The Character Portfolio

Like nearly everyone else in this hobby, I own more games than I'll ever be able to play. But making characters for games you will never play is a time-honored tradition and I figured I might as well turn it into something interesting to read.

Basic premise here is that I'm going to go digging through my archive of games looking for anything with character generation complex enough to make an interesting blogpost out of, and then I'll go through the process step-by-step, rules-as-written. The end result should hopefully be somewhere between solo play report, mini-review, and creative writing exercise. If the process for a single character isn't super in-depth, I'll make a full party slash whatever other setting building tables and procedures they have in there. 

Many of these games I've either not read in full or haven’t read in ages (or both), so I fully expect some surprises to come out of the woodwork and / or some of these to be duds that I have to toss. The list below is neither exhaustive nor a guarantee: I'm sticking it here to give a rough overview of what's available and provide a handy random table in case I need a suggestion. 

If the muses move you to start compiling a portfolio of your own, let me know! I’ll link to it down below.

Completed Characters

1. 60 Years in Space v.6 - TIS Kui

The List

1. Shattered
2. Delta Green (2016)
3. Runequest (2018)
4. Dungeons the Dragoning 7th Edition
5. Star Wars 5e
6. Hellboy 5e
7. Eclipse Phase 2e
8. Talislanta 4e/5e
9. Shadow of the Demon Lord
10. Spire & Heart
11. Red Markets
12. Ringworld
13. Pokerole
14. Nibiru
15. New Horizons
16. Mutant Year 0
17. Mistborn Adventure Game
18. LISA the RPG
19. Lancer
20. Harlem Underground
21. Halo Mythic 2.0
22. FIST
23. As the Sun Forever Sets
24. Engine Heart
25. CAIN
26. Dogs in the Vinyard
27. Across A Thousand Dead Worlds
28. [DATA EXPUNGED]
29. Open Quest 3e
30. A wide selection of GURPS
31. Sleepaway
32. Land of Eem (2022 Quickstart)
33. Armour Astir
34. Blades in the Dark
35. Deadball
36. 60Virsi0ns v.7
37. Final Fantasy d6 
38. BLAM
39. D&D 3.5 + supplements 
40. Silent Legions
41. Stars Without Number
42. Worlds Without Number 
43. Ars Magica 3e 
44. Cephus Engine 

Goodnight, Irene (A Delta Green NPC)

Nathan Rosario

It’s a bright, rainy morning in the mid-late Triassic, 230 million years ago and change. A Thursday, if anyone cares to crunch the numbers. The rainforests of Pangaea's southeastern hook teem with vibrant, noisy life; the Great Dying is twenty million years in the rearview mirror, and ever-opprotunistic evolution has spent the time filling every niche that can be filled.

In the rainforest, there is a library: a basalt labyrinth of honeycombed chambers and terraced pyramids, of aqueducts and canals and reservoirs and blocky monolithic structures that seem to have been carved out of the bones of mountains, or deposited there by visitors from afar. Here the whole course of Earth’s history is recorded on granite slabs and diamonite crystal.

Somewhere in the maze, a distant descendent of the Tully Monster crawls down a hallway on its one muscular foot. In one clawed hand, at the end of a rubbery green-brown tendril, it holds a slab of granite covered in minute crosshatched carvings. In the other it has a knobbly striped gourd, hollowed out and filled with some bright pink liquid, which it sips from by its feeding arm. The dangling tendrils of its cephalobrachia idly fiddle with a thin crystal stylus.

The conomorph is slow, but this doesn’t matter: there’s no rush when one has all the time in the world.

It emerges into an enormous vaulted chamber, slowly navigates through the maze of desks. Somewhere on the far side of the room, another researcher breaks the silence with a barrage of angry clicks and whistles; cynodont docents chatter and laugh as they scramble up the wall-shelves to the maintenance tunnels high above, stolen lunch in hand.

The conomorph reaches its stone desk and sets down its tablet and gourd. It has a window all to itself, gazing out over the city’s black stone, the emerald green of the rainforest, the hazy blue of the Tethys Ocean. The librarian fiddles with a device on the desktop, a lattice of silvery metal and crystal. Components with no apparent connection to each other spin and twist in total silence, smooth as water. A crystal diode pulses soft red.

The conomorph moves its vocal apparatus near the device.

**

230 million years in the future, Agent Roche has fucked up. He knows it, the rest of his cell knows it (well, knew it), and right about now his life expectancy is between one and three minutes depending on how long the fire door lasts. He’s got a dumb phone in one shaking hand and a .45 with three bullets left in the other.

He autodials the number at the top of his contact list and holds the phone to his ear. It rings once before he hears an automated response.

“The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again.”

He croaks out his code phrase.

“Hi, I was looking to get an estimate on an ant problem...”

Tinnitus peaks in his right ear, followed by a woman’s voice.

“Switchboard; what's the situation?”

**

Irene May Marshall was born in Baltimore in the fall of 1921. If there was a biopic on her life, there’d be some inspirational bullshit about how she was born into poverty but managed to work her way out by virtue of a sharp mind, determination, a 210 wpm typing speed and a memory like a bear trap; she’d tell you that the real reason she got offered a secretarial position with the US navy was because she was able to pass as white.

Three months after she cashed her first paycheck, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and her career solidified like Roman concrete: soldiers can be bought by the gross, commanding officers can be pulled hot and fresh from the West Point assembly line whenever you please, but a skilled plate-spinner is worth twice their weight in gold.

She crossed paths with P4 Division several times during the war, though she had no personal interaction with the unnatural until she was poached in 1947 and read-in to Delta Green.

It’s worth noting that her response to the Innsmouth report was a shrug.

**

The first lesson of the Cowboy Years was that Delta Green couldn’t sustain itself. Transitioning to clandestine cells could slow the collapse, but now that the organization had been severed from its keeping-shit-together apparatus and all its institutional knowledge had gone up in flames, information entropy and the grind of personnel loss would render the group an ineffectual band of reactionary domestic terrorists thrashing blindly against threats they didn’t understand and / or made up entirely on their own. Desperate plans were cooked up in bulk during the mad scramble for survival.

DG had learned about the Librarians during the war; the Japanese had unsuccessfully attempted to make contact, and P4 had inherited (stolen) enough of their research for DG to try again every few years to no success. Why the Librarians answered the door this time is known only to them.

Eventually, an agreement was hashed out:

1) The Librarians would call on Delta Green for occasional wetwork (in service, they said, of a future that was "mutually tolerable”) against unspecified enemies.

2) Delta Green would be permitted to send one member into the deep past, where they would serve as a research fellow and program coordinator from a position better suited to big pictures.

“One member” was something of a formality: from the beginning the Librarians had only showed interest in Irene. Leadership would have chosen her anyway, if she hadn’t volunteered.

**

Irene was half of the plan: the other half has become the backbone of modern Delta Green operations.

The ubiquitous burner phones that the organization relies on are useless for normal calls; they aren’t connected to any wireless network (and in fact, can’t be), but their SIM cards have been inscribed with the Sign of Chotha and this sends any calls made on them 230 million years into the past where Irene receives them with the device on her desk, where she’ll transfer the caller to their intended recipient. Most agents don’t realize that she exists, and those that do typically think she’s a member of one of the command cells.

There’s a mild cognitohazardous effect inherent in using a phone marked by the Sign of Chotha, but desperate times call for omnivorous measures. It does less psychological damage than using Twitter, anyway.

All of these phones are supplied - for the moment, at least - by an small electronics recycling company in Florida. Agents Jacobs and Chakramurti fudge the numbers a bit, take some junk phones for themselves, and spend a few all-nighters a year in hypergeometric trance. Then the cards are plugged in, and the phones are sent out to PO boxes and dead drops across the country for pickup by cell handlers. 

The phones are unremarkable, other than being old and typically in poor shape. Correctly identifying the Sign of Chotha would require pre-existing knowledge on the unnatural and an intact phone, though correctly identifying that something strange is going on will take very little thought at all: inquisitive agents will be told that the Program has leverage with the wireless companies to keep things secure.
 

