Character: Malta

This is my character in the Ozcroft campaign.  I already went over her stats and career path in an earlier blog, so this is just extra details.

Full Name:
Malta Klonk

Home Planet:
Tanoose

Race:
Human

Gender:
Female

Age:
30

Crew Position:
Chief Engineer & Ship's Steward

Associates:
Baron Ozwald Haff (Employer), Dr. Melinda Warren (Personal Doctor), Dreya D'Nalor (Crewmate), Lord Kendrick Meadowcroft (Employer), M.C. "Jester" Slate (Crewmate)

Background:
Malta was once a really good student who showed a lot of promise, but her adult life has been filled with career-ending clumsy mistakes.  Her job as a field researcher ended when she almost crashed a research vessel into a moon.  A few years later she lost a job and her eye simultaneously, while running with scissors to help her boss on whom she had spilled coffee... let's just say it was a bad day.  (More specific details in the "Character Creation" blog.)  She is now the engineer for a trading ship called the "Unchaste Harlot", where she hopes to never run into anyone from her past.

Fixing the Jump Drive

Personality, Mannerisms, and Appearance:
Malta has a petite build.  She has black hair, which she keeps cut short (with her propensity for accidents, having long hair around engines would be asking for trouble).  She is missing her left eye, and wears an eye patch.  He has a tribal tattoo on her right bicep from her drifter years.  Malta is clumsy, and can often be seen tripping over her own feet or dropping things.  Despite her past failures, she has an optimistic personality.  When she think she is alone in the engine room, she often talks to the engines, which she considers to be her only true friends.

Nicole De Boer (I added the eye patch)

Creating the Character:
No beating around the bush here:  I rolled horribly.  I crashed and burned on three careers.  Major disaster, minor disaster, major disaster.  After losing an eye in the third career, I figured I would quit while I still had all my fingers.

We were asked to pick a TV celebrity to inspire our character, in order to flesh them out and give each other something to picture.  I had trouble finding one at first.  Someone in the group suggested Molly Shannon, but she wasn't quite what I was looking for.  Being the ship's engineer and picturing a somewhat bubbly personality, I was wanting something closer to Firefly's Kaylee... but I dismissed that for being a little too "on the nose" (many people already consider Traveller the "Firefly RPG").  It was my wife who finally suggested Nicole De Boer, and it clicked the second she said it.  Personality-wise, she's still probably a little bit Kaylee, or maybe Amy Wong from Futurama.

Miniature: Human Engineer (Star Wars - Dark Times #29)

Ozcroft: Interrogation

Stardate: 2012.08.18
GM: Rusty

The Crew:
Baron Ozwald Haff (Greg): Captain, Navigator
Dr. Melinda Warren (Star): Medical Officer
Dreya D'Nalor (Chere): Pilot
Lord Kendrick Meadowcroft (Ted): Purser
M.C. "Jester" Slate (Cliff): Pilot
Malta Klonk (Matt): Engineer, Steward

The Session:
Short session today.  When we left off, Jester was in the forest being chased by pygmies, and his professor companion had been eaten by a giant venus flytrap.  Jester managed to cut down the flytrap and free the professor, who fell unconscious from his injuries.  Jester then fired his weapon at the pygmies until the survivors fled.

Elsewhere in the forest, Kendrick and Ozwald called Jester again on the communicator.  They asked him to fire off a flare, and saw that Jester was about six miles away.  One long hike later, the foursome prepared to leave this strange jungle.  Ozwald opened the jack-in-the-box portal generator, and allowed the others to go through first.  As Ozwald tried to jump through the portal, a vine grabbed his leg.  He spent a few minutes cutting through the vines as the entire forest seemed to come alive.  Finally he freed himself and jumped through the portal.

The party finally reunited in the underwater dome, where we licked our wounds and headed back to the submarine.  On the way, we asked the professor more about this ancient research lab, the "toys" we saw, and the jungle.  He believed that the jungle was on Pscias 3, a planet 4 sectors away.  Jester in particular was very angry with the professor for all the trouble we'd been through, but the professor admonished us by saying, "Any idiot knows not to mess around with ancient technology."  Just for that, we charged him 100 credits for the sub ride back.

We reached the docks, and found our ship's boat surrounded by constables.  We were taken in to custody by the Malorative Society (the planet's colonizers) for a debriefing. Our interrogations required a few diplomacy rolls, and when those went badly we had to make endurance checks to resist torture.  Kendrick rolled so well that he was treated like royalty, while Jester had electric eels attached to places where eels should not be.  Malta proved surprisingly resistant to torture, to the point that we wonder what she does for fun in her spare time.

