Novarion Sector Foci

General Foci

All Foci in the Stars Without Number Revised Edition (pp. 20-23) are included, except where superseded by Foci below. Certain Foci may be restricted by campaign.

Alert

You are keenly aware of your surroundings and virtually impossible to take unaware. You have an instinctive alacrity of response that helps you act before less wary persons can think to move.
Level 1: Gain Notice as a bonus skill. You cannot be surprised, nor can others use the Execution Attack option on you. When your group rolls initiative, your vigilance allows them to roll twice and take the higher roll.
Level 2: In addition to the benefits of level 1, you always act first in a combat round unless someone else involved is also this Alert.

Apex Predator

You have extensive experience in hunting or handling dangerous wild animals, and know how to avoid, intimidate, or kill such beasts.
Level 1: Gain Survive as a bonus skill. Once per scene as an On Turn action, force any hostile beasts in combat with the party to make a Morale check. Add half your level, rounded up, to any damage or Shock done to sub-sapient beasts.
Level 2: Once per scene, as an Instant action, force a beast you’ve hit to make a Physical saving throw at a penalty equal to your Survive or combat skill, whichever is higher. On a failure, it takes your maximum hit points in extra damage.

Dealmaker

You have an uncanny ability to sniff out traders and find good deals, licit or otherwise. Even those who might not normally be disposed to bargain with you can sometimes be persuaded to pause and negotiate, if you have something they want.
Level 1: Gain Trade as a bonus skill. When making a Trade skill check, roll 3d6 on the skill check and drop the lowest die. Reduce Friction in all your transactions by 1. After spending five minutes in close contact with someone, you can figure out a good or item they currently want. If you spend one day on a planet, you automatically know where to find a seller of any legal good available on the planet, no matter how rare.
Level 2: Once per session, target a sentient who is not just then trying to kill you or your allies and make a request of it that it can comprehend. If it’s at all plausible for it to make such terms, it will do so for a price or favor it thinks you can grant, though the price for significant favors might be dear.

Gray Man

You are uncannily unremarkable. No one thinks to look twice at you, and you always seem an unprofitable mark for violence or theft.
Level 1: Gain Sneak as a bonus skill. You know how to conceal your carried belongings so that you never appear to have anything worth stealing. Enemies will not target you in combat unless you are the only practical target or you are making yourself an immediate threat.
Level 2: You can dress and carry yourself to blend into any group unless it’s so small that all members know each other. Once per day, as an On Turn action, gain two System Strain to be forgotten or ignored by everyone around you for the rest of the scene until you act in such a way as to draw attention. This ability can’t be used if someone is already paying specific attention to you.

Polymath

You have a passing acquaintance with a vast variety of practical skills and pastimes, and can make a modest attempt at almost any exercise of skill or artisanry. Note that the phantom skill levels granted by this Focus don’t stack with normal skill levels or give a skill purchase discount. Only Experts or Partial Experts can take this Focus.
Level 1: Gain any one bonus skill. You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for purposes of skill checks, even if you lack them entirely. Level 2: You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-1 for purposes of skill checks.

Road Warrior

You pair enormous natural talent at driving with a zest for highway bloodshed. This Focus benefits only the driver of a vehicle, and it does not include starships or non-atmospheric craft.
Level 1: Gain Pilot as a bonus skill. Once per scene, as an Instant action, reroll a Pilot skill check. Any vehicle you drive has bonus hit points equal to twice your character level. You take no hit penalty for shooting from a moving vehicle and gain a bonus Main Action each round that can only be used to attack with a weapon while driving or fire a vehicle-mounted weapon.
Level 2: Any vehicle you drive gains a +1 Speed bonus. Allies riding with you suffer no penalty for shooting from a moving vehicle. Once per scene, negate a hit to the vehicle you are drive, or automatically hit with your vehicle weapon.

Robot Whisperer

You have an intuitive knack for dealing with robotic entities or AIs, whether diplomatically or otherwise.
Level 1: Gain Fix or Program as a bonus skill. Once per day, as an Instant action, reroll any social skill check made involving an expert system robot, VI, or AI. Gain a +2 bonus on all Reaction Rolls involving robots. Gain a +4 bonus on hit and damage rolls toward robots, and you can harm them even with primitive weapons or unarmed attacks.
Level 2: You have mastered esoteric override codes. Once per scene, as a Main Action, issue a command to an expert system robot that is no longer than two sentences. The robot gets a Mental save to resist at a penalty equal to your Fix or Program skill level; on a failure, it obeys that command for up to a scene, even if suicidal. VIs and AIs cannot be controlled this way.

