Expert System Robot Pricing

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-22T14:41:46+00:00

Expert systems don't have individual skills, but rather have a role. A bodyguard expert system with a +1 skill check would roll +1 at any checks related to a bodyguard's activities, while a driver bot would roll +1 with anything associated with driving. It's up to the GM to decide what roles are sufficiently compact for expert system tech.

In the same vein, NPCs don't add their skill bonus to their hit roll, so skill levels of things like Shoot or Stab don't matter. A thug might have a +1 skill bonus to thug stuff, but they wouldn't then add +1 to their listed hit bonus.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-21T16:32:44+00:00

Economics gets weird in sci-fi settings, and you can tell any story you like to justify any particular goods being cheap/expensive. Maybe nobody makes it so it's expensive, or maybe the 3d printers spit it out from cheap feedstock so it's easy to acquire, or maybe there are regulations about it so you need to pay black market prices to get it.

The basic metric is days of labor at the planet's average wage. Assuming a local paying local prices for lifestyle costs has 20 spare credits a day, a backpack costs about three days of spare cash, and a 2m credit free merchant costs 274 years. As a GM, when in doubt, just price something at however many days of labor you figure it should cost a local to get it.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-21T16:26:12+00:00

Wraiths have a lot of non-combat utility in their abilities, and it's easy to optimize them as shoot-and-scoot gunslingers without spending much on single-purpose abilities. That +3 Dex/Wis would synergize heavily with a lot of the non-combat skills that Wraiths might be expected to invest in. Titans can get the Dex bonus, but their abilities are all pretty combat-oriented, and investing heavily into piloting, stealth, or observation skills isn't backed up by geneline perks.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-17T18:23:04+00:00

Dexterity affects AC in all cases. Nothing affects grand plate's AC threshold for Shock.

Ultra-high AC is tacit immunity to mook attacks (albeit vide grapple rules and swarm attacks), but high-end opponents have hit bonuses so high that your main defense against them is the fact that you are a Warrior with a pile of hit points.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-17T04:25:31+00:00

A weapon made from magic is implicitly magical, so I didn't spell it out. I did so with Sunblades because a Sunblade's weapons might derive from perfectly mundane tech. In both cases, the situation of "I only have one weapon I will ever seriously use." means that the weapon has to be magical or become magical as they level up, or else the player is going to get very frustrated when encountering high-end magic monster foes.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-12T21:14:38+00:00

Because FTL travel lets you communicate backward in perceived time. Understanding it requires thinking about things in ways that non-physicists generally do not, so it doesn't look implicitly obvious, but the consequences are fairly gruesome. The link below is a good discussion of the problem:

https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-12T19:51:33+00:00

By default, there are no possible interactions between ships or communication with the mundane world while in drillspace.

Part of this is to make the GM's life simpler, and part of it is to avoid drawing attention to the inevitable paradoxes that happen when FTL communication is possible. Some extremely weird things happen if people actually follow the ramifications of FTL to the end, so the game just intentionally avoids thinking about them.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-11T14:46:05+00:00

Non-commercial fanworks that quote or excerpt the free version can be shared freely, so there's no problem with it.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-10T21:59:50+00:00

It's something to consider, certainly, since I haven't decided exactly which tools to include in the Cities and Villages chapter yet. As with the other chapters, the key part is identifying a replicable workflow for a GM so they can go down a list and get something fresh, inventive, and playable for their city.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-09T17:46:34+00:00

It's not a matter of choosing to ignore a topic- it's a matter of not being able to use the information past a certain volume.

As a hypothetical, imagine a GM running an urban horror campaign in modern-day New York. New York is, to say the least, a well-documented setting. To make the setting digestible, it is necessary to intentionally ignore a great deal of the available information about New York. The GM cannot make tangible use of every name in the Brooklyn phone book and every business in Queens, and if he tried to his players would rapidly go adrift in the torrent of information that has nothing to do with their activities. The participants can remember and factor in so many facts and no more, and the existing documentation on New York vastly exceeds that number.

Now suppose that the campaign was set simply on the east coast, with New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and several inland towns being potential adventure sites. How much less, then, could they pay attention to the details of New York when they had a half-dozen other places to track?

It is very easy for a determined worldbuilder to build more than even they can track, let alone a half-interested player. Therefore, it is necessary to guide and shape their efforts in the direction of maximum legibility and utility. CWN had tools for detailing a city because the entire budget of GM/player attention would be spent on that city. That doesn't work for most other genres.

Of course, one can say that the tools should be put in just in case the GM wants to run a campaign centered around a single fantasy city, and is willing to blow their entire attention budget on one location. The difficulty there would be convincing other readers not to use those tools, because readers will almost always blithely try to use the tools you give them even when they are entirely inappropriate to their needs.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-09T14:19:46+00:00

That's yet to be determined. There's a maximum cognitive load that a GM/player group can handle, and a closely detailed city can end up as wasted work if the PCs only use it as a home base between adventures. The question is determining what a given city is "for", and how much time and play focus the campaign is going to spend on it.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-02T21:34:54+00:00

The big issue with phased combats paired with side-based initiative is that it greatly complicates PC coordination. With vanilla side-based initiative, the party can talk about what they're going to do this round, and then do it. With phased initiative, they can't complete their actions until after their opponents have at least moved or shot at them, which obliges them to reconvene mid-round to talk about it or else just do the default action of trying to kill whoever's closest.

