Querritix System Set—Equipment: Boarding Weapons & Ship Styles of the Haesten (SFRPG) PDF

Equipment:

The heart of this section would be the notion of boarding weapons, which reminded me of one of my favorite C-movies of all time, Star Crash. A boarding weapon managing to breech or clamp onto a hull successfully delivers its boarding teams. You roll on the critical damage effect table to determine the system affected by the boarding team, and on a success of the affected crew member’s check, the team is repelled. On a failure, we get one level of critical damage to the system in question. This is interesting in that it does bypass the Critical Threshold, which is a pretty potent thing – however, this is balanced by the rather massive BP-and PCU-costs: The most potent of these clock in at up to twice the PCU of a comparable weapon! 6 of these are provided, and they are all tracking weapons, though e.g. speed also represents a balancing factor. A security bay and drift boosters are provides as expansion bays. Cool: The latter is a one-use emergency drift engine, and once it burns out, its bys can serve as cargo bays. Lost in Space, anyone? There also is the repel boarders crew action, which may be undertaken during Engineering, Helm or Gunnery phases. I liked this. As a whole, the boarding rules do not necessarily mean/imply regular beings, more some sort of tech-style nanite/biogel-etc.-boarding, thus avoiding the huge cluster-f*** that this’d otherwise become; while the flavor does encapsulate teams, I’d strongly suggest making this type of boarding, well, tech-based. The abstraction of boarding team elimination can otherwise become weird for smaller ships. The section also provides two distinctly haesten ships, the tier 1 nursery pod, and the tier 9 nursery crèche.

This card is a strong offering. Some fun ideas here, and I like the ships taking the species’ peculiarities into account. 5 stars.

Endzeitgeist out.