The Ysalamiri are such an interesting creation in the EU Thrawn Trilogy books ... but ... would you include them in your campaign?

Their rarity, difficulty to obtain, and fragility make them an intriguing option to include in very small doses...

What I'm curious about is the "range." I was thinking they exert a bubble that goes perhaps to Engaged range, but not any further. It's enough to be a personal bubble, but not to say shield off a squad or a leader AND their minions...

Again, I think the criteria here is:

- Incredibly Rare

- Small doses

- Complete powers described in the books

- Range at Engaged or closer

Any thoughts?

In Star Wars Minis, I believe it had a range of 30 feet (6 squares); I believe it was part of his Leadership effect, hence the range. In the book, it does protect Thrawn's entourage from Joruus C'Boath's powers, both Force lightning and mind control, and then he approaches the aged clone, and strips him of all powers, before fabricating his plan to use C'Boath to make the crappier cloaking device variety viable (hybridium cloaks are crap, but stygium wasn't available in Thrawn's window). (If you use Thrawn, also remember that this is the scene that reveals Grand Admirals, unlike most other officers, were slimmed down storm trooper suits under their white uniforms; deflected an arrow, which is why C'Boath felt it necessary to deal with them, in person.

I'd say keep them sparingly, at best. Yes, they are very cool, and work pretty well, but it stops being as cool when everyone else figures it out. Myrkyr is an out-of-the-way spot, at best, and few to no one would know about this animal, or its powers; certainly not with the "rarity" of Jedi, in the time frame. Also, Myrkyr sort of belongs to Talon Kaarde, so you'd possibly have to go through him to get them. When the Yuuzhan Vong later Vong-formed the planet, and made their modified vornskrs, voxyn, I believe they were called, they also assimilated the anti-Force properties of the ysalamiri, making them even more ack! then they already were. Remember, in most people's eyes, if the Vong used it to increase their cheese, you should mostly leave it alone; it was the biggest support to many to burn the EU, in my opinion, and you won't make friends reminding them why everyone hated that part of the NJO.

As for them, yeah, they re rare, so I'd say most people would have no reason to know about them, or their effect. Most people don't have that big a reason to need to negate Force powers, and not also have such powers of their own. Also, the snakes are sessile, and usually bond with a tree branch, so making them portable, and thus useful, can be tricky; even Thrawn had some trouble with them. At most, I'd say don't go too overboard with them; this system already sort of put the Force off till this book, in some ways, as it is, and being good with the Force can be a pretty significant investment, to just have their powers "shut off", in a way other characters often don't have to concern themselves with. I'd say, like Thrawn, keep them an interesting aspect of a particular place, or antagonist NPC. Maybe build an Inquisitor, but instead of being Force-sensitive, they have on of these, to off set the players' Force powers, and fight in other ways.

I'd say, like Thrawn, keep them an interesting aspect of a particular place, or antagonist NPC. Maybe build an Inquisitor, but instead of being Force-sensitive, they have on of these, to off set the players' Force powers, and fight in other ways.

100% Agree.

I would give them shroud and supress with no range upgrades.

They're kind of cute, but the anti-Force thing seems cheesy, especially if every enemy leader has one as a pet in an F&D game.

If you don't make Jedi into Superman, you won't need kryptonite.

Yeah I'll be dropping a crate at whoever has one. Those little lizards can't stop physics.

Except your crate wouldn't get close enough to be dropped on one. The moment it entered the bubble your move would stop working and the crate would hit the ground. Also you would have to account for drift and the person or lizard just moving out of the way since they can move faster then you can move an object. Thats why blaster pistols are much more effective at dealing with the problem.

Interesting Que

Except your crate wouldn't get close enough to be dropped on one. The moment it entered the bubble your move would stop working and the crate would hit the ground. Also you would have to account for drift and the person or lizard just moving out of the way since they can move faster then you can move an object. Thats why blaster pistols are much more effective at dealing with the problem.

Interesting question about force powers areas overlapping. Does its power effect the living force around it or simply individuals in it's range?

Also, momentum could carry the day for the move power.