Finally they let us go.  We sold our submarine, making a tidy profit, and left the planet.  Next up, the Knorbes system.

Ozcroft: The Missing Jester

Stardate: 2012.08.11
GM: Rusty

The Crew:
Baron Ozwald Haff (Greg): Captain, Navigator
Dr. Melinda Warren (Star): Medical Officer
Dreya D'Nalor (Chere): Pilot
Lord Kendrick Meadowcroft (Ted): Purser
M.C. "Jester" Slate (Cliff): Pilot
Malta Klonk (Matt): Engineer, Steward

The Session:
The session began in the Heffry sector, where we bought some small vehicles to sell elsewhere.  Next we jumped to Forboldn, sold the vehicles, and bought a submarine (again to hopefully sell in the next sector).

Ozwald and Jester went out drinking, and were approached by a man offering them a moving job.  They were hired to deliver some lab equipment for a professor named Scrafandapalous Stephanopoulos Snuffaluffagus something-or-another.  Ozwald, being a bit of a layabout, paid some beggars to do his portion of the work.  When Jester, the professor, and the beggars reached the lab, Jester dropped a box.  The box started to vibrate, someone yelled "No!", and everything went black.

Ozwald went to the lab, but found the entire floor was empty.  He then started asking around town about Jester's whereabouts.  He found some of the beggars' friends, but they didn't have any useful information.  Meanwhile, Jester woke up to the sounds of chanting.  He was tied up, along with the professor and the beggars.  It appeared that they were about to get cooked by a primitive tribe.  He asked how they got here, and the professor answered, "You must have dropped the teleporter."

Ozwald let the rest of the crew know about Jester's disappearance.  We tried to contact Jester's communicator, but got no answer.  Then we took the ship's boat out to try contacting Jester from other points around the planet.  Still no luck.  We went and alerted the officials, who deputized Kendrick and modified our ship with some better sensors.  (We're supposed to give the sensors back once we find them.  We'll see.)  Unfortunately, the new equipment still couldn't locate Jester.

Next we went to the professor's apartment, raided his safe, and started reading his notes.  Apparently he had discovered some alien tech in the ocean.  So we unpacked our submarine, hired a sub pilot, and took it to the area the professor had indicated.  There, we found a large underwater dome.  After we docked, we found that gravity was reversed inside the dome.  The dome's corridors went in multiple directions, and gravity would orient itself based on the direction of the hallway.  There were several doors to choose from, which would open in an iris-pattern as we approached them.

Meanwhile, in the jungle, Jester untied himself and fired a warning shot at the tribal chief.  While the natives pondered his boomstick, Jester and the other prisoners ran for their lives. 

Back in the dome, we explored some of the rooms.  In one room we found some round mats on the walls, which we could sit on due to the room's manipulation of gravity.  In another room we saw some holes on the wall.  We theorized this might be some sort of alien restroom, and left quickly before Ozwald could experiment with them.  (Given Greg's tendency to discover perversity potential in the most innocuous of places, we didn't want to give him any obvious ammo.)

Down another corridor we saw a door that was wedged open.  The room was in shambles, with what looked like alien toys scattered on the floor.  Ozwald picked up what looked like a jack-in-the-box, and turned the crank.  When the lid opened, a bubble floated out.  Inside the bubble we could see a jungle.  We decided to check out one more room before examining the bubble box further.  In the final room we saw a large chair set in a gyroscope, with an attached helmet.  The helmet looked like it was designed to read brainwaves, but the sensors weren't located where they would be for a human.

Back in the toy room, we made the bubble appear again.  Wanting to see if it was a portal or just a viewscreen, Ozwald picked up a toy off the floor - a small "army man" shaped like a centaur - and threw it at the bubble.  The toy landed in the jungle, then turned into a real centaur, who ran off into the forest.  While Ozwald pondered this, Kendrick shoved him into the bubble.

Ozwald found himself standing in the jungle.  They threw in another centaur, and Ozwald tried to talk to it.  It wouldn't listen, and attacked Ozwald.  Ozzy drew his gun and blew the centaur's head off.  When it died, it turned back into a centaur, but with its head still gone.  Kendrick joined Ozwald in the jungle, while the rest of us stayed in the toy room.  They found that they could now reach Jester on the communicator, but they weren't close enough to hear each other's gunshots.

Meanwhile, Jester and the professor were still on the run from the natives.  The beggars had already been picked off, and the professor ran into a giant venus flytrap.  Jester started cutting the flytrap's stalk in hopes of freeing the professor.  And that's where we ended the session.

