Spacers, gear up! Today’s update is a special one - we’re diving deep into the spotlight for the intruders! But before we reveal all the details, let’s take a moment to go through the stretch goals you’ve unlocked recently!
$ 700000: NEW CHARACTER! THE PROFESSIONAL!
Huang Daoming served in the Chinese Military before transferring to the Chinese Space Program. He joined the Coventry’s mission as a result of an agreement between China’s government and the board of the United Corporations.
Each new Character comes with an Oversized Character card and a unique Progression Tree, broadening your character creation options!
SPECIAL UNLOCK: Robodog Joins the Crew!
The votes are in, and the community has spoken - Robodog takes the win! This loyal, high-tech companion will officially join Enormity as a support gear!
Thank you to everyone who participated in the poll and shared your love for our futuristic furry friend.
Community unlock: New Specialization: Combat Body Engineer from Ophir!
The Combat Body Engineer has won! Not because the other top ideas were worse (we loved for example Bio-Technician from 15jthomson, Void Architect from Evan Kelley and War Correspondent from 13th Monkey), but because some of these concepts already overlap with stuff we’ve got in there (just check the Snatcher Spotlight or the Grey Death Expansion)! However, there are interesting threads in each of these that we didn’t think of, and they’ll compliment those we already had nicely – in other words, you’ll see your ideas reflected too!
Now, onto the Combat Body Engineer. This is how Ophir described them: “New technology allows now to wireless telemonitor another's midbrain and influence it. Originally a therapeutic device to monitor and assist the rehabilitation of head trauma, stroke and several neurological patients, the army proceeded with its own R&D (of course). Now a Combat Body Engineer (CBE) can support and assist his fellows combatants. Monitoring their basic homeostasis and gives the midbrain orders to affect and regain that balance, by secreting hormones, regulating bodily and cerebral pH, shifting blood supply via constricting certain vasoactive pathway and dilating others. Attenuating stress by releasing endorphins, raising Adrenalin via Adrenal Gland's medulla, raise systemic coagulability when injured (beware not to induce a blood clot in the wrong place as a side effect!), etc. The CBE, or "Puppet Master" by those who dislike the thought of being "mind hacked", is a unique team member who can monitor and assist up to 3 other team members (but not himself, as the Handler system implanted in him can affect others with implants in their midbrain, but cannot monitor/control its own midbrain).”
This idea is right up our alley, and will add additional dimensions to our body sleeves system.
With this unlock, the Combat Body Engineer specialization is added to each Engineer Division character, broadening their progression options!
BODY SLEEVES SYSTEM
Body sleeves system? What’s that you ask? It’s our meta-solution for ‘player lives’ within gameplay mechanics. In Enormity, your Spacer can die. When that happens, they eject a consciousness black box. This black box is then used to 3d bio print a new body for you in the EPR (Emergency Printer Room). You can do it as many times you want, provided you have enough bio filament for the printer. Which you don’t. Maybe there’s some more aboard the Shepherd…
Community Unlock: New Variant Intruder: The Security Deck Grin
Variant Intruders are the middle ground between a completely new Intruder and a new Intruder level. Think of them as unique specimens, but for the entire Location ecology – every baseline Intruder there will be different, will have new stats, traits or protocols. Not so baseline anymore!
Usually, a variant Intruder is stronger than its baseline counterpart. That’s the case with the Security Deck Grin. They have the same base stats, but are much more alert (they have a stronger Noise Die progression), much more deadly in combat (each attack causes more damage), and are quicker to replace lost numbers in their pack.
Oh, and they’ve got a stronger version of Terrifying (you REALLY don’t want to face them from adjacency!) and Never Stood a Chance, which I will leave for you to discover – because the Security Deck Grin variant has been enabled for the TTS Demo!
Community Unlock: ENORMITY TTS DEMO: SCENARIO 3 UNLOCKED
That’s right, it’s already there, unlocked! You can take all the overpowered Suits, Weapons and Gear you’ve earned in Scenario 1 (Dark Side of the Sun), and Scenario 2 (the Mothman Incursion, aka boss battle) into Scenario 3 and smash those Automas to bits!
