New Year, New Me – Day 8

Roq – Human Marauder – Star Wars Edge of the Empire

Roq finally had it all. He was a contender and he was living the high life. The cuts and bruises, the concussions, the broken bones had all been worth it. The scars were now badges of honor he had earned on his way to the top. People knew his name, they recognized him on the streets from his fights and his family was cared for with what he was bringing in. His days were spent at the gym, his evenings in the shock boxing ring, and his nights at home with his wife and their newborn son. He loved every minute of it.

It couldn’t last. His lifestyle caught up to him. The fights began to take a toll. The medical bills begin to pile up, and Roq began to drink more and more to help with the pain. He began to spend more than he was bringing in, and both he and his manager saw that his star was beginning to descend. He began to get desperate, and did something that he would never forgive himself for. He agreed to take a fall in the second round for a big payout and put a new, young shock boxer on the map. But the kid wasn’t cut out for it. He never should have been in the ring in the first place, and he ended up getting put down in the first round. The stories say the kid still hasn’t come out of the coma. The syndicate head that wanted him to throw the fight lost a lot of money on the fight, and decided to take it out in blood. Roq returned home to the sight of a massacre. Several armed thugs were in his apartment, the bodies of his wife and son laid out on the ground. They put a gun to Roq’s head and he closed his eyes, accepting his death. Instead, he heard these words:

“You did this to them. You get to live with it for the rest of your life. But know that we’ll be watching you to make sure you live it alone. If you try to connect with anyone, get any closer than paying a street vendor for a meal, they will die. But it won’t be us killing them. It will be you. And we won’t stop until you stop. Until you end things, we will not rest. You screwed with the wrong people. Your neighbors are next. You have until tomorrow.”

And then they were gone. Roq took what few possessions he could carry on his back and left. He’s since fallen off the grid. He hears his name every now and then, sees a story referencing that fateful night in the ring. And it’s those times he considers stepping in front of a train to be with his wife and child. But he doesn’t. He knows that he needs to take revenge on the bastards that did this to him, did this to his family. He’s not sure how, but he knows why.

Roq is a concept that I’ve had for a long time now. His backstory was actually heavily inspired by the 2012 Jason Statham film Safe, a solid action film if you’re looking for a recommendation. He’s a pretty straight build with a lot of depth in the backstory and a lot of juicy hooks in both the game’s Obligation mechanic as well as his own personal motivation.

New Year, New Me – Day 7

Superheroes are always in vogue, and the last decade of superhero films has done more to bring them to the mainstream than ever before. But I find a surprising lack of it in the “mainstream” of gaming – there are plenty of games, both licensed and otherwise that provide for any number of superhero gaming experiences, but they’re often overshadowed by games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. A small, very not exhaustive list of games that you can look into if you want to have this kind of experience at your table

• Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game – This is a new release from Greater Than Games. Set in the universe of the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game, the Kickstarter rewards just fulfilled within the last month, so you should be able to get the game soon. It plays like a combination of Cortex Prime and FATE (not surprising when you look at the writing team).
• Wild Talents – This game was my go-to for supers until Sentinels came out with their game. Greg Stolze hit a home run with the One Roll Engine and while it’s not the most intuitive to explain or read about, once you see it in action, it’s incredibly elegant.
• Godlike – Also by Greg Stolze, John Tynes, and Dennis Detwiller, it was the game that introduced the One Roll Engine that powers Wild Talents.
• Marvel Heroic – Sadly out of print, the short-lived Marvel Heroic from Margaret Weis Publishing saw Cam Banks and his team really figure out the Cortex Engine. If you can find a copy of this game for a reasonable price, it’s definitely worth picking up.

Myrmidon – Original idea was created for Wild Talents, but could work in any superhero game

Rand Oikos was by all accounts a normal child. He grew up in the suburbs to a third generation Greek American family. He didn’t cause many waves in his younger years, and while he was never picked last for kickball, neither was he team captain. That all changed when he was doing genealogical research for a school project. He traced his family line back to Greece. And then he kept digging. He found his way into some very esoteric records and found out that he was directly descended (albeit many generations removed) from Ares, the Greek God of War according to texts. When this information got out, he was sought out by a group called AEGIS Laboratories. They were looking for someone like him – someone who had the appropriate DNA for a test. If it were successful, they said his strength and speed would be greatly increased. Rand agreed.

