the narrative over game-breaking?

As you may have guessed from the previous previews, I ended up erring towards the latter. Quite liberating. There’s still a certain amount of thought put into the wording of each skill, but at the same time I opted to scale back on ifs, ands and buts.

The divide between Telekinesis and Launch was a tricky one. I decided to divide things between “fine control” and “brute force”. While Launch can technically throw cars around, Telekinesis has a wider range of subtle applications (Kinetic Scoundrel pickpocket). Also I love the idea of describing a Telekinesis-powered Launch Assault.

Flight almost tore me in two. I kept wanting to go back and add more words. But are they worthy words? Or do they detract from the stark simplicity of the Skill? I considered that this Skill might be seen as super strong, but I realize that there will be- no: there has to be all kinds of alien characters who will be able to naturally fly, glide and/or hover.

Side note: I’m quite proud of my Kinetic career icon, took me a while to come up with something symmetrical that I liked.

Tomorrow: The Psychic

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ptwcshleqo24edv/Career%20-%20Kinetic.pdf?dl=0

Far Beyond Humanity Career Week

Day 3 – Fanatic

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Ah the Fanatic. Started out as the Devoted, but the religious wording didn’t sell the idea that this career could be hyper-focused on any ideal.

So it went through a pass where most overt religious terms were replaced my more general ones (except martyr, which is still common enough in non-religious senses). A couple of skills made their way over to the Chosen career, and a few new ones were added to further sell the fanatical quality.

My personal fave here is “Obsessive”, which tickles me to no end. I just love how well it distills the personality type into fairly simple mechanics. I mean, I absolutely know people in my gaming circles who have that skill.

Terrify is a really interesting one that I’m looking forward to playtesting and getting feedback. It feels like “what you are” rather than “what you can do”.

Very happy with how elegant and straight-forward Nemesis is. It’s always a fear when working on new skills, that all the brevity has been used up.

Tomorrow: The Kinetic

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ze2jz28vr8qboug/Career%20-%20Fanatic.pdf?dl=0

Far Beyond Humanity Career Week

Day 2 – Chosen

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Behold! The Chosen, the channel of the otherworldly forces. Much like the Arcane career, the Chosen is an amalgamation of two earlier career concepts. In this case, both the prototype religious/spiritual aspects of those careers were merged into this new career (which also cut down on “filler” skills.

(Side note: Some of the non-supernatural skills from the prototype “Devoted” career ended inspiring a new career that I’ll be previewing tomorrow)

My favorite design here has to be Pact: The idea that a Skill can create a Faction that only that character can interact with, and the use of Debt as a metaphor for spiritual obligation/geas.

Ritual feels like a bit of an “advanced” skill, in that both GM and player could potentially stumble. But I’m not sure how to shape that idea in a way that guides without restricting… and without writing a novel-worth of rules text.

Lay On Hands was one of my first FBH designs, and hasn’t changed all that much. I appreciate it’s simplicity and how well it combos with other career elements (including new careers; Lay On Hands + Alchemy, for example). That said, when I design a skill like this, forever after I have to consider that all other skills that interact with Patch Up also interacts with this.

Tomorrow: The Fanatic

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wddika0vnne4v66/Career%20-%20Chosen.pdf?dl=0