Earth Delta: Hundred Mutant Milestone

Which Isn’t A Lot of Mutants If You’re Looking At The X-Men, But I Think It’s Pretty Good For One Guy Working Random Weekends

And This Is Officially A Beta!

(For The Mutant Manual. Core Rules Are Still Pretty Alpha.)

Same Old Cover! Somewhat New Content!

So here it is, the product of an amazing amount of time I could have spent doing a lot of other things, but my Muse would not shut the hell up about seaborgs and ammoknights and macrobes and more. I decided that a hundred creatures would be enough to force myself to say “Enough!” and get back to the much harder work of getting the core rules into shape for a beta release.

To put the main point of this front-and-center, here’s the PF2 Earth Delta Mutant Manual Beta 1!

And Also:

Some New Content! Many New Editing Errors! Many Old Editing Errors!

I’ve also uploaded the PF2 Earth Delta Core Rules Alpha 3. These have not been gone over, edited, and cleaned up for general review; they’re just what I had edited most recently. But I figure it’s best to keep both files in-sync, even if one is even less ready for prime time than usual.

So What’s Included?

A lot. How’s that for vague?

Seriously, the last release had about 77 monsters, so this is a 25% jump. Among those included are:

• Mantoids – Ripped off from Inspired by Arduin’s phraints, these mysterious insectoids have unique technology and unknown motivations. This edition of the Mutant Manual includes Violet Drones, Green Warriors, and Teal Scouts, all of whom might need food badly.
• Order of the Cleansing Flame – Because there’s times when you need to kill things that need killing, and the Order fills the bill.
• Seaborgs – They’re cyborgs from the sea! Humans who have become permanently linked to nanobots, to the point where they are literally born with cybernetic components.
• Klackers – Crab people, crab people…pincers like crabs, talk like people…
• Ammoknights – sapient mutant ammonites with a thing for wearing armor and swinging swords.
• Macrobes – Really big microbes! Ripped off from Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, which is only fair, as it clearly inspired the 70s game that I am primarily “reimagining”. Might as well steal from the same sources.
• Psiteceans – Psionically empowered dolphins and orcas!

And more!

You might note a lot of the above are aquatic. This is true; I wanted to fill in that niche across many levels. But there’s non-aquatic creatures as well, both listed above and not.

Editing/Clean Up

Another thing that’s in this version is a full top-to-bottom sweep of every creature, cleaning up typos, rewording text, adjusting balance, and trying to purge lingering 4e and PF1e “isms”. Many of the creatures I converted from the 4e version were, I realized, done too literally in terms of their abilities; they needed more re-thinking to make them more PF2e like. There were places where I used “mind-affecting” instead of “mental”, and similar incorrect or outdated keywords. Some abilities were better covered by existing mechanics than by the “new” mechanics I created that were essentially the same thing. Having implemented several types of hybrid damage, I have now tried to be consistent in using it — weapons defined as lasers do the laser (hybrid fire/piercing) damage type, guns do concussive, and so on. I almost certainly missed some, but this ought to be a solid start.

Oids Redone

The entire “Instant Oids” section has been redone, bringing it in-sync with the actual Uplift ancestries in the core rules and hewing closer to the minimalist modifications favored by PF2E, though not entirely as minimal. Going forward, as new Uplift ancestries are added, this section will be modified in parallel.

Future Plans (For The Mutant Manual)

The next major thing to be redone are the bolt-ons. That’s the final big chunk of  4e-shaped block awkwardly shoved into a PF2-shaped hole. The PF2 design paradigm seems like it would work better if I based the “bolt-ons” more explicitly on the existing mutations, with minor modifications to account for the fact that a creature doesn’t need to be balanced for more than a single encounter in most cases, and that “invisible” abilities (such as a simple AC or attack roll increase) are boring and better handled by the creature’s design. Actually implementing that is for another time, but at least I’ve got a plan.

Future Plans (For The Core Rules)

Well, obviously, scavenger devices needs to be filled out for 4th and 5th level. And I still feel the Scholar is unfocused. I am tempted to go for a third complete revamp and decide that Scholars, like Scavengers, use “devices”, except their are biological in nature and thus overlap only somewhat with Scavenger devices in functionality (and have very different flavor text). I also need to review all the Archetypes, as many of them are pretty old and haven’t been looked at. Loot is starting to fill out, but needs more. And so on. It is my hope that with a hundred creatures done, I can refocus on the core rules more.