Mechanic has the 6th level feat, Exocortex Experimenter, to take a second exocortex, or third if you take the feat again at 12th level.

Has anyone built a character with this yet, and what is your concept to combine them, and what pain points did you find and avoid?

My concept for this is late game using Command and/or Reposition Exocortex to send mines followed by a drone or turret with eyes to guide them around corners and into rooms while the mechanic stands way out of LOE/LOS within the 150' control range.

For drone -> mine it looks like if you fully upgrade your drone when you're supposed to (4, 8, 14), you only have level 10 and 12 feats to even think about adding features to a mine, and you've missed on lower level basics like Double Detonation and Double Deployment. The mines can still add some value here as your reaction (skip Auto Target at 8) and your aoe option (put a striking weapon on your drone), but they're definitely supplemental and you'll have a hard time using many of them.

Mine -> Drone is worse unless you just want the drone as a fairly inaccurate (it needs feats at 8 and 10 to get the missing +3 dex a normal drone could have at 8, which costs you Double Deployment and Proximity Alert Mines) or area fire weapon only pair of eyes that follows, spots for, and opens doors for your mines as you Redeploy Exocortex exocortext them around corners and into rooms ahead of you while you stay in the rear with the gear.

Mine/turret seems easier, because it doesn't need feats to upgrade/maintain striking accuracy, the mines cover the aoe gap otherwise filled by turret feats, and it gets both darkvision and cameras for free (the drone needs eyes, darkvision, and weapon mount/hands to eat up all its basic customization budget) for spotting purposes, but the lack of hands means all of this comes to a halt when your advance your turret and mines to the insurmountable obstacle of a closed door. Time for remote bunker buster mods, I guess.

The other downside to this concept is that not only is it hard to upgrade your second exocortex and challening to maintain what you want on your primary, you really want one of the 10th level feats, Parallel Deployment or Parallel Reposition, that help you deploy/move your two exocortexes together, and if you go crazy with massive mine deployments in advance of battle you need Redeploy Munitions to 2a Redeploy each of them 40-60'.

If you're not running this as some sort of custom exploration activity you can still in combat do on turn 1: Double Deployment, Parallel Deployment (deploy turret and move one mine out ahead of turret), stride to somewhere that breaks LOS/LOE and control everything in safety from there on.

...or maybe just stand in the open and Command drone plus Deploy/Detonate a single mine every turn, call it a day.

Everyone knows Viper is the best Technomancer programming language by miles and Servoshell is probably the consensus last place pick.

But what if Servoshell is actually pretty ok? Consider these applications/intepretations of some rules and options:

1. Signal Relay spellshape:

You transfer a spell between yourself and your minion. If the next action you use is to Cast a Spell that affects only you, other than a polymorph spell, the spell affects your minion instead of you.

There's two interpreations. One is that this only works with spells that can only effect the caster. I originally adopted this and didn't consider any other possibility. This makes this extremely limited and very, very bad.

The second possibility, however, is that the limitation only requires that you choose to only affect you - so a mass buff would have to be limited to you, which would then transfer to your minion. I now choose to believe this in order to rescue this and make it actually functional. Now we can cast touch buffs on the technomancer, which then transfer to the minion. Defensive and utility spells are now on the menu.

E.g. putting Invisibility 4 at a distance on your Summon Robot might be worth it. Later with your 8th level jailbreak ability you can split that between you and your robot for 5 rounds each.

2. Minibot combat utility:

"It can't be used in combat!" It can, with other abilities. (These can all also be used with a Summon Robot, but unlike it you don't have to sustain the minibot every turn, and a stationary minion with no actions can do all of these.)

a. Remote spell use: Conceal Spell (feat 2) plus Incognito Spell (feat 4) lets your concealed spell originate from an overclocked minion. An advanced camerabot, which is level 4 and 1000cr, can be up to 1000' from you. As long as both you and it have LOS/LOE to the target the spell originates from the (invisible?) minibot. Great for massive range extensions, "it wasn't me, I wasn't there," and aiming cones/lines in weird ways.

b. Turbocharge Batteries: this feat 10 is a once per 10 minutes single action to have your minion stride (talk to your GM about adding traversal on this, since all but the early bellbot models float and fly instead of stride, otherwise keep a bellbot and only add non flying capabilities into it) and then destroy it in a 10' emanation. The starting damage is only an average of 15 (42% of a fireball for half the action), but scales at +5 per "rank" compared to +7 on a fireball (71%), narrowing the gap. At level 20 you'd be doing 57% of a fireball that's relatively ally friendly.

c. Bonding Charge: Your focus 3 spell is 2a for you to stride, then unleash a lightning bolt between you and your minibot. This starts at 3d12 vs a 4d12 lightning bolt, then only heightens +2 ranks d12. So it's half the time half a lightning bolt for half an action plus an included stride. If you wanted to move anyway and conserve a spell slot, it's not really that bad. Probably better for a Summon Robot on a Command plus Bonding Charge turn, though. Still, the minibot can be your anchoring point if you need.

