Hc Svnt Dracones is a Post-Cyberpunk posthuman Furry RPG that takes place 700 years after baseline humanity's extinction in the aftermath of a nuclear war between the traditional nation-states and corporations. The solar system is now mostly populated by "Vectors" produced from a blend of human and animal genes who live under the rule of Mega Corps.
The seven major Megacorps that own the majority of the Sol system include:
- MarsCo: The original MegaCorp, formed by the corporations that colonized Mars and created Vectorkind. Now the largest and most diversified of the big seven.
- Applied Science and Robotics: Creators of the Ridiculously Human Robots known as "Cogs", as well as cybernetic augmentations and A.I.s with fewer rights.
- Pulse: Entertainment, athletics, media, and Bio-Augmentation related to the above. In a bit of a Flesh Versus Steel rivalry with ASR.
- The Inner Ring Police Force: The Law Enforcement, Inc. contracted by all the other megas, save for...
- Spyglass: A MegaCorp of whistleblowers, blackmailers, and anarchists in a solar system without governments.
- Progenitus: Originally a division of Spyglass that discovered Big Pharma were Withholding the Cure, started manufacturing the cures themselves, and drove them out of business. Now possesses an almost literal religious fervor that sometimes verges into Knight Templar territory.
- Transcendent Technologies Inc: Almost entirely based on Europa, a corp working on Organic Technology and reality-bending "implants" that might bring Vectorkind to new levels of existence, or destroy it.
- Lumen: A small corporation that appeared out of nowhere recently with Faster-Than-Light Travel and miniaturization technology that has the potential to turn Sol upside down.
Published books include:
- The original Core rulebook.
- Core: Expanded, with rules for playing non-Vector characters: Cogs, Cogsune, Blips, and Exonymphs; as well as many new Vector species and implants.
- Sound and Silence, a purely lore book detailing things from everyday life in MegaCorp society, to their deepest, darkest secrets.
- Fate's Fangs, a novel based in the HSD universe, written by Josh Vogt.
- Multiple adventure modules (contracts).
- The second edition rules were published March 28th, 2019.
- Blood In The Mist, a second novel.
The novels have a page in progress at Hc Svnt Dracones.
Tropes:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Bladed weapons can be upgraded into Vibroweapons, allowing them to cut through all but the thickest armour. Reaper warscythe upgrades it even further with Vicious Edge quality, allowing it to slice through non-reinforced materials and shields with ease.
- After the End: 700 years ago, there was a nuclear war between corporations and nation-states that rendered Earth uninhabitable. The corporations based on Mars have since built a thriving society.
- Amazing Technicolor Population: The Atypical Patterning morphism, which can also result from a common Surgery. Certain groups are prejudiced against the unusually-colored people that result.
- Core: Extended adds the Bioluminescent Morphism and Fi-Op fur implant.
- Anarchy Is Chaos: IRPF propaganda likes to paint Spyglass corptowns as such, the residents of said corptowns tend to disagree
to some extent. - Anti-Magic: Followed are the children of two Vectors with Transcendent implants. They have a shadow that looks like a Manifestation and can diminish Cuil Blooms by concentrating hard enough.
- Apocalypse How: What started as a societal collapse gradually progressed into the extinction of humanity. The destruction did not stop there, however: A few centuries later, something appeared on Earth and exterminated what little life was left on it. The planet is now a barren wasteland where the only thing left alive is... Those things, whatever they are. And if Stifle is anything to go about, there might be destruction on a galactic scale (possibly even universal!) looming on the horizon.
- Arbitrary Augmentation Limit:
- 1st edition: Some Surgeries have a limit to the number of times they can be taken in the description: most notably, Reclamations are limited to three, and a character can only have as many Implants as they possess dots in Mind: Presence or Body: Resilience.
- 2nd Edition: Surgeries are classified as "Operations" or "Augmentations". Operations are limited to one in the character's head, torso, and dermis, while they can have three Augmentations in each of those areas (though some Operations can increase that limit). Reclamations don't count towards those limits but are tied to the experience track system instead.
- Arcology: Megastructures, such as Mars' mile-tall skytowns.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: AP ammo in 1st edition dealt some damage directly to a foe's HP before their armor health is zeroed. In 2nd edition AP ammo automatically wounds when max damage is rolled, even if it didn't exceed the target's Endure score, while Charge damage effectively reduces the target's Endure by 2 but their gear is unsalvagable.
- Artificial Animal People: The Vectors are several species of human-animal hybrid created by MarsCo shortly before Earth nuked itself in the corporate wars and used to repopulate the solar system.
