Creating a retro science fiction adventure game - Part 3 - Characters
Design Diary - Character goals, motivations & names
Hi,
This is the third installment in design diary, where I design a roleplaying game inspired by the science fiction works of Jack Vance.
In the previous installment of this design diary we created the first version of a planet & culture generator, now it's time to look a bit more into what type of characters our retro sf adventure game will have, and what they will do.
Generator for characters:
character goals/quests/jobs
character types
characters names
A short warning, this article is kind of going everywhere, this basically follows my thought process while hacking together this game. Hope you enjoy it!
Looking at the source material
As a start I'll analyse some of the main characters, their mentors/sidekicks, their antagonists and their goals from the science fiction books of Jack Vance. This is not exhaustive list, but enough to be able to define some starting backgrounds and character goals.
Planet of adventure
Main character: Adam Reith, a single, very capable hero. More like classic planetary romance.
Sidekicks: Traz Onmale, a young, brash nomad and Ankhe at Afram Anacho, a talkative, flamboyant renegade (who still sees his previous alien masters as superior), and later love interest Zap 210, a young woman who's emotions were suppressed by her mandatory diet.
Antagonist: A different alien group in each of the 4 books. Not many of Vance's books have as much aliens as these.
Goal: Escape the planet
Ports of Call & Lurulu
Main character: Myron Tany, a talented young man, freshly graduated, eager to go to space
Mentors: After he is left stranded by his aunt, the crew of his new spaceship
Antagonist: Dame Hester (his aunt), but mainly her sycophants.
Goal: Mostly a picaresque story with short subplots, Myron does not have a major goal apart from seeing the universe.
The Cadwal Chronicles
Main character: Glawen Clattuc, a talented young man. We follow him through his graduation and his early career in Bureau B, the local police.
Mentors: Mainly his father, a senior Bureau B agent, but also Bodwyn Wook, the Bureau B director, and Eustace Chilke, the vagabond off-worlder pilot.
Sidekick: Wayness Tamm, his love interest.
Antagonist: Mainly his aunt & nephew, who are jealous of his status within the family (there is a maximum of 20 'indexed' people per family, and there might not be room for both Glawen and his nephew). Also the greater conspiracy threatening Cadwal, with his aunts sister at the top.
Goal: Find the murderer of his first girlfriend. Find the legendary Charter of Cadwal so it can be kept as a nature reserve.
The Demon Princes Series
Main character: Kirth Gersen, a man trained by his grandfather to exact revenge on five arch villains (the Demon Princes)
Sidekicks: Jehan Addels, his banker and reluctant confidant.
Contacts: Kirth is a former IPCC (space police) cop
Antagonists & goals: Kill the five arch villains who killed everyone in his home town.
Emphyrio
Main character: Ghyl Tarvoke, a young stubborn artisan
Mentor: His father Amiante
Antagonist: The rules of Halma
Goal: Revenge for his fathers death and finding out who is making money from the art he and his fellow artisans make (and some revolution thrown in).
Trullion
Main character: Glinnes Hulden, a retired soldier in the Whelm, the stellar navy combating starmenters (space pirates)
Mentor/sidekick: Akadie, a 'wise' man with peculiar philosophies.
Antagonist: Not a main one, but mostly a local, impoverished aristocrat Lord Gensifer.
Goal: Gain enough money to buy back the island his brother illegally sold.
Marune
Main character: Efraim, Kaiark of Scharrode, an amnesiac, who discovered he is an aristocrat in a very strict society
Sidekick: Matho Lorcas, an off-worlder
Antagonist: Other members of his aristocratic household, who wanted him out the way
Goal: Find out who he is, and later who poisoned him and why
Quick summaries
Night Lamp
Adoptee with amnesia tracks down his home planet.Galactic Effectuator
Miro Hetzel is an effectuator: a private investigator. These are classic detective stories (in spaaaaaace)
Wyst
Jantiff Ravensroke is a young artist who wins a prize to travel to Wyst. He learns about the culture, and in the end stumbles on a plot to replace the Connatic, the rules of numerous worlds.
Big Planet
The crashed crew of a spaceship from Earth tries to reach the Earth Enclave on the enormous Big Planet: a planet colonized by misfits, faddists & cultists. Picaresque early planetary fantasy. Later returned to in Showboat World, a later, farcical picaresque story.
Mask: Thaery
Jubal Droad, a (slightly arrogant) young man born into a minor noble house is recruited in the planets secret service. Plots concerning his family nicely tie into the major storyline.
Blue World
An earlier novel taking place on a single water planet. Sklar Hast grows tired of his conservative culture where all people worship giant sea creatures. He rebels.
The Durdane Series
In the first part, Gastel Etzwane, son of a prostitute and an anonymous musician travels the cantons of Shant: each with their own laws, governed in total by an anonymous hidden ruler, the Anome. He takes it on himself to defeat the Anome, as he sees the laws as unjust, and Shant in unprepared for an alien take over. Second two books move away from Shant and focus on combatting the aliens and are some of the lesser works of Vance.
