Unaffiliated Templates

AX.GAT.07.08 - Unaffiliated Templates

The Terminal's permanent population is large enough that a significant fraction of it has no faction affiliation, people who arrived without institutional backing, grew up here outside the faction structure, came from elsewhere and stayed, or maintain deliberate independence as a professional and personal position. This is not an unusual condition. Most station residents move through daily life without faction credential, using the public supply tiers, navigating the social landscape of a station where faction relationships are a background fact rather than a personal one.

What unaffiliated status costs: no faction credential means no straightforward access to Restricted-tier supplies, no institutional backing in confrontations with faction personnel, and no professional network organized to support your interests when your interests need supporting. What it provides: no obligations, no institutional scrutiny of your methods, no loyalty expected by an organization that will also sometimes require you to do things the organization's interests require. The tradeoff is real in both directions, and people who choose unaffiliated status on the Terminal have typically calculated it at least once.

Player characters using unaffiliated templates are not without relationships; they are without institutional relationships. The faction landscape is background texture for a freebooter in a way that it is not for a Vigilant officer or an Oryx contractor. This produces different problems and different freedoms.

The four templates below cover the most common unaffiliated positions on the Terminal. They function identically to faction professions: one Favored Save, optional Power Access, one Progression Track.

Templates

Freebooter

Independent operators who take work across the faction landscape without pledging to any of it. Freebooters sell capability, physical, technical, or social, on terms they negotiate themselves, to whoever is hiring, with the specific freedom and the specific insecurity that self-employment on a frontier station produces. The work is irregular. The rates are what the market will bear. The absence of institutional protection is managed by being useful enough to enough parties that moving against you requires someone to decide the cost is worth it.

Favored Save: Body Save (+1D)

Power Access: None. Freebooters develop their capabilities through practical exposure rather than structured training programs. Tradition access via this template is not available; freebooters who develop traditions do so through their histories before the campaign begins, not through the professional framework.

Progression Track:

10 XP, Open Market

The freebooter has built a working reputation across the Terminal's faction landscape, reliable, capable, no institutional complications. Once per session, the freebooter may approach any faction with an offer of services and be received as a credible professional rather than an unknown quantity. This does not guarantee employment; it guarantees a hearing. Factions that have specific reasons to distrust the freebooter (a past operation gone wrong, a known association with their enemies) are not subject to this perk.

25 XP, No Strings

The freebooter's independence is established and known. Once per scene, when a faction attempts to detain, conscript, or obligate the freebooter through institutional authority, the freebooter may invoke their unaffiliated status: the faction requires demonstrated cause rather than institutional standing to proceed. This does not work against the Vigilants acting under formal warrant or against parties who have a specific documented grievance; it works against routine institutional pressure applied to affiliated personnel as a matter of course.

50 XP, Cross-Faction Standing

The freebooter has accumulated credibility across enough factional lines that they can operate in spaces where affiliated personnel would be viewed with suspicion. Once per session, the freebooter may move through a factional environment, a Vigilant checkpoint, an Oryx administrative space, Violet Sector, the Stellar Equinox's back room, as a known neutral rather than an outsider. The faction's personnel recognize them as someone with standing on this side of the line without being on either side of it. This does not grant access to restricted spaces, but it prevents the social friction that would normally accompany an unaffiliated character's presence.

Station-Born

Characters who grew up on Astraeus Terminal, whose entire experience of the world is the station, whose social map is the faction landscape they were born into, and whose knowledge of the Terminal runs to layers that people who arrived as adults do not have access to. The Terminal is not an environment station-born characters navigate; it is the environment they are made of. This produces specific advantages and a specific relationship to the question of what the station is and who it belongs to that older arrivals do not share.

Favored Save: Wit Save (+1D)

Power Access: None at baseline. Station-born characters may develop traditions through their lineage or through in-campaign profession advancement, not through this template.

Progression Track:

10 XP, Station Intuition

The character knows the Terminal's rhythms at a level that did not come from studying it. Add +2D to all rolls that depend on understanding how the station works, its social patterns, its physical systems, its informal economies, the gap between how it is supposed to function and how it actually functions. This bonus applies to navigation, social reads of the station's community spaces, identification of anomalies in normal station behavior, and any situation where knowing the Terminal from the inside is the relevant skill.

25 XP, Community Root

The character is trusted by multiple station communities in a way that faction-affiliated characters are not, because they are not from any faction, the communities that maintain distance from each other's members extend access to someone who grew up alongside all of them. Once per session, the character may invoke community trust to receive practical support from any station community they grew up with, a safe space, a piece of information, a contact who will meet them without a prior relationship. The support does not require negotiation or persuasion; it requires the relationship. Using this perk in ways that betray the community's trust permanently closes that community's door.

50 XP, The Unwritten Record

The character has accumulated, through childhood, through the community networks of someone who has been here long enough to know people who were here before, pieces of the Terminal's history that the official record does not contain. Once per session, when a situation involves the Terminal's history, the station's physical structure, or the origins of a current factional situation, the character may surface a piece of unwritten history that is directly relevant. The GM provides an accurate piece of historical information that the character could plausibly have acquired through their community connections, something that changes the context of the current situation.

