Skill Based and General Character Knowledge 2 page

Abused (Cannot be taken with WSD)– Characters with this hindrance come from a background of physical and/or mental abuse that they suffered on a regular basis. They are reluctant to trust anyone that they might associate with the abusing party, and are generally distrustful of other people. This hindrance should play out differently than the “slave” hindrance, but because of the poor treatment of slaves in the equestrian wasteland, the two might be frequently linked.

Abused characters tend to flinch an awful lot, have nightmares about their past, and respond with violent or emotional outbursts whenever they believe they’re being forced to do something against their will. This is doubly true when they realize that they’ve done something against their will after the fact. In close range combat, especially when engaged in melee or unarmed combat, abused characters take a -5 accuracy penalty towards anyone who might remind them of their abuser(s). When recalling their history of abuse for any reason (for example, when they see someone who looks an awful lot like one of their tormentors), they become distant or emotional, giving them a -10 on Speechcraft checks. They may also react poorly if any character they associate with preventing their abuse comes to harm.

The response to a specific command or type of command without thinking about it that comes as part of the “Slave” hindrance can cause quite a lot of problems for ponies with both hindrances, but makes for characters that are interesting, if depressing, to role-play. Ponies with the Abused hindrance are functionally immune to the effects of WSD (due to their similar and sometimes indistinguishable symptoms), and cannot take both hindrances at character creation – they’ve seen enough horrors at home to believe that any horror or atrocity in the Equestrian wasteland is par for the course.

Addiction – Your pony is hooked on something, and it’s not phonics. Ponies with an addiction cannot go for long without the substance to which they are addicted, or they begin to go into withdrawals. There are numerous places in the wasteland that can cure an addiction, at least the chemical side of it, but whether or not your pony wants to quit is ultimately up to you. For more information on addiction, and a list of substances to which a pony (or any other character) in the equestrian wasteland might be addicted to, see the Medicine and Drugs section, later on. Players considering having a character take this hindrance at creation should be aware that long term addiction can have different effect s than short term addiction. Depending on the drug, not only can the effects of being addicted differ, but those effects may be greatly increased and significantly harder to get rid of than if the character had become addicted during the course of play.

It should also be noted here that while a character can get addicted to essentially any food or drink item, not just substances like Med-X and Mint-als, this hindrance describes only a physical addiction (with a possible secondary mental component). Addictions to food and other substances that don’t have a physical component, such as ham sandwiches, Sparkle Cola, or strawberries don’t really fit. Such addictions are purely psychological, and can’t really be cured except by roleplaying. If your waster becomes addicted to radishes, which have no physically addictive properties, then it’s not really an addiction, it’s a Fixation. For more information on this, see the Fixation hindrance later on in this section.

Addictive Personality (Cannot be taken by Ghouls) – Some ponies are easily hooked on substances. They might come from a genetic background that shows a history of substance abuse, or they might simply be weak willed. With this hindrance, a pony is much more likely to become addicted to a substance after taking it only a small number of times. When resisting addiction, they automatically fail the intelligence roll, and must succeed on the endurance roll with all appropriate penalties to prevent themselves from becoming addicted. For more information on substance addiction see the Medicine and Drugs section in Chapter 4: Equipment of the Wastelands.

Allergy– Your character has an allergy to something that they commonly might encounter in the wasteland. This is a violent allergy; exposure to this substance causes them to break out in a rash, and ingestion of it can lead to extreme discomfort or even death. Allergies to specific drugs or types of food are fairly common, but this hindrance can also be used to describe allergies to more innocuous things like griffin feathers, specific types of animal or insect venom, certain types of chalk, abronco cleaner, wonderglue, toilet paper, etc. Characters should not be allergic to things like glass (which his totally hypoallergenic), bullets, water, radiation, radio waves, or dirt, nor should they be allergic to things they would never encounter; to that end, all allergies should be subjected to GM approval to ensure that they’re reasonable. Your character may be allergic to orcas, but that’s hardly ever going to come up in the equestrian wasteland, now is it?

