Category: Science Fiction

Welcome to Day 20 of the 2024 #CharacterCreationChallenge and today we will be using the Shadowrun Anarchy Alternate Ruleset. I picked up this book from a gaming swap meet at SaltCON last spring for a decent price and decided to use it for the challenge. I have a Shadowrun character from the first edition of the game. I don’t recall very much about that game. Back in the early 90’s the cyberpunk genre was all the rage in gaming and I think the gaming group was just trying out different versions. I know we played the original Cyberpunk quite a bit.

Shadowrun Anarchy was published by Catalyst Game Labs in 2016 and I had never heard of it before I saw the book. The hardbound book has 213 pages and the ISBN number is 978-1-941582-19-0 and had an original cover price of $39.99. Character creation starts on page 61 and there is a one page character sheet.

The first step is to create a character theme. I looked over the sample characters given and elected to go with another Street Samurai that is cybernetically enhanced. He was taken in by an orphanage at a young age and never knew his parents (they could be a plot point to re-appear in a future session). This orphanage trained kids to become adults that would help protect the neighborhood from different street gangs and corporate thugs. So he has a strong sense of community. I’m instructed to create a character name, which will be Spike. The last item in this step is to create some Tags for the character. One or two word descriptions. I selected: Human, Tough, Protective and Street Life.

Step two is to determine the game level. This is done by the player group and not the GM apparently. The decision will determine the character creation stats and range from Gang-level game to Prime-runner game. As a committee of one, I selected the lowest at Gang-level. This gives me 12 attribute points, 10 skill points, 6 shadow amps, 2 weapons and some gear.

Step three is to choose the metatype (aka race). I already had selected human which gives me +1 edge and +1 skill point.

The next step is to determine if your character is awakened or emerged. Basically does the character have magical abilities or the capability to enter the matrix (Shadowrun’s internet) with just your mind. Spike will not have either of these items.

On step five we assign our attribute points. The attributes are Strength, Agility, Willpower, Logic and Charisma. Each starts with one point and I have the 12 to spread around. Now that we have the attributes assigned, some additional stats can be generated such as the Physical Damage Track and the Stun Damage Track (which to appear to function like hit points).

I have 11 skill points to use in step six. There is also a free Knowledge skill that the character has (I selected local neighborhoods to go along with the character concept). Spike fights, Spike shoots and Spike knows how to ride his motorbike to help his neighborhood.

Step seven instructs us to select Spike’s shadow amps These are special powers that enhance the character and I have six points to use. I selected a natural one of Fear (he intimidates people), wired reflexes and cyberarms (both give some bonuses but take two essence.

Next we are instructed to select two positive qualities and one negative quality. I selected Toughness (all damage taken is reduced by 1), Tough as Nails +1 to the Physical Damage Track and Emotional Attachment to the Orphanage organization (they instruct him and he follows those instructions).

The gearing steps are next. Step nine is to assign armor. Since I had an extra shadow amp point left, I used it to get an armored jacket and step ten is to pick Spike’s three weapons. He has a vibrosword, the Browning Ultra-Power Heavy Pistol and HK-227 Submachine Gun. And in the last of the gearing up steps (eleven) is to select other gear. Up to four items of non-combat variety and two contacts. He’s got a Harley-Davidson Scorpion Bike, a commlink, stim patches and a ring that apparently was left with him when the Orphanage found him. As for his contacts, he has the mysterious head of the Orphanage (who seems to be well connected) and the leader of the local street merchants (they are the extra eyes and ears that he depends upon, and in return he helps protect them).

Next we have step twelve where we create cues for the character. These are phrases (quotes basically) that the character might state during gameplay. These sound like the personal quotes from the D6 Star Wars game from WEG or the Values from Star Trek Adventures. I wrote down some, but would probably ask the GM to let me come up with some on the fly while gaming (when inspiration strikes).

Step thirteen instructs us to create a character background. I thought we did that at the first step? I added some personal data (weight, height, etc.) and history (as seen above). The final step is tweaking where you can adjust things now that you have the character down on paper. Does something not look right or needs to be adjusted, do that here.

Afterthoughts:

I like how at the end of the steps it gives you a chance to adjust a few things. I’ve also loved the use of quotes to help define a character. The steps were pretty straight forward. I did have to do a lot of page flipping, but I was able to track some things down. The book did reference the 5th edition Shadowrun core book once to reference additional equipment, but I didn’t really feel like I was missing anything. This sounds like a rules-lite version of the game when I read the core die-rolling process. I’ve been hearing that this game might be played at a local game store or at SaltCON. I may have to check it out.

