Hc Svnt Dracones
Hc Svnt Dracones (or HSD) is an RPG made by and for furries. Despite saying multiple times in the beginning that this is a Transhumanist RPG a la Eclipse Phase, the fluff, crunch and accessories make it very obvious that this RPG was made solely so you could make your fursona. The cries of "but we're really just trying to help you get in touch with your human side guys!" get drowned out by how awful humanity is depicted, and by how much time they spend jerking off (literally and figuratively) the furries as bastions of the future. They partially write this off as the "spirit" of humanity getting corrupted. With Ayn Rand levels of shilling for the GLORIOUS CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY and an understanding of biology that would make your average high school graduate cringe, HSD shows little to no self-awareness and is solely focused on making furries. At least Ironclaw has decent enough crunch and fluff to justify the setting, and if you want you can swap out the furries for regular fantasy races too. HSD does not have either saving grace.
There is a second edition of the book, which throws away most of the crunch (but not the fluff) of the first book after they realized that the crunch was horribly imbalanced shit, while cutting out a shit-ton of stuff (that was present in baseline 1E core book) to sell later as an additional "Mastered" rulebook. In case you needed a further reason to regard this RPG in horror, their website sells 3D Printed miniatures with realistic animal vaginas. God help us all.
The Fluff[edit | edit source]
This is mostly based off of stuff from the first edition. A fair warning: Sound&Silence expansion for 1E openly tells that a huge chunk of history as shown was a Megacorp propaganda to subdue the masses. Behind the scenes, things are as expected and/or way worse.
Sometime in the far future, humans make giant 3D printer bots that can crunch entire plots of land into materials, which allows for the rapid development of technology in the setting. Nevermind the amount of damage this would cause to the ecosystem. Eventually, every single Megacorp on Earth decides to give the collective governments the middle finger, and move to Mars so they can become GLORIOUS CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, UNIMPEDED BY THE WEIGHT OF GOVERNMENT. Ignore the fact that Mars was not terraformed at this point, they still need a source of food not beholden to Earth, and that Mars gets less sunlight - we have furries to make!
The first furry was made at a celebration of giving Earth the middle finger, much to the horror of everyone. The Mark I furry was an uplifted animal with human-level intelligence, genetically modified into a servitor-like obedience. This essentially made them a genetically modified slave-race. Justified outcries of morality and ethics arose immediately, as did reports of people fucking said slave race, because of course, they would try to fuck them. HSD implies that the reports of people fucking the Mark I furries was just drama stirred up by the media but then why even mention the reports in the first place? The collective governments of Earth immediately set out to deliver the banhammer to these abominations against nature right from the get-go, but they just so happen to be not fast enough, and the plans for the Mark I furry are sent elsewhere.
Offscreen, the governments of Earth get ready to go to war with the Megacorps, but their previous experimentation with a replica of non-Euclidean object from Europa (which already exploded a scientist and painted a bunch of sigils on the wall with the gore) ends up infecting their computer systems with, essentially, scrapcode that launches every single weapon of mass destruction, killing most of humanity in a super-sized ritual. Half of the Earth gets covered in weird blood-crystal stuff that outstretches towards the Moon, with a similar spire growing from the Moon too after blood demons wipe out the local colony (happens some time later).
Without the pesky governments around, the Megacorps get to cranking out more furries, because humanity is royally boned at this point. The Mark I furry plans are immediately discarded for the development of the Mark II furry. Dubbed the "vectors," they are made by taking human fetuses, and sticking animal bits on them which makes them better for reasons… yes I know the way genetics and immune systems work doesn't allow for this, shut up. Over time, with lots and lots of boning, the vectors become the dominant race of the setting, outnumbering humans and eventually fully supplanting them entirely. The final humans of the setting got murdered trying to see how the Earth was doing, finding out that the blood-crystal stuff was sentient and very happy about fresh blood-sacks.
This leads us into the present day, where the vectors have collectively grown to be much, much better than humans! Except not really. The bird-type vectors (fiasco with Owls aside) nearly got hunted to extinction by the cat-type vectors over the span of THREE different race-wars. The wars were 'justified' by the vectors succumbing to their animalistic genetic tendencies, falling into preconceived human stereotypes. This doesn't make any goddamn sense because genetically speaking, the vectors are more human than animal (as gets noted in-universe by some Vectors, even), and it undermines their supposed superiority if they start genociding each other due to their animal genes. Add onto this the fact that human media depicting animals is extremely rare and civilized Laterals (feral-bodied Vectors) are very much a thing (and a majority of Laterals, even), and it becomes another instance of the author writing with his fursona in mind.
If you aren't convinced that the fluff is kind of just a flimsy excuse to inject the author's Magical Realm into an RPG, every Vector has a built-in safety made when there were still humans around to give a damn. Whenever a human voice speaks to them, a Vector will fall into a lull-like trance that makes them highly impressionable (originally introduced for super-speed learning, in case replacement workers are needed). Ignoring the fact that you would think that a sufficiently advanced race with command over biotechnology would cut something like this out (of course, corps being corps and this doubling as a way of accelerated learning through Neuroplex, they've decided to leave it as-is, so beancounters will be happy about getting the workforce trained faster and way, way cheaper than it'd be normally), this rarely has any major impact above someone using devices that play human media (which are extremely rare) as makeshift date-rape drugs or stealing shit after commanding owners not to notice it (Monsters, however, use it rather often for arranging 'accidents' or just manipulating furries as they need). Not to mention that Hemivectors can actually reproduce the effect with no tech needed.
