Character Creation: They Came From The Stars II

Revenge of They Came From etc etc I? Not so much.

The Game: They Came From the Stars II
The Publisher: High Calibre Wizard
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Despite the name, no relation to the They Came From family of games from Onyx Path (fun fact: They Came From Beneath the Sea! was my last published RPG work, though I wasn't credited). It draws on some similar sources, though. To wit, retro sci-fi/horror movies, usually black and white, usually pretty awful on their own merits. The game is meant to take place during the 50s/60s/70s, so Cold War and space race are themes here. It doesn't look like it has the campy fun vibe of They Came From etc and It Came From the Late Late Late Show, but I haven't read all the way through the book yet. The system is in some ways reminiscent of Cortex (roll some dice, other party rolls some dice, compared dice one to one), but it's pretty simple. 

There's no meta-setting, no organization to which PCs belong by default, so I'll just make a dude who might be a character in such a film. I find that when making characters for RPGs that heavily inspired by movies with high character mortality rate, it's useful to think about where in the story a given character buys the metaphorical farm. Thinking about some of my favorite deaths in horror movies of questionable quality (which could be the title of my autobiography), one that springs to mind is Isaiah Washington's character in Ghost Ship. The movie isn't the right period, but it's very much a kind of crap horror movie that I find thoroughly enjoyable, and poor Greer dies because he just finds the ghostly woman irresistible. 

So - death through succumbing to temptation, or otherwise walking directly into the jaws of doom. Cool, that's a start. Chargen is pretty fast; we just put three points into Stats, three into Skills. There are six Stats, and they start at 1 but you can't be higher than 2, so basically we're boosting three of them by 1 point. 

OK, well, clearly I want Intelligence and Perception to stay at 1. Let's boost Personality, Dexterity, and Constitution.  

Skills come from a defined list, and we have everything at 1, meaning there's no point in writing them all down, just the three we boost. So let's see. Ugh, these are too granular. Why are Brawling, Blocking, and Dodge all separate skills?

Well, anyway, I'm picturing my guy as an ex-jock-turned-pilot, so I'll put my Skills into Piloting, Repair, and Athletics. Easy enough.

Everything else is fixed values, except perks. You can take negative perks to raise your Destiny point cap, and positive ones that lower it, but if I take one of each they'll cancel out. Let's see. Eh, the negative ones all kinda suck and the positive ones are OK, but none of them scream at me. I'll skip it.

Oh, wait, y'know what? I'll take kleptomaniac. It's one of those flaws that usually gets used as an excuse to be annoying as hell in RPGs, but I think for him it just really is a compulsion. That can be the temptation that gets him killed, why not. 

And then I'll take Fast Reflexes as a positive perk, which boosts my Initiative. 

That means I have 2 Destiny points, 3 Wounds, and 2 Initiative. I can have a gun and some cash or a knife and slightly more cash; I'll take the latter. 

So: Jackie Ionello played football for some era-appropriate team for exactly one season, and then fucked up his knee and had to quit. He called in a favor from a former teammate to use his plane to get his flight time in so he could become a pilot, but Jackie never quite fit in with the major airline scene, so he does charter flights for whoever feels like paying him. 

Twist: Jackie was never injured. He got caught with a locker full of shit he stole from teammates, coaches, and everybody, but he was popular, so they concocted the injury to let him quit and save face. 

Jackie is now in his 30s. Jeans, leather jacket, shades, dazzling smile, hands always in pockets (because if he doesn't he tends to lift stuff). 

That'll do it!