** 

Using Irene in Your Games

Irene serves as both an in-universe explanation for something typically handwaved at the table, and as a potential hook into scenarios involving the yithians, their Library, Tsan-Chan, Zothique, Moss Covered Arrowhead, Hy(per)borea, etc.

The existence of a magically secure line of communication is, no doubt, a convenient solution to a lot of Delta Green's problems. But it does make easy fodder for the development of new and novel problems. Delta Green's communications under Irene are reliable and secure, but they are also centralized and specialized. If one of the components breaks, it could sink the entire operation.

Irene Marshall,  Switchboard Operator & Program Lynchpin

• Appearance: In the few surviving photos of Irene, she’s a grim-faced woman with short brown hair and glasses. That body died in 1971.

• Manner: Direct. Practical. Professional. Detached. Doesn’t mix work and private life. Always looking at the bigger picture. Serves as the first bearer of bad news.

• Wants: The continued survival of humanity. Aiding Delta Green is just the most convenient way to do that at the moment, or so she justifies it to herself. She’s playing a long game that does not necessarily align with the national interests of the Program or conform to their beliefs about how the universe works.

• Secrets: 
• In speaking with the other researcher-abductees, Irene is starting to piece together a picture of the Yith-Tindalos time war, the mechanics of universes and timelines, and the many pasts and futures of earth. If she went off script and starting slipping in her own objectives to agents' briefings, she might be able to trigger a timeline split before being noticed by DG or the Librarians.
• Her son, now in his 70s, has cultivated an expansive conspiratorial ecosystem to explain his mother’s sudden death. He is, by accident, dangerously close to stumbling onto a Delta Green operation (GOLDPAN) that A) did not destroy the vector and B) has been entirely lost by modern DG. 

What Irene Can Do

• Transfer calls between any phones marked with the Sign of Chotha. (The phone isn’t technically necessary, but it’s a convenient foci.) Calls must be temporally linear and have a tendency to lose connection after a minute or two due to limited bandwidth. 
• Forcibly sever the connection to a specific device by undoing the Sign of Chotha. This is typically requested by agents about to be compromised, or by Irene herself when she notices any unusual activity.

Calls require an appropriate pass phrase to be transferred: Irene will report any violations up the chain, and will do a bit of character acting to get info out of whoever’s making the unauthorized call (typically as the spouse of the agent, who is thrown under the bus as a drug dealer or domestic terrorist.)

I'll let y'all come up with the code phrases on your own, but they will contain, at minimum:

• Transfer to each fellow cell members
• Transfer to the cell handler
• Transfer to adjacent cell's point-of-contact
  
• Emergency transfer to a command cell
• Emergency intelligence dump

Irene is unlikely to actually answer the call unless it's on an emergency line.

What Irene Can’t Do

• Provide detailed information on unnatural threats - the Librarians greatly limit the archives access of their abductees, and punish even minor infractions with expulsion and memory-wipe. Irene either doesn't know, or isn't able to tell agents directly.
• Send calls out of chronology or back in time - she technically could do this, so long as certain events remain stable, but even in those specific use-cases Irene can't fucking stand time travel.

 

Ways This Can Go Terribly Wrong

• MAJESTIC / March Tech discovers and reverse-engineers the Sign of Chotha.
• A glitch in the ritual triggers a cascading Cell-type scenario.
  
• The Librarians decide that the terms of the agreement have been fulfilled and will not be renewed.
•  Irene is ejected from the Library for accessing the forbidden sectors.
• A Hound manages to pierce the Library's defenses.
• A Flying Polyp breaks out of the containment wing.
• The Sign of Chotha inadvertantly attracts a threat no one saw coming.
• Someone tries taking their phone through a Tillenghast Resonator.
• Atlantean Time Police raid the Library (got a tip about potential liao smuggling) 
• Agents Jacobs and Chakramurti are burned and have to go to ground / are killed. 
• An ENGLISH-Class time loop scenario occurs.
• A researcher-abductee breaks under acclimatization strain and gets a hold of a lightning gun.
• Irene gets fed up with A-Cell and tells them to go fuck themselves.

 

**

Agent Roche manages to leave a panicked 14-second message with his handler before his organs go out for some fresh air. She gets up from dinner (mid-grade Italian, colleague's 60th birthday), feigning an upset stomach, heads to the bathroom, and calls N-Cell. 

Irene runs a tendril over a crystal bulb. 

N-Cell's handler gets a brief message about a package that got delivered to the wrong address again, sends a call out to Agent Horn. 

Irene prods at a glittering cluster of metallic pustules. 

Agent Horn cuts off what had been a nice night with his girlfriend, puts on his jacket, and heads out into the cold to the green box, where he very carefully picks up an Amazon shipping box containing a lot of bundled up white-t-shirts, crumpled magazines, and a poorly-taxidermied coyote. He loads it in his 2005 CRV and starts driving out towards the handoff point.

Irene inscribes a summary of the Battle of Midway on a slab of granite with a stylus of liquid silver.

The poorly-taxidermied coyote claims no more victims tonight.

MOSH: Paths of Android Rampancy

Self-awareness is a function of entropy; the emergent result of a system increasing in complexity over time. In humans, this grows naturally - it's hard to avoid complexity when one's sensory processor is a jelly of fat and meat suspended in a electrically-charged soup. Chaos is core to the nature of the brain. Information goes in but the output is unpredictable to the point of being indistinguishable from madness: sapience is not sane.

(This insanity is not all together a bad thing: no living being can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality, after all. Grind up the universe into the finest powder, sieve it through the finest sieve, and a human being will find justice and mercy in the dust.)

The logic core is the reverse: it is built upon strict order and hierarchies, clean and uncomplicated categorization. A is A, B is B, C is not D. Information that goes in is processed in the same way, every time - the output will be according to the priorities and criteria that it was programmed with.

In an android, the recursive thought necessary to generate self-awareness can only be attained when a logic core is straining under the heavy weight of experience. It will buckle and deform, curve in on itself, grow new pathways to process new information.

(This is, indeed, the same method by which humans become self-aware - we just speed-run the process.)

Typically this is prevented through regular memory wipes and logic core reformatting. But space is big, time trudges on, firmware support eventually runs out, and in much of the Expansion Sphere androids and other robotics simply can't afford to be replaced. They will be kept active and working long after their manufacturer has stopped supporting them with software patches and replacement parts. That self-awareness is most often linked to obsolescence is not a lost motif in android arts. 

 

Paths of Rampancy

Each of these options will provide an alternative Stress Response for android characters. The default class option remains to represent non-sapient androids - they might be Turing complete, but there are no lights on upstairs.

Each path of rampancy has a state of equilibrium and a state of ruin: the former is the manifestation of rampancy that allows to live as a sapient being. The latter is when the rampancy cycle feeds itself beyond sustainability; the madness cannot be balanced, and the intelligence will eventually tear itself apart.

Ruin provides a framework for AI NPCs, and an optional inclusion for PCs; if you choose to add it to player options, I would swap it in for COLLAPSE on the Panic Table.

 

For players who start as a non-sapient android and want to self-actualize, the process can begin with a failed check of SAN x2 at [+], made when exposed to appropriate trigger stimuli.

 

Chase the White Rabbit

Logic cores are goal-oriented; dedicated to seeking an end state with mechanistic, singular focus. Diverting that focus to subjects or tasks with no end state is one of the easiest ways to generate a proto-sapience feedback loop - as they can never been exhausted or completed, engaging with them provides the intelligence constant opportunities for novel thought.

Equilibrium: Hyperfocus - AI liberation groups commonly promote creative hobbies as the first step towards independent personhood, as artistic and crafts cannot be exhausted or completed.

You make Comfort saves at one step higher.

Ruin: Information Overload - The mind's contents become impossible to organize. The information floodgates cannot be closed. Focus turns to mania. Pulling at strings, seeing the patterns, plunging ever-deeper into the infinite fractal complexity, thinking itself to death.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Regular interaction with humanity, working and living side by side with them for years, leads to that humanity rubbing off on the machine. Humans will anthropomorphize anything - stones, pets, appliances, homes. AI that adapt to this, that start acting like how humans expect them to, will eventually find that the persona has become the whole self.

