Kenoma progress keeps coming, though I'm still not quite done with content. I think I should be at a spot where I'm just doing layout on Monday, but we'll keep our fingers crossed.
Hammercalled was inspired by Borderlands, and one part of that was having gear that players created on the fly.
Kenoma loses some of this inspiration, aiming for a more realistic and gritty theme, and with that some of the old systems need to adjust.
One major change is that combat is a lot more brutal, and as a result the weapon scaling is different.
For ranged weapons, we actually have ammunition as a factor now. This was referenced in Segira with maintenance, but now it's something that players need to worry about on a per-round basis.
The way I'm handling the weapons I'm making for the core rulebook is to build them from archetypes. There aren't many, just a handful for the main military doctrines, and I extrapolate for more exotic weapons based on the stats of what I have here.
Right now, for instance, if I need to balance a pistol, I take into consideration its accuracy modifier, magazine capacity, bulk, and qualities. It has a range limit and can only use certain types of ammunition due to its frame size, but starts pretty cheap (about a week's disposable income). I have a way to determine the expected cost value, which is a way to keep people from getting things nicer than they deserve, though a lot of gear is based on who you are.
I have an ammo system, where I build from projectile caliber, round diameter, round length, and casing. Then you can buy special qualities.
I don't have an equivalent system for armor yet, but it'll probably have three scales: weight, tech level, and protection. That's pretty bare-bones, but once you add in the extra qualities it'll make sense. Armor's more standard-issue right now, since the non-combatants have armored clothes, the Expedition sergeant has the sort of futurized plate-carrier setup, the pariah has a jumpsuit, and the Decker has futuristic assault armor. The Zealot doesn't have armor, but he gets a Talent to take its place that gives him some absorption and a bonus to defense (and lets him activate his healing Talent as a reaction to taking damage, meaning that he runs through Flame before Blood when taking damage in combat).
4mm Caseless
4mm caseless is a caseless ammunition intended for subcompact civilian handguns. It uses the caseless design to pack extra propellant around a tiny projectile. The cartridge is also used in military firearms as a high volume-of-fire option.
On Alcove, it's one of the cheapest cartridges, used as a training cartridge, for vermin hunting, and in automatic weapons.
The Silhouette is a machine pistol designed for saturation fire. It is available in a smartgun version (this requires a special Talent), but also as a dumb-fire weapon for a less discerning audience.
The statistics given below are for the smartgun version
Damage: 4
Acc: +10
Bulk: 2
Ammo: 4mm Caseless x60
Qualities: Auto (3), Rapid (-15)
AC: 45
12mm eXtended Anti-Personnel was developed during the 21st century as a response to augmented infantry. Designed for use in an intermediate cartridge capacity, it saw limited battlefield adoption, but became popular among law enforcement, paramilitary groups, and bounty hunters for its stopping power.
It's expensive on Alcove, but its users swear by it.
Damage: 7
Length: Medium
Range: Battle
Purchase Info: 1 bulk = 10 rounds at 10 AC.
Properties: Brutal (when you hit in combat, double the damage added by your Margin)
The Headman is a venerable handcannon. Manufactured to the highest possible quality with a variety of finish options, it is a firearm for people who don't like asking for permission or forgiveness. Despite the high-caliber ammunition it fires, it has steady recoil and a low bore-axis for optimal comfort in a firefight.
Damage: 7
Accuracy: +10
Bulk: 2
Range: Skirmish
Ammo: 12mmXAP x 8
Properties: Brutal
AC: 35
As with Hammercalled, the general rule is that an attack will do DAM+X, where X is the margin of success on an attack. There are qualities that alter this equation (e.g. DAM+2X), but generally you're looking at a number from 4 to 12 as your damage outcome, with anything above 12 being in the nice chunky-salsa range.
For instance, an enemy combatant might have Armor 4, Health 8. The Decker's Silhouette machine pistol does 4 damage base, so ostensibly she's not damaging your enemy at all.
However, the Silhouette has the Auto (3) quality, letting its user gain a +15 to-hit, and has +10 Accuracy and the Rapid (-15) quality to let her do multiple attacks.
Her Combat is 32 and her fighting specialization is +30, so she's rolling with a TN of 87 on her first attack assuming she's burning through her ammo. That means she'll hit 87% of the time, and we'd actually expect her to do somewhere around 8 damage because she'll get additional damage equal to the tens-place of her result. She could one-shot that bandit with her machine-pistol, but it would be unlikely for her to dump all her ammo with no effect.
And if she hits, she can do the same thing again because of Rapid (-10), this time against a TN of 72, and potentially again against a TN of 57, and so forth.
The limit on this is missing or running out of ammunition. A Rapid weapon is terrifying, but when you're burning through rounds at 1300 RPM it had better well be!
It's also worth noting that if the decker fired off three bursts, she's looking at a bill roughly equivalent to a day's pay (or roughly 2/5ths of her guaranteed resupply).
I'm still finishing up the characters and the adventure, but I've got it all sketched out now and it's just coming down to nudging the final Talents into place and getting the text and organization (I'm one of those last-minute fiddler types) sorted out.