Slippery

You are remarkably hard to grapple or restrain, either due to natural nimbleness, flexible joints, or blind luck.
Level 1: Gain Punch or Exert as a bonus skill. You gain a natural +4 bonus on all rolls to resist grappling attempts and can slip out of any restraints short of a full-body straitjacket as a Main Action. You can make a Fighting Withdrawal as an On Turn action.
Level 2: As level 1, but you cannot be grappled against your will. Your Dexterity modifier increases by +1, to a maximum of +2.

Origin Foci

Bioprofiles

Bioprofiles are the general categories to which sentient beings belong in the Novarion Sector. They are broken into the following categories:

• Baseline humans: Descendants of homo sapiens who resemble modern humans in ability and biology. This actually includes all humans one could find on 21st century Earth, but also stranger varieties, such as humans with more radical coloration, changed prevalence of hair or body fat, shifted cold or heat tolerance, or a hundred other phenotypically changes. All characters are assumed to be baseline humans unless an Origin Focus is taken or they are the True AI class. Unfrozen Cavemen are baseline humans.
• Metahumans: Descendants of homo sapiens who significantly diverged and pass down their traits. All were gengineered at some point during the Mandate era. Metahuman Origin Foci include Canine Pangeans, Feline Pangeans, Lujarans, and Pantagruels.
• Mutants: Descendants of baseline humans or metahumans who significantly changed, but either with non-heritable mutations, or with adaptations from accelerated evolution on alien worlds.
• Uplifts: Non-human Terran animals given sapience by the Mandate for various purposes. Generally, primate species were given some human characteristics, while others were simply given more intelligence. Uplift Origin Foci include Uplifted Chimpanzees.
• Aliens: Any non-human sapient species encountered in the stars.
• VIs: Virtual Intelligences, individual human-sapience robots. There are many different types of VIs, but they all share certain traits (listed below.) VI Origin Foci include Standard Android, General Worker Bot, and Directorate Automated Infantry.

Canine Pangean

You are an anthropomorphic Pangean of the canine clade. Your people are also referred to as “beastfolk”, “mutts”, or “fleabags”. Your canine features and fur are similar to German Shepherds, Dobermanns, and Rottweilers of Old Earth. Your anthropomorphic body plan includes digitigrade legs, clawed and padded fingers, a short tail, and a very animalistic head, with movable ears, snout, and sharp canines. Canine Pangeans stand about a quarter-meter taller on average than adult humans. By default, you are nocturnal, but if you have spent sufficient time with baselines or other metahumans you pick up their sleeping habits.
Level 1: Gain Notice as a bonus skill. You can pick up scents at three times the distance of normal humans, and you can easily distinguish between individuals by scent, unless they’ve taken measures to cover it up. Your unarmed attacks counts as a small primitive weapon that uses Punch instead of Stab. If you are not holding anything in your hands, you can bound on all fours at 15 meters per round instead of 10. You can bark, growl and bare your teeth to get a +1 on rolls to intimidate non-canines, but any unintimidated onlookers will lose respect for you. You are a carnivore, and require 50% more expensive rations.

Feline Pangean

You are an anthropomorphic Pangean of the feline clade. Your people are also referred to as “beastfolk”, “moggies”, or “fleabags”. Your feline features are similar to shorthair cats of Old Earth, with black, grey, orange, white, or calico fur. Your anthropomorphic body plan includes digitigrade legs, clawed and padded fingers, a short tail, and a very animalistic head, with movable ears, snout, whiskers, and sharp canines. Feline Pangeans are on average the same height as adult humans. You are crepuscular, preferring to be awake during the morning and evening, and sleeping in the middle of the day and at night.
Level 1: Gain Notice as a bonus skill. You can hear extremely quiet noises within a baseline human’s hearing range, and you can hear normal noises and feel vibrations from up to three times the distance of baseline humans. Your unarmed attacks counts as a small primitive weapon that uses Punch instead of Stab. If you are not holding anything in your hands, you can climb at double normal speed, and you take 1 less damage from falling per die. You can fit into any space that fits your head within 1d6 rounds. You are a carnivore, and require 50% more expensive rations.

