How do I care for and feed my Living weapon?

[ThermalCat]

So the new Armory book has these creepy Sting Pistols on page 16, with ant, yellow jacket, wasp and hornet varieties. There are some pictures on page 19. These are derived from swarm technology and I imagine they look and feel like holding the body of a two pound insect in your hand. These are listed as having a capacity of 20 or 40 charges like battery operated weapons. There is no special ammo listed in the ammo table (pg.25) and the weapon category description on page 54 doesn't specify anything on ammo either.

The ant sting pistol uses up 5 of its 20 charges per shot, so only 4 shots before you need to reload. The higher level models use fewer charges per shot and/or take a higher capacity cartridge.

So my question is, would you say these can use standard battery packs? Or would you be more colorful and say that you buy special nectar pouches? Same price as a battery, or maybe the advantage is that these are cheaper to "feed"--a 5 credit fruit smoothie instead of a 60 credit battery?

[EltonJ]

Depends on how living you want your living weapon to be. The Gamemaster should decide if it has a battery hook up or not, or if it eats.

[ghostunderasheet]

I thought they explained it as the weapon feeds on the ammo/energy converting it to what it needs to continue surviving. But I wouldn't mind feeding my weapon the blood of my fallen enemies. Which sounds dark. But it's like those guys that would cut themselves on their blade to sate it's bloodlust in those stories animes and movies.

[ThermalCat]

ghostunderasheet wrote:

I thought they explained it as the weapon feeds on the ammo/energy converting it to what it needs to continue surviving. But I wouldn't mind feeding my weapon the blood of my fallen enemies. Which sounds dark. But it's like those guys that would cut themselves on their blade to sate it's bloodlust in those stories animes and movies.

Ooh blood! I hadn't thought of that, but considering these were originally swarm technology that wouldn't be far fetched. I like the idea of a pact worlds version of these using very dense food bars that are equivalent to battery packs in cost, capacity, size and weight, but maybe a little harder to come by on the availability. If you have captured an authentic sting pistol of Swarm origin, I can see a GM requiring you to fuel it with blood or something else somewhat difficult or unpleasant to use.

I've been GMing and was just looking for a few unusual things to throw into the adventure now and then. Perhaps a Defiant fusion (CRB pg 193) on one of these, I could then describe it--"Little legs grasp your hand back as you hold it and a segmented whip tail wraps around your wrist. The smooth chitinous body snuggles into your palm, slightly warmer than room temperature. Through the translucent plate by your knuckles, you can see its stomach is fully charged."

[ThermalCat]

EltonJ wrote:

Depends on how living you want your living weapon to be. The Gamemaster should decide if it has a battery hook up or not, or if it eats.

Some time I'll be a player (I'm GMing right now); since it's alien technology (more alien than most), I totally want to play up it's weird properties. As a player I'd be willing to go out of my way a bit to use one of these.

[Pantshandshake]

They use charges, so they use batteries. If you and your players want to have them use some kind of biologic power source, I'd take a few minutes and outline where you can find more 'ammo,' and how not-swarm people are cultivating swarm weapon food.

If you're just going to put 'nectar sacs' or whatever in the shop next to the bullets, then I'd just use the batteries that are already there and not bother.

[Nimor Starseeker]

Judging by the way some of those weapons look, I’d be tempted to let it feed on the corpses of my enemies, but not according to the rules. I would let evil players that follow the Devourer as their diety, do this as a house rule, because the flavor of the nasty evil is appropriate!

[Metaphysician]

For the standard "off the shelf" living weapon, I imagine they are designed and engineered to work readily with other standard technology. Which is to say, yes, you just plug a battery into them. Presumably they have some kind of electrovore metabolism, letting them convert electricity ( or whatever form standard batteries provide power as ) into whatever biological chemistry they need to survive. Note: magic exists; their genetics could entirely use such to fill in any gaps.

That said, I bet the associated maintenance and maintenance tools for a living weapon would be different from a standard laser pistol. Instead of applying rust remover and lens cleaner, you give it a vitamin injection and squirt "mouthwash" in its extrusion sphincter.