Essence of theEffective Faction

By consuming this Essence, you receive a comprehensive set of advantages by which a faction might better make the most of its resources.

• The benefits of this Essence may apply to any number of discrete factions at full effectiveness. The only requirement is that you are in some way a part of each faction so empowered. Thus, you could use the Essence to enhance an empire, a species, a small team, or even just yourself.

• You gain access to a peculiar Resource, a material that can be used in place of any combination of others. It can just as easily be used to raise pyramids, construct advanced laser rifles, empower magic swords, fuel the growth of biological horrors, or replace truly exotic reagents such as the geneseed of an Astartes. This Resource does not allow you to manufacture anything you could not produce without it, however, and the cost of any given item scales with the economic cost of producing it normally. At the time of consuming this Essence, you may define the nature of your Resource as any physical thing (such as gold, crystal, components, food, metal, and so on). This impacts, amongst other factors, how your Resource can be manufactured or collected most efficiently. It does not necessarily impact what can be produced from your Resource; it is not infeasible to convert 'gold' into a steel sword.

• At the time of consuming this Essence, you may modify the qualities of your Resource to better suit your needs:

• You may balance the ease of creating your Resource with the ease of actually making use of it. This could provide a material that can be rapidly transformed into new equipment in battlefield conditions, at the cost of a significantly reduced supply of it.

• You may balance the density at which your Resource can be stored with the requirements to safely preserve it. This could provide a bulky material that will remain useful after being exposed to a light orbital bombardment, or a substance that decays rapidly outside of specialized containment structures but can be held in absurd quantities within one.

• You may restrict the set of products for which your Resource is useful, in exchange for improving the quality of all things made with it. This could provide a material that produces impossibly effective machinery, but can never be used to modify living flesh in ways more subtle than outright cybernetic replacement.

• Your economy is reliant on only one part of the set of territory, population, and infrastructure, chosen at the time of consuming this Essence. Thus, whichever part you choose is as productive as if the other two parts were as good as they could possibly be. You receive a beneficial interpretation of this rule, but not one completely uncaring of potential exploits. Your citizens may be as productive as if working with the best equipment you could give them, but perfect automation that could let one person manage an infinite amount of technology will not lead to infinite economic output. If the effects of this aspect of the Essence would decrease your economic output rather than increase it, they are automatically disabled.

• The scientific and technological knowledge of your faction is pooled within a flawlessly constructed non-physical repository. This repository is inviolate so long as any members of your faction yet persist, and denies any efforts to reverse engineer your faction's technologies. Knowledge is both copied from the minds of individuals and downloaded into others as required, allowing all researchers to function effectively at the bleeding edge of progress. Combined with a number of error-correcting processes, scientific progress, and especially reverse-engineering, functions significantly more quickly, safely, and easily. Technical knowledge distributed in a similar manner ensures even the most undeveloped parts of your faction can immediately begin manufacturing the newest advanced weapons.

• Your faction requires minimal logistical support and upkeep. Occupied territory, soldiers, and machines of war count as part of your productive economy, even while actively fighting. None of your equipment, vehicles, or structures require any maintenance save to repair damage caused by enemy action. Once a vehicle or generator is fueled up, it will never need to be refueled; humans in your faction need neither food, water, nor sleep; downtime and resupply is wholly unnecessary. Similarly, weapons that have been stocked with a full load of ammunition will never need to be reloaded, nor will they actually use up their contents or payloads during combat.

• Though this Essence does not on its own permit the spontaneous generation of new workers, it allows for the expenditure of resources to enhance what you already have. You may spend your Resource to elevate any member of your faction towards their theoretical potential, giving them the benefits of training they could have performed naturally or repairing any manner of damage or injury. You may also spend your Resource to elevate the potential of any member of your faction towards their species' peak, giving a muggle arcane potential or a radioactive mutant flawless compatibility with the most inflexible genetic augmentations. This takes an amount of time similar to spending similar quantities of your resource to construct complex devices.

• Where a member of your faction uses a power that would normally draw upon external energies, they now draw upon a well of similar energies that is distinctly 'of the faction'. This greatly reduces the risk of interference by the normal source of the energies, and makes the powers used by members of your faction significantly harder to tamper with. The benefits of this effect scales with both the amount of stuff 'of the faction' in the local area and with the scope of the faction in total. At a sufficiently high level, this can allow abilities to function in antimagic zones or other places where they really shouldn't.

• Loyal members of your faction will never lose their loyalty to the faction unless interfered with by outside elements. Even interfering in this way is much more difficult than it would normally be; every part of the faction, including inanimate machinery, is significantly more resistant to both loyalty-eroding persuasion and outright supernatural corruption. It is always immediately obvious to still-loyal parts of your faction if a person or object has been subverted in any way; no deception can defy this sense. It is similarly immediately obvious to every loyal part of your faction if an order or command is valid, and thus next to impossible to subvert the chain of command.

• You may select one final benefit to reduce the costs of battle:

• Your faction is capable of converting defeated or destroyed enemy units. This costs nothing but some trivial amount of labor, produces a new unit of your faction of a type analogous to the defeated unit's (thus, converting a primitive steam tank would let you produce a modern tank of your own pattern), and takes less than a tenth as long as making such a unit from scratch.

• Your faction is capable of rapidly reclaiming your Resource from any destroyed unit, friendly or not. The efficiency of this effect scales with the degree to which the unit in question's construction matches your Resource; units constructed wholly from your Resource can exceed 70% material recovery even if reduced to tiny chunks.

• Your faction is capable of resurrecting or rebuilding destroyed friendly units, so long as the corpse or hulk is even vaguely intact (in this regard, a starship broken apart into a dozen large chunks counts as 'mostly' intact). The time required and Resource cost depends on the degree of damage suffered, but never exceeds 50% of what it would take to build the destroyed unit from scratch.