The serum worked, interacting with his DNA in a way that it hadn’t with previous attempts, increasing his strength and his speed further than they thought possible. It also gave him confidence that he had always possessed, but never been able to apply. Through their testing of his abilities, they found that he was capable of more powerful feats of strength and endurance than they had initially thought. And so an idea came into being – they presented Rand with an armored suit and an artifact they had developed in tandem with the serum that allowed him to summon a small squad of soldiers from some sort of negative space. And Myrmidon was born. Over the months, his powers have continued to grow. He’s still young and relatively inexperienced as both a hero and a leader, but AEGIS Labs has put together a group of like minded heroes that they can use when the need arises.

Rand seems to be a no-nonsense buzzkill at first, but that’s because he’s actually quite scared of failing in the field and getting one of his team mates hurt or killed. All that aside, he’s a born leader and when he’s able to channel that fear into something productive, he’s a force to be reckoned with. When he’s not in costume he allows himself to relax a little bit more, joking with his team mates and friends, but he’s never more than a few seconds away from his persona as Myrmidon. He feels that the cost to let his guard completely down would be too great.

New Year, New Me – Day 6

C0-EXC5 (Coxxie) – Droid Marauder – Star Wars Edge of the Empire

C0-EXC5 (or Coxxie to his friends) was built as part of a limited edition series of excavation droids, designed to be able to haul large amounts of material and clear out an area for development quickly. The company that put them into production made sure to showcase how useful the droids could be to disaster response search and rescue teams as well, but the high cost of the droid just didn’t make for a lot of sales and the company eventually went belly-up and the droids auctioned off.

Coxxie found himself bought on the cheap by an archaeology department for one of the of the more well-to-do colleges in the Mid Rim. One day, while being used in routine site excavation, the droid found a small pile of debris, which included a few shattered pieces of metal, some circuitry, and a small, irregularly shaped gemstone. He still doesn’t know what possessed him to hide the items in his storage, but as he reviewed them on his own later that night, he figured out that he possessed the remains of a Jedi lightsaber. He began to attempt to make contact with the people that could tell him more about the artifact.

This was how he found the Church of the Force. He managed to make a rendezvous with several members of the order where they told him more about the Jedi and how they had been mis-represented by Imperial propaganda. They were no traitors to the Republic. Instead, they were betrayed by the Republic themselves, and the last of their order were still being hunted down to this day. Coxxie knew that he had found a new purpose, and he never returned to the university. Since them he has used his skills to aid the Church however he can, from helping to clear areas for holy sites to learning to use his tools as weapons to defend pilgrims. One day he dreams of helping to create a grand cathedral that the order can worship in, in a day where the Empire is defeated and the Jedi can grow again.

This character was actually developed after reading Empire’s End by Chuck Wendig. In one of the interlude chapters he introduces a load lifter droid that was part of a religious pilgrimage to return a crate of kyber crystals to Cristophsis. The idea of a droid that believed in the power of the Force and the strength of the Jedi grew to be too delicious of an idea not to further explore, and thus Coxxie was born. He’s designed for use in Edge of the Empire, but with his background, he could likely work very well alongside a Force and Destiny party as well.

New Year, New Me – Day 5

Triskan, The Red Alley Avenger – 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, Human Bard (College of Swords)

Triskan was born into the criminal world. His mother was indebted to a crime boss and the boy was used to help her work off her debt. It started with things like pick pocketing and graduated from there into breaking and entering, racketeering and protection money collection, and even the occasional beatdown. But he never had to kill anyone – though he assumed that it was just a matter of time before one of the bosses ordered him on a job with that goal in mind.

Then he met Mari, a half-elf entertainer with red-gold hair that shined like firelight, green eyes that sparkled, and a smile that could melt steel. The two of them developed an intense connection and Triskan knew that he would do anything, absolutely anything for this woman. She convinced him to leave the life of crime behind before he could be fully corrupted and destroyed by it. He knew there would be repercussions, but anything was worth it for Mari.

Except Triskan wasn’t the one who paid the price.