Character types
We can divide these examples in two main categories that cover most of them:
Young adventurer
Often excels in studies, but not much world experience
Has one or more mentors
Sometimes a sidekick/romantic interest of similar age
Grizzled spaceman
Has a previous career:
Effectuator: crime solvers for a certain organisation (IPCC agent/weasel etc), or at least experience as such
Retired soldier/marine
Organization connection
Good fighting skills, lots of world experience
Often a sidekick who is less of a vagabond, or a weird poet/philosopher
Both of these character types share the fact that they don't fit in to the rigid cultures featured in a lot of Vance's novels or at the very least will question the status quo. Perfect for player characters!
As a start I'll probably define these two options, but we could introduce some kind of lifepath character creation. Might be fun!
Character motivation & goals
The books of Jack Vance have a tendency to go into the picaresque: there might be an overarching plot, but often the stories are a combination of shorter plots & hijinks. Sounds like a match in heaven for a tabletop roleplaying game, if you ask me.
My plan is to give every character an major motivation, but also offer some more concrete short term goals. Hopefully the combination of these two will emulate the wanted type of stories.
Motivation
This table will give each character their major motivation.
Revenge
Escape
Find their origin
Solving a mystery
Explore
Change the status quo
The motivations are broad on purpose. I'm still debating on how they could be filled in. Is it needed to have them more specified before starting play? A lot of Vancian characters have a clear purpose from the beginning of their story, while others slowly discover their world is not as they thought it would be and in the proces discover their own purpose.
There's basically three different methods I'm thinking off for fleshing out the general motivations:
Question prompts
Subtables
Leaving it open
Question prompts are something I use pretty heavily in my solo journaling games A Visit to San Sibilia & Hiria: the Eternal City. For different options you pick, or encounters you have, you get a list of open, but evocative questions you can pick and choose from. This might work pretty well for a solo player, but I'm not sure if this would work with multiple players (maybe if they have a common motivation, and go round the table answering the questions?)
I did some brainstorming for the option of subtables, but I'm not sure I can come up with enough interesting options, or at least, I'm also worried this method might exclude the cool stuff players would come up with themselves.
Revenge
Subtable of revenge for what, revenge on who?
Escape
Escape from where? Locations & situations.
Find their origin
Why don't they know it? Where they adopted, did they lose their memory?
Solving mysteries
Is there a single mystery to solve, or is the character a sleuth, motivated by puzzle?
Explore
Does this even need a subtable?
Change the status quo
Are they rebels, revolutionaries, or just malcontents?
The third option is to leave it open and only provide some very general oracle tables. This is the easiest for me as a game writer, but it feels like a distinct lack of scaffolding for payers.
Which option would you like the best as a player?
Short term goals/jobs
To kickstart adventures it's always a good to have a job or other short term goal next to the big overarching motivation. In a previous blogpost where I looked at solo procedures I also checked ways to randomly generate adventure hooks, usually in the form of jobs, missions or quests.
I will probably start with a simple set of tables like the one from Eco Mofos, and see if it suffices, otherwise I will expand them to a size comparable with Cloud Empress or Stravangante.
Character names
Characters need names! Mostly useful for creating NPCs on the fly, but as someone who is terrible with coming up with names on the spot, I love a good table filled with flavorful names I can just roll on.
Like I did in the previous post for planet names, I started with collecting a lot of character names from the novels to have source material on which to base the new names. Following the same procedure of feeding them into a Markov Chain Generator (which is not generative AI, but basically a statistical method creating similar words/sentences based on a dataset), and the curating the generated names to keep the ones that evoke Vancian names the best.
Markov Chain Generator
A Markov Chain generator is a simple probability based method to generate predictions, which can also be used to generate sentences or in this case words.
You feed your generator a list of names, and it just counts which letters follow combinations of other letters. So if your list is:
alpha
alpaca
it will see an 'a' is followed by an 'l' or 'c', but a 'p' might be followed 50/50 by an 'h' or an 'a'.
For generating words that make sense it usually helps to look what letters follows combinations of 2 or even 3 letters.
I used a Python library called markovify to write a script that can generate words based on a csv list of words.
If people are interested I can do a more in depth post about using Markov Chain generators to generate names for your games. Let me know in the comments!
Most characters have a simple name: just a first and last name. Some people have titles, and some people just go by a single name (the mad poet Navarth being a prime example). To account for the types of names I started by creating this table:
01-70 FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME
71-80 FIRST_NAME FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME
81-85 FIRST_NAME
86-90 LAST_NAME
91-95 TITLE LAST_NAME
96-100 TITLE FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME
You roll a d100, and then for each of the resulting components, you roll on the corresponding subtable.
The numbers are still to be tweaked after playtesting. I wanted to make sure the most regular is just a single first & last name, but maybe the other names are a bit too uncommon.
First Names
Vancian first names often resemble 'real' names. They all sound like plausible names: Ervan, Jerdian, Kirth, Bemus, Ghyl. Often one or two syllables, sometimes more for more extravagant names. Especially in his older books a dash of existing English names is combined with a more outlandish last name, so you might encounter a Jack, Hester or Mildred.
