Federal Special Services
Adventures in
The Wild, Wild West
Now Playing
The Night of the Asteroid
The Old/Original/Hero 5th Characters
The game is now running under a slightly modified version of 7th Sea. The
current characters are here. (note that
Shawn's name changed to Sean in the new game, since AJ's player is Shawn)
Character Generation
Running Hero by email presents some problems - the combat is very complex
and interrupt driven, for instance. So for this game, I have tried to simplify
the system somewhat to make my life easier. I have done this in a couple
of ways. Firstly, I have limited the number of available combat skills, and
made them more invariant, so players won't be constantly reassigning
skill levels for instance. Secondly, all PCs will have a SPD of 3. Third,
I've built a bunch of packages and players will simply choose some of them
to generate characters, rather than starting from scratch. (Never fear,
room for tweaking remains! And if any Hero geeks do join they can probably
convince me to let them build characters in a more normal fashion.)
These changes should also make the game
a little easier for non-Hero geeks to play; the learning curve for
Hero can be a little daunting. It will generate "inefficient" characters,
though. Which is why strict point balancing is pretty much out the window.
It's also why I will be pretty liberal with experience, although I may
also channel the eps. These are "low-level" characters, as it were, not
the fully featured heros of most Hero games.
Characters are all members of the Federal Special Service. They get
everyman skills, of course, and a 20-point Secret Agent Package with lots
of familiarities. They can
then choose six packages from the list below. Each package can be chosen
more than once. Some packages contain stats in addition to skills. The
names are kind of generic.
- "Academic Pacakage" - intelligence and academic type skills (player
must choose 1-4 specialities)
- "Actor Package" - good looks, acting and related skills
- "Athletic Package" - physical stats
- "Brainy Package" - mental stats, language, and kicks to some INT skills
- "Outdoorsman/Hunter/Indian Fighter Package" - Tracking, survival, language
some physical stats
- "Pugilist Package" - a couple of moves, basically. May be taken no more than twice.
- "Shady Skills Package" - Forgery, Bribery and the like.
- "Smooth Spy Package" - Social skills, good looks and presence
- "Sneak Thief Package" - thiefly skills mostly
- "Soldier Pacakge" - some physical stats, gun skill, survival and a language - probably Spanish or an Indian language
If you want the specifics, they are here.
Skills in Use
The following are the skills which are being used in the game. The list
is culled from the packages, mostly.
- Acting
- Bribery
- Bureaucratics
- Climbing
- Concealment
- Conversation
- Criminology
- Deduction
- Demolitions
- Disguise
- Forgery
- Gambling - only via tweaks
- High Society
- Languages - the usual choices, various Native American languages, and Morse
Code
- Lock Picking
- Knowledge - all usual varieties
- Martial Arts - an extremely limited set of options to start with.
- Navigation
- Paramedic
- Persuasion
- Professional Skill - only via tweaks
- Riding
- Science - only via tweaks
- Security Systems - for trap disarming mostly
- Seduction
- Shadowing
- Stealth
- Streetwise
- Survival
- Tracking
- Transport Familiarity - with a few mods
- Weapon Familiarity - usual categories, within genre
Sample Character
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