I don’t know if I’d do any homebrewing for this. The cyberpunk genre, while interesting to play, hasn’t started any creative juices flowing. So that’s more of a me thing than an issue with the game.

Additional Notes:

If you are still reading my posts after twenty days of the Character Creation Challenge, I thank you. I know that some have been entertained by this. Feel free to send me any feedback on the characters or the site in general. I am getting some creative ideas from my attempts (even the unsuccessful ones) and the entries of others. One I’m really intrigued by may even lead to my first homebrewed RPG system.

Coming Up Next:

Night’s Black Agents

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.

On Day 18 of the 2024 #CharacterCreationChallenge I elected to use Vintage Space: Retro Disco Sci-Fi Roleplaying. I don’t recall where I read this from, but this game is a retro-clone/refit of the FASA Star Trek RPG with some serial numbers filed off. So I thought I’d check it out and see how it stacks up.

The PDF is 70 pages long and lacks any bookmarks. The character creation process is listed on page six of the index but is found on page 12 of the PDF. There is no character sheet. Because of this I almost dropped the game from my list. But I remembered that in my early years of participating in roleplaying games that I just used a sheet of paper to write my characters down on. So I’ll whip something up on the word processor and see how it turns out.

Generating the character’s attributes is the first step. They are Strength (STR), Endurance (END), Intelligence (INT), Dexterity (DEX), Charisma (CHA) Luck (LUC) and Psychic Potential (PSY). These were the same attributes found in the FASA Star Trek RPG. However instead of using percentage scores, you have attributes plus skill added together for a number to roll under. To generate the attribute scores, some generic guidelines are listed, but on the next page it has the same guidelines adjusted with racial adjustments. So it would make sense to decide which race the character will be first and then follow those guidelines.

The races are Humans, Satora (aka Vulcans), Korrin (aka Andorians), Inush (Tellerites but dog based instead of pigs), Neyokso (aka Caitians) and Takka (an octopus based race that seems to be original). Since there are six of them, I rolled a D6 to randomly select one, which was Satoran. I rolled up the attributes and wrote them down on the home-made character sheet.

Next is the Hit Points. This is equal to your END attribute. Simple enough, I wrote it down.

Now the character is going through the Starfleet…. err…. Star Corps Academy. There I choose a division (aka department) to join which will determine the course of study. Yea pointy ear boy is going to be a member of the science department. I wrote down the skills as instructed.

Now if the character was just starting off as a newly minted Ensign, the training would stop there. While this is tempting, I think I’ll make this guy a Lieutenant who is the Chief Science Officer on a smaller vessel. So he gets to add one rank to any one skill for Lt. (junior grade) and one rank for full Lieutenant.

The next section was a character creation example. It seems to have followed what I read previously except that each skill point meant that I pick a specialty that would match the skill. I went back up through the earlier pages and I didn’t see that mentioned in the rules. I found some listed specialties later in the book. Also in the example is the note that each character gets one passion skill (interests or hobbies). If you use a specialty your character has, you roll 2D20 and take the best roll.

Because this character is Vulc…. Satoran I looked over the Psionic Abilities. Especially since I had a very high roll when generating the PSY score. The racial description stated that Satoran characters have unrestricted access to psychic education and training, but the section on Psionic Abilities states that you lose the Passions skill and one rank of a skill that is gained at the academy. But is that only for Non-Satorans? Would I list all of the psionic skills or just pick a number of them? It states that there are specialties, but again, how many will this character get? Uh, I’ll just note that the character has them.

The book then goes into some of the system explanations (roll a D20 wanting a low roll for success on both skills and savings throws). I finally made it down to the equipment section. The items your character has is dependent upon a requisition clearance level that is rank based, but there is no chart for the clearance levels. Ugh. There are several items listed. I’ll just write down what a Chief of Science who is a Lieutenant would have. I named him Troxtor and took a screen shot of the document.

Afterthoughts:

I mentioned the AI images (you can’t really call it art) in my White Lies 2nd Edition entry. While those looked like paintings with some emotion, the AI images in this publication were very distracting and pulled me away from the text. Once again the eyes were off on quite a few images (pupils of different sizes and looking in different directions, etc.) No image matched the others in a theme. You couldn’t look at multiple images and say “yes these are from the same in-game universe”. At least the White Lies book had some consistency. I think the worse part is how plastic and soulless everything looked. Characters had no emotion, nothing to express more than “I’m just an action figure in a pose”. Even the ships were just jumbles dumped into a pot and poured out into a bowl.

