Mad Science
Inspired by Arcane's review of Genius, here's how I'd handle the concept of Mad Science in the Chronicles of Darkness:
This take on the concept of mad science draws its mechanical inspiration from Hunter: the Vigil. Like Hunter, the protagonists of a Mad Science story aren't defined by a template: there is no power stat, no fuel stat, no Integrity substitute, no x-splats. Like a hunter, what sets a mad scientist apart from a regular mortal is how he responds to encountering the inexplicable: where a mortal shies away from it and a hunter confronts it, a mad scientist seeks to understand it.
At the heart of the mad science ruleset are the Forteana: bizarre phenomena that don't conform to known science. The scientist investigates these Forteana using the Investigation rules, and in so doing Uncovers Mind-Blowing Clues that challenge his or her Integrity but ultimately lead to a Breakthrough, the Uncovering of the Truth about the Forteanum that reveals to the scientist a new Mad Science.
A Mad Science is a skill that works just like the Science Skill, except that it deals with a type of Forteana rather than traditional scientific matters. Investigating the new field no longer Uncovers Mind-Blowing Clues; the researcher's perspective has been sufficiently altered by the Breakthrough that new discoveries in that field no longer seem all that strange. But there's still reason to further Investigate the field, as the resulting Clues can unlock Mad Specialties for other skills such as Crafts or Medicine. A Mad Specialty doesn't affect your dice pool; instead, it lets you do something with the skill that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do: e.g., Mad Specialties for Crafts let you craft Devices that have capabilities based on the Mad Science that enabled the Specialty; and Mad Specialties for Medicine lets you imbue living things with similar properties, known as Mods. As a general term, the ways that Mad Specialties let you put your Mad Science into practice are known as Innovations.
There are two problems with Innovations: in order to make or remake something, you must first acquire a supply of Unobtainium, a rare resource defined by the Mad Science that's consumed in the manufacturing process. Unobtainium is intended to be hard to come by, the equivalent of spending dots of Willpower or Arcane Experience; it exists to prevent mass production of an Innovation, as each unit produced costs precious resources.
As well, every Innovation has a Downside. The fundamental question that the Downside serves to answer is “what could possibly go wrong?” There's always some sort of unintended consequences stemming from the Innovation; and the Downside encapsulates it.
(Spoiler tags contain defunct material that I'm keeping around solely for archival purposes.)
(To Do: develop a list of sample Breakthroughs and some of their Innovations. Keep both mechanically light, so as to facilitate players coming up with their own. The Breakthroughs might form a “tech tree”, with an assortment of “Shallow Breaktroughs” that are potentially available to any Mad Scientist, and another set of “Deep Breakthroughs” that require the development of other Breakthroughs first.)
A truly ambitious scientist can seek to expand the bounds of Known Science so that it now encompasses his Breakthrough, making its Innovations available to all. Doing so is a monumental task, the stuff around which whole chronicles are built. I would look to Imperial Mysteries' Imperium rules for inspiration on what it takes to expand Known Science.
Thoughts?
There are more things in Heaven and on Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
— Hamlet
As far as I can tell, science truly is mad. Oh sure, it looks sane at first; providing a consistent framework for how the world works. As long as you don't look too closely, that is. If you start probing the real world deeply enough, though, you'll gradually start to find that for every supposedly hard and fast law, there's an exception. The initial reaction upon learning this is to assume that it's still an ordered, rational cosmos, just with a more elaborate, detailed structure than you originally assumed. But it never stops; you can never reach a point where you've uncovered the fundamental Truth of reality, and there's always that exception that implies that everything you've learned so far is at best an approximation of a deeper truth. After a while, it's hard not to start suspecting that there is no deeper truth: the orderliness of the universe is merely an illusion; the world isn't just stranger than we know, it's stranger than we can know. And once you start thinking that way, it's hard to stay sane.This is the horror of the mad scientist. Very Call of Cthulu-esque, except that the mind-warping weirdness tends to manifest as bizarre science and engineering rather than alien gods and supernatural rituals.
— Fukusaku Emiko, formerly of the Science Council of Japan.
This take on the concept of mad science draws its mechanical inspiration from Hunter: the Vigil. Like Hunter, the protagonists of a Mad Science story aren't defined by a template: there is no power stat, no fuel stat, no Integrity substitute, no x-splats. Like a hunter, what sets a mad scientist apart from a regular mortal is how he responds to encountering the inexplicable: where a mortal shies away from it and a hunter confronts it, a mad scientist seeks to understand it.
At the heart of the mad science ruleset are the Forteana: bizarre phenomena that don't conform to known science. The scientist investigates these Forteana using the Investigation rules, and in so doing Uncovers Mind-Blowing Clues that challenge his or her Integrity but ultimately lead to a Breakthrough, the Uncovering of the Truth about the Forteanum that reveals to the scientist a new Mad Science.
A Mad Science is a skill that works just like the Science Skill, except that it deals with a type of Forteana rather than traditional scientific matters. Investigating the new field no longer Uncovers Mind-Blowing Clues; the researcher's perspective has been sufficiently altered by the Breakthrough that new discoveries in that field no longer seem all that strange. But there's still reason to further Investigate the field, as the resulting Clues can unlock Mad Specialties for other skills such as Crafts or Medicine. A Mad Specialty doesn't affect your dice pool; instead, it lets you do something with the skill that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do: e.g., Mad Specialties for Crafts let you craft Devices that have capabilities based on the Mad Science that enabled the Specialty; and Mad Specialties for Medicine lets you imbue living things with similar properties, known as Mods. As a general term, the ways that Mad Specialties let you put your Mad Science into practice are known as Innovations.
There are two problems with Innovations: in order to make or remake something, you must first acquire a supply of Unobtainium, a rare resource defined by the Mad Science that's consumed in the manufacturing process. Unobtainium is intended to be hard to come by, the equivalent of spending dots of Willpower or Arcane Experience; it exists to prevent mass production of an Innovation, as each unit produced costs precious resources.
As well, every Innovation has a Downside. The fundamental question that the Downside serves to answer is “what could possibly go wrong?” There's always some sort of unintended consequences stemming from the Innovation; and the Downside encapsulates it.
(Spoiler tags contain defunct material that I'm keeping around solely for archival purposes.)
(To Do: develop a list of sample Breakthroughs and some of their Innovations. Keep both mechanically light, so as to facilitate players coming up with their own. The Breakthroughs might form a “tech tree”, with an assortment of “Shallow Breaktroughs” that are potentially available to any Mad Scientist, and another set of “Deep Breakthroughs” that require the development of other Breakthroughs first.)
A truly ambitious scientist can seek to expand the bounds of Known Science so that it now encompasses his Breakthrough, making its Innovations available to all. Doing so is a monumental task, the stuff around which whole chronicles are built. I would look to Imperial Mysteries' Imperium rules for inspiration on what it takes to expand Known Science.
Thoughts?
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