Well… that was interesting: ALIEN RPG Solo Game 1 – Havoc Dawn: Session 0.2 - Character Creation Overview & PC 1

I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.
Ash – ALIEN

Havoc Dawn: Session 0.2 – Character Creation Overview & PC1

In this second post of a multi-part series covering the session 0 of this new solo game, I’ll be performing an overview of the character creation process for the ALIEN Roleplaying Game, while creating the first Player Character.

You can read the other posts related to Session 0 by clicking the appropriate link below:

In an intriguing twist, I’ve chosen to construct five distinct player characters for this solo game. Yes, you read that right – five characters under my solo control. This endeavor promises to be an exhilarating challenge, brought about by the unique concept I have conceived for this game. However, given the harsh realities of this world, it’s unlikely all characters will see their journey through to the end.

Character Creation begins on page 25 of the core rulebook.

Advice to the reader

In order to interpret the structure of my gaming session posts effectively, it is strongly suggested that you peruse A Readers Guide to Play Sessions on The Old Bard, if you haven’t already.

To better grasp what I mean when I bring up Fate questions, you might find it useful to keep the Mythic Fate Chart accessible, potentially in a new window or tab in your browser.

My first player character will be a resilient woman, which aligns harmoniously with the tradition of the ALIEN franchise that prominently features strong female characters. The other principal characters I’ve planned will be males. Their creation process, which I will elaborate on in forthcoming posts, is expected to be relatively more streamlined, hence their character overviews will likely be more succinct.

As I usually do, I try to always have a featured image on my posts that relate to the content. These are either a) A photo I took of my character sheets, character or scene journal or b) An image that conveys the posts content, generally generated using Midjourney.

For this post, I wanted to try to imagine what my player characters might look like, so I used the following prompt in Midjourney to generate one:

/imagine <https://s.mj.run/mGWC5BamzUU> a group of 5 human characters in the ALIEN franchise., 4 male, 1 female. Ultra realistic. --aspect 2:1

And here is the result:

Ultimately, it made more sense to use an image for this specific character as the featured image on this post, which I did. However, I decided to use this image as the featured image for the game page and characters page.

Now that I have this image as inspiration, it’s time to start creating the characters.

How To Create Your Player Character

The core rulebook outlines the character creation process on page 27, which consists of the following steps:

Choose your career.
Spend points on your attributes.
Spend points on your skills.
Choose your career talent.
Choose your name.
Decide on your appearance.
Decide on your Personal Agenda.
Choose your Buddy and Rival.
Pick your gear and a signature item.
Roll for cash.

Step 0: Character Concept

Before we move to the first official ALIEN RPG character creation step, I want to precede this with a character concept I have in mind.

This female character will be a space trucker captain who leads a crew of space truckers, individuals who transport cargo and passengers between colonies. Living on the edges of society and moving constantly, they have a unique perspective on the events unfolding in different colonies. She will serve as the voice of the average citizen in this universe.

Step 1: Choose your career

CAREER
The first choice for your character in Campaign play is your career. Your career choice determines your background and your role in the group. It influences your attributes, your skills, your starting gear and what starting talent you can have. There are nine core careers to choose from, described on pages 38—55.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 27.

Looking over the options provided, it’s clear that this character will be an officer. This career type is detailed on page 48 in the core rulebook.

When everything is going to shit—the Company’s holding your crew’s pay hostage, there’s a mountain of reports to file from that last incident near Thedus, and who knows how many family members back home are weighing on everyone’s minds—it’s a good thing you spent all those years training to do this for a living. You’re the authority figure, the role model, the voice of your superiors, and the enlisted crew’s advocate. You’re also the butt of all of their jokes around the mess hall… until it all gets so much worse, and they’re looking to you for what to do next. Better hope your training has a solution to this one.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 48

I bookmark this career page in the rulebook as I will need to refer back to it quite often throughout the creation process.

Step 2: Spend points on your attributes

ATTRIBUTES
Your character has four attributes that indicate your basic physical and mental capabilities, each rated on a scale from 1 to 5. Your attributes are used when you roll dice to perform actions in the game, and also to determine how much damage you can withstand before you become Broken. Read more about this in Chapter 5.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 27.

These attributes are as follows:

Strength: Raw muscle power and brawn.
Agility: Body control, speed, and motor skills.
Wits: Sensory perception, intelligence, and sanity.
Empathy: Personal charisma, empathy, and ability to manipulate others.

Page 28 describes the process of assigning your starting attributes. For Campaign play, I have 14 points to spend across my attributes. The minimum is 2 and the maximum is 4 per specific attribute. However, I can spend 5 points on the “key attribute” for the career I’ve chosen.

