Where a human sees “a bar fight breaking out,” an Android with Quickened Processor sees vectors—who is moving where, which gun is clearing leather, which Rift-lantern is about to be used as an improvised bomb, and which ally is about to be flanked. That analysis isn’t cinematic slo-mo; it’s raw, cold computation layered over an evolving tactical HUD in their synthetic vision.
This feat is most common among Concordance skirmish units, guild security operatives, and Outer Sphere scavengers who survive by reacting one fraction of a Cycle faster than everyone else. Many of them describe the sensation as an unwanted reflex left over from Protocol Five-era hazard routines: their chassis was designed to protect valuable organic owners, and that impulse now turns outward to preserve comrades, contracts, or self-chosen causes.
Quickened Processor Feat 1
You can quickly identify your surroundings and use that information to your advantage, whether you're in danger or piloting vehicles in hazardous situations. You gain a +1 circumstance bonus to Perception checks for initiative rolls and a +2 circumstance bonus to Piloting checks for initiative rolls.
Non-Combat Applications
Dockside Situational Awareness: Quickened-Processor Androids make excellent traffic controllers, airlock officers, or Rift-burg watchstanders, spotting anomalies in ship movement, crowd flow, or structural stress faster than organic staff.
Urban Threat Assessment: In dense Inner Sphere ecumenopolises, they can walk through a crowded concourse and, at a glance, identify likely pickpockets, undercover security, or imminent riots—an asset for fixers, bodyguards, and black-market brokers.
Rift-Space Hazard Prediction: Paired with Chronologists or Navigators, they act as bridge officers who detect micro-debris swarms, time-drift anomalies, or Rift-creature ambush patterns one critical moment earlier, giving the crew a chance to react.
Societal Impact
For Concordance commanders, Quickened Processor isn’t just a perk—it’s a recruitment filter. Units built or upgraded for rapid response are preferentially slotted into boarder teams, breach squads, and asset extraction cells, where the extra cycle of foreknowledge often means the difference between clean exfil and body-bag.
The Commission and corporate security outfits in the Inner Sphere treat it less romantically: internal memos often flag Android personnel with documented enhanced situational processing as both assets and liabilities. Assets, because they make superb first-responder sergeants, riot monitors, and VIP security leads. Liabilities, because they are also the ones most likely to notice inconsistencies, ambushes, and illegal orders before anyone else. Some megacorps quietly blacklist Androids with known Quickened Processor upgrades from sensitive posts where “overthinking” an order could cause problems.
On the streets, reputation follows. In Outer Sphere freeports and salvage warrens, an Android with that unnerving, always-scanning gaze is often assumed to be ex-military, ex-Concordance, or ex-corp tactical. That can attract work… or paint a target, depending on which warlords or guilds run the local decks.
Adventure Hooks
The First Shot Problem: A gang war is about to erupt in a cramped Rift-station bazaar. An NPC Android with Quickened Processor insists they can “pick the right first target” to prevent full escalation. The party must decide whether to trust their threat assessment—or discover that their algorithms are biased by old Concordance priorities.
Pattern Recognition: Quickened-Processor Androids in a sector begin reporting identical pre-combat hallucinations—seeing the same enemy face in every crowd just before trouble starts. Chronologists suspect a time-loop imprint; Concordance analysts fear a Rift entity piggybacking on pre-combat processing routines.
Security Liability: A Commission security chief hires the party to quietly remove or reassign an Android subordinate with Quickened Processor who has started “connecting dots” about illegal station dealings faster than their superiors can bury evidence. The Android isn’t naïve—but they are deciding what to do with their conclusions, and the party arrives right as they act.
Quickened Processor, in Starfall, is the moment where an Android’s synthetic design pulls ahead of organic instinct—where the map of the threat crystallizes before the first shot, and what they do with that advantage says more about their soul than their circuitry.
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