Can Vaylen Clan leaders buy military vehicles?

Page 112:

In order to purchase attack sleds, assault sleds, assault shuttles, patrol craft, and hammer cruisers, one must have the Hammer Lord, Anvil Lord or Forged Lord traits. Anvil Lords may not purchase anything bigger than an Assault Shuttle.

“Clan Leader” is the Vaylen equivalent of these traits, but it’s not listed here. That implies the strange situation that there is NO rules-legal Vaylen character able to purchase military vehicles in character burning except as custom tech – and at 4-5 tech trait points per rp, that makes even an Anvil Ground Car, basically an armed jeep, a 2 rp purchase and a Patrol Craft a 4 rp purchase.

This omission might be because Vaylen are presumed to be GM characters who are buying gear out of the GM’s resources reserve, but what about Vaylen PCs?

Check the Usurper trait on page 276. It’s granted by both the Commander and Captain lifepaths.

Right, Usurper – but that gives command of deceived or hulled human forces. What if I want a Clan Leader with an army of Ksatriyen in armored vehicles?

Wouldn’t you do:

  1. Affiliation with Ksatriyen Army of Doom
  2. Reputation as “The Grand Poobah, Commandant of the Army of Doom”
  3. Relationship with Ksatriyen second-in-command
    ???

Yeah, you’d need to do that too, but the rules aren’t clear how you could get any armored vehicles or combat spacecraft as hard tech, as opposed to color. As I read the rules, all that affilitation-reputation-relationship gets you is a supporting character and a big bonus to Circles rolls to generate more NPC as needed: it doesn’t actually make your Ksatriyen Army of Doom (or your Anvil battalion, or your Hammer wing, or your mercator fleet, or whatever) real in the sense of “Now I can make rolls with these guys and their gear!”

Wellllll, that’s not entirely true. I don’t have a BE book in front of me, so I can’t look up the Vaylen traits for owning stuff, but I do know that Circles characters come with their own appropriate gear. So if you Circles up a captain, he comes with a ship.

-L

The rules are very clear about Vaylen characters being able to buy civilian ships:

Owning Spacecraft
In order to purchase civilian hammer or mercators, one must have the Illegal Crucis, Corvus and Crucis, Merchant Fleet Captain, Meshhen, Vibhuuten, Makara, Offisah, Omshiip Officer, Omshiip Staff, Omshiip’s Master or Owner Aboard trait, in addition to appropriate lifepaths.

That’s on pg. 112, right after the equally conspicuous omission of any Vaylen traits or lps from buying military vehicles.

All it says about characters you find with Circles is

Contacts generated via Circles come with the technology appropriate to their station and index. The GM assigns the technology as he sees fit. Contacts will not freely give their tech to player characters.

The Anvil Lord and Hammer Lord trait descriptions talk about the equipment of your forces in general terms, but although they go into some detail about the kinds of skills and lifepaths the NPCs you Circles up can have, they don’t give any specifics about hard technology.

Any more news on this? It’s a good question. There probably needs to be a Vaylen Hammer Commander type of trait that comes loaded with a fleet, or the ability to have a fleet.

p.

I think the apaprent thing here is Vaylen clan leaders can have all the Vaylen military materiel they need. The restriction mentioned is for human societies.

Except that Vaylen LPs are specifically listed in the “who gets to buy civilian starships?” section.

I think “Clan Leader is equivalent to Forged Lord for purposes of buying equipment” is pretty obviously implicit, but I just want Luke or Thor or someone to SAY it so I can put it on the errata page and turn my obsessive-compulsive disorder on to something else.