3. The other focus spells:

a. Repair Protocols: Free focus 1, lets you sustained heal one or two constructs. If you target one construct you get 4.5HP per rank per round (45xrank for a minute), 2.5 HP per rank per round (25xrank for a minute) you target two. In combat this keeps your Summon Robot alive an extra round or two, maybe. If you have a mechanic drone, SRO, or Living Hologram in you party you just greatly increased their sustainability in combat and largely trivialized their out of combat healing needs.

b. Supercharge Satellite: Focus 5, 1 action, makes a tech minion quickened for 1 minute to strike or stride. Obviously best on a Summon Robot, but can also make your minibot extra zippy if you need to send it 1000' away in a hurry to relay a spell.

4. The Spell Cache: Since day one I've though this programming language had the least need to take feats that add to the spell cache.

1st: summon robot; 2nd: illusory creature; 3rd: discharge; 4th: speak with computers; 5th: control machine; 6th: dominate; 7th: wall of steel; 8th: phantasmal fleet; 9th: telekinetic tantrum

You can always pull a high rank summon robot for you main intended playstyle, or fake them out with a low rank illusory creature, three different spells to handle tech threats or challenges, dominate to try the same on gross disgusting meatbags, a shapeable wall for control, etc. Since we need Incognito Spell at 4th it's good that we can probably skip Expanded Cache. I'd still look at Spell Library at 8 but this and FORTRUN are the only subclasses I wouldn't feel a strong compulsion to take it on.

5. Leverage Specs: Feat 8. "Oh, it's Knowledge is Power, but limited to tech minions and not allies, and doesn't give defensive bonuses." Yes, but did you notice the duration? It lasts int bonus rounds! The real problem will be finding a free action way to recall knowledge, because you want to three action summon robot up front. I suppose it could be a round 2 support action. I will find it very funny if you can consistenly get on a summoned robot your overclock item bonus and a -1 circ to enemy AC that lasts the whole fight. Now if we can only get a status bonus to attack, surely not all the good ones are mindless, I can pick up the Viper heroism spell chips late game...

6. Mechanic Dedication for Drone: You can do this, but your Overclock Pulse will do little but provide rereshing HP when you command it (the attack bonus doesn't work with companions, the AC bonus does and I guess saves you a customization that does the same thing). Your focus spells will work fine. Your drone's dex compared to a max dex/defense option mechanic drone will fall behind by 1 at 4th level (and also behind on perception and saving throw proficiency) with equal consequences to AC and strikes, be 2 behind at 8th level when you take Tactical Drone (they get Advanced Drone and Deft, but you catch up on perception and saving throws), be 4 behind at 14 (you also are now behind on weapon proficiency, lagging -6 on strikes), then you'll be 2 behind on dex (-4 strike lag) at 16 when you take Advanced Drone. At 14 a mechanic drone will also boost its armor proficiency, saves, and perception 2 ahead of you (making you -6 worse on AC, -4 worse at 16). Basically at level 16 when you and the mechanic have both advanced as much as you can you're -4 at everything important (-2 on fort/will saves) due to 2 less on dex and proficiency.

Of course you can heal it and quicken it and cast lightning bolts connecting you to it that a mechanic can't do, and use it for a distraction or skill/utility purposes that a Summon Robot can't do, and with more resource durability to preserve spell slots. Something to think about. This will cost you some feats (2/8/16) and disrupt or delay some other things like the conceal/incognito feat chain.

(It is somewhat unlikely I got all the math perfect on this, but nothing should be too far off.)

7. Special Jailbreaks?: I'm not sure I will see a lot of use for the 3rd level Basic Jailbreak. If I'm willing to drop overclocked bonuses on my minion for at least a round to put a spell on it, I doubt it's often going to be 120' away but also not in line of effect. We close a door on it then buff it to fight alone? I Speedrun away at level 18 through some walls? Maybe. (It's not worse than the tickle damage of DPS++, though.)

The advanced at 8th seems more likely to matter - apply a buff to both me and my minion, split duration? Sure.

Conclusion: Overall I think there's plenty to work with here, especially if you have some allied constructs to help heal. You definitely can do some funky social and even combat stuff with the minibot I wouldn't have initially suspected when I first read it.

Hi, everyone! I’m Lars, GM and host of Tabletop Gold. We’re an audio/video actual play podcast that started with Pathfinder 2E and has been playing Starfinder 2E since the beginning of the year.

Our Starfinder series, Roughnexx, is an anthology campaign where a ragtag group of Pact Worlds misfits go on shorter adventures. Our goal is sort of to show off as much of the Starfinder setting as we're able to while keeping the game and story moving.

