Converting a Special Ability

Alien Archive 2 presents the stellar protozoa, a starship-sized amoeba that can engulf whole vessels! Such an ability is exciting and iconic, and a narrative starship combat against a stellar protozoa that ignores using this ability wouldn’t be as thrilling. But how to implement this complex ability in a much simpler way? One approach is to combine some of the aspects of the Ram and Take Cover tactics. To begin, the stellar protozoa takes the Use a Special Ability tactic (presented below). It then attempts a skill check against the PCs’ ship’s Hard DC. If successful, the PCs’ ship is swallowed! The ship immediately takes 1 hit and takes 1 additional hit every following round that it hasn’t yet escaped. The crew take a chance and attempt to blast their way out from the inside, performing normal crew actions and gaining skill check successes until they reduce the stellar protozoa to 0 HP. On the other hand, the PC pilot could attempt a special Piloting action against the protozoa’s Hard DC to fly their vessel out of the massive creature; succeeding at this action doesn’t count as a successful skill check against the protozoa’s threshold unless the pilot spends 1 Resolve Point. It’s as easy as that!