Last week we managed to play the first prelude mission for our upcoming Uncharted Worlds campaign. We plan to start the campaign quite soonish. And since I already have a character concept in mind I decided to build it in advance. I have no idea if it is something that we will be able to use but we will see. In this post I will discuss the creation of the said character and include some thoughts behind the process.

The method of character generation in Uncharted Worlds differs a lot from other AWengine games. You don’t have a set playbook from which to choose your moves from but a more regular rpg way of choosing suitable options to create your character. The rules tell you to start from combining two careers but I thought of a character concept at first.

The defining point of my character is that I want him to be a sidekick. I might get very vocal during games and demand more attention than other players. In this way I might remember to give the spotlight to other players as well. It also helps that sidekicking means that my spotlight should usually also target “my hero”.

Aside from this function I want him to be an older mechanic from a remote colony. I’m imagining him with a hoverbike and a pessimistic attitude. Something like Kit Carson from Tex Willer, maybe. Since I have a clear idea of a character, I’m quite interested to see if the Uncharted Worlds allows me to build him with the rules as written.

For the prime career I will definitely choose Industrial. It gives me options for skills to play the mechanic. The second career was not as obvious.  Military would give me skills like Tactics and Toughness that could enforce the archetype of Kit Carson. But since I was thinking about the hoverbike before that silver-haired Texas ranger I chose the Explorer.

I was thinking that Custom Vehicle could give me my hoverbike but while going through the Assets I realized this was not the case. The idea of my character being an Explorer still was something I wanted. All Explorer skills are interesting though and I had to consider them hard. I ended up with Reconnaissance that allows me to gather more data points. They might help me to help out other characters. And if not that they are my “I told you so”-points.

Choosing three skills from the two careers is quite easy. Since I already spotted Custom Vehicle I will pick two skills from Industrial: Repair and Construction. I want my character to start out as a regular mechanic and these skills allow me to do just that. Repair is self-evident. And with Construction I can turn any location into workspace (for Repair) or make them shelter, concealed or defensible. The last option even kind of makes the character more capable strategist.

Next I’ll choose the origin. Sadly every option I could choose with my character concept in mind has some overlapping with my careers. My concept of the colonist was more “Colonial America” than the Colonist origin of Uncharacter Worlds, so I choose Rustic origin. This means my character was raised on the frontier worlds at the edge of the Galactic Council. Hard Labor works with the concept of engineer sidekick so I’ll pick that for my origin skill.

Distributing stats did not take long. I need Expertise for Repair and it defines the character most so it gets +2. As a sidekick I don’t have need for Influence so I’ll just dump -1 to it. Even with my character being a mechanic I personally have little interest in Interface so I’ll leave it to 0. This means Mettle and Physique get the +1s and my Hard Labor origin skills raises the Physique to +2. I guess my character is a big guy then.

The advancement in Uncharacted Worlds is a different business also than in regular AWengine. Each career comes with five exp triggers. During a session each character in the group marks one experience when one of those triggers is hit. Since I think that Explorer side of my character is a recent development I choose the Industrial as my first advance career. It will highlight the functionality of any tech we have, giving my repairing skills a spotlight. Once the group moves around, my character will get interested in investigation the galaxy and I’ll move to Explorer advancements.

For my workspace I’ll just have to choose Manufactory from Industrial. It helps me to repair and upgrade any tech we have. And it makes more sense for the engineer anyway.

My character is almost finished now. I only need to choose the description and assets for him.

Combining one element from each career and origin my character is: weathered, muscled and aged. Not very flattering but I still like it. And older engineer still capable of cracking a few skulls if needed.

The assets are one of the first things I thought. I  really want that hover bike so it will be my Class 2 asset. Hover Bike is class 1 as written but since I’m an engineer I have updated it. It already has [speeder] so I’ll choose [rugged] and [agile]. It might have seen better days but it’s still easy to fix and is quick and maneuverable. The class 1 kits will be Engineering Kit for repair and shotgun [burst] for defense.

And that’s it! In the end the character is quite like the original concept I had in mind. Though I needed to take few steps back to fix the hover bike asset it was quite easy from the start. Now I just need a name for my character. Donjon has a Firefly name generator and even though I have no clue if our game will actually be that fireflyish I use it. Parker Jones will be my first campaign character for Uncharted Worlds.