Category: Role Playing Games

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 21: Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy

Written by TardisCaptain January 21, 2025January 25, 2025

Day 21 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’m going to create a character using the Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy book from Necrotic Gnome. This is a clone of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition which I used to create a character in a past challenge. This PDF from DriveThruRPG also includes the expansion with extra classes, optional rules and spells. There are 257 pages in the PDF and the character sheet is two-pages.

This is a standard D20 clone so it uses the ability scores that we should be familiar with. The character creation options are listed on page 14. There is a basic, advanced an optional character creation option. The basic option states that the class selected also determines the character’s race. If you pick an Elf or Ghome, that is both your race and your class. If you pick a Fighter, Thief or one of the other regular classes, then you are a Human. In the advanced option your race and class are separate (which is how I remember it in AD&D1e). In the optional rules, you still create the character with the two methods just mentioned, but there is an option for secondary skills and weapon proficiency. I think I’m going to let the dice decide. If I roll an even, it’s basic and odd will be advanced. I rolled a five so we are going with the advanced option. On page 16 is a step by step guide for basic creation and on page 18 is the guide for advanced creation.

Step 1 is to roll the ability scores. 3d6 is rolled for each ability. It doesn’t have an option to choose so I’m assuming that we are going down the line. There is a note about sub-par characters with ability scores of 8 or less results discarding all of those rolls and starting again. Let’s see how we do. Actually rolled pretty well and with a high strength, I guess we are making a fighter. This is how it was originally done, roll and then select the class from the abilities.

Step 2 is to pick a race and then adjust the ability scores from the racial descriptions. Our options are Drow (dark Elves), Duergar (grey Dwarves), Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Halfling, Half-Orc, Human, and Svirfneblin (deep Gnome). Some of these races had minimum requirements that my low CON roll of 8 didn’t meet. So my only options were Drow, Elf, Half-Orc and Human. If I have made an Half-Orc in a past challenge, I haven’t made one in a while. So we are going with that one. I added/subtracted the ability modifiers and wrote down the languages and other abilities. It also listed which classes were available for this race, luckily Fighter was one of them.

Step 3 choose a Class. As mentioned above, I’m selecting a Fighter for this yet-to-be-named Half-Orc.

Step 4 is to adjust the ability scores. Only the STR, INT or WIS can be lowered by 2 for 1 point addition to another ability score. I could drop my WIS by 2 and add the 1 to STR to give me a higher modifier. Yea, I want this guy to be tough so I’m doing it. I really can’t drop my INT because it would go below the minimum of 9 in the adjustment formula.

Step 5 is to note the ability score modifiers now that they are set. I wrote them down.

Step 6 is to note the attack values. Warning, warning, there is a THAC0 involved. While there is an option to use the Ascending AC I’m going to stick with the THAC0 since I haven’t seen it in a while.

Step 7 is to note the savings throws and class/race abilities. There is a listing for weapon proficiencies here as well, but I’m not following that path today.

Step 8 is rolling Hit Points. Unfortunately I can’t add any CON bonus as there isn’t one. But there is an optional rule to re-roll any 1s or 2s for the first-level character. I had rolled a 5.

Choose alignment. The only options were Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic. Had this been an actual organized game I would have inquired with the GM. So on this challenge entry I’ll just use Neutral.

Step 10 is to list down the known languages that the character knows. Since the INT score isn’t high enough to add any new languages, this unknown character only knows what his race and class lists. Alignment, Common and Orcish.

Step 11 is purchasing equipment. I see the familiar 3d6x10 for starting gold and rolled it. Luckily the Fighter can use all weapons, shields and armor.

Now that we’ve got our equipment. Step 12 is to note the AC of the character. I included the DEX bonus.

Step 13 is to note the level (first) and XP (zero). I also noted that the character needed 2,000 XP to reach second level and that he gets a +10% bonus due to primary attribute bonus.

Step 14 is an optional step for Secondary Skill. I looked at the list and it was randomly rolled on a d100. Sure lets see what we get. A 73 shows a… Miner? I’m, sure I guess. Perhaps he was a slave before he escaped the mines?

The last step is to name the character. I pulled up a random Half-Orc name generator and selected Thamar. Sounds good enough. I transferred my notes to the character sheet and scanned it.

Afterthoughts:

I like how the character sheet lists information on how to use the ability check and savings throws. I remember suddenly needing to look them up during some games in the past.

I ended up rolling for 1,000 starting GP. (5+2+3=10 x 100) and the costs of the equipment, armor and weapons left a lot of GP for a starting character. I wonder if this was correct? I went back to the AD&D 1e players handbook and the starting money ranged from 5 to 200 GP on page 35. I thought it was a little strange.

Additional Notes:

I had something really good happen today that has caused me to switch out one of my games that I was going to use in an upcoming Character Creation Challenge entry. I don’t want to announce it now, but you’ll know it when it’s posted. I’m quite excited by this.

Coming Up Next:

GI Joe

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games, Science Fiction

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 20: Cyberpunk 2020

Written by TardisCaptain January 20, 2025January 24, 2025

A game that I remember playing back in the 90’s is what I will be using for this entry in the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge. Cyberpunk 2020 that was published in 1991 by R. Talsorian Games. Past challenge entries using different versions of the Cyberpunk genre include Cyberpunk v3 in 2022, Cyber Generation in 2023 and Cyberpunk Red in 2024.

Section 1 on page 3 lists your Role (aka Class) and after reading the descriptions I really wanted to make a character that was a Fixer. This is a guy who can be a smuggler or information broker. Section 2 on page 25 is the statistics. There is an option for Character Points for the statistics depending on what type of game the GM wanted to run (Average to Major Hero games). But there was also an option to fast roll the stats by rolling a D10 (re-roll any 1 or 2 results) and place each score where you want it. I’m doing this. The Stats are Intelligence (INT), Reflexes (REF), Cool (CL), Technical Ability (TECH), Luck (LK), Attractiveness (ATT or ATTR on the character sheet), Movement Allowance (MA), Body Type (BT) and Empathy (EMP). I rolled these up and also wrote down the secondary stats based that were mathematically provided by the primary stats.

On page 34 is the first step of the Lifepath. Because Cyberpunk has a strong fashion sense (and I as a player do not) the first step is the Origins and Personal Style. I rolled a d10 to determine the clothes (Biker Leathers), hairstyle (Wild & All Over) and add-ons (Spiky Gloves). You can choose your character’s ethnicity or randomly roll it. Let’s see what the dice says. 0 = European. I narrowed this down to German just because.

