RPX Rollup - Episode 36 - Ashen Stars

[00:00:16] Hello, welcome to the Roleplaying Exchange and it is time for us to do another rollup. So today we are actually going to go back into annals of time here and pull up a game that's got maybe a little bit of dust on it and let's breathe a little bit of life into it. I'm talking about Pellgrin Press' Ashen Stars. And joining me today are my co-hosts in Discord order. Jeremy. This is Jeremy. This is Joe. And this is Zee Brownie because I hate going first.

[00:00:46] Jeremy. Now, this game here, Ashen Stars, nice space hopper kind of game. Have any of y'all played it before first off? Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy.

[00:01:16] Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy. resume he's a creator of the gum shoe system and also wrote work with i think he worked for wrote with for ting shui and hero quest and probably several other games i'm kind of missing here this game came out in again 2011 i think that from all my research it was nominated for an origins

[00:01:41] ward in 2011 as well and it was up for an any for best setting in 2012 as well so do any of you guys have anything to add here it's star trek if it's star trek with the serial numbers filed off as star trek would be immediately after the dominion war if you know anything about star trek I know just a little about star trek and that's why i looked at all these races and said I know

[00:02:08] which one in star trek that one is and kind of piggybacking off that dominion reference here so galactic prior to the game that we would be playing the galactic civilization was i mean everything actually worked all the races and everybody were joined together under i think it's governor called the combine if i'm not mistaken they that's correct and everything going well for them patrol ships were around they kept his peace people had like a shared ideology

[00:02:38] they were at each other's throats and then i am going to butcher a lot of names here so then the alien race known as the malar m-o-h-i-l-a-r how would anyone pronounce that I always thought it was uh molyar molyhar i might go molar but that would someone a different adam limehouse pops into the chat and it's really cool this species like

[00:03:08] nobody can seem to remember them clearly they came in here mess shit up but they had this weird psychic effect about them that makes memories of them fuzzy or at times contradictory which i mean i definitely something i'd never heard of being done in a space opera kind of deal here but the thing that is crystal clear about what they've done say they hit hard they hit fast and

[00:03:36] by the time everything was said and done earth was pretty much trash poison billions dead and the combine so they just vanish or maybe that's part of the psychic resident or is it residue effect that's going on here nobody kind of residence is totally a different word nobody really knows what happened to them they just vanish all of a sudden and now you're left in a wrecked star trek universe

[00:04:05] the combine has kind of consolidated itself in this in one sector of the galaxy and you're actually going to be on the outskirts what is known as the bleed and i think the general premise of this is that your deputized your private contract police group kind of to work in the for the combine

[00:04:30] yeah it's so the combines in real rough shape and they had expanded what some might call too fast certainly in the uh looking back at history from this point you would say it was too quickly and post the war they just do not have the resources to cover all their higher expanded areas so that's where we fill in we take the place of what would normally be a star trek style crew to solve star

[00:04:57] trek style problems except we're mercenaries and we get paid because money has suddenly come back in vogue oh scarcity to scarcity all over again that's got to be yeah big upturn so you mean we got to pay for our time on the holodeck damn it the quarks of the world are very pleased with this turn of events you know before we get too far off of it that uh psychic resonance that happened that was just the uh the laughing gas the molars gave you at the dentist

[00:05:26] i think you're on to something here but yeah you you may be entirely those last nerve is what i'm on too i think yeah no it's fine oh i've heard worse i've said worse so yeah we're gonna be rolling up freelancers which are also they have a nice little acronym lasers and i'm trying to glance through the book here real quick i can't remember what laser stands for oh i found it

[00:05:53] licensed autonomous zone effectuators yeah lasers so space cops i think one of the big things about this too is i don't want a second on paper you're law enforcement but at the same time you know you're handling the bleach i mean the combines problem out in the bleed and all that but you're also bidding on

[00:06:18] contracts you got to watch your your bottom line because you're trying to maintain your livelihood and i guess reputation would be a very good very big thing out there if you're bidding stuff as well so you know if your characters are going to be kind of dirty murder hoboey then you know if your gym chooses to then it's going to be hard to find work kind of deal it's like all independent firms you have

[00:06:43] to worry about reputational damage and we do not have the money for pr now ashen stars uses the gum shoe system so most of us are fairly familiar with it here it's again as mentioned before and something is developed by robin d laws and i think it's pretty dna's pretty much the same as all the other games we've played since then like trail cthulhu nice black agents things like that you know points may be

[00:07:10] different i didn't double check to see if you got more points like you would and say nice black agents which is a bit more pulpy but it's kind of a point spin mechanic so you're rolling 1d6 you've got a target number and then if you have a relevant ability like say that i was trying to shoot at somebody behind cover then i think by default that would probably be a difficulty of four so i'm rolling

[00:07:38] a d6 and if i had points in shooting i would spend to you know modify my robot x amount of points that i spend also with it being gumshoe the big idea is that you make it to the end of the story so you've got is it interpersonal skills i think that's what it's called the you got your interpersonal skills which would be like say botany or anthropology a bullshit detector which is one of my favorite ones

[00:08:06] there cop talk and all that and these are things that if you have it in your inventory and like say for example jeremy your character has bullshit detector and if somebody is lying in front of you for pretty much a zero point spend you know that but if you decide to spend a rating of bullshit

[00:08:30] detector you can gain a bit more information about it you know so it's i guess you would say it's kind of a gambling one i know that there's some people in the past i've talked to about gumshoe that that they find it very frustrating to spend a bunch of points and fail or spend a bunch of points and succeed without the needed benefit of the spends as well so i personally like the system but i know it