- Artificial Gravity: Only ships of Large (destroyer) and bigger size have gravity.
- Attack Drone: The Drone Controller implant allows direct neural control over drones. ASR, in the meantime, fields Gestalt-class dreadnaught drones, explicitly stated to combine manueverability of a fighter with firepower of a battleship.
- Audience Surrogate: In the Lore story in the Core: Extended book Stranger, a Pale Man asks a little Vector girl questions that several fans had asked after the first book was published.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Transcendant Implants had a significant chance of killing their user in 1st edition. FDT weapons in 2nd edition tend towards low damage but cool effects, which often cost a 50-credit battery to use.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: The Vacuum Response augmentation allows characters to operate in vacuum without a suit for ten minutes, and survive another ten minutes unconscious.
- Bears Are Bad News: The reclamation surgeries for Ursidae include reinforced claws, hibernation when severely wounded or deprived of oxygen, cold tolerance that can keep them alive in space (ten hours if hibernating), macro enhancement at 2/15ths of the price tag for other Vectors, and an enhanced nose.
- BFG: LAN weapons, which require an exoskeleton specifically designed for lift assistance to use without setting it on a tripod or something. Such as the H-101 Long-arm, MC-300 Torrent, and V-801 Mag-Lance, the last one still needs to be braced before shooting. The long-arms were dropped in size due to playtesting, so no longer are they a BFG... But they still hurt like hell.
- Big Eater: Vectors who have had Macro or Muscular Enhancement surgery need about 30,000 calories a day. Fortunately Pulse makes "superfood" that has enough calories for them to survive on normal-sized meals, at four times the price.
- Bio-Armor: Among TTI's products. They can emulate genetic reclamation surgeries but if stressed they might start sucking the user's blood.
- Bio-Augmentation: Pulse's specialty, along with sports involving enhanced athletes, and the source of their rivalry with Applied Sciences and Robotics. Their surgeries range from simple cosmetics to Gene Reclamation that grants them more animalistic traits, extra limbs, and even full body replacement.
- Biotech Is Better: Transcendent Technologies Inc is widely believed to have the most advanced technology in the civilized solar system and they use Organic Technology. However, the second rulebook shows that Applied Sciences and Robotics has some secret projects that involve Reality Warping as well, and the sapient robots known as Cogs can receive Transcendent Implants, albeit illegally as TTI doesn't want that to be known.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: A simple Bulletproof Vest can effectively double a weak character's HP in 1st edition. 2nd edition instead opts for raising the damage threshold or Endure score.
- Brain/Computer Interface: Neural Connectivity Suite replaces the skull with hardware that allows a Vector to interface between their brain and computers wirelessly. Cogs can do something similar but need physical contact without an NCS equivalent implant.
- Brain Food: Exonymphs become sapient by consuming Vector brains. And they can gain some special abilities or skills that way.
- Brain Uploading: The very expensive "Body Replacement" surgery, usually used by critically wounded adventurers and retired Pulse athletes. And it's also possible to upload to a clone on another planet, which costs a lot more than physically travelling there but is faster. Either way your old body is euthanized.
- Chest Burster: Whispers infect Vectors by liquifying and pouring themselves down the victim's throat, later bursting out in a fountain of blood that forms a new Whisper. What makes it worse is that the Whisper can remain dormant in the victim's blood for some time, some incursions seemingly appear out of nowhere.
- Chunky Salsa Rule: The various rare Transcendent Implants allow a character to bend the rules of reality by "abstracting" away from reality in a direction that gets the job done. However, should the implants be overclocked by either repeated use or general misuse, their powers start getting incredibly destructive: at the fourth "Cuil" of power and onward you're probably not surviving their use, and if you use a 5th Cuil implant, you absolutely will not return from the experience alive. In most cases it is explicitly ruled that there is no way to recover from misuse of these implants, as it either entirely disintegrates the users body, or sends their conscious spiraling through abstract reality forever.
- In 2nd edition Transcendent Implants only go up to 4th Cuil, but failing a channeling check at high Cuil Bloom will produce a "transcendent catastrophe", rolling a 13 or 14 on a d10+Cuil level check will permanently pull the user (and possibly some friends) into another universe.
- There's simply no way to survive a hit with an -Annihilate weapon if you're the first thing it hits, or in some cases tenth thing. You're going to want at least a blast door or two between you and a Mag-Lance.
