A while ago, I posted a few of the custom specialties I’ve thrown together for Kaserne on the Borderlands. Since then, I’ve added a few more at player request – or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Here’s the most recent full list.

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Battle Planner (Command)

Roll Command when you spend a shift or more planning your unit’s actions in an upcoming combat. You get a +1 modifier for each of the following factors that is decisively in your team’s favor, and a -1 modifier (or greater, at the referee’s discretion) for each one that’s decisively stacked against your team: numbers, troop quality, equipment, terrain, weather, intelligence, surprise. During the planned combat and while generally following your plan, each member of your unit may completely re-roll a number of their own rolls equal to the number of successes you received on your Command roll.

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Fireteam Leader (Command)

Roll Command as a fast action. If you succeed, choose one PC or allied NPC per success who can hear your voice. Each target immediately becomes unsuppressed.

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Folklorist (Persuasion)

When you encounter a phenomenon that appears to be of supernatural origin, roll Persuasion. If you succeed, the GM will tell you something about related folklore or mythology. You’ll generally get more information on folklore that originated from cultures with which you share a language.

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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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Insurgent Leader (Command)

Roll Command when you spend a shift or more interacting with allied NPCs. If you succeed, each affected NPC gains Unit Morale one step lower than your own (to a minimum of D6) while within 5 hexes of you. In abstract mass combat, while within voice or visual range of you, each affected NPC gains one step of troop quality, to a maximum of D12. These effects last for one day per success you rolled.

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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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Medical Examiner (Medical Aid)

Roll Medical Aid when you spend a stretch or more examining a dead body.  If you succeed, the Referee should give you some useful information about what happened to your subject and when.

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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Pharmacist (Medical Aid)

Gain a +1 to Tech rolls for creating medications, and to Medical Aid rolls to use medications or identify and treat poisons.

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Prepared Packer (Survival)

Once per session, roll Survival. If you succeed, you may declare that one common item was “in your pack all along.” Add the item to your inventory. The item may not have a weight greater than the number of successes you rolled, may not exceed your available encumbrance, and must plausibly fit inside your backpack or pockets. If you use this specialty to produce a common firearm or limited-use item, it comes with 1d3 reloads or uses.

[Some of us are Night’s Black Agents fans.]

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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.]

I’m preparing to resume running Kaserne on the Borderlands in the near future. I figured it might be useful for my three hypothetical readers to summarize the house rules my group currently uses. In no particular order:

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Character creation strikes a balance between the book’s template-based player control and life path power level.

A PC starts with a C (d8) in each attribute. The player gets three increases to apply. If the player reduces one attribute to D (d6), they get a fourth increase.

The player chooses one skill at B (d10), two at C, and three at D.

The player chooses three specialties, one of which must be attached to the PC’s B skill.

The player chooses the PC’s starting Coolness Under Fire (as appropriate to the concept), then rolls that die. The die result is the PC’s starting permanent rads.

I assign starting equipment according to the situation in which the new PC enters play. As the game’s economy is largely driven by salvage and looting, this hasn’t been particularly unbalancing.

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Character advancement occurs more-or-less normally (but see Coolness Under Fire changes, below). However, because we’re doing troupe play in which all but one of the players currently have two PCs each, XP is pooled at the player level and can be spent on any PC that player controls.

Coolness Under Fire changes occur at the end of each session in which combat occurred. For each PC who participated in combat, the player rolls their CUF die.

If die comes up its maximum value, CUF increases by one step.

If the die comes up a 1 and the PC took a critical hit or was incapacitated from stress, CUF decreases by one step.

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Machine guns don’t suffer Reliability loss or jams from 1s on ammo dice – only base dice. We’ve found that this tweak makes belt-fed automatic weapons much more effective at laying down suppressive fire for multiple turns. They jam much less than assault rifles – but when they do, the party definitely feels their absence.

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Initiative occurs each round in three phases:

1. Fast PCs
2. NPCs
3. Slow PCs

At the beginning of each round, each player rolls Coolness Under Fire. As usual, they add Unit Morale to this roll if their PC can see or hear at least one ally. If they succeed, the PC acts in the fast phase. If they fail, the PC acts in the slow phase.

During each PC phase, characters in that phase act in whatever order the table deems appropriate. During the NPCs phase, NPCs act in the order in which I deem appropriate.

(If friendly NPCs are in the fight, the NPC phase is split into friendly and hostile NPCs. GM fiat determines which group goes first. Usually, I give precedence to the side that has the greater in-narrative combination of volume of fire, position, numbers, morale, and effective command.)

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Bullpup rifles are treated as carbines, getting a – 1 penalty (rather than -2) for attacks in the same hex and a -2 penalty (rather than -3) for one-handed attacks. However, they always reload as a slow action. This hasn’t come up much in play yet, as I don’t think any PCs have picked up the AUG I included in an early loot allocation, but it feels like a good fit for the handling advantages and disadvantages of the bullpup layout.

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Patrolling is a sometimes-used downtime activity documented in this post. It’s basically wandering around an already-explored hex looking for details and trouble.

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The Cook specialty has additional functionality if the PC is supervising large-scale mass feeding. Each day that the PC spends a shift on this work, 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.

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A few custom specialties are on offer. They’re documented in this post.

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Command, as written, doesn’t do a whole lot, and neither does the vehicle commander crew position. We tinkered with making both of them a bit more relevant as discussed in this post, but we’re currently looking at a broader adaptation of the way the Aliens RPG handles it. Stay tuned.