Day 27th: Angel the Lost, Fe Borg

Welcome back to day 27th of the character creation challenge! The end is so near! I'm very tired today, so I plan to keep it short. Let's see if I manage it this time! I was initially planning to do another D&D 5e character based on art I got, an Aarakocra Monk, but I just could work out the enthusiast for it and I wanted to showcase some more system. I may not have gone all unique system each day this year, but it's still better to at least share some system with people who may not know them! I went with A Couple of Drakes' Fe Borg, a game inspired by Mork Borg as you could probably tell by the title! This means it's based on rolling a d20 to meet a number, but the numbers are low, you can lose stats on level up, the book is mostly random tables and arts, some of it is so stylized to be barely legible and it doesn't really stop to really explain itself, relying more on vibe than anything. Rather than playing some morally bankrupts rat fucks at the end of time, though, we're playing weird little freaks stuck in the world of fairies as the Black Priests of the Hanged God are coming to shut if off and kill magic. Pretty flavorful, this is pretty much the only Borg game that actually caught my interest! I did back the Legacy of Kain TTRPG, but I've been lowkey regretting it ever since, not helped by them happily declaring some time later that they would add playable vampire as a stretch goal, which is a bit if Vampire the Masquarade had a kickstarter and playing a vampire was just a stretch goal. Wild.

 Anyway, I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised, but we're here for Fe Borg! Even the character sheet is full of style, though maybe a bit too much at the cost of substance as there's no actual field for the attributes or most of the things we randomly roll. Most of the sheet seems to be given to enter Fae Scrolls that we can get, for some reason. The Character Sheet is also not in the book anywhere that I can tell, only being available on A Couple of Drakes' itch.io page. Moving on, let's create this fella, shall we? Instead of starting off by rolling the attribute and hope we get something that works, we begin by choosing our "class", essentially explaining how we ended up in here. The options are thing like The Stolen Child, The Warrior-Poet, The Ironbound Fey and Pope Julius the 2nd, oozing with the style of the game. I went with The True Druid. The game doesn't really explain what that is, but from getting to roll a d6 table called the old ways and the strange abilities I can choose from, I'm getting that I'm some sort of pagan weirdo clinging to a sort of placating worship of the Fae and the natural world. The game tells us "Oak, Ash and Thorn" as justification for rolling 3d6+1 for Presence and Toughness, but also "Habitually Undernourished" before making us roll 3d6-2 for Strength. There's also Agility, so I rolled 3d6 for that one. They do say we can also roll 4d6 drop low or 4d6 drop high if we want, I assume I'd add the +1 and -2 after dropping the extra dice in that case, but I just went 3d6. They do say we can swap one set of attribute, I'm not sure if that's before or after the bonus and penalties from the various class! It wouldn't change anything here tho, I roll very average for everything except a 15 for Agility, which I swap for presence. Like it was for Fantasy AGE, the number rolls seems to only exist to create a bellcurve and the actual scores go from -3 to +6.

I threw my +2 to presence as I knew I wanted the Horrifying Rebirth ability, letting me roll Presence vs Morale to take over an opponent with all their ability, with a further test every hour to maintain it or until I choose to end it, bursting out of the opponent like a Xenomorph, fully healed. I'm not sure if the "fall into unbreakable sleep for a hour on a failure" refers only to the initial roll to take over the target or if I go "Bwwwwaaaa" as I explode out of a guy, killing him instantly and then I just fall face first into the gore for a long nap. In any case, gnarly! After this one choice, it's back to the random roll mine for us, my way of respecting the old ways is to "remember the names of the dead, bear them with care. Carve them where they will never be forgotten." My initial understanding is I should be carving it into my skin like Zsasz from Batman, but that fades, so maybe in rocks instead? HP is 1d8+toughness, luckily I rolled a 6! For carrying capacity, we get 8+str reasonably sized item we can carry and a d6 roll for a container for our gear. I get another 6, giving me a mule with bags for 14 item on top of my 8! I end up with 3 day worth of food, 3 day worth of water in a waterskin and 60 silver coins on a 2d6x10 rolls. Not too shabby! We then get to roll a d10 and d4 for weapon and armor, halved if we start with a scroll. I don't, so I roll the standard, getting a 3 and a 4! My weapon is a Whip dealing d4 damage, which I guess is thematic for a druid, but that's going to be hard to carve names with it! My armor is Heavy, so I'm a nasty little druid guy jumping into people body, but in a full plate. Sure, why not. Armor does not make you harder to hit in this system, seems to be the exact opposite actually with me getting +4 difficulty on Agility test, but reducing damage by 1d6. In an actual game, I'd maybe offer to swap with another player for the armor, light or no armor makes more sense in my minds eye. My other starting equipment end up being 1 singular torch and a Spyglass.

I'm starting to think my guy is a bit of a poser, going around talking about being a True Druid, but still wearing full plate armor with a pretty modern little trinket! We're already at the finishing touch with that and I discover that the plain text pdf I was using had less option for the random tables in those section! We get to pick a True Name and a Nickname we use in the Otherworld so as to not reveal and lose our True Name, but the games offer us to roll on 4 tables to generate all that. The actual books is d8s, but the plain text was d6s! In any case, I'm Keiran Cambra, but I use Angel the Lost as my name. Angel is kind of a weird pick and how lost can I be with that cool spyglass? By the way, it gives +1 to Presence when searching thing, so it's pretty good for our Druid. We also get to roll some physical feature, I get Hair like Pitch, Eyes like Fires and Looks like Trouble, which seems quite fair! There's also an extra table that wasn't in the plain text pdf, so let's roll one more d6...4, I got a single cloven hoof! Sure, that's more druidcore than the full plate!