- Cloning Body Parts: Replacing limbs counts as General Surgery, as does adding tails or other non-prehensile appendages, a second pair of arms or legs requires Augmentation Surgery that costs twice as much. You can get an Artificial Limb but it costs five times as much and has no special advantages aside from concealing weapons, they're more of a fashion statement than anything.
- Company Town: Large automated constructors made private cities and even islands affordable and many citizens dissatisfied with conventional governments moved to the new "corptowns". Tensions rose between the Megacorps and the old nations for several years and came to a point after MarsCo colonized Mars and began to genetically engineer sentient bipedal animals called "Vectors", which the governments saw as abominations and tried to exterminate. This led to Mars declaring independence supported by the Earth-bound corporations and open war with the governments, which became nuclear. MarsCo was the only significant power to survive the war, though in later centuries other Megacorps emerged, so pretty much everyone now lives in a corptown. There are even a few "corpornations" of continent size, though few megacorps have more than one (aside from MarsCo)
- Compelling Voice: The "Master's Voice" phenomenon, analog (but not digital) recordings of human voices have a hypnotic effect on Vectors. Hemis are immune, and in 2nd edition they can invoke the effect once a session.
- Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: Pulse sponsors costumed vigilantes or rescue workers known as "Beacons" who are supposed to provide role models for the public. It's also suggested they occasionally create supervillains or monsters for them to fight too.
- Corporate Warfare: "Hotzones" are areas where the IRPF has sanctioned a small-scale armed conflict between (usually) small corporations, something like a mix between a hostile takeover, a football game, and a gang war. The Sound and Silence lore book introduces Darkwars. Unlike hotzones, Darkwars are not public and involve large numbers of soldiers and ships. This is when the corporations want something they would rather not have the public know about and there are fewer rules of engagement.
- Cranial Processing Unit: The default for Cogs, to emphasize their similarity to Vectors, but it's possible for both Cogs and Vectors to undergo a "brain decentralization" procedure that makes headshots much less lethal.
- Creator Cameo: The introduction in the expanded core rulebook features a lizard girl named Eliza, who was already a preexisting character for that particular artist from another setting.
- Critical Failure: You think you succeeded, but didn't. Particularly bad for Transcendent Implants, which activate at a higher Cuil (see Chunky Salsa above) on a critical failure.
- Cyberpunk: On the surface, it seems utopian enough to count as Post-Cyberpunk, but as one digs down into the lore it becomes clear that horrible things are happening in the shadows. Small-scale armed conflicts between corporations are commonplace and the Mega Corps have full-blown wars that they keep the media away from, MarsCo has kept the solar system technologically stagnant in the name of stability, no MegaCorp has qualms against killing people and if caught they pin the blame on one of their subsidiaries...
- Death Is Cheap: As a general rule any death that leaves the brain intact can be survived with Body Replacement Surgery. Cogsune take it a step further with quantum backup systems that download them to a new body upon death. It's mentioned that they often do this as a means of rapid transit, much as a video game RPG character might use it to shortcut back to the inn.
- It's alluded that Vectors or Cogs sometimes have backup copies of their brains that can be instanced upon their deaths, but the necessary scans require specialty equipment that aren't exactly portable. So they don't remember anything between the brainscan and their death.
- Characters with the "Dubious Origin" background (including Cogsune in 2E) can get backup bodies from their creator.
- Defenseless Transports: Carriers have no weapons arrays by default, they rely on their drones and flak barriers. Though they do have two Omni-Slots that weapons could be fitted into, or landing bays for carrying corvette's, or point-defenses.
- Detonation Moon: Deimos was accidentally registered as "debris" by MarsCo's orbital construction network and fed to the Geomats. They did build a BlueSky station in its place though. Earth's moon, meanwhile, is covered in the crystallized blood of God knows what.
- Dominant Species Genes: While interspecies couplings among Vectors have random results the offspring of Vectors and Cogs take after the mother. After all, one type is gestated in a biological womb and the other is built by an internal manufacturing center.
- Earth That Was: Earth was nuked in the old war. But a few centuries later strange, bizarre, and deadly new life appeared there, and spread to the moon, killing the entire colony there. Needless to say the whole area is quarantined.
- Eldritch Abomination:
- “Whispers” are mysterious entities formed from what appears to be crystalized blood after bursting out of a hapless victim that can’t possibly contain that much fluid.
- Transcendent magi can summon “Manifestations” with too many limbs or eyes and which move along impossible planes, intentionally or unintentionally.
- The Foea of Europa do not need to eat, instead they draw sustenance from extradimensional radiation that was cut off until the orca probes entered the monolith and TTI reconstructed the extinct species, yet they have teeth. So much teeth!
