Ship Quirks and Crew Abilities Deck

There won’t be new ships or the Captain’s Box at Gen Con. Still trying to work out a new process in production that will finally allow the line to move forward in a way that will be both profitable for Catalyst and a regular release schedule for players.

In the mean time, we’re trying to see if we can’t get something to Gen Con for Leviathans players. I’ve talked about this concept before. That we’ve been working on and off on these things forever, but we’re pushing to see if we can’t have a deck of Ship Quirks and Crew Abilities for sell; they won’t be for sell in stores anytime in the near future, but we’ll look at putting them on sell online after Gen Con.

So…what would these cards entail? Why would we want these in the game? Well…as any good miniatures game progresses…well, you add to it. Simply the nature of the beast. And for me, right from the get go as I was designing the game and then polishing it up through endless playtests, a slew of fun rules would come into my head and I’d jot them down. Ultimately, however, any of these rules do not work as “standard” rules…in fact, they won’t even work within the Captain’s Manual “enchanced rules”. Instead, they’re perfect for players to add some unique flavor to a ship in a given scenario to mix up game play.

Taking directly from the rules text that introduces both the Ship Quirks and the Crew Abilities:

Not every ship is the same, even among ships of the same class and Type. Anyone that has served on board a vessel knows the complexity of their construction creates unique design quirks that bring a flavor all their own to each ship. This is all the more true for leviathans that are still relatively nascent technologies.

The following is a series of positive and negative quirks, each with a numerical value that determines the relative strength or weakness of a given quirk. It is strongly recommended that if a player chooses a positive quirk for his ship, he or she should give it a negative quirk of equal as well. However, each playing group can decide if negative quirks must balanced positive quirks.

CREW ABILITIES
A ship is far more than the nuts and bolts and electroid that holds it together in the sky. The men and women that bring their skills, passions and blood are what elevate each ship to be far more than the sum of its parts, turning a ship into a legend. The following rules allow players to bring the crew of a ship to life.

“Just show me some of the rules!” I can hear you saying…so here here we go.

First up, the current look of the Ship Quirks and two of many, many cards that’ll be apart of deck.

Right out of the gate, note that these were test layouts done…well…a good while ago, so the rules have progressed in playtesting since then. For example, the current final rules for “Superior Armor” are:

A particularly superlative batch of materials results in superior armor.

All Armor Slots on the ship provide an additional +1 modifier to any Slot Numbers in its Location.

The value for this quirk is based upon the total +1 Breach modifiers provided by all Armor Slots on the ship. For example, the HML Raven has five +1 Armor Slots and so the value of this quirk assigned to that ship would be 5. However, the HML Beagle has five +1 Armor Slots and a +2 Armor Slot, so the value of this quirk assigned to that ship would be 7.

As for “Accurate Weapon”, the final text will have a point value of “+2, +2, +3, +4, +4? to reflect the fact that this helps smaller dice more than larger dice, while it also won’t be able to be used with Bracketing Fire (just too sick).

Next up, the Crew Abilities. You’ll notice no point values on either of these cards…that’s because when these were given a test layout, the points were not yet assigned.

All-Weather is pretty much as is, still, just getting a 1 point cost added.

As for Lady Luck…it’s one of the most powerful of the Crew Abilities, and so will be priced at 5 points. Even then, we’ll be folding in a change to curb it down..a “own ship only” text will keep it from being too sick…but it’s still a great ability.

Anyways…there ya have it! Please note, we are ‘trying’ to have this at Gen Con, but no promises. Regardless, after Gen Con, we’ll move to get these released in PDF format for purchase. They’ll add a wonderful variety of play to any style of game.

For those attending Gen Con, see ya then!

Randall