Work continues on Stark Space. That’s my own little gritty dystopian supplement for White Star which is an awesome game in its own right. Stark Space takes it the gritty rough and tumble reaches of Blade Runner, Aliens, and Outland.
I wanted to make some core classes to better reflect the Stark Space universe. In general, these are meant to replace the existing classes but this the OSR GM’s should do what they want to make their games awesome. As I mentioned in my previous post, there three classes.
The Muscle: This one should be pretty obvious. This is the fighter, mercenary, soldier, thug, martial artist, and hot shot pilot. One thing I wanted to do is make them shine a little more in combat so they’ve got three class abilities. Combat Expert is a bonus applied to combat with a certain type of weapon like small arms, space weapons, melee weapons, or unarmed combat. Combat Sense provides the character with a bonus to Armor Class. And then there’s Combat Style. While Combat Expert reflects the character’s training. Combat Style reflects the character’s approach to combat by being a Brute(Damage bonus), precise (bonus To-hit), or mobile (bonus to AC).
The Brains: These are your tech’s, engineers, medics, hackers, and walking encyclopedias. They can jury rig equipment. Get a bonus to whatever skill they specialize in. Re-roll failed class skill rolls. That’s pretty much the standard stuff. Brains are also the planners. So I threw in couple more things. They gain a bonus to initiative and they can provide bonuses in combat to other characters by relaying crucial tactical information.
The Face: We got the Muscle and the Brains, now somebody needs to do the talking. Brains are con artists, detectives, and other social types. Like Brains, they gain a bonus to their specialized skill. They know where to find the right people and how to act around people. They can distract and demoralize opponents. They have a little bit of luck to help with those Saving Throws.
Now on to Races. Once again, I’ll refer back to my original post. I’m not using race in the real world sense but in the game mechanics sense. Since Stark Space is that Gritty dytopian future, I opted for no aliens as player characters. But once again, this is something that GM’s can change if they wish. There’s four options for “race”.
Human: That one is pretty obvious. I wanted to add a little punch for humans. So bonus to skills and saves. They’re humans so I don’t need to explain that much about them.
Max-Gene: Take a normal human and do some genetic manipulation and attempt to turn them into a super soldier or hard labor drone. These characters have good physical stats but terrible mental stats. They prone to all sorts of add psychological behaviors. The basic mechanic around them is reduce mental ability scores and improve physical scores at character generation.
Simulants: You’ve seen Blade Runner, right? There you go. As they level, there’s a chance that they’ll start to degrade and lose points from their ability scores. It can be repaired but that’s very expensive and illegal.
Psi: There had to some sort of mental abilities. The powers of these characters have much less effect than the Gifts or Meditations from the core White Star rules. While these powers could be considered minor, they’re the only type of power in the implied setting. It works off the skill system but more on that later.
There you go some more rants on the classes and races. I’ll have more rants in the future about skills and inspiration. So stay tuned.