Hello everyone,
I’m looking for a rules clarification regarding the Consciousness Uplink Drive (Starship Operations Manual / Archives of Nethys), specifically the rule for abrupt disconnection.
The relevant text reads:
“The user can instead disconnect at the start of a round before the engineering phase, but severing the link so quickly is harmful; they take damage equal to twice the starship’s tier when a system becomes malfunctioning or wrecked.”
After carefully analyzing this wording, I’m unsure about the intended timing and frequency of the damage.
The ambiguity
As written:
Abrupt disconnection itself does not seem to cause damage.
Instead, damage is triggered when a starship system becomes malfunctioning or wrecked.
However, the text does not specify:
Any duration for this vulnerability, or
Whether the damage can occur only once or multiple times.
Read strictly RAW, this could imply that:
After a single abrupt disconnection, the character might take damage every time a system becomes malfunctioning or wrecked in later rounds (e.g. N+1, N+3, etc.), even though they have already been physically disconnected for several rounds.
This feels unclear, and possibly unintended, but I can’t find any explicit limitation in the text.
Questions
Is the damage from an abrupt disconnection intended to occur only once, triggered by the first qualifying system damage after disconnecting?
Or is it intended to apply every time a system becomes malfunctioning or wrecked until the end of the encounter (or some other implicit duration)?
If the latter is not intended, is there an assumed but unstated duration for this effect?
Any clarification—official or community consensus—would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
