The future is grimdark & not just figuratively in today’s game, Fading Suns. Imagine a twist cone of Stargate & Dune & you won’t be far off. It’s the close of the 50th Century & humanity has spread across many systems, founded & lost two Galactic Republics, encountered many alien life forms – some of whom they’ve befriended, some they battle continuously, some they’ve robbed of their homelands & imprisoned on reserves. A good thousand years ago a new Dark Age began. No one now knows how the old technology of Holy Terra was created, & increasingly few know how to keep it running. Human space is ruled by feudal Great Houses, all of whom owe fealty to & scheme against the Emperor of the Known Worlds. Malevolent body snatching symbionts lurk at the edge of known space. All of which you would think would be trouble enough, but the universe had one more cheap shot up its sleeves: despite official denials, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the stars – all of them – are beginning to darken. Sooner or later, no one can be sure when, they’re going to just go out.

There are four basic types of character in Fading Suns, each very Dune-y & each of which is split into subgroups called roles. There are the Nobles (divided into Houses), the Church (a galaxy-spanning neomonotheism with a variety of sects), the Guilds (of various professions), & the Ousiders (aliens & human cultures from outside the Empire). Each role has certain suggested important characteristics, skills, blessings/curses, & benefices, but it’s always the player’s choice how closely to cleave to what is essentially the stereotype for that role.

The fluff surrounding the Church & its relationship to psychics & psychic powers has given me a germ of an idea, so we pick one of the Church roles. Our character is part of the Eskatonic Order, the mystics who scour the Known Worlds for occult lore & methods of fighting the diabolical magic called Antinomy.

That decided, we have 20 points to distribute among three sets of attributes (here called characteristics). Body & Mind characteristics work as you would expect. Spirit characteristics come in four opposed pairs: Extrovert/Introvert, Passion/Calm, Faith/Ego, & Human/Alien. These do double duty as behavior regulators à la passions in Pendragon, & as related characteristics for certain kinds of rolls. Body & Mind characteristics start with a 3, human low average, & build up from there. Your dominant Spirit characteristic gets a 3 while its opposite gets a 1 (apart from Alien, your grasp of cultures other than human). Maximum starting value for any is 8.

Strength 3+1=4, Dexterity 3+1=4, Endurance 3+3=6, Wits 3+5=8, Perception 3+4=7, Tech 3+2=5
Extrovert 1 / Introvert 3. Passion 1+1=2 / Calm 3, Faith 1+2=3 / Ego 3, Human 3 / Alien 0+1=1

Each character also has Vitality equal to their Endurance + 5. When the [Endurance] levels of vitality are lost to damage, the PC begins to suffer penalties that increase with the loss of each of the remaining five. Once you’re out of Vitality, you’re dead.

Now we have 30 points to spend on skills. Some skills are “natural skills” & have a base of 3. Others are “learned skills” & have no rating unless you spend points on acquiring them.

Natural Skills: Charm 3 + 2 = 5, Dodge 3, Fight 3, Impress 3, Melee 3, Observe 3+3=6, Shoot 3, Sneak 3+3=6, Vigor 3
Learned Skills: Academia 3, Alchemy 3, Focus 2, Inquiry 2, Lore (Occult) 3, Lore (Xeno) 3, Read Latin 3, Read Urthish 3, Stoic Mind 4

(The game draws an interesting distinction between Endurance, which can be passive, & Vigor, which is always active.)

The PC gets 10 points to spend on Benefices, which are advantages of various types: gear, social standing, resources, & so on. You can get extra points by taking an Affliction.

Benefices: Refuge 6, Vestments 1, Ordained (Novitiate) 3, Passage Contracts 2
Affliction: Dark Secret -2

Our hero has a safe haven at a monastery, blessed clerical vestments that make their Theurgy spells more effective, position in the Church low though it might be, & an arrangement for at least a space to stretch out in the hold of any freighter traveling from system to system.

Now comes the hairy bit where I might have got it entirely wrong, but since it’s unlikely anyone’s ever going to play this character we’ll just roll with it.

After all that is done, you have 40 more points to spend on raising characteristics (3:1), skills (1:1), buy more benefices, acquire blessings (which give you a bonus in certain narrow situations), take up to two curses to get extra points, or – & this is the important bit – buy levels of occult powers (1:1) & points of wyrd, the fuel for those powers (2:1).

