Good news everyone! I just updated the main rulebook in the downloads section! Updates include:
Notes
• OGL license added for marginal legal protection
• Synthetic Security Model rebalanced
• Meet the Tah’loo, an avian species, and the Reptilians, a, well, reptilian species.
• Custom Aliens taken down a peg or two (exactly 2 AP)
• Soldiers may now drive and blow things up (or clip the red wire) from character creation.
• Gunners get a little more dakkadakka at level 7.
• Mobile Infantry armor rules brought up to date with new style of armor hp and the way modules now work. Loss of overstacking is compensated with damage threshold.
• Captain inspiration now spreads farther, easier, and should hit most parties
• Operative tool choices expanded.
• Savages in general made a bit more defensive to compensate for lack of offensive options.
• Savage Warrior abilities refined and clarified to complement new savage role and abilities.
• Savage Oathsworn capstone reworked to punish damage, not prevent it, with a slightly easier action cost.
• Covering Fire feat expanded in versatility
• Supressing fire now makes terrain difficult temporarily. (should it set move speed to 0 again?)
• Weapon base prices adjusted to accomodate magazine costs, and for general balance.
• Clarified the difference between Burstfire and Autofire
• Refined ammunition rules
• Steam Grenades added (get wrecked, lasers!)
• Armor weight and classification clarified
• Refined and expanded shield related armor mods
• Firefly armor buffed (again)
• Juggernaut armor extra attack trait now plays well with other abilities and traits.
• Added Vehicles and associated rules
• Mod system reworked for ease of use
• Spaceships gain amenities
• Resting rules specified
• New story added
Edit: The initial version was a junk pdf format, with no interactable text, I updated it (0.9) to have searchable text, copy/pasta functionality, etc. It had the pleasant side effect of reducing file size, so yay!
Also, sorry for taking so long to get back to you,
I was wondering, will the Ship Manual ever be updated? I fell that ship combat is lacking in description and mechanics, with ships often feeling like they are just bigger players that move in space. Also, some stats take a dose of inference-ing to get, like how it never mentions how to calculate ship acceleration outside of showing the example ship where you can see that it is ENGI/10, and how ECM has no penalty or function outside of being compared to the defenders ECCM. Like what happens if they don't have ECCM? Also on the character sheet the proficiency 'Atmospheric Vehicles' is currently 'Atmosphetic Vehicles'. Dunno if that is intentional or not. Outside of that great system, I am truly impressed by it.
Ship development fell by the wayside due to a lack of interest from people, but I always intended to go back, and will be doing so now. I just wrapped up a playtest campaign that was virtually shipless, but will be doing one next that revolves heavily around it. As for the overall design, yes, I did basically do a "big party controlled character in space" route, I was trying to capture what makes 5e good, being quick and smooth, and bring it to ship combat. As for specifics, I basically wrote this one night as my crib notes before a session, and called it the ship manual. You get to see some of my ideas for function and flow in the vehicle rules that are now in the core book.
Notes on ECM: The intended function is that you target a weapons subsystem and make an opposed roll, ECM vs ECCM, and if ECM wins, disadvantage is applied to a weapon's next attack. The typo is intentional, I do my best to catch them, but with just one man and so many... they get through. I'll try to get this one fixed. My main pc went down last year, and took most of my productivity software with it, and I never quite got back to speed. I'll see about getting the software to edit the sheets, and make a pass on them again.
i actually may have a suggestion, i recently realised your mod system would work really well in a looter style like diablo why not try breaking down the mods into 2 types, weapon/armor unique and generic, then you could put them in roll tables and when players get a new piece of armor thts not base, or upgrade their armor you could roll from the table to see what they get, from my time playing this amongst my group (who have a knack for finding the most broken combinations possible), it helped prevent them from breaking things outrigth and actually made them want to interact and find quests after they realised i tied gear to quest rewards. with the unique mods, the one that gives pistols the heat mode is a good example, you could make them mK3 or mk1 slot only, either one giving thses peices of gear extra value. and this could also then be applied to creating bossess or special enemies by giving certain enemies random mods on their gear. i'm myself testing this in barebones form with my group and boy there are issues i find sometimes. but its an idea i wanted to offer.
I would love the idea of a random item generator, with inherent "locked in" mods. Probably the only thing I miss about standard treasure tables is the random fun. I tried to replicate some of that with the specific loot drops in the hazard handbook, but they don't really drop combat gear.