I wonder if this was an early draft? There was some minor errors that an editor would have caught. While I was going through the creation process and reading some of the sections, I got the urge to re-write some sections to make it smoother.

I can see where the FASA Star Trek RPG inspired this system. It’s not a direct descendant of the game that has a cult following, but the DNA is present. I can see where references were pulled from other shows with the serial numbers filled off. I would often say “Oh, those are Klingons from Star Trek and those are Cylons from Battlestar Galactica.” The system itself looks like it could work at the table pretty easy. I wouldn’t mind getting a few friends together just to try it out. I could even lead to some homebrewing. But it needs something more, it needs something to give it the extra kick needed to say “I want to play this game.” Clean up the character creation steps is something that I would recommend for a start. If there is an update or re-write of the game, I’d even pay a few extra bucks just to have a publication with real art that gives flavor to the universe.

Additional Notes:

Wow, just wow. Yesterday when I was checking the hashtag #CharacterCreationChallenge on Mastodon, I came across a post by Lester Smith. He had posted on his blog about his involvement in the 2021 challenge and how it helped him to climb out of a bout of depression. Creating the characters got him back into writing and he has released several new roleplaying games including one called D6xD6 Dungeons. I decided to buy a copy to check it out. Then I started going through his blog. I eventually had to stop myself because I had items that I needed to get done. Mr. Smith had written the first edition of the Dark Conspiracy RPG and contributed to a lot of other works in the gaming industry. Now he is “retired” and just writes the stuff he wants to because he enjoys it. It sounds like a goal of mine. David Gerrold once said that he writes the books he wants to read. We’ll I’d like to get to the same level as Lester Smith and write the games that I’d love to play. I guess I was taken aback by hearing how the Character Creation Challenge had helped someone. It wonder if this is what Jimmy Doohan felt when he had helped save a fans life from suicide. Note, I’m not saying that Mr. Smith was at that level in his issues, but I got the same feelings that Mr. Doohan had when read this blog post.

I started this challenge to have fun and I invited others to participate in that fun. Having fun was the goal. But I should also remember that participating in the group activity called a roleplaying game can be very therapeutic as well. Even just the act of writing, drawing, painting, getting together, etc. for a game would be therapeutic. I guess I’m just awed.

Coming Up Next:

Fantasy Hero

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.

Here we are at Day 13 of the 2024 #CharacterCreationChallenge. Today I’ll be using Star Ace originally published by Pacesetter in 1984. Sometime in my gaming past, I had created a character for this game, but I never remember playing it. Perhaps we never got out of session zero where we were getting everything ready. In the post I linked above, I mentioned that the game wasn’t on DriveThruRPG or other sites that I could find. Buying a game that I would probably never play at Ebay prices didn’t make sense to me. A reader sent me a message after that post stating that the PDFs was available on the Paizo website at a reasonable price. So I snagged them. It only has the three books from the boxed set, but it would be enough for me to use in the challenge.

The three books are the Star Team Basic Training Manual, the Star Team Wilderness Briefing Manual and Deuces Wild, an introductory Star Ace adventure. The first two PDFs are kinda bookmarked. They only bookmarked the start of each chapter instead of the contents. But considering that these are scans of the original books, I guess that is more than what we could have received. The character creation process starts on page five of the Basic Training Manual. I’m instructed to use three ten-sided dice and I write my name next to Player on the character sheet.

Next we select a race for the character. I slipped down to the end of the chapter to read the descriptions. Crystal Clones (some sort of human/crystal hybrids) sounded interesting. The Humans (sounds boring). The Kleibor (Large humanoid polar bears with telepathy). Then there is the Traka (an agile cat like race). None of these really knock my socks off. So by a random roll (my decision) this character will be a Traka.

Next, I have to select three skills. Two of them have to match the Order I’ve selected. Uh, I haven’t selected an Order yet (goes and looks up what an Order even is). Hearts, Spades, Diamonds and Clubs (the card suites). OK, but what do they do? Ah, a few pages down finally describes them and they sound like the classes. Spades are the weapon specialists, Heart the techs, Clubs is the noetic skills (mental powers) and Diamond are decoy activities like deception and stealth (and for some reason called ducks). So Diamond it is. And I finally found the skills (I really wish the bookmarks were more precise) and wrote them down.