Ozcroft: Pilot Episode

Stardate: 2012.07.14
GM: Rusty

The Crew:
Baron Ozwald Haff (Greg): Captain, Navigator
Dr. Melinda Warren (Star): Medical Officer
Dreya D'Nalor (Chere): Pilot
Lord Kendrick Meadowcroft (Ted): Purser
M.C. "Jester" Slate (Cliff): Pilot
Malta Klonk (Matt): Engineer, Steward

Left to Right: Melinda, Ozwald, Jester, Princess, Dreya, Kendrick, Malta

The Session:
Today's game was basically "Adventures In Bookkeeping".  We met up at a bar in the Regina sector (yes, centuries in the future and the party still meets at the tavern), where cousins Ozwald and Kendrick hired on a crew for the cargo vessel "The Unchaste Harlot".  We spent a good deal of the session sorting who is responsible for what duties, which starting vehicles we would keep, and what sort of jobs we were going to take on.  The name of our company is Ozcroft (a combination of Ozwald and Meadowcroft).

While Kendrick looked for some cargo jobs, Dreya and Jester went attempted to visit Dreya's uncle.  Her uncle stood her up, apologizing in a message that explaining that he had to babysit some researchers.  Since he had paid for their meal in advance, Dreya and Jester sat down to enjoy the food.  There was a loud group at another table, annoying some of the patrons with their noise.  Jester exchanged insults with some of them, which escalated things until there was a full-scale bar brawl.  After the fight, some of the other scouts congratulated Jester, and he joined them for a drink.  One of them gave Jester a lead on some potential work.

Between Kendrick and Jester we ended up with two jobs.  In addition to general cargo shipping, we have taken on a data collection mission.  We are to visit as many worlds as we can, and scan them for all sorts of data, seek out new life and new civilizations, boldly going - wait, wrong show.  Once we had all the cargo loaded and destinations plotted, we jumped to the Hefry system.  There we scanned the planet, sold our cargo for a tidy profit, and gathered data from the locals.  At one point Malta was arrested for putting her foot in her mouth (figuratively), and Melinda bailed her out.

Next session we plan to jump to the Forboldn system.

"The Unchaste Harlot"

Afterthoughts:
This was my first time playing Traveller.  Not much happened in today's session, but that's because we're all still figuring things out.  Once we start streamlining things, the next sessions should have more meat to them.  Overall I still had a good time and look forward to seeing what happens next.

Back in college I played a lot of an online game called "JediMUD".  In JediMUD your stats were generated randomly, but you could reroll them five times.  Early on people would create a character, reroll five times, delete the character, make a new one, etc... until they had a character with lots of 18s.  Well, the designers didn't like that, so they made it so you can't reroll (or even see) your stats until level 5.  So now people just powerlevel to 5 (by following a higher level friend around) and still reroll/delete/recreate, it just takes a few minutes longer.

I think that's one of the reasons I've never liked randomly-generated stats.  You can give me all kinds of reasons to roll the dice during the game itself, and I'll be happy to oblige.  But when it comes to character creation, I'd generally rather use a balanced set of options that lets me create exactly the character I want to play.  Particularly in a high combat game, I feel it's unfair to marry some players to ineffective characters for an entire campaign.  Meanwhile other players at the same table are playing master swordsmen, just because they got lucky while rolling up their characters.

Gaming allows you to live another life for a while, and for some of us part of the fantasy is playing characters who are smarter/stronger/prettier than we are in real life.  I'm no longer a teenager with near-infinite time to play these games, so I'm not at the stage where characters are just disposable to me.  I look forward to the one day a week where I can live vicariously through my avatar, and it ruins the fun if I have to play a character I don't like.

But in Traveller, making your character is like part of the story.  I won't lie, I had some pretty bad die rolls during character creation, and now I'm committed to playing a clumsy weakling who can't walk and chew gum at the same time.  And...  I couldn't be happier. So far Malta is a pretty interesting character.  Granted, she didn't get to do much today so it's hard to really judge, but I think I'm going to like playing her.

Traveller: Character Creation

3/10/2012:
Our current D&D campaign only has a handful of sessions left, and we've been thinking about what to do next.  We've decided to play Traveller.  It's a sci-fi RPG with a flavor that has been compared to Firefly.  Today we planned to spend a couple of hours before our D&D session working on our upcoming Traveller characters.  However, time got away from us and we spent the entire session planning our party.

Traveller's character creation is quite different from what I'm used to.  You add to your career path in four-year increments, and at any point you can quit with what you've got, or add another four years to your background.  Depending on how well you roll, adding more to your background could give you more skills, starting money, and other benefits.  But you also risk getting in accidents resulting in lost limbs and other injuries.  So it's a bit of a gamble building an experienced character.  But we're lucky - in older editions you could actually die during character creation.

