Character Creation: ROTA

I keep thinking "rota" is a food of some kind, but I may have dreamed it.

The Game: Realms of the Ancients
The Publisher: Immortal House
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Just another fantasy game, really. Sure, it's a mix of sci-fi and fantasy - the basic gist is that when you try to travel between worlds and you miss, you wind up in Limbo, and some time ago some ambitious folks figured out how to set up shop in Limbo and then transport whole star systems in. So the result is a potpourri of worlds, peoples, civilizations, with 16 playable races and so forth, wrapped around a 1d20+stat kind of resolution system. 

But y'know? I think it'd work fine at the table. It's very much not my kind of game mechanically, but I have a weird fondness for mishmash of genres and worlds, so I don't know if it's the kind of thing I'd run, but I did find myself digging the game while reading it. So that's cool. Let's make a ROTA! Or, I guess, a character, since we're not making a whole realm or ancient.

Chargen is a 12-step process (that oughta get me some interesting traffic), though a couple of them don't apply because, as usual, it's just me. Step One is concept, but folds in the three splats that characters use (species, origin, and transformation) as well as why the character is part of the "team," for whatever value of team we're dealing with. 

I read through the species, and some of them are pretty cool (I think this game could have stood to kill a few darlings, but then most games could). One of them are called Ferlines, basically if cats evolved into people instead of apes, so they're lithe and sneaky and so forth. I like those for some reason, so I think I'll lean into my proclivities and make a roguish sort of character today. Fairly easy with Ferlines, since they can defy gravity and track anyone they've been around. So we'll say my character is a spotter, getaway driver, lookout kind of guy. He's a Rogue Walker (a Ferline without a clan), exiled for stealing shit from his clan. His name is Foezar (one of the example names listed, I kinda like it). Ferline gives me Physical 1, Social 0, Technical 2.

So what's Foezar's origin? My options are Warrior, Operative, or Magus, and I think with this concept Operative is the obvious choice. I get 20 Health, 4 Energy, +2 to Social, and 2 Stat points to put where. I'm gonna put one into Physical and one into Technical. I get Infiltration and Stealth Attack as abilities, and then I get 4 skills. Let's see. I'll take Acrobatics, Vehicles, Perceiving, and Stealth. I avoided Climbing and Tracking because my species abilities give me better ways to do those things, hopefully. 

Transformation! There are a lot of fun options, but I think given the concept, Outlaw is the clear choice. That gives me +5 Health, +1 to a stat of my choice, and another Operative Skill. For the latter, I think I shall take Evasion. I'll put the stat boost into Physical. 

Oh, and, the other steps of chargen are mostly just adding together the stuff I get from the first three choices, so that actually takes me right through to Step Ten, which is (ugh) buying equipment. OK, everything else was quick, we'll give it a look. I get 200 monies.

I'll spend 5 on a baton (I think Foezar doesn't like bladed weapons; they cause too much blood and he hates to be messy). I'll spend 25 on a pistol, mostly for show (guns are loud). I'll buy a long coat for some armor, and a mask as a Charm. That's probably fine.

So now some derived traits! Just stats plus armor or charm value, that's easy enough.

So that's pretty much it! Foezar is fastidious, picky, and precise. He's a good lookout and driver, and he can fight, but he'd really rather not. Unlike some clanless Ferlines, Foezar doesn't advertise he's a Rogue Walker, he just doesn't mention a clan (for the record, he was part of the Mist Clan before his exile). Foezar has silvery-grey hair and amber eyes, and like most of his species is lean and dexterous. 

Cool, that'll do it!