When I started playing the role-playing game Traveller with a group of middle school students, one of the first challenges to overcome was the creation of original characters and interesting new stories. You can only play for so long with characters named Solo, Skywalker, and Vader. Then, you must get creative.
What I am going to show you today are a passel of characters so creative, lame, and craptastic, that you will probably forever after have pity on those poor kids who chose to play the game with me.
Harry Scipio Strontium 90 was a space detective. He and his assistant, the dwarf Quark, were necessary to the game because player characters had a tendency to kill people, aliens, and destroy planets, routinely misusing the biggest and baddest weapons in the equipment handbook. He relentlessly pursued player characters and villains across space and time.
The Geomancer was a deep space explorer who mysteriously never took off his space suit. He bailed characters out of trouble when they invariably got marooned on airless asteroids, lost in dead space with no fuel for the starship, or imprisoned by cannibal plant people on an unexplored world. In the end, it turned out that his mysterious space suit was actually empty, containing only gas and radiation, and possibly an alien spirit-entity.
Mantis was actually a player character. The son of the high school science teacher was one of my most dedicated game players. He decided that he had to have an evil player character. He said to me, “Mr. B, we will make him secretly evil so that he does things that take the party into danger and betray them without their knowing. It will be fun as they try to figure out how to save themselves.” Now, Mantis was an alien super-scientist who had a very big head and small body, so he removed his own head and connected it to a large robotic body. He stood imposingly taller than all the other characters at eight and a half feet tall. His evil plots were initially rather lame and easily defeated. It didn’t take the players long to figure out that he was working against them, and he spent a considerable amount of time as a detached living head on the starship’s auxiliary control panel. He went through various penances and punishments, ultimately avoiding being flushed into space through the space toilet.
Susano initially started out as Mantis’ evil experiment. He was an enhanced clone with super powers and wings. He was super charming and likeable, but supposed to further Mantis’ evil agenda. They began to plot the take-over of entire planets like Djinnistan and Vilis. But the longer the game went on, the more he became a son to Mantis, and the more he influenced his scientist father to use his abilities for good. They would eventually help a band of rogues create a New Star League out of the ashes of the Third Imperium. Teacher’s kids are often the biggest pains in a classroom, but that tends to be because they know all the teacher tricks already and are invariably more creative than the average classroom clown. The last I heard from Mantis’ creator, he was an electrical engineer in Austin, Texas, and probably busy secretly planning to take over the world. Though hopefully he didn’t remove his own head as a first step.
That is only a small sampling of the characters we created for Traveller, but at more than 500 words already, I need to be saving the rest for another day.
So, what are Nebulons? Gyro Sinjarac on the left in the picture is an example from Aeroquest of a Nebulon. They are aliens who are human in every respect except for their blue skin. Interestingly they can even successfully interbreed with Earther humans. This is apparently due to either the evolution of Nebulons from Earther explorers, or, more likely, the galaxy being seeded with Earth humans and Earther DNA by the mysterious alien race known only as “the Ancients”. What is not debatable is that Nebulons have unique skin. The blue skin with high levels of natural copper sulfate in it has evolved as a protection from interstellar nebula radiation. No one who has learned their language and studied their culture has ever identified a planet of origin. Instead, the Nebulons have been a space-born race since humans first encountered them, travelling in their symbiotic space-whale space cruisers. They are a mysterious deep-space race of alien beings who use organic symbiotes, in other words, living creatures, as their pervasive technology.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
Catch a Falling Star 