Vidiian Horror

by Lucas Thompson, Designer

18th July 2024

Once Vidiian development got underway for real, I got a lot of feedback from other players about what they would want to see in a Vidiian affiliation. One of the most common pieces of feedback was that they need to take captives - after all, capture wasn't central to my initial pitch, and they take captives in both Faces and Deadlock. For a smaller faction like Vidiians, two episodes is a pretty sizeable fraction of their appearances, so capture definitely needed to find a way into the affiliation.

You've already seen one of their means of taking captives, Culling Raid. But what Vidiians do with their captives is (I think) more important thematically than exactly how they obtain them. They experiment on them, they put them to work, they terrorize them, and they harvest their organs piece-by-piece. If TNG Ferengi are walking metaphors for how ugly greed is, Vidiians are body horror personified. They may need to harvest organs to survive, but you can't deny the terrorizing effect their practice has on their victims - made worse because, unlike traditional shambling undead ghouls, Vidiians are smart. Once you're a captive of the Vidiians, you are at their mercy, and they're very good at rationalizing that mercy away.

Face Off (playtest titles include Neelix Has No Lungs and Durst Has No Face) aims to capture that horror in gameplay. Rather than hostages (which is generally how Cardassians treat captives), Vidiians use captives as a resource. A card you'll see later on will take that captives-as-a-resource in a more traditional way, but Face Off provides a more unique-to-Vidiians angle. You kill your captives, which horrifies your opponent's personnel (attributes -1) while strengthening your Vidiians (attributes +1). This is a temporary boost (unlike, say, the Borg's Biological Distinctiveness) while the Phage continues to eat away at your personnel's organs, so you'll need to keep killing captives each turn to keep your boost up (and keep your opponents terrorized).

Side note: when a non-unique card says that you can only do it once each turn in Second Edition, you can do it once each turn per copy in play. So, if you have three copies of Face Off in your core, you can kill three captives per turn. -3/+3 is a very significant attribute swing!

Still, there are other punishment cards that are not affiliation specific, and I'm looking forward to seeing what tech players might try out in Vidiian decks. Given the volume of captives that Vidiians can acquire in the late game, they might try using Condition Captive so they can use those captives as their own. Psychological Pressure may no longer be as strong as it was in its heyday, but it's still a not-insignificant source of resource depletion. I guess I will have to wait and see.

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