Yeah, like many things "immune to magic", using magic to throw something lets regular momentum/inertia carry it to the target, assuming the target can be hurt by the hurled object. You couldn't Force-hurl a YV, because their race is immune to the effects of all Force powers, but you could pull the ceiling down, and crush them. The ysalamiri are the same, so long as their bubble doesn't cover the ceiling, making it impossible to target it with the Force. If you hurled a crate up, though, and shattered the ceiling, or just let the crate's momentum carry it, said projectile would still impact the target; the Force made it move, but now it will move, until acted upon by another force (friction, drag, and gravity), or by the Force.

As for the ysalamiri, anything more than a hatchling, pretty much, is entirely sessile. Part of their power on Myrkyr is to hide from the Force-sensitive Vornskyrs, because they cannot move, if found. So, if not being carried by someone else, such as Thrawn wearing his brace, or an idea I used in the early 2000's to have Jedi Assault droids with life-support systems set up inside their chassis, they cannot dodge, unless FFG changed something. Also sort of surprised, with so much of the EU having been burned, to make room for Disney, that they still kept this creation of that fluff around. I know people will tell me that Heir to the Empire isn't canon, anymore, but it gives me more the feel that it, Thrawn, and his race, among some other things there, are still close, since they were among my favorite Star Wars bits.

Actually it usually doesn't work like that.

See the force pushing an object does not actually generate momentum so when the force is no longer pushing the object towards something it just stops and hits the ground.

Hurl would of course be different, but hurling an object and expecting it to magically bounce off another object to fall down and hit a third object isn't a very good choice of course I'd still rule hurl is just the force pushing an object really quickly.

Stop trying to bring physics into my pseudo magical energy field that binds the universe together.

The simplest solution to the problem is the magic force rod aka a Blaster pistol.

Why waste time trying to use the force when blasters will guarantee a quick death?

Except your crate wouldn't get close enough to be dropped on one. The moment it entered the bubble your move would stop working and the crate would hit the ground. Also you would have to account for drift and the person or lizard just moving out of the way since they can move faster then you can move an object. Thats why blaster pistols are much more effective at dealing with the problem.

Sounds less like an auto-fail and more like a reason to add setbacks to me...

I use them, but sparingly. The very first mission of the campaign involved stealing ysalamiri and vornskrs from the Zann Consortium. Actually using them mechanically in the campaign didn't happen until over a year later when I introduced Dalan Oberos from Chronicles of the Gatekeeper a few months in advance. Since he would be going up against Force users with over 1,000 XP (including one just shy of 2,000), I gave Dalan an ysalamir.

It worked out well, as he was the one villain in the campaign who the Force users in the group had to use different tactics on. Fittingly, he was killed in Chronicles of the Gatekeeper II. The Force users in the group could have saved him from a fatal fall, but he refused to give up the ysalamir in his possession and fell to his death.

They're kind of cute, but the anti-Force thing seems cheesy, especially if every enemy leader has one as a pet in an F&D game.

If you don't make Jedi into Superman, you won't need kryptonite.

Can't "like" this enough. Creations like the Ysalamiri (and similarly, the Vong) encompass much of what I despise about the EU.

I don't know, I rather liked them, and while I wasn't so big a fan of the Vong, I initially thought they fit, too. When the Force is such a central thing, and COULD make its users substantially more powerful than everyone else (hence the power creep of various other systems), there sort of needed to be the one thing that could one-up it, like the lightsaber miraculously having one, and then umpteen, substance it couldn't cut through, like a hot knife through butter. That it was only in one place, and was impractical to use, to some extent, made it better. As for the Vong, at least they weren't another enemy with the Force, or the Emperor Reborn for the fourth time. By their end, I entirely agree that they had worn out their welcome.

In the rules for this game, however, the Force is hardly that OP, though, so it doesn't scream "these characters are cheese, and need a limiter!" The XP costs, and the relative inaccessibility of the only talent that can increase FR, cover that base comfortably. So, you don't need the snakes, except as an NPC one-off, and by the time you might get to Vong, there are plenty of full Jedi you need to build, again, too; you had to let that happen. My opinions, of course.