He returned home one night to find Mari dead, her throat slit. Her life’s blood stained the mattress, now turned a sickly brown color. Her green eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling and her face, never without it’s smile in life, was twisted into a permanent grimace of pain. The bosses were sending Triskan a clear message – “There’s no way out of our employ alive. This is your only warning.”

Triskan broke. He had an idea who had been sent to do the job. Using the skills he learned from his youth, he went hunting. He found the duo drinking alone in a small hole in the wall that their kind frequented. They were deep in their cups, celebrating the completed job, drinking with the coin that Mari’s blood had bought them. The knife that tore out her throat was hanging from one of their belt, still stained with her blood. Before they knew what was happening he was upon them. He grabbed the knife that had ended Mari’s life and jammed it to the hilt under the chin of one of the killers. He grabbed the other by the top of the head and drove his face into the table, knocking him out. He’s still locked up for the murder of his partner.

Triskan couldn’t go back to his previous life. Mari had shown him just how dark and dangerous it was and how it would eventually destroy him. But without her in his life, he didn’t know how he could move forward. And so he became someone else – The Red Alley Avenger. By day he used the skills that Mari had taught him to earn coin. By night he donned a mask and stalked the criminals of the city, hoping to strike the same fear into them that they had inflicted on the city for so long.

Triskan was designed to maximize the benefits of the College of Swords Blade Flourish by pairing it with the Mobile feat from the Player’s Handbook. His background has a lot in common with a street level superhero’s origin story, and he would excel in a city based campaign. In a Pathfinder game, he’s a shoe-in for the Vigilante class.

New Year, New Me – Day 4

Drit Ohnaka – Edge of the Empire – Weequay Explorer (Archaeologist)

It’s not easy to be recognized as a prominent scholar when your people are commonly seen as nothing more than pirates and thugs. It’s even more difficult when a well known relative of yours actually is a pirate and a thug.

Drit has the misfortune of being born with the infamous Hondo Ohnaka as an uncle. He’s never met the scoundrel, but the shadow of his clan name hung heavy over him his entire life. He had a keen interest in history and the past while growing up and worked harder than anyone else to get a scholarship to attend a University housed in the Expansion Region despite his damaging pedigree where he received a degree in xeno-archaeology. Then he worked just as hard to get a job doing field work for a Museum of Alien History owned and funded by the University. He struggled the entire time with students, faculty, and colleagues dismissing him or worse because of his family name and the fact that his people weren’t often seen as “intellectuals.” Still, he persevered because his passion was important to him.

However, the disdain shown by many of his colleagues and superiors afford him a surprising amount of latitude to “disappear” for extended periods of time on pet projects without too many serious repercussions. This has allowed him to follow us several threads and rumors that the University didn’t put stock in and decided not to fund. Funding these digs himself is expensive (especially when the leads don’t actually turn up anything substantial), but he’s not necessarily bound by the rules and regulations that he would be on “official digs.” And he knows deep in his bones that it’s only a matter of time before one of his personal digs finds something that will propel him into the galactic spotlight and force his colleagues to give him the respect and credit that he deserves.

Drit is a character that I’ve wanted to play for quite a few years and has been a pregen for several Edge of the Empire games that I’ve run. The idea of the scholarly Weequay is one of those “against type” roles that I love to see in play. The idea of making him related to Hondo was something that came after that initial inception, further tying the character into Star Wars lore in a tangential way that isn’t “he’s related to Han Solo, lol”.

New Year, New Me – Day 3

Stase Trebal – Star Wars Edge of the Empire – Colonist (Marshal)/Bounty Hunter (Skip Tracer)

Stase Trebal was born on the Outer Rim on a small planet with a relatively established population. Started as a colonization effort during the Republic, it was small enough and far enough out of the way that it avoided attracting the attention of whatever government was currently in power. The citizens of the planet were largely self-sufficient with a profitable mining venture that brought most of the material wealth into the governor’s coffers.

Stase was the nephew of the sheriff of one of the larger towns on the planet and he knew from an early age that he wanted to take the job from him when he retired. The young boy grew up with a powerful sense of justice and spent as much of his time as he could at his uncle’s office watching him work and just absorbing everything that he could about the way he did the job. He eventually did take over and presided over the town for several years until the McCullen Gang decided to use the planet as a hideaway.

