[Cosmos] Armor - Bravos Compact Drone Plating

Public opinion of Bravos Corp. autonomous drones dipped significantly after the Trava Incident, spurring the development of the foldable Compact design. Sold as a "drone you don't need to see or worry about," they dominated the drone market until the public promptly forgot about the Incident two months later.

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Bravos Compact Drone Plating
Armor (any plate armor), technomancy, rare (requires attunement)

This armor grants you a +1 bonus to your AC while a drone is embedded in it (see below).

Deploy Drone. This armor hosts an embedded drone. You can use an action to deploy it, causing it to unfold in an unoccupied space adjacent to you. The drone is a Small Construct with AC 17; 15 hit points; resistance to nonmagical bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage; and immunity to psychic and poison damage. It has a walking speed of 30 feet. If it makes a saving throw, it adds your proficiency bonus to the roll. The drone remains active until it is reduced to 0 hit points or until you use an action to re-embed it into your armor. While embedded in your armor, the drone regains all missing hit points at dawn or whenever you use an action to expend a spell slot of any level to repair it.

While the drone is within 100 feet of you, you have a technomantic connection to it, allowing you to communicate with it and receive information detected by its sensors. The drone acts on your turn and at your command; it can move up to its speed and take any actions available to it. Unless you use a bonus action on your turn to command it take the Dash, Disengage, or Help actions, the only action it can take is the Dodge action. As long as you are connected to the drone, it also functions as a set of hacker's tools and a connector, allowing you to interface with technomantic terminals remotely as if you were in the drone's space.

There are several types of armor, each designed to host a certain kind of drone. Depending on your armor, your drone has one of these benefits:

• Panopticon. This drone's sensors have darkvision out to a range of 120 feet and tremorsense out to a range of 20 feet.

• Quadwalker. This drone has a walking speed of 50 feet and can carry up to 25 pounds of weight.

• Rotorwing. This drone has a fly speed of 40 feet.

• Titanstead. This drone has AC 19 and 30 hit points instead.

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Very Rare Variant. The very rare version of this armor has two embedded drones instead of one. It grants a +1 bonus to AC for each drone embedded in it, up to a +2.

Legendary Variant. The legendary version of this armor has three embedded drones instead of one. It grants a +1 bonus to AC for each drone embedded in it, up to a +3.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

There needed to be more cool armors, as well as more products from the Bravos drone corporation — hence this one. The flavor text is a cheeky little poke at the untouchable state of megacorporations often found in many cyberpunk settings.

Overall, I compare the armor to its +1/+2/+3 armor counterparts. at the same rarity level. While your drone is deployed, you lose the AC bonus, so I don't consider the drone and AC bonus a "stacking" benefit. However, it's still a versatility benefit, which is covered by the attunement requirement cost.

The drone itself basically functions as an at-will find familiar with more hit points (effective 30, if the damage type is right) and no material cost. You can revive the drone with spell slots, so it's more like find familiar. Each drone has its own unique benefit over a typical familiar as well: choosing from tremorsense for invisible targets; speed and carrying capacity for special delivery; flight for exploration; extra AC & HP for tanking some hits. Titanstead doesn't have that much HP to truly tank, but a cost of 1 spell slot to resummon makes it worthwhile. Each drone doesn't equate to +X armor, but adds enough versatility to make the rarity tier what it is.