Character Creation: Welcome to Slaughterville RPG

Whenever we've playing the board game, we've wound up say /slæftɚvɪl/ ("slaffterville"), because you can't have slaughter without laughter!

The Game: Welcome to Slaughterville: The Roleplaying Game
The Publisher: Laughing Rogue 
Degree of Familiarity: None 
Books Required: Just the one

So, as mentioned, this was a board game first. I've played it, it wasn't really anything special. But now it's an RPG, using the Year Zero Engine! And it's...still nothing special.

The basic premise is that you're in the titular town, which occupies a weird liminal space and prevents anyone from leaving it. It's the town where the horror movies happen, where all the monsters live, which is actually kind of a cool premise - you're trapped in the meta-space where the horror stories happen, and if you wanted to do something like Tales From the Crypt or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, that would be a fantastic framing device. But the book never really gets into that, it just tries to be spooky without grounding the horror in anything understandable or interesting, and as any connoisseur of horror will tell you, horror without characters you can relate to is just brain-popcorn, at best. 

And, of course, this game runs up against the problem that all horror RPGs do for me: Would I ever choose to run this over one of the games I really like? And, like, not really. But let's make a character and see where we end up!

Let's assume we'd be playing through the introductory scenario, which is your basic "slasher hunts the camp counselors" thing. PCs are the counselors, but literally nothing else about them is established. Let's assume they're young adults (I had counselors at summer camps that ranged from late teens to early 40s, though it would be much more in-genre for them all to be 20-somethings). 

(Side note: There is no table of contents, the index is crap, and the PDF isn't bookmarked. Sigh.)

First thing we do is pick an Archetype. There are 10 to choose from, I don't have a concept, so let's just roll a d10 and pick one that way. A roll of 1 gives me...The Jock. OK, sure. There is...no spot to write this on the character sheet. Not off to a strong start, here, guys.

My character does not look like this

Well, you know what, I went to soccer camp as a teen, and a lot of the counselors were European, so let's assume my character is English and he's on a minor-league football team in the UK, and is here working after an injury. His name is Hayden Raleigh. 

Attributes! These are rated like grades, A to D. I start with C in all four of them and then I get three increases. I can also drop one to D to get another such increase. But I think I want Hayden to be relatively competent across the board, so let's go B in everything except Agility (the injury, you see). 

Health is determined by translated the grades into die types (A = d12 and so on down), summing the die types of Strength and Agility, and dividing the sum by four. In my case, 5 (we round up).

Nerve works the same way with Wits and Empathy, so also 5. 

Stress starts at 0, but it's not on the sheet, so it can't be that important.

Skills are rated the same way as Attributes, and I get 6 of them (one B, two C, three D). Let's take...Stamina as my B, Mobility and Force as my Cs, and Observation, Insight, and Persuasion as my Ds.

I get one Specialty. My Archetype suggests Hard Hitter, but that's just a suggestion. And indeed, it's not appropriate for Hayden. I'll take Fast Thinking (if I go first, I get a +1 to my first skill test).

Gear! Hayden has a whistle, some shinguards, and a pair of cleats. His Signature Item is his Arsenal hoodie (my friend Morgan is a big Arsenal fan, see). 

Hayden is tall, red-blond hair, blue eyes, still walks with a slight limp but it's improving. He's finding he's developing an American accent and he hates it. He's still trying to live down referring to himself as a "gooner."