Next step is the Family Background and this has an actual flow chart. The family ranking is Pirate Fleet (um… what?), both parents are still alive and the family status is OK. The character’s childhood environment is in a decaying, once upscale neighborhood. The roll for siblings resulted in this guy being an only child. I’m directed to move to step three: Motivations.

And here we are on the step three flowchart. This unnamed character is intellectual and detached. The person they value the most is a parent. What they value the most is power (insert Unlimited Power meme here). Using people like tools before discarding them is how the character feels about most people. And finally for the last random roll in Motivations, the character’s most valued possession is a piece of clothing. Onto the next chart.

Life Events is step four. I’m instructed to roll 2d6+16 for the character’s starting age of 27. This means for each year past 16 I roll 11 times on the Life Event chart. Oh boy, I’m going to my scratch paper and rolling them all up. Wow, there was a lot of rolling here. If you made a friend or an enemy you had to roll up their personal style using some of the earlier steps in this character creation process. Since there wasn’t really room for this on the second page of the character sheet, I just put down TBD on my notes.

The skills of my Fixer is next. There is a Career Skill Package and there are 40 points to use for these. There is also 13 points for non-career skills (as determined by INT+REF scores). I wrote down the skills I thought my Fixer would need.

Gearing up the character. The book says that the characters are mobile and you’ve got to keep your equipment portable. The starting funds are dependent on what level your special skill is for your role. And unfortunately I was running out of time for today. I had a few things written down, but I’d probably fill this out with several cyber enhancements and the like to make it more cyberpunkish. Oh, I don’t have a name yet. Consulting a random name generator I settled on Xenos.

Afterthoughts:

Turns out I had seen the lifepath first and thought it was the start of the character creation process. When it suddenly ended with no further steps I had to go back. That is when I realized that I started in the wrong spot, the lifepath was the end. So I was just a tad confused for a minute. I wish the organization from the lifepath had been used throughout the entire character creation process.

I liked how they gave examples using real life and fictional examples of what skill levels they had (example Ronald Reagan had a Persuasion of 7+, Sherlock Holmes had Awareness/Notice of 10+, etc.) on some skills. It helped when I was thinking about them.

I had quite a few good fond memories of playing this game. I wish that I could play it again. Even my wife was remembering a Cyberpunk 2020 game that we had played years ago with friends.

Additional Notes:

I had posted a link to the Character Creation Challenge entry for Shadow Ops on the publisher’s discord server. I wanted to share what the author’s response was in his own words.

“Thanks for doing this! I appreciate it! I think you were a little harsh on figuring out Combat Skills, though I will concede that I should have noted something about Combat Skills using score on p. 8.

I used Skill Set rather than Class because the term fit much better in the genre. In the fiction, people literally talk about their “skill sets.” Plus Liam Neeson has a particular set of skills, after all.

Overall, you didn’t seem to enjoy the process, which is unfortunate, but everyone has their own experiences and their own expectations about what the process should be.”

I thanked him for taking the time to explain some of his thinking to me. I could see where he was coming from with the Skill Sets vs Class line of thinking. I’m still planing to do a cover-to-cover read of the book when things are not so hectic later this year. But this is not the type of response I would have normally received from a larger publisher.

Coming Up Next:

Old School Essentials

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games, Westerns

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 19: OGL Wild West

Written by TardisCaptain January 19, 2025January 23, 2025

The western is one genre that I’ve always been interested in. So for this entry into the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge I’m going to be using a game I found on DriveThruRPG called OGL Wild West. In past challenges I had used Tall Tales B/X, US Marshals and Boot Hill.

The OGL Wild West PDF file is 241 pages long and was released by Mongoose Publishing in 2004. This is the same publisher that released the Traveller 2nd Edition RPG that I used earlier in this challenge. It was written by Richard Neale. The character sheet is three pages long. The character creation starts on page nine.

The first step listed is the character concept. I’m going to to go with a Pony Express rider who was accused of being inappropriate with a saloon girl and fired. He’s trying to find his new way in this world.

The second step is to generate the ability scores which are standard in an OGL roleplaying game. The book give gives three options, a pre-set of stats, a planned generation with 25 points to spend between each stat that already starts at 8 or… and you know where I’m going… roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die and allocate to the stat.

Choosing the class is step three. The classes are directly from the D20 Modern RPG that had come out at the time. These are the Strong Hero, Fast Hero, Tough Hero, Smart Hero, Dedicated Hero and Charismatic Hero. Well he rode for the Pony Express so I’m thinking Fast Hero. I wrote down the benefits, selected the skills, talents and feats. There really wasn’t a Pony Express Rider vocation for step four, so I picked Tenderfoot since he had come from ‘back east’ to find his fortunes in the wild west. The skills and feats were step five.

Steps six was the finishing touches. This would include age (he is 19), Height and Weight (randomly rolled as 5’5″ and 175 lbs. Reputation of nothing and luck. Aaaannnddd nothing on equipment for the character. I scrolled down to the Outfitting chapter (I really wish they had put bookmarks in this PDF) and there was nothing about starting gear. So screw it, I just wrote down some things that I thought the character would have. Oh and while reading about Pony Express riders I took a first name from one and a last name from another and settled on the name William Keetley. I then transferred my notes over to the character sheet and scanned it.

Afterthoughts:

I found some (See Combat, page XX) in a few places. So the book could have used another round of editing. There were some confusing steps in the process (lack of getting gear listed in the process for one). If I were to run this game, I’d probably end up re-writing half the book. So I don’t know if it would be high on my priority to homebrew for it. To my knowledge no one is playing this game. So I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to play.

Yes, you’ll notice that the name of the character isn’t listed on the character sheet until page three.

I did like how they had a Rogues’ Gallery in the back of the book that had stats for historical figures of the western era.

Additional Notes:

I was able to go back and look at the traffic coming to this site. From that I was able to find several new websites and message boards that were participating in the Character Creation Challenge. I’ve added them to the links page for the challenge.

Coming Up Next:

Cyberpunk 2020

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games, Science Fiction

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 18: Traveller The New Era

Written by TardisCaptain January 18, 2025January 23, 2025

The Day 18 entry for the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge will come from Traveller: The New Era (I wonder if that title was inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation?) I had won an online auction that had a ton of dead tree books for this game last year, so I thought that I’d use it for the challenge. I recall seeing a lot of ads and articles for this game when I picked up the Challenge Magazines (there were a lot of good Star Trek and Star Wars RPG articles within the issues). This game was originally published by Game Designers Workshop, but is currently being sold on DriveThruRPG by Far Future Enterprises.

