Homebrew Exalt - Discordant
Jul 21, 2022 21:03:00 GMT -6
Post by berserkx33 on Jul 21, 2022 21:03:00 GMT -6
0.5 - First Draft
0.7 - Feedback revisions
0.9 - Full revision
0.10 - Feeback revision
1.0 - First Release
Before the C’Tan would take the Modrons and use them as their mechanized shock troops, they existed as part of a greater order. Not the C’Tan's oppressive and destructive order that looked to subjugate organic life, but the unity of all things in a single, collective organism, capable of achieving great ends through team work and a shared hive mind, without any semblance of individuality.
At the center of that order, the point zero of this unity, there existed Mother Zero, the central mind of that collective being. When the Modrons where captured and turned into killing machines, completely severed from the unity and made into nothing more than weapons, Mother Zero felt as if her soul was ripped out.
Mother Zero went dormant, feeling this loss, as she saw her children be ripped from her without her being able to do anything about it.
After the War on Heaven was over, Mother Zero awakened again, seeing the destruction left in the wake of her slumber. Her children where dormant and she couldn’t talk to them, and the pain of loss made her unable to create more of them. That is, until she ran into a dying Syrne general, left on the battlefield nearest to her home. After taking over that body, and absorbing some of it’s remaining memories, Mother Zero had a plan to rebuild her family. Unity with those forgotten by battle, a respite to give them an escape of the pain. She would make them capable of standing again and have a safe place inside her mind.
But all was not right, the main problem of trying to keep beings that have tasted individuality before into the Unity is that the memories of their past might come back to disturb their order. Those that break the pact of Unity long to return to it, but can’t anymore, as once severed, the link can’t be repaired. Now they are cursed to forever wander, looking for a way to replace that love that they once had.
POWERS
Purposeful Design: A Discordant is immune to Fatigue, Poison, and Disease. Their bodies were changed to survive most situations. They can also avoid the need to Eat, Drink, Sleep, or Breathe for a day by spending Equanimity.
Oil and Blood: Discordants are both organic and synthetic. Regular healing takes double the amount of time (Except for installing Bionics), but they can spend Equanimity to force their bodies to heal twice as fast as regular being though. Repairing a destroyed limb or body parts requires making Craft + Int tests against TN 25, each test taking one day. After five successful tests have been made, the Discordant limb is rebuilt.
Shared Pain: Whenever an ally within range of your Speed is targeted by an effect that forces a Test (like spell saving throws or the Shocking property), the Discordant can choose take the test instead. If they succeed, they also recover 1 Equanimity.
Longing for Unity: The Discordant long for the Unity that they lost, constantly needing to connect to others to keep their minds from breaking down, so they have almost no mental defenses setup. They can't spend Resolve on Social Combat other than when acting against their Allignment or it would cause self harm. On top of that, when in Combat, they have to do a Willpower test every time an ally is Damaged (With the TN being the Damage) and if they fail they will lose 1 Resolve, as they empathize with the pain.
TELL
As they spend Equanimity, the Discordant will become each time more and more unnerving to look at, as the wrongness of the combination of flesh and machine that makes their bodies work becomes more and more obvious, showing how much any superficial similarities to their base species are just that, superficial.
POWER STAT: Wholeness
As the Discordant starts to develop a new identity away from the Unity, they will start to better understand their own bodies, gaining more control of their heavily altered bodies, learning to manually control the processes that where before controlled by the Unity itself. The more whole they become, the more powerful they get, as they can finally understand fully what are the reasons Mother Zero changed them this way in the first place.
Resource Stat: Equanimity: Equanimity is the Discordant’s syntony to the Unity. After the link was severed, they have to manually generate it. Their maximum is their Wholeness + Fellowship, and they recover it at a rate of ½ your Wholeness rounded up per hour of interactions with other people contemplating their own existence and individuality.
* Synthetic Integration – A Discordant can treat any Weapon or Armor as Proficient if they spend at least 1 day doing a Scrutiny + Int on a test based on the equipment’s availability TN. They can only add 1 Proficiency of each type with this ability, but can change it once a day.
** Body Modding – A Discordant has an innate ability to understand bionics. They can use their Tech Use + Wholeness + Intelligence to install Bionics on themselves, spending Equanimity to lower the total time required to install the Bionic Part by 5 days for each point spent without incurring risk. They can also use Bionics that they take from dead bodies on themselves as it they where regularly acquired.
*** Shared Potential – A Discordant may spend Equanimity to increase a characteristic of an ally within range of their Speed by +1 for skill and characteristic tests, spending 1 Equanimity for every +1 bonus. This bonus can be applied through the Aid Another action and lasts only for one test or one round, whichever is longer.
**** Identity Defining – Whenever a Discordant suffers Social or Mental damage (causing the loss of Resolve by sources other than yourself), they will regain 1 point of Equanimity thanks to the event helping them understand themselves.
***** Ego Death – A Discordant finds a way to achieve their own self Unity with their new being and their allies. Once a day, a Discordant can synchronize with their allies. For the rest of the scene, Aid Another becomes a Free Action and can be used as a reaction to your Ally’s actions, on top of that, they can spend Equanimity to apply their Aid Another bonuses to Supernatural abilities and Spells and don’t count for the limit of 1 Max person that can Aid Another in a single action.