In the immediate presence of their allergy a character takes a -5 penalty on all rolls. If forced to be in extended contact with it for more than 5 minutes, this penalty increases to -25, coupled with a rash of hives that will remain for 2d20 hours. The penalty will drop to a -5 immediately after the allergen is removed, but will now persist even if the allergen is completely absent until the rash clears up.

Characters forced to ingest or who are intravenously injected with a substance that they’re allergic to must be treated medically within five minutes, or will begin to suffer from a combination of violent convulsions and vomiting followed immediately by the joys of anaphylactic shock, with a very high probability of death. After about two minutes of uncontrollable vomiting, the presence of the allergen (if it isn’t fully removed by the vomiting) will lead to swelling of the throat, tongue and nasal cavities to the point where the character will begin to suffocate (See “Everything else that might kill you” in chapter 11 for suffocation rules) and almost immediately pass out. This can be treated in several ways; drug-savvy and very well prepared characters can immediately reduce the swelling by injecting the suffocating character with a shot of adrenaline. In a pinch (because there aren’t exactly many places capable of producing that sort of adrenaline these days), a mixture of Dash and Med-X will do the trick, though creating such a mixture in ways that will prevent a fatal drug interaction requires at least 5 minutes and a difficult Science or Medicine roll (MFD ½), and the risk of addiction is still present. Alternatively, given a knife and a short hollow tube (such as a segment of surgical tubing), a medic can create an incision in the neck that will allow a pony to continue breathing without reducing the swelling. The allergic pony should return to normal after a day or two of bed rest.

Those considering taking this hindrance should let their GM know what their character is allergic to.

Amnesiac (Cannot be taken with Guilty Conscience or Unforgivable) –Something happened to make your character forget about the past.Amnesia can occur for any number of reasons – having experienced head trauma, magical memory erasure, or psychological trauma are only the most common ones. Either way, your character has forgotten a large span of time out of their life (maybe even all of it), possibly including their name or resulting in temporary illiteracy. Characters that start with this hindrance are created as normal, but depending on what they’ve forgotten they may have no idea what they’re good at. They may have forgotten how they got their cutie mark or what it means, what spells they are capable of casting, what organizations they belong to, or what obligations and debts they might have. Some players may wish for their GM to create parts or all of their character for them, or to hold onto their character sheet during game, to help role-play this.

Bad Luck (Cannot be taken with Lucky) –Your wastelander tends to have the worst luck; first their pack brahmin dies of taint poisoning, then the rifle that they just fixed falls and the barrel gets bent, and then their last grenade blows up in their face in the middle of a firefight. But that’s just how things always tend to go for them, and they get by as best they can.

If you’re playing with the Live by Luck rules, then this hindrance means that your character receives one less luck card per session. Even if you aren’t, this hindrance expands your character’s critical failure range for all rolls by five, meaning that they score a critical failure on any roll that comes up 91-100 (or 90-99). The effects of this hindrance stack with other hindrances that would expand the critical failure range.

Despite this hindrance’s effect on a character’s luck, it does not prevent that same character from taking the Good Luck Charm trait – just because somepony is unlucky personally doesn’t mean that they’re bad luck for those around them.

Bad Luck Charm (Cannot be taken with Good Luck Charm) – You keep finding that those around you tend to have a bad time. It’s not your fault – they just have worse luck than normal when you’re around.

This hindrance is the opposite of the Good Luck Charm Trait; Once per session, you mustchoose one roll made by a one friendly NPC or player character (not including yourself) to reroll a success or critical success. At the beginning of each session all other group members (including any NPC companions, not including you) draw one less luck card.