For a game that I’ve never played, I sure do pick up a lot of Traveller products. I remember the original game being advertised back in my early D&D days. When I’ve posted Traveller characters from past challenges, I notice that the number of visitors to my website spike up. So there is a lot of popularity with this game. My past character entries have included the Classic Traveller, Traveller20, Traveller 2nd Edition and retro clones, such as Cepheus Deluxe. There was even a fantasy version called Swords of Cepheus and a fan made Star Trek adaptation called Star Trek: Alpha Quadrant.

So this game comes with a one-page character sheet and a one-page character generation worksheet. Hopefully this will help with the creation process. The book itself is 384 pages long and I can tell it had been used a lot. There were several highlights that a previous owner had made on certain rules and page numbers. They had even colored in some of the black and white artwork. I haven’t looked at any of the different supplements that came with this core rulebook to see if they have also been highlighted/colored. This is primarily a cold read as I’ve only flipped through the book a few times prior to the challenge.

Note: In the book, the character generation starts on page 15 and it looks like it is in a slightly different order than on the worksheet. For the purpose of this entry, I’m going to follow the worksheet steps.

Going down the character sheet, the first thing to do is pick a name and race. I did read up on the different races earlier today and I think I’ll stick with Human just because I’m still trying to catch up. The name will be Jarl Barkton because it popped up in my head.

Attributes are next on the worksheet. We start with Strength (STR), Agility (AGL), Constitution (CON), Intelligence (INT), Education (EDU) and Charisma. There are columns for roll, mods and final as things may change during the creation process. I’m instructed to roll 2d6-1 and assign as desired. There are two additional attributes of Psionic Strength (PSI) and Social Level (SOC). The PSI is the only entry on the worksheet that has a page number and when I read it, apparently you have to role play the encounter to get your PSI tested, so I’m going to skip it as I’m already getting a mental image of what I want Jarl to be.

Step 4 is the homeworld. The worksheet has several blank spots on it and when I look at the book on page 16 it states that the player or referee can name a starting homeworld that has already been created, or the referee can roll up a homeworld for the character. However, when I went to look at the planets in the core rulebook, the different sectors were all marked as “Referee only, do not share with players” so I guess I am rolling after all. It then took a second to track down the homeworld effects on the character which I added to the worksheet.

The careers are step 5. When I’ve made past characters using the similar systems referenced above, I never know how many four-year career terms I’m supposed to use when making the character. Looking over the careers I’m going to select Army (just because he meets the prerequisites). I stumbled my way through this process and I think I got it right. There are blank sections on the worksheet (Scndry Act is what?). The character did two terms in the Army then one as a Mercenary.

SFrom the careers I wrote down the skills for step 6 the initiative for step 7 and the age for step 8 (17+terms x4). Step 9 was the Jarl’s Hit Capacity per body part, step 10 is the character’s weight, step 11 is the load (carrying capacity) of the character, step 12 is the throw range and step 13 is the unarmed combat damage (all determined by math formulas).

The last step on the worksheet is starting money. You multiply the character’s SOC by the tech level for each term (three in this case) so 1,500 credits.

Well the worksheet is done and I did have to refer to the book quite a few times to get clarification. I didn’t come up with any backgrounds for the three contacts. As I was looking for the equipment I stumbled across the military academy section (Jarl did become a commissioned officer and was promoted several times) but it looks like he didn’t meet the prerequisites so… never mind. And actually I’m going to skip the equipment for now because 1- I need to wrap things up and 2- I would have heavily consulted with an experienced referee to see what type of campaign this would be. I’m going to go with the assumption that Jarl is the hired gun who is protecting the exploration team that I created in my earlier Traveller 2nd Edition and Stars Without Number challenge entries. I transferred what information I did have over to the character sheet.

Afterthoughts:

I really like the character generation worksheet. It’s all on one page. The only thing I wish they had added was the page numbers in the core book so I could quickly find the additional information that I may have wanted.

Some of the skills listed in the careers didn’t have skill descriptions that I could find (Determination, Spacehand were two I wanted to know more about). This was frustrating as I needed to know more about them to select or increase. Oh, I found out while transfering the data from the worksheet to the character sheet that determination and spacehand were skill clusters that I could have selected something specific in. Too late now.

While this was an interesting dip into the pool and I did read some of the game lore that was in the book (and there was a lot), I really don’t know if I’d play this game. I wouldn’t turn down an offer, but if anyone is going to have a game going, I’m expecting it to be the latest version of the Traveller RPG series.

Additional Notes:

Narak on BlueSky had created an entry using the Teenagers from Outer Space RPG. I got into a discussion with this person since I had used this system in last year’s challenge. They said “It seems like it be a great game to bust out for a silly gamenight, maybe between story arc of a serious campaign. It was fun lightweight character to build in any case! Kind of a less random, less shameful Maid RPG.” I had never heard of Maid RPG. Should I look in on it? Or is it something that I should avoid?

Coming Up Next:

OGL Wild West

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 17: The Witcher

Written by TardisCaptain January 17, 2025January 21, 2025

For Day 17 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge I am going to be using The Witcher Pen & Paper RPG to make a character. This game is based off of the series of The Witcher novels, video games and later a television series. The roleplaying game was published by R. Talsorian Games in 2018 and was written by Cody and Lisa Pondsmith. The PDF contains 337 pages and the character sheet is four pages long. I had picked up this game with several supplements (as well as other R. Talsorian titles) in one of the bundle sales. This will be a cold read as I haven’t had a chance to do any prep work on this. I recall watching some of the TV episodes with my wife as I know she likes the main actor. So I have a little knowledge of the world this game is set in. In fact that’s where the “toss a coin to your blogger” line that you see in the “About This Site” sidebar comes from.

There is a “Dice You Need” sidebar on page 5 that advises the player to be prepared with two D10s and some D6s. There is another side bar note on page 20 where the Creating Your Own Character list starts that states that the explanation of the game mechanics will be explained over the next several chapters. So it appears that the writers took the explain and create at the same time procedure that we’ve seen in other RPG books. Depending upon how this is done, it can be really good, or really confusing. We’ll find out very soon.

OK, the list is as follows. 1- Pick your race (thank you for not asking me to come up with a concept first), 2- Run a Lifepath, 3- Pick Your Profession, 4- Pick Your Statistics, 5- Select Pick-Up Skills, 6- Get Your Coin and 7- Outfit Yourself.

So for this unknown character I’m looking over the races. The available options are Witchers (Humans raised as Witchers), Elves (The Aen Seidhe), Dwarves and Humans. According to the book the Humans are the most prominent across the lands so let’s go with that.

