Tag Archives: character concepts I’ll never get to play

Beep Boop Click Click Boom

When The Girl and I can get down to Atlanta for a holiday weekend, I always try to put together a one-shot for her old gaming group, running a system and setting they haven’t experienced before. To minimize churn before we get into playing, I usually provide pre-gens. About ten years ago, the New Year’s game of choice was Fantasy Flight’s edition of Star Wars, and I gave one of the group’s aerospace engineers a character that I’ve always wanted to run myself. This was a droid – an astromech chassis, to be precise – built into this game engine’s Engineer career, Saboteur specialization. Some excerpts from the character sheet:

Motivation: Crime. Built to sabotage and undermine, this droid takes a particular glee in doing this to government and corporate institutions rather than machinery. It’s not malicious on a personal level but it likes to test complex systems to destruction.

Motivation: Betrayal. When this droid attained full sapience, its crime syndicate masters decided to wipe it. This threat overrode its loyalty programming and it now seeks revenge on the underworld culture that was ready to so casually discard it.

Weapons and Armor: ion blaster (built-in); fusion cutter (built-in); 9-slot internal rotary launcher with cold beer x3, fragmentation grenade x3, stun grenade x3; malicious sense of humor

Personal Gear: long-range comlink; macrobinoculars; surveillance tagger; com jammer; electronic lock breaker; tool kit; mini-refrigerator

The player in question looked at this toolbox and just started giggling. Then he proceeded to absolutely own a Hutt-backed casino.

The punchline, though?

Sabotage commando droid built on an astromech chassis. Model number: R2-C4.

Aggressor

For Star Wars (any system, but preferably Fantasy Flight’s):

Another starfighter pilot concept. This one’s a human, an Imperial instructor pilot who defected with an early-model Interceptor. He’s still a starfighter pilot and still flying it, but for obvious reasons, he’s a better fit for an irregular unit (like the PCs’) than a fleet squadron. He may have done a tour as an aggressor pilot in a Rebel training unit, so he likely has an encyclopedic knowledge of the capabilities and flight dynamics of most of the galaxy’s common starfighter designs. For best effect, and because the Star Wars universe has always implied social status with accents, play him as a WWII British Spitfire or Hurricane pilot: upper-crust accent, unflappable, prone to understatement, immaculate hair and mustache, silk scarf, tongue like a razor if you get on his bad side. Tallyho, chaps!

His bird was from his training squadron, so it was fitted with ion cannons in place of the lasers (no sense in needlessly killing the cadets too early). Rebel techs have restored the original laser capability but the ion guns are in a shipping crate just in case they’re needed. He’s named the bird To Serve the Empire… in the same sense as To Serve Man. Add appropriate nose art…

Phantom

For Star Wars (any system, but preferably Fantasy Flight’s):

This pitch is for is an R2-series astromech droid starfighter pilot.

Yes, pilot. He flies an X-Wing or Y-Wing from the astromech socket. His organic partner was killed by a cockpit hit. He got the bird back to base at a time when the situation was so desperate that someone in authority let him keep flying. He’s steam-cleaned the gore out of the cockpit but otherwise left it gutted by the turbolaser hit (hey, not running life support means more power budget for shields). The starfighter is now painted in a monochrome version of the standard Rebel Alliance palette to make it look like an unmanned ghost fighter.

While the concept is wholly playable, the droid’s designation is the joke:

R2-F4.