Those little creepers can be very fun... espacially if you don´t use them as a "real part" of the BBEG.

e.g. Imagine you´ve got some gangster overlord with the habit of taking exotic pets, may be having an entire minagerie in his Skyscraping Ultracomplex. Set the final encounter in this menagerie and during the fight let the enemy draw close to our little lizardry friends, and right in when our force wielding heroes come lightsaberswinging in tell them they just lost the connection of the force and fell dizzy and disoriented (giving them setbacks and upgrades)

Of course nether the players nor the evil gangster know anything about the anti-forcepower of the lizards, but that way you could let the evil escape and give the players a mysterium of what happened this time to them.

But I wouldn´t recomment to let every BBEG having those little bastards... except your playing a Thrawn related campaign... since he packed his ship full of them...

They're kind of cute, but the anti-Force thing seems cheesy, especially if every enemy leader has one as a pet in an F&D game.

If you don't make Jedi into Superman, you won't need kryptonite.

Can't "like" this enough. Creations like the Ysalamiri (and similarly, the Vong) encompass much of what I despise about the EU.

Well, with the Ysalamari, they served a plot purpose in their original appearance far beyond nerfing Force users, namely letting Thrown grow his cloned stormtroopers in record time. And from what I understand, Timothy Zahn never intended the little critters to show up nearly as often as they did, and certainly not to be used as an anti-Jedi tool, even going so far as to have all the ones at Mount Whatsit get blown up so that the Force users could have their big fight at the end.

I do agree on the Vong, and good riddance to that rubbish.

To quoth Papa Zahn himself (from the 20th Anniversary annotated edition of Heir to the Empire ):

Quote

One of the tricky things about writing Star Wars (or any other shared media work) is to not only keep track of what was done in the movies, but also keep track of what wasn't done. If something that could have been useful wasn't done, it means there must have been a good reason why not.

The ysalamiri are a good example. A creature that can block Jedi abilities should have been used all over the place by throughout the movies by anti-Jedi forces. . . unless they were unreliable, difficult to find, difficult to use, et cetera. To be on the safe side, I invoked two of those limiting parameters: the creatures are relatively unknown (the Jedi would hardly broadcast their existence, after all), and they're hard to get off their trees without killing them.

Now, the latter is really only placed in a throwaway line of Karrde's, where he offers some of his people to show Pellaeon's men the art of safely removing ysalamiri from their branches, stating that the technique isn't terribly difficult, but really does need to be demonstrated. Then, in pretty much the next breath, he tells Mara that the main benefit is having his people watching Pellaeon's people from the moment they land to the moment they lift off, and as we all know, Karrde's main passion is knowledge, so this bit can come off as a smokescreen. But you take it as Word of Zahn that ysalamiri are very difficult to remove from Myrkr's trees without killing them, so they'll be vanishingly rare in the galaxy as a whole.

But yes, if the Prequels did anything right, they showed that "Jedi" does not equal "invincible superman." Luke, Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Anakin are so blasted impressive because they're main characters, not because they're Jedi. So ysalamiri shouldn't be needed to counter Jedi characters in general, because by the time they're obnoxiously powerful their foes should be, as well.

Still, as a rare trick, having a significant villain have a portable ysalamiri nutrient frame would be cool, forcing the players to use different techniques to defeat him. And I agree on the "engagement" range idea, to a point. One of the other things about ysalamiri is their ability to "reinforce" each other, creating much larger bubbles together. One ysalamiri can't cover a whole squad (or not much more than that, and only if they're cuddled up close), but a dozen could probably comfortably hold a platoon. However many ysalamiri Thrawn had in Mount Tantiss (one per Spaarti cylinder, and while there's no hard count, it was "hundreds" of cylinders) was enough to block the Force over the entire mountain and "much of the surrounding area."

In the campaign I'm currently GMing, only one NPC has access to ysalamiri and they're a relatively reclusive religious/political leader who holds that the galaxy would be a much better place if no one was Force-Sensitive.

They're old, and was once a Jedi, so their whole space station base is covered with ysalamiri, most of which have been bred there and are actually attached to the former Jedi in question (they're a Neti, and I've been playing around which what the species can do), who is spread out across the whole station. As a result, the entire place is a bubble of Force negation, and has been for some time. It only really works because the NPC in question pretty much stays put, though that may be about to change.

