Character Creation: Necrobiotic

Sounds like macrobiotic, but like, more dead.

The Game: Necrobiotic
The Publisher: Penny for a Tale
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one, and perhaps a deck of cards? 

This game kinda breaks my heart, and not in a way I see often. It's got a really cool, evocative setting - it's more or less post-apocalypse. The world's population dropped in the 2010s, various calamities ensue, eventually having a workforce (or rather, not having one) becomes the most serious issue because there are very few able-bodied people left to, well, work. So the science to reanimate dead bodies becomes available, and now there are constructs running about. The horror of the setting (indeed, why I think it's a horror game rather than a PA game in my completely informal classification system) comes from the idea that you might lose someone you love and then see them - their animated corpse, rather - keeping someone's house the next day. All kinds of questions about the soul, where life ends and slavery begins, and of course the idea that there are a few cities left but much of the world has been left to rot. And, of course, some potential to hit some of the same themes as Promethean, which as the only consistent line developer that game ever had makes me happy. 

Also, the system looks fun. As always, the way to judge a system is to play it, but this one is card based and involves playing cards to buy off consequences from the GM as well as to achieve what you want. The given examples are mostly combat, but it still looks interesting and it's not fucking d20 at least.

But...I have no idea what you'd do in this game. I didn't even know if you were playing constructs until I got most of the way through the book. There's a sample adventure, but it's literally two pages and asks that the PCs either be loyal to a particular faction or guns for hire. There's so, so much cool and moody fiction and not once does the book ever say "OK, this is an RPG, everyone plays a character, there's a GM called the Mechanist, your characters are people who blah." 

There's occasional discussion in RPG spaces (wherein I lurk, like the infamous butcher in the Amigo the Devil song of the same name BWAHAHAHAHA) about whether the obligatory "what is an RPG?" section of games are really necessary. After all, anyone who buys an RPG these days is probably at least passingly familiar with D&D, and even if a casual non-gamer was going to pick one up it probably wouldn't be a game with no particular online presence or support that Kickstarted almost four years ago. But with that said, I'm...pretty familiar with RPGs. I own close to 1500 of them, I've run...shit, dozens, probably? and I read new ones all the time. So if I'm reading your game and thinking "cool, but like, how does it work? What themes are we going for?" and finding the transition from "intro fiction/history" to "character creation" with no handshake intro abrupt, then maybe a page or two wouldn't have gone amiss? Or just give us the CATS for the game (something I've seen other games do, and it's helpful)?

Anyway, griping aside, there's a lot I like about Necrobiotic, I just wish it was a little more user-friendly. Let's make a character!

Because I need some guidance, here, let's assume that my character is going to be participating in the presented adventure (What Rises Must Fall, which got me thinking that there's some God-Machine adjacent stuff in this game, though the title might be coincidental since the phrase in CofD is "what rises may fall"). As such, I need to be either reliably for hire or loyal to the Citadel...which means what, exactly? It's the city-state, kinda-sorta, of whatever area we're talking about. I assume for my purposes we're talking about Florence.

(By the way, almost all of the setting material is presented in-character as interviews or fiction or whatever, and I know from experience how immensely fucking annoying it is, as a writer, to have to convey information that players can use at the table while also writing fiction that's fun to run. Better to just present prose and then you don't run into unreliable narrators, but here we are.)

Well, let's say my character is an Architect, someone who turns corpses into constructs. He's always looking for interesting new ways to preserve and reactivate flesh, and capitalize on the ways in which corpses are (from a labor standpoint) superior to living things. Sounds like a pretty good company man, as it were. 

OK, so of course there's no step-by-step in chargen, but it says I get 20 points to split between characteristics (Flesh, Steel, Steam, Gear), min 3, max 8. I think my character concept lends itself to a more intellectual sort of fellow (shocker), so I think putting points into Steam and Gear (mental acuity and special skills related to Architect, respectively) makes sense. If I put 7 into Gear and 6 into Steam, that leaves me 7 points to split between Flesh (social) and Steel (physical). 3 Flesh, 4 Steel, then? Sounds OK.

Skills! Skills are either trained or not trained, much like in Chill, but training just gives you the ability to play two cards rather than one. They're also a good way to specialize within an attribute; I think there's only one Gear skill I want to train, f'rex. I get 6 trained skills, or 5 plus an upgrade. Hmm.

Well, I know I want to train Necro-neurological Programming (that's the one in Gear that I want). Actually, I'll train Advanced Medicine, too. I want to train Reasoning (under Steam), and I'll train Firmness (huh-huh) up on Flesh. Two or three more. I think Dexterity makes sense, as does Perception. 

So, do I want an upgrade or a sixth trained skill? I think I'll train Resistance, and say that my Architect burns the midnight oil a lot (and thus has developed not only a resistance to fatigue but a tolerance to various drugs). 

Right, what's next? Face card! These are special abilities, and there's a whole discussion on making new ones, but actually I like Neurosurgeon so I'ma take that.

And then...Joker archetype, but for me that's Architect. Why in the world would you put this at the end of chargen, since it determines what Skills you get (Gear Skills are different for each Archetype)? Well, just more evidence that no one did a usability check on this book. 

So: Renato Fiorentino is a younger Architect, but kind of known as a whiz kid amongst his peers. He regards flesh and bone as raw materials, but to the extent he believes in a "soul" or "anima," it's in the nervous system - he's read old stories of how computers worked, and believes that the brain can be programmed and reprogrammed. Perhaps even after the construct has been activated, it might be possible to reprogram it with minimal surgical intervention? The possibilities are endless.

Renato is short and skinny, black hair, brown eyes, and while his clothes are typically neat and pressed, he doesn't sleep much and forgets to shave. He tends to append "don't you think?" to sentences.