We are excited to announce a Zinequest 3 ambush in the form of a zine about nanotech AKA the Blood… 

SUBTLE FLUID will combine all of the rules on the blooder class, the nanofluidics advanced powers, and nanotech items along with new art, lore, and world-building details. In addition, we’ll be doubling the nanofluidics powers, greatly expanding the options for the blood class. Plus, for the first time, we’re offering a print option through DriveThruRPG.

Check out the SUBTLE FLUID campaign on Kickstarter! 

Note, we are also opening up content direction from backers: we hope to offer a few mini-ventures drenched in self-assembling mayhem… And we’re excited to be able to offer a nanotechnology theme song from Music d20! I mean, how often do whole strata of technological evolution get theme songs? Not often enough!

Thanks to everyone who has played the game and helped us develop it from homebrew idea/rambling science fiction into a visualized world. (Now with new logo!) We truly appreciate you.

Reloading this page will generate a new, random, playable 1st-level character. Note, this is a working draft: if you see something wacky, please feel free to reach out on Discord and let us know.

Wetan Blooder level 1

Rankstillfleeter minima nonfactor, subclass petty-I

You are a vainglorious influencer from Calarash. Through your own luck, you have become a nanite warlock. Your job is to use your ability to command powerful nanofluids to complete the venture as contracted, and to appraise and repair Late Tephnian nanotechnologies discovered during the venture.

LanguagesSpin, Rasp, and Malteni

ScoresCOM d8
MOV d10+1
REA d12
WIL d6
CHA d6-1
HEA 19 [maxCOM+maxMOV]
GRT 11 [maxWIL+maxCHA]
DR 0 [no armor]

Powers

Species

• Arthropod (permanent) – You gain a permanent bonus of +1 MOV. [already included]


• Chemoelectric sense and sensibility (permanent) – You gain a bonus of +4 on rolls related to bug-stratum archaetech.


• Mandibles, spiracles, etc. (permanent) – You can metabolize a much greater range of chemicals than hominins, only a few of which are cognizable to humans as “food.” You thus spend less on equipage during venture outlay (you just carry around some rotting fungusbark and human-urine energy shots). You effectively make back an extra 25 voidguilders with each venture. (Standard venture pay is your level × 25.) This power doesn’t help at game start.

Class

• Control nanofluids (varies, typically standard) – Your blood is infused with the Blood, capital B—the liquid suspension of ultra-advanced nanites possessed ubiquitously during Late Tephnian civilization but long since lost and probably corrupted. The Blood acts according to your will, resculpting your body to give you insane powers but also making you… kind of insane. Choose 3 initial nanofluidics powers [already included]. Every subsequent level, you can choose 1 more nanofluidics power in addition to 1 other advanced power.


• Consume (standard) – Your nanite-infused Blood hungers for literal flesh, but only flesh patterned by intelligence: you can eat biological material derived from other sapients (flesh, blood, ground bone) to repower yourself. Devouring 0.5 Kg of biomaterial restores dWIL GRT. You can eat up to 2 Kg per day before becoming sick and suffering damage.


• Overcharge (free) – You can will your Blood nanites to do crazy things that are bad for them and you, and everything around you. When you overcharge, burn 8 +X GRT, minimum 1: add X to your initiative, dCOM checks, and damage rolls for the next X rounds. In addition, your offensive nanobio powers deal +2X damage. Every time you overcharge, make a WIL check: if you fail, you must act in some inappropriately over-serious way on your primary passion (your telos, if using those rules). This can put you or your comrades at risk; it doesn’t matter.


• Wear the world’s skin (standard) – Burn 3d4 GRT: for the following number of rounds equal to your level +1, your form becomes monstrous, red, varicose, and grotesque, and your powers shift: each of your natural attacks now deals dCOM or dMOV damage, whichever is higher. You gain +2 DR. You automatically intimidate all non-blooders who fail a WIL check. In addition, as a free action, you can regenerate 1 HEA per round per level by burning 2 GRT.

Nanofluidics

• Limb (standard) – Burn X GRT: you shoot out a hand or even a head as a “satellite” to fight or otherwise act for you. This power lasts for the subsequent X +your level rounds. Your head can speak and hear; your hands can attack normally or manipulate small objects. Your Blood uses nanotubules to maintain efficient contact among your parts, and you don’t “feel” separated. You do feel nauseous afterward.


• Repro (standard) – Burn 8 GRT: you send your nanites into an electrical device—this can be a standard Tephnian comm, a dumb ancient radio, or a sapient brain—to induce any specific effect possible. The host rolls WIL/perceive against your REA or CHA, whichever is better, to detect the manipulation (she must roll higher than you since you are attacking). If the manipulation would destroy the host, it gets an additional WIL/resist other check against difficulty 7 to remain fragmented or inactivated, but alive.


• Spew (standard) – You spew up your Blood up as an area attack: the loosed nanites dissolve nearby opponents into hot omni-goo. Burn 4X GRT and roll to attack. Spew does Xd8 +your level damage to any number of targets within a 5-M radius.

Gear

Weapons

• Detachable, throwable second head (3 nano) – d4 damage. 3-M range. Attacker takes 1 damage, -1 CHA (weird neck seam) [already included]. No value except by ardentest negotiation.


• Musket. 5–.9-caliber, smoothbore (3 clank) – 2d10 damage. 80-M range. After you have attacked once, you must spend one round reloading. Two-handed. Doubles as a club. 50 gl.

Armor

• None – No damage reduction (DR).

Other

• Some shit you’ve found, potentially useful – Business suit, briefcase, blank letter-size paper, jar of violet ink, fountain pen. 5 gl.


• Stimtenyl, 3 strips (2 bio) – These non-addictive strips heal d4 HEA each. 45 gl. (15 gl/strip)


• Oddment – Letter from a director (could be used for blackmail).

Voidguilders (gl) remaining: 21

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Stillfleet is a tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) about exploring ruined spacecraft—“hulks”—as well as habitable earth-like planets long-ago colonized by terrans but then cut off from contact with the greater galaxy for decades or centuries—“rocks.”

Thus Stillfleet is really two different games, one hulkside—a series of grimdark explorations of advanced technical structures, hanging in the void—and the other rockside—a political game about managing a company distributed across space.

Players take the roles of various explorers working as part of the Worshipful Company of Stillfleeters, more often known simply as “the Company,” abbreviated the Co. Theoretically, the players are working together… In practice, this is not always the case.

The term “stillfleet” comes from the fact that many planets were once colonized by humans, and that most of these planets (or all of them?) are orbited even today by massive, “dead” ships. However advanced, these ships never work as originally designed.

Their tachyon drives are unpowered, their dimension mills broken. To reach them, fleeters use not other ships but the timespace gates called stiffworks.