Exciting Changes! (part 1)

Recently I talked about the new dice system that is going into the Solar Echoes Player's Guide, but there have been some other changes I've been waiting to add until now. It seems like the perfect time, with the changes to the dice system, to add in these other improvements, so I'm calling the next version of the book version 2.0. One of the exciting changes that is going into the book is the addition of alien character weaknesses. In Solar Echoes, we have a variety of weapon types with different effects, but sometimes the effects felt somewhat “cosmetic.” Did you know about “threshold effects?” Thresholds involve the amount of damage that must be sustained before an effect is triggered. For instance, fire weapons have a threshold of 3, which means you must do 3 or more fire damage to trigger the burning effect. Burning deals damage every round or so, until an action is spent to put out the fire. So, we've added in alien character weaknesses to not only give each race a slight vulnerability, but to increase the value of some of these weapons. If you're planning a raid on Krissethi pirates, it might be a good idea to bring some weapons that do cold damage—after all, reptiles are slowed by the cold! If there's a nasty group of Erwani hackers that need to see justice, a good plan would be to bring along some weapons that deal fire damage. Those are just two of the races, we have others that have some interesting and fun vulnerabilities. Only the Human race is without a notable vulnerability—humans are the all-around well-balanced race in the game without any real extremes—and some players prefer that.