So far we have looked at the Russian Soldier, the Brute, and the Warden from the upcoming expansion, LEVEL 7 [OMEGA PROTOCOL]: Extreme Prejudice. This installment of the developer diary series focuses on the first new hero introduced in the expansion.

Now that I’ve finished talking about the new enemies coming in LEVEL 7 [OMEGA PROTOCOL]: Extreme Prejudice, it’s time to start giving you a look at the new heroes.

Creating a hero is an interesting process in any game, but creating expansion heroes comes with extra concerns. Walking the line between making a new hero compelling when compared to existing heroes without invalidating any of those original heroes can prove difficult at times.

Of the two new heroes in this expansion, the Ghin Commando was by far the easier to fit onto the team. He has access to thematic ideas that only the Countermeasures Specialist even resembles. That means the challenge wasn’t in making him stand out; rather, it was in translating his alien abilities into things that would provide new angles for attacking the overseer’s nefarious plans.

When we began discussions how the Agency’s team would expand to take on the escalation of the Ghin threat, one of our first questions was if all of the Ghin were on Cronos’ side. Their race has been working with humans for half a century, and the story of LEVEL 7 [JUDAS PROTOCOL] proves that the Ghin don’t always see eye to eye.

Since we knew there would be a Ghin in combat gear on the enemy side of the game, we immediately considered a similarly armed hero character. Casting the sculpt in both colors of plastic gave us two characters that would influence how each other’s rules worked while exploring different concepts of what a Ghin warrior can do.

As I explained in the previous entry in this series, work on the warden focused on his flexibility. I wanted to mirror that flexibility in the Ghin Commando but also give him powers that no human in the setting would have.

Focusing on the Ghin psychic connection to one other and to their servitor creatures gave me a lot of room to explore for this kit deck. One of the first abilities I wrote was the ability to briefly take control of a clone or hybrid. These creatures are controlled through mental commands, and the Ghin Commando can temporarily subvert the overseer’s control to move and attack with the creature.

In addition to interacting with the creatures on the map, I wanted to give this character a unique interaction with the overseer player. A large part of what the overseer does represents the behind-the-scenes actions of Dr. Cronos. Some other abilities in the game can affect the overseer’s choices when activating dashboard abilities. The Ghin Commando can use his mental powers to directly attack the dashboard.

I also wanted to explore ideas that didn’t fit in the power sets of the heroes in the base game. OMEGA PROTOCOL is a dungeon crawl at heart, but because it’s a sci-fi game, we don’t get to do things that would fit better in a fantasy game. This last preview card is my favorite. Since the Ghin Commando’s pistol is built with psychotronic tech, it can operate on the mental wavelengths of the enemies. This allowed me to put something into the game that I jokingly called psychic chain lightning during playtest.

This character was a lot of fun to make, and I hope you enjoy the new options he gives while building a team. Next time, I’ll discuss the last new figure in the expansion, a character that pushes all the boundaries of what it means to be a commando.