The McCullen Gang were ruthless gangsters and criminals wanted in several systems for a number of different crimes, chief among them being the murder of an Imperial Governor. Not wanting to bring the attention of the Empire to his planet, Stase put together a posse and went after the gang, raiding their hideout. The firefight that resulted was brutal, but Stase managed to capture or kill several members of the gang. McCullen himself escaped, but not before he put a blaster bolt in Stase’s brother-in-law.

For the next several months Stase simmered with resentment about the results of the raid. He turned over the gang members he captured to Imperial authorities, but focused on the fact that McCullen was still out there with laser focus.

He knew what he needed to do.

He promoted his deputy to the office of sheriff, cashed out his retirement accounts, and went after McCullen. He’s managed some promising leads, but the gangster always seems to be several steps ahead of him. He’s learned a lot about how the criminals think and how to track them, often taking small local contracts to keep his ship fueled and fill his coffers enough to continue his search for McCullen.

I’ve loved both of these specializations since they were both introduced in Far Horizons and No Disintegrations respectively and love the way that they synergize with each other to create a hard boiled film noir type of investigator that can still handle himself in a firefight. They feel like they were made to complement each other.

New Year, New Me – Day 2

It turns out I have something a soft spot for farming sims. I’m not talking about the Farm Simulator series and the like, but the more whimsical games like Harvest Moon. Now, I never spent a lot of time with the original game on SNES, but Harvest Moon 64 was a pretty common staple in the system. I hesitate to even venture how many hours I sunk into multiple save files on that, but it was a lot.

I saw that Stardew Valley received a major update a few days before Christmas from a friend on Facebook. I had picked up and put in a good chunk of time on a farm on the Playstation 4 version about a year and a half back, but decided to grab the Steam copy to occupy myself on Christmas Day since it was on a good discount and my laptop was more than capable of running it. At the time of writing this, not even a week later, I have already put over 40 hours and nearly two years into a new farm.

All of that is to say that this next character has been inspired by this recent jaunt into a certain valley across the Gem Sea.

Merric Goodearth – Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition – Stout Halfling Druid (Circle of the Shepherd)

Merric was born already taking care of the land. His mother and father were farmers. As were their parents. And even their parents before them. The Goodearth Farm had been a staple outside the town walls for over 300 years. They knew the land more deeply than a husband and wife knew each other. And the animals and produce that came from the farm were always of the highest quality.

Merric spent his adolescence and young adult years learning the family business. He loved it and took to it with an ease and nature that shocked even his parents. He especially loved working with the farm’s animals, helping bring the newborns into the world and staying with the elderly and sick ones until they left it. He bonded with them on a deeper level than either of his parents. They didn’t quite understand, but were happy for the boy’s skill, and the loftier price they could attach to quality livestock. But Merric grew up always feeling that he was suppressing something of himself by setting down roots so early in his life. There was more to his ability if he could just explore it. But that wasn’t in the cards for him. He watched with no small amount of envy as the more adventurous youth of the town grew up and struck off on their own into the wider world. Sure many of them eventually came back to their home to raise families of their own, but at least a few of them met with some small measure of success. Then he watched their children, raised on those most recent stories, go through the same process. And the same thing with the next generation.

By the time Merric was turning 90 years old, he knew that he had made a mistake. He could no longer deny the spirit that rose in him whenever he listened to the stories these old adventurers told over pints of beer at the tavern. He knew what he had to do. He gathered his few belongings and struck out on his own in the middle of the night, leaving a note for his family explaining that he could no longer sit idly by while others got to experience the things that he always wanted to. He would be back, but it wouldn’t be soon, and it would likely be a different person.

The next town over he managed to buy passage on a wagon where he met an elderly human woman who saw the same mote of potential in the halfling that she had when she was younger. Despite still being 30 years Merric’s junior, she offered to teach him what she knew, and thus Merric began to learn the ways of Druidcraft. He learned what he had always felt – that his connection to the farm’s livestock went far deeper than he initially thought. Despite approaching middle age, he took to the task of learning from his mentor quickly. A common joke between them was that an old wolfhound could indeed learn some new tricks if they were properly motivated. It’s been just over a year since he left his family farm and he’s ready to strike out on his own, having learned what he could from his mentor. Now came putting it into practice and finding out just what larger role the world had in mind for him when he was born.

