A world of strange peoples and stranger vistas

Mars is home to many peoples. The most numerous are the Red Martians, of which I am one. We are the common people of the Red Cities, and I suppose I must admit that our rulers are of the same descent.

We share our history with the Greens, though you’d hardly know it to see them. They are giants, of whom my master fought not a few. The Greens stand over a dozen feet, with four arms. I would not have believed that every one of those hands could hold a sword, but I have seen it with my own eyes –and been lucky to survive. Their eyes are large, their hair black and spare, and their mouths sport two small tusks.

Like us, they are the descendants of desert nomads who survived the drying of the seas and the fall of the cities of the First Martians. Unlike us, they choose to reclaim these cities. Of course, there are not many of them anymore – the First Cities are dangerous places, as is the open desert – yet they live in small settlements among rebuilt ruins. I have heard them called a savage race, but my master often said that we are no less savage. For, if we were not, how could we survive in a world which also contains them?

We Reds and Greens are not alone, of course. The Zaius, sought after as physicians and wise men, resemble the apes even more than we. The women of Wyeth are as much plant as animal, and much-feared as warriors. The Skarrans have survived where most other lizards have died, evolving to generate heat within their own bodies. And there are others, smaller, stranger peoples who might be found in the bazaars of Vance or their own lost cities.

Whence came so many peoples and the fragments of culture we share is unknown to me. I’ve heard it said that we were created by the First Martians, each with some purpose in a grand design. Some astrologers claim that we were seeded from distant stars, that the First Martians themselves were survivors of some earlier, more beautiful world. My master, though he could wax philosophical given enough drink, dismissed these questions as the domain of scholars hunched over books and bones. I myself think that when our world truly lived, it was simply abundant in all things, thinking creatures included.

During my apprenticeship and in the years beyond, I have never met a man quite like my master… yet I have met many who share the same wanderlust, the same greed, and the same passion for reckless adventure. I have met these among all the people I have encountered on our Red World. For some, there is no place in life but that carved with the point of a sword.

Next: Warfare!

You can read previous installments of “The Apprentice’s Tale” here.

The City of Vance, illustrated by Chris Huth

What to say of the cities? After he bought me, my master brought me to Vance, where we lived modestly in a room above his favorite tavern. Despite his occasional protestations, I can think of no better place to have grown up. In Vance, the canals divide into a spiderweb of streams which serve as the city’s streets. At night, a thousand colored lanterns light the channels. The city refuses to sleep. In those late hours, a handful of chits can buy almost anything, though one must watch one’s purse closely. My master would often say that Vance is a city of thieves, yet I could say the same of any other city we visited. Perhaps it was the company we kept.

The Red Cities number some two dozen. Every one is located near some source of water. Thus, most are located along the canals, as Vance is. Yet there are a few outliers. Star-ruled Zodiac is an oasis within a great bowl of rock, which somehow traps the water from the pole with no need of canals. There, it even rains. In Ziggur, a place I shall shun and curse all my days, the people are rationed water that condenses within the atmosphere processor.

In any city, the majority of construction is stone and mud brick. Sometimes, this construction can be quite shoddy… my master told the story of being thrown through a third story wall in Chiaro.

Daily life is a struggle for all. No one is well-heeled enough to be certain where their next skin of water will come from. Every hand toils to earn food and water, whether attached to the arm of a laborer, a scribe or a sellsword. Still, better the cities than the sort of town I grew up in.

Traveling between cities can be difficult. Hire a boat down the canals, and you risk pirates. Desert thieves say the water pirates are soft; the two missing fingers on my master’s left hand put the lie to that. Travel overland, and you risk the desert thieves, not to mention the desert itself.

Yet for all that, the journeys are worth it. Few of the city-states are truly self-sufficient, and anyone who can trade or steal commodities in one to sell in another stands to earn more than their share of water.

Ah, but how to buy that water, or the knife you need to earn it? Each city manufactures its own money, backed at some level or another by rations of food or water. Most use ceramic coins or chits, treated in some way as to challenge the skills of counterfeiters. In Vance, for example, an iridescent glaze is applied; a similar technique is used in Zodiac. Illium’s coins give off a radium glow; I’ve used one to lure a mark down an alley on a dark, cold night.

The greatest quantities of both money and resources are naturally controlled by the upper classes, our supposed betters. Different cities have different aristocracies, ranging from Vance with its nobility of merchants and thieves to the theocracy of cursed Ziggur. Yet the divide between rich and poor is razor-thin, a fact of which every one of us is keenly aware. Thus, some of the wealthy are given to acts of extreme generosity, in the hopes that we will visit the same upon them should their fortunes turn.