We just wrapped up our first adventure, Murder in Metal City (which we really enjoyed), and have moved on to Battle for Nova Rush by Jessica Catalan, published last year as part of Free RPG Day. The first two episodes are out now.

Episode 28 is the start of the new adventure, and we have set everything up to make it easy to jump in without any additional background. Or if you'd like to start from the very beginning, Murder in Metal City is finished and ready to binge from Roughnexx episode 1.

The show is a fully edited video podcast on YouTube and Spotify, or audio wherever you listen. tabletopgold.com

Getting ready to run a campaign and familiarizing myself with the starship combat rules, and it feels like there's something missing or that I'm missing with regards to the Magic Conduit battle station and starship spells.

One of my players is eyeing technomancer for their character, so I took a look at the Technomancer Magic Module and the second half doesn't seem to do anything

When you cast a starship spell that deals acid, cold, electricity, or fire damage while the battle station is overclocked, you can change the damage type to acid, cold, electricity, or fire.

It should be a useful feature, allowing a technomancer to change a cold spell to fire against a sentinel or gardenship, for instance. But the only two damaging starship spells we have both deal force damage, so they can't have their damage type changed.

The Magic Conduit also mentions in its helmed benefit that

You can only cast a starship spell from the repository if your spellcasting feature allows you to learn spells of the same tradition.

But all four starship spells (which are in the repository of all Magic Conduits) belong to all four traditions, so this restriction seems unnecessary.

Are these both just examples of future-proofing, or have I missed a section on additional starship spells? If I haven't missed anything, what sort of spells would make the most sense to add to the list of starship spells? Would it make more sense to unlock additional spells with higher-grade magic conduits, or should expanding the repository count as an upgrade?

WRECKING BALL

CHARACTER Hammond

SOURCE Overwatch

BUILD GOALS

o    Wrecking Ball is an initiator tank hero from Overwatch who is actually a hyper intelligent hamster that operates a spherical mecha that he maintains and upgrades

o    For a time, he fought in the mecha battle arena of the Junkers and became close with them

o    His mech is equipped with Quad Cannons, automatic assault cannons that are meant to operate at mid-range

o    He can launch a Grappling Claw to swing from a point and crash into enemies to damage and knock them back and has Roll as another movement ability where he transforms into a ball and speeds up

o    Activating Adaptive Shield grants him extra temporary health and can be reactivated to distribute this extra health to nearby allies

o    If airborne, Wrecking Ball can trigger Piledriver to slam into the ground to damage and launch enemies upward

o    The rather simply named Minefield deploys a massive field of proximity mines

Summary of Goals: I want to express Hammond’s nature as a literal hamster inside of a mecha though a lot of the aspects of this mech, its ability to knock people around, can feel a bit incongruous with its auto cannons. Grappling Claw also seems like it would be hard to represent as something other than an item, which I’m not a fan of doing. Some of these abilities might require going a magical route, especially if I want to keep Hammond and his Wrecking Ball mech as separate entities.

BUILD CONCLUSION

Wrecking Ball is represented through a Tiny running awakened animal summoner for Hammond with the bot itself being his construct eidolon. Through the clockfighter background, he covers the time spent in the robo-battle arena of the Junkers and while summoner already has ten HP per level, we make the pair even tankier with options like Toughness and reinforce eidolon to help him to sustain and survive attacks. For his autocannons, Ranged Combatant gives WB ranged attacks that he can unleash though Hammond himself could get in on it with multi-hit spells like slashing gust or force barrage. Sadly, I couldn't build Grappling Claw into this kit though you should be able to find one with ease in Star or Pathfinder. He can still smash into and knock around foes with Advanced Weaponry for the shove trait and then eventually Weighty Impact to do that even easier. With Magical Adept, WB can fleet step to cover his Roll and Trample to run enemies over. Adaptive Shield is pretty easy as endure can supply him with temporary Hit Points before a three-action Ibex's harvest can share some with the entire team per the recast. By using Magical Master, blazing dive or blastback allow WB to drop into the midst of enemies with terrific effect though I think the latter of these fits a little bit better of the two. The choice is much simpler for his minefield as he simply lays out an instant minefield to turn the battlefield into a booming bonanza.

An erudite rodent and his rotund robo, these rapscallions regularly roll into roustabouts, reducing ramparts to rubble and rabblerousers to reposed in raging ruptures.

I was talking a while back at this point about how to possibly build Wrecking Ball and I thought that summoner was the way to go. It's far from the only way (mechanic took just a bit too long to come out), but it's what I thought would be the most fun to build for me. If you want to see the full range of my ideas behind using the options I did, feel free to check out the free Patreon post or the YT video. Have a fantastic Friday!