A few days into our 30-day campaign and we're off to a solid start, but still have some ground to cover before we lock in our funding for this project and the Onyx Path crew can begin working on taking this draft manuscript to a fully-developed complete game.
Please continue to spread the word in your social circles and on your social media, and let's see if we can't get this boiler fired up and get our war rig into action!
All backers have access to our first manuscript section, which covers the history and setting for this parallel world within the Trinity Continuum. Today, I want to get a sneak peek at some of the options for characters that are coming in the next draft manuscript section which will be available next Tuesday.
One quick note before we take a loot at this material - this is just a sample of the contents of this chapter, just to give us an idea of what we can expect. There's a lot more information and direction provided in the actual text, but this should be enough to get a conversation started!
Creating War Heroes
When you build a character in Trinity Continuum: Steam Wars, you are starting a story. It could be the story of a single person, their life, their adventures, and ultimately, their death. Or it could be a longer tale, of how a character and their steam rig crew saved a town, pushed back the enemy’s advance, took down a despotic power, and won the war for their countries. But you needn’t worry about such grandiose plans yet, because every character has an origin.
A player character is how a player engages with TC: Steam Wars. Players create player characters to act as avatars within the game world. The player makes decisions for the character and uses them to experience the rich environment available in the game. Character creation is the set of rules players follow to mechanically create the persona they use in the game. It adds flavor and depth to their character, informing them of what their character’s capabilities and weaknesses are. The first thing you should do is consider who your character is and what they do. This concept can be anything from a short blurb to an entire sentence describing who the character is and what they do, along with any special identifying features. A more specific concept helps when choosing or creating Paths and assigning points.
Role Path
This step and the next two involve choosing Paths for your character. Paths are a summation of your character’s life up until this point. They represent their training, upbringing, special skills, where they come from, and what was important to their development.
A character’s Role Path defines what function they serve aboard a steam rig crew, which is one of the most important choices. Choose a Role Path from one of the following options:
Captain
Engineer
Envoy
Gunner
Navigator
Pilot
Apply Components
Once you’ve chosen your Role path, apply the following components to your character sheet:
Assign six dots in Skills among any or all of the 3 Skills provided. No Skill can have more than five dots.
Assign one dot to every Attribute as a starting base. Then, assign 10 more dots in Attributes. These dots will be specific for the Attribute Arena listed. You cannot have more than five dots in any one Attribute.
Assign three dots to Path contacts. These dots can all be spent on one or spread across multiple contacts.
All Role Paths have Skills, Edges, and contacts suggested for players. Players can choose whichever of these traits they wish, however, in character creation. The only requirement for Edges is the character meets the prerequisite (where applicable).
Captain
No matter the military they serve in or the mission at hand, the captain is the rig’s commander and the figure to whom the other crew members answer. Generals and tacticians see war on maps, but captains are the commanding presence that take it on the actual battlefield. Their choices, orders, and capacity to coordinate vision and action are key to a rig’s success.
The role of captain comes with power and control over the rig and everyone aboard, but is also ripe with responsibility and pitfalls. Each captain walks a tightrope between camaraderie and tyranny. Some captains affirm their authority by maintaining a firm separations between crew and officers while installing a regime of rigid discipline. Others make a point to see their crew — and their rig — as brethren in arms. Good captains know that victory and survival in war come to those who know how to balance respect and ideals with the harsh truths of the conflict and what it demands to do. Great captains go even further, aware that someone in their role must know what to risk and what to save, no matter the sacrifice needed — be it even their own life.
Rig Relations
Captains are the face of the rig and the people most removed from its crew. Their role positions them above everyone else, meaning that a captain’s reach is filtered through chain of command and structure.
Most captains create strong connections with other officers and the people they have around them in the headcab. Having them within reach or in direct contact, captains know — and rely on — the piloting crew, the navigators, and the envoys. They maintain a relationship of mutual collaboration with positions such as head gunners and chief engineers, but the ranks often create a divide between headcab and rest of the rig.
Path Concepts
Father to his men, ambitious warmonger, inheritor of military legacy, leader from humble origins, aristocrat at war.