For an officer, that careers key attribute is Empathy. I could spend 5 points there, and then have 9 left over where I could equally split across the other attributes and give them each 3 points. However, I want this character to have a higher Wit attribute, so I decide to spend my points as follows:

4 points on Empathy
4 points on Wits
3 points on Agility
3 points on Strength

I mark these down on my character sheet.

Step 3: Spend points on your skills

On the same page, 28, of the core rulebook it describes skills as follows:

SKILLS
Your skills are the knowledge and abilities you have acquired during your life. They are important as they determine, along with your attributes, how effectively you can perform certain actions in the game. There are twelve skills in the game and they are all described in detail in Chapter 3. They are measured by skill level on a scale from 0 to 5. The higher the number, the better.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 28.

Much like we did for Attributes, we have a pool of points to utilize for our skills. 10 points in fact. We can spend a maximum of 3 points per skill on the key skills for our chosen career, and a single point each to the other skills of your choice. However, there are 12 skills total as follows:

Heavy Machinery (STRENGTH)
Stamina (STRENGTH)
Close Combat (STRENGTH)
Mobility (AGILITY)
Ranged Combat (AGILITY)
Piloting (AGILITY)
Observation (WITS)
Comtech (WITS)
Survival (WITS)
Command (EMPATHY)
Manipulation (EMPATHY)
Medical Aid (EMPATHY)

So, this means, that for some skills we will have no points assigned. That’s ok, because even if you don’t have a level in a particular skill, you can still roll for any skill. Details on how skills work is covered in Chapter 3.

For an officer, the key skills are: Ranged Combat, Command and Manipulation.

I decide to spend my points the following way:

3 points on Command
2 points on Manipulation
1 point on Ranged Combat
1 point on Close Combat
1 point on Observation
1 point on Survival
1 point on Medical Aid

I mark these down on my character sheet.

Step 4: Choose your career talent

TALENTS
Talents are tricks, moves, and minor abilities that give you a small edge. They are more specialized than skills and make your character unique. Talents are further explained in Chapter 4.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 29.

A character gets one talent initially at the start of a game, and you learn more over the course of a game. The career you’ve chosen lists three talents you choose from. For an officer, those talents are Field Commander, Influence, and Pull Rank. After reading the description for these talents on page 76, I decide to choose Pull Rank and mark that down on my character sheet.

Step 5: Choose your name

Now we need to choose a name for this character.

Note: It’s 4:30 AM and I’m at a local Dennys working on this character. I MEANT to pack a couple of random table books I have in my collection before I left the house because I wanted to utilize them, but I forgot. Unfortunately, I don’t have PDF versions of those books either. It’s not like I NEED them, we are just talking about coming up with a name here, but I’m bringing this up as a note to discuss for a few of my future Insight Checks I’ll be doing titled “The Organization Quest – Notes, Journaling, and Digital Tools“, “Character Creation – The Art of Becoming Someone Else” and “Caffeine and Content Creation – Early Mornings at Denny’s and Late Nights at Starbucks“.

I decide to use Behind the Name to come up with a feminine name for me and it generates Yuliana Petra Danailov. I’ve left the links to each of the name’s etymology and history for your reference.

I like this, and decide that most people close to her will refer to her as “Yulz”

Step 6: Decide on your appearance

APPEARANCE
Describe your player character’s appearance in a few words. Your career gives you a few suggestions, but you are free to choose any appearance that you think fits your character.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 30.

From the list of options, I choose “Serious, Intense expression” and write that down on my character sheet. But of course, we are going to create a much broader Appearance for this character along with a backstory. From what I see, there is nothing about a character’s backstory in the rulebook, but I like to generate one as that helps with the story as it progresses.

We’ll come back to appearance in just a bit.

Step 7: Decide on your Personal Agenda

Here is what the core rulebook notes about this step of the character creation process:

PERSONAL AGENDA
You might be a team, but each individual PC in your group also has an angle of their own—a Personal Agenda. How personal agendas work differs between Cinematic and Campaign play.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 30.

The mechanics around Personal Agendas in Campaign Play, which is what we are preparing for, is that if you have taken some concrete action to further your agenda during a session, despite risk or cost, you gain a bonus Experience Point.

I also refer back to the Officer career type on page 49. There are a couple of options here, but nothing I want this character to sink their teeth in. I decide for now, that she wants to return to the colony where she grew up, where her mother is buried. She carries a locket given to her by her mother that has a picture of her father. Her father was also an Officer who went MIA along with his ship several years ago and is assumed deceased.