Now on step four we are finally generating the Basic Ability Scores. Roll 3d10, multiply the sum by 2 and add 20 for results between 26 and 80. Um… OK. I wrote down my results since in step five I assign them to one of the eight abilities. Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Personality, Perception, Willpower, Luck and Stamina. From these scores, other statistics and skill scores are generated (there is a lot of math in this creation process). This actually took us through several short steps.

Step nine is to find the base scores for each skill using the mathematical formula provided in each skill description. Then step ten states “Find the character’s actual scores by adding 15 to the base scores obtained in step 10.” Uh… I hope you mean step 9. Yea, I’m going with that (blasted lack of editing).

In step eleven we select a name (I wish they had given us examples) and a background. I plucked Balkor out of the air. As for his background, since the Star Aces are the Robbin Hoods of their time, yea he joined up because he wanted to steal stuff and give it to the less fortunate.

There is already some basic equipment (weapon, armor, starfighter) on the character sheet. But nothing else is listed in the character creation steps. Going back before the steps started I did see a note that stated that starting characters roll 2d10+10 for their starting chips (money). You also get a kit to a skill that you use. So I’m assuming I have a forging kit and a lockpick kit. None of the other equipment made any sense to my character. Ya know what, I’m tired of sloshing through this, I’m done. Here’s the character sheet.

Afterthoughts:

Since the game is the year 3512, I noticed that the rules didn’t treat humans like they would have been in the 1980s. Longer life span, slightly larger size by a few inches, etc. Too many times I see a game treat humans as they are right now. In a hundred years we should have better ways to stay healthy and expand our life spans.

The character creation process seemed to be all over the place, which was typical from games published in the 80’s. Certain steps were referencing other sections that you hadn’t selected yet. For example, picking skills that would match your Order, but you hadn’t selected an order yet. It made me want to re-write the steps so that everything flowed in order. Another example, the skill descriptions were after the starship descriptions? Personality and Perception both have the abbreviation of PER? (I think Perception is PEN? that shows up in some of the formulas) Who edited this book?

Playing or homebrewing for this game. Likelihood is very low. I wouldn’t turn down a session to try it out (it looked like there was a lot of chart consulting to see what type of results came up from your rolls). If I was really going to play or run a generic sci-fi game, there are a lot more that have caught my eye like Frontier Space or one of the Traveller variants.

Additional Notes:

I’m very thankful that Paizo made this game available on their website, but that site needs a lot of help. There are a lot of links to sections that have nothing listed in them. And when you order PDF copies off of the site, it is like pulling teeth to get the downloads to come through. I’ve never had this happen with other publishers where I’ve purchased directly from them. Not only was I having issues with Star Ace, but when I picked up a charity bundle that contained a lot of books for Pathfinder and Starfinder, I wanted to pull my hair out. I had sent their customer service an email and they responded right away. But when I sent some feedback on the lack of quality on the website, I never received a response. Shrug, oh well.

The past few days have been extremely busy. I wish I had set up a buffer just in case real life issues came up. But I was able to get through it. I’ve already seen one person drop out. If you need to back off but still want to complete the challenge, you can. Some participants would make multiple characters for a familiar system on one day. What ever you need to do, do it. That includes taking care of yourself. This is a project for fun, not an assignment to be graded by a teacher.

Coming Up Next:

Ninjas and Superspies

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.

For Day 6 of the #CharacterCreationChallenge I am making a character for the Tiny Wastelands role-playing game. Previously I’ve created characters for Tiny Dungeons 2nd edition (2022) and Tiny Spies (2023). After the Tiny Spies entry was posted, someone had requested that I make a character for Tiny Wastelands. I had place it in my notes, but failed to write down who had requested it. So thank you for the request, I hope you enjoy this.

The PDF is 194 pages long. The “Making a Survivor” guidelines start on page 20. The character sheet is One page. The first step is to select an Archetype. This is the equivalent of a character class. The options are Normals (every day people), Mutant (self explanatory), Scavenger (wanderers searching the wastelands for useful stuff), Survivor (Normal humans that have been through some stuff and toughened up), Wanderer (Think nomads), Crazy (Nut jobs still alive after the apocalypse), Fixer (Mechanics basically) and Tyrants (Leaders who take over lands and people by force). I thought this last one would have been an NPC only archetype. Having read through the list and descriptions, I’m torn between Survivor and Wanderer. But I elected to go with Survivor.