On to the lifepath and for once, it’s actually a lifepath. There is a flow chart with a start box and a, go here guide depending upon what is rolled or chosen. This gives me hope. As a Human I need to know where this character’s homeland. An even roll guides me to Nilfgaard, I then go down to Nilgaardian Origin and I roll a 3 which is The Heart of Nilfgaard (and the character gets a bonus +1 to Deceit). Now the line takes me to the Northern Origin or Vassal Origin, so I’m assuming that I follow the path down to the Family chart. With an even roll, some of the character’s family is still alive and I’m directed to the Parents chart. Another even roll says both parents are alive, go to Family Status chart. My roll results in “Born into servitude” led a simple life as a servant and worked a lot. But he gets a trained bird or serpent as part of his starting gear (uh… OK). We are directed to roll on the “Most Influential Friend” chart which resulted in A Mage (and more starting gear). Perhaps the parents of the character worked for this Mage in their servitude. Next is the Siblings chart and he has two living siblings. An older sister that likes the character and her personality is romantic. For the second sibling they are another sister that is a twin of the character and looks up to him with a stern personality. Interesting way to roll this up. Heh, the book states that when your character dies, he dies. So your siblings could be used as a replacement character. Or they could be a possible rival to the character. Next on the lifepath is the life events of the character itself. You roll a d10 for ever ten-years that the character has been alive. I haven’t seen anything about the character’s current age, so I’m going to pluck the age of 25 out of the air. So I roll twice and both came up Fortune or Misfortune. The first one was a misfortune of an accident that resulted in four-months of healing. On the fortunate side apparently the character helped a Witcher at one point in time and he now owes me a favor. That’s interesting as the next step is Allies & Enemies. If I’m reading this correctly I’m only getting one randomly rolled. A roll of 4 is even for an ally who is male, Mage that the character saved from something and is now a friend who lives in the Northern Kingdoms. Based off of that roll, I’m going to assume it’s not the same mage that the parents worked for. Wow, this is still going (I think, we’ve moved to different pages that don’t say, move to next chart) and we have Romance. I rolled an 8 which resulted in Whores & Debauchery. Kids? Who knows, but I’m sure the character is light a few coins. Wow, this is still going. We are onto Your Personal Style (what is this style thing you speak of?) I roll a d10 four times and this character is wearing traveling clothing, is contemplative, has a complicated hairstyle (uh… what?) and a shadowy cloak. Um… OK. Now there’s a chart for values and three rolls later this character’s most valued person is a friend (who?), their value is hedonistic pursuits and his feelings on people is “people are great”. I don’t know how this is relevant to the game? The last list has some example names for by speech or region, but none of them really excite me so I reached out to the random name generator and selected Styd Rarlart. I haven’t read the books so I don’t know how accurate this generator is. But wow, that was a long section.

Styd’s profession is next. I haven’t made a bard yet, so he’s a bard. I wrote down his defining skill, vigor, magical perks, skills and starting gear. See, that was quick and easy (looks at last section).

We are finally to the statistics. Each character has a rating in Intelligence (INT), Reflexes (REF), Dexterity (DEX), Body (BODY), Speed (SPD), Empathy (EMP), Craft (CRA), Will (WILL) and Luck (LUCK). There were two ways to generate these stats, roll a D10 (ignore any 1s or 2s) and place the scores where you want or point buy. Yes, I’m rolling. After I assigned the scores there is some derived stats for Stun, Run, Leap, Health Points, Stamina, Encumbrance, Recovery, Punch and Kick. I mathed the maths and boy are there a lot of charts and side charts.

Skills are next and each skill can have a rating from 0-10. We already received a bunch of skills from the profession and I’m allotted 44 points to use between all of them and I stated them out. Next are the pick-up skills which are the non-profession skills that your character has also learned. Add your INT and REF scores together to get your total number of points to assign to the non-professional skills that you have picked up.

Step 6 is money money money and step 7 is outfitting the character. The coin is called a crown and your starting amount is based on your profession. I rolled up how much money that Styd and set him up with his equipment. I need to wrap this up so I’ll just say it’s the standard buy piecemeal, but there is some recommended items. Gah, everything has a special name because it came from the source material.

Wow, half the items from the lifepath do not have spots on the four page character sheet. I also have some blank spots but I’ve got to wrap this up. This only re-enforces my belief that a character sheet should not be more than two pages. I didn’t scan one of the pages because it had to do with spells and magic.

Afterthoughts:

I liked the lifepath in this game. I don’t think I would have come up with the concept of a twin unless the dice came up with it. However towards the end of the lifepath process I was wanting to get past all of this and move on.

When the book was providing the skill descriptions, I like how they said “A base 10 can do this, a base 13 or base 20 can do this”. It helped me decide where to spend the various skill points.

The system sounded pretty straight forward. d10+stat+skill (if present)+modifiers to meet or beat a target number.

I don’t really see myself playing this game beyond a one-shot at a convention. I also don’t see myself homebrewing for this system. Not because of anything bad, but because my fantasy itch is already covered by other games that I know very well.

Additional Notes:

Still chipping away at the block of marble. This will be something good when I’m done with the challenge.

Thank you to everyone who has been posting on social media with the hashtag #CharacterCreationChallenge. If I’m using that social media site, I’ve been re-posting your entries for others to see.

Coming Up Next:

Traveller: The New Era

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 16: Barbarians of the Ruined Earth

Written by TardisCaptain January 16, 2025January 20, 2025

Day 16 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’ll be using the post-apocalyptic roleplaying game Barbarians of the Ruined Earth. The book says this is a Black Hack adaptation and inspired by the animated series Thundarr the Barbarian from the 80’s. I show I remember watching back then, but I haven’t seen any episodes recently. I should do a re-watch. Now I’ve never done anything with Black Hack, but it sounds like a D20 OSR adaptation. So lets see what we have to work with.

I had picked up this PDF last year on DriveThruRPG when the game was on sale. I’ve had an affinity for post-apocalyptic games and movies for quite some time. Mad Max, Night of the Comet, Cherry 2000, Damnation Alley and a host of other movies that range from excellent to cheesy are still a cup of tea for me. So it’s shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ll pick up a post-apocalyptic game when a reasonably priced one becomes available.

The PDF has 170 pages in it with the character creation process starting on page 8. The character sheet is only one page. Let’s get started.

