More Mutants

 Just a grab-bag of mutants from other RPGs, many of these are just not really tested.

Blue Planet

Bad Mojo

Enhance SPD END DET GOO-P: +35

Size Rating: 10

Basic – Otherworldly (Piscimilis) Finned, Carnivore, Movement: Aquatic, Respiration: Water-Breathing

Major – COMPOUND SLIGHT (5), NATATANOID (FREE WITH MOVE: AQUATIC) AGGRESSIVE (5) SWIFT: SPRINT SWIMMER (2) PREY SIGHT (5)

Minor – Camouflage (Ocean Surface), Pack Hunter, Specialised Predator, Saltwater Tolerance, Teeth (Pursuit), Spurs (Skull)

Diving Strike - (Swift: Sprint + Spur + 5 GOO-P): You can increase your MOVE bonus to 100% for a turn and maximize your size or weapon damage dice (your choice) for any maneuver performed that turn, starting from a higher depth. You gain Strike - Melee as a supported maneuver for Spurs.

Basilisk (Lacerta Infucatus var.)

Enhance AFF PRO PER GOO-P: +30

Size Rating: 7

Basic – Otherworldly (Dacondonta), Facultative Herbivore, Hexapodal

Major - ENHANCED SCENT (5) PREY SIGHT (5) TOXIC (GAM TETRO) (10)

Minor – Aposematic, Claws (Climbing), Languid, Teeth (Insectivore), Toxin Digestion, Long-Neck (Ambush,) Distasteful, Flamboyant

Sweet Smell (Toxin Digestion + 10 GOO-P): You possess a sweet-smelling saliva used to attract insects, when you make a dramatic roll for social interactions to get something from a human or fruit/nectar-eating species, you gain A and skip one step.

Borderlands

Spiderant

Enhance AFF DET PRO GOO-P: +25

Size Rating 10

Basic: Otherworldly (Pandoran), Carnivore, Quadrupedal

Major: AGGRESSIVE, BURROW (10 GOO-P, SUBTERRANEAN +5 GOO-P), HEADSHIELD (5), ROYAL DIMORPHISM (4 GOO-P WITH NO WINGS, KNIGHTING + 4 GOO-P) SPIDERSILK (10) ROPING (5)

Minor: Communal: Hive, Pheromone Language, Rot Digestion, Territorial

Choose one caste ability from below.

Fight with the Hive: (Headshield + 2 GOO-P): If you are in melee with allies that also have Headshield or Shell, you gain Resistance 3 and Armor 3 against all opponents, not just one.

Gyro (Headshield + 2 GOO-P): When charging, gain +A on knockdowns, and treat them as a supported manoeuvre for your fighting style when using unarmed weapons.

Fallout

Snallygaster

Enhance: STR, END, DET GOO-P: 18

Size Rating: 10

Basic Traits: FEV Mutant (Cryptid), Omnivore, Movement: PERIOPODAL, Prehensility: Grasping

Major: AGGRESSIVE (5 GOO-P), CATCHING TONGUE (5 GOO-P), COMPOUND SIGHT (5 GOO-P), DORSAL PLATES (5 GOO-P), FEARLESS (5 GOO-P), MUSK (10 GOO-P) SMELLY (-5 GOO-P, UNIVERSAL), SCYTHE (3 GOO-P), SPLAY (5 GOO-P), TOXIN RESISTANCE (2 GOO-P): UNNERVING VOCALIZATION (3 GOO-P), VENOM (10 GOO-P): (TOXUNGEN +5 GOO-P)

Minor: Claws, Long Neck, Nearly Human, Rot Digestion, Teeth (Crushing), Toxin Digestion

ABOMINATION OF MAD SCIENCE (6 GOO-P): When in combat, spend 1 Will to make a Bully Maneuver on every opponent in the fight regardless of range. Outside of combat gain +A on social tests invoking violence or fear

Skags Mutants

 As part of my tinkering with the Mutants in the Now ruleset, I settled on creating some fictional speices, some from Blue Planet and some from the Borderlands video-game franchise, due to both settings' focus on the violent ecology of their planets. Violent creatures being surpisingly easier to make then trying to specialise herbivores and more normal animals. A legacy of being based on Palladium's RPG and hence AD&D.