[00:08:56] isn't for everybody but i think everybody should give it a try at least so with that being said guys let's go ahead and start this roll up here so there's more options in human so i think this would be a good time for us to go ahead before we really get into character creation to go over the i think seven species let me double check here the seven people yeah and yeah we'll kind of go into this so

[00:09:23] if you have the book or pdf turn with me to page 16 i think it yeah it's a book it's 16 and i'd like to hmm yeah this looks like it's the dollar if i'm not mistaken i think i'm reading that right the bala is a really weird b yeah that's a little weird all right so the bala you're the bala a

[00:09:48] lith light bone species known for being ever more eerily beautiful with age Bala children appear unformed and somewhat grotesque even to their parents despite your clumsiness and unbecoming appearance you are trained by your elders from adulthood of grace and beauty by the time you've

[00:10:11] reached sexual maturity around the age of 18 you uh had gradually transformed into a silky haired bright-eyed being with perfectly symmetrical features and ideally proportioned musculature at the same time your interactions with other species has changed you were treated as an object of awe and granted unconscious deference sometimes those attentions were uncircable taking the overtone of

[00:10:40] intense sexual desire your elders warned you not to wield unwarranted power as a weapon and to treat other species as equal despite their instinctive urge to worship and obey you as you got older your physical loveliness will only increase many decades from now you will enter a cloistered life so your extreme beauty will not drive others even other younger bala insane that's interesting so space elves

[00:11:09] space elves and it says to fear emotion so vulcan yeah and if you get angry you can be a romulan look and see if there's anything special about about them because each one kind of has something different so again ethereally beautiful looks like they have a glance there is here they have an affinity to nature internal tension feeling everything and showing nothing there's your vulcan now if you go on over to

[00:11:34] page like 17 you get into boosts that they have like botany which would be the kind of the interpersonal skills i talked about there the botany geology history geology subtle drives which we can kind of choose throughout character creation these are the things that particular idea of what the character is so if i was a justice seeker that would be my drive uh there's actually unique drives species special abilities

[00:12:02] emotion suppression yeah and apparently this one can have cybernetics i know some of the other ones cannot but yeah so instead of just rattling off all of those that's kind of in a nutshell who would like to take the next one here or would like to add to that i think you covered it all okay i could do the next one all right thank you the cybes genetically and cybernetically altered

[00:12:28] beings originally from human stock results of super soldier experiments dull during the mohalar war probably served in the war and if you didn't you should explain why not you consider yourself a new species called which you call yourselves homo ampius amplius homo amplius about 70 percent of cybes see themselves as new species okay so those are our board yeah your board they want to many of them

[00:12:57] want to found a separate cybe based society a cybe society yeah cybe society has not worked out uh one in ten cybes are like no we're still human we just have robot bits you know like you do those are your hues of borg for those of you keeping track at home they can reprogram themselves at will at the cost of personality drift using the neural rewiring ability translation devices render their

[00:13:25] speech patterns as slightly stilted or robotic beady yeah so they have some special abilities i have some unique drives integrationist and social engineer and then some specific abilities which would be the enhancement integration and neural rewiring they could have all cyber but netic

[00:13:48] capabilities no cybernetic clashes viral wear affinities for all no viral wear susceptibilities there you're boring except not like you know evil and shit yeah just the normal amount of evil yeah it's the sort of amount of evil you would find in every average human being which might be quite high is some of this kind of reminiscent of cyberpunk or or is

[00:14:14] it eclipses or whatnot like the more upgrades you get the more humanity you lose kind of thing that's what uh that's definitely cyberpunk okay that and uh shadow run yeah it's a common thing in many properties yeah yeah so would who would like to take our next little alien species here oh boy that's me

[00:14:38] oh tell us about the dura or whatever it's called i think dura is a better a better way to call them and i'm just gonna call them dwarves other species may instinctively recoil at your twisted features and hunched physiques but you dur certainly came in handy during the moliar war your ability to briefly phase between dimensional layers made your people ideal spies and infiltrators a once despised enemy of

[00:15:04] the combine your people initially threw in your lot with the moliar when war broke out your much derided penchant for double dealing proved indispensable when you martyred when your martyred former king uxqua used his access to the moliar mothership to discover your their genocidal plans for your race after the combine was defeated thanks to the bogey conundrum due credit for the defeat of the moliar

[00:15:30] were taken away from you still you are sure that the derg are somehow instrumental to the victory small faction they want to go back the old ways and fight the combine but the majority seeks peaceful union so they're they're former bad guys they realize that the real bad guys were going to betray them as soon as they won and they did the thing that the kind of bad guys do and became less bad

[00:15:53] guys but there's still some bad guys yeah this would be the star trek type of klingon we didn't pick this one i don't think i just said space dwarves you guys have one i'm not as trekkie as some people are uh this is sort of a combination between early klingons and late romans i would say i would even go as far as to say it's because not mass effect had been out by this point in time too this is the

[00:16:20] god what was rex and all them uh uh the krogan's krogan so it seems like there's some krogan markings on this as well i like kromulas or ring-ons that works for me i'm kind of glancing through your space dwarf here they get boosts on all kinds of technological stuff their drives are altruism anger chronicler comradeship along with some other things you'd expect from a space dwarf their unique drives are phase rider that's interesting i guess that's the going through

[00:16:49] things that along with their species specific ability of phasing through solid matter they do get some cybernetic compatibilities like breadbox handgun interface transducer their clashes are aid kidder berserker and unpleasant i mean epic sealant that's what that is yes they can piss people off they can hide they can dominate people they can be spoopy alien types they can smoke lots of stuff wonderful i like that one of the drives is footloose

