My players created a Vaylen NPC in the World Burning process. He’s our Usurpation FoN for the Vaylen side. Instead of arriving off planet, or being a plain vanilla Vaylen burned up with the normal Vaylen LPs, he’s a pre-existing member of the human nobility that was hulled at some point previous to the game start. The mystery of how he was hulled is a larger overall mystery for the game that neither I nor the players have postulated upon.
The basic idea is that this FoN is one of the Lords-Pilot, serving an antagonistic Hammer Lord. As a human being, he was a classmate of one of the PC’s, and they trained Anvil together. He went on to a relatively mediocre career. Since he’s been hulled, he’s begun moving up the ranks, moving over from Anvil to Hammer in a strangely successful bid for power. Basically, going worm has been nothing but good for him. Now he has the ear of his Hammer Lord, and is using him to manipulate the local politics.
As of right now, I burned him using the Vaylen LPs. Vibhuuten Naiven, Dilettante, Syzygy, Commander (x2), Captain (x2). This lets me simulate the Anvil/Hammer cross training that such a character would have. It doesn’t seem to conceptually handle this character concept though, as building him with the Vaylen LPs makes it out that he’s an off-worlder who came to this planet with a good backstory.
So, is there another way I could build this character to simulate the fact that he started out as one of the characters on planet, and was then hulled? It doesn’t seem like using the hulled in play rules makes much sense here.
Or, if you think you’re clever, make him a human and try to hull him in play. More interesting, usually, because the players can try to discover and stop your mad schemes.
Cool, thanks. Out of curiosity, you posted a little while ago (can’t remember when/where on the board) that it was vital that Vaylen not have native access to the Iron Trained trait. Why is that?
Another comment as far as using the Vaylen lifepaths: Remember that you can switch bodies at any time, even in the same setting, as long as you’re willing to accept the loss of bonus stat points. So it’s entirely likely that the worm in this FoN’s head started out in the host of a Syzygy noble on a Vaylen-held world, got involved in clan politics, and accepted/was coerced into taking on the Anvil Lord infiltration on your campaign’s featured world. The Vaylen is the identity of the human Lord-Pilot, and has been for years, and has the lifepaths for it, but has additional backstory as well.
The bonus stat points were one of the things making me think that I should’ve burned up some weird combination of the Human/Vaylen LPs, actually. The Vaylen section seemed to suggest that if the Vaylen switched bodies, even during burning, it would lose the bonus stat points. Since my Vaylen did just that, as I figure Commander and Captain came about as the result of the move to the new body, I figured he should lose the points even though he wasn’t changing to a different Vaylen LP.