9 Weapons
9.1 Weapon Degrees
Weapons are organized into grades/magnitudes:
9.2 Personnel Combat
| Degree | Examples | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weapons of last resort, e.g., Succubi stings, pistols, bayonets, broken bottles, bare-chested barbarians, etc. | |
| 2 | Melee (e.g., glaive, katana), common gas guns, trained open-hand combat, SMG, shotgun, stun-gun, carbine, Blattid psionics | |
| 3 | Classical anti-personnel ballistics (rifles, machine guns); Modern small arms (pistols, etc.); Flasbacks | Flashbacks cause bloom |
| 4 | Modern anti-personnel ballistics (inter-offing rifles); Dousing rods | |
| 5 | Anti-personnel \(\gamma\)-guns; AM slugs | \(\gamma\)-guns cause bloom and—like all ray guns—don’t shoot over the horizon |
| 6 | Tactical propulsives (e.g., missiles discluding nukes, etc.), Least Weasels | |
| 7 | ||
| 8 | ||
| 9 | ||
| 10 | Higher-order weaponry, e.g., building- or ship-level weapons used on personnel-level battles | See rules in sec-higher_order_attacks |
9.3 Vehicular, Building, and Platoon/Company
| Degree | Examples | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weapons of last resort, e.g., impulse drives, flak | |
| 2 | Point defense (e.g., hardened machine gun nests, anti-AM \(\gamma\)-guns) | |
| 3 | Tertiary weapons | |
| 4 | Secondary weapons | |
| 5 | Main weapons; mounted \(\gamma\)-guns | |
| 6 | ||
| 7 | Cruise missiles, self-guiding torpedoes | |
| 8 | ||
| 9 | Howitzer; tactical nukes | |
| 10 |
9.4 Army, City, Hägg, Spaceship
| Degree | Examples | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weapons of last resort, e.g., impulse drives, flak | |
| 2 | Point defense (e.g., hardened machine gun nests, anti-AM \(\gamma\)-guns) | |
| 3 | Tertiary weapons; Flashbacks | |
| 4 | Secondary weapons | |
| 5 | \(\gamma\)-guns | |
| 6 | AM rockets | |
| 7 | Cruise missiles, self-guiding torpedoes | |
| 8 | Nukes; Planet-Tethered System Defenses (Flashback cannons); Hägg defenders (Snails, Urchins, & Crabs) | |
| 9 | Hägg main cannon | |
| 10 | AM converters; jump flashes | AM converters typically have to be manually placed and initiated |
9.5 Special Rules for Different Weapons & Weapon Types
9.5.1 Ballistics
- Weapons that use mass & kinetic energy to cause damage (um, in case you didn’t know…)
- Classical ballistics of 1° — 3° use chemical propellants, and so go boom and eject a pretty visible puff of heated gas.
- Attacking with a classical ballistic makes the attacker more visible, going from fogged to concealed, or concealed to revealed
- However, a unit may expend 1 additional AP to remain at their evasion degree while firing a classical ballistic
- Attacking with a classical ballistic makes the attacker more visible, going from fogged to concealed, or concealed to revealed
- Modern ballistics use rails and so don’t suffer the reveal that other ballistics do
- Ballistics in space are only ever 1° or 2° in mag & range
Dousing Rods
- A Human machine gun usually of the same degree as inter-offers.
- Suppresses on any hit.
- They are expensive, especially for jumps, given their delicacy and ammo requirements.
- Although they can usually process the surface of Rocky planets into a sufficient stream of slugs—gunstones—they still need their own factory to process it and supply the other resources for its steady flow of rounds to target.
- They also have +1° attacks with “real” ammo instead of that scraped off the surface
- They also have +1° attacks with “real” ammo instead of that scraped off the surface
- They are also rather light (helping shed extra heat) and can be moved quickly. They are thus no more likely to reveal themselves than other modern ballistics.
- They do, however, cause a bloom in the host hex at 1/3 the rate of gamma guns (and so wet units that use them usually have anti-bloom armor, further adding to their jump costs)
- Although they can usually process the surface of Rocky planets into a sufficient stream of slugs—gunstones—they still need their own factory to process it and supply the other resources for its steady flow of rounds to target.