Big Ears (Cannot be taken with Deaf or Hard of Hearing) –Your character’s ears are so big, you can probably pick up radio with them! Well, that’s not necessarily true, but they are larger than normal and they’re definitely more sensitive than a normal pony’s ears. This sort of thing often happens as a reaction to taint exposure at a young age. Characters with this hindrance can hear lots of things that others wouldn’t normally be able to, including a small portion of the sonic spectrum normally totally inaccessible to nearly all species other than diamond dog descendants (who have this hindrance by default). All auditory perception checks are 1 MFD step easier for you, and you get a +10 on any perception checks involving sound, including those made to determine the direction of origin.

What’s the downside, you might be wondering? Well for one thing, the hearing isn’t selective. Your character will tend to overhear things they weren’t supposed to, at ranges when most others would be out of earshot. That’s only a minor downside though. The real downside to this hindrance is the flip side of the coin of having such sensitive ears; whenever an explosive or loud noise goes off (such as a gunshot) within 5 feet of your character, they must roll endurance MFD ½, or be deafened for 2 combat rounds (12 seconds). Critical failures will cause them to be stunned for the duration, unable to act. This can be avoided with the use of proper ear protection (if your character can find any). While in this state they cannot make auditory perception checks or communicate normally with others, and they take penalties to actions as though they were crippled in the head.

Conventional firearms, either mouth wielded, levitated, or mounted on a battle saddle, can easily trigger this endurance roll. As far as guns go, silencers and suppressors are a must for anypony with this hindrance.

This hindrance also causes those characters with it to take double damage from any sonic-based attacks, such as Soundburst or Sonic Screech. Endurance rolls made to resist the effects of harmful sound-related spells and magic are 1 MFD step harder.

Blind (Cannot be taken with Wall-eyed, Four-Eyes or Color Blind) –At some point in their past, your character lost their vision.This sort of thing happens a whole lot in the wasteland, be it from taint causing tumors to push their eyes out of their head, or from cruel slave masters who pluck out eyes because the slave bit them the last time he tried to violate them orally. Less severely, characters with this hindrance might have cataracts from old age, or maybe they were just born blind. Regardless of the reason, your waster hasn’t got working eyes any more. This makes things a bit more difficult for them than most, but they get by as best they can. On the bright side, maybe a cyber-doc or a zebra medicine mare might come along and replace them someday, who knows?

Blind characters cannot see, and are thus completely unable to make sight-based perception checks or make use of any sort of visual interface such as those associated with SATS, the EFS, or the pipbuck. This means that they cannot aim most ranged weapons (at least not reliably), giving them a 3 MFD step penalty on all ranged accuracy rolls, and provides a 1 MFD step penalty to accuracy rolls made for unarmed and melee attacks. They cannot use the science skill without assistance (someone reading the screen output to them) or a special interface. If sight is required for a particular application of another skill, such as a visual inspection as part of a repair roll or reading a scroll as part of a magic spell, they cannot do it without assistance and take a 1 MFD step penalty. Additional assistance (as with assisted skill rolls) does not lower the MFD for such a roll. On the upside, blind characters do not have to make fear and horror checks triggers by sight. If the scene is described to them they must still make the check, but it will be at least 1 MFD step easier. Audio, touch, and scent-triggered horror and fear checks proceed as normal.
Because blind characters have suffered such an incredibly crippling disability (and to make things a bit more interesting for players looking for a challenge), taking this hindrance at character creation reduces the cost of taking any multiple-point-cost traits by up to two points, minimum cost 1. This applies to as many multiple-point-cost traits as that character takes.

Cannibal (Cannot be taken by Alicorns, Ghouls or Canterlot Ghouls) – Sometime in your pony’s past, they were forced to eat some very strange meat in order to survive, and they discovered that they quite liked it. They liked it so much that now they want to eat it whenever they can. They may or may not have known what it was at the time, but since then they’ve discovered that the taste they enjoyed was in fact the flesh of other ponies. Cannibal ponies are opening themselves up for a number of diseases down the line (some of them not so far down the line as you might think) but in the short term, they can eat the bodies of their fallen enemies – ponies, zebra, griffins, alicorns, hellhounds, you name it –in order to survive. Eating the bodies of the fallen in this fashion will cause cannibal ponies to regain health, but it is considered a disgusting act and will cause them to lose karma. Most ponies will attack on sight if they know you are a cannibal, even if they didn’t see you commit the act; if seen chowing down, they will always attack you unless they are cannibals themselves.