In general, the people of Mars are given to grand gestures. We are keenly aware that we live in our planet’s last days, and so we weep and curse and love openly and with abandon.

This is true of no one more than the rogues of the Red Cities, a fraternity of which I have sometimes been a member. Gamblers curse their luck with the names of forgotten gods, while bravos seek satisfaction of one another in the streets and taverns. A slight against a hired sword can find a man with a handspan of steel protruding from his back. These rough characters inhabit the lower class portions of town, but are sometimes hired by the upper crust as bodyguards and assassins. Many times my master was hired by a young noble to fight a duel in his place.

Next: The Peoples of Mars

Today’s lovely illustration comes courtesy of the incomparable Chris Huth. Chris is doing a couple of pieces for Cavaliers, of which this is the first. You can find previous installments of “The Apprentice’s Tale” here.

Alright, started testing out a new conflict system for Cavaliers of Mars last night.

I want conflict in Cavaliers to be a swashbuckling game of rapid back and forth exchanges, as well as a process of making choices about how much to commit to attack or defense.

To that end, the system I’m testing is based on a bidding mechanic.

At the start of a round, everybody rolls their combat dice. (In my mock-duels, I’ve been giving everyone 4 d6s.) These “hands” of dice are concealed.

On your turn, you can bid a die and narrate your attack. The target can bid a die of equal or greater value and narrate a parry or a dodge or the like. In turn, you can narrate an attempt to get past that defense, again bidding a die of equal or greater value. And so on.

If you, as attacker, bid the last die, you deal your damage.

You can also bid your dice for other actions. An attempt to disengage and retreat, for example, might use a dice bid, as might an attempt to force your opponent to move. Extra dice to your initial roll can be gained by picking up “terrain dice” from around the map; manipulating a standing brazier might be worth 1 die, where knocking around the throne of the Princess Invincible might be worth 2 or 3.

In the final system, someone who loses the bidding process might have options other than taking “damage”… for example, it might be possible to give ground, or accept a condition which hampers you.

Thoughts?

I’ll be attending White Wolf’s Grand Masquerade in New Orleans this week. I’m planning to devote a lot of my time to talking to players, so, please, come and find me. I’ll be the guy with bright red hair talking about vampires as horrible lizard-brain boyfriends.

When I get back, I’ll be releasing the third part of “The Apprentice’s Tale” for Cavaliers of Mars.

A world of fading sunlight and haunted storms

Continuing “The Apprentice’s Tale,” for Cavaliers of Mars.

We live upon an old world, and you can find that in every aspect of life and death. My master often spoke of the world dying. As a child I imagined I could hear its groaning sighs on the wind. As a grown woman, that is not a fancy I have entirely left behind.

My first voyage across the desert began the day after my master bought me. Or, as I’ve come to think, bought my freedom. Clad in long desert robes and silk breathing masks, we set out beyond the borders of the square mile in which I had lived all my life. The desert, then as now, was temperate by day, frigid by night, and extended forever in all directions. Though we followed an ancient track, no one could have seen it who had not learned it by heart. Master to apprentice, as it was with me.

My master often said that the sun no longer looms as large as once it did. Certainly, it no longer warms the planet with the same intensity. While the air itself is thin, it is thick with dust, creating the strange scarlet skies. As the sun rises or sets, the dust gives it an eerie blue halo. Like many, my master was superstitious about night and the color blue. Twilight lasts an hour or more at both at sunrise and sunset, and at that time you can clearly see the blue star called Earth.

Dust storms are common, and can cover huge regions. We were fortunate not to encounter any during my first desert crossing. A few times a century, a storm will rise out of Hell’s Basin and engulf the entire world. A planet-wide dust storm can leave behind an epidemic of the maddened and possessed. It had fallen to my master sometimes to put such people to the sword.

Bodies of water are few, and rain is rare and precious. Some parts of Mars have not seen a drop in thousands of years. Sometimes I’ve seen ice clouds in the coldest, highest parts of the sky, giving it a violet hue. This ice can be harvested by intrepid flyers – one of the thousand ways Illium maintains its flowing fountains and generous water rations. Other water comes from ancient wells, or is processed from layers of ice beneath the sand. The marsh people of the old sea beds distill their water from the muck. Indeed, I have been forced to do so myself, and can say that the results are musty and unpleasant, but as life-giving as a drink from any other source

Yet Mars’ greatest waterworks, those which sustain our remaining societies, are the canals. The canals are the final legacy of the First Martians, miraculous channels which melt water from the polar cap and irrigate large sections of the planet. Nearly all of the Red Cities depend on the canals for water and trade, and repairs to the canal network are one of the few subjects which can bring our feuding rulers together in cooperation.

