Day 16th: Orange Glow at Dawn, Savage RIFTS

 Day 16th! I decided to go with a weirdo character to keep the week rolling, choosing to try my hand at Savage Worlds with the Rifts conversion! I never played RIFTS® or any Palladium Games game, but I've known about it for a while, so I picked up the Savage Worlds version when there was a reprint campaign a while back, getting my books a few months ago. I do also own most of the Nightbanes® book, but never played it either and frankly, I have a hard time believing anyone actually ever played it! Rolling a character in that was fun, at least until you get to the Skills and then it's just a miserable process of writing down insultingly low percentage of success in a ton of extremely niche skills you will never use anyway! The random tables are pretty fun though, at least in the first few books where the options are flavorful and combines in weird way, the more recent books have a lot of full transformation that are just boring. Oooh you now look like a stereotypical Fantasy Warrior, how horrific and mind blowing! Oooh get +2% in your Farming Skill at night, OooOooh! Such a waste of a fun concept.

Anyway, enough about Nightbane®, we're doing Savage RIFTS! This is only my second Savage World character ever and the GM ended up nuking the game before it got started, so I'm very much not confident that I made a character that even makes sense! It doesn't help that my Physical Book is in French and seems to be a slightly different version than the PDF in English that I also have, despite both being the Adventurer Edition. I think I managed to get a hold on the difference, though! When I came in the game, I knew I wanted to make a D-Bee, I had a visual of the character, but wasn't sure which Framework to take! Before deciding that, I looked up the rules to create a custom D-Bee and made it this morning before work. I decided that the character was a Sasquatch, or at least the basis for the legends, giving 2 rank of size as the free benefit, then a resistance to cold and weakness to heat because of her fur. Hopping back to the Savage Rifts guide, I took a bunch of Setting Specific hindrances. Tough I think she looks pretty close to a human, all the example D-Bee in the book had the D-Bee hindrance at -2, so I figured that was good enough for her too. I guess a -1 would be like an elf? Since the Sasquatch are huge and weird, I took a hefty penalty to using human-sized equipment and getting human treatment. With all those, I took a bonus to starting Strength and Vigor, night vision and extra toughness, representing thick fur and skin. Size also adds to toughness and strength maximum, so she's really tough and can potentially get crazy strong! I did not see a way to make her a MDC creature or give her Supernatural strength, but that's ok for this character. It's a bit of a shame though, Nightbanes become MDC creatures with Supernatural Strength when they go on Rifts Earth, it says so in Nightbane®.

Art by Yusttas on ych.commish.com

 Looking at the Frameworks, I though about making her a Wilderness Scout, the MARS people are pretty appealing to me actually, but I wanted her to be more about sword than guns! I know that's a weird take to bring into RIFTS® since that's all about the power armors and the list of nearly identical giant missile launchers! In the end, I went with a Mystic, her design have a few trapping that remind me of all these manga about Japanese exorcists in the last several year! Mystic are holy mage with psychic power on top, nothing that suggest a physical powerhouse, but the rest of the flavor is on point and they have access to a Smite spell! So I wrote down all the things the Framework gave me, chose my spells, chose my Psionic power, noted roughly how they worked, got my starting gear just cause it was on the way. With a better idea of what I needed stat and skill wise, I distributed my 5 stats point, then went back to pick hindrances, we can pick up to either two majors, on major and two minors or four minors. Looking back at the Mystic Complication, I worked with the assumption that the hindrance I get from it are fully apart, not giving me benefits in exchange, nor counting as my picks, but now I'm not sure. It does say I have to take a Code of Honor, Major Pacifist or Major Vow with no added benefit, but it doesn't say anything about being considered an Enemie of the Coalition or the True Federation of Magic! Oh and for the above I took a Major Vow that she must respect and obey the spirits in all thing, she's some sort of Animist Priest. In any case, I gave her a Code of Honor, Strong loyalty to her friend and she's illiterate, in exchange for even more Strength and some Agility.

 All that was left was rolling on The Hero's Journey tables! It does say we can just choose instead of rolling. Mystic get to roll on either Magical Gears or Experienced or Magical Talent table and then another roll on any tables but the Cybernetics table, as this is one of those setting where cybernetics hinders magical talents! I rolled on the Magical talents, getting an edge that lets me tire myself out to regain some PPE or ISP to power on my abilities. My armor also drains PPE or ISP to stay at full strength, so that's a pretty welcome ability! For the second roll, I just went to the close combat table and picked the first result so I could get my huge fuck-off swords. So I added said sword, a giant vibro-blade that I can wield one handed because I'm a 9' tall Sasquatch with d12 Strength. The final roll is on a Narrative hook table, I got 10 for Grudging Respect! There's someone out there that I keep running into on opposite side and we admire and respect each other despite the hostilities. Enemy to Lover arc? Or Vegeta arc? Probably a Coalition officer with more actual humanity than your usual Skull Nazi or a Federation of Magic Wizard, but I don't know the setting well enough to really choose something. It's a good start to work with a GM for some hook and backstory!

All that was left was the name and... I had no idea what a Sasquatch name could be? So I decided to go with a deep hippy name, playing around in my mind until I landed on "Orange Glow at Dawn". She'll probably end up getting called Glow or Dawn. For her backstory, I think she wanders around, surviving on her own, sometime being thrown around the Megaverse®. I think at some point she got taken in by some Onmyoji who taught her to harness her magical and psionic talents, but she was already spiritual and was attuned to the spirits in all thing already. With her power physique, she mostly honed her skill as a defender of the spirit and natural world, wandering the earth to fight all those Alien Intelligences and the Coalition disturbing the natural order with their skelebots and Skull-spider tanks, then there's all those wizard with no sense of right and wrong! Joining up with the Tomorrow Legion was only natural from there, as they seems the best hope for North America. Granted, she should probably be in Mexico fighting vampires, but it's way too hot down there.

I'm happy with the result, though I have no idea if the character actually fits in the setting! Granted, the whole point of RIFTS® as a setting is that absolutely anything can show up through a rift, so I guess I'm good. I'm still having some trouble wrapping my head around Savage Worlds, there's lot of moving part, but I don't hate it.