I know there's some people who love brainstorming this sort of thing, it's about NPC biographies for a game.
We've got a Mass Effect backup game soon to start, provisionally titled "Spacebase", set in 2179 on a remote asteroid observation post. It's a hollowed-out rock which is used to monitor a pre-spaceflight civilisation on a water planet below. Originally found by an asari science team, they discovered Prothean relics as they explored, eventually realising those ancients had used the base for exactly the same purpose. The Prothean find has overtaken the original team - it's now a big deal with everyone wanting in on a piece of the archaeotech potential. After much negotiation with the Asari Republics (who stepped in to make it all official), the Systems Alliance have been granted access for a science team of their own to explore the base. Only a tiny proportion of the interior has been explored and catalogued so far, it's all early days.
That science team will comprise about ten specialists in various fields - archaeologists, biologists, linguists and so on. The team is led by one of the PCs, a Lieutenant Commander who's an engineer and scientist and veteran of virtually every conflict since the First Contact War. Supporting that science team, ensuring they can focus simply on their area of expertise and not mundance concerns like where the food is coming from or how to get equipment is a support team. Their Team Leader is another PC, my character, who is a Marine Gunnery Chief and biotic. We haven't decided yet whether he's there by special request of the Commander, or the military bureaucracy fouled up somehow, but he's a combat leader assigned to manage a team of tech support specialists. For added administrative tension, he's a Marine and they're all Navy (the Marines are a subordinate branch of the Navy in ME), and one (but only one or it'll get tedious) of the team really resents being put under a Marine. He may have been brevetted Operations Chief for this assignment so that he at least isn't outranked by anyone in the squad.
What I'd like people to put forward are ideas for that team. They'd comprise a name with a paragraph-long biography. They'll cover the following roles:
So that's five people, who should be Enlisted or NCOs (see ranks), though the Medical role might be a 2nd Lieutenant if they're a fully-qualified medical professional (though newly commissioned and inexperienced) rather than an experienced corpsman. I'd like to get a good mix of gender, ethnicity and nationality, also of origins (whether from Earth, the colonies or spaceborn).
The NPC setup is still slightly in flux, we may come up with another role entirely for my PC, which will mean we'd need a logistics officer (probably a 2nd Lieutenant) who'd be Team Leader instead.
This is a serious game, but colourful and comic stuff is allowed, just not outright silly. After all my character is deliberately being put in an absurd situation for the (OOC) laughs of the players. The best ideas will end up in the game (and you'll get to hear us as usual on our podcast site).
Here's my first attempt at one:
Name: Service Chief Lee Caruso
Role: Maintenance
Physical description: 6'4" tall and 230lbs. Caruso is a big, brawny guy who knows his size intimidates a lot of people, but also comes in handy doing his job. He has a mane of curly black hair as long as regulations will allow, a close-cropped beard, green eyes and olive skin.
Background: A son of miners from Zorya on the Ismar Frontier, Caruso spent much of his childhood repeatedly repairing equipment overcome by fungi and humidity, and taking pot-shots at the local wildlife. While he grew to excel at the former, he was never more than passable at the latter. His preferred approach for dealing with overly aggressive fauna was to hit it with a sufficiently heavy tool. Having no interest in meeting an early end to an industrial accident or from some tropical disease, he signed up with the Alliance not long after reaching adulthood. His technical aptitude served him well, his issues with authority, particularly taking orders from anyone he felt knew less than him, less so. In spite of numerous insubordination charges and having been demoted a couple of times, he's made Service Chief and appreciates the autonomy NCO rank gives him. As well as the right to boss servicemen around. He has a gift for both repair and jury-rigging low and high tech, but doesn't play so well with others when he's not in charge.
We've got a Mass Effect backup game soon to start, provisionally titled "Spacebase", set in 2179 on a remote asteroid observation post. It's a hollowed-out rock which is used to monitor a pre-spaceflight civilisation on a water planet below. Originally found by an asari science team, they discovered Prothean relics as they explored, eventually realising those ancients had used the base for exactly the same purpose. The Prothean find has overtaken the original team - it's now a big deal with everyone wanting in on a piece of the archaeotech potential. After much negotiation with the Asari Republics (who stepped in to make it all official), the Systems Alliance have been granted access for a science team of their own to explore the base. Only a tiny proportion of the interior has been explored and catalogued so far, it's all early days.
That science team will comprise about ten specialists in various fields - archaeologists, biologists, linguists and so on. The team is led by one of the PCs, a Lieutenant Commander who's an engineer and scientist and veteran of virtually every conflict since the First Contact War. Supporting that science team, ensuring they can focus simply on their area of expertise and not mundance concerns like where the food is coming from or how to get equipment is a support team. Their Team Leader is another PC, my character, who is a Marine Gunnery Chief and biotic. We haven't decided yet whether he's there by special request of the Commander, or the military bureaucracy fouled up somehow, but he's a combat leader assigned to manage a team of tech support specialists. For added administrative tension, he's a Marine and they're all Navy (the Marines are a subordinate branch of the Navy in ME), and one (but only one or it'll get tedious) of the team really resents being put under a Marine. He may have been brevetted Operations Chief for this assignment so that he at least isn't outranked by anyone in the squad.
What I'd like people to put forward are ideas for that team. They'd comprise a name with a paragraph-long biography. They'll cover the following roles:
- Maintenance
- Communications
- Logistics
- Medical
- Food Service
So that's five people, who should be Enlisted or NCOs (see ranks), though the Medical role might be a 2nd Lieutenant if they're a fully-qualified medical professional (though newly commissioned and inexperienced) rather than an experienced corpsman. I'd like to get a good mix of gender, ethnicity and nationality, also of origins (whether from Earth, the colonies or spaceborn).
The NPC setup is still slightly in flux, we may come up with another role entirely for my PC, which will mean we'd need a logistics officer (probably a 2nd Lieutenant) who'd be Team Leader instead.
This is a serious game, but colourful and comic stuff is allowed, just not outright silly. After all my character is deliberately being put in an absurd situation for the (OOC) laughs of the players. The best ideas will end up in the game (and you'll get to hear us as usual on our podcast site).
Here's my first attempt at one:
Name: Service Chief Lee Caruso
Role: Maintenance
Physical description: 6'4" tall and 230lbs. Caruso is a big, brawny guy who knows his size intimidates a lot of people, but also comes in handy doing his job. He has a mane of curly black hair as long as regulations will allow, a close-cropped beard, green eyes and olive skin.
Background: A son of miners from Zorya on the Ismar Frontier, Caruso spent much of his childhood repeatedly repairing equipment overcome by fungi and humidity, and taking pot-shots at the local wildlife. While he grew to excel at the former, he was never more than passable at the latter. His preferred approach for dealing with overly aggressive fauna was to hit it with a sufficiently heavy tool. Having no interest in meeting an early end to an industrial accident or from some tropical disease, he signed up with the Alliance not long after reaching adulthood. His technical aptitude served him well, his issues with authority, particularly taking orders from anyone he felt knew less than him, less so. In spite of numerous insubordination charges and having been demoted a couple of times, he's made Service Chief and appreciates the autonomy NCO rank gives him. As well as the right to boss servicemen around. He has a gift for both repair and jury-rigging low and high tech, but doesn't play so well with others when he's not in charge.
[Mass Effect/Fluff] Help me populate a Systems Alliance support squad
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