Basically, it's heavily implied it's hard to find ysalamiri, and if I was going to have NPCs use them, I'd have to have a decent reason in terms of backstory, etc, to explain how they know about it.

On 4/23/2016 at 7:33 AM, thelastcantina said:

The Ysalamiri are such an interesting creation in the EU Thrawn Trilogy books ... but ... would you include them in your campaign?

Their rarity, difficulty to obtain, and fragility make them an intriguing option to include in very small doses...

What I'm curious about is the "range." I was thinking they exert a bubble that goes perhaps to Engaged range, but not any further. It's enough to be a personal bubble, but not to say shield off a squad or a leader AND their minions...

Again, I think the criteria here is:

- Incredibly Rare

- Small doses

- Complete powers described in the books

- Range at Engaged or closer

Any thoughts?

I already included them in my campaign. Someone who later had the PCs steal an experimental bacta tank (aka spartii clone cylinder) previously had them obtain a ysalamir, after they obtained a 200 year old blood oath dagger. To get the ysalamir they needed the help of Talon Kardre, who did not reveal the secret of safely harvesting them, but first they had to do a job for him, corporate espionage (steal insider info for Kardre to use on the galactic stock exchange) against a gowix computers facility on corellia

I am not sure why this is even a discussion, as the profile is in the core book.

Probably to get an idea if they are mechanically sound, not too cheesy, and if they'll tick off characters who used XP on Force powers, too much, also if they can be easily included. Age of Rebellion also included the Praetor class (micro-Super) Star Destroyer; that doesn't mean it's automatically a great idea to just include in any game.

As I've said, I've always been a fan of the little critters, and especially now, with the Force (stupidly) effecting things in critical ways, that it never did, before, I like the idea of other things having an influence on it, too. If you are familiar with Warhammer 40K, you know about Psykers, and the shenanigans they can cause, even before including those they don't do intentionally, like blowing up, or accidentally summoning a daemon, when Perils of the Warp happens. Because of Psykers, they also have Blanks; the Psyker "off-switch", if you will, able to shut them down, or at least to an extent, if they are close enough. When I was looking at the rules for Inquisitors, one of the first thoughts I had was "where it says Force powers, you might occasionally sub in one of these", as a way to harass the Force-using players. Certainly not every time, every NPC; even Thrawn was pretty much the only one who ever used one, for the most part. In that book, with C'Baoth having his "wizarding Jedi" turned all the way up to eleven, I'm not sure how else people expect Thrawn would've obtained his aide, without becoming a mindslave.

I had a player once outright ask me if he could get ahold of an Ysalamiri. I had to refer to Dave Filoni's comments on re-introducing Thrawn to the canon, that something shouldn't be able to block the Force like that, since the Force is in all things in the Star Wars galaxy, it's part of life itself.

To me, the little lizard is a cheap-shot to players or characters with powers and you can find other creative ways of dealing with the Jedi around the corner than just a power nullifier, including just overwhelming them with an Imperial garrison.

If.... If I ever were to include them into my games, I would just give them the suppress power which would dampen powers to an extent but wouldn't necessarily outright cancel all abilities automatically.

Well, Zahn also says in the 10th Anniversary annotations that he got a lot of flak for the "push back the Force" explanation, and described that it isn't really what ysalamiri are doing. That's just Thrawn's explanation, and while he's a brilliant mind, he does not experience or understand the Force. So his explanation is flawed. Zahn doesn't go on to state exactly how he intends ysalamiri to work, but it stands to reason that ysalamiri are less "creating bubbles where the Force ceases to exist" and more "jamming" the Force in a localized area, preventing people from accessing it. It should be noted that, while it is theorized ysalamiri evolved this ability to hide from vornskrs, who hunt through the Force, vornskrs on Myrkr almost always went straight for Luke Skywalker, indicating their ability to essentially sense a being's Force Rating was intact. This happened in the exact same book ysalamiri were first introduced, giving the reader a big honking clue that Thrawn's explanation was, at the very least, inadequate. If ysalamiri evolved the ability to "push back" the Force, how could vornskrs have evolved the ability to essentially ignore that ysalamiri create zones where the Force doesn't exist? If it's simple "jamming" on the other hand, it's entirely conceivable that vornskrs have evolved a way pierce the jamming.