Tag Archives: Character Creation Challenge 2025

Corey Marsh

Game: Conspiracy X (New Millennium Entertainment, 1996)

My Experience: Conspiracy X was one of the forerunners of what now feels like a late ’90s market saturation of X-Files-inspired TTRPGs. I grabbed it soon after it released, ran a campaign that lasted two to three sessions, and never did anything with it again. I own the later edition that runs on Eden Studios’ Unisystem engine, but, as is generally the case with this challenge, I’m using the original here.


Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset

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Ekundayo Temitope

Game: Trinity (White Wolf, 1998)

My Experience: I was an intern at the Wolf while Trinity – then titled Aeon – was in early development. I wasn’t in that compartment, but I knew it was coming, and I was hungry for it. Halloween weekend of ’98, I was in Dayton at a Halloween gathering with some friends I’d made on a chat server. We went out to hit a local game store and I saw the book sitting there. That was pretty much the end of the weekend for me. I feel in love instantly. Almost three decades of gaming later, Trinity remains the setting in which I’d most want to be a PC. My only opportunity to play it was a short-lived play-by-email game in which the developer, Andrew Bates, was also playing incognito. I’ve run it a few times, including one complete playthrough of the original published adventure trilogy. I was lucky enough to provide input on several supplements and freelance (not my best work, sadly) on the Player’s Guide right as the line’s first incarnation was wrapping up. When Onyx Path rebooted the line a few years ago, I scored several chunks of the core book and a couple of supplements (which I think are among my best work).


Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer

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Bánoy

Game: Aberrant (White Wolf Publishing, 1999)

My Experience: I was never a huge superhero aficionado, so I kinda slept on writing opportunities for Aberrant (and, if memory serves, I was busy with Vampire work at the time anyway). However, the WWGS freelance community at the time was smaller than it is today and somewhat well-coordinated, so I did get to do some playtest work, and ran a couple of pre-release demo games at the infamous Origins ’99.


Bánoy (Manuel Kidlat Salazar), Stormwhisperer

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Vera Rodriquez

Game: Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. (version 2.01 – R. Talsorian Games, 1993)

My Experience: Not as much as I’d like. I played in a couple of sessions of stuff Tracker7 ran in the late ’90s or early 2000s. I’ve tried once or twice to organize a play-by-post but never put in the sustained effort to get anything off the ground.


Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster

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Mercedes Cantrell

Game: Dark Conspiracy (GDW, 1991)

My Experience: Dark Conspiracy shares a game engine with several other GDW products, most notably the second edition of Twilight: 2000. Because of my T2k appreciation, I was primed for anything else in that neighborhood, so when DC released in ’91, I snapped it up pretty much immediately. I then flailed about for something to do with it. I wound up running a couple of unsuccessful sessions of it for my Boy Scout troop/gaming group, then shelved it for thirty-plus years. I’ve never gotten to play it – and, truth be told, I’ve never entirely gotten my head around precisely what sort of adventuring the designers intended PCs to accomplish within it.


Mercedes “Sadie” Cantrell, Two-Fisted Psychic

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Cutter

Game: Blue Planet (Biohazard Games/Fantasy Flight Games, 2000)

My Experience: I’ve adored Blue Planet since I first picked it up in the early 2000s; I may have mentioned it in that light a while ago. For all my adoration of the setting, I’m ashamed to say I’ve done very little with it. I did get into one convention game at Archon, but I was with a bunch of Zombie Squad dudes who were so hung on logistics that we never got out of the planning phase of the op (and for me, that’s saying something). I’ve run one or two one-shots over the years. My biggest problem with the setting is that it’s so wide open that I don’t want to close off possibilities by nailing down a campaign focus.


Cutter, Cetacean Salvage and Recovery Expert

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Aleksey Sokolov

Game: MechWarrior (third edition – FASA, 1999)

My Experience: I will admit to having owned the first two editions of MechWarrior, and even having built characters in them, but I can’t recall ever playing before third edition. Back in the day, Little Sister ran a somewhat hyperbolic campaign in which I and Methrys were the primary players. We may have invented the new war crime of planetary-scale psychological warfare.


Sao-shao Aleksey Sokolov, Electronic Warrior at Large

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Jared Ingram

Game: Stargate SG-1 (Alderac Entertainment Group, 2003)

My Experience: I’ve previously written about one of the best convention GMing experiences I’ve had. Subsequent to that, I ran a home campaign for about a year, maybe a year and a half, with the PCs as the members of the exploration-focused SG-17. On the freelance side, I wasn’t involved in core book work (I think I was busy cranking out words for Spycraft products at the time), but I contributed content or rules editing support to all of the following sourcebooks in the line.


Staff Sergeant Jared Ingram, Interstellar Weatherman

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Harbinger

Game: Shadowrun (third edition – FASA, 1998)

My Experience: My claim to playing Shadowrun‘s first edition hinges on the barest of technicalities. It was my second-ever play-by-post game (first honors go to Polis). I made a character and participated until the GM got so tired of our circular planning arguments that hostile NPCs rolled up and fired a rocket launcher into our not-so-safe safehouse. I spent much more time in a long-running campaign that Little Sister ran, starting with the Harlequin published adventure and continuing into the insect spirit outbreak; we started that one in second edition and converted into third about two-thirds of the way through the run. I also got some play time in a campaign Paladin ran before real-life commitments killed that one off. I’ve run a few one-shots and played in a couple more, and I’m always up for going back to the dawn of the Sixth Age.

I don’t typically get involved in edition wars, but for me, there were no editions of Shadowrun after third. The mechanical changes, the massive shifts in the setting, and the movement from cyberpunk to transhumanism all made the later games unrecognizable and unenjoyable for me.


Julien Yoshioka (“Harbinger”), Nocturnal Predator

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