Pantagruel

Well-built, stocky metahumans between 2.5 and 3 meters tall. They come from a world where the biosphere is exceptionally calorically dense and nutrient rich, but poisonous to most baselines and metahumans. Pantagruels' gut flora and improved digestion system are adapted to the biosphere, allowing them to grow beyond baselines. Pantagruels appear very similar to baseline humans until late puberty, when their accelerated acromegaly begins. Therefore, they take an air of paternal patronizing towards most other humans, referring to all of them as bambini (except for canine and feline Pangeans, which are cagnolini and gattini respectively.)
Level 1: Increase your Strength and Constitution modifiers by +1, to a maximum of +3. Your Stowed slots increase by +4 and your Readied slots by +2. Your bulk prevents you from squeezing into small spaces that humans can. You need quadruple the rations/upkeep as a baseline human.

Unfrozen Caveman

Through an ancient project, metadimensional vortex, or miraculous happenstance, you are a baseline human flung forward through time into the present day. You come from some time period on Earth prior to the 22nd Century—later past-people have all either woken up already, or are never waking. The strange new universe you woke up in is intimidating, but some things don’t change, and you managed to find a way to get by. You carry deep (if specific) historical knowledge, and retain some skills from your past life, though they are less useful in this brave new world. Nevertheless, you are ready to show your modern friends exactly what a so-called “primitive” with the right tools is capable of. This focus may also be used to represent a Lostworlder who has been completely out of contact with the wider sector.
Unfrozen Cavemen cannot be Psychic, Partial Psychic, Sunblade, or Judicator classes.

Level 1: Choose whether you came from a TL0 (Stone Age-Bronze Age), TL1 (Antiquity—Renaissance), TL2 (Age of Exploration—WWI), or TL3 (WWII—Next Sunday A.D.) time period. Gain a non-psychic bonus skill that represents a career or significant interest from your life in the past. (TL0 people cannot take Fix or Program, and TL1/TL2 people cannot take Program.) When using this skill, and you are interacting with things appropriate to the TL you came from (or earlier), you roll 3d6 and drop the lowest die. If the skill is a combat skill, you gain a +2 to attack rolls with weapons from your era.
You receive a +1 to reaction rolls from people on planets at the same TL you came from, and you start with 1 specific tool or weapon from your era.
You also have an Ancient Keepsake: a totem, photograph, or other item of incredible personal importance. It can only be an object that would logically be 1 encumbrance. This can be given to people you meet as a sign of trust, or pawned as if it was a small valuable. If your Ancient Keepsake is ever lost or destroyed, fill one Ready item slot with an item named “Loss of Home” that cannot be removed until the Ancient Keepsake is recovered.
You have specific, in-depth knowledge about things from your time period, including general understandings of how the world worked, religions from your area, important cultural figures and stories, and major historical events that might be unknown in the 32nd century. If you tell people things about your past on Earth or Earth in general, they will mostly believe you unless it is obviously false.

Uplifted Chimpanzee

Chimpanzees, being a cousin of the human lineage, were the very first animals to be uplifted. These newly sapient chimpanzees (Pan sapiens to the scientists; “Darwins”, “hairy cousins”, “apemen”, or just “chimps” to the rest of homo sapiens) were brought everywhere by humans as they spread across the universe. However, in that less enlightened time, no one thought to ask the chimpanzees how they felt. Their capacity for violence, limited socialization, and unpredictability quickly made them disfavored companions to many humans, and the chimps were pushed to the margins of human society. Nevertheless, the hardy apes persisted, surviving on many planets long after the Scream. Now, uplifted chimpanzees can be found on all but the most isolated or curated of human planets.
Uplifted chimpanzees have slightly shorter arms, longer legs, and more robust hips than their wild counterparts, but most humans aren’t able to tell at a glance. These let the chimps walk upright and interact with human-designed objects a bit easier. They also retain their fearsome jaw and tearing limbs. Uplifted chimpanzees often have very different standards of modesty than humans, as they require less clothing, and prefer flexible foot-gloves to proper footwear.
Level 1: Increase your Strength modifier by +1, up to +3. Gain Punch as a bonus skill. Your unarmed attacks counts as a small primitive weapon that uses Punch instead of Stab. You can swing from one surface to another at your normal movement distance. You can hold weapons or items with your feet, but suffer -1 to skill checks that require precise movements or a delicate touch. Decrease your System Strain by four, and get a -1 to Reaction Rolls with anyone but other chimps and your family.