Next on the list is selecting three traits. These are items that the character is really good at. The Archetype gives you a trait already (in this case, Always Prepared for the Survivor). Looking back, my tiny Spies character had four, but my Tiny Dungeons character only had three. Re-reading the blog entries, the Tiny Spies had an extra trait due to the Archetype that was selected. So I’ll just pick two more traits.

Now we select a weapon proficiency and mastery. These are weapons that you are proficient with and I selected the Heavy Ranged group. For the mastery, it is the specific weapon in the group and I selected Assault Rifle.

Next we will equip our survivor. The character creation steps say that it is assumed that we already have a weapon of our choice (the assault rifle mentioned above) and standard armor or clothing. Your character also has 10 clix (money, credits, moola, etc.) and a Survivor’s Kit containing some basic equipment. I wrote these down.

Pick an name and description and some background info. Stewart Barlow was a carpenter by trade before the bombs fell and killed his family. He is 6’0″ with black hair, a full beard and brown eyes. He’s always looking around like he’s expecting something to come out after him.

The last step is to select a Drive. This is a statement that the character lives by and may often say. Considering how nervous Stewart is he often stays “Been caught off guard once, never again.” I believe that I have everything filled in, so here is the character sheet.

Afterthoughts:

I did see some editing mistakes in my copy of the PDF. Example on page 30: “See Scavenging Items; pg. XX” So hopefully with this being a PDF on DriveThruRPG, they can update this. The book also mentioned blasters (sci-fi trope) when I assumed they meant guns. When I went to write down my Drive on my character sheet, I noticed it was listed as a Belief. I believe that these may have been hold-overs from other releases of the Tiny RPG line.

I liked how they used quotes and references to different media (not just post-apocalyptic shows) to reference different aspects of the game.

As I’ve mentioned with Tiny Dungeons and Tiny Spies, I really want to see how this rules-light system plays at the table. I’ll probably have to run a game myself to make this happen.

Additional Notes:

A reader on the RPG.net forums responded to me about the Top Secret S.I. character sheet comments that I had made. They had also agreed and had already done so. They had shared the updated design with me which knocked it down to two pages. I’ve saved them for possible future use. I love seeing how a game has inspired someone to be creative.

I also ran my first Star Trek Adventures game (prepping for an upcoming convention) and I also received a Kickstarter reward. Both will be detailed in upcoming blog posts.

Coming Up Next:

The Dark Eye

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.

My Wednesdays are usually pretty busy. So when I was prepping for the 2024 #CharacterCreationChallenge, I made sure that my Wednesday’s entries were systems that seemed simple. I hope that I have chosen well for Day 3 with White Star: Galaxy Edition. A sci-fi based roleplaying game using swords and wizardry inspired rules. It appears to borrow from Star Wars, Cyberpunk, the Borg from Star Trek, Firefly, Flash Gordon, Aliens, Transformers, Guardians of the Galaxy and more.

White Star: Galaxy Edition is written by James M. Spahn and was published by Barrel Rider Games. There is no copyright date in the document itself, but it was added to DriveThruRPG in 2017. There are 336 pages in the book and the character sheet is four pages long. The character creation rules start on page 11. So I’ve grabbed some dice and let’s get to it.

Being an OSR inspired game, the standard D&D attributes are present and can be rolled in order with 3d6. But on page 12 there is a house rule that states you can roll Heroic Attributes by rolling 4d6, dropping the lowest die and placing the scores to the attributes that I wish to use. I’m electing to go this route. Even without the extra die, my rolls were much better than they were yesterday. Since I knew I wanted to play a Jedi… err… Star Knight, I placed my best attribute in Wisdom.

Instead of using Good, Neutral and Evil alignments, this game has a house rule that uses Star, Nebula and Void respectively. Your starting credits is 3d6x10, which is pretty standard in OSR games.

