Languages, Cultural Familiarity, and Cosmetic Details
Mission X keeps only the cultural and linguistic rules that matter in modern-action and sci-fi games – and makes them fast and useful. Every IQ 6+ character gets one Native language and one culture for free. Additional languages use clean comprehension levels (Native / Accented / Broken / None) with separate costs for spoken, written, and gesture modes. Cultural Familiarity is 1–2 points and mostly serves to remove unfamiliarity penalties that can degrade diplomacy or infiltration.
That’s what’s in the core book, and it provides the group clear guidance on alien languages and special physiology so the table can decide whether limited communication is fun or frustrating. It presumes many adventures will feature strong threads of negotiation via superior firepower. That being said, one of the inspirations for the book and the motivation for writing the genre treatment is Stargate: SG-1. In that series, Daniel Jackson is an expert linguist and historian, and rapidly becomes a core part of SG-1’s effectiveness because of his knowledge of cultural nuance and its influence on alien motivation. The legends of the ancient human past – the myth and story lived and planted by the Goa’uld to control their slaves – inform the present and the strategy the team employs to defeat them as often as not. So it’s as deep as you need it to be, but you’re not forced to create the infamous thirty-page backstory.
Just as with cultural intricacy, age, handedness, height, weight, hair/eye/skin color, sex – all are zero point features in Mission X. The book flat-out says these features normally have “no net impact on the adventuring life.” You can be a 6’11” lefty with neon-green hair and it costs nothing – unless the GM rules it creates an actual story hook. We’ll get to that during the discussion of Disadvantages.
It provides the same focus you see in Dungeon Fantasy and the best Savage Worlds books: cut the cruft, keep what fuels the genre. The rules stay focused on the things that matter when the bullets start flying or the alien horror rounds the corner.
Over the next weeks I’ll be making posts talking about the different chapters, the game development, what MX is … and what it’s not. Please stay tuned! If you want to follow on Kickstarter so that you will be on board immediately when it launches, please click here to jump over to the promo page!