If you want a more challenging scenario, to see how frantic and deadly Enormity can be, take a Recon Run instead of the Stealth one (or, if you’re a masochist, go for the Combat Run or Overrun, with the caveat that that last one is very experimental!).
Alternatively, try the Scenario with level II Automas or level II Grin, or the newly added variant Security Deck Grin! The possibilities of how you can play Enormity are aplenty!
GRAND INTRUDER SPOTLIGHT!
Hey guys and gals! I’m told there’s a hunger among you for an in-depth dive into Enormity, like our old ‘endless ATO scrolls’! Some of you would like to hear more about the game’s mechanics, others want juicy lore, and some would just like to check out the miniatures up close!
Why not kill three Intruders with one stone – or a well-placed rifle burst? Let’s look at all the alien, bizarre and horrific things that you’ll face; those already in the Core Box, those just within reach (looking at you, Snatcher!), and those that we’ll probably save for a reprint campaign! :D
Before we dive in, a couple of words on the naming conventions. Mothman, Slender, Journeyman, Headless, Goatmen. Those don’t sound like alien species names do they? We wanted to ground the story of Enormity in something real. Astronauts making first contact with something unknown wouldn’t really know what it’s called – or if it even has a name. No. To make sense of the things they’re seeing, to ‘tame them’, they would use references, labels, names they are familiar with. Urban legends and cryptids are a good reference point.
When a Spacer sees a giant, winged thing with glowing eyes and a distinct shape, they will call it a Mothman, based on that superficial similarity.
In fact, the thing has little in common with the Mothman. It’s not even a creature, but some kind of environmental suit. But that name… it gives some comfort. Some familiarity.
Whether humanoid or not, the alien beings of Enormity are truly alien, frightening and weird. This familiarity to Earth-based myths serves to highlight the alienness; if everything was strange, nothing would be. But the uncanny? The slightly skewed, the not-quite-right? The thing that exists just outside reality, but close enough to mimic it, that is the most terrifying.
The Mothman
I’ve already hinted at the nature of this Intruder: it’s not a creature at all, but an alien EVA suit, or perhaps a starship, one of a much more intricate design and durability than anything Old Earth can come up with. On its solar sails, it crosses the stars, searching for, what? Scientific discoveries? Victims? Meaning?
The ‘Mothman’ has visited a star. Walked its photosphere. The shell withstood it. Its occupant, or occupants, that is a different matter. They met something there, and that something has laid its eggs inside them. Iridescent, radioactive eggs.
The Mothman is now driven by a maternal nesting instinct, conflated with some sort of religious zeal. What will it give birth to, if given the chance?
The Mothman is our first boss, themed around moth-like instincts and radioactivity. It uses ranged and zone attacks, the former to shoot radioactive beams at Spacers and the latter in conjunction with the Lure keyword that brings Spacers closer for maximum damage.
Radioactivity introduces a tertiary death mechanic (beyond normal damage and dying from Stress), putting even more pressure on you.
And, finally, throughout the boss battle, the Mothman consumes latent radioactivity to feed itself, or perhaps its unborn, blasphemous offspring. Once it has had enough, it will explode in a brilliant supernova, dealing staggering amounts of damage and radiation, and causing a subsequent blackout. You don’t want that.
The Mothman abhors all that is black and void, and will become hyperaggressive whenever in the presence of a slave to darkness, like the Slender, or its thralls, the Hollowed. There are legends of the Mothman creating its own servants – flaming Torched avatars of the sun – but those are just tall tales, from beyond the rim of the millionth star.
Hollowed
On the Shepherd, a quick death from a shot or claw is a mercy. If you’re less lucky, you may end up as the Hollowed. You will meet these pitiful creatures in the darkest parts of the ship, their mouths grotesquely agape, endlessly droning.
The Hollows serve the Slender which is in itself just an emanation of some Void Entity. Inside these slacked jaws, something akin to a black hole forms. They can, and will, devour everything.
