I’ve thrown together a few custom specialties over the last few months. Some fill gaps in the 4e character model that my group has identified. Others are just there to add flavor (but should still be worth the 10xp investment). The following are currently in play on PCs or allied NPCs.

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Herbal Medicine (Medical Aid)

When you attempt to forage, you may choose to gather medicinal plants rather than edible ones.  If you succeed, roll 1d12 on the following table and gain one dose per success of the indicated medicine:

1. Pain reliever
2. Pain reliever
3. Pain reliever
4. Anesthetic, local
5. Antibiotics
6. Antacid
7. Anti-diarrheal
8. Multivitamins
9. Sedative
10. Stimulant, mild
11. Stimulant, mild
12. Stimulant, strong

[Some of these meds are also homebrewed. I’ll eventually post them too.]

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Jerry-Rig (Tech)

Gives a +1 bonus to SURVIVAL when scrounging for parts and a +1 bonus to TECH when repairing or improvising construction of simple machines.

[We’re currently monitoring this one to see if it’s too powerful.]

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Meteorologist (Survival)

Roll SURVIVAL when you spend a stretch or more making weather observations.  If you succeed, the Referee should tell you the upcoming weather trend for a number of days equal to the successes you rolled.

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Storyteller (Persuasion)

Once per shift, roll Persuasion when you spend a stretch (5-10 minutes) telling a moving or inspirational story. For each success, choose one audience member who may remove 1 stress.

[We’re also monitoring this one to see if it’s calibrated appropriately.]

Something that’s always bugged me about Twilight: 2000’s vehicle combat is the relative lack of anything meaningful for the person in the vehicle commander’s seat to do. Sure, many of them have their own pintle-mounted MGs, but there’s no command function. This recently came up in a Kaserne on the Borderlands session and my table had a brief discussion about it. Here’s what we came up with:

Vehicle Command: As a slow action, the vehicle commander may coordinate the actions of his vehicle's crew.  Make a Command check.  With success, this counts as help (Player's Guide, p. 46) for each other crew member's actions this turn.

Timing wasn’t an issue because of our house rules on initiative. The table agreed that the commander should act first to determine success or failure on granting the bonus.

In the interest of balance, we restricted the benefit to actual crew positions, not passengers. There was some debate about whether human cargo using firing ports should benefit, but I felt that was excessive. If you want an in-game rationale, assume that only the actual crew seats have jacks for the vehicle’s intercom.

This seemed to work well as implemented. The commander’s player felt his XP investment in Command was being rewarded, and the gunner appreciated the extra +1 to offset penalties. The driver was a NPC, so he didn’t have opinions, but the bonus was there when needed.

A minor house rule from my Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign:

One of the PCs in this campaign has the Cook specialization. With the campaign centering on a farming village with adequate food production, the party hasn’t yet had to subsist on its own in the wilderness, so foraging and hunting are more supplements to the local food reserves. This makes Cook something less of a good investment.

The community currently has 71 residents (including PCs), so it burns through 71 rations of food a day under normal circumstances. The PC in question has assumed a discussed-but-not-seen-on-screen role as the village’s head chef. Up until now, it’s been solely a roleplaying factor, but we recently negotiated a means for giving it some mechanical effect.

Each day that the PC spends a shift supervising food production, the player makes a Survival check. Each success reduces the community’s total food consumption for that day by 5%. This represents increased efficiency in the communal kitchens – basically, the same effect as the specialization’s as-written function, but scaled up.

It should come as no surprise by now that the tinkering with rules continues in my Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign.

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Improving Coolness Under Fire

I’m not a fan of the rules as written because of the chance to lose Empathy on increasing CUF. As there’s no way to improve attributes during play, that’s a permanent hit to any EMP-reliant character. We’re currently assessing the effects of the following house rule:

At the end of each session, roll your base Coolness Under Fire die.

If the die comes up its maximum value and you were in combat during that session, increase your CUF by one step, to a maximum of A (d12).

If the die comes up a natural 1 and you took a critical hit or were incapacitated from stress during that session, decrease your CUF by 1, to a minimum of D (d6).

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Initiative

I’m definitely not a fan of a random initiative system that doesn’t reflect character proficiency (leaving aside the poorly-named Combat Awareness specialty). Our current initiative system, which we’ve been using since the first session, is:

At the beginning of each round, each player rolls Coolness Under Fire (adding Unit Morale if the PC is within voice or visual contact of a teammate). With success, they act in the fast phase, before all NPCs. With failure, they act in the slow phase, after all NPCs. Characters in each phase may act in any sequence and players may (briefly) discuss tactics and order of operations before declaring actions.

As a play aid, I’ll watch the dice log and drop a brief summary of the rolls into the chat. A typical turn sequence may look like:

1. Fast phase: Red, Leks, Magda, Arkadi, Pettimore (in any order)
2. NPCs
3. Slow phase: Minka, Zenobia, Miko (in any order)

This incentivizes keeping the team close (no lone-wolfing), rewards both individual proficiency (Coolness Under Fire) and team cohesion (Unit Morale), and allows the sort of coordinated action that we see in both documentary and cinematic examinations of small unit tactics.

With my Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign revolving around a village, one item that’s been on my players’ minds is the need for their characters to maintain awareness of their surroundings. A hex is something like 60 or 70 square kilometers, so exploring and mapping it doesn’t necessarily reveal everything it contains. Nor does this keep eyes on it after the initial pass. This is a bit of a gap in the core book’s rules, so we sat down at the virtual table to homebrew a downtime action. This also enables players who aren’t regularly able to make sessions to contribute outside “I brew fuel… again.” Here’s what we came up with:

Patrolling

Designate the hex that you’re patrolling (which may require travel time to reach). Roll Recon (additional recon team members may assist if they have Recon D or higher), modified as follows:

• Scout specialty present in the group: +1
• Open terrain: +1
• Woods or mountains terrain: -1
• Ruins terrain: -3
• Dark: -1
• Light precipitation: -1
• Heavy precipitation: -2
• Cumulative per person in the patrol above three: -1

The patrol finds one item of interest per success. These may be:

• landmarks
• exploitable resources
• hazards
• active threats
• intel/clues
• salvage items
• plot

On double 1s, something unpleasant (but not lethal) befalls the patrol.

(It’s not as rigorously-programmed as the core rules’ actions, but it has worked for us so far. I try to get a general sense of what each PC is looking to get out of their patrol and provide appropriate results so the player feels like the time was well spent.)