Burrowing

BURROWING

Type: Movement

Action: Move (active)

Range: Personal Duration: Sustained

Saving Throw: None

Cost: 1 point per rank

You can burrow through the ground, leaving a tunnel behind if you choose. You move at a speed of 1 MPH at rank 1. Each additional rank moves your speed one step up the Progression Table, to a speed of around 5,000 miles per round at rank 20, allowing you to dig straight through the Earth to the other side! (Provided you can survive the conditions near the planet’s molten core.) Speeds per rank are shown on the Burrowing Movement table. You burrow through soil and sand at your normal speed. Burrowing through hard clay and packed earth reduces speed one rank. Burrowing through solid rock reduces it by two ranks. The tunnel you leave behind is either permanent or collapses behind you immediately (your choice when you begin burrowing each new tunnel). Note that Burrowing differs from the Permeate effect of Super Movement, which allows you to pass through an obstacle like the ground at your normal speed without disturbing it at all (see Super-Movement for details).

POWER FEATS

• Subtle: Your burrowing effect somehow dampens the usual vibrations and noise associated with rapidly tunneling through the ground, making it more difficult (or even impossible) for those on the surface to detect your approach and movements with effects like tremorsense (see the Super-Senses effect for details).

EXTRAS

• Action: The action required to use Burrowing cannot be decreased, since it includes moving through the tunnel, and reducing the action needed for a character to move is not recommended.

• Affects Others: The +0 version of this extra grants another character the Burrowing effect. The +1 version is not required to bring others along with you as you burrow unless you want them to automatically keep pace with you; others can still follow down the tunnel you leave behind at their own pace, even without the Affects Others extra.

• Area: At the GM’s discretion, this extra—specifically the Burst Area—can widen the size of the tunnel you burrow from large enough to accommodate you to (rank x 5 feet) in radius, allowing you to excavate large tunnels and even artificial caverns.

• Penetrating: Normally, the hardness of the ground affects only the speed at which you burrow. At the GM’s discretion, some super-hard materials may be considered Impervious to Burrowing, in which case this extra allows you to dig through them, provided your Penetrating rank reduces the material’s Impervious Toughness to equal to your less than your Burrowing rank.

• Range: This extra either allows you to create tunnels at a greater distance (without having to be at the end-point of the tunnel as it forms) or, in conjunction with Affects Others, allows you to grant the Burrowing effect to someone else at a distance. Doing both requires two applications of the extra.

FLAWS

• Distracting: Burrowing may well be distracting, reducing your dodge bonus while you are moving through the earth (and leaving you more vulnerable to attack while doing so). If combat while you are burrowing is unlikely in the GM’s opinion, this flaw may be disallowed or reduced to a complication.

• Limited: Burrowing may be limited to certain circumstances or materials, such as only loose sand and soil (leaving the character unable to burrow through dense clay or solid rock), or only snow and ice (being unable to burrow through earth and soil at all).

ASSOCIATED EFFECTS

• Damage: The same trait that allows a character to burrow through the earth—claws, drill-bits, digging beams—may also grant the ability to inflict damage as an attack.

• Immunity: Burrowing assumes a pocket of atmosphere fills the tunnel as it forms. However, for especially lengthy periods underground, or trips that may involve pockets of natural gas or the intense heat of the planet’s core, the Immunity effect (particularly life support, possibly with Affects Others) is desirable.

• Super-Senses: Burrowing does not include the ability to see where you are going while underground, so Super-Senses may be helpful for long-range or rapid burrowing. Tremorsense and X-Ray Vision are particularly useful in this regard (see the SuperSenses effect for details).

BURROWING SPEED