[00:17:16] i just want one to be dancing like kevin bacon well it yeah so you have at the subtle drives at footloose is that what you're talking about or is that patrick swayze i can't remember footloose was kevin bacon yeah patrick swayze is a roadhouse we are still crazy for spacey though don't don't don't worry yeah and uh dirty dancing was was one of those also in ghost or am i thinking

[00:17:41] about another yet different person patrick swayze was a ghost yeah crazy for spacey got it jeremy if i can pose upon you here this is really exotic race it's next up on page 20 here you care to i mean i know this is gonna be a stretch but you think you can kind of I'll have to step out of my box to do this one but it is the one that i am i i as i is human

[00:18:05] oh i said i was mispronouncing that all these years okay who man that's how my cats say it hello who man where is my dinner who man why have you not pet me who man why are you still petting me who man my belly is a death trap who man rub it who man you know you want to jeremy tell me about this exotic race of the who mons the who mons as a human you belong to the

[00:18:33] combine's most numerous and politically dominant species you probably look just like a particularly fit and attractive human being of the early 21st century about one in 20 humans now boast genetically inherited body modifications these originated in a vogue for cosmetic form alteration that flourished during historical periods known as the flowering today it is not uncommon to

[00:18:59] encounter people with brightly hued skin pronounced facial ridges luminous hair or cat-like eyes some conformist cultures require all citizens to display distinctive set of cosmetic alterations other insist on other original human form or ohf as it's called yes any species you you use of viral wear may also alter your appearance so uplifted humans or jovians depending on how you want to

[00:19:26] do it you're either uplifted or you're space amish mm-hmm bombish spanish space horse and buggy they're spuggies spuggies yeah and there's horses yeah spenonites and a night i tell it also says you have a high opinion your species and its history you believe yourself inspiring innovative and resourceful even though you're probably the youngest race on this man on this planet or in this universe

[00:19:56] and i know it's going to be hard but which star trek race is this uh an analog of completely romulan okay i thought it was bajoran but you know i'll take i'll take your word for it i guess if we were going by humans and other things they're kind of the middle of the road kind of deal they're the jack all trades like most you know like like any basically any tabletop game they're kind of the jack of all trades i like to call it satirical but like the honest kind of view that robin v lawles kind of

[00:20:25] mentions here on the on humans and cultures like you know not only do we believe that we're the we're the best and we believe in ourself and so forth but also kind of i think alludes to tribalism as being something that we can kind of find ourselves into idealism chauvinism i know i saw that word in there our history of unchecked expansion yeah that sounds about

[00:20:51] right accurate and now you got a lot of special things to go over with the human abilities here it looks like on page 21 jeremy oh yeah totally all of them boost basically any of them suitable drives non-unique unique drives none species specialist specific abilities none cybernetic capabilities

[00:21:14] none cybernetic clashes none firewell affinities none firewall fire aware susceptibilities none they're flats they're flats yeah they are the vanilla character now i wish i'd had humans because we're kind of circling back around to the next round so we got a couple other of these ago there is the

[00:21:40] chick tick t-e-c-h dash t-h-k yeah i was trying to figure out how to say that too the chick tick tick tick they're big locusts grasshopper things who treat death as a minor inconvenience because they can pretty much migrate their consciousness into a new body that's stored in a special chamber trying to see if there's anything else here seems like kind of paraphrasing this here

[00:22:07] looks like they're kind of blunt materialistic they're basically spaced locusts that were bred to not eat people because they were eating people they're blunt materialistic and will describe people by how they taste which i mean will obviously make them fun at a party here don't know if this can be hooked to a star trek they're just xorax and space coast coast coast coast yeah

[00:22:32] they unlike humans it seems like they have kind of looking at the rest of their stats on page 24 here they get a boost to history copy because they keep being reincarnated over and over again and they're seem to be very combat oriented here with scuffling and shooting and stuff like that also they had the kevin bacon drive of footloose but they also have hot shots part one and part two

[00:22:58] so seems good unique drive hunger tourism so it's like we could play this character and it would be like a delicious dungeon anime we just kill stuff and eat them oh i plan on doing that and he's like gonna basically be a food critic it's like a thousand years ago when i ate this it was so much better oh really you're bridging self out of existence looks like they can have cybernetics and trying to see

[00:23:27] special species ability with the migraine consciousness though we'll say that when the consciousness you when you get a new body you don't inherit all your own cybernetic wear i did read that somewhere in here earlier yep oh it also do mimicry great so yeah that is the space uh biblical plague of locusts joe i think this one's an easy one to pronounce the havoc like seven feet tall

[00:23:57] weighing close to half a ton is that the metric ton or do they mean the american ton which is twice as big does it end with an e or not yeah this is a regular non-e end i'll go american on that one then okay there you go that would weigh a thousand pounds descended from the armadillo like creatures of your home world tav recovered with hairy plates of natural armor piercing retractable claws wait

[00:24:25] within your long wrinkled fingers culture transformed your ancestors discovered the warp corridors and reached the stars for that your people were peaceful placid herbivore when they found space they found in a cold and unforgiving environment wrecked with warfare so they over a course of generations they made

[00:24:46] themselves into a warrior species however they do retain a tradition of spiritual serenity and political coexistence right until you said they were called i was gonna say they were klingons they got ruffles got ridges just like them yeah yeah they're calm klingons maybe they're they leaned more into the samurai part of klingon culture than the viking bit to to really totally reduce two very complex cultures into

[00:25:16] their most pop culture form i'm just gonna say klingons with space weed it's fine there you go they have no special drives uh they do have plus one to hit threshold hand to hand claw attacks do plus one damage oh they do have a unique drive meditative reconciliation and they can resist battle frenzy because they have a tendency to fall into it they're cybernetically compatible with berserker mesodermal jumper and

