Hi everyone

i'm about to planning next adventure and probably it will bring PC to Tapani Sector, hosted into a Gala with several nobles and rich people. There will be also some Lightfoil Duelists. Of course something will go bad and they could be in the need of combat. Due to their cover they probably will be with little-to-no weapons, and sure no lightsaber with them, but the Jedi(s) can easily access to Lightfoil

Lightfoil , are basically retro-ingeneered lightsaber derivates, less powerfull and lacking some special lightsaber qualities. So i'm guessing what would be the stats?
I think a flat [damage 4, crit 2, pierce 5 defensive] is a good guess.
It would be used with Lightsaber skills, and for semplicity sake i will guess Jedi can use all their talents except for reflect/deflect (or they can deflect but not reflect?)

what do you think about?

For a quick and simple version, I'd suggest to just use the shoto lightsaber stats, swapping the rank of Accurate with a rank of Defensive, and dropping the Breach quality entirely.

I probably wouldn't go with that many ranks of Pierce, since at that level it's not much different than Breach 1 given that most characters rarely get a soak above 6 without some serious investment in Brawn, armor, and talents. Pierce 2 will probably suffice against your typical saber rake. At Damage 5 and Pierce 2, that's a pretty solid damage rating.

If you look at the lightsaber creation rules in Endless Vigil, one of the examples for the "precision lightsaber" is the lightfoil. The precision lightsaber is basically just the shoto.

Prior to Endless Vigil , here's what I came up with for lightfoils as part of my (stalled, because some fool put only 24 hours in a day) Lords of the Expanse conversion:

Only major suggestion Nytwyng that I'd make is add a note that a lightfoil can't make use of Lightsaber crystal attachments, i.e. no swapping out the lightfoil's shoddy kyber-substitute crystal for a proper kyber crystal.

That and perhaps lower the price tag, since 10K is the same cost of a lightsaber will a fully modded Ilum crystal. Perhaps drop it to somewhere around 5K, which still puts the device into the realm of "rich kid's toy."

Good idea on the crystal restriction.

The price is taken straight from the original Lords of the Expanse data:

16 hours ago, kelpie said:

Hi everyone

i'm about to planning next adventure and probably it will bring PC to Tapani Sector, hosted into a Gala with several nobles and rich people. There will be also some Lightfoil Duelists. Of course something will go bad and they could be in the need of combat. Due to their cover they probably will be with little-to-no weapons, and sure no lightsaber with them, but the Jedi(s) can easily access to Lightfoil

Lightfoil , are basically retro-ingeneered lightsaber derivates, less powerfull and lacking some special lightsaber qualities. So i'm guessing what would be the stats?
I think a flat [damage 4, crit 2, pierce 5 defensive] is a good guess.
It would be used with Lightsaber skills, and for semplicity sake i will guess Jedi can use all their talents except for reflect/deflect (or they can deflect but not reflect?)

what do you think about?

I used a basic lightsaber with pierce 5 instead of breach 1

I'd kick around the Vicious quality and see if it plays ok. Saber Rakes tended to have cybernetic prosthetic hands and such A LOT.....

I'd stick it with some kind of negative quality, especially if it's the kind that was made by the Saber Rakes and not an actual Jedi Knight (in other words, just about every Lightfoil ever made). Inferior would be a good choice, or possibly some special quality that means that every time the wielder rolls 3 Threat or a Despair the blade "dies", just like the D6 description.

1 hour ago, Krieger22 said:

I'd stick it with some kind of negative quality, especially if it's the kind that was made by the Saber Rakes and not an actual Jedi Knight (in other words, just about every Lightfoil ever made). Inferior would be a good choice, or possibly some special quality that means that every time the wielder rolls 3 Threat or a Despair the blade "dies", just like the D6 description.

Yep. That's in my build. The GM can use 2 threat or 1 despair to make the blade die. Fixing it requires 2 hours and an Average Mechanics check to repair.

2 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

Yep. That's in my build. The GM can use 2 threat or 1 despair to make the blade die. Fixing it requires 2 hours and an Average Mechanics check to repair.

2 threat is harsh, a typical heavy blaster pistol takes 3 threat.

1 minute ago, EliasWindrider said:

2 threat is harsh, a typical heavy blaster pistol takes 3 threat.

Maybe.

But a typical heavy blaster pistol is a mass-produced item from a manufacturer that designed the weapon from the ground up. Meanwhile, a Tapani lightfoil is reverse-engineered from an intricate item that originally included processes and abilities that couldn't be discerned from the reverse-engineering and were largely unavailable to those building them from the reverse-engineered schematics.

11 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

Maybe.

But a typical heavy blaster pistol is a mass-produced item from a manufacturer that designed the weapon from the ground up. Meanwhile, a Tapani lightfoil is reverse-engineered from an intricate item that originally included processes and abilities that couldn't be discerned from the reverse-engineering and were largely unavailable to those building them from the reverse-engineered schematics.

I believe the saber rakes had hundreds to thousands of years of trial and error to get it right though.

