Character Creation: Ex Machina

IF I AM BECOME A MACHINE THEN HAIL THE GOD OF MACHINES

The Game: Ex Machina
The publisher: Guardians of Order, now sadly defunct.
Degree of familiarity: Like I said, ran it once or twice, and I'm fairly familiar with Tri-Stat.
Books required: Just the core. 

 

So, the setting I'm using is Daedalus. In this setting, everybody has a chip implanted, usually at childhood. These chips feed you media, help you grow, even "help" you find your soulmate and fall in love. There's a lot of attention in this setting to personal relationships, but it's quite clear that the relationship are on their terms. Everything is, really.

Who's "they?" The government. This world suffered some serious terrorist attacks a few years back (decades, probably, though years aren't specified) and that's what got everybody thinking that ID chips were a great idea (sound familiar to anyone?). Over time, the technology developed. Children could be flawlessly tracked. Oh, and now we can regulate your brain chemistry, so if you aren't producing enough dopamine, bam, we'll tell your brain to make more! No more Parkinson's! No more Alzheimer's! We can stream media directly to your mind. The settings of your lights, AC, heat, even your chair respond to your chip's broadcast. And we can teach you languages and other skills through bio-memes. Holy cats. Sounds awesome, right?

You can see where this is going. The government controls you. You are your brain, and the feds own that. This setting is a little bit Gattaca, a little bit Equilibrium, a lot of 1984, and I see some Minority Report in there, too. One of the interesting things is that since the chips regulate emotion, when you meet someone, they might start acting weird, and you've got to figure out if that's really them...or the chip?

OK, so I want to do something a little different for my character. This guy was a social scientist, working for what's now the Ministry of Citizen Welfare (MCW). His name is Gavin Croy. He remembers the world before chips, if vaguely (he was about 15 when chips started getting implanted), and has been through many different incarnations of the chips in his lifetime (we'll assume he's in his 60s now). At the time, he was all for it. He lost friends in some of the early terrorist attacks, and he had these absurd notions about they might be able to read your brain, but they'd never own your mind (as though there's a difference). So he championed the chip to his fellow students in college, and he went into government work to try and help people come to love the technology of the chip. And he was very, very successful. He married, had kids, chipped them, watched them grow up and marry and have their own kids, and was even thinking about retirement...

And then one day, he got a weird case. A file crossed his desk, a man named Herbert Thespen. Thespen was a resistant, someone for whom the chip just wasn't taking. Gavin has some medical training, and reading this guy's file, something rang a bell. It was a condition he'd heard of, some long-cured neurological thing that a friend of his in college had suffered from (in the days when chips were just for tracking, before they could stimulate neurochemicals). Gavin searched the archives for information on the condition, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere. He started looking into his old books and files from college, and he found more than he wanted.

Yeah, he found info on the condition. He also found copies of books like 1984. Fahrenheit 451. Snow Crash. Anthem. The Handmaid's Tale. These books aren't available anymore. Print books haven't really been easy to find in a while, anyway (everything's digital; that's not explicitly mentioned in the book, but it sure seems to be the way we're going), and he wasn't a pleasure reader. But now he started reading again...and he finally got it. The brain is the physical organ, and it controls the mind. It is the mind. And now they have the keys that labyrinth.

Gavin is an older man, and so he wasn't equipped to go scampering off into the night. But he also had a long lifetime of experience backing him up. He left his home to protect his family, and he went to the Outside, to the people who he knows aren't chipped. He got them to remove his chip, and he coped (barely) with the withdrawal of not having the world respond to him anymore. He's now selling drugs, medical equipment, and government information, making a living as a low-rent shadow doc (since most of his medical knowledge is theoretical; he's never actually practiced medicine). But what he wants more than anything is a way to free his family from the chips, and to cope with the crushing guilt he feels. He helped build this world.