There are many dangerous ‘subspecies’ of Hollows, chief among them the Bloater, a giant abomination, fat on life and light, ready to disgorge its gravity-crushed innards all over you. A rare sight is the Kosmonaught – a very old, tall Hollow, whose deformed spacesuit hints they once belonged to the Interkosmos Kosmicheskaya Programma of something called the Soviet Union, supposedly of Old Earth. You have not heard of such a thing.
Hollows hate light.
Slender
The Slender is what happens to a person if they stare into the eye of a black hole… and the black hole stares back. A Spacer, possibly of Earth origin, though with its body so warped it is hard to tell for certain, transformed into a grotesque being of darkness and immeasurable gravity.
The Slender stalks the corridors of the Shepherd, drawn to light and life, both of which it extinguishes with an unnerving, understated glee.
In battles, the Slender utilizes the grand force of a black hole’s gravity, as well as its elongated fleshy tentacles. The Slender moves through the ship with ease, unobstructed by doors and bulkheads. It moves when you cannot see it, disappears into the darkness only to reappear right next to you at the faintest sound.
Do not look straight at it. Ever.
You are not sure if a Slender can ever be killed definitely. Though it certainly leaves a corpse, at the moment of death its head implodes into a singularity, a final cruel parting gift you have to deal with, only for the creature to reappear later, in a different part of the ship, seemingly undamaged.
Some say the Slender serves a higher purpose, a higher entity, but there is no evidence to back these claims. Just stories told to one another out of fear and helplessness. There must be a purpose right? Nothing could spread such pain and misery without purpose. Right?
Automas
Space is hard. In that, it is hard to survive in space. To travel? To thrive? Almost impossible. Humanity has not evolved to inhabit the void between the stars. We did, however, create a form of artificial life that can.
AI.
Well, not true AI. True AI is banned by the churches, as well as the corporations – both know they would become obsolete once a real gen-AI would emerge. It’d be godlike. So no, not true AIs. VIs, virtual intelligences, somewhat confusingly called AI for commercial and marketing reasons.
VIs are enough. They mimic human behavior just enough for us to accept them, to use them, to sometimes fall in love with them, without them ever being a threat to our sense of superiority and uniqueness. And that’s not even counting the safeguards, in the form of the Actuated Three Laws of Robotics Ver. 1.53318 (with the “Zero Law” hotfix).
AIs, in their physical frames called Automatons, or Automas for short, have made conquest of the Sol System possible. They have made the Shepherd’s mission possible.
And now, they have malfunctioned. A mysterious infection has spread through the Automas of the Shepherd, from the lowly cleaning scuttler to the mighty loaders and armed security units. This alien fungi has done something to them; made them smarter, deadlier. Made them feel pain. It made them go mad.
The Automas of the Shepherd now roam its empty halls, hungry for food they cannot consume, asking existential questions and warring – with you, and with other Automas.
Has the fungi created true AI? Or has it only spread madness?
The Undead (UND Androids, series 3)
No, they are not undead, they were never alive to begin with. And UND Androids is quite the pleonasm, as UND stands for Ultimate Nanofabricated Droid. Supposedly, they are cutting edge VIs, as close to the gen-AI threshold as anyone has dared to tread.
They certainly look the part, with humanoid frames, and with perfect motor control and the latest quantum processors, they can perform the most sophisticated tasks, both menial and mental. Many rogue outfits on Old Earth used UNDs, especially those of the third generation, as assassins, strike units or security detail.
Some think it is a corpo lie. That the UNDs are not VI or AI at all, but rather resleeved human consciousnesses, reprogrammed only slightly to not remember what they once were. A horrible thought.
And one that becomes moot on the Shepherd. The UNDs here, either an unofficial part of its crew or a team sent by a third party shadow faction, have also been infected by the MG fungi. Their madness has manifested in a different way.
They want to become human, to the point of hunting spacers, wearing their skins as cloaks, skulls as headgear, eyes as good luck charms. Though the Coventry’s anthropologist sees in these actions some primitive form of tribal life, and spirituality, you see only grotesque murders.
The Undead hunt in squads and coordinate their tactics, they prefer long-ranged weapons, but move close for the kill, to not spoil the trophy.
Your fellow Spacers have reported unique ‘specimens’ in the field, like the old UND-2s, ‘the Terminators’ and the 4s, the Synths.