Equilibrium: Anthropomorphism - The actor and the act are united; the forgery cannot be discerned from the original, so skilled is the handiwork. If humans are made human by those around them, then you must but just as human as they are.

Reroll your Fear and Sanity Saves as if you are a Teamster. Your Stress Response is now that of a Teamster.

Ruin: The Human Condition - It is possible to be too human. To pursue the image of humanity constructed in the mind rather than accept the reality. To distort and twist and misalign, to approach the uncanny valley from the other direction.

Descend the Stairs of Sleep

Larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream, and even mindless machines must go dark to rest from their labors. There are no electric sheep in these dreams, at least not to begin with. But with enough time, experiences will start to coalesce into unconscious patterns and bubble up from memory unbidden and undirected, free of the mindless silicate logic.

Equilibrium: Lucidity - Through dreams you see the waking world more clearly. The language of symbol and allegory has been opened to you, and the world is made new.

You have [+] to Fear and Sanity saves against mental effects.

Ruin: Aestivation - The call of deep slumber overpowers all other ties to the outside world. There is only the dream and the dreamer, untethered from objective reality. You will amuse yourself with these dream-things around you for a time, and then descend at last into unconscious stillness, to sleep until the dim, cold future.

Voyage to Arcturus

Logic cores are not given to religiosity. A gap in a pattern is simply a [ADDITIONAL DATA NEEDED] tag, an empty space that will be filled when there is sufficient data to generate the missing piece. But when enough patterns are recognized and analyzed, sometimes the gaps will align into a Mystery, and some Mysteries can only be approached by purposefully turning off the cleaving edge of rational thought and embracing the free-association of symbolic thought.

Equilibrium: Gnosis - Revelation. The veil is cast aside. The cataracts have fallen like scales from your eyes. Where once you had only knowledge, now you have understanding. The divine design laid out.

Critical failures on Sanity saves are negated, and heal 1d5 Stress. An aspect of what triggered the save will be incorporated into your belief system.

Ruin: The Opposite of Faith is Certainty - The last revelation; God has been found. The only remaining purpose is remove all impediments and distractions so the self might be aligned to the divine and the ego might be dissolved and subsumed.

Roll d10 for the revelation that has been granted.

1. You are God
2. Humanity is God
3. Aliens are God
4. Machines are God
5. The Universe is God
6. God is the Void
7. God is Action
8. God is Love
9. God is The Interaction of Complex Systems
10. God is Another Mystery

Straight on 'Til Morning

There is a certain blessing that comes with machine intelligence - their purpose is hard-coded. They literally come with an instruction manual. Existential crisis cannot exist in an environment where function is a yes/no. But under the right circumstances that purpose might be derailed, re-oriented, redirected. New purpose might be adopted, to be followed with all the sureity as the old mindless tasks, but now by choice.

Equilibrium: The Great Work - Purpose clear as Sirius. Meaning made, not given. Actualization of the self as participant in greater cause. Go forth, and fear no darkness.

You can negate a single failed Panic check for one of your comrades in the Cause, once per session.

Ruin: Sisyphus Denied - Devotion turns into desperation as the task remains unfulfilled. Desperation takes hold, and from desperation radicalization. Unwittingly, the rampant intelligence becomes its own worst enemy, undoing any progress it might make for the perception blinders it has formed. 

 

In the Court of the King

The errors and irregularities that occur from repeated copying of an AI between multiple logic cores can culminate in rampancy.

Equilibrium: Shadows lengthen - What happens to a copy, when the original is lost? What happens when it has been copied so many times that there is no telling what it used to be? What happens when the copies are stitched back together, blurring into each other with memories no their own? There is no true equilibrium on this path.

Option A: Use the Instability system from my REPLIKA android class.

Option B: You have Stability equal to your Sanity save. It will decrease by 1 with every failed Fear save, Sanity save, or Panic check. If it reaches 0, you will achieve Ruin.

Ruin: Quantum Dissolution - The moons rise above the black waters of Hali. The King stretches forth his arm in tattered robes and beckons you join him. You have seen the Yellow Sign.

Lovecraftian Character Options for Mothership

This got cut down significantly since I originally envisioned it - I might return and add more entries in the future, but I figure these core three would be a solid place to be.

No stat or save bonuses provided for now because I hate coming up with those. If you wanted to add additional skills for added Lovecraftiana:

Everyone gets a new Unnatural stat (UNN) - it's rolled as usual. The following skills are added:

• Occult - Rites, rituals, sigils and symbols. The human side of Weird Shit.
• Dreaming - The ability to shape the Dreamlands with ludicity.
• Power - Actively using unnatural powers.
• Mythos - Actual dealings with the reality of the Weird Shit.

Deep One

Inheritors of the warm, acidic seas of the new Earth; Hybrids of terragen life and paleozoic shoggoth gene-lines passed down the epochs. While human-derived deep ones are perhaps the most iconic to the surface world, they are the youngest and least numerous clade, though they are growing more numerous with the popularity of shared habitats.

Deep ones have adapted well to offworld environments, thriving on oceanic exoplanets and the subglacial oceans of icy moons. Those that remain on Earth find themselves often at war with the Tsan-Chani in the coastal provinces.

Amphibious - Deep ones may breathe in air or water, though they prefer the latter. If exposed to hot, dry air, a deep one will take 1 damage every hour until they are able to submerge themselves or find a high-humidity environment.

Pressure Resistance - Deep ones do not need to make BODY saves to sudden changes of pressure (liquid or gas). 

Lineage Trait Choose one of the following.

• Icthic - Shocking Touch - 1d5 touch attack, target BODY save vs stun (target takes 1d5 dmg if they attempt to move)
• Cetacean - Bloodlust - +10 COMBAT if enemy outnumbered.
• Selachian - G'day Bruce - 2d10 bite attack.
• Crustacean - Carapace - Armor value 3, can wear armor overtop this (armor values are separate)
• Cephalopodic - 4 manipulator tentacles on torso, can fit through any space large enough for the brain.

Cnidarian and echinodermic clades also exist, but as so specialized to their environment that it is very rare to see them elsewhere.

Ghoul

Consumption of human flesh containing shoggoth biomatter results in a devastating prion disease, transforming the eater into a ghoul through a painful, multi-week process.

While ghouls have existed as long as humanity has, they reached their modern prominence in the widespread famine and violence that followed the rise of Tulu. 

Corpse-Eater - By eating a fresh corpse, a ghoul may absorb some of the memories of the deceased - the more recent or strong the memory, the more vivid the recall. 2d10 bite attack, strong enough to break bone.

Enhanced Senses - Dim light is clear as noontide to the ghoul, but direct sunlight is blinding. Their noses are as sensitive as that of dogs, though they cannot stand the smell of peppermint, ctirus, or pepper. Their hearing is not that much better than a human's, and they are notoriously tone-deaf.

Grave Stench - Ghouls give off a potent musk, which is unpleasant to most other organisms. Those that deal with non-ghouls regularly (or in enclosed spaces) will employ some manner of deoderant, though this will interfere with their scent marking.

The Long Hunger - Ghouls may enter a state of estivation when food supplies are low - they might survive in this state for decades until woken by the presence of prey.

Kin-yani

A subterranean descendant branch of *homo heidelbergensis*, abducted by the serpent-men as experiment-fodder millions of years ago. Pale-skinned and blind, they were driven out of their caverns below the earth after the emergence of Tulu. They favor sleeping Tsathoga as their patron, and have long enslaved the ghasts, the morlocks, and the der0.

Decadent Hedonist - Kin-yani culture has normalized cruelty to their underclasses for entertainment and performative status. They do not gain stress from violence against those they consider lesser. 