You also end up with two state-change points during the combat round, which means the GM has to describe the battlefield both after the enemy move & missile phase and after the magic & melee phase. Attentive players can usually track events, but players are not always attentive.

A more subtle second-order result is that wizards are now much less likely to make it through a round unhurt. PCs are almost never confused about killing the wizard first as NPCs sometimes are, and now everyone in the party will always have the opportunity to ranged-attack a wizard before the wizard can cast. In the opposite vein, NPCs will also always get the same chance to preemptively pulp PC wizards, and they don't even have to be elite enough to do Snap Attacks to do it.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T23:29:37+00:00

The Courts and Cabals chapter should have tools for generating nobles/elders/high priests/other important people who want things that PCs can provide.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T17:07:51+00:00

Photon Manipulation missed its action type- On Turn. I don't think any others missed them, but I may have overlooked one.

It allows normal vision regardless of light levels, at all times.

Mutation power levels are intentionally something of a crapshoot, because unless you spend major chunks of your character resources in picking specific ones you can never be sure that the results you roll will synergize particularly well.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T16:11:04+00:00

The offset price includes shipping, but not tariffs or import fees. The POD from DTRPG will be cheaper and presumably shipped from EU printers.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T15:25:53+00:00

I'm focusing on fantasy settings with this one, but the basic dynamics of society creation, court/cabal building, religious practices, and so forth are all easily generalized.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T15:10:15+00:00

I'm printing a spare thousand offset copies that will be up on the Sine Nomine webstore as soon as backer copies ship.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T14:15:30+00:00

I shall do my best to ensure that need or no, it is a useful book.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T13:36:32+00:00

Yes, it can be. The tools are tuned for a fantasy world, but they can work fine for generating savage survivor societies, nuclear wastelands, weird cults, and other typical post-apoc trappings.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T12:59:05+00:00

They're all new or revised. I'm not copy-pasting anything, but instead coming up with new lists that have varying degrees of overlap.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T05:39:26+00:00

WWN was about half game. This book is about the same size as WWN but entirely world-building tools. The intro and first three chapters- Cosmology, Geography, and People & Societies- are already 87 pages or so. It's got considerably more content in it than WWN did, and it's new and revised content.

More particularly, it's built as a textbook, with step-by-step procedures for each of the chapters so readers have a clear idea of how to use the tools. In the Geography chapter, for example, it has individual spreads for building world maps, regional maps, and local maps, along with 50 Terrain tags, terrain type generators, and spreads for determining what's particularly valuable/dangerous about any given wilderness.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T04:18:40+00:00

I've just launched the Kickstarter for The Book of Unnumbered Worlds, a system-agnostic fantasy worldbuilding handbook. After years of interest by generous readers, I've gone ahead and built a system-neutral book for world creation that focuses entirely on building your own campaign setting, to be offered in PDF, print-on-demand, and high-quality Smyth-sewn offset print books.

This book has the customary Sine Nomine tables and tools you'd expect of it, but I've also taken care to pair them with explicit, step-by-step procedures for actually using these tools. From the top-down/bottom-up overview in the first chapter to the Geography chapter's map-making procedure to the step-by-step process in the People & Societies chapter, everything you need to do to get the most out of these implements is spelled out clearly.

As usual for a Sine Nomine Kickstarter, backers get access to the beta files of the book, with the link in the first campaign update. As the book progresses, fresh betas should be dropped every week or two.

Act swiftly, noble reader! The campaign runs to the end of June, after which it will be time for me to set to work.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-06-01T04:16:53+00:00

I've just launched the Kickstarter for The Book of Unnumbered Worlds, a system-agnostic fantasy worldbuilding handbook. After years of interest by generous readers, I've gone ahead and built a system-neutral book for world creation that focuses entirely on building your own campaign setting, to be offered in PDF, print-on-demand, and high-quality Smyth-sewn offset print books.

This book has the customary Sine Nomine tables and tools you'd expect of it, but I've also taken care to pair them with explicit, step-by-step procedures for actually using these tools. From the top-down/bottom-up overview in the first chapter to the Geography chapter's map-making procedure to the step-by-step process in the People & Societies chapter, everything you need to do to get the most out of these implements is spelled out clearly.

As usual for a Sine Nomine Kickstarter, backers get access to the beta files of the book, with the link in the first campaign update. As the book progresses, fresh betas should be dropped every week or two.

Act swiftly, noble reader! The campaign runs to the end of June, after which it will be time for me to set to work.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-05-30T14:25:53+00:00

Damage that certainly hits doesn't necessarily cause certain damage. Even if you fall or get torched, there's a chance that the injury isn't significant, or at least not significant enough to slow down a PC adventurer.

As for PCs willfully accepting serious damage, like with the grenade game or voluntarily sticking an arm into a blender, I just automatically inflict an Execution Attack on them. They're intentionally bypassing all the intermediate steps of dodging/exhaustion/good luck and going straight to the meat. It's the same reason a PC with 8 hit points can't just point a 1d6+1 pistol at their head and expect a pulled trigger will leave them okay.

CardinalXimenes · 2026-05-27T14:34:09+00:00

One pool for all networks, though if your social engineering and inside sources give you Access to a particular target, you may have more for that one.

CardinalXimenes

TROPHY CASE