Skotadi Capabilities
Hey Tau - I remember your Skotadi working off a different set of Capabilities. Did you ever work those up in codified form?
Skotadi Capabilities
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Everything here is a spoiler for my campaign. Only read it if you don’t mind knowing half the plot. The players can read this, as they generally already know it.
These are the Skotadi rules as I used them for my campaign. I advise that the Skotadi be kept a blank space with “GM fiat here”, as they work well as unknowns. That said, any GM who wants to adapt these rules may feel free. Players who take these rules as sacrosanct get what they deserve.
Skotadi have 3 capabilities:
Shifttech: Roughly equivalent to stringtech and the perception parts of nanotech. This represents the ability of the skotadi to move through space, and change its external environment (including attack it). It can be thought of as external change and external perception.
Tempering: Roughly equivalent to metatech and general mental flexability, plus biotech. Tempering is the ability to change oneself and those around you. Skotadi mental and physical states are much more intertwined than for humans, so changing a Skotadi’s psychology (including its own) results in substantial changes in its physiology.
Stasis: The catch-all defense capability. Stasis is used to defend against any sort of change, to oneself or to one’s immediate surroundings. It covers much of the stringtech, biotech, and metatech defensive abilities.
Finally, Skotadi may use their Core Values as if they were capabilities. This covers most of what would be Cognitech, although it may overlap with other capabilities. This, coupled with using tempering to change their Core Values, makes Skotadi both very powerful and very adaptable… and very single minded.
Skotadi Core Values are much more specific than human ones, often requiring a full sentence to describe. Their societies used to have Core Values which focused on working together or a sense of ethics, because otherwise they’d all be too driven in their different directions to maintain a society at all.
If a Skotadi has four Core Values, none may be higher than 5. If it has 3, none may be higher than 10. If a Skotadi has only two Core Values, they can reach 15. In the (normally rare) event that a Skotadi has only one Core Value, it can peak at 25 (although it rarely does). Skotadi can become psychotically single-minded.
When under stress, Skotadi rapidly change CVs, gaining ones that focus on whatever is needed to fix the problem (by their own definitions at the time). When calm and relaxed, it is difficult to get a Skotadi to change its CVs. The Skotadi definition of stress is somewhat different than the human one. Even if things are bad, if they aren’t changing the Skotadi don’t feel “stress”. Rapid change, even good change, causes “stress”.
I’ve been using metallurgy metaphors to explain Skotadi sociology. It works tolerably well.
As a note: Skotadi professions are also rather different, but I haven’t bothered to come up with a list.
My rules for Rem-8 were that he could roll on Tempering + the profession Self Editing (which he doesn't have) to change his CVs. Every 10 lets him get a +/-1 or shift a point. He can do this as often as he wants without stated downsides, but I'll notice every time he does it. Rem-8's Tempering is currently 2.
Between sessions I quietly reduce Rem-8's CV in Humanity. It took the player a few sessions to realize. Otherwise, nothing bad has happened yet.
/forum/t-51263/skotadi-capabilities#post-