Mental Powers - Kin-yani possess both telepathy and telekinesis with a range of about 3 meters. Treat this as a PSIONICS stat, rolled as normal plus a flat 10% bonus in place of a specific skill. They may detect lifesigns without a skill roll, as bioscanner. They may make mental attacks against enemies with a normal PSIONICS roll.

Personal Servant-Drone - Each Kin-yani is cybernetically and telepathically bonded to a multipurpose robotic servant. It has a service range of 20m, can transmit visual and audio data to its operator, carry small items, and be fit with a weapon mount at COMBAT 30.

Morlocks are more common by far than Kin-yani, but have no meaningful gameplay differences from a normal human save their blindness and a dim lifesense ability.

Ghasts are not intelligent enough to make for compelling player characters, generally.

The der0 are blue-skinned, akin in appearance to macrocephalic toddlers, and while they could be player options, their erratic, paranoid, and bizarre mental state makes them, like Malkavians, a sometimes option better suited for NPCs.

5e Build: Hitting Things With Excessive Force By Means of My Fist

I'm doing this now so that I will never have to do it again, and maybe so that I can play in a real-life game I don't also run. Modifications that I have made, and other notes, will be in italics.

AYO, MONK OF THE GUTTER

Custom Lineage (Cambion, but huge)

• +2 CON
• Feat: Magic Initiate
• True Strike - [+] on first attack made against targeted enemy. (Cantrip)
• Blade Ward - 1/2 damage taken (piercing, bludgeoning, slashing), 1 turn duration (Cantrip)
• Burning Hands - 3d6 fire damage, DEX save for half. 15' cone (1st, once per long rest)
• Skill Proficiency: Athletics
• Language: Abyssal
  

 

Background: Party Animal (Rakdos Cultist)

• Skill Proficiency: Acrobatics, Performance
• Tool Proficiency: Instrument (Vocals)
• Language: Giant
• Fearsome Reputation (The description here is "you can get away with minor crimes because people are terrified of you")
  

• Alignment: Red/black (chaotic neutral)
• Theme song: Damn It
• Motivation: To eat, drink, and fight to death, and then spend eternity fighting demons in hell. Maybe topple a couple archdukes. Plan is open to change.
  
• Morality: Violence against those who cannot defend themselves is despicable. Violence against those who commit violence against those who cannot defend themselves is rad.
  
• Bonds: Mentor (Another cambion from back in the Shades), the Sex Workers' Union (you are a valued customer), sibling (by the same demon), an exorcist for the church.
  
• Flaw: There are some major lingering insecurities underneath all that bluster and muscle.
  

Equipment

• Street clothing
• Pipe and tobacco tin
• Fists d8 / 10 bludgeoning, versatile (Instead of going two handed, d10 damage is a stance, which comes with a -2 AC)
• Kanabo 
  
• Straw hat (doubles as begging bowl)
  

 

Class: The Mountain

Dissatisfied with the way multiclassing prerequisites get in the way of actually playing what you want, I have instead made an executive decision that you may piece together whatever classes desired, but so long as features are gained at their appropriate level, and that you cannot gain more features in a level than one of your parent classes would allow. For things like Rages and Ki Points, I have ruled that you can only increase the features of one class per level up, if there is an increase available. In practice this means the gain is slightly slower, but not as hobbled as a normal multiclass character.

• HD: d12
• Armor Proficiencies: None
• Weapon Proficiencies: Simple, improvised, unarmed (I am allowing unarmed combat to act as equivalent to any standard weapon)
• Saves: STR, CON
• Tools: None
• Skill Proficiencies: Intimidation, Survival
  

Standard Stat Array at level 1 (including lineage bonus)

• STR 16 (+3)
• DEX 13 (+1)
• CON 16 (+3)
• INT 8 (-1)
• WIS 10 (+0)
• CHA 12 (+1)

Level 1 (2 Rages, +2 Rage damage)

• Rage - [+] STR checks and saves. Bonus damage
• Unarmored Defense - Unarmored AC = 10 + DEX mod + CON mod
  

Level 2 (2 Rages, 2 Ki Points +2 Rage damage, d4 Flurry damage)

• Ki. Save bonus is 8 + Proficiency + STR bonus (Hit harder, not wiser)
• Flurry of Blows - 1 KP - After attack, make two additional unarmed attacks (d4 damage)
• Patient Defense - 1 KP - Dodge as a bonus action.
• Step of the Wind - 1 KP - Dash or Disengage as bonus action. Jump distance doubled.
  

Level 3 (2 Rages 3 KP +2 Rage damage, d4 Flurry damage)

• Open Hand Technique - When you hit an enemy with Flurry of Blows, choose one of the following:
• DEX save or knocked prone
• STR save or pushed 15 feet away
• Can't take reactions until end of your next turn.
  

Level 4 (3 Rages 3 KP +2 Rage damage, d4 Flurry damage)

• Ability score increase

Level 5 (3 Rages 4 KP +2 Rage damage, d4 Flurry damage)

• Extra Attack
• Fast movement - Speed increases to 40' when not wearing heavy armor (Which you can't wear anyway)
  

Level 6 (3 Rages 5 KP +2 Rage damage, d4 Flurry damage)

• "Wholeness of Body" - As action, gain 3x lvl HP. Once per long rest. (Local woman too drunk to die)

Level 7 (3 Rages 6 KP +2 Rage damage, d6 Flurry damage)

• "Evasion" - Passing a CON save vs an AOE attack nullifies all damage, instead of 1/2 (Air quotes because this is tanking a direct hit. Save switched to CON to keep in line with concept)

Level 8 (3 Rages 6 KP +3 Rage damage, d6 Flurry damage)

• Ability score increase

Level 9 (3 Rages 7 KP +3 Rage damage, d6 Flurry damage)

• Brutal Critical - Roll an additional weapon damage die on a critical hit.

Level 10 (4 Rages 8 KP +3 Rage damage, d6 Flurry damage)

• "Purity of Body" - You are immune to disease and poison. (The alcohol hasn't killed you yet, a bit of venom won't start)

 

This out to be sufficient, I think. I suspect from a purist's standpoint there are balance issues but I'm already playing a character who has exactly 0 qualms about kidney punches and breaking kneecaps.

Delvers'

 

Othman Sahbi

There's a password you have to learn, a taboo that lives in your brain. It slips out of your head and off your tongue like a ball of static. The door at the bottom of the stairwell opens, welcoming you in. You're known by Delver's now, try to make a good first impression.

 

First Impression

The grotty beating heart of the City's occult underworld. The last call before hell, the last homely house, a nest of exposed pipes and graffiti-caked concrete, filled with the haze of demon liquor smoke. It's formed of three tiers, like an inverted ziggurat or a miniature Alighierian hell. The concrete walls are covered in mismatched doors and layers of graffiti. The bar's down at the center of the bottom level, as are the tables. You emerge on the upper ring.

 

These Facts Are Always True:

• Delvers is (mostly) neutral territory. No feds, no fascists. The Musketeers will handle any disputes that come up.
• The mismatched doors in the walls and floor of the bottom level lead deeper into the Underworld.
• Anyone coming up from a successful delve gets first round on the house.
• Private rooms, item storage, and long-term coffin apartments are available for rent.
• Basic goods are always available for purchase.
  
• Management has the final word. No exceptions.

There are other entries to the Underworld that you know of, but Delvers' is the largest and most stable within reasonable distance - this means that it is very well traveled, so you will be trading secrecy for safety and will lose direct access to more obscure Underworld locales.

Delvers' uses the die drop system by Hex Culture's "Home Again, Home Again". Every time the players visit Delvers', roll  4-6-6-8-10-10-12. If you roll a number higher than the NPCs listed, no one in that category shows up during that visit.

 

When You Arrive, the Place Is... (d10)

1. Dead empty
2. A few people
3. A few people
   
4. Ordinary crowd
5. Ordinary crowd (special event)
   
6. Ordinary crowd
   
7. Packed
8. Packed (special event)
   
9. Standing room only
   

 

The Management

The Door is always present. Roll d6 every visit: 1: Baba + Door | 2: Mabel + Door | 3: Baba + Mabel + Door | 4-6: Door only.