Skills: Artistry, Close Combat, Leadership Path Attributes: Mental 2, Physical 3, Social 5 Path Special: Gain +1 Enhancement on all Leadership actions. Additionally, once per session, you can substitute Leadership for any other Skill on actions thanks to the strength of your commanding attitude and role. Edges: Chain of Command, Going Down With The Ship, On Me, Order in the Chaos, Seasoned Officer, This is War Contacts: Friend from officer academy, wealthy relative, beloved mentor up the command chain, tailor
Chain of Command (•)
Role Prerequisite: Captain
It doesn’t necessarily matter what someone’s rank is if you can pull position or need. If you have a hierarchical advantage over someone, the Persuade Trick costs 1 less.
Going Down with the Ship (•••)
Losing your rig on the battlefield is the beginning of the end, but you still have time to give your men an advantage — even if it costs you your life. You can remove any combat rig status effect by taking an injury level.
Order in the Chaos (•)
In chaotic situations, you're cold as ice. If you’re under fire, amid screams, collapsing buildings, or in the midst of the Overstimulating area effect (p. XX), you gain +1 Enhancement to any action and suffer no Complications from the Overstimulating area effect.
Gunner
“In my position you soon learn you have a bigger weight on your back than expected, and you better have the shoulders to carry it. Sure, I’m good with a gun. Fist and saber too, or I wouldn’t have survived past my first boarding, and I can hold onto a railing when the rig takes a punch. But I’m also the one calling the shots when it’s time to attack or the one the crew looks up to for making sure they don’t return home in a casket. Forget the officers: you’re in this with the rest of the crew, whether to tell them what to really do or down a beer with when everything’s done.”
“What I do? I kill people, pure and simple. Now, I’m happy to beat some sense into whoever’s so stupid to say ours isn’t a grim job, but get to the bottom of it and things really are that simple. We’re all at war, it’s a matter of survival and duty. It’s just that those handing the weaponry like I do don’t have the luxury of looking at it from above or behind layers of thick steel. No, we aim, pull the trigger, and see clearly what that leads to. Hell, we hear and feel it too. Explosions, gunfire, heat, and screams are the gunner’s currency.”
We want YOU to be a Gunner!
The role of gunner is as much a vocation as it is something people are forged into. It takes the right kind of mentality to embrace a position as the most direct attacker and defender of a walking fortress, exposed more than anyone else to the heat of battles and the strikes of enemy rigs. Physical prowess represents a necessary requirement that gunners develop fast, given they need clean sight, precise hands, and the muscles to jump, climb, and hold tight. Combat and frontline deployment test all these elements; the people who pass through their fires become as strong as iron and proper gunner material. Those who don’t — and survive the experience — soon ask to be reassigned either through their own awareness or their crewmates’ insistence. An unfit soldier who insists on being a gunner requires a lot of luck to avoid the enemy’s bullets and bombs, let alone the ire of their own crewmates.
Gunners enjoy advantages for all the risks they take. Few would ever call these “benefits,” but small satisfactions are hard to refuse when serving on a rig. A gunner’s job is rough and dirty, but not thankless. Formal credit goes to captains and pilots most of the time, but brave gunners earn reputations of their own. This can’t be called “mystique,” but rather the exact opposite: people know the feats gunners achieve, and witness how a gunner is often the first to react, the one keeping control even in the direst situation, and the one whose directions and blows are responsible for saving so many people’s lives aboard.
Rank and Structure
Gunners all over the world tend to the weapons through which rig crews hold positions, defend resources, and attack the enemy.
Path Concepts
Demolitions artist, expert saboteur, forcibly recruited criminal, reluctant yet talented killer, scar-covered soldier with a mysterious past.
Skills: Athletics, Larceny, Ranged Combat Path Attributes: Mental 1, Physical 6, Social 3 Path Special: Gain a +1 Enhancement on all Ranged Combat actions. Additionally, once per session any weapon you use grants you +1 Power Advantage on an attack action. Edges: Cover Fire, In Your Own Time, Make Safe, Natural Gunner, Rapid Fire, Zero In Contacts: Special operations, drilling sergeant, local resistance, criminal underground
Cover Fire (•) to (•••)
You know how to cause a distraction, whether it’s a hail of bullets to keep your enemy’s head down (they can’t shoot you when they can’t see), or a well-placed explosion — you can keep eyes off of you or a teammate with ease. Gain Enhancement equal to your dots in this Edge on Mental Attribute actions dedicated to causing a distraction.