Punch Guns
A sort of advanced (nearly) recoiless shotgun often used for on-ship combat. They shot is a little finer than grains of sand, and the rounds have very little penetration. Their chokes can be opened to spreads nearly as wide as what video games seem to think is true to real (classic) shotguns, giving them a good chance to hit, even if they don’t always deliver the full inpact of the round.
- Penetrating attacks from punch guns (folowing rolls of natural 1s) are made at -2°. It’s usually safer not to try to attack the back line, but just take the 1 point of damage to the front.
Punch guns are poor long-range weapons. They suffer the following attack penalties are different ranges:
| Range | Void | Light Gas* | Medium Gas** | Heavy Gas*** |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present | 0° | 0° | 0° | -1° |
| Close | 0° | -1° | -2° | -3° |
| Far | -1° | -2° | -4° | -5° |
| Very Far | -3° | -4° | -8° | -9° |
* Light gases like dust clouds and thin (e.g., Martian) atmospheres
** Medium gases such as Earth-like atmospheres
*** Heavy gases like smoke clouds and gas giants’ atmospheres
Gas Guns
Weapons of varying calibers, but all with kinetic energy per shot limited to whatever else can power it up. Including you pumping it up. As long as there’s atmosphere that can be safely (and quickly-enough) compressed and rocks around malleable enough to be turned into shot, then you got yourself a gun.
- APs invested in shooting gas guns can be preserved up to the next shot1.
- Each AP invested increased the degree of the weapon (accuracy & damage, like usual)
- However, gas guns have a maximum upper-value to their attack. The attack bonus allotted by stacking additional APs only goes up a certain amount. This number is usually given as, e.g., a “7-max gas” when the highest attack value for that gun is 7°.
- Most, however, are mass produced 2-max guns that are light enough to be carried by many 2° units deployed to interstellar theaters.
So, every round, a unit with a gas gun can choose to invest as many APs as they want/can into attacks, but not carry out that attack, just add those APs to whenever they do attack, up to that gas-gun’s max degree.
Range
The range of a gas gun depends on the degree it has been pumped to for that shot. Viz., a gas gun can attack Present units when pumped to 1°, Close units at 2°, Far at 3°, and Very Far at 4° or higher.
Over-Compressing
- Gas guns can be pumped beyond their mix degree. E.g., a 2-max gun can be compressed with 3 APs to make it a 3° attack
- Each time an extra AP is added beyond the gun’s max, the unit must make a 0 AP roll against that new degree.
- Failure: Nothing happens; the gas gun successfully gains an extra degree it can use in its next shot
- Success: - The gun is damaged to the degree of the roll. Gas guns have HPs equal to their actual max degree. Damaged gas guns have their new, reduced level as their max for the rest of the scenario (assuming spare parts & tools are available). - That additional AP is added to the degree; however, no additional APs can be further pumped into that shot
- Example:
- A unit has already pumped 2 APs into their 2-max gas gun
- That unit invests both APs in a new round into further increasing the degree of the next shot with it
- After spending 1 AP to invest the first over-compressed degree into the shot, the unit makes a roll against 3°.
- The unit decides to invest an OP into the roll, meaning they now only have to roll against 2°
- They roll a 3, “failing” the roll and causing no damage to their gas gun
- After spending 1 more AP on the shot, the unit rolls again, this time against 4°
- The unit does not invest any OPs into the shot, so it stays against 4°
- The unit rolls a 1. The gas gun takes 1 point of damage; it is no longer a 2-max gun, but a 1-max gun after this shot
- In case you’re curious, the next round they take the shot at a 3° target with all armor in the front
- The unit spends 2 APs to take a careful now-5° shot
- They roll a 5 and so the target loses all frontal armor and takes 2 points of backline damage (i.e., loses 2 HPs since it has no backline armor). It is critically wounded and defenseless.
- Each time an extra AP is added beyond the gun’s max, the unit must make a 0 AP roll against that new degree.
Inter-Offers
The standard-issued ballistic for Simos, the backbone of the Human’s heavy infantry. Essentially really powerful rifles.
- Inter-offers gain 1 AP (per round) when attacking revealed targets at Very Far range.