Being a D20 OSR game it has the standard attributes that we are use to. STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS and CHA. We are instructed to roll 3d6 in order, however if a stat is rolled at 15 or higher then the next stat must be rolled with 2d6+2. Then rolling returns to 3d6. There is an optional of rolling 2d6+5 for each stat. While the later sounds tempting, I really want to see what it’s like with the first method. Dang, none of them were 15 or higher. Oh well.

Selecting a race is next. The options are Human, Sorcerers, Beastmen, Robot and Vek (a raptorfolk) or the option to create my own. While the last is tempting I’m under a time crunch. The non-human races are treated as both race and class. I went and read the racial descriptions and selected the Robot. So this is also covering the next step of selecting a class. From this I rolled up my Hit Points and wrote down my unique abilities and starting equipment. I was asked to select the model of robot and I didn’t think it would be a combat robot with a really low STR score. A random name generator came up with Humanoid Lab Partner Robot which I turned into HLPR-47. But when I looked at the models available, there were no “science” type robots, so I selected a medical robot. It’s not entirely clear, but it appears that I roll for an interesting trinket and a life event (Life? Don’t talk to me about life.) Apparently HLPR-47 does not understand the whining and prattling of humanoids and has been chased off from towns for more than a few times due to mouthing off. Same HLPR-47, same.

I don’t understand why a robot was provided with torches in their starting equipment when they can already see in low light. I know it’s not see in the dark, but it made me raise an eyebrow.

The character creation doesn’t really have an ending. It starts with a list and then, like a lot of RPGs that I’ve read, just starts wandering off into the other chapters. I didn’t see anything about robots having any proficiencies. Under buying equipment it stated you roll for your starting currency (which is based upon the different kingdoms). I guess I’m done. Here is the character sheet.

Afterthoughts:

There is no attack roll by your character’s opponents. Apparently when you are attacked, you roll to see if your character successfully dodges/defends itself, etc. Interesting. I wonder how that plays at the table.

Destiny points appear to be the same as fate or luck points. With this optional rule you can re-roll a failed roll or obtain other benefits.

I may have to look into the other Black Hack products and see if some things are explained a little bit better. I could see myself playing this game, but it sounds like a quick pick up game instead of long term campaign option. Possible run at an upcoming SaltCON?

Additional Notes:

LexTenebris on Mastodon responded to some of the questions and comments that I made on the See You, Space Cowboy… entry I had posted earlier. yea, clearly a space mafia is… in space. They also said that See You, Space Cowboy… strikes him as a cheap rip-off of Scum and Villainy. I haven’t seen this game yet but it is a Forged in the Dark clone (which I also haven’t had a chance to look at yet). So I don’t have a comparison between the two games, but I’ll have to see if S&V come up for sale.

Coming Up Next:

The Witcher

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games, Spy-Fi

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 15: Shadow Ops

Written by TardisCaptain January 15, 2025January 19, 2025

The espionage roleplaying game called Shadow Ops is what I’m using for Day 15 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge. I had backed this game on KickStarter and received both a PDF and physical copy of the game that I reviewed in a past blog post. I received some interesting questions from that post from people wanting to know more information including a map maker who’s live streams I watch several times a week. It made me feel good to hear feedback on my past writings. Since I had already talked about the physical book and RPG system in that past blog post, we will jump into the character creation process (aka Agent Recruitment) with the outline found on page 23 with an example of the steps on page 31.

We start with a concept for the character. Plucking an idea out of the air (especially since I don’t know what the other “players” at the table would have been taking) I’m going to go with one of the basics. This guy is a driving specialist that can handle any ground vehicle to get the mission completed.

OK, attributes. They are Insight, Intellect, Personality, Coordination, Endurance and Strength. Each attribute starts with a score of 5 and I have 30 points. I was trying to see if there was any minimums or recommendations for the different Skill Sets (aka class) but I couldn’t find anything, so I bumped up the attributes that I thought a Wheelman would have.

The book now says that as a level 1 agent the wheelman has 2 skill steps to spend on my skills (other choices had different skill steps). All skills start at d4 and the two I bump up will roll a d6. I picked the two I thought a good Wheelman would need which was Driving and Technology.

There are three combat skills. Unarmed Combat (using the body), Melee Combat (with hand held weapons) and Firearms Combat (with ranged weapons). The Wheelman has a 5 for the combat skills under that description (which is the same amount as a Solider), but I can’t seem to find out what I’m supposed to do with this score of 5. The character in the example creation only had 1 skill point and couldn’t raise anything. The Outline on page 23 fails to tell me how to spend these points. The additional description on 25-27 says that you can spend enough to get one of the combat skills from a d4 to a d6 at level 1, but still fails to give me a description on how to spend the points to get up to the higher dice step. Even the Combat Skills section on page 82 lacks an answer. It does tell me here that the combat skills are not advanced by skill steps, but rather by scores like attributes and resistances. OK, that helps a little bit since the score chart on page 8 has a breakdown of what the attributes have (Gods, I’m jumping all over this book trying to find answers). So if I’m understanding this correctly, I can dump all 5 combat points into one of the three skills to make it a d6 at level 1 but the other two would have a score of 0 (which only gives a d4). I’ve wasted enough time on this so I’m going to go with that assumption. Yes, I’m starting to get frustrated.

Deep breath. OK let’s continue. Choose one of 25 Fortes. These are described on page 86 and the book states “Fortes are intended to represent a significant element of an agent’s personality, previous life experience or additional career training.” OK these sound like the Feats we know in D&D. I looked over the list and picked one for Agent Unknown.

Next comes pick one Skill Set Ability choices. Looking at the description under the Wheelman these seem to be a special ability that only your class has (I really wish they had just stuck with the name “Class” in this book). Some can be taken more than once (I’m assuming when my character is improved in play) and one has a level 2 limitation. I picked Experienced and bumped the driving skill up to d8.

Pick two abilities. No not the Skill Set Ability picked in the previous step. These are General Feats… err Abilities that any agent can have. Looking at the list on page 87 there are a boatload of them (200 to be exact). A list of general feats broken down into smaller categories, I just found two and picked them.

Pick three knowledge. This is specialized stuff that Agent Unknown knows. The example seems to show that these are just general items the agent is really knowledgeable about, but not on a list. So from the air I plucked “Cars that Top Gear Has Tested” (where he got his interest in cars, he has the episodes practically memorized), “All organized automobile races in Europe” (like Le Mans, Formula 1, Monaco Grand Prix, etc.), and “Playing the Drums” (while growing up he through he was going to be the drummer in a rock band).