However, unlike those characters with perk of this name, sometimes the cravings get too strong to resist… If your character hasn’t eaten meat of some type within the last 24 hours, they must roll a Willpower check (that’s a roll of both INT and CHA, taking the better of the two as your result), MFD ¾, penalty of -10 to both rolls, to avoid cannibalizing a corpse if one is available. The penalty for this roll will increase by 10 for every additional day (-20, -30, -40, etc., with no hard cap limit) that characters with this hindrance go without eating meat of some type, regardless of its source.

Cautious (Cannot be taken with Curious or Ponikaze)– Caution is good to have, especially in a place where just about anything might end up trying to kill you, but if a character’s got this hindrance than they’re cautious to a fault. They tend to hesitate in nearly all situations, are very indecisive about risks, and are almost never the first pony to enter a room. This hindrance gives characters a -15 penalty on initiative rolls in combat, since they’re not usually the first pony to start shooting, but also gives a +3 rank bonus to Explosives.

Clumsy –While it is certainly difficult to be able to manipulate objects with your hooves, your character is worse at it than most. It’s not that they don’t try to be careful; they just don’t know what went wrong!

Clumsy characters, while not necessarily lacking grace or agility, are very prone to mess up delicate tasks such as lockpicking, mixing chemicals, delivering mail, fixing town halls, reloading weapons, bomb defusal, and carrying delicate glass vials. This hindrance makes such delicate tasks more difficult, incurring a -5 penalty to all rolls made to perform such tasks (for reloading weapons this manifests as taking an additional 5 AP per reload in SATS). Functionally, Lockpicking, Explosives and Repair take a -5 penalty while any other potentially affected skills only take penalties situationally.

Additionally, when clumsy characters do mess up, they tend to mess up more catastrophically than others. To reflect this, all skill and attribute rolls affected by the -5 penalty can now critically fail on a roll of 91-100 instead of the normal 96-100 range. This effect stacks with other effects that expand the critical failure range (such as Jinxed) and is additive rather than multiplicative.

Code of Honor (Cannot be taken with Sadist) -Your wastelander has a set of standards they live by, one which they will try their very hardest not to break. Generally speaking this is a code of honor that upholds one or more virtues, such as always remaining loyal to the client, never leaving a friend behind, or always treating and being kind to the wounded regardless of what side of the battle they were on. This is a role-playing hindrance, but characters with a code of honor that they uphold may find themselves gaining karma slightly faster due to the restrictions it puts on their course of action. A code of honor forces them to handle a situation in a specific way, and it’s very unlikely to change during gameplay unless something extraordinary happens. To nail down your character’s specific code of honor, talk to your GM about it. Codes of honor are subject to GM approval.

Color Blind (Cannot be taken with Blind)– Sometimes colors get the best of you. Colorblindness was present in a significant portion (roughly 5%) of the population of Equestria pre-war, and this rare genetic condition persists still, preserved and carried on by the survivors within the stables. Characters with this hindrance don’t experience colors the same way most ponies do. This normally isn’t a problem for them, and can even help those afflicted spot irregularities and pick out camouflage in some circumstances.

This perk comes in two flavors, red-green colorblindness (where the colorblind character cannot tell the difference between greens and reds), and blue-yellow colorblindness (where the colorblind character cannot distinguish between blue and yellow), the former being much more prevalent than the latter. Just don’t forget to mention this hindrance to your GM when you have to operate any sort of contraption with color-coded controls. Have fun not being able to tell ponies of different colors apart!

Cowardly (Cannot be taken with ­Brave) – This is the hindrance for ponies that are just generally afraid of things. For ponies that are afraid of specific things, see the Phobia hindrance later on in this section.