Make Safe (•••)
You’re renowned for your attunement to your war rig. You can always reroll the D10 for the Unstable Fuel rig status effect and take whichever of the two results you prefer.
Rapid Fire (•••)
Once per scene, when you succeed on a Ranged Combat attack, you gain the Shockwave Trick for 0 hits.
Pilot
“I was a kid when I saw my first rig. A small thing compared to what we use these days, one of the early models. Doesn’t matter, ever since that day all I wanted was to gain control of one. I don’t mean through ranks, nor orders: no, I mean piloting one. Lemme tell you I had to be a stubborn son of a bitch to get here: back when I started, the idea of handing a rig to someone like me was a dream. A nightmare, for some bastards. But I worked hard, accepted no shit, and earned my place. Now all those sacrifices paid off. Now when I move, a steel colossus moves with me.”
The pilot’s skills mark whoever wins or loses in the Steam Wars. The rest of the crew build conditions that the pilot turns into victory or defeat. Pilots capitalize on everything their rig represents and achieves. They move and strike, respond and push through, the small yet passionate human hand moving the immense but mindless one.
Aspiring pilots come in such large numbers that only few can make it to such lofty roles. People with authority or the proper connections see the role of pilot as a good position to reward friends and relatives with a coveted position. These “pilots” rarely last long, and pale in comparison to the real deal. Growing into the kind of person prepared to pilot a rig requires dedication, constant training, and the ability to maintain nerves of steel in the direst situations.
Rank and Structure
No matter their origin, history, or nationality, all pilots drive their rigs with masterful demonstrations of skill and willpower.
The Global Pilot
Pilots clash against conventions with the novelty of their role. There’s something in being the one that makes a steam-powered titan move that enables the rise of hellions and independent thinkers. This merges poorly with the structure of an organized army. All nations push back against this tendency, enforcing discipline with methods well-tested and new, but the tension remains.
Armies where respect for the chain of command is a strongly rooted tradition like Prussia, Britain, and Japan dedicate a significant amount of energy in the process of proper pilot training. The clash between established conventions and new drives feels especially harsh there.
Path Concepts
Rig-obsessed youngster, steam-powered modern knight, sober and cynical soldier, arrogant yet talented ace, son of a famous late pilot.
Skills: Athletics, Close Combat, Pilot Path Attributes: Mental 2, Physical 6, Social 2 Path Special: Gain a +1 Enhancement on Pilot actions. Additionally, once per session during a rig combat, you gain an Enhancement equal to the current steam dice pool on all your actions to pilot the rig or fight. The hits gathered from these Enhancements cannot be used to pay off steam Complications. Edges: Drilled Reflexes, Evaluating the Skirmish, Full Steam Ahead, Insubordination, Listen In!, Polemicist Contacts: Aviator friend, rival pilot, trusted mechanic, long-distance fan
Drilled Reflexes (••)
You know the drills like the back of your hand. The cost of the Critical Trick is 1 hit less.
Evaluating the Skirmish (••)
No combat is identical, but strategic review of what may have contributed to the outcome can provide insight and give you an advantage going forward. When you cite an encounter in a previous battle, gain +2 Enhancement for one action of your choice in the current operation with similar parameters or against a similar foe.
Insubordination (•)
When you ignore a direct order, you gain +1 Enhancement on your next action. If this action does not succeed, you may incur Minor to Moderate Social Complications from the person who issued the order, which if not resolved may result in a dressing down, or even a court martial.
We're gonna get a whole lot more about Role Paths - and all of character creation - on Tuesday, when we get our next big manuscript section. Backers will gain access to the complete draft manuscript, chapter by chapter each Tuesday, and we'll be able to read the entire book before any pledges are processed or payments collected at the end of this campaign.
You'll also be able to provide your feedback directly to the writers and developers, because backers make things better!
SO - join in if you haven't already, and spread the word if you're already a member of our crew. Let's get this project funded and power up the engines on our massive machine!
I'll have another sneak peek look at the manusript covering Alliance Paths coming before Tuesday. Does anybody have one their more interested in? Let me know in the comments and I'll prioritize getting sneak peeks at the top vote getters!
