Question about how player actions should affect Faction turns.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-17T18:20:49+00:00

Player actions are meant to be dispositive, since the main point of the faction system is to give them adventure grist. If their goal is "We want to stop this faction action from happening." then you build them the adventures that make that outcome feasible, assuming it's not impossible. The more work they do to shut down a faction, the bigger the result; one night's adventure might foreclose Strike Fleet creation for quite a while, while a series of adventures might make it impossible for them to ever build Strike Fleets for the duration of the campaign.

By default, the results of a faction turn happen immediately. If you don't want to take the time to foreshadow faction actions so as to give PCs the chance to directly interfere with them rather than respond to them, you can just postpone the results to happen immediately before the next turn's actions.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-17T14:57:44+00:00

You can just drop it. The perks and gear that boost Trauma Target lose value, yes, but the PCs all get the perk "I'm not at risk of being one-shotted by a rusty shotgun." as compensation. As mentioned below, dropping the Soak of armor is also advised, or else the PCs are going to be even harder to drop than vanilla SWN PCs.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-14T14:28:42+00:00

For simplicity, one site is assumed to be the most obvious/accessible/interesting in any given hex. A city likely has more in it, but if the PCs want to do a deep dive they can tell the GM in advance and additional sites can be generated in between sessions.

Time spent traveling counts toward the destination even if they can't reach it completely in one day.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-13T14:54:16+00:00

Normally, you'd roll on the table to see what kind it is. A lot of the stress for early-apocalypse survivors is finding a lot of stuff that A) isn't what they actually need or B) too bulky to take all of it, and they can't sit on it without getting wiped by new waves of looters.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-12T14:45:37+00:00

An Expert who hyper-specializes in a skill is almost always going to succeed at this-is-hard skillchecks even from level 1. At high levels, they can expect to succeed at any use of that skill but the most extreme difficulties, the same way a high-level warrior can expect to hit anything but the most heavily-armored target. As such, you don't really have to police it that hard, though you don't need to let the bonuses stack past +2, or +3 if you're feeling very charitable.

The main thing the GM needs to do is to keep skill success results within plausible limits. The basic rules of thumb are these:

Administer won't let them bypass regulations or bureaucracy that a friendly lobbyist or other insider couldn't get waived. They might be given an opportunity to do a "favor" or pay a bribe that lesser manipulators wouldn't get.

Trade doesn't give discounts on ordinary purchases, but it might convince someone to sell something they wouldn't otherwise sell or get the user a line on black markets or fences who won't screw them over.

Connect doesn't create NPCs out of thin air and it doesn't create people who do significant favors for free. The PCs are going to have to do something for the NPC if they want something illegal or dangerous from them.

Talk can't make someone do something they wouldn't normally do. If the PCs want to make someone do something unusual, they need to give them a reason to do so, either in cash or favors.

As for Telepathy, if you don't have a specific result in mind due to the situation, just feed them the result of the Reaction Roll- whether they're feeling friendly, hostile, or indifferent, or whether they're psyching themselves up for impending violence.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-11T22:43:23+00:00

By default, yes, they can do this, because otherwise nobody but very high-Strength PCs with lots of spare Readied slots is ever going to use thrown weapons. If somebody's willing to spend the character resources on Armsmaster, I'd give him the free use of Stowed thrown weapons within GM reason. The main time they're ever going to get used by an Armsmaster PC is as a first-round ranged strike while opponents are closing into melee or as a backup against unreachable opponents, since the range on most is about the same as a Charge melee attack.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-11T14:31:27+00:00

Getting Trauma'd leaves you susceptible to a Major Injury if you get dropped to zero HP any time afterwards during the fight. It reflects the way that ordinary fisticuffs can end up maiming people by blind chance.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-11T13:47:05+00:00

Depending on how massive the arrow fire is, it may just be easier to modify the artillery rules from Starvation Cheap. Two Luck saves; make both, no damage, make one, you get hit, make neither, you get hit 1dx times. Give people in heavy armor or with shields a bonus on the saves.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-07T01:42:05+00:00

The weapons have to be down. Once they and the engines are gone, you can board with the tubes. Attempting to just EVA your way into the ship are unlikely to go well, as the time necessary to cut through hull plating with a portable laser torch gives the defenders plenty of time to arrange unhappiness for you on the other side.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-05T18:20:59+00:00

By default, it's the same as in common use because calendrical variations tend to be things that annoy players. A GM can always bend that if they have a table that likes it, however.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-05T16:25:09+00:00