For ponies with the Cowardly hindrance, whether or not their belly is yellow, their pants (assuming they wear any) are more often than not brown after something scary pops out at them. They tend to be jumpy, frequently uneasy at the prospect of wandering around ruins, old buildings, or generally anywhere where anything more frightening than other ponies might be lurking (which is almost all of the places in the Equestrian Wasteland). This doesn’t necessarily make them useless in a fight, but if the fight doesn’t appear to be going their way, they’re the first to cut and run. In frightening situations – anything that warrants a fear roll – the situational MFD is one step higher for them than it would be otherwise. For information on exactly how this affects them or how fear rolls work in general, see the Fear and Horror section later on in this document.

Crippled– Your waster caught a bullet to the knee (or wing, if they’ve got Flight as a racial ability) and it never healed quite right, but they kept on adventuring anyway. Their movement speed is reduced by 25%, rounded down to the nearest five foot increment (so a pony with an agility of 5 can now only move five feet per action rather than 10, or a Pegasi with an agility of 5 can now fly 20 feet per action rather than 25 ). Because this injury occurred so long ago, it does not count as crippled for the purpose of skill penalties, though crippled-wing Pegasi will take a -15 penalty to Flight skill rolls. The limb can be crippled again by sustaining new damage, in which case the newest crippled effect penalties override any other penalties the limb might give.

This hindrance can be removed if the limb is given sufficiently advanced medical care and treatment (if the hindrance is bought off or if the medical care is provided as the result of a quest). Otherwise, the penalties to speed can be reduced to 10% if a leg brace is used. Pegasi with crippled wings must find or create a wing-brace to similarly reduce their flight speed penalties, and the wing brace reduces the flight skill penalty to a -5.

Curious (Cannot be taken with Cautious)– Curiosity killed the cat, and it’ll kill ponies with this hindrance too if they’re not careful. Your character is curious, dangerously so. They can’t resist hitting the big red button. They always want to investigate a little more than they should. They might not be able to resist a locked door or an encrypted message within a terminal (willpower rolls are made against CHA and INT, taking the better of the two outcomes). When ponies with this hindrance come upon something that catches their eye, they’re bound to investigate – for better, or for worse.

Deaf (Cannot be taken with Big Ears or Hard of Hearing) - Frequently paired with Dumb (see below), ponies with this hindrance are severely hard of hearing. Commonly triggered by such things as gunshots too close to the ears, Deaf ponies need not necessarily dumb as well. If they are still capable of speech, as most adults struck deaf later in life are, when talking it is usually quite obvious that they cannot hear what they’re saying. If a pony takes this hindrance at character creation, it can be assumed that they are able to read lips, having lived with the disability for some time. However, the loss of the ability to hear tones still negatively influences their Speechcraft and Mercantile skills, giving them a -15 penalty when using those skills against others who are neither Deaf nor Dumb. Additionally, the lack of ability to hear imposes a -15 penalty to sneak rolls. Characters who receive this hindrance due to roleplaying reasons (such as being the victim of certain sound-based spells) after character creation receive double these penalties. Needless to say, auditory perception checks are completely out of the question for any deaf character. Characters with this hindrance tend to be easily ambushed.

Demented –Ponies with this hindrance have Dementia. They may be elderly, or they might just have been on the receiving end of some brain damage, but regardless of reason they’ve been a little… spotty in the think pan lately. In game terms, this hindrance permanently gives a -2 to INT and a +1 to Luck, and gives them a +5 skill rank bonus to either explosives or melee weapons. This might sound a little weak as a hindrance, you might be thinking. You’d be right: it gets better. Every time demented ponies suffer more than two wounds to the head, their brains get rattled around. Instead of the -2, they now take a penalty to INT equal to the number of wounds to the head they have, down a minimum intelligence score of 1. Characters brain damaged in this way should act accordingly. This penalty to intelligence persists until the wounds are healed and the demented character has had a full night’s rest – at least eight hours.