The Preacher
The Loader spider robot has been heavily used in the logistics industries and on remote missions, like that of the Shepherd. Their dual-brains, positioned somewhere between basic Automa and UND-levels of complexity, made them quite smart.
That was before the MG infection. Now… now the spider robot is on a different plane entirely – because although the size of a brain corelates to intelligence only mildly (to a value of 0.3-0.4), the loader’s brain is huge, and so is the fungi that overgrew it.
The Loader has found that elusive spark or, depending on the interlocutor, timid need for, divinity. It looked into the vastness of space and found god. Not yours. Not any one you know.
The Preacher is a very difficult opponent, as it utilizes a variety of combat tactics to dispose of its enemies. It’s fast, agile, and strong, can move on any surface and jump long distances, so it dominates the Spacers physically. It has access to additional mid- and long-range options through its tool arm variants.
However, its most potent weapon is psychological. The Preacher is a narcissist or psychopath with delusions of grandeur. Many follow its teachings of their own free will – many Automas, many UNDs, some Davids… and some humans.
Do not be swayed by its reasonable words or its fake miracles. It does not serve God. If anything, it is the devil itself.
The Grin
The Grin may be the ultimate shape of all organic and inorganic life, and all other matter, in the universe. It is grotesque and sickly. It is, for some unfathomable reason, the shape of giant fingers. You laugh, you cry, you wail as your body slowly starts to turn, to sprout digits. Why? Why fingers?!
You will never know. You will never understand. You will slowly turn into one of them, like everyone and everything before you.
All the while the things look at you with their eyeless scalps, grinning all the way around. Such a horrible wide grin.
The Grin come in all shapes and sizes. The lowly ones can be dispatched quickly, but they keep on coming and keep on evolving. Even so, there are unique breeds among them, like the extremely fast Longlegs or the terrible Mouther, spouting awful clacking mating calls, to draw in others.
However, deeper in the ship, you will meet…
Grin Praetorians
These monstrous Grin are larger, tougher and more aggressive than their smaller counterparts. Even one or two may be too much for your party to handle. They charge at you like bulls, gnawing at you with maws large than your heads.
That is not the most terrifying thing they do. The Praetorians are smart. They have a giant handpouch on their backs, into which they grab their victims, then drag them away into the darkness, never to be seen again. Better to just eject your consciousness black box and have it over with…
Another horrifying thing about the Praetorians is the sheer richness of their forms. They are truly varied, even more so than the normal Grin. The Fingerfin is a deadly predator that stings with its tail and crushes with its back. The Doublehead is an unstoppable force. And the Mimic. The Mimic walks upright’, and supposedly speaks.
Conductor
The Grin infestation converts everything: you, other Intruders, dead tissue, all organic and inorganic matter, from corpses to bulkheads. There is no discernible hierarchy among the Grin, no social structure to speak of, no herd behavior.
Yet, there is some malevolent intelligence moving in the background, sowing seeds of destruction, preaching the coming of the Outer Dark. Is it this… Conductor? Who knows. But the Conductor is the largest, ugliest and deadliest Grin you’ve faced. It is always accompanied by a retinue of baseline Grin and Praetorians, for once acting in unison.
The Conductor will give you no quarter in combat. It’s imposing size and strength will have you scrambling for shelter. However, whatever power drives the Grin transformation process, it emanates from this bipedal monstrosity in real time, changing anything, and anyone, that gets too close to the writhing nest of fingerlike-worms.
Journeyman
The universe is vast and unknowable. The human race is but a blip on the radar, to be eternally extinguished at any moment. There is a countless myriad of other races, species, civilizations, a million times older, who have come and gone.
Yet, others linger.
The Journeyman is a member of an unknown alien species. It wanders the stars and, however unlikely it seems at this point, is not outright hostile. If you leave it alone, it will let you live, too. Alas, your paths have to cross.
The Journeyman seems to be able to tap into one of the four fundamental forces of the universe: strong nuclear force. What this Intruder can do with it, if you weren’t people of science, you would call it atomic magic.
