Okay, so please clarify this for me.
Lets say I have a FoN’s childhood friend that gets hulled before play starts. How should I burn the character? Should I make the Vaylen and the human and combine them? SHould I just make a Vaylen with the appropriate skills or visa versa. Some input is appreciated.
Normally, if they’re hulled before play starts, you just burn them as Vaylen. Use the Vaylen lifepaths to follow the worm’s life from Naiven to your FoN’s hulled friend.
However, given that the friend was hulled just before play starts I do wonder what the last lifepath would be, and what the number of years on it means. For instance, say you pick your last lifepath as Sleeper (5 yrs). My guess is the lifepaths are supposed to be abstract enough that you could explain the Sleeper skills, resoures and circles as being due to the worm’s prior preparation and training for becoming a spy, instead of the normal situation where he was supposed to have ~5 years experience as a sleeper. (Also does the rule about carrying over stat bonuses from Human & Vaylen settings apply in this case?)
It is a bit weird though. I’d like to hear others’ take on this.
Cheers,
Mike Lucas
I agree - just make the Vaylen. I ran into the same problem when trying to burn a Vaylen’d Cotar Fomas FoN, but the Cult Leader and Commander LPs easily fill out the kinds of skills and traits such a religious warrior would have.
Use the Vaylen lifepaths for anybody who starts the game with a worm in his head.
Related question. I just hulled one of my FoNs in play. Should I burn up a worm, then do the thing where it takes some of its skills and traits with it? Or should I just say, oh, yeah, he’s got the worm now, and maybe burn the worm to the extent of deciding on past LPs so I can get inside its head a little?
You should make a Circles test for that worm if you want him to have any prior experience. If you just want the worm to be a blank template, then don’t worry about it (so long as you have a cache of worms, of course).
I’m struck how utterly alien to human experience it would be to get “born” this way. One minute you’re a completely non-sentient flatworm wriggling in a tank with a thousand other flatworms; the next minute you’ve got a body with an internal skeleton, the sense of sight, a sex drive, the need to breathe, opposable thumbs – and, oh yeah, a lifetime of memories that aren’t really yours.
I’ve yet to read whatever BE material there is on this subject (just got my brick last night), but there’s a fantastic short story in “Year’s Best SF 11” (Amazon.com) called “Second Person Present Tense”, about a girl who has overdosed on a drug that breaks the continuity of personality. She has a lifetime of memories which just don’t feel like “her”. She wants to move on with her life, which of course devastating to everyone around her.