Monday, October 13, 2014

People who aren’t Heterodynes: the Gaslamp Melodrama PCs

With the rules in place the players cobbled together their PCs

Rachel already had a PC –Rachel’s a big fan of Barbra Bain and has that sort of smart and sexy spy as her default archetype. In this case she’s adding combat skills but Nadia seduces people for information, has information from people she’s already seduced and has former conquests as allies. Rachel added some background secrets, a missing eye, eyepatch and casting as Angelina Jolie from Sky Captain to get more points. Nadia is an Ally level character since she’s focused mostly away from combat and invention.

Diane was playing the young heiress and therefore took a lot of levels of Spark and a background as the local tailor’s daughter. Elena has a broad array of all the science skills from her spark levels, she’s very smart, very tough but not strong, combat savvy or worldly. This works great on some levels in that her lack of combat skill and life experience means she needs allies, but is not the same niche as a BtVS Hero’s physical superhumanity.

Since Asha was the other regular player (Emily was heading off to college and Jim and I will be trading off on GMing) she claimed the second Hero level character. Bella is a beautiful if slightly mad Parisian pastry chef with some Spark in her (likely because Chemistry is Cooking). The visual image is Catherine Zeta-Jones from Without Reservations. She’s a genius with chemistry, has an insanely keen nose, near superhuman reflexes and crazy knife skills. This takes us a little closer to the idea of the Hero PCs being superhman, but she’s still not in Buffy territory.

Emily opted for a Clockwork Girl Thief. You may recall that I debated outright denying Clank PCs because they don’t appear in the source material. I don’t know if it’s a drive to special snowflaking or just the desire to do something new, but someone’s asked for it both times. The Clockwork Girl, Katarina, has damaged memory cylinders and remembers notion prior to waking up in a burn mark in an empty field (she also has linguistic ticks: she knows synonyms for primary colors but not the actual primary color words). She has superhuman reflexes and sight and is very much optimized towards acrobatics and crime, but remains an Ally level character.

Jim is playing Lt. Anton Adler, a young soldier in the Junta’s army destined to rebel against them for the love of the fair Elena. He’s the commander of the 1101 sanitation inspection platoon and therefor has a cadre of 5 scruffy soldiers under his command as they tract disease vectors, make notes on superior waste elimination designs and have an uncanny knowledge sewer systems. An ally level character he’s upright, downright, forthright and square, and while he’s a capable soldier he’s still young and not at superhuman prowess.

I’m playing Jahn Pava, a member of the low nobility driven out by the Junta and living in his family estates just outside of Turduckenstan, the country in question. A funder of the resistance movement that employs Nadia to protect Elena, Jahn is also the survivor of an experiment (he was vivisected, kept alive and reassembled, and therefore has a fear of surgeons and a hatred of the Junta’s sparks) that gave him superhuman strength. An ally level hero he brings money, physical power and gothic brooding to the team. Like Anton he has Love for Elena on his character sheet, but Jahn’s is Tragic Love (and actual BtVS quality), so we know who Elena ends up with.


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