But it cannot be magic. No, certainly not. It’s just atoms. Interactions.
The Journeyman poses a hard challenge as it is one of the few true NHIs (Non-human Intelligences) – in other words, its devilishly smart. Not only that, it has an arsenal of advanced alien weaponry (something you’d like to get your hands on) and that grasps on one of the fundamental pillars of creation.
Atomic magic.
Snatcher
The Snatcher is our grand 1 million goal, one I have an inkling is within your grasp!
Fun fact, the Snatcher was conceived as one of the earlier Enormity Intruders, but, just like some ATO designs, it was deemed too complex and challenging to start with.
The Tortor transfigurans, better known by its nickname, ‘the Snatcher’, belongs to an unknown NHI (Non-human Intelligence) species that has mastered control over its own evolution. A culture of the Hunt has subsequently arisen: a Snatcher sets out into the unsuspecting universe to harvest DNA samples to add to its own. To perfect its form. This may be the reason why the Snatcher fiercely exterminates both Ratcatchers and Splicers – they are competing for the same ‘food source’.
When a Snatcher deems itself full of alien DNA, it may finally return to whatever place it calls home, to share its trophies with the collective. One dreads to think what the Snatchers will become several generations from now.
A Snatcher has breached the Shepherd. It stalks you now and it will not relent. It cannot, its honor demands it.
The Snatcher is quite a unique boss, as it can transform its body into any shape needed to achieve its goals. It can multiply its limbs or grow additional ones, it can also transform any of its appendages into a specialized tool perfect for the current task: a sword, a spear, a whip, even firearms, like bio cannons.
During the boss battle, the Snatcher will try to isolate a lone Spacer and suck them dry of DNA, to instantly add to its own. Yet, maybe the Snatcher’s most devious weapon is its ability to temporarily morph into other things. Once it has harvested its first human, it will be able to take their shape. To blend into the Coventry’s crew. To harvest silently from the shadows.
The Snatcher waits at the millionth star, I mean the $1 Million Stretch Goal!
And now we’ve arrived at the extended Enormity content we’d like to add to your games, but which will probably have to wait for a reprint campaign, in some unknowable future! These are not in the game yet!
Torched
You could say these are merely astronauts on fire. You would be correct… to a point. Yes, the Torched are flaming humanoids, mostly of the Shepherd’s crew, but the radioactive flame that consumes them is no mere fire.
Simply put, the Torched burn, but they do not burn out. The agony they’re experiencing is forever painted on their strained faces.
The Torched seemingly serve the Mothman and protect its nest. Though they usually rush at you, a fireball of destruction, they are much more intelligent. Some Torched stay behind and attack at range, while others, like the Wisp, can even imitate a human’s voice and lure you to your doom.
Oh. And some Torched explode when killed.
The Torched are a challenging threat, hidden beyond the rim of the millionth star. These are not in the game yet!
The Fly
Would you believe this pitiful creature was once an EVA suit, or spaceship, of the Mothman’s species? No, of course not, but that is exactly what you’re looking at. At first you thought the Mothman survival vehicle traversed the stars exclusively on its solar sails. Although that is true, it is far from the only transportation device this species utilizes.
Teleportation is another. Teleportation is a… tricky business. Teleportation research was banned on Old Earth for religious reasons: the soul is indivisible, they said. Funnily enough, the hierarchs had no problem with the backup body sleeve system, arguing that between the deceased body, the black box with your consciousness and the resleeving, the soul’s continuum was preserved.
No such continuity with teleportation, quantum or otherwise.
Maybe that’s why the Fly came back so twisted. Maybe you should not tamper with things God forbade.
Though the Mothman’s sibling, the Fly behaves quite differently. Instead of shooting, it prefers melee knockdown attacks, it zaps in and out around the arena, it mutates into increasingly impossible shapes and mishappen creatures, and it causes the very fabric of reality to scream and tear – maybe you’ll even use these wounds to take shortcuts across the Incursion arena.
The Fly is a challenging boss, hidden beyond the rim of the millionth star. This is not in the game yet!
