Braincase Creation

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Your braincase is you, in a very real sense. You can make adjustments and such later, of course, but in campaigns where characters are hopping from body to body, these are used to quickly move from one vessel to another, both literally and in terms of rules. Naturally, this primarily applies to homo supernus, homo excelsior, artificial sapiences, and related beings, but their 'lessers' do make use of a subset of the following rules.

Mental Attributes

  • Body: Governs proprioception, sense of balance, somatic senses, and the resulting bodily or vehicular control that these permit. Acceleration, mobility, and coordination are governed by this mental statistic. It is often closely tied with perception.
  • Creativity: The introduction of 'errors' into processing in order to arrive at novel ideas.
  • Empathy: A measure of understanding others. Above and beyond the traditional definition, it used as a measure of social aptitude and ability to evaluate the goals of other beings. This was considered important enough to develop a 'third hemisphere' of the brain. See Hypersapience for details.
  • Intuition: In artificial intelligence terms, intuition is the strength of an entity's heuristic capabilities - the ability to come up with an acceptable solution where there is not enough time or data available for proper analysis.
  • Logic: Raw, logical processing ability. Generally measured in ability to perform complex mathematical proofs. Extensively supplemented by encephalons in advanced humans.
  • Perception: While external inputs feed the brain sensory information, the brain itself has to actually process it, creating a mental map which it can respond to.
  • Response: How fast the entity is able to come to conclusions. Assuming it possesses a body capable of handling it, this effectively measures how fast the creature perceives and interacts with the world around it.
  • Willpower: Willpower controls the strength of an entity's current world view. In addition to functioning as a limited defensive measure, it prevents the entity from constantly changing its mind and potentially wasting time on conflicting goals. When too strong, the entity is too single-minded and may end up pursuing a self-destructive goal.
  • Type: Root, Panacea, Enhanced, Supernus, or Excelsior.

Root, Panacea, and Enhanced

Supernus and Excelsior

  • Size: Linear dimension of the case. Usually between 10 and 13, with 7 to 16 not being uncommon. 1 to 22 is the extreme range.
  • Armor: The portion of the case devoted to armoring and other defensive systems. It is subtracted from Size to when determining processing ability. Usually 1.
  • Area: (Size - Armor)^2. A measure of how much there is that the braincase can actively perform.
  • Components: Sensors, communications components, and so on. Sometimes transportation. Armor provides its rating in component spaces for free. Any additional is subtracted from Area.
  • Power: Area - Components. Power is used to buy up components as follows:
    • Control:
    • Empathy:
    • Intuition:
    • Logic:
    • Perception:
    • Willpower: