Description
Once, your body was normal, augmented only by the natural abilities of your species. But somewhere along the way, one of your arms was replaced by a mysterious prosthetic limb. As you learned to live with this new extension on your body, you discovered that you could make it perform some wondrous functions just by thinking. You may miss the feel of your original arm, but you can’t deny that this one has gotten you out of more than a few sticky situations. The more you use this gauntlet, the better you get at controlling it and unlocking its secrets.
Details
GM Intrusion: Your artifical limb malfunctions and is uncontrollable for 2 rounds while you reforge a connection with it.
- Connection:
Pick one other PC. This character is somehow able to control some of the arm’s function just as well as you can. If within immediate range of you, he can use an action to activate one of the gauntlet’s powers (he cannot control the movement of its digits, however).
- Additional Equipment:
You’ve found an oddity that resembles a smooth, orange pebble. Your gauntlet can always point in the direction of this rock but cannot tell you how far away it is. With ten minutes of concentration, you can use the gauntlet to teleport the pebble into your hand.
- Esotery Effects:
If you perform esoteries, you activate them by making specific gestures with your artificial hand. For example, casting Onslaught could consist of a punching motion that launches a fireball during the follow-through.
- Minor Effect Suggestions:
- Your gauntlet analyzes your current action and provides a useful tidbit of information to make the action one step easier if you attempt it again within a few minutes.
- Major Effect Suggestions:
- Surging with power, your gauntlet causes your armor to glow brightly and provide 2 extra damage resistance against the next attack that hits you.
- Tier 1:
Scan (2 Intellect points): Pointing at an object produces a flurry of informative images that slowly rotate around your hand. (Functions the same as .)
Tech Armor: Simply by clenching your fist, your gauntlet causes a translucent set of armored plates to appear around your body. These holographic plates count as light armor and can be deactivated by clenching your fist again.
- Tier 2:
Decoy: Your new hand lets you summon a phantom image within immediate range to distract or confuse your enemies. (Functions the same as .)
- Tier 3:
Cryo Blast (3 intellect points): Your gauntlet launches a silvery ball of light toward an object or enemy of your size or smaller. Whatever it hits is frozen solid (immobilized) for one round. If it hits something larger than you, only a patch the size of your silhouette is frozen.
Power Armor: Your tech armor can now produce medium armor instead of light armor.
- Tier 4:
Overload (5+ Intellect points): By forcefully extending your fingers and focusing, you can produce and arc lightning from your fingertips to your enemies. (Functions the same as .)
- Tier 5:
Assault Armor: Your tech armor can now produce heavy armor instead of medium armor. When hit by a melee attack, you can forcefully detonate the tech armor to knock down your attacker. Your tech armor remains offline for one round, rebooting on the attacker’s next turn. Effort must be spent to knock down an opponent larger than you or to reinitialize your tech armor immediately (2 effort for both).
- Tier 6:
Sabotage (6 Intellect points): You have mastered the gauntlet’s capabilities. You can now use it to interface with and manipulate nearby machines. (Functions the same as .)
Is this inspired by the Engineer class from Mass Effect? The powers seem very much to coincide with the names and functions of abilities from that game, with the “arm” functioning as an Omni-Tool and the Tech Armor being Shield.
Indeed it is! Tech Armor, of course, is from Sentinel.
I found that many of the Nano’s esoteries could be interpreted like biotics from Mass Effect, so I wondered what other powers would be fun to borrow.
Here’s the background I devised for a character when I used this focus myself: [Name] used to be an Aeon Priest who studied the transformative effects of the Iron Wind. Young and foolish, he convinced a few peers to accompany him in “storm chasing” to see the Wind change the environment in realtime. But when the malfunctioning nanites changed course and moved toward the Aeon Priests, they couldn’t run away from the storm or find adequate cover. All but [Name] died due to his hubris, but [Name] very narrowly escaped being turned into an abomination by sprinting just fast enough for the Iron Wind to change direction again with only his arm in range. He fainted, and when he woke up, he found that the nanites had saw fit to replace his arm with an armlike machine that gave him rudimentary control of the magic around him. He may have escaped alive with a newfound power to prove it, but the death of his undeserving friends would haunt him forever.
Ah, thought I recognized it. Haven’t played sentinel myself, only engineer.
I would generally think it good form when refitting material from one setting to another to at the bare minimum credit your sources. The theme, names of abilities, and functionality is very much a direct copy from Mass Effect, so you probably ought to attribute it as such in a disclaimer in the description. Otherwise it could be construed as plagiarism, as not attributing it essentially says “I came up with this, it is original work by me”. It is not obvious to all, especially those unfamiliar with Mass Effect, that the Focus is essentially a engineer/sentinel using nanites as biotics.
The transformative nature of your work is, of course, yours 🙂 just like others have reworked the Cypher System to work with the Star Wars setting.
I initially didn’t cite the inspiration due to lack of precedent on any other foci, but I decided that you were right about being upfront about the idea’s origins. I’ve updated the title and description to clearly state where most of the ideas are from.