- Sound and Silence details Meta-Cuil Manifestations (MCM), entities that exist in every cuil simultaneously, and the Whispers are components of an MCM codenamed Hydra, or Apophis. While the Foea and Transcendent implants draw energy from another entity called Ra, whose TTI prays they won't attract.
- Eldritch Location: Transcendent events or accidents with TTI biotech can sometimes result in “Blightspots” covered with Meat Moss that can turn into Alien Geometries further in.
- Near-Cuil realms also qualify, as some of them either run on their own rules of reality or, in case of Stifle, lack them entirely.
- The prime example of those in Sol, however, is the Ruby Spire - a physics-defying two-part structure made from Whisperwerk, parts of which stretch from the (now tidally-locked) Earth and Moon. The sheer impossibility of it existing under the normal laws of physics extends to the space around it, forming the area of altered reality, known as Earth Orbital Wake.
- Mastered expansion to second edition adds more examples, such as Hellmouths (areas of manufactured reality on Earth, that incorporate factors from many different realities and are used by Hydra for creating new agents).
- Experience Points: In first edition stats were upgraded every couple sessions while proficiencies improved after two weeks of Sleep Learning. Second edition replaces this system with experience tracks.
- Eye Spy: The Utilit-i implant has a wireless range of 9 feet, and can be networked.
- Fantastic Racism: Each Family and Morphism description includes common reactions by each of the main Families. They're not as bad as some real life examples, generally, since Vectors haven't had any history of one race conquering or enslaving others. Though it is the reason why digitigrade and plantigrade Vectors get an extra Proficiency point (and Balance).
- As a general rule, Canidae are least accepting of Morphisms (aside from taurs), in particular twin-tails as having extra tails attached is a popular body modification among young canids. Felidae usually think of a morphism in terms of how they might best serve their own purposes, and are willing to compensate them handsomely. Reptiliae don't really care much, snakes are always either laterals or taurs (nagas) anyways. Avaiae are actually a bit envious of their taur-equivalents (angels) and take other morphisms in stride. While mustelidae tend to react to anything exotic with loud "squees" of delight, especially if they're shiny or adorable.
- There used to be an aggressive Feline Supremacist movement, but after they decided to attempt proving their superiority by picking on rabbits, and got reminded of the equalizing effects of guns, it kind of died out.
- Blips have trouble fitting in with Vector society as they are completely unique creations with no others of their "kind" unless their parents decided to make siblings for them. They are required to assign their smallest stat dice to the Community block.
- Fossil Revival: The Foea of Europa were extinct before TTI arrived and reconstructed them from ancient genetic material.
- Ghost Town: After being terraformed, the colonization of Venus never quite took off the way the corporations expected it to, leaving quite a bit of empty wilderness. There are many pre-fabricated settlements that were never occupied. They are now commonly used by criminals or other people wanting to lay low.
- Gratuitous Latin: The title, it means "Here be dragons"note .
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Campaigns and adventures centered around conflicts between the corporations tend to be this as they all have their good and bad points.
- Hammerspace: The "Nanoassembler" implant puts deconstructors in one's hands that can take an object apart and store its particles in cavities in the bones for later reassembly. While Cogsune 06 tails contain a spatial compressor that allows them to function like a more traditional Bag of Holding.
- Hive Mind: Can be formed, either "part-time" or "full-time" with the Hive Node implant.
- Hollywood Hacking: Largely averted, hacking is rather difficult to do and usually requires physical access to the device being accessed. The essential hacking device is basically a laptop with no wireless capability.
- Hostile Terraforming: When Whispers are done killing everyone in the area and using them to replicate they fuse together into crystalline structures referred to as "Whisperwerk", which has covered half of the Earth's surface and reached out to the Moon. While Europa's prehistoric ecosystem was created by a different MCM before it abandoned the place and the Foea starved without its' energy. Great job cloning them TTI!
- Humanity's Wake: the creation of bipedal and sentient animals known as "Vectors" set off a sequence of events that ended in a nuclear war between Mega Corps and traditional governments that sterilized Earth. During the war gene therapies designed to repair the mutations from radiation enabled humans to be transformed into Vectors and MarsCo offered those who took the procedure the chance to evacuate to Mars, while amping up production of other Vectors. Within a century unmodified humans were extinct.
- Humanoid Abomination: These are now the primary population of both Earth and Luna. And they're showing up on Mars, too.
- Intangible Man: "Ethereal" Transcendent implants at Cuil 2 and above enable you to "swim" through walls for a limited time, at Cuil 3 attacks have a chance of passing through you harmlessly, or just through your armor.
- Judge, Jury, and Executioner: The IRPF has Inquisitors who are empowered to hand out summary judgements in order to relieve the workload on their courts, though they're rarely allowed to give out sentences more severe than a year in prison. Which isn't to say that it doesn't happen sometimes.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: 1st edition didn't even bother with stats for energy weapons. 2nd edition added Force Displacement (FDT) weapons that use levitation technology to deliver kinetic energy in a less efficient manner than bullets, and a laser "Pulser" that has to be focused on a target for prolonged periods.
- Laser Blade: The "Rayblade" is a laser projector with a one-inch range that can do massive damage up close, it was used widely in boarding actions before the development of practical ship-to-ship weaponry. FDT swords are invisible (and usually sold with holographic blades) but like ranged FDT weapons they deal low damage unless a charge is spent.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: “Blanks” are a drug that causes anterograde amnesia for an hour, useful for plausible deniability. While a “Full Stop” device uses extreme sensory overload to wipe a subject’s memories up to the last day.
- Law Enforcement, Inc.: The Inner Ring Police Force. A lot of mega corps like to outsource their security to the IRPF because they have a single consistent set of laws, previously local executives were prone to changing rules at a whim.
- LEGO Genetics: The predecessor to the program that created the Vectors involved a lion with wings grafted on. Later creations involved other mythological hybrids and eventually humans with animal genes.
- Living Ship: Transcendant Technologies makes bioships, prone to going crazy under stress and rebelling, sometimes eating the crew or teleporting to a random part of space, or sulking.
- Mad Scientist: The Cogsune created by ASR are a race of half-organic Artificial Super Intelligences who can make technology that seems like magic, but is safer than TTI's reality warping tech. They're also single-mindedly obsessed with research and occasionally run experiments on unwitting Vectors such as Lumen. TTI's scientists on the other hand seem to think of themselves as more like wizards or something.
- Magic from Technology: ASR once marketed a "Techwand" device that could do anything from light up and play smooth jazz to act like a blowtorch and hack locks, it was pulled after a number of accidents but can still be bought on the secondary market. TTI implants, on the other hand, are actually (in)Sufficiently Analyzed Magic.
- The Man Behind the Man: Every Megacorp has an anonymous "Shadow President" whose job is to watch the company and keep it in line, sometimes by assassinations.
- Massive Race Selection:
- The 1st edition Core Rulebook lists 24 species sorted into five families with nine possible morphisms. The Core: Extended book adds 29 more Vector species (four added to existing families plus five new ones) and six additional morphisms. Along with "Blips" that are unique Vectors, Cogs with their assorted frames and specializations, Cogsune, and Exonymphs.
- 2nd edition no longer lists stats for specific species, just gives lists of options for the ten families, which are available to both Vectors and Cogs. While the list of morphisms has been reduced to the seven most morphologically drastic alterations with the more cosmetic ones re-worked into character quirks. Cogs get the choice of five frames.
- Master of None: Characters with a MarsCo scholarship can choose any proficiencies but cannot raise them past the Educated (2 dots) level, as opposed to the normal Masterful (3 dots) allowed at character creation. Bears with the "Drifter" ability take it a step further, instead of a normal scholarship they add 1 dot (Talented) to 17 different proficiencies, though they can use their species and morphism points to bring three-four proficiencies up to Educated.
- MegaCorp: The widely agreed upon definition is a corporation with more than 20 million employees. There are at least seven.
- Mental Space Travel: DigiTrans, where a clone is grown at the destination at the same time the original is euthanized. Quicker but much more expensive than travel by ship.
- Metaplot:
- The Ruby Spire assault being planned by Pulse and Progenitus, over TTI's objections, first mentioned in Core: Extended and elaborated further in Sound and Silence.
- Feyrin in the novel Fate's Fangs is married to Elysium, the drug-crazed homicidal falcon scientist in the "Stars Over Landria" module.
- The protagonist of Blood in the Mist is Marshal Rio Demla Ca'Wo, the PCs' client in "Eon", the events of which she occasionally mentions she should be seeking therapy for.
- Mind over Matter: "Dislocation" TTI implants, though at higher Cuils you have to worry about all the kinetic energy you're manipulating.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The "Aberrant Anatomy" and "Hybrid" morphisms.