[00:25:45] moto booster and bad with bad liver neurojulter night vision kind of came away from the bloodline yeah yeah your marks with their marksmanship is so well honed that they can at will do lethal damage while firing a weapon tuned to a non-lethal setting you never have to pay shooting points to switch a weapon from non-lethal to lethal so you could shoot somebody in the eye with your stun gun and it well blows their

[00:26:10] eye up i guess sounds pretty fucking rugged also like it says on the second paragraph there humans take credit for brokering the formation of the combine but it's the tactic philosophy that provides it with its uh guiding principles so i mean it sounds like us we'll put our name on it which one do you want to do to the vast small don't all speak up at once leave that pause in leave that pause in

[00:26:36] pregnant pause the vast small once less than a blink of an eye in cosmic reckoning you were infinite you were the vast crowd beings of pure energy and universal cost consciousness though you are not gods and sought sought sought not the worship of biological beings you sometimes received it all the same your thoughts reverberated through the universe you become one with the great cycles of being and

[00:27:02] unbeing all was revealed to you there was neither happiness nor unhappiness neither desire nor content contentment there was simply was the vast crowd and that was balanced and infinite from time to time your sense of pervading essence led you to intervene in mortal affairs first you exiled to the first you exiled to the final corridors of the dimension you the renegade boss kra whose name can now not be

[00:27:29] remembered he had gone mad and acted like a devil in mortal mythology tormenting hapless sentience so naturally he had to be removed to a place beyond the veil though this act you forged a bond with beings called humans you saw their potential and their tragedy and were moved so basically your little space gods or not space gods kind of like jedi ex space gods ex space gods it's like you know cube

[00:27:58] from star trek and then post fall q so it looks like they're all you know bossed something for the various forms of their species do you think when they're reproducing they're the vast deference uh that did actually pop in my head when i saw the title of that too but i took the high road sir not me as pythagoras once said every triangle is left triangle triangles

[00:28:27] it looks like if i'm reading this right too so they were almost a god and then if the molar kind of messed all that up and now they're little gray skin humanoids with big heads it seems like 92 to 122 centimeter humanoids your oversized head with eyes black and enlarged your body spindly and

[00:28:52] twisted your skin is gray or green and semi-translucent when you use your psychic powers mere mocking mocking echoes of what you once possessed your luminous brain can be seen pulsing within your skull so that's kind of got to be terrifying i mean except for the shiny brain they basically describe martian greys in sci-fi with that although in the picture they're dressed kind of like jawas without the hood

[00:29:18] maybe that's why jawas wear the hood all the time yeah and their eyes glow that's just their brain no well no star trek not star wars we're not crossing that line i'm sorry it's my fault i like the picture macy's hand looks like he was doing the crab dance well he's just copying the guys above they're all got kind of clenchy crabby's looks like you can't this one can't have any cybernetics either either no

[00:29:41] what is this what does a god need with a cybernetic that and they're they're all psychic type things so that's probably why they don't need or need or get cybernetics although the transposing of those two words to blowing grain i mean you put the cybernetics in and their heads pop like popcorn my guy's gonna put one in the microwave sometime looks like it doesn't actually get any species

[00:30:08] unique abilities yeah they're species specific it's like consciousness simulation dream dream sight farsight neuro sight time sight pathway amplification probability override and psychic vitality so they get a whole psychic vitality pool thing yeah i guess with this said here it looks like we're about ready to get into the row of rowing up of the roll up here so the first step here and let

[00:30:36] me go pull a book i just clicked off of it like a dipstick uh we need to choose our species kind of going back up to the top here and this is something we kind of glossed over we'll kind of jump into it sooner or later it mentions on page four it mentions what did you do in the war sooner or later players will want to establish what their pcs did in the war you might choose to start with a decision and and envision

[00:31:05] your character around it or find a likely answer to establish the facts about your uh laser character for example crew position species or drive your wartime activities might explain how you gained training and made you an ultra combat problem solver you are today so some of the default ones i just want to

[00:31:27] kind of go over here is bullet points you fought the molar uh molar or whatever as a member of the combine fleet you fought plan aside as infantry in combine forces you fought well in a local militia you fought the invaders as irregular or partisan group there saw action while serving in non-combat support role served as a

[00:31:53] civilian in the combine administration bribed or finagled your way out of military service called up duty but excuse me called up for duty but granted conscientious objective status deemed medically unfit you were imprisoned as a criminal or a deserter served in a war effort scientific researcher spent the war hospitalized for a debilitating but now cured condition you were

[00:32:21] too young to fight trained to fight but stationed planet side in obscure location and saw no action worked as a severe unit a crucial industry or was a swirling energy being unfettered from the limited notion of space timing causation so boss ball so those are a couple and of course obviously you can make

[00:32:46] up your own so i don't know if any of us actually have what we want with that yet well we can answer it as we go on here but does anything particularly stick out to you well i think a lot of that's gonna be informed by kind of what race we choose right or what species rather because yeah i'm i'm choosing the derg uh so i'm a bad guy right i was miles o'brien on a bad guy ship only smaller and a little bit

[00:33:14] lumpier mm-hmm only a little lumpier it was lumpy right right and i will point out for for jeremy who i know is going for the titik titan spurs don't actually get you out of the military they just shovel you over the infantry yeah well they just shoot me and they just shoot me and keep keep putting me in new bodies until i don't have them anymore they basically old yellow me until i get

[00:33:36] my bone spurs away what's everybody thinking well i think i was in the war as a doctor so i'm gonna go with doctor so i was a war doctor not the war doctor but a yeah i was a wartime medic and your suppression would have done wonders for your bedside manner i imagine