There is another optional rules for “Serials” which helps generate a background for the character. Since I was in a dice rolling mood, I decided to try it out. For Homeworld I rolled Low-Gravity (resulting in +1 Dex but -1 Str). With Family I rolled a 5 so my family actively attempts to act against you (weird, but it may lead to an idea). For his Youth experience I rolled a 3 for Refuge (I can find food and water in urban environments on a certain d6 roll). Next was his First Adventure which was a 2 for Stowed away on a Starship (hey this gives him a remain silent option on a d6 roll). Next is an Adversary and I rolled a 2 for a Former Lover who is jilted and out to get revenge on the character (well that comes out of the blue for what I was thinking so far). If you have an Adversary, you’ve also got to have an Ally. On the Allies table I rolled a 6 which gave him Corporate Benefactor (Hmmm…..). The last item is a Critical Event and a 4 was rolled. This is “According to an Alien Mystic or Star Knight, you have a great destiny” which results in an automatic success in one savings throw each level. Now this fits the concept I’ve had so far. In the shades of Traveller, the character could have died had I rolled the wrong critical event.

The next chapter (I’m just following the flow of the book) is the Character Classes. There are standard sci-fi related options to choose from. As I mentioned above, I had already selected Star Knight. From the description, these are a kind of space cleric that has meditations instead of spells. At first level there is no meditations that I can select now (just like clerics in OSR). There are some limitations to weapons and outfits/armor, but wielding a Star Sword earns a +2 to all to-hit rolls and he receives one at first level with no cost. There are also some other optional classes that the GM may or may not allow depending upon the campaign.

I was finally able to scroll down to page 89 where the Skills were listed (and listed as optional). I’m going to be adding the skills to this character sheet. Each character gets three skills, one standard with the class and two selected by the character and they have a rank of 2. These are also adjusted by the attribute modifier. You would roll a d6 and if you roll under your skill, then you succeed. There are rules to increase or add to the skills through the campaign, but no skill can have a rating higher than 5. After reading the descriptions, I added the two optional skills to start with. All other remaining skills have a score of 1.

The next chapter covers Equipment. The first thing it breaks down is the money values. Credits, Sub-Credits (10 equals a Credit) and Chits (1,000 equals a credit). Some equipment items are listed, but not available unless acquired through the campaign. Since I thought I had to roll it above, I already know that I have 120 credits to spend. I picked up some light armor (using the ascending armor class system) and a laser pistol. Then I filled in the rest of what I thought this character would have needed to survive.

The next chapter went into “Playing the Game” so I’m assuming the character creation process is done. I made sure to fill in any blank spots. Since I didn’t have any Meditations yet I hadn’t filled in the last two pages (and thus didn’t need to scan them). Before I throw it in the scanner, I think I’ll name and give a brief background to this character.

Jenker Slix belonged to a family that had survived their original homeworld’s destruction. They eventually settled on a low-gravity world in the Rukkar system and tried to re-create their culture from there which included arranged marriages between clans. Much to the dismay of his future bride and his family, Jenker felt no connection to her and left Rukkar. Something was drawing him to the stars and he stowed away on a starship that belonged to Ortho Greengar, a corporate executive who was conducting business between worlds. When the starship was attacked by pirates, they didn’t know that Jenker was onboard. This gave him the advantage to rescue Ortho and some of his crew so that they could take back the ship. When Master Kli’nik of the Star Knights arrived in response to the distress call, he felt something in young Jenker and invited him to join the order as his apprentice.

Afterthoughts:

I really wish that the PDF had some good bookmarks. They are present, but they only go to the front cover, the first page and the back cover. That’s not really going to help guys. Another thing that would have helped would be a character creation checklist. I also had an urge to re-make the character sheet. The one provided wasn’t bad, but lacking in some areas (no space for money, do we need four sheets?)

I was actually surprised how the Serial optional rolls helped me develop a background for this character. I only knew that I wanted to make a Star Knight when I started. I’d like to see how this system plays out at the table. It may be interesting to run or play this particular roleplaying game.

Additional Notes:

So I was able to add three more links to blogs participating in the Character Creation Challenge. One of these, Grim Tokens, had an entry for a game called Transit RPG. The character you create is an AI controlled starship. Being a big Treknologist who loves starships, I was enthralled by this entry. I’ve added the game to my DriveThruRPG wishlist. I love being introduced to games that I didn’t know was out there.

On the TardisCaptain dot Com discord server I had someone respond to my Hackmaster Basic entry. They were not aware of the basic edition, but did confirm that the 4th edition was quite complex and crunchy. They mentioned that a player had spent 90 minutes just to roll up a character, only to have their stupidity kill the character off 45 minutes later. Some of these “There I was…” stories are great.

Coming Up Next:

Fantasy Quest (via Dicing with Dragons)

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.