- Mobile-Suit Human: A "Body Socket" is a robotic rig that allows a Lateral or Micro to function in society like a normal digitigrade/plantigrade Vector. They're particularly favored by snakes, who don't have any limbs to start with. And in turn they can slip that into armor that is considered Active (i.e. power armor..) talk about recursion...
- Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
- In 1st edition the "How Did That Get There?" morphism can have a second pair of arms but they're not functional without Augmentation surgery, at a 50% discount. Augmentation can also graft a pair of arms onto a "normal" Vector for the full price.
- 2nd edition has Aberrant Anatomy and Limb Addition augmentations.
- Multiple Persuasion Modes: The Coercion proficiency is used to manipulate others through trickery, or threats. Actually browbeating someone is covered by Intimidate. Express is for getting across information or negotiating, though if a character is lying they can substitute Deception.
- Multiple-Tailed Beast: "Twin Tailed" is a possible morphism, it's considered one of the more "attractive" morphisms and many Vectors have tails surgically added to mimic them. In fact it's so common among Canidae that true twin tails are assumed to have had surgery and take a social penalty among their own kind.
- Nano Machines: Spontaneous Assembly Machines use nanites to sculpt objects from compressed foams and resins. Intelliformic Flesh is an implant that replaces one's skin with mentally controlled nanomachines, though if they're used for healing too often they gradually turn the user into a sentient mass of goo.
- Nerf: Transcendent Implants in 2nd edition. Most users are only capable of Cuil 1 powers and Cuil Bloom doesn't raise the Cuil of all implants in the area, just the difficulty to activate. Fortunately even "Radiants" capable of higher Cuil powers are far less likely to accidentally kill themselves and everyone around them, and they're cheaper.
- Nested Ownership:
- An in-universe conspiracy theory claims that MarsCo secretly owns the other six Mega Corps. It is publicly known that most of them were originally MarsCo subsidiaries, though Progenitus was a Spyglass division, and there's little evidence that it still owns them.
- In the novel Fate's Fangs the corptown of Sacroden is owned by the Reveidolon corporation, which is said to be a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Progenitus.
- The Nose Knows: Scent is a skill that most Vectors can learn, Hemivectors take a penalty to it. And canids can have a reclaiming operation to improve their sense of smell to the point of recognizing people by scent and sniffing through bluffs.
- Nothing Is Scarier: In-universe, popular horror videos show the monsters screaming and roaring. If you ever meet any, all you'll hear are their footsteps.
- Well, and Whispering Ghosts... but if you're close enough to hear that, it's probably too late anyway.
- Ominous Owl: There has been only one attempt at creating an owl-person, and it resulted in a monster that has been murdering people.
- One-Hit Polykill: Annihilate weapons keep going in a straight line until they've dealt a total of 1,000 damage. The heaviest suit of armor in the game has 160 HP.
- One Nation Under Copyright: Traditional nation-states are dead.
- Organic Technology: TTI specializes in designing and producing biological constructs known as "bioprobes", living ships, living armor, and symbiotes.
- Our Centaurs Are Different: Taurs have the lower bodies of lateral versions of their species. There are also Pale Riders, also known as Centaurs, from Monster Project, which currently exist only as data, but can become a reality if Guide decides to follow this plot arc.
- Our Dragons Are Different: They were made as an entertainment wildlife aggreforms for Venus, explicitly being tailored after mythical depictions of dragons. There are also TTI Sunclaw-class frigates, which look like large dragons, TTI bioship fighters (which, going by description, seem to be smaller versions of Sunclaws) and Dragons, a.k.a. Palewyrms, from Monster Project, designed by Terra Firma to be a commander subspecies for other Monsters.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Averted, most of the religions followed by humanity perished with them, and those that didn't ended up merging over time. In the meantime several others arose, particularly after the discovery of the monolith on Europa and the development of Transcendent Implants. Though the only ones mentioned are Doomsday Cults (now known as "Universities") and the Universal Sanguinists who believe the secrets of the universe may be uncovered through biotech.
- Painfully Slow Projectile: Torpedoes travel two hexes a turn, aside from dreadnaughts every ship big enough to lock onto has a greater speed than that and they can take multiple move actions per turn. On the other hand, the ship movement rules mean that often ships end up using half their move actions to slow down or change direction.
- Playing with Fire: "Excitation" Transcendent implants allow you to set things on fire. Or at Cuil 4 project your psyche as a living avatar of plasma, that has a 3/4 chance of incinerating your body when you try to "return".
- Population Control: It's illegal to reproduce below a certain income bracket, enforced with mandatory reversible sterilization procedures.