9.5.2 Direct Radiation
Some weapons project rays of energy—either in a polarized line (like lasers) or a (maybe still polarized) burst or cone. Without special reflective accessories, none of these weapons can fire over the horizon into that vast Very Far world.
Most of these weapons also penetrate better than ballistics (and sometimes differently than concussives). Of course, there is armor designed against them (like ablative (sec_ablative?) and quasicrystaline sec-muler_armor_material), but most cannot defend as well against it. Therefore, most direct radiation weapons penetrate on a raw 1 or 2.
Most also can ionize the atmosphere they pass through, causing that air to “bloom” (sec_bloom?) and be harder for subsequent shots to pass through. (Or for all types of recon to penetrate as well.)
Flashbacks
Flashbacks gain 1 attack AP for every magnitude of distance (i.e., +1 AP for Close, +2 AP for Far, +3 for Very Far)
Flashbacks only shoot if they hit/suppress. Therefore, a unit that fires a Flashback can opt to reuse that AP for something besides a direct attack at that moment.
I’m thinking that hits into the back line work differently for Flashbacks. Maybe:
- The first point of damage taken from a Flashback is made on the back line. (So, a roll of 1 is still a penetrating attack on the back; a roll of 2 is one front & one back; a 3 is 2 front, 1 back; etc.)
\(\gamma\)-Guns
Intra-offing battlefields smell like ozone, pork, and diesel fumes.
\(\gamma\)-Guns usually look nothing like a gun. They are pillowy plates with rounded edges with a faint prismatic despite their dull blackness. These plates—arrays—are in fact comprised of thousands to millions of tiny, flat lenses made up of two main parts. Each lens is ringed with a hexagonal optic sensor behind a polarizing filter; this sensor is tuned on the fly to detect a given pattern of incoming radiation (the target) in the light that arrives perpendicular to that lens.
The inner section of a lens is covered its own filter, which is normally opaque. If, however, the sensor ring detects the target image, the filter over the center quickly turns transparent, emitting a intense beam of \(\gamma\) radiation.
\(\gamma\) arrays act like an arthropod’s compound eyes, and neighboring lenses can work to fine-tune the sensitivity of each other, further helping target parts of a given target to fire upon.
For Human units, the \(\gamma\) arrays are usually mounted on each shoulder, flattened in front and linked to a targeting visor on the unit’s helmet used to “paint” the target for the arrays. Ferrets have a similar layout, except that instead of a head, they have smaller forward- and rear-facing camera arrays that allow for more precise tracking and painting of multiple targets.
It’s worth noting, too, that even the intense \(\gamma\) radiation emitted by these arrays is invisible, and the firing of the lens—the piezoelectric switching of the filter from opaque to transparent and back—is silent. However, if the beam passes through a thick enough and sensitive enough material—like the ionized gas of a blooming location—then it will flash and crack with the lightning that marks its path. But there is no “pew! pew!” no leisurely dots and dashes of day-glow sausage links bursting into sparks on the walls around our heroes. Just the deep pop organs vaporized by an unseen beam.
\(\gamma\)-Guns are not that effective in gassy locations, and can’t shoot far over the horizon (without reflectors rarely worth their price). But they are accurate and penetrative.
- \(\gamma\)-Guns can attack the back line on raw 1s or 2s.
- Like all direct radiation attacks, \(\gamma\)-guns cannot typically attack targets in rocky combat beyond Far (i.e., cannot attack Very Far units)
Stun Gun
- Penetrate most armors (certainly 1° — 6° PPEs)
- Gain 1° damage and on successful back-line attacks
- Do not remove HPs, but instead APs
- The target unit can’t use or gain APs until those “damage” APs are used instead
- Have a Primary Restrain skill
- Failure: Target is not restrained
- Success: Target is restrained and unable to use APs except on rolls to break free
- 1: Target takes 1 HP in addition to an additional optional roll for APs to be lost to restraint (So, breakthrough attacks with restraint “penetrate” in that they actually hit the target and can then “penetrate” to so they can do in APs what an ordinary breakthrough shot would do in damage.
- Units that are restrained when the scenario ends are in Thinny custody.
- Breaking free
- The target can opt to turn the first—and only the first—point of damage from this attack into a defensive roll (i.e., a raw 1) to stop a successful attack once it’s started.