I made skags first but never really had an idea to fix their growth. Species in Mutants in the Now (in the Mutants in the Next book) can metaphorph to adult forms and age, but nothing suggests changes after they achieve adult forms. Skags get bigger and more armoured the older they are, with the largest types developing a laser beam. But they don't morph shape very much. I could just discount Skagzilla as a one-off creature had not another giant, aged but apaprently normal skag done the same in Borderlands 2.

I ended up truncating some of the changes and tied them to the aging rules, leading to the odd situation where they get weaker as the reach their monstrous final forms. This may all be edited later after feedback.

Dinopithos latro Skag SR 11 Enhance DET STR END GOO-P: +20 Basic: Gugiformes, Carnivore, Quadrupedal Major: Aggressive (5) Burrow (10 GOO-P, Slow -5 GOO-P) Enhanced Scent: Rotting (7) Exoskeletal Defences (15) Swift: Sprint (5) Minor: Abrasive, Claws (digging), Heat Tolerance, Hibernation, Longevity, Mandibles (piercing), Pack Hunter, Prehensile Tongue, Rot Digestion, Territorial Leaping Slam (Swift: Sprint +2 GOO-P): If the Charge attack hits, the target is also Grabbed.

Spitter Skag SR 9 Enhance PRE END PRO GOO-P: +27 Basic: Gugiformes, Carnivore, Quadrupedal Major: Aggressive (5) Burrow (10 GOO-P, Slow -5 GOO-P) Enhanced Scent: Rotting (7) Spines (15) Swift: Sprint (5) Toxin Resistance (2), Toxic: Lead-Acid Pollutant (12 GOO-P, Toxungen +5 GOO-P) Minor: Claws: Digging, Heat Tolerance, Hibernation, Longevity, Mandibles: Piercing, Pack Hunter, Prehensile Tongue, Rot Digestion, Territorial, Corrosive Mucus (Toxic: Toxungen +3 GOO-P): The ranged attack with Lead-Acid Pollutant reduces the damage by only one step, reduces Armor by 1 per hit.

When a skag reaches shifts from Adult to Middle-Age, it follows the rules established on p.41 of Mutants in the Next with the following exceptions from Species Shifting: It must immediately increase its Size Rating by 1, even if this causes a negative GOO-P value. If you have a negative amount of GOO-P at the end, you must take as much GOO-P as you can as a milestone to offset this (Now, pg. 94). If you still have a negative GOO-P value, you must continue to do so at every milestone until your GOO-P total reaches 0. The skag becomes known as an Alpha Skag and may purchase the Extra minor traits: Spurs (Heel, Legs)

Spitter skags are known as Elder Skags and cannot.

When a skag shifts from Middle-Age to Elder, it undergoes the same process with new effects: It must immediately increase its Size Rating by 2, even if this causes a negative GOO-P value. The skag refunds the Major Trait: Sprint if not yet refunded. The skag may purchase the Extra Major Traits: Exoskeletal Defense and Stable. Special: Exoskeletal Defense costs 5 GOO-P for you instead of 15 GOO-P. If Exoskeletal Defence was already present, the GOO-P difference is refunded. If Spines is present, the trait may be replaced with Exoskeletal Defense and the GOO-P difference may be refunded. They gain the Unique Trait: Resistance 4 (5 if you have Exoskeletal Defense) You may refund your unique species trait if present and purchase the replacement Psychic Power: Ergoplasmic Lance (15 GOO-P) [Thank you LV0 Console Peasent] A beam of mysterious, luminescent psychic force streams forth from your hands or mouth as a ranged strike, obliterating all in its path. It doesn’t disappear once the attack hits or misses, traveling forwards until its energy has been expended. When performing this attack, you may use +DET instead of +PER or +PRO; this attack does double your Determination dice on a successful hit against Defense. Before you can use this power, you may spend a moment to charge up energy. If you do, you add your Determination dice again to the attack’s damage, for three times your Determination dice of damage in total. You may only charge Ergoplasmic Lance if you have less than two statuses. If you use a charged Ergoplasmic Lance for two turns in a row, you gain and reinforce the tired status and don’t recover from it at the end of this scene unless you spend 1 WILL. Boost: Ignore any Resistance and Armor of non-boss foes have when inflicting damage with this ability, or reduce the Resistance and Armor of boss foes by 3.