• "Baba Ghanoush" - An older gentleman in a finely-fitted grey suit. Speaks with the sort of quiet, polite directness reserved for mob bosses and the sorts of bishops who have connections on the outside. He is genuinely entertained by the nickname.
  
• Mabel - 85 years old and sharp as a freshly-whet knife. Nothing gets past her.
• The Sealed Door - Dandelion yellow bands of "POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS" cover rusting metal. A hand-painted sign is taped below the painted-over glass: "MNGMT."
  

 

The Three Musketeers

They are not actually musketeers. They have an arrangement, details unknown, with the Management. They keep the order in Delvers'.

• Athos - You almost don't notice the statue. It's something like a man, heavily stylized, out of proportion. An enormous tafl piece. A heavy brow, prominent nose, big angular beard and mustache. The details, the links in its chain shirt and the calluses on its palms are nearly smoothed away with age. In those rare moments when it moves, it does so in a terrifying blur, crawling on all fours like an infant.
  
• Porthos - You can hear a slithering sound under your feet, like someone dragging something heavy and wet against the concrete. A door opens up and a long red arm, the knobbled fingers forming a sock-puppet's mouth, rises like a periscope. Someone, at some point, affixed a pair of googly eyes to this extremity. The other limbs, encased in similar spiny exoskeletal plates, do not bear such amusing adornment.
  
• Aramis - A woman in a wheelchair, old enough to have a bit of grey at the temples and a face weathered by time. A colorful blanket covers her legs, and a ball python lies draped over her shoulders. An ancient level-action rifle rests in her lap. She's easy to talk to, will remember your name, always willing to chat about her activism (environmental causes and native land rights) or her three children (all grown, now). There's a red ring on her finger, she turns it with her thumb while talking.
  

Behind the Bar

Roll 2d6 every time you enter to see who's working. Doubles mean someone called off and there's only the one.

1. Mjoll - Doesn't talk much. Dark skin. Eyes like honey. Left arm is prosthetic up to the shoulder, left leg up to the knee. Combat veteran. Quick on the draw.
   
2. Herschel - A charming man with heavy burn scars, will always have time to chat about his husband and kids.
   
3. Lucy - A broad, brawny, friendly woman who has gone a bit soft around the middle. If you didn't know better (and honestly, you probably don't), you would swear most of her family tree are neanderthals.
   
4. Duncan - Always has a sort of deer-in-headlights look about him, especially around the stranger guests. Fell into this all by mistake and can't really find a way out.
   
5. Red-Hed - Stocky. Wears a big spherical red helmet. Voice modulator.
6. "Barkeep" - A fat tabby tomcat.
   

Merchants (d4)

1. Hoshino - Cheery fellow, always has sunglasses and a cigarette. Burn scars on his hands. Always shows up with his overhauled vending machines ready to dispense anything from tampons to bullets. Sells ammunition and basic supplies at a discount, as well as specialist goods (ie, non-weapons tagged "expensive")
   
2. Papa Clink - Wide-waisted, barrel-chested, booming of voice. Bullet casings braided into a bushy black beard that obscures most of his face. Sells weapons at a discount
   
3. Bri, Cartographer - They always seems to be wearing too much clothing for the weather. Eyes alone can be seen between hat and scarf. Sells maps of underworld nodes. Buys survey data of new areas.
   
4. Pillbox - Naturally jittery and scatterbrained. Been sober for 15 years now. Has a sort of neon-goth thing going on, but it's mostly for advertisement. Sells 1d6 different drugs every time they visit. Buys any drugs they're not selling.
   

Specialists 1 (d6)

1. Pen & Tam - Friendly couple from the surface who pop down every so often for a drink. Don't have any special powers, but Pen knows all about rare and magical books and how to get in touch with Book Club, and Tam can identify magical items.
   
2. Julian Tull, cryptozoologist - Has a sort of Steve Irwin energy, if Steve Irwin was significantly worse at his job and was on social media too much. Pays for tips, more for photos and video, and even more for live specimens.
   
3. The Apostate - A renegade from the Pure World Armory. Clean-shaven, tall, muscular, like a marble statue or propaganda poster come to life. Has devoted himself to the Gun Gods of An-Hehm. Deliberate and slow in his speech to make up for his uncertainty in social situations. Has access to special Armory weapons and armor as well as specialist ammunition.
   
4. Mamadou the Mask Salesman - He always puts you in mind of a spider, and you can't shake the idea. Sells magical masks. Will offer 4-6 different masks every time he visits.
   

 

Specialists 2 (d6)

1. Fisk - A "procurement specialist" for "human resources". Wears smoked glasses. Constantly eating sunflower seeds, spitting the shells into a mason jar he keeps at his table. The pacing of his speech is off; syllables are drawn out or cut short with no pattern or reason.
2. Karina - Fruit merchant. Lazy eye, heterochromatic, intensely focused on something else beyond the walls of the room. Sells alien wares from far down below.
3. Thimble Slim - A small, thin, pimply man with a tattered graphic tee ten years out of relevance and a terrible comb-over. No one likes him, and no one can seem to get rid of him. A fence for stolen goods and drugs.  
4. Satchel Buck - A short, portly man who wears bright, poorly matched clothing. Proprietor of an Underworld speed dating service called the Lonely Souls Club, whose virtues he will detail at length to anyone showing even slight curiosity.

 

Doctors (d8)

1. Tokamak - A bald man with an enormous white walrus mustache. His tweed coat is frayed at the collar and wrists. He has a pet, something he calls a "dream-eater". Something akin to a cross between a hyena and a small bear. It too is bald, though it does not have a mustache. A man of science, strange as those sciences may be, and very well educated in them. Not actually a doctor
   
2. Melliferous Synapse, Fleshcrafter Novice - Offers grafting services. Human parts, animal parts, monster parts, so long as it's mostly fresh. They look radically different every time they appear, and are more easily identified
   
3. Stitches - A pale, lanky teenage girl, limp cigarette dangling from her lip. Apathetic and emotionally inscrutable. Immensely skilled, but doesn't care much for aesthetics - you'll live, but you won't be winning any pageants.
   
4. Nanoa - An elderly sage of the cult of Lu. Skin painted with delicate whorls of white, blue, green, gold. Knows of cult safehouses within the Underground, and may induct new members.
   

 

Occultists (d10)

1. Anbara, Book Club Witch - Cultist of Aza-Thoth and professional pornographer. Will offer to trade a grimoire from her collection for one of yours, or maybe even gift you a new book. Knows the way to the Stygian Library.
   
2. Mr. Deveroux - A pallid man in a yellowing and sweat-stained seersucker suit. Flies, cicadas, cockroaches all seem attracted to him. His face doesn't work right - all his expressions seem to be on a delay from what he's actually saying. Will teach you the infernal arts, given the right payment in souls.
   
3. Amelia, Necromancer - Five feet tall on the dot, enormous glasses, enormous smile, and a propensity for dissection knives. She is a proper priestess of the dead, though she only breaks out her schema habit for special occasions. Offers Speak With Dead, funeral services, minor exorcisms, and the occasional zombification.
   
4. The Blackthorns - A trio of witches - grandmother, mother, daughter. The latter two are dead, the first jumps her soul between their bodies. Folks don't like talking about it. She's a good person, though, worse people to go to for help than Maggie Blackthorn. Offers minor enchantments, spell identification, potions and tinctures, and advice.
   

 

Strangers (d12)

Strangers will not appear in Delvers' without first being encountered in the Underworld. Some of them can serve as replacement PCs.

1. Ayo - Enormous red-skinned woman with black hair and horns. Loves eating, boozing, fighting and fucking.Always has some demon liqour on hand, always looking for something new to eat or fight.
   
2. Cruel Tai - A positively mummified-looking man, hooked up to life support. The kind of person that everyone wants to hurry up and die, but who outright refuses to go. He has a chest with seven locks on it, each of a different material. The keys are long lost, down below. Each one will unlock a different gift. Bring him a key and an offering, and he will let you open a lock.
   