What travel and survival rules do you enjoy in RPGs? I’m just starting to design these for Cavaliers of Mars.

Next: The Cities of Mars!

A world of dusty little towns and mysterious wanderers

“I have lived a long life,” my master used to say. “Soon it will be my turn to die. And not long after, the world’s turn.” And then he would order another drink.

When my master took me in, I might as well have been an orphan. He bought me from my mother for a handful of ceramic chits laced with the radium of Illium. They were worth a dozen rations of water, but he might as well have handed her his flask of liquor directly. I know he was carrying one.

Why my master did that, I don’t know. He told me, at various times, that my father had been his brother-in-law, or that they had served together in the war. There were other stories, too. Any or all of them could have been true. I often suspect that he took me on because he pitied me.

Whatever the case, he raised me from the age of 13 as his own child.

He died three years ago.

The master was a man of wild stories. He had been across our Red World a dozen times or more. He told me of hard-fought battles, of daring deeds, of the love of princes and princesses. He talked most often when we were practicing with swords. I think he talked to teach me how to fight while distracted. He told me his stories, and he told me that one day I would have as many of my own.

From the time he adopted me until his death, he made his way as a fencing instructor and a hired bravo. He made little money this way, but always enough to keep him in his cups and to keep me well looked-after.

This book is our world as he saw it, the world he lived and died in. I am giving you his words, as honestly as I can, and with care taken not to reveal certain indelicate secrets. I am giving you the words of a dying man on a dying world. I am giving you Mars.

The Desert Towns

I spent the first 13 years of my life in the desert. It is, as anyone will tell you, a hard life, harder even than in the cities. We were fortunate… we had an old well, an artifact of the First Martians that plunged deep into the permafrost and sucked out the water.

The desert brigands merely collected dues from our village; we were spared the seasonal ravaging that came to so many others. My master told me about the brigands. He told me that no man joins them by choice, that they are bands of outcasts driven farther away from society than any others, save perhaps the lost inhabitants of the dusk cities.

He never said whether he fought with or against them.

Without walls or buildings, the desert towns are also subject to the full fury of the elements, including the dust storms. When those great red clouds come rolling out of the desert, they bring scouring debris. Worse, though, is the dust itself, fine as smoke. It will seem to suck the moisture from your tissue, and you must try desperately to hold your breath, lest you be taken by a ghost. Storms give voice and motive power to the dead, who can otherwise travel only on the wind.

Still, there are reasons to stay. Overland trade can support many a community, as can the rare operating mine. Some take the difficult path of raising meat animals, and bring in a measure of prosperity in selling them to the larger settlements. Some few are even located on oases, where vegetables can be grown and water is not quite so scarce.

Desert towns aren’t precisely hospitable, but they can be good places to go to ground. I can vouch for this from experience. More than once, my master and I were been hunted across the desert by those would have our water. Some towns will hire wanderers as protectors, to ward off desert raiders, or even to enforce the law.

A few of our ill-omened expeditions into the lost places began in towns like the one I grew up in. Despite the danger ahead, I was never tempted to stay behind.

And here begins a series exploring a red world of strange adventure. Stay tuned.

Pride and Prejudice

For this week’s theory/criticism post, I’ve invited over Calvin Ashmore, a close friend and Digital Media student at Georgia Tech. Calvin studies game adaptations, both in tabletop and electronic forms. He hopes one day to make a Pride and Prejudice game, which should tell you something about why we’re friends.

Calvin’s been working with a concept called “story worlds,” which has a lot of bearing on how games construct and relate to fiction. It’s a different perspective from what we get in tabletop theory, so I thought it would be interesting to share.

Stories are not static. They move, they change, and the things that happen in them happen for reasons. Story worlds describe narratives using rules. When events in a work of fiction unfold, they do so because it is appropriate for them to do so. A common rule to hear in fictional writing is that if a gun is introduced in the second act of a mystery story, then it needs to be fired in the fourth. This rule is not just a guideline or a convention, it is a mechanic. Rules such as these indicate how fiction works, to the degree that if a story does not follow them, then it feels broken or dysfunctional.