So we got the basics of character creation out of the way, though we still need to think about our characters' personalities and other fluffy details.  Looks like we have a noble, a marine, a scout, a pilot, a medic... and me.  My character doesn't excel at much, and will probably serve as the group's comic relief.  She chose three career paths - Scholar (Field Researcher), Drifter (Barbarian), and Citizen (Colonist).  All three ended with an accident.  As a result, she is missing an eye and has very low Strength and Dexterity scores. So I've decided my character is accident prone.

So here's what I'm looking at so far:

Name: Malta Klonk
Age: 30
Race: Human
Homeworld: Tanoose
Stats:
Str 1, Dex 2, End 8, Int 6, Edu 10, Soc 7
Skills:
Advocate 0, Comms 0, Computers 1, Diplomat 0, Engineer 2, Investigate 0, Medic 0, Phsyical Sciences 0, Sensors 1, Space Sciences 0, Stealth 1, Steward 0, Survival 0, Vacc Suit 0


 Career Path
1 (4 years): Scholar (Field Researcher), Accident: Nearly killed
2 (4 years): Drifter (Barbarian), Minor Accident: Lightly injured
3 (4 years): Citizen (Colonist), Accident: Lost eye

Early life:
Early on, Malta's parents noticed her propensity for tripping over her own feet and walking into walls, so they encouraged her to excel at non-physical activity.  Any time she tried to engage in exercise, they said, "Wouldn't you rather be on the computer than to go outdoors?"  Therefore she put all of her efforts into her studies at school. 

Career 1 (4 years): Scholar (Field Researcher), Accident: Nearly killed
Upon reaching adulthood, Malta joined the crew of a deep space research vessel, assigned to study space anomalies. A few years in, she became romantically involved with a fellow crew member.  The rotating duty roster meant that occasionally the two were assigned to man the bridge together while the rest of the crew slept.  One shift things got a bit amorous, and they made out in various locations around the bridge.  At one point Malta sat on one of the control panels, and somehow locked the ship into a collision course with a nearby moon.

The alarms woke up the rest of the crew, who rushed to the escape pods.  Malta herself also tried to get to a pod, but accidentally locked herself in a bathroom instead.  Meanwhile, her boyfriend stayed on the bridge and attempted to unlock the controls.  He managed to recover control with seconds to spare, but for Malta's career the damage had already been done.  For risking the lives of the crew, and the expense of recalling the escape pods, Malta was in a world of trouble.

She was thrown off the research team and blacklisted from similar projects.  Her boyfriend would have nothing more to do with her, and she was forever known as "that girl who can crash spaceships with her butt."  In some circles, the name "Klonk" is still used as derogatory slang, as in, "You really klonked up; get your head out of your klonk!"  With all her life's dreams crashing around her, she decided she needed a fresh start.

Career 2 (4 years): Drifter (Barbarian), Minor Accident: Lightly injured
Malta was now on the run from her embarrassing reputation, so she decided to go off the grid for a while.  On one planet she found a small society of people who were living as simply as possible.  They were aware of modern technology, but rejected it in favor of spiritualism and "the old ways".  Malta missed computers and indoor plumbing, but she couldn't deny it was a less stressful life.  She still wasn't particularly graceful, but the other villagers were tolerant of her bumbling antics.  Forgiveness was in their nature, and besides, how much damage could she really do without sophisticated machinery?

Well, over the next four years, they found out. It's hard to say exactly which accident led to her expulsion from the community.  It might have been when she accidentally she mixed the Town Elder's ceremonial staff in with the firewood.   But it's more likely because the fire she started with that staff also burned down the town hall.  But let's not dwell on particulars.  She was banished from the community, and took the next opportunity to leave the planet.

Career 3 (4 years): Citizen (Colonist), Accident: Lost eye
By this point her accident on the research station was nothing more than an urban legend.  She had the opportunity to throw in with a small colony attempting to seed a new world.  Malta was glad to see higher technology again, in an environment where her name wasn't a running joke.  She became the personal assistant to one of the colony leaders.  By being extra careful, she managed to get through the next few years without any major embarrassments.

And then she had one really bad day. First, she spilled coffee in her boss's lap.  While trying to help him, she somehow stapled his tie to his desk.  Unable to tear the fabric or remove the staple, her next thought was to cut off his tie.  She ran to the supply closet to grab some scissors, and in her rush to get back she forgot one of the first lessons most people learn in childhood...

She awoke in a Navy hospital ship, headed away from the colony.  She had lost her left eye, and had been asked not to return to the colony.  Now she's a drifter once again, looking for purpose in life.