Stranded Traveler

Someone who came to Astraeus Terminal from somewhere else and stayed, whether by choice, by circumstance, or by the gradual accumulation of reasons that made staying easier than leaving. Stranded Travelers bring skills and knowledge from outside the Terminal's specific ecosystem, a perspective on the station's factional dynamics that insiders do not have, and the particular adaptability of someone who has had to learn a new environment more than once. The history that brought them here is their own; the station is where they are now.

Favored Save: Speed Save (+1D)

Power Access: None. Stranded Travelers' capabilities reflect diverse backgrounds rather than structured training in any tradition.

Progression Track:

10 XP, Portable Skills

The traveler brings skills from elsewhere that do not have obvious application in the Terminal's specific environment and turn out to be useful in specific moments in ways that locally-developed skills are not. Once per session, the traveler may declare relevant off-Terminal expertise, a professional skill, a cultural knowledge, a technical capability developed in a different environment, that applies to the current situation. The expertise must be plausible given the character's established history. The GM may ask one clarifying question; the expertise then provides +2D to the relevant roll.

25 XP, Outside Perspective

The traveler reads the Terminal's factional dynamics from a vantage point that people inside those dynamics do not have. Once per scene, the traveler may identify one thing about a faction's current behavior that insiders have normalized and that the traveler, as an outsider, can see clearly, a contradiction between stated position and actual action, a structural dependency no one inside the faction acknowledges, a pattern that is obvious from outside and invisible from within. The GM provides an accurate observation that the character's outside perspective would produce.

50 XP, Routes Out

The traveler has developed knowledge of the ships, schedules, captains, and arrangements that move people off Astraeus Terminal when staying is no longer viable. This knowledge is specific and current, who is departing, when, on what terms, and what they are willing to carry for the right arrangement. Once per session, the traveler may arrange passage off the Terminal for themselves or for another character within 24 in-game hours. The passage is real; the terms are negotiable; the destination is whatever ship is available rather than any specific location. The traveler may also use this knowledge as leverage, the ability to get someone off the Terminal quietly is a resource other parties will pay for.

Independent Psionic

A practitioner who developed Psionics outside the structures, Velhari or otherwise, that the faction landscape expects psionic capability to flow through. Not registered with the Vigilants' analytical division. Not affiliated with the Velhari community governance that shapes how the tradition is practiced in formal contexts. Developed through the specific path that produces capable practitioners who operate outside institutional constraint: quietly, carefully, and with an awareness of what their unregistered status means in a station where the people who want to know about psionic practitioners have resources to find them.

Favored Save: Wit Save (+1D)

Power Access: Psionics at 1D. This is lineage-independent, the Independent Psionic has developed Psionics outside the standard access pathways. Velhari characters taking this template begin at 2D per their lineage affinity and have a specific history explaining why they practice outside the community's governance structures. Non-Velhari characters with this template have a history that explains how they developed the tradition without Velhari instruction or Vigilant training, unusual, and worth developing.

Progression Track:

10 XP, Unregistered

The practitioner's psionic capability does not appear in any Vigilant record, Oryx personnel file, or Velhari community documentation. This provides specific operational freedom, they are not subject to the social and institutional monitoring that registered practitioners navigate, and specific operational risk: no institutional protection if the capability surfaces in a context where it creates problems. Once per session, the practitioner may use a Psionics application in a context where a registered practitioner would be flagged or followed, the use occurs without producing the institutional trail that registered practice leaves.

25 XP, Outside the Tradition

The practitioner developed Psionics without the formal structure of Velhari community instruction or Vigilant analytical training. This produces a relationship to the tradition that formal practitioners find unusual, approaches that the formal training would mark as incorrect but that produce results the formal training's methods do not reach. Once per session, when a standard Psionics application would be blocked by an environmental factor, a formal counter-measure, or a target specifically trained against registered psionic methods, the practitioner may attempt the application anyway using their outside-the-tradition approach. The Threshold is standard; the application does not trigger counter-measures designed for institutional psionic practice.

50 XP, The Quiet Network

The practitioner has located, carefully, over time, other unregistered psionic practitioners on the Terminal and in transit through it. The network is small, informal, and specifically not organized: a set of relationships maintained for mutual awareness and occasional support, not an institution. Once per session, the practitioner may access the quiet network for one of the following: a piece of current operational intelligence that the Vigilants' analytical division has not yet processed; a warning if any faction has recently become specifically interested in locating unregistered practitioners; or a brief safe location where the practitioner's psionic use will not be detected by monitoring systems. The network's information is accurate within its limitations; it knows what unregistered practitioners have observed, which is different from what the official intelligence networks know.

Using Unaffiliated Templates

Unaffiliated templates produce characters who engage with the faction landscape from the outside. This creates specific campaign considerations:

Faction access: Unaffiliated characters do not have the supply tier access, institutional backing, or social standing that faction membership provides. They gain it through play, through relationships built with faction NPCs, through the trust accumulated by reliable behavior within faction contexts, through the specific standing that individual progression perks provide. The absence of institutional access is a starting condition, not a permanent one.

Multiple templates: Players may discuss with their GM whether a character's history warrants elements from more than one template. A Station-Born Freebooter is a coherent identity. The mechanical starting point is one template; additional template flavor is narrative.

Faction membership later: A character who begins with an unaffiliated template may affiliate with a faction during campaign play. This is a significant in-fiction event, factions have criteria, and joining one changes the character's relationship to all the others. The mechanical path for this is in-campaign profession advancement, not template replacement. The GM and player should treat faction affiliation as a campaign development rather than a mechanical transaction.