Day 19 of the 2026 #Character Creation Challenge and I’m using a pulpy science fiction RPG that I had picked up in a charity bundle sale years ago. This game was published from Cubicle 7 called Rocket Age. It has Humans exploring the solar system with adventures on Venus, Mars, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and more with a 1930’s attitude. It appears to be similar to the Doctor Who RPG that this same publisher released. Let’s dive in to see.
There is a one-page character sheet. The character creation rules are found on page 94 (after a TL/DR intro into the game universe) with a total of 257 pages for the core book. A summary is listed on page 95 and has four steps.
The first is what type of Sophont is your character. Well this is the games fancy term for race. My choices are Earthlings, Eurpoans, Ganymedians (both of these are from the moons), Ioites (a race that had their homeworld blown up by the Europans), eight different types of Martians (gee, I wondered what inspired this) and Venusians. I’m keeping it simple and sticking with Earthling. I’m told that I have 42 character points and the cost to be an Earthling is 1 of them. This also gives me the attribute modifiers and traits for Earthlings which I wrote down in my notes.
Step two is the occupation of the character. I looked at the choices and they are Citizen, Diplomat, Explorer, Merchant, Military, Miner/Scavenger, Native, Scientist, Law Enforcement, Europan Emissary, Deutsche Marskorps War Walker Pilot (Nazi cyborg mech drivers on Mars who left the service), Martian War-Priest, Rocket Pilot, Rocket Ranger and Venusian Harvitioi (wandering Venusian). Well the non-Earthling options are out. Again, keeping it simple, I selected Rocket Pilot which cost me 11 character points. I wrote down the attributes, skills and traits listed for this occupation in my notes.
On step three we now take the remaining character points (of which I have 30) and spend them on Attributes, Skills and Traits. Some of these have already been added from the first two steps above. The Attributes for a Rocket Age character is Awareness, Coordination, Ingenuity (aka Intelligence), Presence (aka Charisma), Resolve (aka Willpower) and Strength. These were the same in my Doctor Who RPG first edition entry. Also the same was the skills each character has. Athletics, Convince, Craft, Fighting, Knowledge, Marksman, Medicine, Science, Subterfuge, Survival, Technology and Transport. Traits are good and bad things about the character. The bad traits can give you back character points to spend elsewhere. I spent my points trying to make an Ace pilot.
The last step is the character’s story. What is their name and do they have a nickname. Pulling from one of my favorite shows, I’m going with Arnold “Ace” Rimmer. The image of the silver suited pilot from the Red Dwarf popped into my head. His friends are… well you know (or should know). The book also says that equipment is picked in this step. It just says, look at the equipment section and pick the reasonably logical items. It already stated that there was a ship connected to this character in one of the above steps so I’m marking that down as well. This looked like it was both vague and too much in some sections. So I’m going to skip it (other than I already wrote down the silver leather jacket and the ray gun). Here is the character sheet after I transferred my notes over.
Afterthoughts:
I repeat myself. Rule book first, lore second. Rule book first, lore second. When a gamer picks up an RPG book, they can (usually) tell from the cover what genre of game it covers (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc.) They want to know “How do I play it? How do I quickly explain it to my friends to try to get them to play it?” If you can’t do that near the front of the book, then most gamers are going to use a system they are already familiar with and adapt your lore for what they want. The lore did sound a little interesting from what I skimmed through, but I didn’t take a deep dive into it as I wanted to learn the system.
The bookmarks in this PDF were… weird. I finally had to go to the index and find the page number and tell my reader to go there. That’s when I realized I was skipping over 90 pages of fluff.
I had picked up this game because it was cheap in a bundle charity sale (I don’t recall which bundle service it was). But at the time I was thinking homebrew. Now…. I’m not certain. It’s pretty much fleshed out. The system is pretty simple (that I recall from playing the Doctor Who RPG). Roll 2d6 and add the attribute and any skill or trait modifiers to reach a target difficulty.
Had I known that I was going to make this character into Ace Rimmer, I might have adjusted some of the attributes and skills to make it more like him. But I didn’t want to go back and change anything. So don’t think this is my 100% interpretation of Ace Rimmer in Rocket Age.
Additional Notes:
I kept wondering why I had the thoughts of a Mallard character who was a Mage for my Dragonbane entry in the 2026 #Character Creation Challenge. Then it dawned on me that I had shared this video online years ago and I had to find it again. At the time I was thinking of my D&D 3.5 magic user in the last big campaign I played in.
Coming Up Next:
vs Ghosts
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