- (In other words, units hit by a new restraint attack can opt to use one of the APs they’ve lost in that attack to instead make a roll to not be affected by the restraint. A kinda low-stakes saving throw if they feel it’s worth the throw.)
- The target can opt to turn the first—and only the first—point of damage from this attack into a defensive roll (i.e., a raw 1) to stop a successful attack once it’s started.
Percussion Gun - Designed to have a wide and strong wave of relatively non-massive force that hits hard but doesn’t penetrate - The SWAT and Thin Blues are usually armed with 4° p-guns they can use by spending an additional AP to attack in combat - Thinnies can spend an additional 1 AP to on an attack
Example
| Action | AP | Round |
|---|---|---|
| Thinny begins attack | 1 | 1 |
| Thinny whips out their p-gun | 1 | 1 He’s got that thing waving around |
| Thinny devotes an other AP to the attack | 1 | 2 |
| The thinny fires | 1 | 2 |
| Damage | — | — |
If that had been a SWAT unit, the it could be a 6° attack (which could kill a fresh 3° with a raw 6 or a aw 1 + anything between a raw 4 — 6)
Sensory Dampeners
- Takes -1 AP to fire
- I.e., can be fired simply by declaring they’re still firing that dampening feeling and where
- and can opt to add 1 AP p-gun + 1 AP extended attack to this 0 AP attack to turn up the heat
- I.e., can be fired simply by declaring they’re still firing that dampening feeling and where
- Otherwise works like a stun gun, taking APs away on successful rolls
- Note that the senses dampened by the roll is also dependent on that roll:
- Senses that are dampened
- At the beginning of entry into a scenario, that unit can choose the order of the senses that are dampened by choosing from Table tbl-sensory_dampener
- On a raw 1 the first senses on that list is overwhelmed and unusable by the target
- On a raw 2 the first- and second-listed senses are dampened
- Etc.
- At the beginning of entry into a scenario, that unit can choose the order of the senses that are dampened by choosing from Table tbl-sensory_dampener
- Successful attacks with a sense dampener dampens the affected senses for the rest of the current and all of the next round
| Sense | Notes |
|---|---|
| Vision | — |
| Audition | — |
| Nociception | Feels constant and severe pain, loosing additional APs to the degree nociception is in the list2 |
| Analgesia | Cannot feel pain or notice new damage taken |
| Thermal | Can be made to feel burning hot or freezing cold |
| Proprioception | Cannot maintain balance or successfully move into a new position (like re-orienting head, etc.) if moves (Can’t move at all without falling down) |
| Tactile | Cannot know if in contact with anything |
| Homeoception | O.K., I’m sure there’s a better term. More than sense of self or sense of internal state, more like even self awareness -1° psionic defense rolls Cannot devote APs to psionic defenses while under this effect |
| Self | Has difficulty telling if they or something else is doing any particular action Psionic attacks have a .5 chance of being self-directed Points devoted to a psionic attack while under the effect have a .5 chance to be instead stacked against the attacker; they remain so until the attack is launched; a successful attacks first hits the attack with the number of points so stacked against them |
| Clairvoyance | Target cannot use or devote APs to psionic clairvoyance actions |
| Prescience | Target cannot use or devote APs to psionic prescience actions |
| Telepathy | Target cannot use or devote APs to psionic telepathy or recon actions |
| Fine Motor Control | -1° attack and evasion rolls -1 AP for movements |
| Gross Motor Control | -2 AP for movements |
| Orientation | Cannot understand one’s location and its relationship with other locations, including distance and direction. |
| Actual | Has difficulty telling if real or imagined things are real. Things imagined would be, well, things that kind of unit would probably sit around imagining. -1° on defense, evasion, and recon rolls |
Example
| Action | AP | Round | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWAT walks in the room | 0 | 1 | The SWAT unit takes an additional turn in a round to roll a 0 AP attack on a unit closer than Very Far3; their sensory dampeners are 4°, and the GM rolls a 5 for the attack, missing the target. |
| SWAT moves to a new location | 2 | 1 | Just to clear the board and focus on the sensory dampener |
| SWAT unit recons a location | 1 | 1 | It’s a 4° roll that they get with a 2, seeing their target now better. |
| SWAT turns up the heat | 1 | 2 | The SWAT unit uses 1 AP to increase the degree of the sensory dampener attack on a unit closer than Very Far. This is a 5° attach; the GM rolls a 4, successfully hitting the target4. |
The target looses 4 AP (but can use one to try to break free if they are restrained during this time).