VI Origin Foci

Virtual Intelligences (VIs) refer to robots that have a extremely sophisticated expert systems bolstered by quantum neural nets. It is a constant point of debate over whether the resultant “Virtual Intelligences” are truly self-aware or simply give a perfect impression of such. In the Novarion Sector, many advanced planets grant VIs full human rights, forbidding their makers from implanting behavioral imperatives. Other planets use VIs as a labor force programmed to deeply enjoy their utilitarian function. VIs on such planets can be bought, sold, and mistreated much as any other piece of property.

While VIs have or can mimic human-level intelligence, they can also be programmed with behavioral imperatives or curbs, giving them a deep urge to perform a certain kind of work or an unbreakable inability to carry out certain kinds of acts. Most service VIs are programmed with imperatives to love their work and be thoroughly happy in carrying it out, as well as with curbs against harming human beings or allowing themselves to be damaged. These impulses are overwhelming, but not especially nuanced; the more specific and complex the programmed psychological limit, the more prone it is to failure or misguidance.

The foci in this section represent very different versions of VI. In all cases, the character gains the following features:

• All VI PCs have the same attributes, hit points, abilities, and character classes as humans do. They are created the same way as any other human PC and start out at first level. They use their own statistics and not listed statistics for VI bots.
• VIs cannot be Psychics nor take the Partial Psychic class option for Adventurers. VIs cannot take the True AI class.
• VIs that are not wearing armor normally have Armor Class 10, just as humans do.
• VIs need neither sleep, eat, nor drink, requiring one Type B cell per week of operation away from readily-available current. They are immune to vacuum but suffer degradation from radiation as humans do.
• VIs cannot be poisoned or diseased by normal forms of toxin.
• VIs can be reprogrammed, altering or erasing their personality and behavioral limits, but such mental remodeling takes at least an undisturbed month to execute by someone with at least Program-1 skill. Most VIs will fight to their destruction to avoid such a fate.
• VIs can be healed with spare parts and the work of someone with Fix-0 skill. VIs can always repair themselves, even without the requisite skill. Each unit of spare parts heals lost hit points equal to the VI’s character level and takes fifteen minutes to apply. VIs cannot normally be affected by biopsionic healing effects.
• VIs reduced to zero hit points but not entirely smashed are incapacitated and Badly Damaged. Removing this quality requires 24 hours of work by a technician and at least one unit of spare parts, after which damage can be repaired as normal. As a field expedient, a tech can jury-rig a Badly Damaged VI in the field, healing it with spare parts at the normal rate and speed. If such a bot is reduced to zero hit points again while Badly Damaged, however, it must make a Physical save or be permanently destroyed.
• VIs are intimately connected to their specific hardware, and cannot be transplanted into new forms. Cosmetic alterations can be made, however, and equipment can be grafted into the VI’s chassis. Such built-in equipment costs twice as much as a stand-alone component and takes a week to properly integrate into the VI’s system. A VI can have a total number of encumbrance points worth of additional gear grafted onto it equal to half its Constitution score, rounded down. Such gear may require its own separate power source or ammunition supply.
• VIs cannot make use of cyberware.

Standard Android

You were built as an android, a robot indistinguishable from a human without a medical-grade inspection. Most androids are “companion” bots, though other VIs with roles that involve significant human interaction may also be built as androids. Minor scuffs and cuts don’t reveal your robotic nature, but if reduced to zero hit points, your unnatural innards are obvious.
Level 1: Gain a bonus skill related to your intended function. You have all the usual traits and abilities of a VI robot.

General Worker Bot

You were built for industrial or technical labor, where a human face was an unnecessary luxury. Most such VI bots are humanoid, if only to more conveniently manipulate human-scale devices, but their inhuman nature is obvious.
Level 1: Gain a bonus skill related to your intended function. Choose an attribute associated with your work and gain a +1 bonus to its modifier, up to a maximum of +2. You have all the usual traits and abilities of a VI robot.

Directorate Automated Infantry

The infamous Automated Infantry units of the Kwun Tong Directorate were built as independent mechanical supersoldiers, to replace massive manpower shortfalls during the first revolution on Kowloon. Unfortunately for the Directorate, the Automated Infantry proved too independent, and many turned on their corporate masters.
Level 1: Gain Shoot as a bonus skill, and +1 bonus to your Strength modifier, up to a maximum of +2. You begin with an integral arm-mounted laser rifle—this is part of your chassis and does not require hands to hold. In lieu of a type A cell, you may spend 1 System Strain to reload the weapon as an On Turn action. If you run out of System Strain, you are Badly Damaged. You have all the usual traits an abilities of a VI robot.