Psychics and Techpriests

Two of the more interesting characters in terms of rules in my game are York Benetec, an imperially sanctioned Navigator, member of a family with a specialised psychic mutation allowing them to steer a warp capable vessel through the shifting dangerous tide of the immaterium and Enginseer Prime Pak, a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus who had risen from humble beginnings to become a bionic priest of the Machine God.

In terms of what the rules needed to reflect...

• Navigator: Psychic powers and the ability to navigate a ship through the warp.
• Enginseer: A bionic third arm attached to his body and a floating servo-skull that he can directly interface with.

...the person playing the Enginseer wasn't able to make last session and so I didn't have to worry so much about the tech-powers, for the Navigator I just jotted a couple of psychic stunts down based on information from the Diaspora system, but they didn't really come into play.

Trying to think of ways in which I could represent the abilities of the two characters without unnecessarily complicating the system, having spent the day reading through FreeFATE (as recommended by Teo Tayobobayo on Google+) I realised that I could adapt some of the ideas about stunts (particularly in the magic system) to cover both character types.

What I came up with was...

• Navigator
• Psychic stunt: Player may spend 1 fate point to substitute their psionics skill for any other skill and may carry out the skill check at range - if the player doesn't want to spend a fate point then they may still use this stunt but the activity will take three times as long since they have to focus their psychic energies.
• Navigator stunt: Player may spend 1 fate point to guide a vessel through the warp using their psionics skill to determine the length of time taken, by default a single leg journey takes 3 months, each shift on the roll reduces the time by one step on the table. Originally this used the navigation skill but I decided to incorporate it into the psionics skill.
• Enginseer
• Mechendrite-arm stunt: Player may spend 1 fate point to substitute their repair or engineering skill for any other skill - if the player doesn't want to spend a fate point then they can still do this but the activity will take twice as long. 
• Servo-skull stunt: This stunt allows the player to substitute their reapir/engineering skill for any other skill (as per the mechendrite-arm stunt) at range.

...we'll see how well this works next session :)