Merric is a simple concept that just feels like he would be fun to play. As I get older myself I find the appeal of playing a young, 20 something wet-behind-the-ears adventurer waning more and more. Couple this with the fact that I have seen numerous middle aged (and even older) characters thrive and take on a life bigger than themselves through several shows on the Glass Cannon Network of shows, and you have a recipe for me wanting to try my own hand at making my own attempt. Whether or not Merric finds more satisfaction in the unmapped dangers of the greater world than he did on his home farm remains to be seen I suppose.

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New Year, New Me – Day 1

Back in November I saw this 31 Day Character challenge posted on Facebook – the idea is that you create a character that you would like to play each day in a month. Several people decided that they were going to attempt the challenge in December, but given that the holidays are a busy, stressful time anyway coupled with the fact that we were operating on a skeleton crew at my second job… well I decided not to add any unnecessary stress to my plate.

However, I really liked the idea of the challenge and wanted to take a stab at it. Given that the new year is often a time of reinvention for many, I decided to take this challenge in the month of January – New Year, New Me.

Instead of providing full character sheets, I’ll be providing more of a “capsule overview” of these characters including their name, what system they’re built for and any relevant build information (such as race and ancestry for something like Dungeons and Dragons), and a brief background as far as it’s relevant to playing the character.

Falnor – Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition – Half-Elf Bard (College of Glamour)/Warlock (Archfey Patron)

Falnor was a struggling performer. Born into a life of poverty, he tried his whole life to rise above it, but his ability was… mediocre at best. Desperately in debt, he was always one failed performance or bad payment away from losing everything. One night after a particularly bad show where no one showed up, he was attempted to drown his sorrows in cheap whiskey, spending his last coppers attempting to escape reality. A woman asked him what he was drinking – he didn’t remember her walking in and sitting down next to him, but there she was. She was very well dressed and stunningly beautiful. Falnor stammered out whiskey and the woman ordered two glasses of the bar’s finest. As the drinks were poured, she turned to look at Falnor. She was intoxicating – her perfume of jasmine and lilac put his head deeper into the fog that the whiskey started. She spoke of many things, but the only thing that Falnor remembered was “Take my hand, and I will help you attain what you want.”

He awoke the next morning in his apartment. She wasn’t there, but the jasmine and lilac scent clung heavily to the bedsheets. As he stirred, he heard her voice, spoken directly into his mind. “The contract is signed with your seed. Enjoy these gifts… my husband.” Falnor felt a new power swell within him, like a previously empty reservoir filling with liquid.

The woman was in fact a Fey Lady, and when Falnor “took her hand” at the bar, he also took her hand in marriage. But the power of the fey was now his to use to escape his life. He commanded an unearthly presence which he could use to enrapture his audience, and he quickly began to grow in fame. The coin started to come in from bigger and bigger performances and his debts began to be paid down. He has not seen his lady wife since that day and she has made no further demands of him, but every so often he catches the scent of jasmine and lilac and senses that she is near, watching him, and so does his absolute best to remain faithful to the idea of a marriage lest he anger his patroness and lose everything again. Of course, he has no idea what that could mean to the fey. Time will tell if he’s correct or if there’s more to his fate.

This multi-class combination might not be the most potent, but the synergy between the College of Glamour Bard and the Archfey Warlock is simply too much fun to pass up. I saw the basic idea mentioned by a friend as a “Robert Johnson”-esque performer who sold his soul to the devil for musical ability and twisted the concept as I zeroed in on these two archetypes.

House Rule: Cumulative Death Saving Throws

I’ve been spending some of quarantine finally getting into Critical Role while I search for new material to stream while I’m working from home. I’m still early on in Campaign One, so I don’t know the specifics of this rule or if it’s ever specified, but in a fairly major combat a character goes down and fails two death saving throws before they are brought up with healing magic and Matt says something about keeping those two failed saves and it got me thinking – I kind of like that idea for a grittier, slightly more lethal version of 5th Edition, and I want to spitball an idea I had here for a house rule for death saves.