Her desire is to return the locket to her home world to place it at her mother’s grave there, reuniting the memory of her father with her mother. I write down “Return locket of father to home world.” on my character sheet.

Step 8: Choose your Buddy and Rival

So, we have an interesting dilemma here. Here is what the rulebook says about this step.

BUDDIES AND RIVALS
The ALIEN roleplaying game is about a small group of people facing unknown and horrifying dangers in the cold darkness of space. To survive, you need to find someone to trust, but also be careful who you turn your back to.

In game terms, your PC can have one Buddy and one Rival amongst the other PCs. You can only have one of each. Your relationships are important for the GM, as she can use them to create interesting situations in the game.

In Campaign play, you can choose one PC to be your Buddy and another to be your Rival. In Cinematic scenarios, the choice is made for you.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 31.

But we don’t have all of our characters created yet, so we’re going to have to come back to this once we finish creating the other characters. This would be the same dilemma even if I wasn’t playing solo, as the group would have to wait on the others to be complete with their characters as well, then chose their buddies and rivals.

So, we’ll note that we need to revisit this after we create the others and just move on for now.

Step 9: Pick your gear and a signature item

All gear is located in page 117 in Chapter 6: Gear. For Campaign play, your career determines what gear you can choose from at the start of the game. Referring back to the Officer career type on page 49 it notes the following:

GEAR

Choose two of the starting items below. You also get $2D6x100 in cash.

M4A3 Service Pistol or Rexim RXF-M5 EVA Pistol

Samani E-Series watch or binoculars

M314 motion tracker or IRC MK.50 Compression Suit

Seegson P-DAT or IFF transponder

ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 49.

I don’t even need to look at the gear section to determine that I should probably choose a weapon, but there are two options for the weapon there. I turn to listings for those in Chapter 6: Gear and I see that the Rexim RXF-M5 EVA Pistol has less of a Bonus advantage than the M4A3 Service Pistol, but it’s also armor piercing. I choose the Rexim.

After looking at the other descriptions for the other gear options I have, I decide I’m going to pick the Seegson P-DAT.

SEEGSON P-DAT: A personal data tablet, a P-DAT can be synced with Spectrograph Mapping Devices, PDTs, and helmet cams to coordinate a team on the go.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 6: Gear – Page 132.

I write these down on the Gear section of my character sheet. I also write down the Rexim in the Weapons list and it’s stats on the character sheet.

For her signature item, I think that’s pretty obvious. Her locket.

SIGNATURE ITEM: In addition to your normal gear, you also have a signature item—a small item that’s not of much practical use, but that has sentimental value to you and that says something about your character. Signature items are usually tiny (see next page) and thus don’t encumber you at all. Common examples include a patch, a cap, or a photo of a loved one.
ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook – Chapter 2: Your Character – Page 33.

I write down “Locket of her father” in the Signature Item section on the character sheet.

Step 10: Roll for cash

Your career lists the formula to use when you roll for cash. For an Officer, this is 2D6x100. I roll 2D6 for a result of 5 and 1. On page 22 of the core rulebook it states “2D6 means you roll two D6 and add the results.“, so my result is 6. Multiply that by 100 and my starting cash is $600. Since page 33 lists cash in your starting gear, and it’s also listed in the Gear section of your career details, I write down $600 on the gear section of my character sheet.

Step 11: AI Details

This isn’t an official step. But it’s my custom step where I’m going to take everything we’ve come up with and feed it into ChatGPT and see what the results are, and possibly tweak it if I see something I don’t like, or it makes sense.

Also, I’m going to come up with Visuals for her using Midjourney.

ChatGPT

I use the following information and feed it into ChatGPT in my ALIEN RPG chat session I’ve established that contains everything we’ve done in this post series:

I’ve created the first of 5 characters I’m going to use in this first solo game of the ALIEN RPG. I want you to come up with a backstory for her.

Her name is Yuliana Petra Danailov, but her closest friends just call her “Yulz”.

She is in her early thirties.

She is an Officer, a space trucker captain who leads a crew of space truckers, individuals who transport cargo and passengers between colonies. Living on the edges of society and moving constantly, they have a unique perspective on the events unfolding in different colonies. She will serve as the voice of the average citizen in this universe. The ship she captains will be revealed when after I create the other characters.

For her Attributes, she is stronger in Empathy and Wits and slightly less strong in Strength and Agility with the following scores:

4 points on Empathy

4 points on Wits

3 points on Agility

3 points on Strength

Her Skills are as follows with higher points meaning she is stronger in that skill:

3 points on Command

2 points on Manipulation

1 point on Ranged Combat

1 point on Close Combat

1 point on Observation

1 point on Survival

1 point on Medical Aid

Her Talent is “Pull Rank” which means she can use her COMMAND skill to order other non-officer PCs and NPCs around, as long as they belong to the same organization as her. To force someone to follow her orders and perform a specific action, she rolls COMMAND against the target’s MANIPULATION. If successful, the target must follow her order, even if it means harm or danger to themselves. Her STRESS LEVEL increases by one each time she does this.

