Force Power: Thought Bomb
Control Difficulty: Very Difficult
Alter Difficulty: Opposed Perception roll
Required Powers: Affect mind, dim another’s senses, life sense, receptive telepathy, projective telepathy.
Warning: A character who uses this power gains an immediate Dark Side Point.
Effect: This is one of the rarest and most dreaded Sith power. The power can concentrate the power of the Dark Side into a horrible vortex capable of drawing in the life essence of nearby sentient beings. These destructive telepathic waves threaten to crush any mind in its wake. If the thought bomb achieves sufficient force, it is capable of not only draining a person of their thoughts, but also decimating one’s body, reducing it to no more than dust. In game terms thought bomb affects all sentient beings within a 4 meter radius and inflicts damage that is not resisted by a character’s Strength attribute, but their Perception attribute (unlike most Force powers, Jedi may not use control to resist the thought bomb). The Sith may increase the range by increasing the control difficulty +5 for every 2 meters the range is increased. If there are multiple Sith performing the thought bomb ritual, it will also increase the alter damage, following standard combined action rules. However, all damage done by the thought bomb is calculated as mental damage.
Mental damage is not calculated like physical damage. It reduces the character’s mental attributes (Knowledge, Perception, Mechanical, and Technical). Gamemasters should consult the normal Damage Resistance Charts for calculating the damage, though the characters do not take physical wounds. Any character who becomes stunned, removes one pip from all mental attributes. Wounded characters remove 1D from all mental attributes. Incapacitated characters remove 2D from mental attributes. Mortally wounded characters remove 3D from all mental attributes. Characters reaching Killed have all mental attributes reduced by 4D. Killed +5 reduces all mental attributes by 5D. If all mental attributes are reduced to 1D, then the gamemaster may choose one of the effects listed below, or roll a die to randomly determine the characters status. They may become a 1. Drooling imbecile, 2. Psychotic killer, 3. Raving lunatic, 4. Frightened runner, 5. Paranoid madman, 6. Harmless amnesiac. If the thought bomb is powerful enough to reduce all mental attributes to 0D, then the character immediately dies.
Surviving characters who suffer mental damage will recover by rolling their Perception (or control) against a natural healing chart, and will mentally recover 1D each time, if the natural healing roll succeeds. If a character fails the control difficulty, then the thought bomb is beyond his own control and must roll his Perception to resist damage against his own alter roll to avoid being consumed by the thought bomb.
Background: A thought bomb was the result of an ancient ritual that, through the focused willpower of many unified Sith Lords, unleashed the full volatility of the dark side of the Force. When detonated, a thought bomb annihilated the entirety—corporeal and non-corporeal—of every Force-sensitive being caught within its blast radius and absorbed their fragmented souls into a swirling vortex of perpetual torment that resolved into an orb of silver iridescence. While the ability to wield such destructive power originated with the ancient Sith, the thought bomb’s origins dated back to the Ritual of Nathema that saw the Sith Lord Vitiate consume an entire world, and its details were discovered during the Jedi Civil War by the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Revan, who recorded the secrets of its creation within his Sith holocron. Revan’s repository and the thought bomb ritual therein remained hidden in a forgotten temple on the planet Lehon until it was discovered in 1000 BBY by the Sith’ari, Darth Bane, who passed the instructions for its creation on to Lord Kaan, leader of the Brotherhood of Darkness. In a desperate attempt to end the war in which they were engaged with the Jedi, the Dark Lords of Kaan’s Sith Brotherhood created and detonated a thought bomb that annihilated nearly all sapient Force-sensitive life on the planet Ruusan. More than a thousand years later, the spirits of the vanquished Jedi trapped within the thought bomb were set free by the valor of a young Rebel agent named Kyle Katarn.