The remaining humans in the setting (The ones abandoned on Earth), used the same gene-splicing tech to make the monstrous gene-constructed soldiers (in a 'creatively' named Monster Project), because… well, why wouldn't you make yourself armies of soldiers who are immune to radiation and inhospitable shit and who know how to handle firearms from their very birth? The only side effect was they universally came out looking like eldritch horrors and had a period of total dependence on handlers. After humans died out, the remaining Monsters decided that they were going to chill on Earth and live with advanced technology, and murder any of the furries who came to check out their home. This only slightly backfires when that bloody crystal eldritch god makes living on Earth untenable for them by the means of shit-ton of blood daemons that can make more of themselves by diving into their victims, leading them to covertly slip off Earth and quietly start murdering furries, taking their shit, hiding in well hidden outposts and, on one occasion, secretly taking control of an entire corporation with no one in it knowing.
On a side note, one furry megacorp (Transcendent Technologies Incorporated) managed to kill everyone in Sol 15 times over (time travel helped) and also gave the evil eldritch god an easy and reliable way to make daemons out of anyone's blood. They've also used biodata from corrupted race of a different eldritch god to make all their tech, which (when it doesn't literally eat its own users/crew, which it does rather often) starts to work really fucky in presence of corrupted bioprobes (which they've also pretty much gifted to this eldritch god). And they still keep quiet on all of that, while continuing to make shit worse in half-hearted attempts to fix their mistakes.
And with Mastered released, shit's gotten even worse. Bloody crystal eldritch god is adapting, making new kinds of blood demons (now includes ones with antimateriel guns, ones that can erase knowledge from the universe and ones that do the whole "deal with the Devil" thing), mad AI prepares to upend the entire Sol in the "ends justifies the means" campaign, the different eldritch god (that was already busy fucking the rest of galaxy over) returns to Sol for a bit and, in general, the happiest ending in sight seems to be by another batch of mad AIs pulling a biotransference on everyone and allowing them to fuck off.
The Crunch (1st Edition)[edit | edit source]
When you make a character, you get to choose three things, based on what kind of furry you want to be: Family (what general class of furry you want to be EX: Canidae for dogs), species (self-explanatory), and morphism (Body shape - this is how you become a taur). After that, you get to assign classes of dice to four stats: Mind, Body, Community, and Economy. There are five categories of substats that sort of act like skills, which determine the number of dice you get to roll for a particular check: Dexterity, Resilience, Acuity, Strength, and Presence. This seems innocent enough, until you start to think about just how much overlap there is between the three "physical" stats. After all, there isn't a ton of difference between Mind:Acuity, which is about sensing things, and Body:Acuity, which is about feeling things with your sensory organs.
The last column, the Economy stat, is the thing that makes the entire system go out the window. Ignoring the idea of substats in economy making little to no sense, the Economy stat is a measure of your Ledger, which is a thing that grants you money every so often by simply...doing nothing. That's right, the biggest incentive to go out and go on an adventure as a murderhobo, cold hard cash (or credits in this case) is handed to you for free by sitting on your ass and doing literally nothing. There is therefore no incentive to do anything in the setting, especially when combined with the fact that the Corps are mechanically able to retcon anything that happened as something completely minor. You will never make an impact on the story, the setting, or anything else in furry space taking the game as written. Truly, in the grimdarkness of the far future, there are only furries.
By min-maxing the Economy stat, you make it very, very simple to buy pretty much anything you want while still having points to allocate so you aren't a withered, anti-social husk of a furry. Within a few sessions of doing nothing, it is entirely capable to buy the strongest weapon in the game, with a set of power armor to lift said weapon, and then absolutely trivialize every single combat you might want to get involved with. It is no surprise that the Economy stat was totally scrapped from character generation in the second edition.
TLDR[edit | edit source]
If, for some reason, you want to play a furry RPG, play Ironclaw instead. Or Albedo, which is way more OG.
If, for some reason, you also want to play a sci-fi game set in the burnt out remnants of the solar system with megacorps running everything into the ground, or one of your players is a furry and keeps insisting on HSD, just tell them they can be a furry in Eclipse Phase. Or, you know, any other sci-fi RPG. Fuck, Starfinder could possibly scratch their itch.
If you don't heed our advice and play something else, and you desperately, desperately want to play in this setting, with its constant unstable rules and half the missing content saved for the second edition, be prepared for the following:
- Shitty Player builds that will trivialize everything you could throw at them. Seriously, a semi-optimized (not even minmaxed) Lateral with a semi-basic melee weapon will eviscerate the shit out of basic mooks on Lvl 1. And something like Slagcoil will wreck the balance even further with how it deals more damage the more enemies are armored (aside from living armor, which can eat enemies on its own instead).
- Players being more than capable to Party-wipe by using the stupid psychic system in the game (Literally worse than psykers). Gets a bit better in 2E, when it's no longer a fucking Vortex Grenade equivalent and, even in the case of worst outcome, Peril-affected can choose, whom to drag into hell with them (no more than 10 total). However, a possibility of Whisper Event happening instead makes up for that little improvement.
- Stupid grenade rules.
- Stupid map-layouts, since it's hex-mapped.
- Tons of reused art from previous rulebooks and supplements.
- Wacky page layout in the 2E core book, with invisible text sections duped from other pages (at least, in the PDF). God have mercy on you if you decide to play raw 1E. However, keeping the 1E books nearby might make sense even if you play 2E, because Mastered expansion still assumes you have all the lorebits either present in previously-bought books or memorized.
- Mastered expansion releasing with ton of bought-out art (some of which looks like stock drawings) and still no weapons for tanks and APCs. Also, no rules for Ra's agents, despite bioship failure table's "True Nature Revealed" result implying there should be some actual rulebits. Oh, and author's Mary Sue snake character present as a "Noteworthy Population of Sol".
- And finally, what a Socialist thinks a future run by corporations will look like.