OpenQuest Character Creation; Cashiered Ranger

Further utilizing the material found on the blog Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque I will create the next ill fated player character for OpenQuest Fantasy Adventure Campaign #2.

This character of country birth worked as a scout in the army, but has been recently let go. Missing a cleverly set ambush while out on patrol many soldiers died. Only your savage fight for survival against grim odds spared your court martial. Back here in the city far from any one you know you are beginning to desire the safety of the wilderness.

OpenQuest Fantasy Adventure Campaign #2 is predicated on a dark fantasy setting with players urged to use human characters. This character is designed with the ability to function well in the wilderness surrounding the campaign's starting point.

Significant points are invested in the Combat Skills as well as Perception and Riding. As a ranger you carry very few personal possessions. What you have is usually tied in the bedroll at your feet. What few points you have in craft are intended for the repair of your outdoor gear and weapons.

Taking advantage of OpenQuest's suggested rules for Background, Appearance and Personality I give this poor mercenary an intriguing map with unknown inscriptions. Maybe one of his more learned friends could aid you in deciphering it?

All starting OpenQuest player characters receive six points worth of Magic Magnitude. These six points allow you to further customize and design the PC you have in mind.

For the ranger I keep it simple; a small package of abilities I will name "Ranger Lore", abilities he picked up growing up in the untamed northern forests. Clear Path (4 magnitude) is the ability to move through dense undergrowth as if it was clear terrain. The points of magnitude of the spell determines how many people the ranger can effect within 10 meters. A Heal (2 magnitude) spell will be extremely useful when it comes to weathering the extremes of wilderness adventuring.

While I have incorporated OpenQuest's magic requirements into the character creation process, you can see how I have not necessarily given the ranger an overtly wizardly nature. While the initial expenditure of magic points may seem an awkward mechanic for innate class like skills, consider the adventure implications of devices, quests, etc. which would enable the player to acquire magic point stores or otherwise overcome the built in limitations.

USRPS/Champions Superhero Mash Up Conclusion

As I mentioned in the initial post regarding using USR to role play a supers campaign, I am going to use the Champions books Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth and Millennium City to create the starting campaign setting. Armed with some highlighters I skimmed STST looking for the adventure's important points.

Dr. Timothy Blank, the Viper scientist, was pretty necessary as his diabolical plans drive the plot. His desire to unleash a virus in a major metropolitan city after leaving the Viper Nest in the deserts of New Mexico helps establish Millennium City as our convenient home base for PC's.

The initial ghost town amusement park as cover for the Viper Nest hidden in the desert did not appeal to me. The thought of having the deranged mad scientist completely absent from the Nest in the opening acts seemed too much of a plot weakness for me as well. So I jettisoned both. However the PC's are "hooked" into being in the vicinity of Snake Gulch it will be at the same time Dr. Blank is making his explosive escape from the Nest with his breakthrough discovery: the Coil Gene. There is plenty of good info on the tension between the Nest Leader and Dr. Blank for a GM to fashion dramatic scenes of double crossing agents, compromised villains, and buffaloed heroes.

The aftermath of the first scenario can have PC heroes following leads back to Millennium City or returning to the city to lick their wounds.

With my initial PC's I created and their intertwined back story's it was a cinch to establish a time traveling accident in the desert, a Viper Nest confrontation, and return to the city in search of answers and aid.

Millennium City provides plenty of locations to play out the next chapters in the adventure as well as supporting NPC's fair and foul. Dr. Silverback is an obvious choice and Signal Ghost provides a good inside Viper agent who would be able to find common cause with the heroes at the height of the plague.

So what about all those PD's and ED's and Combat Skill levels and ???d6 damage dice used to resolve action in Hero Game System?

Just jettison them all.

Your Unbelievably Simple Role Playing System mechanics doesn't need them. Our character with the power of time travel was taken as an Action specialism. The +2 given his action rolls will suffice for his bonuses to attack and dodge. The time traveling agent would logically have some advanced armor characteristics to cushion physical and energy attacks. Any disadvantages and power limitations which would come into play will rely on the shared story created by the PC's and GM. Viper agents have blasters. Good, better avoid getting shot because blasters leave big holes in soft human flesh. If you chose to play a "Brick" type superhero with incredible physical toughness then those same blasters won't hurt so much.

My initial character choices are what I would consider enhanced normals. While some abilities are enhanced in extremely powerful ways (traveling through time in a controlled manner), they still can be harmed by normal physical means. If your genre book is a good one you can pluck all the mood and meta-genre information you need for creative guidelines for your campaign and the characters your players chose to play. Relying on my Champions genre sourcebook from my dusty shelves I find the Drama Campaign has many useful bits I would mention with my players while crafting the PC's back story's. The implications of time paradoxes, and the distortions possible with existing relations, the judgement of the Time Corps, etc...


Good character concept generated with the input of the GM and the other players at the beginning of play will allow you to use USR to game any genre effectively. For superhero role playing I just need to wring out all the essential elements of my existing sourcebooks and leave the number crunching aside.

As I mentioned earlier, I would read the Fiasco rulebook for inspiration on how to distill story lines down to their essential elements regardless of system. It will go a long way in maximizing your role playing pleasure with USRPS and other game mechanics which trend towards lite.

USRPS Mash Up cont.

I am using Scott Malthouse's Unbelievably Simple Role Playing System to create PC's for superhero role playing, and now wish to begin creation of the second player character, a Time "Agent" who now is stuck in the campaign's time period.