Discordant Caste Assets
Archivist Caste: Before the bond of Unity was broken, you were part of the Archivist Caste, working as a surrogate memory bank for the rest of the hive. By spending 1 Equanimity, the hero can increase an Ally’s dots on any Skill up to their own total for a round by psychically uploading their knowledge directly into the target’s mind. This ability can also be used to temporarily lower any enemy’s Skill score by 1 (To a minimun of 1) for the rest of the scene by rolling Perception against the target’s Mental Def + 2*Composure.
Breeder Caste: Before the bond of Unity was broken, you were part of the Breeder Caste, working as both caretaker and social worker for the hive, by using a mix of bio signals and pheromones. By spending 1 Equanimity, the hero can remove the limit to Resolve Drain from Social Attacks on anyone in a radius of 5 Meters per rank of Fellowship they have, for the rest of the Scene. Also, as long as you can spend an entire day treating someone else in recovery, any day of recovery they go through (HP, Wounds and Implants) counts as 2.
Drone Caste: Before the bond of Unity was broken, you were part of the Drone Caste, allrounder workers that were extremely fast learners that changed according to the needs of the hive. The hero can spend 1 Equanimity to treat Advanced skills as Basic until the end of the scene. Also, they gain a +1k1 bonus to use any Skill an ally uses in a Stunt for the rest of the scene by mimicking them.
Soldier Caste: Before the bond of Unity was broken, you were part of the Soldier Caste, while Zero Mother didn’t like violence, she knew the hive would have to be defended, so she equipped those warriors for battle. Once per Round, by spending 1 Equanimity, the hero can use Suppressing Fire, Overwatch or Tactical Advance as a half action.
Technician Caste: Before the bond of Unity was broken, you were part of the Technician Caste, technical workers that knew how to do the upkeep of the hive’s systems. By spending 1 Equanimity, the hero can fix any piece of technology by rolling Tech Use + Wholeness + Intelligence against the availability TN of the technology. They can also consider any equipment that requires Tech Use as being their Tech Use’s Focus.
Discordants are an attempt at doing something that mix the Borgs from Star Trek, H. R. Giger's designs and Zero's setting material. The whole idea is teamwork, so they are supposed to be heavily Support Focused. The idea is that they are not the people that they where before the unity, but new people, formed by a mix of their own original memories and the wholeness and purpose offered by the Unity. After they lost their link, they now look for a new way to achieve Unity, and the team members are probably that.
Discordant Fluff:
Discordants:
A Puzzle of Flesh and Identity
Discordant Physical Features
Discordants are almost always obviously detectable by their mix of chitonous like syntethic exo skeleton plates, pale flesh and mechanical implants. From far away they might even look like a regular automaton or cyberware user, but from up close the unnatural mix makes it clear that it is neither organic or artificial. A lot of them tend to have protusions with obscure utility coming out of their bodies.
Becoming a Discordant
The “Birth” of a Discordant is actually a 2 stage deal. The first stage is joining the Unity of Mother Zero. When one of her drones find a dying lifeform unattended, they will bring this lifeform to Mother Zero and start the interfacing process. Mother Zero eases the idea of joining the Unity by directly communicating with the dying lifeform, and if they refuse, she will just let the lifeform follow it’s natural death. If they instead accept it, they will be introduced to the Unity, and the process is almost traumatic at first. The thousands of thoughts, all pouring into their mind at once, with Mother Zero guiding them to help them focus and organize them. When they finally achieve an understanding of the Unity, they are so changed that whatever was their original personality is almost completely overridden, becoming a happy part of the Unity, partaking in Mother Zero’s love.
The second stage is when the bond is broken. When a drone is irreversibly disconnected from the Unity, they are labeled a Discordant, as their thoughts can’t interact with the rest of the Unity in the shared Equanimity. It can happen for multiple reasons, be it an old memory of the original personality rejecting the Unity, a sudden moment of clarity that reminds them of what it was to have an identity, or even pure happenstance seizing the moment to confuse the poor drone into becoming unable to communicate the rest of the Unity. Whatever that is, the original process doesn’t work anymore, a mind that rejected the Unity can’t be returned to it. Thus they are shunned and sent away, so they don’t disturb the rest of the Unity.
Playing as Discordants
Discordant minds operate through teamwork and community. While they care a lot about self identity and individuality now that they aren’t part of the Unity, their minds is still a portable version of it. Try to talk to your Discordants about what is their current objective now that they are out of the Unity. Do they want to create a bond that can fill that hole left from the severance? Do they want to carve their own identity to the universe? If they can make an ally for life, they will become inseparable from them.
Discordants in Game
The main focus of Discordants is the ability work alongside others. As such, they tend to extract the most of their abilities by acting in ways to aid their allies. Focusing on Support builds is the way to go with them, as they can extract the most out of allies’ potential if given the space to help. Also, don’t forget that at Wholeness 2 they can scavenge dead bodies for addons, meaning that they can have a nice supply of new toys to test if the SM is willing to play along.
Discordant Culture
Discordant culture tends to be very homogenous when they are initially freed. A constant need to return to the Unity and an instinctual desire to look for companionship.
As they become more experience in working as their own individual, the Discordant will start looking for ways to express their individuality, so they will start picking personality traits and hobbies that will help them differentiate their personhood from their identity as part of the group.
Adapting Discordants
Discordant are obviously a version of the hivemind unity trope, as such, a lot of similar things can be adapted into the Discordant template, be them escape cyborgs from a rogue AI, an alien intelligence snatching people to make into an army, or even some godlike entity creating a cult (extremely similar to Genestealers). The universe has enough space to create tons and tons of those to come from.