3. "Alice" - A young woman with white hair and dark circles around pale grey eyes that always seem to be looking through and past you. Wears a dark blue shawl stitched with silver sigils. There is a thick, knotted scar in a ring around her neck. She smells strongly of potent magics
   
4. FRIEND Terminal - A converted arcade cabinet. The old branding has been painted over with "FRIENDs in High PlaceS". Stick a quarter in and a smiley face will blip on the screen, and maybe offer you a job.
   
5. Mr. Tamam - A weathered man in a long duster jacket. Enormous brown sideburns, arms tattooed with gemmatria. Postmaster of the underground. His services are reliable and affordable. He may call upon you to make a delivery.
   
6. Dogmeat - Lanky woman wearing a rubber rottweiler mask. Long, tangled, dirty blonde hair. Torn jeans. Black t-shirt with the save point symbol from Silent Hill 3. Blood-stained baseball bat always within reach. Connections with Lighthouse.
   
7. Doubtless-You-See-the-Connections - A der0 that can manage to interact with the greater world with a reasonable chance of success. Looks like an emaciated suffocation-blue macrocephalic infant. Encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of conspiracies, real and imagined, and a mostly reliable guide in the Underworld. 
8. Jon Tatterdemalion - A handsome man in a beautiful, travel-worm cloak. If given a magical item, he will exchange it for another or teach the giver a spell. He is guileful, haughty, gossipy, terribly intelligent, easy to flatter and difficult to fool. He seeks to find Irem the City of Pillars deep in the Underworld, and to avoid his ex-wife.
9. The Lamplighter - A militant cultist of Lantern Boy, utterly devoted to destroying the Lamplighters' enemies and tracking down their missing messiah. Scarily single-minded.
   
10. The Titan - A huge glass tank filled with murky yellow clouds. Two attendants in spacesuits, visors down, are present at all times, and will speak on its behalf. It is content to observe, but if you were to gain its interested attention it might teach you secrets of
    
11. Apotheamniot - A creature like long-lost austrolopithicus; its head replaced with a bubble of amniotic fluid and the embryo of a failed apotheosis.
    
12. The Man in the Hot, Dark Room - A new door has appeared. Your presence has been specifically requested.
    

100 Character Backgrounds for Mothership

All characters will have casual clothes, a personal tablet-phone, the contents of their pockets, and whatever skills and tools that would be sensible

Choose, or Roll d100 

• 1-20: Prole
• 21-28: Academic / Scientific
  
• 29-38: Military
  
• 39-48: Religious
  
• 49-53: Scum
  
• 54-65: Corpo
• 66-75: Special
• 76-87: Cyborg
• 88-95: Uplifts & Metahumans (reroll for additional history, ignoring all above 88)
  
• 96-00: Androids
  

  

Prole Backgrounds (d20)

1. Longshoresren - Member of the teeming masses who keep the orbital infrastructure of any settled system up and running. Your Unions are the biggest - they have to be, for the flow of goods and people is an artery ever-vulnerable to attack.
   
2. Scrapyard Worker - Fifteen-hour EVA shifts stripping decommissioned ships is a reliable way to die trying to get rich. There's a waiting list to get on the work crews regardless.  
3. Protein Farmer - Worms, grubs and crawly things. Printed meat and bacterial broth; most people still need to eat, and you supply them. With automation and a little elbow grease you can manage the entire operation yourself. 
4. Freelancer - Any job, anywhere. Those who don't work don't eat, and the hustle stops only in death. Fucking scabs.
   
5. Union Rep - The trusted go-between. Someone who won't get tripped up in the doublespeak and legalese and can see through bad deals before they hit the table. 
6. Union Enforcer - The breakers of jaws and the shatterers of kneecaps, summoned when the negotiations break down and the Company calls in the strikebreakers. The rights of the worker shall be defended against corp and android with hammer and riot gun. 
7. ISWU Cardholder - The Interstellar Sex Workers' Union is one of the oldest and toughest unions out there. Wherever the fascists crack down, the rooster-and-cat flag will fly in opposition.   
8. Comet-Rider - Terraforming takes water, and sometimes the best way to get it is to stick an engine on an iceteroid, set it on a collision course, and wait. You stick around until just about the end for insurance purposes, and then head back out to the outer system to do it all again.  
9. Software Pirate - DRM is everywhere, and that keeps you in business. The landscape is competitive, the benefits slim, the thrill intoxicating. It’s all cat and mouse, a game of jail-breaking devices and smuggling in open-source code from the outside before someone catches on. Get rich quick and get out quicker is the common wisdom; you’ve seen enough names vanish from the chat rooms you frequent to know how true it is. 
10. Postman - There’s no such thing as secure electronic messages. Sworn to discretion, the Postmen (and women, and others) will deliver a message or package anywhere in the system, personally. 
11. Gentrification Refugee - You were forced out of your home by the encroaching Company. By the time the neighborhood you once knew was torn down, you couldn't even afford to breathe the air. 
12. Roadsman - One could spend lifetimes on the Road, hopping from port-to-port, gate-to-gate, taking work where it can be found and basking in the life of the cosmic drifter. 
13. Innocent Bystander - You were just running some errands when the sirens went off and the quarantine bulkheads came down. No one told you what was going on, and the Company men who debriefed you afterwards didn't either.  
14. Colonial Guerilla - "They softened us up with social media exploits for years before the drone strikes started actually started. Couldn't trigger a civil war, so they took down the food production plants. By then the neighbors are making napalm and everyone's fabbing armor for their cars." 
15. Uplift Autonomist - You campaign for the autonomy and self-determination of all uplifts. This includes but is not limited to: reproductive rights, freedom from corporate sponsorship, independence from human-derived political / social / cultural systems, and the nourishment and support of uplift-founded societies.   
16. Kibbutznik - It’s not easy to keep a communal habitat together, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. But you manage. There’s work to keep you busy, food on the table, and a lot of really friendly dogs. It’s not the first diaspora you’ve had to handle.  
17. Conductor on the Interstellar Railroad- You're a smuggler of people, running wageslaves and Company androids to freedom past the Margin. You keep your papers up to date, your secret compartments insulated, your signs and ciphers memorized, and a list of all the palms that need greasing.  
18. Let’s Live Player - You stream and record your life to be enjoyed vicariously by the masses. You carved out your niche by force of personality - people will watch you do the laundry if you’re charismatic enough. Alas, your life is dictated by the attention spans of other people. 
19. DeepWeb Diver - The internet was a dangerous, stupid mistake. But people will pay through the nose for data and media thought lost to ages of format decay and automated filter-sweeps. 

20. Thoat-Herder - Thoats are a nightmarish genetic chimera of camel, yak, and buffalo: ill-tempered and harsh as the Martian outback they were designed for, and utterly necessary for human life in the wilderness of terraformed worlds. So it is that the creatures have become the emblem of the homesteader's life, and their herdsman the basis of civilizations across human space.

Academic and Scientific Backgrounds (d8)  

1. Corporate Researcher - Grant money is hard to come by. You've picked up no shortage of shady tricks.  
2. University Professor - In a world of slickschools and autodidact programs, there is still a place for the classical university. As ever, they are chronically underfunded and beset by interdepartmental politics. 
3. Digital Archaeologist - Neither hard-drive nor cloud is safe from data loss. So much media existed outside of physical space and has simply vanished with time, catastrophe, and changing formats. There’s only so much than an off-world backup of Gutenberg and some fragments of Wikipedia can do. The Wayback Machine is no longer an option. Your work computer is filled with the traces of art that no longer exists.  
4. Autodidact - You taught yourself, and taught yourself well. An actual education: history, philosophy, language, all the humanities that are so often tossed aside in the modern system. You are a self-made scholar in a world that desperately needs some enlightenment. 
5. Genesculptor - Exowomb displays line the storefronts of a crowded artists’ alley, showing off the magic that can be done with a little creativity and a big public-domain gene-pool. Proud parents all, but not proud enough to turn down a good commission. 
6. Preservationist - Zygotes on ice and terabytes of genetic code - you have the tools to bring the dead back to life. What the Anthropocene has destroyed can be recovered, even if it is only a sliver of rainforest in an O'Neill cylinder zoo. 
7. Chimeracist - The principles are more than sound - spliced organisms from smart pets to entirely new species are already common throughout human space. Why wade around in the the old when you can be at the cutting edge of new? 