- Powered Armor: There are a lot of "Active" armors. And then there's TTI's "living" armor.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Gazelles deliberately cultivated that reputation to compensate for their low initial numbers, and its kept their population low since.
- Psychic Powers: A number of Transcendant Technologies implants.
- Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Transcendent implants work by harnessing Cuil Theory and abstract reality. When implanted they have a Cuil level of 1 to 5, when an implant of Cuil 3 or higher is activated there's a good chance that the owner will die messily: A Translocation Implant could suffer a Teleporter Accident, while an Exciter implant could set yourself on fire, etc. While Cuil 5 implants are just instant death to activate, you just can't survive it. And Transcendent implants temporarily go up a level each time they're used in combat.
- Remote Body: The Drone Controller implant allows the user to "puppet" drones. While a Telesynchronization organ enables one to fool a suit of living armor into thinking they're wearing it. Beware if it figures out you're not in it though.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Cogs were intentionally designed that way by ASR so that they wouldn't seem threatening to Vectors or the last few humans. They learn like organics and even have childhoods, changing chassis every couple years to simulate "growth" until they reach 20. ASR gave up on making them look organic, the results were just creepy.
- Robo Family: Cogs are usually raised in families based on human or Vector families. They are even capable of reproduction through an internal manufacturing center that combines traits of the mother and a partner into a new Core Consciousness and starting frame, and it can translate Vector genes into frame designs. Likewise there's a device that can translate Cog frames into Vector genes.
- Servant Race: The "Master's Voice" phenomenon suggests to some that Vectors were originally intended for such a purpose. Mice were specifically designed as de facto slaves by a rat MegaCorp (which went down in flames when they revolted, and were later accepted into societynote). While ASR categorizes Cogsune as "industrial tools" after a PR blunder where a CEO referred to the precursor project as "Cogs 2.0" and the Cogs thought they were being replaced. So instead the tech was used to make small, harmless-looking half-bio robots with programmed AI.
- The Shadow Knows: Followed are the children of Transcendent Magi, they have shadows that look nothing like themselves.
- Sinister Scythe: Reaper, with the space in long handle used to give it Vicious Edge quality, allowing the blade to slice through most non-reinforced materials and shields with ease.
- Sleep Learning: A neuroplex adds proficiency points to a character in this manner.
- Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Most Vectors are Beast Men, but "Hemis", descendants of humans who modified themselves with animal traits, are just a Little Bit Beastly. And "laterals" are like Talking Animals.
- Smart Gun: The P.I.D. lock is a security lock for weapons with a note for the GM that it cannot be hacked.
- Smart People Shoot: shooting checks use a Mind stat (Mind:Acuity in 1st edition, Mind:Exert in 2e), meaning that smart people are literally better at shooting.
- Smelly Skunk: Skunks don't have musk glands by default, but there are a couple of reclamation surgeries that are available to any mustilidae.
- Space Age Stasis: In the 700 years since humanity's extinction there hasn't really been much technological progress, whenever somebody starts to develop something truly ground-breaking MarsCo buys them out to keep the status quo or Spyglass steals the research and hides it. ASR and TTI both have Sufficiently Advanced Technology but ASR keeps theirs under wraps while TTI's tech is too dangerous for mass market. Lumen caught Sol off guard because they're run by ASR's Cogsune acting in secret, and they're too small and fast to catch.
- Space Elevator: The "Spear of Heaven" on Europa. So large its' anchors are individual corptowns.
- Splat: has three or four splat categories. Species are grouped into "families" that share certain abilities, with the species acting as skill specializations. Then there's "morphism" or body type, such as ordinary digitigrade, taur, hemi, micro... And finally you choose one or two Mega Corps that provided your education and pick from their associated skill lists.
- Starfish Aliens: The Foea (short for Family Original, Europa) are native to Europa's sub-crustal sea and utterly bizarre. They don't need to eat or breathe, sustained by radiation, yet they have mouths, often with massive fangs.
- Stealth in Space: Spyglass ships are considerably more difficult to detect than other ships, because they've installed backdoors in everyone's sensors.
- Stealth Pun: The game's first officially released (only about-to-be-released at the time of this page edit) contract module is called "Stars Over Landria;" it's also the name of a small space station that serves as the adventure's setting. Throughout the plot, it's abbreviated to "S.O.L.," supposedly for convenience. Of course, S.O.L. also stands for...something else. Any guesses on what happens to the S.O.L.?
- Swiss-Army Appendage: Cogsune have modular limbs and tails that they can swap out for specialized appendages. Many of which have super science abilities that put TTI to shame.