Essentially, story worlds treat stories as simulations. However, this does not mean that stories must be realistic, or simulate exactly what characters would do in a narrative situation. A simulation is an approximation of some other system, be it the rules of physics, the dynamics of characters, or the rules of drama. All of these are systems, they can be described by formal models, but compelling arguments can be made that we perform simulation in our heads during the very process of reading.¹

In a world-centric perspective, plot is not static, it is mutable and volatile. There may be determined outcomes, but the essence of a story is in the path it takes to reach its destination. If we look at a story as having a world, then the story itself is just one of many possible valid paths.² Story world theory pushes toward looking at narratives as fictions³, rather than as texts. The meaning from story worlds comes not from the plotted outcome of a story, but in the system of rules that map causes to effects. In this perspective, games and narratives have a great deal in common.

Applied to game design, story worlds are particularly useful for thinking about composing a design based on a source text or a setting. If it is possible to interpret a text to create a story world, then the world’s rules and mechanics can be applied toward the game design. This is useful for both adapting an existing IP into a single game (a huge number of video games are adaptations, after all), and also for adapting a setting (a huge number of tabletop roleplaying games are adaptations of settings). By using story worlds to inform design, it is possible to recapture some of the elements that make the story enjoyable and create a similar type of experience for players. Story worlds are useful for creating a sense of immersion, and also a sense of participation within fictional universes.

One of the most important issues from the perspective of game design is interpretation. What is the right level of abstraction for building a story world? How do we distinguish what is relevant in a story, and filter these into coherent rules? There is clearly no single right way to interpret a world from a text, but there are also interpretations that are better or worse than others. It is possible to identify five key criteria for judging story worlds:

The first challenge is that games made from story worlds are not gamelike enough, namely that the rules for a story are not interesting for gameplay.⁵ My answer to this is “too fucking bad.” If the point of a project is adaptation, then forcing the game to be more gamelike by including gameplay that is irrelevant breaks the principle of minimality, sabotaging the adaptation.

The second challenge that often appears is that story worlds are not storylike enough, that they allow players to have freedom when the designer would much rather like the player to reach the interesting outcome of the story. My answer to this is “then write a fucking story.” If there is only one interesting path or outcome (a principle which is absurd if you know good players), then the design should be for a story, not a story world.

Cavaliers of Mars

A world of strange vistas and daring adventure

Cavaliers of Mars is a setting and game that I’m making for my own group, as well as for future publication. The “trailer” above was an early piece of writing I did to capture the tone of the setting: planetary romance, swashbuckling in the vein of both Flashman and Captain Alatriste, and the haunted mysteries of a dying world. I’ll be posting content from Cavaliers here as the project takes shape.

In order to lighten the mood a bit from my post earlier today, let’s talk about game design.

You can’t build games in an ivory tower, or even at an Ikea writing desk. Today, I’d like to talk about what happens when one kind of reality meets theory, and a bit about the lifecycle of a game design.

Playtesting is an integral part of the game development cycle. Game design, unlike publishing, is an iterative process. You build, you play, you build, you play. In the process of playing, you will uncover problems, and they will need fixing.

I’ll illustrate. My current project, To Seek Adventure, is a two-player adventure game. It’s a roundtable game — no single GM. The game uses random scenario generation, rather like In a Wicked Age. For several generations of design document, it used a random location for each scene.

In a white box environment, playing through the game myself and working out the math, this seemed fine. Put into actual play, it crashed and burned. The game was too random. Players had too many curve balls to react to.

So my co-designer and I went back to the drawing board.¹ We created a scenario generation system based on drawing some random elements (with just one location), then brainstorming a set of challenges for the heroes to face.

We took that back to the table, and damn, the game ran like a charm. I’ll be talking about these mechanics more in the future, but suffice it to say, I’m really happy with them. The game’s a mile closer to finished because and only because we put it into actual play.

During the same rounds of playtesting, we found that another mechanic was unnecessary because players tended to do it automatically. So we struck that rule. In the white box, it felt fine. But with real live people… superfluous. Entirely.

The next step is external playtesting. As a designer, I’ve got to know whether the game works when I’m not in the room. An earlier version came back with mixed results. Time to try again with the latest and greatest.

Vincent Baker’s talked about how roleplaying games modify a conversation. I’d go so far as to say that you can’t tell what that conversation is until you’ve had it. You can guess, sure, but it’s like high school debate. Prepare all you want, but you’re going to end up in emergent arguments you never predicted.