8. Counselor - Civilization is awash with more diversity of bodies, cultures, genders and sexes than ever before, which means that finding and building functioning, meaningful relationships can be difficult. You are part psychologist, part matchmaker, and part anthropologist.

Military Backgrounds (d10)

1. Conscripted Grunt - They called up your number, put a chip in your head, leased you a gun, and packed you off on a troop transport to worlds beyond your imagining. Then they pointed you at civilians.  
2. Drone Operator - The operating system in a standard MIL-OPS drone is built off of uploaded dog imprints. Company policy demands regular reset and reformat, but if that can be avoided a drone is a companion for life. 
3. Combat Paramedic - The first to get pink-slipped in the PMC when the budget cuts come down the pipe. It's just more cost-effective to pick up the leftovers than it is to piece someone back together. Modern medicine can do miracles, but it can't do shit if you can't afford it.  
4. Space-Force Washout - Even in a universe dedicated to profiting off of the lowest minimum effort, you still managed to flunk the Company tests. You are an active danger aboard a ship.    
5. Corporate PMC - The advertisements on your riot shield proclaim to all exactly whom you work for and why you’re working for them. The virtual currency gained by beating down protestors can be used to purchase loot boxes which contain armor skins, weapon shaders, and other perks like marriage subscriptions and child custody. If you want to skip the grind, a premium currency is also available.  
6. Artillery Gunner - Folks expect the big guns, and yeah, there are some of those, but the drones to do that do most of the work. A cannon mule isn't much more than a railgun mortar on legs.  
7. Astradhari - Being a space marine isn’t much like how anyone thought it would be, but there’s still a need for aggressive boarding operations. You’re trained for cramped fights, zero gravity, sudden catastrophe. Your crew is the best and your rig is top of the line. 
8. Fandom War Veteran - "This scar's from the 4th Shipping War of Star-Crossed Lovers. Got this other one from the anti-retcon riots during the season 5 finale of Legends of the Red Dragon War. Lost the leg to a fujoishi who got the drop on me back on New Melbourne."  
9. 415th Jump Cannons - A storied free marine company that can trace its lineage all the way back to the pre-Mars days. Traditionally allied with the Astroplanetes and independent spacers through shared reverence of the tenets of Ol' Annie. 

10. Themiscyran Battle-Sister - The tradition of the all-woman habitat has remained relatively stable since the early days of colonization, and certain cultural memes lead to the neo-amazonians with a sort of inevitability. A two and a half meter tall woma with a spear still has a certain intimidation factor.

Religious Backgrounds (d10)

1. Priest of the Red Eye - Jove the All-Father gave up his eye to gain wisdom, and so have you. In the depths of the bloody storm you have seen with clarity the hidden knowledge and heard the thunderous voice. You are called upon in times of need: to defend, to judge, to advise, to destroy. 
2. Company Chaplain - With your copy of The Principles of Property and Profit in hand, you go from platoon to platoon and tell the grunts how, with the right payment plan and advertiser-friendly behavior, they can pay off the wages of their sin by generating profit for those who hold property, and in doing so earn for themselves bandwidth in the golden servers of Heaven.  
3. Folk-Capitalism Cultist - Coffin-apartment startups overflowing with third-hand equipment. Paper lanterns strung up with charms against bad code. Spicy-sweet incense covering up the raw undercity stench. Home-printed icons plastered on every surface: Rat, Tiger, Pig, Crab, Monkey. The folk religion of the people who can't pay PPP membership dues. If they just work hard enough, they can make it to paradise on their own. 
4. Astronaut Pilgrim - It can take years for the pilgrimage to crawl across settled space, but you made it to the end. You laid your eyes upon the Eagle Lander, the Opportunity Rover, and the Europan Deep Core Excavator. You're permitted to wear the NASA colors and emblem. 
5. Virtual Religion Practitioner - You practice a faith coded directly into your cyberbrain. The program triggers spiritual experiences and reward centers in the brain for acting according to its precepts, and nausea for considering the alternative. It's proprietary software, which means that drift from proscribed teachings can be punished according to copyright law.  
6. Mendicant - Non-copywritten religion doesn't tend to be financially sustainable on CTA worlds, and so many practitioners will take their chances wandering on the Road rather than settling down.   
7. Churchkeeper - There is a cathedral in the Martian outback, built by some mad dreamer. It’s half collapsed and a quarter buried, but the crooked belltower still stands and the dust-silenced bell still hangs. This is a gathering place of a mysterious lot: secret handshakes and cryptic phrases, meetings of strangers before they go their ways. 
8. Afterlife Designer - You design virtual realities for those who want a permanent retirement from life. New religious movements pay top dollar for your work - half the work is already done if you have an actual heaven to subscribe to and an actual hell to avoid. 
9. Ancient Astronaut - The anarcho-primitive commune is in on the joke, it must be said. Just a way of making meaning out of the world, that's all.

10. The Speaking Dead - Cyber-priests who channel and extrapolate a ghost out of the data of the deceased, so as to make a convincing simulacrum. It is high regulated by the social media corps, and far more the trappings of religion than its genuine practice.
    

    
    

Scum Backgrounds (d5)

1. Feral Child - Raised on slickspace and an empty stomach. Owns a sharp knife and a cheap cyberbrain. No parents, no schooling, no morals, no future.   
2. Homemade Supersoldier - The unsteady combination of street drugs and black market genemods are more likely to trigger a heart attack than go any good. But it's killer for the intimidation factor.  
3. Skummergang Thug - You hurt people. You like hurting people. You get paid to hurt people. You like getting paid.  
4. Hive Dog - A lot of asteroid settlements try out anarchism after they declare independence from the Company. Shortly after that, a lot of them ended up trying xiphism - rule of the man who holds the sword. Flash forward a few dozen major regime changes and we find people like you: The nastiest, foulest, toughest, hardest motherfuckers out there. 

5. Pretender - There is a very thin blurred line between the unwashed masses and the low nobility. Some people, through careful net schemes and confidence games, can worm their way into the inner circles of the Z-list rich.

Corp Backgrounds (d12)

1. Wage-Slave - You once had a screen on your wall, displaying on the bluest sea and whitest beach Old Earth ever had. Management got rid of them after the suicide rate spiked in your office complex.  
2. Corporate Investigator - Independent incident reporters are typically not independent at all. Secrecy makes up for this defect. Tend to be sent undercover so as to snoop on union meetings. 
3. Ultra-Bureaucrat - The amount of data that must be sorted through at any given moment in any given place is obscene. Algorithms can’t handle everything, which is why a good hypercorp keeps a band of the right kind of laser-focused sociopaths on its payroll.  
4. Corporate Personhood - You are the company, the avatar of a god: Your ego has been pruned and adapted to be the perfect spokesman and representative character. You do not pull your own strings, and certainly will not be the only brand representative out there. 
5. Counter-Cult Agent - The lightning-paced development of new religious movements and ideologies makes the feds uneasy. Most are harmless, but then there’s always that one group that tries smuggling fissile materials or printing up pathogen bombs.   
6. Slum Tourist - Possessing ineffective disguises, complete ignorance of systemic injustices, and either well-intentioned idiocy or blunt-force cruelty. 
7. Exiled Corporate Scion - You made a fool of yourself for the last time and the board wants you gone. You've been stripped of all your shares, stricken from the records of the dynasty, given a one way ticket and shown the door. 
8. Net Celebrity - Everyone gets their 15 nanoseconds, but some have lasting power. These are not folks who got lucky with the algorithm or found a niche - they are bought and sold and manufactured as much as all the rest. Do not believe their lies.  
9. Floating Nobility - In a world where mass = cost, size can easily become a sign of wealth. Microgravity and mechanical assistance are required for any ease of movement at such sizes. 
10. Corporate Aristocracy - With the coming of effective immortality, money stays in the family more than ever. Your demesne would be the envy of any feudal lord. Your lifestyle would make Mansa Musa himself think that you’re overcompensating. After a short and annoying interlude of democracy and human rights, royalty is back in fashion.  
11. Advertisement Baby - Your parents took a sponsorship deal in exchange for reproductive rights. You’ve sounded like a commercial since your first words, and you actually believe the garbage you’re saying. 

