Character Creation: Judgement Day

"Every day is Judgement Day." - Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs & All

The Game: Judgement Day
The Publisher: Mystical Throne Entertainment
Degree of Familiarity: I know SWADE pretty well, and of course I'm no stranger to judgement
Books Required: Judgement Day plus some version of Savage Worlds or other

Judgement Day is pretty simple at the guts of it; it's a monster-hunting RPG in which characters are members of the Catholic Church, specifically the Inquisition (which, in-universe, was about hunting actual monsters rather than religious hysteria and power acquisition). It's got rules for three eras, Crusades (12-15th century), Victorian, and modern day, but I'm only making one character.

So...I dunno. On the one hand, modern would be the easier character to conceptualize, followed closely by Victorian, but those are also settings that I feel like have a lot of representation in the project. On the other hand, doing a character in the Crusades setting is a little harder to wrap my brain around because I don't know the era too well. Ah, what the hell, the system is easy so even if the conceptual stuff takes a little longer, the mechanical stuff won't. Let's do an early Inquisitor.

Hmm. One of the issues here is that the period covered here is more than 300 years (1149 to 1450), which makes concept and setting stuff a little tricky. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure the political landscape in Europe changed a lot during that time. OK, fuck it, let's randomly pick a year for my dude to have been born...1250. That means he's likely to be active in the 1270s. And what was happening in, say, the Vatican during that time? Oh, wait, Thomas Aquinas died in 1274 at a Cistercian monastery. I can work with that.

So let's say my character was a young herder who was chasing after a runaway colt. He chased it to the Appian Way and saw Aquinas struck down by...something. He was never ever to fully describe it, he just remembers that it had too many eyes and wings and teeth. Although he was terrified, he fell to his knees and prayed, and the creature did not kill Thomas but fled (now, whether or not it was his prayer that drove it off is unknown, and not really relevant anyway). He helped Thomas on to Monte Cassino, and later that day members of the Inquisition arrived. They told everyone that Thomas had hit his head while riding, but the young farmer knew better and started to say so. The Inquisition told him that there were battles happening against Satan that the greater populace knew nothing - could know nothing - about. But they gave him the chance to join that fight, since he clearly had courage. He took the name Acacius and became an Inquisitor!

There, good start. Obviously Acacius is human (really the only choice here), so let's move on to Attributes. I think we'll just go d6 across the board for now.

Skills! This game predates SWADE, but whatever, it's not hard to convert (really just comes down to arranging Skills). So I get a d4 in the four Common Skills, and then 12 more.

Well, I'll bump Notice and Athletics to d6. I'll take Knowledge: Demonology at d4. I'll take Riding d6, Fighting d6, and what the heck, I'll bump Stealth and Persuasion up to d6 as well. Oh, Survival probably makes sense, we'll put at d6 there. Hmm. I guess let's put a d4 in Battle, too.

Hindrances! Let's take Overconfident (if God is with us, who can be against us? Lots of things, turns out). For similar reasons, I'll take Death Wish - it's not that Acacius wants to die, he just expects to. And just for flavor I'll take Anemic; Acacius is pale and prone to illness and fatigue. 

Edges n' stuff! I get a free Edge for being hooman, and I kinda want the Inquisitor Edge (otherwise I'm an injunctive, not an inquisitor), but it will requires rearranging a couple of things because I need a d8 in whatever field of study I specialize in. I think it's gonna be Demonology, but I only have a d4 right now. Hmm. I'll move that point out of Battle to give myself a d6, I'll use two of my "points" from Hindrances to jack it to d8 (I need two because it's higher than my Smarts), and I'll use those last two points to buy the Inquisitor Edge. Oh, and I need Spirit d8, too, so that's where those last points are going.

Pace 6, Parry 5, Toughness 5, easy enough! Acacius is 25 or so. He's got black hair but his skin is lighter than his siblings' (he's always been pale). He's trained with a club, dagger, and sword, but he's not comfortable wearing armor, though of course if the Inquisition gives it to him he'll don it. Acacius has learned a lot very quickly, and he hopes to read the rest of Thomas' works some day, but at present he's a little busy fighting demons n' shit. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he suspect he'll run across the demon that felled Thomas Aquinas some day, and he suspects he won't live through that encounter...but if he has anything to say about it, neither will the demon. 

That'll do it!