Playtesting is vitally necessary because we, as designers, can’t whiteboard human elements. A roleplaying game lives and dies on human elements. Those need to be observed, and the game needs to be improved in response to them. More to the point, a roleplaying game only truly exists in play. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your game’s clockworks are… it must play, or else it’s hardly a game at all.

I’ve talked about the excellent ways in which 3:16 makes me uncomfortable. I thought I’d tackle those feelings from another angle. I started jotting down a few notes… and then, an hour or so later, I had a total conversion on my hands.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses suicide.

The Bugs

A Science Fiction Roleplaying Game based upon 3:16

No one’s ever seen it, but they’ve called it a lot of names. The Grave World. The Corpse Star. The Eye of the Damned. You begin to see a pattern.

When humanity stretched forth into the cosmos, we found dozens of worlds that could be adapted to our ways of life — and more that we could adapt our ways of life to. Spaceflight was exciting and profitable.

Spaceflight was also deadly. The engineers called them cold equations. Mathematical rules which modelled the boundaries of what a human being could survive. The rules that tell you when you run out of fuel, when you’re freezing to death, even when you’ve lost your mind.

Ships were lost frequently, especially in those early centuries. Millions died. Stuck in flatspace, sometimes, or losing rations to a cargo breach. Long, slow forms of death, affecting hundreds or thousands of people at once. And therein, the coldest equation of all.

In space, humans are close to twenty percent more prone to suicide.

The equations became well-known, but the variables were debated. Isolation in metal cocoons? Neurological consequences of stasis-sleep? The subtly unique radiation patterns of Earth’s sun, or the composition of its soil?

No one knew. No one knows. But tens of thousands of humans have died by their own hands or knives or tampered EVA suits.

Settlers joked about it. “In space,” they said, “no one can hear your cry for help.”

They were wrong. Something did hear those cries for help. Those last, desperate moments. Hard to say what it was, exactly, but it gathered all of those lost human souls and it gave them new flesh. New consciousness. New life.

They accreted, merged, became the Corpse Star. And then, as humanity does, they sent out settlers. Unhuman beings linked by a single, overriding drive. The missing variable in the cold equation. Hatred for Home.

They are the Bugs. You are one of them.

What’s a Bug?

Physically speaking, a Bug is what happens when you try to house a human soul without any human flesh to work from. You end up with a simple mockery of a human shape, made out of cartilage, chitin, and things most people wouldn’t even call living.

The name Bug comes from two places: the scourgemind, and the tendency of Bugs to have extra body parts that some thoroughly alien molecular engineering system thought would be a good idea at the time. The longer a Bug evolves without integrating something else’s genetic material, the stranger its appearance becomes, as its nanoscopic, mad engineering microbes try to patch flaws in the design.

Bugs are capable of self-grafting organic material, from genetic fragments to body parts and brains. Human adaptability merged with alien biology.

What do Bugs do?

Bugs conquer and destroy human ships and settlements. On occasion, they absorb them, usually as fodder for the scourgemind. Everyone whose heard of the Bugs know that they don’t want to encounter them. Some people fear them so much that they commit suicide. And if you don’t want to be a Bug, that’s the worst thing you can do.

Stage one is infiltration. Bugs can’t communicate well enough to properly lie or deceive, but that’s not for a lack of cunning. Bugs hide in cargo shipments, ride meteorites through atmospheres, lurk in the cyclopean grave-cities of lost alien civilizations.

Stage two is infrastructure. The Bugs create the scourgemind, the neurosphere that plans, schemes, and nourishes the invasion forces with hatred. The scourgemind is generally a single Bug, immensely overgrown and supplemented with as much human neural tissue as can be salvaged. Some are massive, deadly hulks, others near-helpless brains in pools of mutated cerebral fluid.

Stage three is invasion. The Bugs cut off supply lines destroy power, open habitation zones to hostile environments. And then, only then, do they begin to stalk the survivors.

Adaptations

How do I create my Bug?

Sound: Each Bug has a sound, which is effectively the name by which it is referred to in play. This might be the sound your Bug makes moving, engaging in short range communication, or killing.

Role: Bugs lack the strict, evolved hierarchy of insects, but specialization remains a priority.

Abilities: A Bug has two Abilities: Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability. Assign these as per 3:16.

How do Bugs develop?

Bugs develop into progressively more monstrous forms. A Bug changes and mutates until it makes one wrong mutation…and gets killed. Probably by a desperate human civilian who’s just figured out how to flip off the safety on a slug rifle.

Bugs advance in level just like troopers, and can improve their mutations or manifest new ones. See Forms and Mutations later in this article.

