Equipment, Perks & Wonder Weapons
These three types are the gear layer — what the crew carries, drinks, and builds toward. They share one discipline: scarcity is the design, and the side effects are where the system earns its grimness.
Equipment
Equipment is anchored by era — the field that keeps a 1940s map from selling 1980s hardware. Keep it honest; the era field is doing real consistency work, and drifting gear dates a world faster than anything except an anachronistic faction. Class (primary, sidearm, melee, tactical, lethal, buildable-part, consumable, tool, document) plus rarity (standard → unique) set its role and its price of admission. Damage rating, magazine, and handling are the mechanical and the textural half of one thing: write the damage and the magazine, then write the handling — the weight, recoil, sound — so the players can feel the number. Don't stat a grenade and forget to say how it sounds under a low ceiling.
Pack-a-Punch is a reference to the same type's other entries: the upgraded form of one piece of gear is another piece of gear. Build those pairs — the base and the upgrade should be recognisably the same thing with the safety off.
Perks
A perk is one crisp mechanical promise plus one honest lie. Rule text is the promise, written exactly — what it modifies, when, and by how much. Effect summary is the one line a player reads off the machine. The craft is in the pair: the summary sells the promise, the rule text delivers it, and the side effect tells the truth the jingle leaves out. The class (survivability, offense, mobility, utility, support, anomalous) and the cost place it in the economy. Cost matters more than it looks: it is how you gate power, and how the crew feels the first loss of a slot it paid for. Cost is denominated in whatever the rule set's perk economy field says it is — Attrition Protocol uses points held in the world state's party resources, with earning rates written down. If you fork the rule set and drop that field, drop cost with it; a price tag in a currency nobody defines is the fastest way to make a gear layer feel unfinished.
Under the hood: two kinds of perk effect
A perk can affect the sheet in two ways, and knowing which to reach for is the craft of the type.
Modifiers are structured, and the sheet computes them. A modifier names one of the derived numbers — wound threshold or composure — and a value, and the character sheet picks it up automatically from every perk the character holds. Juggernog carries its +2 wound threshold this way, so a sheet showing a Juggernog holder shows the real number rather than one the GM has to correct in their head.
Rule text is prose, and the GM applies it. Everything a perk does that is not one of those two numbers lives here — re-rolls, timing changes, what happens on death, the conditions it ignores. Write it so a GM can apply it in a glance.
The split is deliberate, and the modifier list is short on purpose. Derived numbers displayed on a sheet should be true, because a wrong number on screen is worse than no number. Everything else should stay legible and adjudicated, because a perk that silently rewrites six systems is a perk nobody can reason about. When you write a perk, ask whether the effect is one of the two computed numbers. If it is, make it a modifier. If it is not, write it plainly in the rule text and trust the GM.
Perk machines on a map
Perks are not a list you own; they are machines you place. The location's perks available field is the map's machine row — put the machine slugs there and plot them as pins on the map so the crew can see where each one waits. Let the placement do the designing.
Pick by scarcity, not menu. A map gets the machines that tell the GM something about the spend. Der Riese keeps its four-classic wash because the whole site is a pounding loop of tight funnels and reload-starvation: Quick Revive for the room held, Speed Cola for the reload the horde punishes, Double Tap to make the fight worth it, and Juggernog because buying it first is the crew's little optimism. A high vault of points with Mule Kick at the top says greed is the map's sin; a lone PhD Flopper in a basement you can only reach by throwing yourself off something says the map is a dare. Choose machines that bait the crew.
Costs gate, so set them to gate. The point value on each machine is the price of the room it buys. Make the expensive ones sit where the crew has to earn or push through to reach — the reward is not the drink, it is surviving the reach. Keep the cheapest thing (usually Quick Revive) reachable first, so a room always has a low-cost hope.
Continuity decides who is on the walls. Tag a machine to a continuity if it belongs to that era's canon; leave it untagged and it plugs into any map. For a plug-and-play table: pick a continuity, pull the tagged machines that fit the site, then bolt on one or two untagged options for texture.
Mark where it is on the map. A machine name in the list is a promise; a pin on the map is the address. Plot each machine as a pin linked to its perk file. If a machine is a reward, hide its pin behind the hazard that guards it — the crew should have to meet the machine, not just read the menu.
Wonder weapons
A wonder weapon is a set-piece with a fuse. Acquisition (mystery-box, buildable, puzzle-reward, quest-reward, unique) is the strongest storytelling lever in the type — how it is found tells the players how much it matters before they ever fire it. A buildable needs build parts (references to equipment), a puzzle needs a puzzle-reward framing, and a unique is a whole arc. Give it charges and a recharge rule so it is a decision to use, not a button. And give it exposure risk — usage costs exposure every time — because the most powerful thing in the game should be the thing slowly killing its wielder. The side effect tells you what firing it does to the wielder, the site, or the walls between things: keep that true to the continuity's power source.
Lore significance is the field that separates a wonder weapon from a magic item list — why this weapon matters to the storyline, not just the fight. Write it. A wonder weapon without significance is a gun with extra steps.
The shared rule
Every one of these types can carry a side effect or hidden cost, and that side effect is non-negotiable. The system's tone is "nothing is won for free," and the gear layer is where that becomes felt: equipment jams, perks overreach, wonder weapons feed on their wielders. When you build gear, ask what it costs to use — and if the answer is "nothing," add the cost before you ship it.