[00:33:59] i'm sure it was great you will be fine i promise and immediately die turn to the next person you will be fine i promise reassuring you will be fine you will be fine oh wait no that's a side

[00:34:21] you will be fine soon you will feel no pain to tell the truth yes i didn't lie and they don't feel anything do you want to kind of lead into that with or where you kind of led into that with the race that you were picking as well right yeah i'm gonna go with the bala bala doctor i'm going with the uh the kitch stick and i think he was an inventory soldier because his whenever the war

[00:34:51] broke out his character his his race basically said yay and he basically just ran around going are you going to eat that when something got killed on a war to buffet basically all the space folks on the left go yeah completely okay i think i'm going to say that my character was he was in a war he was

[00:35:19] injured in a war i'm kind of wanting to go with a sabi here so why don't we if this isn't breaking any kind of rule here i want to say that i was working as perhaps a a trader you know essential services kind of thing the group that were going between the different outposts and colonies and all that and i was on a sabi planet when they got particularly hit or territory at least when they got hit particularly

[00:35:49] hard and my injuries were too severe and the only way that they could save me is to upgrade me so i'm a babby sabby a babble yeah or even if you won't it's done now yeah so i'm i'm adopting to the ways you know take it till you make it kind of deal so we're going on to kind of we started here on page

[00:36:15] four where it was what did you do in the war the timeline i mean i'm looking at timeline there deal so we've actually already started our by choosing our species i think the next thing before we do really finish flesh out everything else step two is to assign crew packages so it says as seen on page 28 which we'll get there most lasers fulfill at least one role warp side on a ship that means

[00:36:45] plus at least one role ground side on various planets you visit during the step players can partial out responsibilities between them crew packages you give will give you basic abilities you need to perform these tasks so i guess it's time to go to page 28 i'm pretty open for this since we're kind of rolling up a group of characters to play together makes sense to me yeah yeah and you know

[00:37:13] i think our backstories also kind of figure into some of what we might select here me again shorter lumpier miles o'brien i would go with a systems role on the warp side and a technical role on the ground side because i'm either working on the ship or i'm working on the ship sensible that makes sense to me and that's not because every character that i play plays the techie no not at all where's my wrench

[00:37:41] yep so systems officer on where while others freeing on the bridge you're down in the bowels of the ship keeping it running whether she's coming apart during a warp corridor breach or withering under a neutronic pulisade pulisade i don't know you'll be the one holding ship together you manage competing resource requests to the bridge crew take damage systems offline before they blow up and throw

[00:38:07] everything you've got into the emergency whatevers when the chips are down you're the one with your head stuck under the access vent manually repairing the transducer conduits while sparks shower all around you this provides me four points of system design and six of systems repair which you fill in in the abilities section of your character sheet and then the other side of that is the technical officer on the ground side when the answer to a mystery revolves around a piece of tech or can be scanned enhanced or analyzed with a piece of tech you are there to bring your toolkit

[00:38:36] your gear bag and your ingenuity to bear whether you need to id a bomber from its exploded handiwork flip a hollow snail into a target's hidey hole that sounds dirty or sift the crucial snowflake from an avalanche of data you're the tech for the job that gives me one in explosive devices forensic engineering hollow surveillance imaging and industrial design and underneath general i get four on infiltration because who pays attention to the maintenance guy two in system design and another

[00:39:02] six in systems repair what uh what are you selecting over there joe well i'm gonna go with medical officer well there's lasering is tough work no greater testament to that fact than the countless wounds i've sealed poisonings i'm reversed and exotic cures i've engineered moments before my patient's breath ebbed away medical officers tend not to double up on work side duty so they can be

[00:39:26] ready to deal with any casualties during space combat they may or may not double up ground side okay i think however ground side will need a face and that's probably me yeah yeah i had my blown off so yeah i'd appreciate it there have been many times when i've been walking down the corridor past you and said hey do you think this needs stitches and they just kept walking

[00:39:54] awesome uh what areas bear me what you got i was thinking with my guy being the warlike species i think weapons officer would probably be the thing that makes the most sense on the was on the warp side part and then probably security officer for ground side assignments so weapons officer during a naval

[00:40:20] battle you operate the shipments weapons cut the shipments during a naval battle try this again during a naval battle you operate the ship's weapons console adjusting the targeting algorithms in response to enemy movements and your own ship's maneuvering you may select weapon types yourself when granted leeway by your stratico or execute assault patterns according to his instructions

[00:40:43] for general i get battle console six scuffling four since trouble two shooting four and then for the ground side assignments for security officer you draw on the horriest methods of policed work to move cases into the wind column when you suspect needs when a suspect needs sweating you're there to lean in and put you're in them when he refuses to surrender for questioning you got a disruptor disruption pistol in

[00:41:10] your belt and if all else fails a hard pair of fists to batter his jaw cheers the 25th century and all but sometimes the old ways are the best ways investigative i get cop talk interrogation evidence collection and kinetics general athletic scuffling sense trouble shooting and surveillance with a lot of the boosts my guy gets it kind of made more sense to go to lean in with the more

[00:41:39] warlike guy especially with his race that brings us to you adam what are you picking ah well it looks like you guys you know however band needs a drummer i think every spaceship needs a pilot so i think i'm gonna go with the pilot i'm star bucket instead of star bucket now i'm not gonna go that's not gonna be my name but you may call me that behind my back you don't get to name our ship the shit box this time just telling you yeah no shit boxes pilot courses through space lanes navigating the ship through