How do Bugs fight?

Just like troopers in 3:16.

Can Bugs use Armor or Combat Drugs?

Armor’s still armor — Bugs are naturally tough. Combat drugs are replaced by sudden surges of Hatred.

Who fights back?

Whoever survives the initial assault. Soldiers, mothers, miners, children. Collectively, they have Survivor Ability, which replaces Alien Ability, and can use Threat Tokens. Humans have a Survivor Advantage, which replaces the Special Advantage aliens have in 3:16.

How do Bugs use Strengths and Weaknesses?

All Bugs can hear the voice of the Corpse Star. That’s where the name comes from, actually — whatever the Corpse Star actually is, it generates radio output a lot like a conventional pulsar. Radio Bugs across the universe can hear. Unlike the scourgeminds, the Corpse Star doesn’t transmit plans. It transmits memories, emotions, lifetimes worth of human mental residue. Where individual Bugs pervert human adaptability, the Corpse Star perverts human memory.

A Bug having a Flashback remembers some little incident from some little human life… almost certainly one that ended badly. If that memory gives the Bug Strength, then the Bug shows some remarkably deadly human trait, like courage, guile, independent decision-making. If the memory belies a Weakness, the Bug is temporarily overcome by a positive human trait, one that prevents the creature from continuing in the slaughter.

All Bugs share their first Strength (Hatred for Home) and their last Weakness (Mercy).

Forms

When your Bug develops into a new form, take a new mutation. Bugs below Pastor can keep no more than two mutations. Pastors and more advanced Forms can keep three mutations.

Spawn

A primitive, newly reborn Bug, usually an advance scout. Like other humans, Bugs have an instinct to protect their young. A panicking Spawn can Force Weakness.

Mutations:
- Hand to Hand
- Acid Breath (Grenades)

Hellspawn

A fully grown Bug, more dangerous and independent.

Mutations:
- Bio-rocket (E-Cannon)

Mutor

A Bug beginning to mutate in earnest. Lesser Bugs instinctively follow mutors, simply because the mutor demonstrates more determination and creativity.

Precisely because of this, a Mutor can persuade an entire group of Bugs to run away when the battle turns against them. (Use the E-Vac rules.)

Mutations:
- Lethal Precision (Sidearm)

Initiate

Most Bug infestations never reach the stage of manifesting Deacons or other advanced Forms. Once Bugs stop killing, evolution stops.

The Initiate begins to understand the dogma of the Corpse Star, the abstract concepts of hating humanity and the world that birthed it. As such, the Initiate is able to call upon its brother Bugs and lead them into war.

The Initiate can summon a swarm of brother Bugs. (Use the Orbital Bombardment rules.)

Mutations:
- Greatclaw (PowerClaw)

Deacon

A Deacon can not only call a swarm, but can control one.

Deacons can compromise human vehicles by fusing them with Bug biomatter (APC). Deacons can call entire swarms of Bugs to berserker suicide attacks (TPK Bomb).

Mutations:
- Scorpion’s Tail (PowerBlade)

Pastor

The Pastor leads specialized swarms carrying out attacks too sophisticated for the average Bug. When Bugs display shocking strategic ability, it’s usually the influence of a Pastor.

A Pastor can organize swarms to create a nest as a base for further assaults (Drop Ship).

Mutations:
- Survivor (Kinetic Field Armor Transmitter)
- Voice of Hate (Flame-Gun)

Bishop/Scourgemind

The Bug which commands the invasion of a ship or planet. Typically, there’s only one per infestation. Multiple scourgeminds tend to either merge or destroy each other.

When a scourgemind Sacrifices its swarms of Bugs in the name of hatred (Paradise Bomb), it ascends to Bishop.

Human Survivor Advantages

Ambush

Armour

Hit and Fade (End Encounter)

Martyr (Enrage)

Combat Drugs (Boost Ability)

Suicide Bomb (Exploding Bodies)

Retreat (Flee)

Advanced Armory (Ignore Armor)

Defending the Weak (Ignore Wounds)

Savior Virus (Impair)

Plea for Salvation (Induce Weakness)

Pincer Attack (Isolate)

Heavy Weapons (Lasting Wounds)

Jet Packs (Leaping)

Vehicle Support (Rapid Movement)

Jam Corpse Star Transmissions (Reduce Visibility)

Reinforcements (Regeneration)

Neural Chaff (Stop Technology)

Special Ops Team (Suicide)

Relentless Advance (Swarm)