She generally has a Serious, Intense Expression on her face.

Her skin looks very tan. Her hair is dark and slightly curly, and a medium length.

She carries a locket given to her by her mother that has a picture of her father. Her father was also an Officer who went MIA along with his ship several years ago and is assumed deceased. This is her signature item. Her Personal Agenda is to return to the colony where she grew up, where her mother is buried to rest this locket at her mothers grave.

She carries a Rexim RXF-M5 EVA Pistol and Seegson Personal Data Tablet with her.

And the result we get is:

Yuliana Petra Danailov, affectionately known as “Yulz” to her close companions, was born into a life of hardship and uncertainty on the edges of the Frontier. The daughter of a revered space trucker captain, she followed in her father’s footsteps, enduring both the awe-inspiring wonders and relentless dangers of interstellar travel from an early age. Her father’s sudden disappearance, his ship vanishing without a trace years ago, only hardened her resolve to endure.

Strong-willed and incisive, Yuliana quickly proved her mettle as an officer. Despite her relatively young age, she earned the respect of her crew, demonstrating an innate knack for command coupled with an empathetic understanding of her crew’s concerns. The close-knit, nomadic lifestyle of space trucking gave her an unusual perspective on the unfolding events across different colonies, cementing her role as the representative voice of the average citizen amidst the corporate power plays and political upheavals of the universe.

Empathetic and shrewd, Yuliana’s natural gifts lie in her ability to intuit the intentions of others and act decisively when it matters most. Her physical strength and agility, although not her most formidable attributes, have been honed through years of laborious work in the weightless void of space.

Her skillset reflects the range of challenges she has faced throughout her life. From command and manipulation, needed to maintain order in the rough-and-tumble world of space trucking, to ranged combat and close combat, vital for self-defense in the lawless Frontier. She’s also adept at observation and survival, skills that have often meant the difference between life and death in the unforgiving emptiness of space.

The seriousness of her profession is reflected in Yuliana’s intense gaze, a look that rarely wavers, even in the face of danger. Her skin, tanned by the synthetic suns of various colonies, and her dark, slightly curly hair, mirror her hardy, resilient nature.

Yuliana’s most cherished possession is a locket handed down to her by her mother. The tiny photograph of her missing father nestled inside the locket serves as a constant reminder of the personal cost of her life on the Frontier. It’s a keepsake that’s become an integral part of her identity.

Driven by a sense of duty and the need for closure, Yuliana’s personal agenda is to one day return to the colony of her birth, where her mother is buried. She seeks to lay her father’s memory to rest by placing the locket on her mother’s grave, a symbolic gesture that she believes will help her make peace with her past.

Armed with her Rexim RXF-M5 EVA Pistol for protection and her Seegson Personal Data Tablet, a crucial tool for her duties as captain, Yuliana stands ready to face whatever the Frontier throws at her, all while holding onto the hope of fulfilling her deeply personal mission.

Not too shabby. I like it! There is nothing I want to tweak or change for now.

Midjourney

And now that we have a description for Yuliana Petra Danailov, let’s generate what she may look like.

I used the following prompt to generate these images:

/imagine <https://s.mj.run/UhZGK8TiYZc> Dark skinned woman on a space ship in the ALIEN universe. Ultra Realistic. --aspect 2:1

And here are the results:

Initial Character Description & Sheet

I created a full character page for Yuliana Petra Danailov that you can view by clicking here with her description and details.

And below is her initial character sheet:

It should be noted that the Relationships section was not filled in until after all the primary characters were created.

Bookkeeping

I finalize what I can for now on the character sheet for this player character. We’ll need to revisit this sheet once we’ve finished the other characters to list her Buddy and Rival. I created a character page for this character here to store her visualizations and character description for later reference.
I also update the page description that will provide information on all characters in this solo game here. We’ll update this page after each character is created.

Now we need to go create the other 4 characters for this solo game.

Till next time!

Resources Used

ALIEN – The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook.
Mythic Game Master Emulator Second Edition (MGME2E)
ChatGPT for generating a description of various elements as noted.
Midjourney for creating imagery.
Random Name Generator – Behind the Name for the characters name

Well… that was interesting: ALIEN RPG Solo Game 1 – Havoc Dawn: Session 0.2 – Character Creation Overview & PC 1