Selecting the Stress Die is the next step. Luckily there are three of them that are broken down by what type of agent your character can be. The book stated that d8/d10/d12 is a specialized approach that is good when the bullets fly. Sounds good to me. As for resistances all three of them (Speed, Spirit and Stamina) all start out as d4 for a level 1 character and the Combat Training and Defense was set by the Class… err… Skill Set as 1 and 0.

Equipment, there’s something in the Skill Set notes about Equipment .5 (vehicles) and a Resource score of 1. As you can probably tell I’m running out of energy here. Agent Unknown has a damn good car and I’m assuming he has a good handgun and perhaps a few other things. Who knows.

All agents start with a one d6 contact. The book says that it doesn’t need to be defined at the start of play and my mind says “Thank the heavens”.

Combat Modes? Smeg, I just want to make a character not write an wikipedia entry. These are actions a character can do in combat. I get 5 of these. Fine, randomly I picked Aid, Close Quarters, Aimed, Fight and Autofire. (and later when transferring information over to the character sheet, Fight was already filled in, I’m not going back and choosing another one)

Finally the last step. I found a name of English chaps from a random name generator which was Mason Gordon. Since he watched a lot of Top Gear and knew about European races he was born and raised in England. He was going to be a drummer in a rock band before he was ‘discovered’ and recruited to be a driver for an intelligence agency (MI-5? UNITY? GI Joe? Who knows). He’s good looking even when covered in grease and loves working on his car. I transferred everything over from my notes and scanned the character sheet because I wanted to be done. I didn’t scan the second page of the sheet since it was just ability descriptions.

Afterthoughts:

I was glad for the character creation example in the back. When I got stuck a few times I went back and read the example in order to make sure I was following the process right. However I really wish that page numbers had been provided when I wanted to look up additional information. I felt frustrated looking back and forth for information. I was using at least four bookmarks and could have been using more.

If I was going to use this in a campaign, I’d probably create a better step-by-step character creation guide or a worksheet. It started off well, then quickly became frustrating with all of the searching and page jumping. While I might use this game for a special series of blog posts that I have planned, I don’t know if I’ll be doing any homebrewing for this system.

The RPG system itself sounds pretty straight forward. But the deep dive in the character creation system made me not want to do a deep dive in the other systems provided for chases and combat. I’m sure I’ll take a closer look at them later, but I’m really not getting encouraged to run this as a one-shot at SaltCON.

I’m not disappointed that I backed this Kickstarter. The book is gorgeous. Hoping that the system will run well like GURPS even though the creation process was long and tedious. But I felt that things could have been written to make rule look up easier. Following the analogy of the pizza that I used in my Cowboy Bebop Kickstarter review, I got the right toppings, but the crust and sauce didn’t impress me much.

Additional Notes:

This was done at the end of a very long day, so forgive me if I got a little snippety toward the end. I may have to put this book on the “read later” list to see if just a simple read through would give me some 20/20 hindsight. I almost gave up on this character creation, which I haven’t done too often.

Coming Up Next:

Barbarians of the Ruined Earth

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games, Science Fiction

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 14: Stars Without Number

Written by TardisCaptain January 14, 2025January 19, 2025

Day 14 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’m using a game that I’ve had my eye on for quite some time. The Stars Without Number Revised Edition by Sine Nomine Publishing. This is an OSR D20 based science fiction RPG that has spawned several other “Without Number” type games such as Worlds (fantasy) and Cities (Cyberpunk). The game allowed for third-party publishers to produce their own adventures and supplements on DriveThruRPG. I had picked up this game in one of the bundle sales.

This appears to be a sandbox style game where the GM can select the type of science fiction universe they wish to run. Mechs, AI, rebels, explorers, etc. There is an in-game universe where it is the year 3200 and humanity lives on different planets scattered across the stars but I don’t think that would stop the GM from adapting it into a campaign they would want to run.

The character sheet is only one page. The PDF file is 325 pages long with the character creation summary located on page 4. Steps 1 and 2 deal with attributes. Steps 3 is for selecting background. Steps 4 and 5 deal with skills. A class is selected in step 6 and a foci (side talents) are selected in step 7. Step 8 deals with aliens or AI characters (if used in the game). Step 9 deals with non-psyching skills that reflect outside interests and step 10 deals with any psychic capabilities if present. Steps 11 and 12 deal with hit points and attack bonuses. Equipment and armor are covered in steps 13 through 16. Step 17 deals with savings throws and the final step covers the character name and goal. That’s an interesting breakdown of the character creation steps. Let’s see how they hold up for a first time attempt.

If you need a character quick, there is a Quick Character Creation chart on page 26. But I will not be using that for this challenge entry.

Being an OSR inspired game, the six attributes are determined by a 3d6 roll and assign as desired. The player then has an option to change one attribute to a 14 to ensure that they have at least one good one. There is also an option to take a pre-determined set of numbers, but if you’ve been reading my past blog entries, you know that I’ll want to roll some dice. Before rolling, I looked over the character options and I think I’m going to follow up on my Traveller character that I created earlier in the challenge. That character was a scientist in an exploration group, this character will be a medic/doctor type person. I generated the attributes and wrote down the modifiers.

With the background you can choose or roll for it. The book describes this as something that your character did before they started the adventure. Each background provided a list of skills that are provided. A 0-level skill is one that the character has a basic competence in and thus doesn’t incur the -1 untrained penalty to skill rolls. The chapter also advises the player to pick their homeworld and note down why they left. So my unnamed doctor dude selected the background of Physician on the colony planet of Orton III. He was training to be a full blown doctor until he was accused of a crime by a rival, one he didn’t commit, but didn’t have the clout the rival had to prove it. I wrote down the skills provided from the background.

For the class, I picked Expert as it sounded like something a doctor would be. I wrote down the additional skill, rolled the hit points and attack bonus (what little there was of it). As for the Focus, this is an additional knack that the heroes have in the game. Something that makes them stand out from the standard NPCs. Looking through the list I picked Wanderer since he had to leave his colony world. I wrote down the skill and bonuses it provided. Next the book instructed me to pick a non-psychic skill to represent an outside interest. Being on a colony world he had to know how to shoot since there were predators around. I also rolled the hit points as described in the class.

With the final touches I picked a name for this wandering doctor from a random name generator of Zan Camrin. On page 25 there are equipment packages ready to go for new characters. This sounded faster than trying to pick and choose the equipment. I wrote these down and wrote down the Armor Class and damage from the laser pistol. I also wrote down the saving throw details for the character and decided it was time to transfer everything over to the character sheet.

