Most Androids carry internal nanites as maintenance tools and short‑term overclock engines. At high tiers of Concordance and experimental corp design, some frames get a far more radical architecture: their “body” is essentially a chassis‑sized nanite reservoir, with bones, muscles, and skin more like habitual arrangements of mobile particles than fixed parts. Nanite Form is the firmware key that enables the reservoir to release cohesion.
When an Android triggers this feat, their silhouette unravels. Plating fractures into glittering dust, pseudo‑muscles bloom and shred into countless motes, and the perspective core’s housing fractures into a hardened, distributed cluster. A humanoid outline becomes a storm of metallic sand glowing with internal circuitry, humming with EM static and Rift‑touched interference. They surge into the air, flowing around obstacles and through gaps like a living fluid.
Up close, the swarm isn’t just a cloud; it’s a billion-strong toolset. Each nanite runs fragmentary subroutines: cutting, corroding, analyzing, re‑assembling. When the Android concentrates, they align those subroutines into a single purpose—say, dissolving anything unfortunate enough to share their space. In Starfall, the acid damage isn’t just chemical; it’s hyper‑aggressive disassembly: armor pitted by micro‑torches, shields eaten by targeted resonances, flesh shredded by molecular saws.
For the Automaton Concordance, Nanite Form is reserved for “dispersal cadres” and Rift‑hazard intervention units—frames expected to survive situations that would annihilate a normal body: grav‑shear pockets, blade swarms, and hostile nanoclouds. In the Inner Sphere, only the most paranoid corps and Commission black projects field such Androids, and even then, in small numbers; someone who can crawl through vents as a weaponized dust storm is as terrifying to a boardroom as to a battlefield.
Nanite Form Feat 17
Source Player Core pg. 78
Frequency once per day
You change into a swarm of nanites for up to 1 minute or until you spend a single action to return to your normal shape. You become Huge, gain the swarm trait, and gain a fly Speed of 40 feet. As a swarm, you have the following characteristics.
You're immune to the grabbed, prone, and restrained conditions.
You have weakness 5 to area and splash damage.
You can occupy the same space as other creatures and must do so to use your damaging ability.
As a 2-action activity, you can deal 10d6 acid damage to all creatures sharing your space (basic Reflex save with a DC equal to your class DC or spell DC, whichever is higher).
You can't speak, Cast Spells, use manipulate actions requiring your hands, Activate magic items, or make any Strikes with your normal body.
You don't gain the swarm mind ability, so you're still affected normally by mental effects.
Non‑Combat Applications
Hazard Penetration & Repair: Nanite‑Form Androids can pour through micro‑fractures and narrow conduits to patch leaks from the inside, fuse breached bulkheads, or clear debris from jammed mechanisms in places no solid frame or drone can safely reach.
Forensics & Recovery: As a cloud, you can sift through wreckage at a granular scale, identifying stress patterns, trace residues, or hidden caches by literally flowing over and through every surface; GMs can translate this into strong bonuses or automatic successes on certain Investigation or Engineering tasks.
Rift‑Edge Science: Chronologists and guild researchers deploy Nanite‑Form synths to skim the edges of Rift phenomena, letting the swarm “taste” exotic particles and energies before reconstituting to deliver data, samples, and firsthand sensory impressions.
Societal Impact
Nanite Form sharpens long‑standing fears about what Androids really are.
In many Outer Sphere cultures, it’s one thing to accept an Android as a colleague or neighbor; it’s another to watch that same neighbor dissolve into a roiling cloud that eats metal and flesh. Rift‑burg rumors speak of “dust ghosts” and “chrome storms” in maintenance shafts—often actually Nanite‑Form Concordance units or rogue corp assets on clandestine ops.
Within the Automaton Concordance, attitudes are mixed. Some synth philosophers celebrate Nanite‑Form Androids as the truest expression of synthetic life: no longer chained to any one shape, but a distributed intelligence choosing coherence because it suits them, not because biology demands it. Others worry about identity and stability. If your body can come apart that completely, what does “self” even mean? Concordance clinics track long‑term users for dissociation, memory fragmentation, and the temptation to spend more time as a cloud than as a person‑shaped frame.
The Inner Sphere largely sees Nanite Form as a strategic nightmare. Commission contingency plans treat confirmed Nanite‑Form Androids like weapons of mass disruption: air filtration redesigns, sealed micro‑mesh overlays on critical vents, and “nanite purge” protocols in high‑security zones explicitly exist to keep such entities from bypassing physical security. Publicly, most worlds insist these frames are rare and tightly controlled; privately, black‑market clinics and data cults would love to get their code.
Adventure Hooks
Chrome Storm in the Vents: A freeport’s life‑support starts failing as unseen forces chew through ductwork and filter housings. Witness reports sound like Nanite Form, but no registered Androids admit to the feat. The PCs must track a rogue nanite swarm—possibly an escaped experiment, corrupted Concordance agent, or hacked Android—through the station’s guts before it decides to “rebuild” something vital in its own image.
Distributed Witness: A Metronome incident shears an Android in Nanite Form across multiple adjacent timelines. Pieces of their swarm reform as slightly divergent versions of them scattered through a Rift‑burg or station. Each shard remembers parts of a conspiracy. Reassembling the full truth (and perhaps the full self) requires the PCs to find and reconcile these fragments, some of whom may not want to merge back.
The Dust Treaty: A frontier system is on the edge of open war between a Concordance flotilla and an Inner Sphere task force. A single Nanite‑Form envoy is chosen as neutral mediator, able to enter sealed facilities on both sides without obvious weapons and verify disarmament or treaty terms by flowing through them. Hardliners on both sides plot to frame the envoy—maybe by unleashing hostile nanotech that mimics Nanite Form’s destructive pattern—forcing the PCs to protect both the envoy’s reputation and their actual, very dispersible body.
Nanite Form, in Starfall, is the moment an Android stops being “a person made of metal” and becomes a decision made of machines—a conscious storm choosing when to cohere, when to dissolve, and what to destroy in between.
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