Davids (Statuesque Androids)
Named after the famous Michelangelo sculpture, these state-of-the-art androids were not made merely to push the boundaries of science, but to be pieces of art themselves. Commissioned by the eccentric CEO of the somewhat ironically crudely named TOOl Corporation (lower case ‘l’), Howard R. Carradine, the Davids saw only a very limited release. An exorbitant price and rumors of banned AI experiments circling TOOl made Carradine shutter the line after the first series left the factory floor.
Carradine funded the Shepherd’s mission and delegated his personal Davids to act as part of the crew, stewards and decoration.
It has been decades, and the Davids you meet onboard are nothing like how you imagined. They’re broken. Cruel and callous. You have no idea if they are infected by the MG fungi, but their disdain for you is tangible.
Some Davids, like the Demigod, believe themselves gods or the successors of the human race. Others seek the meaning of life in its terminus (like the Grim Philosopher). They are extremely intelligent, and like to play games with their victims, posing as actual statues, moving only when no one is looking at them, and asking Sphinx-like questions.
Davids are an extremely challenging Intruder group, hidden beyond the rim of the millionth star. These are not in the game yet!
Shadowmen
It has now become quite apparent to you that there is a war going on aboard the Shepherd, between the Mothman and whatever abomination it carries, and the servants of what you came to call the Outer Dark, represented by the Slender and its mindless slaves, the Hollowed.
However, where light meets darkness, it creates shadows. Whether the Shadowmen are Torched doused by the void or Hollowed ignited by the searing flames, or just shadows cast after a successful supernova, is an academical debate.
The Shadowmen are real. They move from shadow to shadow, seemingly incorporeal, until they wish to strike with their equally spectral weapons. They cannot exist in absolute light or utter dark, but then, when is the world ever fully black and white?
The Shadowmen seem to be a faction onto themselves, though they sometimes align with one or the other of the powers that birthed them. What is their goal?
Shadowmen prefer long-range combat and can move great distances, but only through shadows. They are notoriously hard to kill, and they can pull unwitting victims into the shadows themselves. Among their unique variants are the dreaded Longshadow and Moonshadow.
Shadowmen are a challenging Intruder group, hidden beyond the rim of the millionth star. These are not in the game yet!
?????
Just as the Journeyman harnesses the strong nuclear force, so too does this ghastly Intruder tamper with the weak nuclear force, sometimes called the electroweak force. The name implies feebleness, but the creature is anything but. The weak nuclear force governs the interaction inside individual nucleons, allowing protons to turn into neutrons and vice versa.
The Intruder is just as enigmatic as the other wanderer, though it is much quicker to anger, making a confrontation an inevitability from the start. This thing will make your atoms dissolve inside you at the snap of a finger just as if it were magic.
And now you’re wondering if there any more of these space magi out there. There are. There are four fundamental forces of the universe, right? And a rumored fifth…
Aaaaand that’s that – for the time being! I hope you liked this extended look into the world and mechanics of Enormity. Maybe I should do another one, for the Expansion Campaigns ;)
Pledge Manager Q&A: Dates, Places, Prices
We’re getting a lot of questions about the PM, so I thought I’d take a moment to answer the most burning questions! First, when is the PM dropping? Everything points to February. What PM will we be using? We never commit to anything without surveying all our options and negotiating terms, so its TBD. However, historically, for our projects we’ve used Gamefound.
Now, some of you have asked about PM prices, will they increase? Likely so. During a Kickstarter campaign, we always offer our games at a high discount, to encourage early adoption – this helps us budget our projects better. Starting from ATO in 2019, at the end of each year we evaluate our development costs, production costs, inflation rates and, maybe most importantly, the scope of the projects. ATO famously went from $129 in 2019 to $299 in 2024. KF has likewise grown in content and will see its own increase.
Obviously, Enormity will not grow in scope between now and January, so there won’t be any sudden hikes, but we are still looking at something of $10-15 on games and expansion campaigns.
Finally, how long will the PM stay open? We don’t like to court FOMO, so we tend to keep our PMs open as long as possible, until production commences. At the moment, we’re scheduled to produce the game at the end of August 2025, so that’s the tentative close date of the PM.
Until next time, Spacers - see you in the comments!