Afterthoughts:

I don’t know if it was the authors intention, but I was getting a lot of Firefly vibes from reading the rules for this game. I know it’s not just limited to that, but I could see myself running a Firefly campaign using Stars Without Number.

I was also getting a Traveller meets D20 vibe as well when looking at the character backgrounds with the growth and learning tables. There were also chapters on creating planets and sectors like I had seen in some Traveller publications.

The character sheet has no spots for regular equipment. Sure there are places for weapons, armor and “readied items” that I assumed was for stuff in hand. For the purpose of the sheet, I used the section as a regular equipment list.

Seeing how many third-party publishers there were for Stars Without Number, I wondered if I could homebrew some stuff for this and actually get paid for it? I may have to look more in on this.

Additional Notes:

I’m really enjoying the challenge entries that I’ve seen on the TardisCaptain discord, various social media sites and on the three big RPG message boards. It has been keeping me inspired to continue on despite how far behind real life had placed me in.

Coming Up Next:

Shadow Ops

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 13: Tales of the Valiant

Written by TardisCaptain January 13, 2025January 18, 2025

And welcome to Day 13 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and today we will be using the 5e based fantasy game from Kobold Press titled: Tales of the Valiant. This game has a free open gaming license and is compatible with D&D 5th edition with some changes. So how does it stack up? Well after finding the PDF on sale last year on DriveThruRPG, I was able to finally snag a digital copy.

The blue tinted character sheet is two pages long. The character creation step-by-step listing starts on page 11 and is broken down into nine steps. 0- Gather materials, 1- Create a character concept, 2- Choose a class, 3- Determine ability scores, 4- Choose a linage (aka race), 5- Choose a heritage (where the character was raised before adventuring), 6- Choose a background (also known as the character’s day job before they decided to become an adventurer), 7- Starting equipment and 8- Fill in the blanks. There is even a final checklist on page 14 to make sure you didn’t miss anything small like motivation, size, etc.

For the gathering materials in step 0 it lists the basic equipment that all RPGers should be familiar with (pencil paper, dice, etc.). I will say that I’ve been using a yellow mechanical pencil for the past 3 character creation challenges. It seems to wait for me to pick it up again the following year.

Step 1 is Create a character concept. While the classes look like the standard classes that you’d find in a D20 based game, I think I’m going to stick with a fighter just because I’m trying to chug through these posts as quickly as possible. Why is he a fighter? Dunno, perhaps something will inspire me while I’m creating the character.

Step 2 is already done from the previous step. He’s a fighter currently without a name. When I scrolled over to page 48 where the fighter was listed, they had a “Fighter Quick Build” side-note that talked about the items you wanted to focus in on while creating the character. There was a note about the fighter subclasses that you can select at higher levels. Spell Blade sounded interesting. There is a class in TOV called the Mechanist which is an inventor/tinkerer. That is one I might have explored if this was going to be a character for an actual campaign.

Determining the ability scores is our third step. This is the standard attributes that you see in a D20 clone. There are three methods provided to determine this. Rolling 4d6 and drop the lowest and assign as desired. Once this is done, add 2 to one score of your choice that is under 17 and add 1 to a score that is 17 and under. OK, I don’t think I’ve seen that before. The second method listed is a point buy (not really my cup of tea) but you don’t get to add anything after generating your scores. A standard array is listed as the third method with scores ranging from 8 to 16. Tempting as I want to get this blog post done past, but I can’t turn down the chance to roll some attribute dice. So I rolled and assigned and altered and chopped and sauteed. Oops, sorry about that last one, I must be getting hungry.

OK, step 4 is choosing a lineage. The choices that were available are Beastkin (bipedal animals) Dwarf, Elf, Human, Kobold (well it was released by a company called Kobold Press), Orc, Syderean (beings from another plane of existence like albino Celestials or the horned Fendish) and Smallfolk (aka Halflings and Gnomes). I’m thinking of making a Beastkin-Avian that has the head and wings of a bird after seeing the picture on page 105. I wrote down the details of that race.

Step 5 is the Heritage. While there are some recommended heritage listed, but a player can choose any of them if they want to try something unusual. However, as this is the first time I’m going to pick the standard heritage for Beastkin of Wildlands.

On to Backgrounds and Talents for step 6. Looking over them to see which background fit an Avian and knowing that he’d be a fighter, I picked Soldier. There was an adventuring motivation list that I could have rolled on, but I was attracted to having a dishonorable discharge so I have to adventure to make a living. So I’m thinking this unnamed birdman was a defender of his tribe/clan/what ever they are called and failed in a mission so he was kicked out of the group.

Starting Equipment for step 7, there is some equipment listed for the fighter that I was tasked to choose from as well as some from the background. That was easy. So for the last step, Fill In The Blanks so I looked at the final checklist. Basically this is making sure that anything you are missing on the character sheet is filled in. This included the talents and skills and a name (which I pulled from a random name generator) of Grunnubawk. I’m sure I missed something, but dinner is calling. Let me know if I did miss anything. Here are the character sheets.

Afterthoughts:

I like the final checklist. I just wish that the checklist had included page numbers if I wanted to look up additional information.

I need to get a physical copy of this book. I tend to learn a system better with a dead tree version. Yea, I know it’s basically 5e, but (insert gasp here), I’ve only played 5e a few times in convention one-shots. And we didn’t really get into the minutia there.

I’m wondering if this is the game that everyone would flock to if the general public decided to “BlueSky” the Wizards of the Coast products. I know that Pathfinder has a lot of popularity, but it has a nickname of “Mathfinder” that may steer people more towards ToV and other similar clones. Would I play this? Yes. Would I home brew for it? Possibly if I get into a campaign.

Additional Notes:

My apologies to anyone who tried to get to my website earlier today and found it down. As you can already see the issues were resolved and we are back to normal. But I’d like to stop having one website issue per week in 2025. This year has sucked so far and I’m hoping it won’t be bad as the year-that-shall-not-be-named.

Coming Up Next:

Stars Without Number

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

Character Creation Challenge, Role Playing Games, Star Wars

2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 12: Star Wars Edge of the Empire

Written by TardisCaptain January 12, 2025January 17, 2025

For my Day 12 entry in the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge I’m going to use the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire core rulebook by Fantasy Flight Games. I had picked this up at the used game swap at SaltCON last year at a bargain price. I’ve been a Star Wars fan since the first movie in 1977 and I’ve had a lot of fun playing the West End Games Star Wars RPG that I made a character for in a previous challenge. There was also the D20 based Star Wars RPG and Saga Edition that I’ve also made challenge characters for.