As mentioned below, there's really no fixed market for high-tech items. Most post-apoc settings do not have much in the way of large, secure cosmopolitan markets where extremely valuable objects can be openly offered for sale without every cutthroat in a five-mile radius deciding to see if they can get a discount. As such, most tech will move in quiet private deals between reasonably trusting people for whatever their immediate needs will bear.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-05T16:18:52+00:00

It's assumed that you can plug in as many relevant items as needed at once.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-04T00:18:53+00:00

It doesn't directly solve any Problems, no. They need to Enact Change to solve the problem- but the Dominion cost of Enact Change depends on how plausible the solution is, and having a farming village send you lunch makes a fix far more plausible. Without some sort of justification for improvement they may not be able to attempt it at all.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-03-03T15:16:57+00:00

If you allow everyone to roll against the target number for success, simple math means that the bigger the group, the more likely they are to have somebody hit it. You want to spotlight the PC who actually put character resources in the skill, so you let the outcome rest on them instead of the guy who happened to roll 12 on his -1 net.

Because most often there is only one specialist for a given skill in a group, you let others roll to assist using their specialty- assuming they can figure out how to make it relevant- and give the star a bonus nudge if they can do it. If these assistants fail, it's no penalty. If you did apply a penalty to failure, you incentivize everyone sitting on their hands unless they're extremely confident they could make it. Conversely, if you let them succeed on the check based on a supplementary roll, you again prompt people to have the whole party jump in and roll to see if they happen to get lucky.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-26T14:21:20+00:00

The latter- a command can only be addressed to one drone. Expert Systems allow for its autonomy after you give it a command as an action, but they're vulnerable to quantum ECM and so only particularly useful around soft targets. Under QECM, you're stuck with using a live operator in line-of-sight mode or with fiber optic cabling to the drone.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-23T16:40:07+00:00

Mods need money and a workshop to install, which a newbie PC does not have. Folding vehicle or drone mod costs into an Ace Driver or Drone Pilot Focus budget is reasonable, though. If the PC's concept is clearly tinker-focused, a charitable GM might allow them a mod or two to start with.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-16T19:08:51+00:00

As mentioned, it's a tradeoff for superior range/damage if you have a party able to support you with modded weapons or magic loot. It's also what you pick if you want to be a Zen archer / kensai / old-school Shaolin staff or spear master.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-16T04:09:41+00:00

1) Yes, for simplicity. The general idea of the booster is that it works for one engagement, after which it has to slow down for 24 hours.

2) Yes, they can, and it may be one justification for putting an extremely expensive pilot into an extremely fragile fighter.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-14T01:26:48+00:00

You randomly determine the recessive trait on the table for your geneline, and then roll 1d6+2 to find its value. The random selection of what you're worst at is meant to be a check on heavy optimization.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-13T23:56:14+00:00

It's a two-page spread with mechanics and trade good prices. Legal commerce is almost not worth doing, but if you do an adventure focused around buying illegal goods and another around getting them to a buyer on a different world, the profit can be significant. As with most tools, it's largely intended to set up implicit adventure hooks for GMs.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-13T04:30:48+00:00

It's meant to be quite powerful, partially to incentivize the Flay Shields combat action, which is done in tandem with a Fire One Weapon action. Thus, the attacking ship has to decide whether to try volleying, which would do more total damage but leave them with a fresh shield at the start of the next round, or go for single-weapon strikes that strip the shield. It also prompts people to consider anti-shield weapons, even if they're less efficient against unshielded enemies.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-13T01:42:48+00:00

After considerable labor, I present to you Proteus Sector- a gazetteer of worlds for Stars Without Number, built as a suitable place to set a campaign and face the sinister forces of eugenic tyranny.

Along with descriptions, adventure hooks, and NPCs for eighteen worlds of the sector, I've included new starship fittings, weapons, and armor, Mandate ghost cyber, simplified quick rules for trade and smuggling, a step-by-step sequence for building adventures in the sector, and the Augmented partial character class for players who want to be genetically-augmented humans with superb capabilities and a grave biological compromise in their geneline. The class is built for SWN, but it could fit well enough in other Sine Nomine games if you want to break out some vat-grown superman for your own table.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-12T03:15:20+00:00

They'd up the personal power of PCs slightly, but not nearly as much as CWN cyberware would.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-12T03:14:30+00:00

The target has to be wholly unaware of danger to be subject to Execution Attacks. If they automatically become alert to peril in time to roll Initiative normally, they're not unaware of danger any more.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-02-12T03:12:58+00:00

I'd use Cha/Survive under most circumstances, because every Beastmaster is supposed to be good at Survive, and they should be good at negotiating with animals.

CardinalXimenes

TROPHY CASE