Here I ran into some issues with the Markov generation: when setting the prediction of the next letter based on just 1 or 2 characters the chance on gibberish gets pretty high, and when you set it higher, generated names tend to be quite a bit longer then the original name. To get some good results I had to do some runs on different settings and curate it A LOT. When curating I also wound up just adding and tweaking entries.
Antelin
Adar
Adelinnoc
Ailia
Ailkinnet
Altris
Amiaster
Amidie
Ankadios
Apole
Arth
Atta
Averdhra
Baney
Bannoc
Bante
Bodario
Bode
Bodelia
Bogan
Bunth
Buntrig
Buntry
Caffinnoc
Coness
Condrey
Dairdy
Dins
Dobbett
Duggardy
Dugo
Duisy
Endester
Errig
Estel
Eusz
Faderl
Fadias
Flia
Flon
Ganchen
Gastevan
Glayn
Gliannah
Glinnoc
Hance
Haness
Hess
Hessilo
Ifney
Jace
Jehary
Jodardy
Jodelys
Jodwynes
Jorl
Julinney
Kile
Kirde
Kirdhroop
Kiro
Kure
Lalu
Liliantry
Lorne
Lugg
Luggina
Luter
Madred
Milda
Mildrig
Miless
Mirdian
Moffin
Morl
Moulia
Muren
Narence
Nios
Orles
Ottel
Pogar
Pogg
Poonwitus
Salte
Schader
Sios
Skoor
Skornet
Thar
Tibberleg
Tinness
Tinnet
Udes
Uthea
Vallonwitz
Vion
Waynn
Wilia
Zhdel
I'm quite happy with this list, but since creating this list I've been adding more and more names to the source list of first names, so I might do another run with the generator to see if I can find some even better ones.
Some entries I didn't keep:
Caffinnoc
Caffinka
Gaggin
Gagmondelinne
Mouliondern
Omonessilo
Poop
Shirt
Spantry
Wabbin
Last Names
There are distinct phases in Vance's work. In his earlier works he stuck mostly to regular Anglosaxon names, while later he went more in the direction he used for the first names: making them sound like regular names without using a lot of actual names. I curated the list of names for the last name generator to contain mostly names from the second phase, as those are the more 'Vancian' names.
Addenbane
Asheyr
Ashgaven
Attledune
Audmarkin
Ballander
Ban Fal
Bandolph
Blan Brouty
Blarne
Borce-Top
Byzane
Carilleg
Casz
Chanshaw
Chig
Clagath
Clatz
Colph
Darcantfoy
De Faleby
Detter Yestlei
Diduc
Dorreronsi
Dwyn
Dydinger
Erlincuris
Etzels
Falt
Farlingwitch
Faus
Filke
Finnelstaff
Gassit-Darius
Gline
Gontwill
Grasgan-Gole
Grotesz
Gundali-Sri-Tanch
Guntillman
Hambalter
Harspiek
Harve
Hesphorner
Heth
Holderling
Hrostick
Ibramurous Tremboran
Jaganigatz
Jeck
Jiroulk
Knerwick
Lam Anacawany
Lan Blas
Lanaquisle
Lodwy
Lysidderson-See
Madice
Malagave
Maursty
Mirby
Miskins
Of Poulsant
Ollaverty
Orching
Pallemont-Faide
Pansig
Pomph
Pullish
Rohorray
Rolverty
Ruter
Scamy
Seriu-Ngone
Serloc
Stig
Swal
Tarabeston
Teesq
Thammatz
Thaw
The Magrave
Thoury
Thrumble
Ulsx
Underbee
Unsh
Unspitzel
Vedels
Vermould
Waldenfroe
Wart
Waunderwood
Widdersen
Witz
Woodking
Woof
Yamp
Yika
Zamm
Titles
Some occurring titles from the books. Some of these are more job descriptions then titles, so I might split it up into a 'proper' title and a job description table (which I can add to with regular functions like merchant, banker, pilot, etc.)
For playtest purposes this will probably suffice. It does not need to be a d100 table of course.
Arbiter
Arch-TITLE
Bailiff
Benchmaster
Brother/Sister
Cadet
Captain
Chief
Chief TITLE
Commander
Constable
Controller
Count/Countess
Curator
Dame
Damsel
Deacon
Didactor
Director
Discriminator
Doctor
Duke/Duchess
Effectuator
Guildmaster
Hierach
Hierophant
Intercessor
Lady/Lord
Madame
Marshal
Master TITLE
Nunciator
Overman
Panarch
Prince/Princess
Professor
Rector
Saint
Second TITLE
Sir
Superintendent
What's next?
This wraps a good portion of character creation, enough to start creating both players characters and non-player characters. It might be fun to add some extra adjectives or descriptors to be able to flesh out NPCs a bit more.
Roll up a character name, and post it in the comments!
Of course one thing is very much missing: actual character stats and play rules. Next installment I'll go into setting up the minimal required rules needed to actually start playing.
See you next one!