- Subspace Ansible: The objective of the research station in the Contract Module "Echoes", one scientist got so desperate as to start recreating Owls as they could possibly communicate FTL. Cogsune already have quantum entanglement communication, but they keep it to themselves.
- Summon Magic: "Manifestation" TTI implants allow you to call horrific entities from the fevered dreams of alternate realities. Good luck controlling them.
- Super-Soldier: The true nature of Pale Men and Selkies - a species of disposable supersoldiers, developed by Terra Firma to fight on Earth in nuclear warfare conditions.
- Teleporters and Transporters: "Translocation" TTI implants allow you to teleport yourself or others, and so does the Snap-Shunt module (albeit more range-limited). Sling-Shunt, in the meantime, works more like a teleportational harpoon, although it was also used as a long-term mean of getting people between planet's surface and space station
- Random Transportation: A bit of randomness is added to Translocations at Cuil 2 or higher, Cuil 3 runs the risk of a Tele-Frag and Cuil 4 can send you into deep space.
- Terraform: The terraforming of Mars started before the corporate wars and took a couple centuries to complete. Venus and Ganymede were terraformed considerably more quickly. Europa on the other hand had a prehistoric aquatic ecosystem that went extinct a long time ago, but TTI has been reconstructing it.
- Twinmaker: DigiTrans makes a clone of a character on another planet, synchronized to begin growth at the same time that the original is euthanized.
- One of the stories in Sound and Silence shows what happens when the original isn't terminated on schedule.
- Upgrade Artifact: The Neuroplex, an ocular implant that teaches you new proficiencies, at the rate of one point every two weeks, while you sleep.
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: "Taurs", with the exception of snake taurs or "nagas" who have two limbs, most have four legs and two arms while avian taurs ("angels") have a pair each of arms legs and wings. It's also possible for other Vectors to obtain an extra pair of arms with Augmentation Surgery.
- Voice Changeling: Expressive Control surgery allows one to mimic someone else's voice almost perfectly. In "Eon" the Pale Men patch into the client's radio and impersonate her. And then one of them starts singing, triggering a Master's Voice effect.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: The Spontaneous Metamorphosis surgery allows a Vector to transform once per day into an alternate form that has a different morphism. Other surgeries only apply to one form, such as Macro Enhancement. So, for instance, a digitgrade wolf could turn into a horse-sized lateral wolf, or vice-versa.
- Wave-Motion Gun: ASR Broadwing-class carriers sport Broadwave Cannons, some of the most powerful energy weapons in Sol, but which tap off ship's drive directly and need to recharge after firing.
- Was Once a Man: Many of the last few humans used targeted mutation technology to become Hemivectors. Quite a few suspect that the Pale Men are somehow descended from that tech gone horribly wrong and it's increasingly suggested that the specific individuals currently appearing in the system were pre-war humans.
- We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Zig-zagged, Vectors were initially engineered to be immune to all known diseases at the time, which resulted in a health crisis when the pathogens mutated, the healthcorps almost went broke trying to cure all the new diseases but eventually they figured it out and became some of the wealthiest megacorps in the system. Then, 300 years later, a division of the espionage corp Spyglass, known as Progenitus, discovered that the healthcorps had discovered cures for everything, but were only selling temporary treatments - at greatly inflated prices. Progenitus released this data system-wide, not expecting to survive the counterattack - only for public outcry to swarm to their support, destroying the healthcorps in massive riots. In the present, every corptown willing to provide Progenitus with protection receives universal healthcare at a rate similar to cellular service.
- We Will Spend Credits in the Future: They're a function of the "ledger" programs everyone has since birth that automatically buy and sell corporate shares to offset the cost of living.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Humanity is extinct, but it seems like they set the standard for what is considered a person, and that which has a major advantage over humans or a potential threat to the oligarchy is property rather than a person. Blips born with capabilities Vectors can only attain through surgery are considered bioprobes, and it's possible for Vectors to get reclassified as bioprobes through radical enough surgery. Cogs are only considered people because they have similar lifespans to humans, other AI such as Cogsune that are programmed instead of "grown" are enslaved.
- Winged Humanoid: Normally Avians have hands on the inner edge of their wings. But "angels", their equivalent to taurs, have separate arms and wings.
- Withholding the Cure: Progenitus became the sole medical MegaCorp by revealing that all the established pharmaceutical corps were doing that, and then making and selling the cure themselves.
- Wound Licking: Canids can get "antiseptic saliva" as a genetic reclamation. It's about as effective as a first aid kit.