The target also has some of their senses dampened for the duration of the hit. In this example, let’s say this SWAT unit had chosen—at the beginning of the scenario—to dampen the target’s senses in the order of Audition, Vision, Analgesia, and Nociception (plus other ones for higher values). The target would now be unable to hear, see, or fell any pain but the induced one.
Nukes
9.5.3 Hunter-Seekers, Least Weasels
- Ferrets are standard-issued six Least Weasels. These are drones, really. Ferrets can fire them as any normal attack.
- Once fired, Least Weasels navigate the map like any air-born unit.
- They each get 2 vanilla APs per round.
- They have normal (ambient info) vision.
- They are detected at -5° recon rolls, and the detecting unit must actively decide to use a AP to detect without knowing when to do so
- Because otherwise Least Weasels travel the map invisible to all units but the launching Ferret (and those it’s in direct communication with):
- Least Weasels may attack at any time, but only get one attack before they are destroyed (they are destroyed on attack). This, of course, can be at melee rules for an attach from the same hex.
- They also share some ambient information with their host Ferret (and this any unit within that Ferret’s ambient range). But it’s entangled, so they can’t send much. What is does do, though, is give that Ferret (etc.) +2 recon within the Weasel’s ambient range. They cannot otherwise “see through the Weasel’s eyes.” (So, yeah, opposing players might get an idea when to recon themselves for Weasels.
- If Weasels are detected, they can be attacked. They have 1 HP & 1° defenses.
9.5.4 Area Effect Weapons
By default, explosive weapons attack multiple units. Each attack is rolled separately (or condensed if attacking a bunch of units at once). The attacker can choose to attack fewer units than the weapon allows, but not more. The maximum number of units that can be attacked in a single location is the weapon’s degree \(\times\) 10. So, a 1° explosive and attack up to 10 units, a 2°up to 20, etc.
Also by default, explosives of $$4° attack Close locations at -1°. Explosive that are $$6° attack Far locations as well, but at -2°. The number of additional locations (lcose and/or Far) that can be attacked is the final degree of the attack roll.
Attackers can choose which additional locations are attacked (and if any are). They can also decide the order of the attack rolls (i.e., which units are attacked first, second, etc.) if they wish.
Precision Explosives
Some explosives are more precise. Generally, these can attack only half as many units (e.g., 5 with a 1° explosive), but the attacker can also choose not only the order of the units attacked, but to exclude friendlies from that list.
AM converters
Humans do chemistry well (it turns out). And one of the innovations was macroscopic conversion between matter and antimatter. Normally done in very controlled settings, specialized converters can nonetheless be made that cause a self-perpetuating wave of partial conversions from matter to anti-matter propelled forward by the energy of the annihilation of that matter/anti-matter stew right behind it. It’s a very wonky technology, though that usually fails, so (outside of those used by the Chocolate Elvis), their chance roles are inverted (antimatter, get it?), needing a 1 (not a 10) to succeed.
Jump Flashes5
A system that either is really pissed off or has it back against the wall may use its jump point like a really long range artillery gun, firing raw mass through points calculated to be within the lethal range of populated points in the target system. Outside of telegraphic snapshots from entangled sensors sent through as part of the “projectile,” it’s hard to tell how accurate these massively expensive rounds are. So, although they’re deadly if accurate, their usage costs loads of OPs to use. In addition, the player has to spend OPs (not APs) to recon, part of which is to prepare and send a robot with sensors enough to read the ambient information to send back. Outside of these, the attacker is firing on a constantly foggy map.
Still, would make for a cool late-campaign battle scenario.
Bloom
- Energy weapons that fire from/into/inside gassy environments (inside a planet’s atmosphere, inside a gas cloud or accretion disc, etc., into a dust shield) can bloom that gas
- Any gassy hex is fired through by any energy weapon travels into/through twice in a row blooms. Blooming happens regardless of the success/failure of the attacks/defenses
- Blooming reveals all units in the bloomed hexes due to the generation of ambient radiation (i.e., information about this automatic reveal travels at the speed of ambient info)
- Any energy weapons firing into/through a bloomed hex gain -1 attack mod for every time an energy weapons fired into/through it.