Her equipment has been damaged by unanticipated temporal interference and has effectively cut her off from returning to her space/time origin. This interference is manifest in some action by the first PC and his use of untried time traveling abilities.

A trouble shooter of cosmic conflict, our time agent has access to advanced equipment and training. Until now. Being stranded in the past she has lost the ability to replace damaged or lost equipment. A highly skilled human, she may have a list of "specialisms" as such;

Detective Work +2, Wit
Ranged Weapons +2, Action
Combat Driver +2, Action

I could have chosen to give her some electrical or technical specialism as fitting to a future tech setting, but then why go through the trouble of wrecking her transport equipment?

The importance of a "hooky" character role to play for the PC is important with the USRPS. The lack of a lengthy rule set (the core is a mere seven pages of text) will require increased table talk for all involved. Players as well as GM's.

If someone wants to play the stranded time agent, the background story should give enough information of their nature to help players chose a character they would enjoy playing in the campaign setting. If players wish to create their own PC, the pre generated characters provide good examples of great archetypes to play.

Her specialisms make her a clear action oriented  superhero. With the powerful tools available from the unimaginable future she can more than take care of herself. I break her attributes down this way;

d8 Action
d10 Wit
d6 Ego
Rolled 9 for Hits

That's it for the bones of the character. The rest is to be fleshed out in descriptive terms with the GM. Good character concept questions worth discussing would be what type of equipment does she find herself with, why was she being sent back in time for to begin with, what was the nature the temporal disturbance and its relationship to our first character?

None of these character concept questions need a lot of detail. I like to look to Fiasco from Bully Pulpit Games and the game's set up rules for guidance. Their thoughts on how a good background story for a player character is done is essential reading for a game like USRPS.

Gone are the piles of stats, attributes, powers, endurance points, stun points, speed points... a Champions character creation process could take two hours, or more!

Next we will take a look at these two quick superheroes and how they interact with the Champions Universe and plot an adventure with some of Champions own sourcebooks.

A USRPS/Champions Superhero Mash Up

USR by Scott Malthouse looks to have drawn sizable buzz in the geek community and I threw the system at my Champions adventure books to see what became of the mash up.

The superhero genre was one I first embraced with gusto after the D&D glowing fan boy attraction began to dim under the games disappointing role play mechanics. 

I was choosing between Villains &Vigilantes from Fantasy Games Unlimited and Champions from Hero Games. I ordered a back issue of some gaming magazine which gave a review of the different systems. It could have been in Dragon Magazine, I don’t know. 

While I was attracted to the wide open system of character generation, Champions turned out to be a cruel joke in state of the art game design. Math and dice heavy, the game rules were another product which helped hide the potential inherent in role playing games behind a voluminous rule set. It was another case of players not being placed front and center of the story. At least for me. Maybe others had better success with complicated rules when they were thirteen, but for me dense rules hindered more than helped. Not that I would have been aware of this back then. Besides, Champions was the only thing on the shelf at Toy City in Fort Eddy Plaza when I managed to gather enough bread for purchase. 

So maybe “Unbelievably Simple Role-Playing” would be the trick to tame the hundreds of dollars of Hero products which once dotted my dusty bookshelves. I am down to a few items left so I pulled out the campaign sourcebook “Millennium City” and the adventure sourcebook “Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth”.

 With only seven pages of text USR puts all the creative elements in the players and GM’s hands.

Your starting character is created with three attributes and three “specialisms”.

Assigning your attributes is simple. 

Really think about your specialisms though. Besides adding a +2 for your attribute skill rolls, which is how you resolve everything, it is the three defining elements of your character. 

The premise of the system is these three freely chosen game elements, these specialisms, give you all you need to flesh out your characters strengths, powers, and abilities. Let us see how such premise holds up against a wild card character as a player character superhero. 

The two initial characters I came up with are;

a gifted scientist from Millennium City who has discovered the ability to time travel, and

a time travel agent from the far off future.  

A superhero is nothing if not the story behind his origin. Spiderman was created through the bite of a radioactive spider, Batman from the terror of violence, and Superman by the color of Earth’s sun. Our intrepid scientist has created a machine which he believes will allow movement back and forth through time. On his first experiment he succeeds, but with some ramifications. He is not sure where he has been and he is not sure what happened to him on the trip. All he is sure of is the journey has fried his experimental equipment and by the mere thought of a past event he finds himself at that place in time. Travel back to his last recalled present moment is possible as well, but conceiving himself in any future which has not occurred yet does not result in a time “jump”.

I wrap this unique ability around the specialism “Enhanced Movement, Time Travel +2 Action”. In the spirit of an Unbelievable Simple Role-Playing I am capturing the entirety of this character’s time travel superhero ability in this one specialism. The fact that it gives a +2 to his Action attribute roll will aid in many tasks including combat.

The next specialism is easy to conceive, “Theoretical Physics +2 Wit” is a nice tag for a comprehensive knowledge of the latest scientific thought.

A third specialism is causing me some consternation, but I finally settle on “Persuasion +2 Ego” to simulate the characters ability to convince others of the soundness of his science, to secure research grants to fund his experiments, and his expertise in navigating the competitive world of scientific research found at most prestigious schools of learning.

So the three attributes are simply selected per the rules and now I have three abilities (a power and two skills), this character has started to take shape. All that is now required, and insisted on by the rules set, is a background story.

While I let this new superhero's back story percolate I'll move on to the "Time Agent" character concept...