Our hero presents herself as a native of a planet called Icon, so named because it’s a stronghold of one of the most devout noble Houses. She’s actually from the neighboring world, Manitou, which is the one Known World under shared rulership. Part is under the administration of the Empire, but part is under the control of a little understood alien people called the Vau. Its people are far from Church orthodoxy, & more importantly out of the reach of its inquisitors. Strange things happen on Manitou, & its human inhabitants are free to pursue lines of psycho-spiritual inquiry that would get them incinerated by Avestite Inquisitors on other worlds. That isn’t even her Dark Secret though. No, what our hero is working hard to hide isn’t just that she holds heretical ideas; she’s actually an impenitent psychic herself who joined the Eskatonic Order partly as a way to hide in the last place anyone would expect a heretic to want to be, & partly to exploit their resources & Theurgic training as a way to deepen her own knowledge.

So a lot of those 40 points we mentioned go to psychic & theurgic abilities.

Psi 3 / Urge 0
Theurgy 3 / Hubris 0

Urge & Hubris are the Dark Side points of those abilities. Our hero is going to have to step very, very carefully since she’s opened herself up to acquiring both!

Most of the rest of the points go to buying levels of powers:

Psi: Lifting Hand, Throwing Hand, Sensitivity
Theurgy: Prophet’s Holy Blessing, Divine Revelation, Celestial Alignment, Rending the Veil of Unreason

The first theurgy power is essentially a cleric bless, while the others are perception enhancers.

We’ve still got a few points left over. More Wyrd wouldn’t go amiss, since mystic abilities are what our hero is after. We’ll buy to more points of that. Base was the higher of Faith, Introvert, or Extrovert, but all of those are 3 so there you go. Four more points go to buying a 2-point Wyrd Tabernacle – a saint’s relic that stores Wyrd for use later.

Everyone with an occult power displays an occult stigma. For a psychic that’s just something weird or unsettling, but for a theurge it’s something with distinct religious overtones. There are no rules for what the stigma is, so let’s say that when our hero speaks there’s a just barely noticeable delay between her lips moving & the sound reaching the listener, as if she were incredibly far away. She justifies it by calling it a sign that she’s plumbing great spiritual depths & luckily for her she hasn’t yet bumped into anyone who knows enough to question it.

That leaves enough for some blessings, if we take one curse to balance it out. Our hero is perceptive & a smooth talker, but a little obscure when she tries to explain a concept. (Maybe not entirely unintentionally either.)

Blessings: Shrewd, Well-Liked, Curious
Curse: Subtle

We presume that our cleric has the usual ecclesiastical garb & some personal items. Leaning on a staff that both makes her look dignified & can be used to bludgeon attackers, our Novice sets out to plumb the mysteries of the darkening universe.

Name: Novice Monell Samdiphor
Race: Human
Native Planet: “Icon” (Manitou)
Rank: Novice

Strength 4, Dexterity 4, Endurance 6, Wits 8, Perception 7, Tech 5
Extrovert 1 / Introvert 3. Passion 2 / Calm 3, Faith 3 / Ego 3, Human 3 / Alien 1

Natural Skills: Charm 5, Dodge 3, Fight 3, Impress 3, Melee 3, Observe 6, Shoot 3, Sneak 6, Vigor 3
Learned Skills: Academia 3, Alchemy 3, Focus 2, Inquiry 2, Lore (Occult) 3, Lore (Xeno) 3, Read Latin 3, Read Urthish 3, Stoic Mind 4

Blessings: Shrewd, Well-Liked, Curious
Curse: Subtle

Benefices: Refuge 6, Vestments 1, Ordained (Novitiate) 3, Passage Contracts 2
Affliction: Dark Secret -2

Occult:
Wyrd 5
Psi 3 / Urge 0
Lifting Hand, Throwing Hand, Sensitivity
Theurgy 3 / Hubris 0
Prophet’s Holy Blessing, Divine Revelation, Celestial Alignment, Rending the Veil of Unreason

Stigma: voice lag

Vitality 0/0/0/0/0/0/-2/-4/-6/-8/-10