Now please note that I have not had the chance to playtest this – so please keep that in mind while reading it. That said I present to you:

Cumulative Death Saving Throws

As written, whenever you gain any hit points, the number of death saving throws you have rolled, both successes and failures resets to 0. With this house rule, you keep the failures you accrue until you take a short rest, similar to how Pathfinder 2e has the Dying and Wounded conditions. If you fail one death saving throw and then are brought back to consciousness by the cleric, but go down later in that battle or the next one, you start that clock with one failed save and failing two more will mean that your character dies – it certainly would heighten the tension if the front line fighter with two failed death saves already falls in combat.

Failed death saves are reduced to 0 when you complete a short rest. If you don’t have the time to take a short rest, you can “buy off” failed death saves by taking one level of exhaustion per failed save you have. Exhaustion is a wonderful mechanic that I feel the designers kind of forgot about. There are precious few things that seem to interact with it in the core rules.

So what do you think? Is there something that I missed? Anything you’d change? Let me know!

The Dead Steel Regalia Part Seven – Using the Darn Things

So you’ve got these shiny new weapons that you want to use. But how? Arguably the easiest way to include these five weapons into your game is to use them as macguffins to stop a BBEUG (Big Bad Evil Undead Guy) from taking over the world, culminating in a classic showdown of good versus evil as the heroes bring all of their powers to bear to stop the undead apocalypse from covering the world in the darkness of undeath. But I know you can think of more clever ways to use them than that. But just in case you need a little bit of help, I’ve included three quick campaign seeds using the Dead Steel Weapons as a campaign focus.

Let No Man Put Asunder or Else They Be Put Under

There will always be those that stand against the world of the living – whether it’s the undead themselves or creatures in service (or thrall) to the undead, that dark power is always going to be present. The Dead Steel Weapons are a known quantity within the realm, and have been a vicious thorn in the side of those powers of undeath for a long time. Just as there are those adventurers that seek the weapons to defend the realms of the living, there are those that seek them so they can be destroyed. This campaign seed sees the heroes racing against the forces of darkness to find the Dead Steel Weapons first. If they don’t, they are most likely consigning the weapons to oblivion and robbing the realms of the living of powerful weapons in the future. If only those darned magic items didn’t like to hide in dungeons so much!

Two Minutes to Midnight

What happens when intelligent magical items think they know better than you? The Dead Steel Weapons are a powerful force of good within the realm. Of that, there is no doubt. They have stopped more undead threats and saved the realm more times than have been recorded in the history books. That can’t be a bad thing, can it? Their purpose is to save the realm of the living, after all. But they know that nothing in existence is permanent. The undead can only be held off for so long before even their might fails. They have stopped so many threats since their creation, and it appears that they will face many more before their time is done. And so, over the years they have come to the sad realization that the only way that they win over the forces of the undead is if there are no living for them to threaten. They wish to be taken to the Anvil of Icarros where they tell their wielders, they will be able to uncover the secret of stopping the undead forever. Once there, they join their powers together and begin the process of unmaking the world. Now the heroes are faced with stopping a cataclysm that they helped to unleash, with the Dead Steel Weapons fighting them every step of the way. The artifacts are convinced that this is the only way to prevent another ruler like Kharos from taking over after they are gone and will use all of their powers to fight back against the heroes.

Lord Kharos’s Final Revenge

The Dead Steel Weapons are one of mankind’s best chances of stopping the threat of another creature like Lord Kharos from taking power again. But the fact that these weapons were created from the very thing they seek to stop in the future worried several of the clerics that oversaw their construction. How could something so evil be completely transformed into artifacts of pure good? What if something of the Death Knight survived within the weapons? The truth is far direr than they imagined. Fractions of Kharos’s spirit reside within each of the artifacts, but the magic used to create them keeps them largely inert and powerless. At least individually. Kharos uses the weapons’ natural desire to be gathered together to bring those fractured pieces of his spirit into proximity with each other, where they can join with each other and grow more powerful. From there he subtly attempts to bring the wielders of the Dead Steel Weapons into conflict with the artifacts, hoping to transfer his spirit from the weapon into a living host. From there he can start to corrupt the wielders and set the stage for his eventual return to the world. This plot culminates in the heroes unwittingly taking part in the destruction of the Dead Steel Weapons in the ruins beneath Kharos’s ancient fortress in the former kingdom of Arceel, where they were first brought into this world. The unmaking of these weapons frees the remainder of his power, and from there the corruption of his hosts will be complete, allowing him to be reborn in a new form.