Random Mothership Characters (The RIG 2.0)

18 August 2020 ☼ Mothership

In between working on other things, I’ve been doing second passes at some of the older systems I’ve pieced together for Mothership over the last year or so. A couple weeks ago, it was my Debt rules. This week, it’s my Traveller-esque random character generator.

I had a few goals with this redesign…

• I wanted to fit everything on a single printable sheet. Sure, people are playing with physical copies of things way less in these Unprecedented Times, but I figured it was a good constraint as far as keeping the rules tight.
• I wanted to pull the generator closer to the original Traveller rules. My first take was honestly closer to the Mongoose Traveller rules than anything. I eventually zeroed in on the limited set of careers found in the original Traveller Book 1, and am happy with what I came up with here.
• I wanted to try laying things out. For a first try at this sort of thing, I think it looks pretty good! It took most of an evening to nudge into place, however, so this is clearly something I could stand to get quicker at.

In any case, here’s the final product!

I had a little space left, so I was able to squeeze in some rules for quick and dirty random mercenary generation, along with a recommendation for turning a mercenary into a PC on the fly. You know, in case someone gets hurt. I’m sure that won’t happen.

And that’s it! If you end up giving these rules a try, please let me know what you think!