OK, enough of that. Now, numbers! I'm building Gavin on a 75 point base. I've already done Steps One (kinda) and Two, so now:

Step Three: Assign Stats. Each stat point costs 2 points from my 75 total. Gavin's an old guy, so his Body is fairly low. Let's put it at 3, below human adult average. That's 6 points. His Mind and Soul are going to be higher, though. Let's put mind at 6 and Soul at 5, for a total of 28 on Stats.

Step Four: Template. There's a medic template, but it doesn't work for what I want to do with Gavin, so I'll just wing this.

Step Five: Attributes. Really, there aren't many of these that I'm going to want. Definitely Highly Skilled, though. I'll just devote 10 points to that right now, and maybe more later. That takes me to 38 spent.

Gavin isn't chipped anymore, so he doesn't get Item of Power for that. Organizational Ties, though? I'll blow 4 points to take level 2 for La Liberte. They want what Gavin knows, and he's happy to give it to them, it's just a matter of sifting out the useful information. I'll take Divine Relationship at 8; Gavin's a lucky dude (and the lack of other powers and abilities means he'll need those re-rolls). How about Heightened Awareness? Since Gavin's lost his chip, he's gotten paranoid and he's always been a fairly perceptive guy. I'll throw five in there, too.

That takes me to 55 spent, meaning I've got 23 left. Let's do something nutty, here. Gavin, to be most effective, needs a presence Inside. La Liberte, recognizing this, gave him a sleeper agent, someone with a half-chip that can get around in the city. This allows Gavin to make use of his old files and some of his status, as long as he's careful about it. I take one level of Agents, for 5 points. My Agent's name is Stephanie Peck, and while Gavin doesn't know it, she was a childhood friend of Gavin's daughter, Brianna.

That's 60 points spent. I'll proceed to...

Step Six: Skills. I presently have 130 points to spread out among Skills, and I might well take more. All Skills get a specialty, and they have variable point costs. This might take a few minutes.

Area Knowledge (Patrol Hotspots) 3 (12 points)
Biological Sciences (Genetics) 2 (8 points)
Computers (Databases) 3 (12 points)
Cultural Arts (History, Literature) 2 (6 points)
Domestic Arts (Cooking) 1 (2 points)
Driving (Car) 1 (4 points)
Electronics (Sensors) 2 (12 points)
Etiquette (Chipped People) 3 (9 points)
Foreign Culture (Allied Nations) 3 (9 points)
Languages (Various) 3 (6 points)
Law (Criminal) 2 (4 points)
Management/Administration (Government, MCW) 4 (9 points)
Medical (Pharmacology) 2 (6 points)
Physical Sciences (Biochemistry) 2 (8 points)
Social Sciences (Psychology, Politics, Social Work) 4 (10 points)
Stealth (Unobtrusive) 3 (9 points)
Street Sense (La Liberte) 1 (4 points)

Step Seven: Defects. There's gonna be a few of these. I'll take Recurring Nightmares (1 point); Gavin dreams about his family. I'll take Physical Impairment. He's old and his leg and back give him problems (also 1 point). I'll take a 2-point Skeleton in the Closet (the extent of Gavin's involvement in pushing the chips back in the day). And, definitely Wanted. Just 1 point, but the government would love to have Gavin back. That gives me 5 points back.

Well, heck. That means I have 55 points spent, for a whopping 20 points left. I could throw them all into Highly Skilled and get 200 more Skill points, I suppose. Hmm. I suppose I'll follow up on the "La Liberte wants me safe" theme and take a Servant. I'll put 12 points into it, giving me a level-2 Servant that I can swap out between adventures. Basically, La Liberte always has a staff member free they can assign me to help me out. Sometimes it might be a duke to protect me, others it might be a winger to drive me. That still leaves me 8 points, though.

Let's make me more important. I'll jack Organizational Ties up to level 3, which costs the rest of my points.

Step Eight: Derived Values. My Attack Combat Value is the average of my Stats, or 4. My Defense Combat Value is that minus 2, or 2. Ugh.

I have 40 Health points, and so my Shock is 8.

And that's it, really. I could earn Background Points if I had a GM, but I don't, so that's that.