Class Feature Friday: Discorporation Faculty (Nanocyte Faculty)
With the new Tech Revolution book came a new class to Starfinder, the nanocyte! This tanky combat class has a nanomachine colony integrated into their body, granting them many benefits that such a symbiotic relationship can bring, ranging from obscuring themselves with clouds of nanites to creating weaponry out of nanomachines, and more.
Nanocytes also specialize in faculties, which are more elaborate than the one-note knack abilities, representing a suite of tricks that their nanomachines are particularly good at.
The first of these faculties, which we are focused on today, is discorporation!
One of the core defensive abilities of the nanocyte class is their ability to rapidly break down and rebuild their bodies to either harden against attack, or open up temporary holes in their bodies to let attacks pass through unhindered. While viscerally disturbing, those with the discorporation faculty take this even further, able to break down their body at will.
Such discorporators seem to melt or evaporate at will, and almost seem more like a swarm of nanites able to adopt a humanoid form than they do a living being with a very meticulous ability to take them apart and put them back together again while maintaining their consciousness.
Indeed, that seems to be what sets these nanocytes apart from their peers, since their consciousness seems more integrated into the nanites themselves much more so than others, to say nothing of how advanced they are to be able to remember and rebuild their shape so easily.
Such nanocytes might be insidious infiltrators and assassins, or they might simply be elusive combatants, or even simply explorers that can get into nearly anywhere.
Rather than try to escape damage, discorporators can unleash a spray of nanites from their wounds to fill the air with a cloud similar to one they might have created deliberately, albeit lasting mere moments, though perhaps long enough for them to escape or get into a better position.
The iconic ability of this faculty, however, allows them to break down into a liquid-like form, slithering through small spaces and being resistant to physical damage, but losing many of the benefits of limbs, speech, and so on.
Eventually, they also learn to spray their nanites while also escaping damage reflexively, and they can instantly liquify parts of their body to avoid the effects of wounding weapons, reforming and merging the damaged parts nearly instantly.
More powerful discorporating nanocytes can achieve a flying, gas-like state, becoming resistant or immune to many physical ailments while it lasts, and are hard to disperse.
The most powerful of these can discorporate and form a sheath shell around an ally similar to what nanocytes normally do on their own, providing all manner of useful protection for hours at a time, though they can also form limbs to create nanomachine weapons and help fight back. However, doing so destabilizes their sheath form, reducing the time they can remain covering an ally like so.
This faculty works well with pretty much any nanocyte build, allowing them to enter a mobile and resistant state, while also providing reflexive cover and the ability to shield another at high levels, so with that, you can do things like combine it with the infestation faculty to deal damage to nearby foes when you get hit, combine it with effects that bolster the cloud array, or provide new abilities to the sheath array if you expect to get to high level. Regardless, it is quite useful for any utility, stealth, and defensive build.
More so than any other nanocyte faculty, the question of how much of these beings is still mortal and how much is just nanomachines comes to mind. Some might be more likely to refer to themselves as “We” than other nanocytes, but not all of them. Certainly they are more familiar with how their own bodies fit together than most others, akin to those who regularly use polymorph abilities.
An unknown verthani intruder was detected not long before the assassination of Magistrate Verga, but no trace of them can be found, and no immediate escape route was available… that is until the party runs a sweep for nanomachine signatures, finding traces of them leading into the ventilation.
Strange solar flares and radiation are detected emanating from the surface of a distant world. When approached, explorers find the source to be a solar fey called hulsa, who is obsessively blasting the landscape with solar fire. If politely asked why, they reveal that a curious figure stole a relic from them and vanished into a mass of nanomachines that escaped underground to parts unknown. Unable to track the thief, the fey has been trying to melt a path to follow ever since, though they have certainly gotten very far away by now.
Nina Vashi needs the party’s help in taking down the corporation that gave her the symbiotic nanites that now live in her body. While the machines protect her and give her unprecedented control over her own body, she has seen first hand that her particular batch was built upon a foundation of blood, and she aims to hold them accountable, as well as stop their retrieval squads once and for all.