Scale and Borderlands for Cyberpunk

 So it's been a while.

What was surposed to be a short break for work and to reset my erratic schedualing managed to become 2 months. My only consultation is that Throne of Salt, the blog which inspired me to restart this blog after leaving it for 5 years hasn't updated since September, but Dan writes more than me and more frequently.

So if you don't know Borderlands, it was a video game series by Gearbox Software which pioneered the Looter-Shooter genre. Where you shoot through a class-based FPS and constantly find and exchange gear (mostly guns) for better versions.

Apart from the nice cell-shaded graphic, the main draw was the desolate wastes of the planet Pandora and the dark humour that cam with it being populated by an ecology of horrible monsters, Mad Max bandits and hard-scrabbled settlers.

But there is a fun intersection here with Cyberpunk. In a set of audio logs, the governor of one of the few refugee settlements to survive lays out the background details of how the planet came to be like it is. This background and the whole setting's background changed every game so it's only relevant for the first game where the lore was established.

• "With thirty thousand prisoners on Pandora, you may wonder what Dahl's security plan was. The answer is just as cheap and short-sighted as the plan to have thirty thousand criminals do your work for you. Dahl's security plan consisted of 600 armed men, and over forty six hundred unmanned sentry turrets. Predictably, when the prisoners took over the mines and prisons, they took over the sentry turrets as well."

This puts the game in a new perspective. Thity thousand prisoners got released 2 years prior and manage to route 600 armed men (who were mostly left there by Dahl), plus an unknown, isolated by well-armed civilian/administrative population. There couldn't have been more than 100,000 people on the entire planet in it's heyday and probably a lot lower. Yes the Crimson Lance was there as well making things worse but this looks less like a Mad Max planet and more like a single region left as an open-air prison.

Which brigns up to the topic at hand.

Death Valley Free Prison is descibed as 4000 square miles of hell-on-earth.

Within its borders dwell half a million depraved Gangmembers, battlescarred mercenaries, renegade netheads, demented road warriors, psychopathic felons, and other assorted social rejects. It's easy to get in, but just try to escape.

This does everything Borderlands wants (bar the monsters) and leaves the video game as simply a failure to conceive scale. Every plot and character you want out of the Borderlands 1, 2 and the prequel can fit inside Death Valley or any other part of the ruined USA you want in a way for your players to visit without having to justify why the bandits haven't overrun Night City.

Now DVFP was made for Cyberspace, a derivitive of Spacemaster/Rolemaster and not for any of the Cyberpunk editions. But in a fortunate coincidence, I was in Florence, Italy, in a little games shop off the Cathedral called Stratagemma. I found a Cyberpunk 2020 adaption of it. It looks like the European distrabutor had a habit of releasing various 2020 books that were alt-universes like Gravity Falls as far-future sourcebooks and repackage other games lik Cyberspace as 2020 books presumebly becuase they sold better. So I ended up with a compatible game but in Italian.

With a few conversion equations from Challenge Magazine, you can even you wing the process. Now we got not a lot of material on SoCal in Cyberpunk's timeline, so there is plenty of game space to insert DVFP either exactly as it appears or as a wholesale reference to Borderlands.
If you want an excuse for why no on cares, you could set it in Texas where there is a lack of setting material and empathy as well. You could even set it in the nebulous south-west if the rock formations are essential.

You can always blame Biotechnica for the monsters.