Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Cepheus Light - Bad*ssed Scholar Character

In my last post, I reviewed Stellagama's Cepheus Light Upgraded. One of the great things about the character generation process is you can take any rolls for characteristics and turn them into a pretty functional character, no matter how bad those rolls are. 

My Scholar has the following stats: 

STR: 7
DEX: 8
END: 8
INT: 9
EDU: 10
SOC: 8 

In the fifth term, I tallied a mark
for the three skills I
was thinking about. 
Those were some great rolls and I would think these stats would have been great for a Scout or some other military type. Since I was merely going in rolled order, this happened to be the Scholar character. I figured I could "save" this character by making them a skill hound, where they had stayed in the business until they had an insane number of skills.

That didn't happen. 

In rolling one of each character type, I came across a quirk where something bad happened to a Scholar character that from a storytelling point of view should not have happened. The Scholar was the only character to suffer a significant injury. He lost an arm. 

Hmm. How does it happen that a Scholar loses an arm but none of the military types have any significant injury? 

That story comes out in the skill generation portion. 

I imagined that all 6 characters would be a part of the same crew on a ship. So the Scholar needed some people skills and every other odd skill that a military guy wouldn't have. 

I lead with carousing as a homeworld skill. In his first term, I gave him Computers and Medicine and he ended up with +2 to benefits. In the next term, he received Medicine 2 and Animals plus a contact. So far so good. In the third term and subsequent rolls, things got rough. He received another rank of Medicine and Science plus the Liaison 1 skill which was great, but then he was kidnapped and escaped. In the process, he lost an arm.  

Then he was kidnapped again. And he gained an enemy, in addition to Investigation. In his fifth term, he picked up a rank in Leadership. 

At this point, he got out of the business. Obviously, he was pushing his luck. 

So, here is where the storytelling merges with the character generation. What does this guy have in common with a merchant and a bunch of ex-military people? That third term spells it out. 

He was researching poisonous animals, breeding them for military purposes when he was kidnapped. The Scholar wanted out, so he allowed himself to be bitten by a poisonous lab animal and played dead. Once all eyes were off him, he shot his own arm off to stop the poison from reaching his brain and heart. When the government agents got to him, he was nearly dead but thanks to their quick actions, he survived and picked a government agent contact. 

Using his fourth term talent of Investigation, he arranged to be kidnapped from the government agents and vanished off the radar of his prior employers, picking up an enemy. 

It's nice when a plan comes together in character generation. 

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