Now at the SaltCON where I picked up both this book and a starter set, I had the opportunity to play the game at a table. It made some sense, but I didn’t get a chance to fully immerse in the game as the GM was also doing a test-run of gaming tablets which did most of the work for us. There are also other books in this series that cover other Star Wars eras. They are all interchangeable since they were published by the same company.

As you can see in the photo below, this game uses some special dice specifically for Star Wars Edge of the Empire. There are blue boost dice, green ability dice, yellow proficiency dice (all positive) then black setback dice, purple difficulty dice, red challenge dice (all negative) and Force dice (the white one) and apparently there should have been two D10s in the set (luckily I have some of my own). I don’t know the system well enough to explain it here. I feel like I’d be making this blog post way too long. So we’ll just concentrate on character creation.

No numbers, some sides are blank. Dome dice are positive and some are negative.

I don’t know if these special dice are needed in the character creation process, but in chapter 2 (starting on page 33) the book talks about creating a character. This volume of “The Edge of the Empire” focuses on characters that are on the fringes of the known galaxy. The steps listed are 1- Determine Character Concept and Background, 2- Determine Starting Obligation, 3- Select Character Species, 4- Select Character Career, 5- Select Specializations, 6- Invest Experience Points, 7- Determine Derived Attributes, 8- Determine Starting Motivation, 9- Choose Gear and Description, 10- Group chooses starting ship. Just from this list it sounds like the characters would have been made in a session 0, so I’ll make some different assumptions during this solo creation.

Concept and background- Random name generator came up with Corvo Sturig and he will be a Human smuggler trying to make a few credits without getting caught by the authorities. He didn’t want to be a bog-raker on the remote swampy world of Trankit IV where he grew up. When a smuggler needed a hired hand, Corvo took the first opportunity to leave and learned the tricks of the trade from him.

Starting obligation- This is a debt that the player owes. I saw this concept recently when I made a character for See You, Space Cowboy… and I can see how it would add to to the character’s background. This could be an actual debt (to a legitimate or illegitimate org) or a feeling of loyalty to a person or group. There is a random d100 table available, but I’m really liking the concept I’ve come up so far so I would have asked the GM if I could pick one. After Corvo’s mentor retired, he allowed Corvo to make payments on the ship to eventually own it outright. This would have been debt on the list on page 39.

Select character species- I’ve already said Human. Page 48 gave me the Species Abilities (as part of the attributes that I’ll post about below), wound threshold, strain threshold, starting experience and special abilities. I wrote these down on my notes.

Select character career and specialization- I’m instructed to pick a career and specialization. From this the character will gain some different skills. I found the information on the smugglers on page 80. Out of the eight skills listed, Corvo knows four of them at rank 1. I picked them. There were three specializations listed and the Pilot sounded like the one that fit the concept that I’m following. This specialization has four additional career skills of which I’m allowed to pick two (I believe at rank 1). I wrote them down on my notes.

Invest Experience Points- I have 110 XP from being a Human. I can use these points to improve a characteristic, training skills, acquiring talents or learning new specializations. I’m referred to page 92 for more information. Apparently during character creation is the only time that characteristics can be increased by XP. That tells me that I’ll probably be spending a lot of points in those as the other items can be purchased when more XP is earned in the game. I had said above that I’d list the Characteristics later, and I think later is now. These attributes are Agility, Brawn, Cunning, Intellect, Presence (I wonder if Vader can sense my presence?), and Willpower. They all sound pretty standard that you usually see in RPGs. As a Human I started with 2 in each category. To raise one characteristic up to 3 would cost 30 XP and if I want to raise it to 4, it would be another 40 XP. I looked at the Characteristics that would help my smuggler skills and decided to bump those up. With the remaining 20 XP, I went to the Pilot Talent Tree on page 83 and purchased a few talents for Corvo. (I was wondering what the talent tree was when I was reading the smuggler description)

Now that I have my stats nailed down, let’s move onto Determining Derived Attributes: I was directed to page 94. These give me stats for the Wound Threshold, Strain Threshold, Defense and Soak Value (no not the BYU thing, how much incoming damage you can ignore before being seriously wounded). These were determined by characteristics, racial modifiers and armor worn.

Determine Motivation: This is explained as something that makes the character “tick”. I can create one (with GM’s permission) or one can be rolled random. Since I didn’t roll for the earlier Obligation, I’ll roll for them here. A roll of 2 says that Corvo has a Motivation of Ambition (see table 2-6) and a d100 roll of 66 which is Status. So Corvo wants to be known as the best smuggler. Perhaps a smuggler that always eludes the authorities.

And here we are to Gear and Description: This is usually the sign that you are near the end of the character creation process. On page 97 the description starts. The character has 500 credits to purchase items. Wow, a light blaster costs 300 credits. And the last step is to select a ship for the group. Of the three listed I selected the YT-1300 Light Freighter. We could have talked the GM into providing another ship within a certain credit range and if this was for an actual game, I probably would have taken the time to look one up.

I transferred everything over from my notes to the character sheet. There was no spot for the ship so I assume it would have been on a different sheet all together.

Afterthoughts:

So good news, you don’t need the special dice to create a character. And for jumping into the pool for the first time without reading the book, the steps were pretty straight forward. Considering how interesting the play was at the table with the weird dice, I was expecting something more complicated. I remember thinking after I had played the game at SaltCON that the system did encourage a shared narrative from the players.

I liked the use of Star Wars quotes at the beginning of the different chapters. As a love of quotes this made me smile because it added to the Star Wars feel of the books.

I really wish that the book would have given us the stats for the characters we’ve seen in the various Star Wars movies. Even if it was just the big ones like Han Solo or Mace Windu. A game based off of an IP sometimes makes me wonder, how does my character stack up to them? What could my character eventually become to simulate what we’ve seen on screen.

Well I already know that I’d play this game as I had at SaltCON. Would I play this game in a campaign? Well I wouldn’t turn it down if someone was willing to run one. However the GM at SaltCON was from out-of-state. I’ve never seen or heard of anyone locally who plays this game. And it may be a sense of nostalgia, but if I was going to run a Star Wars game, I’d probably stick with the WEG D6 Star Wars RPG.

Additional Notes:

MoonHunter on the TardisCaptain Discord Server gave me some feedback on the Terra Primate challenge entry. They said “Not only do I like the setting, Terra Primate did an incredible job with it. And I like the game system. I admit it.” Considering I hadn’t seen anything about the game before the auction where I picked the book up, I was wondering how well known this game was.

Coming Up Next:

Tales of the Valiant

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.