14 minutes ago, EliasWindrider said:

I believe the saber rakes had hundreds to thousands of years of trial and error to get it right though.

Nah, its a fairly recent fad. At least according to the original sector guide it says the first saber rakes used actual sabers. The Empire showed up pretty fast and confiscated them, but by that point sabers/foils were cool and half the sector's spoiled young nobility had their own knock-offs...

1 hour ago, Ghostofman said:

Nah, its a fairly recent fad. At least according to the original sector guide it says the first saber rakes used actual sabers. The Empire showed up pretty fast and confiscated them, but by that point sabers/foils were cool and half the sector's spoiled young nobility had their own knock-offs...

The lightfoil tradition dates back to the Old Sith Wars (specifically the Great Sith War/Exar Kun War) when the Tapani house of Mecetti began distributing sith teachings throughout the ranks. The original lightfoils of the Mecrosa Order were on par with a true lightsaber but after the Cleansing of the Nine Houses the lightfoils were of lower quality. To claim it is a recent fad is to imply 4000 years in a small period of time for humans.

19 minutes ago, BipolarJuice said:

The lightfoil tradition dates back to the Old Sith Wars (specifically the Great Sith War/Exar Kun War) when the Tapani house of Mecetti began distributing sith teachings throughout the ranks. The original lightfoils of the Mecrosa Order were on par with a true lightsaber but after the Cleansing of the Nine Houses the lightfoils were of lower quality. To claim it is a recent fad is to imply 4000 years in a small period of time for humans.

Well I was referencing the original text, which says it happened well after Palpatine's Empire was around. Sounds like SWToR or something decided to get in on the action...

38 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Well I was referencing the original text, which says it happened well after Palpatine's Empire was around. Sounds like SWToR or something decided to get in on the action...

Which original text would that be?

12 minutes ago, BipolarJuice said:

Which original text would that be?

Lords of the Expanse GM guide from the original boxed set.

18 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Lords of the Expanse GM guide from the original boxed set.

Ah, there you have it, I've never read Lords of the Expanse, I was running off Evil Never Dies (formerly on Hyperspace) and some of the Wizards' stuff.

1 hour ago, BipolarJuice said:

Ah, there you have it, I've never read Lords of the Expanse, I was running off Evil Never Dies (formerly on Hyperspace) and some of the Wizards' stuff.

Lords of the Expanse Gamemaster's Guide, page 6:

On 22.5.2017 at 4:19 AM, Ghostofman said:

Well I was referencing the original text, which says it happened well after Palpatine's Empire was around. Sounds like SWToR or something decided to get in on the action...

Nah, the Sith War and the whole Exar Khun story is pretty old, WEG times actually, they even made jedi academy source books.

2 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

Nah, the Sith War and the whole Exar Khun story is pretty old, WEG times actually, they even made jedi academy source books.

Yeah, but the WEG Lords of the Expanse boxed set was the first time the Saber Rakes (the entire Tapani sector actually) was ever mentioned.

As usual the details got polluted as later authors and such repurposed it for their own purposes, often for little reason beyond the misconception that citing something else would make their work more relevant... think of all the times Thrawn's name was envoked for no reason....

With regards to the saber rakes and quality of lightfoils...

The original lightfoils were crafted by the Sith aligned Mecrosa Order, but said Order wound up getting purged long before the Galactic Civil War. The lightfoils they constructed were of similar quality to a Jedi lightsaber, as they had access to both the Force and all the technical data the Jedi Order had on building lightsabers.

The saber rakes is in galactic terms a fairly recent subculture, one that is frowned up by Imperial authorities since it was reminiscent of the Jedi Knights. The lightfoils that the saber rakes employed were reverse-engineered from Jedi lightsabers recovered in the wake of the near-destruction of House Pelagia, which itself had strong ties to the Jedi Order. Since the saber rakes didn't have access to the Force, to proper kyber crystals, or to generations' worth of technical data on the finer points of lightsaber construction, their lightfoils are in effect third-rate knock-offs, like those katanas you find at oriental-themed curio shops in your local shopping mall. Said curio store quality katana is a weapon, but it's really more of a club with an edge and a sharp point than a proper sword, and is more likely to break if you try to use it in an actual swordfight.

So essentially, there's two types of lightfoils, those used by the Sith Mecrosa that are comparable to Jedi lightsabers, and those created by a bunch of jaded/bored rich kids that wanted a cool new toy to play with and weren't that particular on the level of equality said toy had.

As for the "fizzing out" aspect of the Tapani lightfoils, I'd say putting it a Despair or 3 Threat result would is sufficient, and that 2 Threat makes it far too likely that it'll crap out; going by the lore said weapons are finicky, but they're not quite that finicky. Though for my Ways of the Force file, my own take on the Tapani lightfoil made it so that if the duelist used the Parry or Reflect talent, then the attacker could choose to spend 3 advantage or a Triumph to overload the weapon, rendering it useless until an Average Mechanics check was made to fix the damage.