stillfleet

Killed a bad dude... who turned out to be connected. You are being watched. You owe these powerful watchers, whoever they are, something worth a life.

Burn 4 GRT and tell a lie: everyone believes it, no check required. This is not a weird power and won’t work forever, if the lie is unreasonable or can be disproved, but it will allow you to fool anyone briefly.

• ҂ Bonus Item: you start play with a chiv, free of cost.

Name a stealable object—or overhearable or glance-at-able phrase or password, etc.—and burn d8 GRT. Roll a dMOV +your level check. If you succeed, you steal the thing without being caught. If you fail, the entity from whom you’re stealing makes a dWIL check: if they succeed, they catch you; if they fail, you still didn’t steal the thing, but at least you didn’t get caught. A 1 is always a failure.

• ҂ Bonus Item: You also begin play with a free well-made dagger, stolen or of your own design instead of a chiv. But at character creation, if anyone asks you for help buying essential starting gear, you must give them d12 gl (representing the fact that you are a prisoner or orphan and thus cash-strapped); each other player can ask for your money. They must ask; if they don’t read this rule, then they miss out!

Once per venture, when your group reports back to your refactor, you can submit your own memo without your teammates noticing. If you do so, choose to either say nothing of importance or reveal something that at least one of the other PCs did not want to report back to the Co. If you reveal nothing of great importance, you simply gain an additional 25 gl as a minor reward. If you rat out one or more of your fellows, however, you gain a 200 + (your level × 25) gl reward and a closer connection with your refactor: they offer you secret side ventures and lend you archaetech items, etc. But now you must rat out the others each time you report back or suffer a loss of rank, the suspicions of your overseers, and possible prison time, etc. The other PCs can never catch you in the act of turning in a memo, but they can uncover your deceit by other means.

Sidebar with the GM: hatch a plot to kill one target (this may be anyone, NPC or PC), and then burn X GRT. The plot must make some kind of sense. It takes at least one round of concerted effort to conceive, at best. X must be greater than the level of the target, minimum 2. Whenever the time is right, roll dCOM to attack the target (even if you’re using poison, etc.). This roll can be signaled secretly to the GM using a pre-arranged signal. (“I roll to parry” = murder.) The target rolls dMOV or dWIL to resist, depending on the nature of the attack (stabbing or poison, e.g.). For every 5X you spent when plotting, your target suffers a −1 on their roll to resist. If your final result is equal to or greater than your target’s, they die. This entire process, if successful, can take place without the target knowing who is attacking them, your choice. If you fail but took reasonable steps to protect your identity, your target must make a dREA −X check to identify you.

You gain a permanent bonus of +1 MOV.

You can metabolize a much greater range of chemicals than hominins, only a few of which are cognizable to them as “food”—from rotting fungusbark to human-urine energy shots. Whenever you encounter something possibly edible, make a WIL/resist world check. Take that result and roll as many d4s. For every resulting 4, you regain 1 point of pool, assigned to HEA or GRT as you like. (The GM gets final say on what things around you might be “edible,” but they should be generous!) Eating possible-food takes at least 20 seconds (two rounds).

Wetan is actually a family of so-called rasp-languages: it involves pheromonal and electrical signals that nonbugs can never fully understand. It is weakly mutually intelligible with other bug languages such as Cryptocerid (extinct), Mantish (on Terra), and Yuggothi (the language of the mi-go).

You gain a permanent bonus of +1 COM.