Elderly (Cannot be taken by Alicorns or with Young) – Characters with this hindrance are old, perhaps not in spirit, but in body. Their aged state hinders them in many ways, particularly with regards to physical activities but what they might lack in physical state they often make up for with experience and practiced skill. You don’t live to experience old age in the wasteland unless you’re damn good at not dying.

Elderly ponies take a -1 permanent penalty to AGI and STR, and must choose to take -1 penalty in one other stat, excluding Luck, but also may increase either their INT or Charisma by one point (potentially negating the third attribute point penalty). They also get a +3 rank bonus to all skills and a free fourth tag skill (+15 to one skill) at character creation, reflecting their extra experience overall and their lifetime spent focusing in a single field. Due to the effects of their age, characters with this hindrance are 2d4” shorter and (2d4*10) units of weight lighter than they were as adults.

Enemy - Perhaps following in the footsteps of Blackjack, your pony has pissed off something much more powerful and deadly than they are (or at least deadlier than they were when they pissed it off). They have somepony (possibly many someponies, if they pissed off a group) chasing them around the wasteland, looking to beat the living hell out of them, probably violate a few of their more notable orifices, and then leave them to die. This hindrance can be taken multiple times; each time it is taken, the wastelander gains another large, deadly creature (or exceptionally deadly person or group) tracking them down. The GM should try and incorporate the enemies that this hindrance represents into the storyline as frequently as possible until they are defeated.

Editor’s note: It is usually inappropriate for the “Enemy” tracking down a character with this hindrance to be an organization that is already out for the blood of that character’s entire race. If an alicorn character has “Enemy: Steel Rangers,” then it should be because that character did something to piss them off above and beyond the fact that they happen to be an alicorn, and as a result the organization is willing to invest a significant amount of resources to see that character specifically brought in and/or killed.

Faithless (Ponies only)– Your pony knows of the Goddesses, but believes that they have either died or abandoned their people following the fall of Canterlot. This hindrance is mostly about mindset; faithless ponies have lost what for many is the last ray of hope in the depressing existence forced upon them by the world in which they live. This manifests as a negative, cynical attitude that tends to make others around the faithless a bit sadder with the world, and a -5 on Speechcraft towards those ponies with a little bit of hope left. In addition, faithless ponies cannot gain the benefits provided by having another character with the Faith trait in the party.

Family– Your character’s got a family, whether it is just a spouse or a single sibling, one as big as the Apple Clan (though that’s uncommon in the wasteland), or anywhere in between. Character-family relations might be great or they might be strained, but in the end they’re still family. Your character won’t want to hurt them under most circumstances (but you might if they’re a scourge on the wasteland, or if they beat your character as a child, etc.), and can’t use skill rolls to interact with them. That’s right wasters – you gotta role-play. On the other hoof, your family will probably treat you the same way you treat them, and the GM can’t roll for their checks against you either. They might not be able to officially call off the execution, hypothetically speaking, but if you’re in a jail cell guarded by a family member or someone under their command you might suddenly find a bobby pin and screwdriver in your daily fare the day before you’re due to the chopping block.

Fixation – Your pony is completely fixated on something. It may be something abstract, like a lifelong goal, or something concrete, like a specific item or type of item, or even another pony (which can get pretty damn creepy). Whatever it is, your pony finds it absolutely difficult to stop thinking about that person, item, or goal when they don’t currently have it, or them, with them, or if they’re not working on it in the case of those who fixate on a goal. They’re absolutely obsessed. As a result, they have trouble focusing on anything else. Ponies with a fixation are positively despondent unless they are in possession of the item, with the person, or somehow working towards the goal upon which they are so narrowly focused. If for some reason the goal becomes impossible, or the person dies, or the item (if it’s one of a kind) is destroyed, then it is more common for the pony to fixate on something else than it is for them to snap out of it. The only way to snap most ponies out of this state of mind is to get them what they want, and it’s rarely a permanent fix. You might describe them as having a mental addiction to the person, goal or item. These sorts of ponies tend to do very well in the collegiate, where their single minded-ness is an asset to research.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 772