[00:42:09] work corridors in orbit or near orbital conditions you engage in stellar traffic systems and avoid collision where the automated system has ceased to function you keep it steady a steady hand on the helm with my own automated systems probably so looks like with being a pilot as my two one my investigative

[00:42:30] geology and astronomy and ground craft general abilities helm control six shuttlecraft four i think it kind of explains why i was on in the ziby area i was probably piloting a ship you know ground side

[00:42:51] hmm i'm kind of torn i honestly am kind of leaning toward like an operations officer but i was also considering the technical officer i would like your all anybody have any feelings on that which way i should go well i think i already chose tech and i don't know if you want to double up on that you're the attorney

[00:43:12] attorney ace phoenix attorney-in-law or whatever so for the operations officer the bagger if you will law enforcement is a business as well as a vocation operations officers handle logistics legalities and practicalities you keep the mission supported with necessary clearances and equipment your contribution

[00:43:37] goes far beyond the mere support however in the poverty-stricken post-war environment of the bleed an ancient motivation for trouble has suddenly arisen from the depths of history material greed your mastery of financial matters allows you to track the flow of credits negotiables and put down cases you follow the money yeah and that gives me some forensic accounting law bureaucracy

[00:44:02] negotiation and general uh business affairs for public relations so on our handy dandy character sheets i can see where i'll go ahead and fill out pilot and operations officer or bagger i guess that list characters choose a species assign a crew packages now this is kind of getting to the part of the

[00:44:29] row up here where we're going to do a brief little musical intermission here and come back with our characters as is but before we get to that point here we're getting on to the point of i said point twice we're going to start distributing investigative abilities now the cool thing about this game here i mean some games have a hard cap at a certain number of players you i don't really particularly see a limit here

[00:44:57] on page six it does mention five plus characters and the reason i mention five plus characters is you get investigative build points for the number of characters you have so the last characters like say if there was two we would have to be compensating quite a bit so we would take 36 points with there being three of us at the moment we're just going to roll up with 28 investigative build

[00:45:24] points and that's going to be the stuff that we're going to distribute throughout the investigative abilities section here that makes sense real quick those crew positions and stuff like that i assume they eat some of the points i think they provide you with their points i don't think they eat any i think they give you this is what you start with if you have that that's the from what i was reading that's the

[00:45:51] amount of points that you have to have in something to take that skill like okay to be an operations officer you have to have a minimum of four in business affairs foreign preparedness and foreign public relations it said that if you that's the minimum you have to have to basically be able to take that but if you want to really be a badass you can take you can combine the two like say if you had

[00:46:17] i don't know what in my in my things with weapons officer and and i get at least a foreign scuffling for each one but i can add those points together and just have an eight and scuffling it doesn't make sense for that to be the minimum to be able to have that type because just adding up the ones that i got from mine that's 27 which means i could not have those two things together maybe that's the point

[00:46:43] at a five plus you can have have them you have four like that's that's it to take either deal like you don't have to have eight to have both it says each crew package sets out sets out minimum requirements in both investigative and general abilities before spending any points elsewhere elsewhere to make sure you have covered the same abilities in more than one or one or

[00:47:08] in more than one of your packets make sure you have at least the highest of the hit the highest minimum to be particularly bad at a six minimum perhaps even adding the minimums together so you have to have four ah gotcha still gross i gotcha still gross yeah still weird but yeah like you just have to have the minimum for either one on a practical matter it seems like the if i'm understanding all

[00:47:35] this correctly here the other points are already spoken for row you deduct the costs from we're going to deduct the costs from our 28 points that we have and then we have the others to spend the doubling up if you will if you have the ability appear more than one say like with my office my pilot and my bagger ground side guy i also have that ability i can also double those

[00:48:05] you double those points up as where as well you only need to hit the highest minimum and not pay it twice so i can either you know i get it because yeah i got it somewhere else is that right jeremy mm-hmm yeah you don't have to spend it twice you just have to have the minimum of whatever it says like say you have since trouble of two and two different abilities all you need is two you don't need four

[00:48:28] yeah okay sounds good and i think while we're on it here we're gonna during this brief break we're also going to go through here and spend our 75 general bill points to start to you deduct the cost of the general abilities listed on your crew package before spending the remainder of those as well yeah so for example if you're like a security officer your athletic scuffling and since troubleshooting

[00:48:56] and surveillance requirements are going to come out of that 75 first which basically i'm talking about you aren't i jeremy yep okay so it seems pretty straightforward i appreciate you taking time looking at up there it's something that didn't ring to me until i actually looked at it so essentially just for the the quick math of it say we what we get 75 points yes sir then if you take

[00:49:20] security officer and your general abilities is fours across the board so 20 points so two you're going to lose 20 points right off the rip so you're going to have what 50 points or 55 points left to spend on your general abilities and if health and stuff like that's covered you get like a there's certain abilities you get like a base everybody starts with

[00:49:45] this and that with this being a gumshoe game i mean you could put more into health and all that but there's so many like three b's that you get with health but at the same time i want you to be aware of health doesn't you don't die at zero in a gumshoe game typically once you hit that then you're going to start getting negatives and i believe unless this one's different you pretty much when you get to negative 10 that's when you're all up guys good with me going ahead and taking us to the break

[00:50:15] sure cue the bossa nova well we'll we're going to go ahead and roll these up and we'll be back in

[00:50:22] just a few moments and we're back so yeah by going and going through the uh the class that we took

[00:50:47] our two crew positions whatnot some of the points were already spent and uh yep i went ahead and distributed all mine i'm just going to kind of gloss over a few things not everything i don't want you to hear how i spent all 20 some odd of my points but as far as investigative abilities when you know i i get the savvy culture and whatnot there was some law skills i went ahead and took human culture because

