Integrating Beskar

Homebrew & House Rules
#1

I thought it would be a good idea to move any discussion of how to integrate beskar into the current rules in to one place.

So in canon beskar is a metal which is highly resistant to damage, even from energy weapons. We know that it is very rare, only occurring naturally on Mandalore, and between its rarity and desirability because of its physical properties it is very valuable. There is no indication that beskar is any more dense than, say, durasteel, but nothing says it isn’t, so adjustment of encumbrance is a possibility to try to maintain game balance if needed.

My proposal is fairly simple in principle, but the details may need tweaked.
I would suggest that any suit of armor or melee weapon (at GM’s discretion) found in the books could also be forged out of beskar. If an item is forged from pure beskar, it should have the cortosis quality without using a hard point.

Weapons with the Cortosis quality are immune to the Sunder quality. Armor with the Cortosis quality makes the wearer’s soak immune to the Pierce and Breach qualities.

In addition (and this is where the potential tweaking comes in) its price should be increased by ten(?) times, it should be Restricted and of Rarity 10. I don’t think there is a need to increase Encumbrance, but maybe others would disagree.

For Armor, maybe 1 additional Soak? I don’t think any Defense increase makes any sense.

Worked Example:
Let’s say somebody has armor equivalent to the Nightstalker Infiltration Armor, but made of beskar.
It’s stats would change as follows;
Defense - stays at 0
Soak - increases by 1 to 3
Price - increases by ten times to 48,000 and remains Restricted
Encum - stays at 2
HP - stays at 1
Rarity - increases from 9 to 10
It would also retain its special qualities (Add an automatic success to Stealth checks. Add an automatic disadvantage to social skill checks.) and add the Cortosis quality.

Narratively I would imagine light armor like this to use a combination of beskar weave and plates to achieve this effect.

You could even use beskar weave in banal apparel if that’s your kind of thing;
Defense - stays at 0
Soak - increases by 1 to 1
Price - increases by ten times to 250 and becomes Restricted
Encum - stays at 0
HP - stays at 0
Rarity - increases from 0 to 10
Adds Cortosis quality.

Thoughts? Am I missing anything?

Edit to add:
I thought I should also do a worked example with the Mandalorian Armor provided by FFG. My assumption here is that this describes a beskar-free or -lite version of a heavy suit of Mandalorian armor, so finding a pure-beskar suit upgrades it the same as any other type of armor.
Defense - stays at 1
Soak - increases by 1 to 3
Price - increases by ten times to 60,000 and remains Restricted
Encum - stays at 6
HP - stays at 5
Rarity - increases from 8 to 10
Adds Cortosis quality.

#2

First, just so we’re on the same page, the Cortosis quality and attachments are also supposed to represent beskar and other lightsaber resistant alloys, as per the devs.

What you’re talking about is done with the Beskad, Kal, and Crushgaunts in Collapse of the Republic.

For this, I’d look back to those three examples I mentioned. I would not suggest a flat multiplier though, as 250*10 is just 2,500 for a Cortosis Vibrosword, but 7,500 for a Cortosis Vibro-ax. The main difference between the two is in the sort of technology and the difficulty to make, not the amount of material used. A flat multiplier may make sense for some individual items, but by and large is not applicable.

I think that for buying an item, it should either be restricted to purchasing the weapons in the books or homebrewed weapons, but anything else would just use the Cortosis Forging attachment from Rise of the Separatists, which is 8,000 credits and only takes up one HP.
If looking to buy an item forged of beskar, I would not make it illegal by default. Cortosis Forging isn’t restricted, and if applied to a legal weapon it wouldn’t make the weapon illegal.

If I had a player buying a weapon forged of beskar, I’d simply take the base weapon and add the Cortosis Forging attachment, including the cost into the cost of the weapon. Depending on the rarity of the weapon, I’d either increase the rarity to 9 or 10.

If you want something that better replicates the Beskad and Kal, which are both less expensive than the Cortosis Forging attachment, I’d say +4,000 for a light weapon (vibroknife), +6,000 for a medium weapon (vibrosword), and then the full +8,000 for a heavy weapon (vibro-ax).

As stated earlier, this is what the Cortosis Weave is supposed to represent.

This is a pretty good illustration of my problem with the *10 modifier. The armor is that expensive because it is high-tech and has a lot of technology built into it, not because it has a lot of material. It also means it takes 40 thousand credits to get +1 Soak and Cortosis.
Also, based on what the armor is, beskar weave doesn’t make much sense. With 1 HP, part of their thought process was likely eliminating the ability to add any of the 2 HP attachments, like Cortosis Weave. Because of its nature as a stealth system, it’s not going to be something you can easily modify.

So now it’s just 225 credits to increase Soak by 1 and add the Cortosis quality, and now you’re walking around in a metal T-shirt? This is really, really broken and doesn’t make sense.

My conclusion is to just stick with the RAW. I think the Cortosis attachments are perfectly good for this.

