If you are looking for my 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge after action report with completion graphic, it will be posted when I’m caught up from being put behind by real-life events. If you made it to 31 characters, email me or privately contact me on one of the message boards or social media and I’ll make sure you get the graphic. Thank you for participating.
We are in the home stretch for the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and today we will be using one of my KickStarter rewards with the Planet of the Apes Role Playing Game. I backed at a level where I’ll be getting the physical book when they get it published. But until then, Magnetic Press Play provided a special PDF to the backers so they could see the game now. The PDF of the core rulebook isn’t even available on DriveThruRPG yet. Now I have made some characters previously for games inspired by the Planet of the Apes franchise. In 2021 I made a character for Apes Victorious that I thought was well done so much that I had to do a re-watch of the Planet of the Apes movies. Then earlier in this challenge I made a character for Terra Primate which was… OK.
So, two things I need to say about this game. It’s based off of the PotA movies and TV series from the 60’s and 70’s. Second, the RPG system is a modification of the West End Games D6 system that was used in Star Wars and Ghostbusters. This is called the D6MV (Magnetic Variant). One of the classic attributes, Technical, was removed with the skills moved to Knowledge and Mechanical and a new attribute of Willpower (spirit and mind power) was added. So the current attributes are DEXterity, KNOwledge, MEChanical, PERception, STRength and the aforementioned WILlpower. The skills were also limited to just six per attribute. Also when you roll a pool of D6’s one of them of a different color would be known as the “Irradiated Wild Die” which can provide additional bonuses or boons and can even explode if you roll a 6. So this game felt like I was returning home with how many sessions I played of the D6 Star Wars system.
The first several chapters in the book give a good rundown on how to play the game, a taste of the PotA world (not too much to be overwhelming, but just enough to wet the appetite), and information on the templates used in character creation. The actual steps to create a character are listed on page 106. Step One- choose one of the previously mentioned templates. The book highly recommends that the players make an ape character for the first games. There are information on the various humans and mutant characters that could also be created with additional supplements on the way. After reading through them, I wanted to make one of the Chimpanzees. Specifically an Ape Scientist named Flint. This provided some information on the character such as a Memento (a special piece of equipment that provides a bonus), regular starting equipment and the attributes.
The second step is to select the Character Persona which includes a Quirk, Remarkable Ability and Motive. There is a D66 quirks table on pages 108-9 where you can randomly roll for one. The one that came up is Paranoid. Hmmm…. perhaps Flint had discovered something that would be shocking and is worried that the Orangutans will find out that he knows. By taking a Quirk, I can also select a Remarkable Ability from the next list. I selected Lucky which would allow me to re-roll a 1 on an Irradiated Wild Die. It was probably by luck that Flint found out this deep secret. The Motive is a driving force for the character and is also randomly rolled by a D66. This came up as Selfish. I… don’t know how to fold that into the character yet, but perhaps it would come up in play.
Our third step is to select Flint’s skills. Each new character has 7D to distribute among the different skills with a max of 2D in any one skill. After I picked these the next step was to calculate the SRP defenses. This is the Surprised Defense, Readied Defense and Psyche Defense. These are generated by a mathematical formula based on other stats. I wrote them down on the sheet.
Step five is the fine details. It references the quirk and motives. This is also where the character’s appearance is written down with a random D6 resulting in Bulky. Interesting. Step six is the “time to get connected” step where the backstory of how the different characters in the party connected with each other. As I have no other characters to connect, I tried to ask the voices in my head and several of them talked about how it was time to go to bed. So I’ll skip this part. I think I’m done so I’ll scan the character sheet.
Afterthoughts:
While reading through the PDF during some down time I found a major printing error. So much so that I had to make a screen shot and send it to the publisher. I hope they can correct it in time before the physical publishing goes into effect.
Reading the book, I really wanted to play and run this game. In fact, I am. I’m going to be running the quick start adventure at SaltCON spring in a few weeks.
Additional Notes:
I had one reader respond to my entry of For Gold & Glory where I talked about meeting the minimum requirements for the Illusionist. Apparently the character would have had to meet both requirements listed. Another reader wanted to hear more about a possible Rome inspired campaign, which I’ll admit is pretty tempting. And yet another reader (sorry there were quite a few of you and I’m trying to churn these last posts out as quickly as possible) liked how FG&G used the alternate skill rules that were introduced in AD&D 2nd Edition.
And one last feedback note that I received on The Strange (since I don’t want to seem like I’m beating up on them). I had even more “yea I also had major issues with character creation from this publisher” in a Old Gods of Appalachia game (using the same Cypher System) where it took them 2.5 gaming sessions to make their characters. Yikes!!!!
Coming Up Next:
You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to say this. Red Dwarf The Roleplaying Game
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