- I.e., -1 mod for the turn in which that hex blooms (second time an energy weapon fires into it), then an additional -1 mod for any other turn that an energy weapon fires into/through (so -2 on second round of fire, -3 for third, etc.)
- This attack mod loss is separate from possible damage as described next
- Optional rule (for Worlds or single battlefields): Blooms reduce energy weapon ranges:
- Pre-bloom: No distance mod
- -1 blooms: Range reduced to 1/2
- 2: Reduced to 1/3
- Etc.
- (Note actual range is usually infinite line of sight, so half would still be longer than most planetary battlefields outside of army-level battles)
- As of now, the only two energy weapons are \(\gamma\)-guns and Flashbacks
- Some atmospheres are more conducive to blooming than others.
- Battlefields can have a bloom mod for all hexes
- Some hexes can have/gain/loose different bloom mods due to passing storms, dust devils, etc.
- Possible mods include:
- Shorter of longer number of turns of subsequent attacks until bloom
- No adding of OP demerits, just -1 forever
- A max number of -1 OP stacks
- And, of course, faster mod stacks, say counting by 2s instead of 1s
Incandescent Blooms
- A little bloom fluoresces, a lot incandesces.
- Any hex with a -3 or greater energy attack mod from blooming also has:
- -1 attack from any weapon into / out of / through that hex
- A 1° attack at the beginning of each round from the environment on each unit in that hex. This roll can be modified with OPs/APs and is often also modified by anti-bloom defenses, but isn’t usually modified by the environment
- Obscures lines of sight into / out of / though the hex:
- Any units so obscured are automatically concealed and become re-concealed after the end of the round
- Recon rolls made into / out of / through -3 or greater blooms have a -1 mod
Bloom Dissipation
- Bloomed hexes loose 1 level of bloom at the end of any round during which no energy attacks pass into / out of / through a bloomed hex
- E.g.,
- A hex with -2 bloom (from being fired into with energy weapons three times in a row without a break) will become a -1 bloomed hex at the end of the round
- It will become “pre-bloomed” at the end of the next
- And bloom free at the end of the next
- E.g.,
9.6 Set to Stun
- Weapon6 degrees represent the maximum degree at which that weapon can make an attack.
- Weapons can all be used at a lower degree than that, as chosen by that unit.
- Degrees not used are not retained. I thought about it, but no, that’s too unbalancing. This remains a nearly esoteric rule. (I made it in relation to combat in Anthropic environments, so even powerful units could “dance” in a slow war before a massive pounce)
- Some weapon-based effects of ballistic and explosive weapons still occur at the normal rate; classical ballistics still flash, go boom, and make a lot of smoke, etc.; modern ballistics still hit with the same force, but less of that force is directed at the target; etc.
- The bloom from radiation weapons, however, can be reduced to the same degree as the attenuated attack. It is up to the attacked if they wish the bloom effect to be reduced or not.
- If it is reduced, then it is reduced in lock-step with the reduction in damage
- IF the bloom effect is not reduced, then it stays at the same level as it is normal for that weapon & situation
- The bloom from radiation weapons, however, can be reduced to the same degree as the attenuated attack. It is up to the attacked if they wish the bloom effect to be reduced or not.
Written while listening to Sarah James.↩︎
And yeah, I did think of the fact that since this is a dampener, this ought to in fact be reducing pain and Analgesia should be not not increasing it or something, but this was, frankly, too anal a concern even for me. And even though I don’t swing that way, I see nothing wrong with taking it or liking giving it. I just prefer the easier road closer to a rosier patch together. And who wants to call the killer raw roll anything other than choosing their nociception for that SWAT. So I left it, and so should we both now.↩︎
Sense dampeners are radiation weapons.↩︎
Just to be clear, they’ve taken their normally-0-AP rolls already this round↩︎
Yeah, these are technically direct radiation weapons, so should technically go under that section.↩︎
Sure, and I guess armor & defensive, too, technically. Maybe I guess if you want your corpse to still have some armor for the afterlife or such buzz.↩︎