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#3

Yeah, you’re right, it is balanced a lot better to do it that way. Now I just need to think narratively why armor forged from beskar would lose 2 HP compared to a similar suit made of durasteel.

Or I could go back to my Forgemaster and add a talent which allows adding the beskar (cortosis) weave with fewer HP. The two slots I have for Efficient Forging could each reduce the cost by 1 HP instead of returning extra beskar. The more I think about it the more I like this idea.

Edit: Comparing this to Tinkerer, which adds 1HP to a single item. This talent would effectively add up to 2HP to multiple items, but would only apply to items actually created by the PC, and only items made of beskar, the availability of which would be controlled by the GM.

#4

That is a good point, and one I’ve always kinda wrestled with, but part of it is that you are modifying a suit of armor with additional stuff, which will make it less customizable in other ways. It’ll make it harder to mount a Strength Enhancing System because it’s an additional thing to work around, or some weather-proofing will have to be sacrificed because of the additional bulk.

I like the HP system as it is because it’s simple, but if I were to rewrite it, I’d give armor 2 different HP values: helmet and armor. Mandalorian armor might be 3/4 or 2/4.
Armor attachments would fall into two basic categories: environmental and enhancement. Environmental would be like cold-proofing, vacuum sealed, rad shielding, etc. and enhancements would be like Cortosis Weave, Strength Enhancing System, Integrated Med-Systems, etc.
Helmet attachments would be like the Enhanced Optical Suite, Squad Tactical Systems, Range Finder, Mandalorian Vambraces, etc.
Most armor attachment weaponry would become wrist-mounted individual weapons disconnected from HP, and without vambraces you can only mount one on each wrist. Vambraces allow for greater control and coordination, but must be integrated to a helmet’s system.

That was a bit of a tangent, but to come back to this… It is not at all uncommon for ranked talents to have a secondary ability which often does not stack with future purchases. It might be a bit too powerful (but you still have to ask how often it’ll come up), but perhaps the secondary ability for Efficient Forging (or I might call it “Waste Not Want Not” instead, but that’s a bit long) can simply be that when this character installs the Cortosis Weave attachment, it only costs 1 HP.
I really don’t think you should make it 0 HP. I’d be perfectly comfortable keeping it at 2, and think it should probably stay there, especially because it would be passive which means that, theoretically, anyone could pick up that tree for the passives and Melee talents and ignore stuff like Mechanics, viewing the few Mechanics talents that gate other talents as simple speed bumps.
No, I think probably best to keep it as is.
An alternative (though I would still not recommend it) is to have a new talent replacing Inventor that says something along the lines of “When installing the Cortosis Weave attachment, may make a Hard(?) Mechanics check. If successful, reduce the HP cost by 1 to a minimum of 0. The character may spend Triumph on a successful check to reduce the HP cost by 1 to a minimum of 0.”

#5

Ha! Yeah, it was wasn’t it?! Don’t worry, I’m not going to go back into Forgemaster stuff in this thread but I wanted to explain what I was thinking.

My thought was that narratively, beskar armor is harder to modify because the material is so hard to work with. But, because forgemasters are privy to ancient secrets about how to work the metal, maybe it doesn’t have to apply to them (so much).That way mandalorian forged beskar’gam will always be superior to beskar suits made anywhere else.

#6

I was actually referring to my tangent about HP. Your comment about Forgemaster was fine.

It’s not just about being hard to work with, it’s that you’re adding material. I think a better sort of “Mando forged baskar’gam is superior” is just that they actually know how to use beskar, while those outside the Mandalorian clans who know how to work beskar are vanishingly rare.

#7

I don’t know why I have struggled so much to get my head around this! I think I have figured it out now and I’m going to lay it out in case anyone else was struggling as much as I was. All of the following is Rules As Written.

Forging Beskar Armor
Following the rules on page 90 of Keeping the Peace, the character chooses a template of armor and then finds the correct amount of credits worth of materials. Since beskar would require the cortosis weave attachment which costs 10,000 credits we will add that on to the total, so for the Augmentative Armor the total amount of beskar required would cost 14,500 credits.

Next, they would roll their Mechanics check to see if they are successful in constructing the armor. For our Augmentative Armor it would be Formidable (five purple). If they fail the materials are lost. If they succeed there is no need to roll again to add the cortosis weave attachment (one of the things I struggled with was thinking there would be a roll), it just takes up 2 HP and its done.

Next the player looks at their Advantages and Triumphs and decides what to spend them on to augment the armor, again according to the table in Keeping the Peace.

Finally the GM uses the same table to decide how to spend Threats and Despairs to add flaws to the armor.

And that’s it.

Adding any further attachments is a separate thing, which is done as normal and Mechanics checks may be needed to activate any Modification Options for the Attachments.

I was way over-complicating it in my head.

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#8

Looks like you’ve got it figured out. :)
I’m glad you’re satisfied.