New BASH-SF Datafile - Thane Krios, Knight-Marshall of the Commonwealth!
So, last weekend, since I and a couple of my players had a free Friday night, we decided to start a new game. One of the reasons I love BASH is because it encourages a very loose organizational style that works for me, mostly because I am not very organized.
Because BASH is easy to work with on the fly, it is also easy to game seat-of-the-pants style, something I have been trying to adopt a little more after reading Apocalypse World. The three of us sat down with only a vague notion to game, ideally in a Sci Fi setting, because we thought it would be fun, and came up with characters, the core of a setting, and played a short adventure, in one session running about 4.5 hours.
Because we were doing Sci Fi, we decided on BASH Sci Fi, an adaptation of the Superhero BASH game to the SF genre. It has slightly more crunch than BASH, but mostly it is just pre-tooled to do what you want in a SF game - it has genres, aliens, equipment, starships, vehicles, and adversaries, already waiting for you in its tight 137 page package.
After some discussion, we decided that we wanted to play a pretty science light SF, in which Technology was only poorly understood by most people at best - sort of a 'dark ages in space' feel. This was pushed somewhat by me, as it is one of the features of a favorite RPG of mine, as far as SF goes, Fading Suns. So the average person looks at technology as something a 'black box'. If it breaks, you might try to fix it, but you might just as well pray over it, or anoint it with blessed oils. Even tech-savvy folks undertake these rituals, because many believe there really is a ghost in the machine, so to speak. Thus there is as much ritual as mechanics involved in working with tech of just about any sort.
Going from there we ran with the dark age feel a bit and came up with the Order of the Knights-Marshall, a quasi-mystical order that has set itself the mission of defending the Rim worlds of the Commonwealth from aggression, tyranny, and alien threat. They would act as Judge, Jury and sometimes, executioner on the Rim, sort of like Old Republic Era jedi, or star-faring Judge Dredds.
Wait, what's the Commonwealth? A loosely defined collective of aligned alien and human cultures that united out of enlightened self-interest to avoid open warfare. Some of the members are less thrilled with the Commonwealth than others, but every one of them is aware that it is better than facing the outside threats, like the Mandragora or the Sithik on their own. Of course, the Knights-Marshall will be on the front lines, or even behind them, in the struggle for security of the Rim against these internal threats.
The Knights-Marshall provide ships, training, equipment and surgical upgrades to their members, in exchange for an oath and a lifetime fo service. Sometimes those lives are very short. Such as the ones belonging to the Knights who preceded our Knights in a rugh and tumble Sector of Rim space.
Enter our Heroes: the first of which is Thane Krios, a Ssaren- a reptilian race only recently freed from the dominion of the Mandragora. Becaus we were doing so much in a single session, we resolved to keep the backgrounds simple to begin with. My hope is to encourage further nuancing of backstory with flashbacks as time goes by, paying Hero Points for for a cool flashback moment germane to a situation.
You can find Thane's datafile as an attachment on this page. Those who have followed my other BASH datafiles will note that this a different character sheet, which I got, like the BASH superhero one, from the BASH Forums. Alas I do not remember who made either one. I would be happy to credit them if I did, cuz I use them all the time. You might also note that Thane has a companion, listed in his background as a Mandragoran Synthe. I provide no further details because there are none at this time. I will be working with the -player to decide what sort of synthetic creature this represents. Knowing the Mandragora, it will be kinda nasty.
I will post the other player character, a human psionic by the name of Reetha Shartar, tomorrow, and will fill out the setting and other stuff as time permits. If you follow along for a while, you will be provided with most of a setting for BASH Sci Fi. So stay tuned!
BTW, art for this post - by the incredibly talented Daryl Mandryk.