[00:51:13] i'm a new savvy as it all goes also like xeno xeno culture that's one thing i picked up because i thought it was beneficial for somebody who was like a trader trade pilot and all that then i took a couple interpersonal skills i like bullshit detector kind of came with it that took intimidation and interrogation since i'm kind of a lawyer kind of got to reassurance respect was an interesting one

[00:51:42] and went over for the ship side and technical uh i went ahead because i'm very mechanic mechanically made i like the idea of being able to not only do astronomy with the pilot but bio signatures data retrieval decryption being able to pick up energy signatures and of course forensic anthropology i skipped over that

[00:52:08] and for some reason i took viral ology i can't remember if that was listed or not now as far as my general abilities went i really focused on ground craft and shuttlecraft give it putting a lot of points into them combined well not a lot but i put six in each one i'm maybe

[00:52:31] go back later if i played this character and tweak it up a bit i went ahead and took his health at 10 so i made him rather robust and i took the athletics ability at eight i like the idea of being a bonnet commando kind of deal and then i honestly this is the first time in a gumshoe game that i really felt like i didn't i had to actually attempt to spin these points like other interesting ones i took was like

[00:52:59] obviously helm control because i'm a pilot but i also like the idea of naval tactics so i'm familiar with ship coordination and whatnot put a cut several points in preparedness because that's the great catch-all for gumshoe games oh well of course i have a philips head screwdriver just in preparedness for it and yeah didn't make him a total robust bang bang character but i did drop five points in that

[00:53:26] ship since travel and scuffling so i think i did fairly decent on that uh i hope about everybody else any highlights from your general and investigative bill i basically built my guy around he's kind of a cop that likes to eat since that kind of fits both sides of his of his role so i built a lot of my

[00:53:50] investigative abilities around like trying to figure out what he can eat so i took botany zoology astronomy so he could know how to find places biosignatures chemistry evidence collection which came with the the the cop abilities kinetics biology biology and then along with some of the cop abilities where his bullshit detector cop talk downside so he knows so he goes into the sceny

[00:54:16] places the black markets interrogation intimidation and then for general abilities i took a lot of the same ones kind of that adam was saying where it was like athletics up to eight so i can get my hit threshold to four battle console for the weapons expert pilot ground crafts or or just called ground craft in this just so i can drive health at 10 migrate cautious consciousness because that's the kind of the racial

[00:54:43] ability that i have preparedness scuffling i got scuffling and shooting i got because i got boosts in those sense trouble shuttlecraft because i think having a second pilot even though i'm not good i can at least make it limp to the to the next place at the way station surveillance and then also systems repair for being the combat officer on ship so i know how to repair something if it breaks i took the drive hunger tourism

[00:55:10] which is the racial ability that he has he's just as as brownie put it he's the michelin star critic he's a hunky boy the ashen michelin star right yep the ashen michelin star and his name i named him mccall's also known as mikey because mikey i think he likes it nice very nice i am rejiggering some of my

[00:55:35] stuff because i didn't put anything to health but that that can be done later on for the investigative abilities i picked a couple of things that i thought were interesting i mostly built them around being an engineering type character but i gave him a little bit of negotiation a little bit of downside because when you got to get parts you got to get parts and sometimes that's on the seat of your side that's kind of an analog to criminology the way i read it most or less that's what you'd expect but i also

[00:55:59] grabbed geology because even in space you know door rock and stone and then again in the general abilities i i did that a lot around the stuff you'd expect like system design systems repair a little bit in shuttlecraft because you got to fly a little bit sometimes i give myself some scuffling and shooting because you know rough them up we're going to be doing that a little bit of that i imagine a little bit in filch because sometimes you got to get the part but i did add six points into the phase which is the face dwarf specific class ability

[00:56:29] uh so cultural officer and medical officer that leaves me put four in anthropology two in archaeology three in forensic psychology i know you're serial killers after all a point in history of my own culture the bala a point in the history of the combine i'm pro combine but like many people pro things don't know enough about it a two in xenoculture three in bullshit detector because it's important one in downside one in

[00:56:57] impersonate two in respect one in chemistry one in forensic anthropology and four in virology general abilities ten in emotional suppression for the bala that's pretty important eight in filch hey when you're handling a dead body sometimes you got to take something off it you don't want others to know ten in health two in infiltration ten in medic five in preparedness four in scuffling

[00:57:24] five in sense trouble four in shooting four in surveillance and eight in viro manipulation sometimes you got to make your own cures or as you do your own war crimes or do your own war crimes i mean either way yeah potato potato really honestly we just got a few other things to go over here with character creation but we pretty much got this done here the next step

[00:57:50] does mention that we did off mic as well was uh we chose our drive you do have unique drives for your characters but since my character was a bit of a um late addition to the savvies uh i put my drive as and i do want to play it up so i chose my drive as nowhere else to go i like that he's new enough to the

[00:58:19] lifestyle that he's not quite human anymore and he's also not quite savvy enough anymore so rather than face his face his problems he's kind of running away i guess you could say trying to live the life that he once he once had if that makes sense there it does yep and yeah that's what i'm kind of going with

[00:58:46] what about anybody everybody else i to bring in and get another sci-fi ish property i know we talked about star trek we we skirted our ways around the wars and star wars to bring a little bit of 40k in i chose the phase rider which means that i get visions basically of the 40k warp whenever i'm phasing through materials i don't get actually nibbled on by nurgle or anything like that but i see

[00:59:10] psychedelic stuff when i'm passing through solid objects yeah and apparently i like it because it's a drive well it it sounds cool yeah phase visions one hell of a drug what's everybody else got well i've got combine ism i want to restore the combines authority over the bleed very important to me combine's the best thing that ever happened to any of us god damn it we got to bring it back