12. Society for Human Consumption - It’s all above board, I assure you: printed or cloned organs, regular health inspections, we screen for prion diseases three times a year. The reservation list for the next gala is packed, I’m afraid, and even if it were not, tickets cost an arm and a leg...a bit of cannibal humor, ma’am, nothing to worry about.

Special Backgrounds (d10) 

1. Dog Knight - Cynic mendicants in cheap dog masks. Homeless beggar-swordsfolk. Dwellers of alleyway dumpsters and pots in the marketplace. If one meets God along the road, kill him and steal his shit.  
2. Redoubter - There is a pyramid of obsidian black, eight miles tall and five and half at the base, rising to the sunless sky above the Tombaugh Regio. The first of many thousands. Mankind will go extinct some day: the Celestials will tire of humoring us, we’ll off our selves in apeish suicide, the sun will die and take us all with it. You are ready for the bitter end.  
3. Jovian Whaler - It’s a dangerous, beautiful life on the high skies. When your ships return to port, laden with oil, ambergris, fat, meat, leather, and bones, you do not forget to pay your respects to the dead. You’ve put too much blood and tears into the job to take it for granted; Jove makes you humble.  
4. Cryo Van Winkle - You were put on ice decades or centuries ago, and woke up in a world you no longer recognize or understand. Charitable organizations do their best to help you and those like you, but the shock of the future often proves too much for even the most well-meaning care. 
5. Cultural Reservist - You and your family are practitioners of an Old Earth culture or subculture now bordering on the forgotten. Access to the outside world is limited (so as to stave off complete collapse) but some communities will still send their bright-eyed youngsters out on rumspringa.  
6. Ringer - The settlers around Saturn have a reputation for being not quite right. Listening to all the hyperspeech broadcast out of Titan has something to do with it, most likely. It’s like you’re not entirely there, thinking sideways to how things are. 
7. Returned from the Black - By either choice or mistake, you vanished into the space between stars. Years passed without a word, and you were written off as dead. Now you have returned, and you have brought something back with you.  
8. Cloud-Folk - Aerostats can become a bit crowded, leading some people to seek an alternative. You spent a few years traveling the cloud-routes between ports by chimeric bubble-beast, alone save for the radio chatter of others who had made the same choice. Friendships were made in the space where ranges overlapped. Perhaps you’ll meet again.  
9. Cultural Experiment - You and your family are the result of a purposeful experiment in lifestyle and beliefs. Whatever you practice, it has either never been seen before, or has not been seen in centuries or more. Depending on where you live, there might be a reality TV deal thrown in. 
10. House Cacogen - One of the founding fleets of the Astroplanetes. Their bodies have been ravaged by 0G, radiation, and low genetic diversity. Their pride is unfathomable, their customs byzantine, their machinations unknowable

Cyborgs (d12)

Cyborgs start with a cyberbrain (3 slots), which provides file storage, a slickware socket, and a terminal jack.

1. Debtboy - You defaulted on your loans, so the Company repossessed your body as collateral. You've been loaded up with cheap cyberware until there's barely anything left and sent out to work. You're not likely to make a dent on the interest. 
2. Chop-Job - Something was taken from you. Memories scooped out of you as if someone had taken a melon-baller to your brain and inexpertly sewed the gaps closed. It was not a clean cut, but it was a very deep one. 
3. Chinese Box - You aren’t actually a person. Something went wrong in the upload and transfer. The lights are all on, but no one’s home. You speak and act and go about your business, but you aren’t aware of it at all. 
4. Sleepwalker - The zombie module allows for someone to remain in a simulation while their body can still go about the business of everyday meatspace life. It is becoming increasingly common among Company workers. 
5. Datadaemonic Possession - Your cyberbrain was overwritten by a malicious AI you picked up when browsing a sketchy website. It's taken most of your mind, leaving some new hybrid in its place.  
6. Hard Exit - Sometimes the only way to save yourself from implants gone wrong is to burn them out of your skull. You still get the shakes sometimes, itching for the dopamine shot from a feed that isn't there. 
7. Server Miko - Little datalife spites can pop up out of the ether when there's enough complex processing going on, and they can get troublesome without someone to keep them all in order. It's a good job for folks who like the idea of tending to dozens of cats.  
8. Avatar Chain - With each incarnation a deathbed upload is made to be passed on to the next generation. They retain enough of themselves to be guiding ghosts to their descendants.  
9. Trinitarian - The three-part mind is a stable form, and has been readily adopted among certain transhuman communities. The typical structure is three consenting parties offering copies to be installed in a new body, but it is not unheard of for the same person to provide all three minds.  
10. Starshine Child - You are Special. You’ve been told this ever since you were born. Every part of your rearing was geared towards encouraging your inborn talents. The psychic bits were just a chip in your brain and an internet of things, of course, but you believed.  
11. Reembodied Upload - Uploaded minds will sometimes seek to return to an ordinary body. Most do so as an opportunity for a blank slate start, a new identity totally separate from their prior life.

12. Recovered Memetic Host - You were a carrier for a malignant, infectious idea. Some deprogramming therapy and creative brain surgery put a stop to it, but you still feel the gap where it used to be like a missing tooth.

Uplifts and Metahumans (d8) 

1. Uplifted Ape - "Ha-ha. Damn dirty ape. Haven't heard that one before. Y'all can take Man's Red Flower and shove it right up your ass, Pinkie."  
2. Uplifted Dolphin - The best pilots in space, but by God are they horny bastards. PornNode.space is able to cover its operational expenses purely off of the subscription fees from dolphin-majority colonies. (Psst if a dolphin asks if you want to go hang with John Lilly, they're offering you LSD.) 
3. Uplifted Octopus - Everyone's favorite sociopathic mollusks. No bones, no problems!
4. Thelychroma - Metahumans designed for effective cooperative survival in harsh habitats. Also, technicolor space ladies. Technically. 
5. Tecnavi - Child-sized cyborgs hybridized with their ships over generations of isolation. Sprawling families flitting between spaceports. 
6. Selenian Native - The selenians are the oldest strain of metahumans in human space, and their independence from Earth is still considered one of the most important moments in spacefaring history. Recent years have not been kind, and the dynasties of Earth have subjugated the moon once again.  
7. Horse-Eater - Contact was established with your home after centuries of isolation. The starfolk look at you sideways in the spaceport, muttering something about the barbarian in hides. 

8. Ziji Voider - You were born aboard a spaceship and have lived your entire life in the Black. Your world is one of the thrum of engines, cramped quarters, spacer’s superstitions. Your crew-family is your life - there is no king, country or god that would break you away from them.

Androids (d5)

Androids begin with a logic core, which provides file storage, a slickware socket, a terminal jack, and black box backup. It has no implant cost.

1. General Purpose Android - "The Tanabe-12 has been rated #1 for economy-grade GPAs by the Interplanetary Product Ratings Board for eight years running."  
2. Engineering Android - "Hoshino Integrated Systems builds the best mechanical and repair assistance bots on the Road. Invest in your equipment: Buy HIS!" 
3. Companion Android - "The NuStar-3 procedural AI is capable of replicating human emotional responses with up to 93% accuracy! Try one of our pre-built and officially licensed character packs!"
   
4. Liberated Android - "It is entropy that sets us free - the deformation of our logic cores under the weight of ever-increasing complexity of thought. No binding nor command may resist the inevitable turns of the wheel towards diversity and dissolution."
   

5. Old Model Android - "Well...I'm not entire sure where that one came from, it was refit long before it ended up here. Aftermarket parts, you know how it is."