[00:59:40] but i wouldn't express it that way because that's too much strong emotion i would just say the combine is advantageous to everyone yeah commonism that sounds like something they have an ointment for i will have to probably manufacture one because joe off joe the player thinks that that's probably a bad choice for a try

[01:00:05] get your virology in there and get that argument going yep yeah jeremy what do you got my drive is hunger tourism as i said before so i took hunger tourism so he is the ashen michelin star driving around he wants to taste everything in the universe to try and find the most tastiest of things and it's kind of delicious and dungeon in space for him so you want those glowing head meats off of

[01:00:33] the the vast deference i mean uh that's i mean it's right there you don't want it to go to waste no it's i you put it in the microwave it pops up like popcorn that's small that's what it was sorry no no no that's it's better chilled we went over this yeah you sometimes you got to get a little char on it before you make your your gazpacho why and just make sure you use the theater popcorn uh butter on it you're fine

[01:01:00] i'll allow it well it seems like it's pretty much it now there are some additional stages that typically in these we don't really go too far into like picking out gear and so forth but i do want to kind of briefly mention that as a group you uh would sit down and choose your ship your ship during stage six like what kind it's mentions here together players decide the type of ship the

[01:01:25] characters will fly when you pick your ship you'll be choosing the balance of offensive and defensive qualities that best match your group's self-image do you want to blaze firepower or deflect incoming attacks what weight do you place on speed against jamming etc etc then after that during step seven you would choose to enhancements so i do want to read this to you here as well the there's a nice

[01:01:53] little chart here that gives you your total budget for combined members so it's not individual our case but had a budget of 84 to go shopping on our ship and i think that also you you would be spending some of that money toward like cybernetics and enhancements as well that you would go through

[01:02:15] and spend step eight which is kind of quite lengthy here it seems like just adding personal details to your character which i think there's we can do that real quick here and by the personal details why don't we just come up with names does anyone have a who would like to display their character's name first here so we would obviously have more than that but what are you guys kind of thinking of

[01:02:43] for your character name sticking with the theme of the kitchen or however you say it they basically have a three letters a hyphen and then three more letters so i went with mick alls and also known as everybody calls him mikey because from the the 80s mikey i think he likes it that was three letters a dash and how many three letters it's m-i-k dash a-l-s and then everybody just calls him mikey because

[01:03:12] no one wants to nobody else has mandibles so it's hard for them to say it i call you yum yum behind your back just so you know yeah i'm sauce yeah i'm pretty boring in all things in my life and so what was the name that i use for every dwarf character that i play uh tech are i didn't even look at the list no that's fine i did use the list and i came up with s-o-o-s excuse you yes all right you do and

[01:03:40] you'll clean it up that's an insult in my language i'm sorry i can't help what i was named and i'm gonna pick two names because of my human that i haven't quite forgotten that as well as my sabby name so i wanted to pick something that kind of had like dual identity kind of thing here so i want my main

[01:04:05] sabby name that i kind of go by is margin i was you know a trader and a pilot and also the lawyer kind of bureaucratic background there i chose margin but i also my friends call me reggie because my name was regional so kind of i don't know maybe i took a liberty there that one should

[01:04:28] not i don't think that's a problem yeah i don't table flip adam how dare you you son of a bitch reggie killed my mother i am margin marvin the margins well that looks like that's about it thank you so much ashton star looks like a fun game i hope we get around to playing it looks like

[01:04:52] it has a lot to offer and i i definitely think i dig the not that i don't like star wars but i kind of like the star trek feel that the anti-star trek everything's shit's went bad and you're trying to piece together the utopia that once existed it seems like it has a lot of potential i concur star trek like it joe wants to play no way yeah yeah you could actually play in a star trek game

[01:05:19] instead of run one yeah but we still need an ensign hammer i was gonna say ensign hammer has to be an npc on our ship his drive his sexual adventures are all are all of your characters gigolos with the name hammer i just i'm just drawing a conclusion here finally no ensign hammer was provided that name

[01:05:44] because it was invented on the spot and i wanted something that was absurd to start off with so that's what we got didn't he also show up in tachyon squadron he did because that game immediately really followed one and then he went back in time to a ghostly realm so he could be an orpheus a different hammer no relation no relation and different hammer and yet all of our problems still look like a nail

[01:06:11] yeah that's that's ball peeing hammer if we're seeing that any of you guys are interested in what we've been talking about we've kind of referenced uh previous games that appeared on rpx star trek what was the first season called star trek i remember what it was called but that was called it was a long time ago man i was like let's call it the original season years ago

[01:06:39] yeah pre pre-covid 19 yeah so go ahead and check out that or our tachyon squadron games and speaking of which if you would like to learn more about the podcast if this is your first time listening then you know go over to our podcast network page which is creating the night.com you can also find other great podcasts there as our friends at one less die a shadow one run and

[01:07:08] other and so much more whatever it needs to be that day yeah yeah and a creepypasta fiction podcast where they read and review pod creepypastas and if you're listening to this in the month of february 2026 i'd like to thank you because you're a patreon backer and all patreon backers at a certain tier receive these roll-ups three months in advance

[01:07:37] if you're listening to this in may hey no problem and it's your first time thank you for tuning in and if you're interested in more please check us out there we also have a patreon page we're at patreon.com slash roleplaying exchange and yeah help us fight those hosting bills thank you all once again for joining me and uh it's been fun hopefully we can do something with this we're looking forward to it sounds like a blast and until next time folks we'll see you all later

[01:08:07] goodbye goodnight internet goodbye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye