Reading through the character gen rules, I decided to try my hand at creating a character.

Reading through the character gen rules, I decided to try my hand at creating a character. It was supposed to be a character I play in a Firefly game on rpol, a deckrat/cabin boy/mechanic sort of character. Going through the options, he turned out a little differently than I expected.

Name: Kyle Mitchell

Origin/Careers: Galactic Starfaring Industrialist

Archetype: Greasemonkey

Stats: Physique 0, Mettle +1, Expertise +2, Influence -1, Interface +1.

Skills: Tinker, Upgrade, Custom Flyer, Repair

Loadout: EVA Worksuit (Simple C2 Attire, vac Sealed with integrated Engineering Kit), Heavy Duty work overalls (Rugged C1 Attire with many pockets filled with tools and spare parts), Personal Hand Blaster (non-lethal Stun Pistol), Fire Star (Heavily modified C3 Speeder, Agile, Rugged and Sealed)

Rooms: Workshop, Shuttle Bay

Descriptions: Energetic, Grubby, Young

Personality: Strong willed, independently minded, in some ways Kyle is a typical teenager in that he doesn’t like being told to do something, especially if he doesn’t want to do it, and he isn’t shy of letting people know. However, earn his respect, and you’ll get a hard worker. Earning his trust is easy; don’t treat him like a kid. Don’t assume that just because he is young, he is stupid, especially when it comes to machines. Despite this, there are times when he just wants to goof off and be a kid for a bit.

Appearance: Young and fresh faced, no matter how many times he washes or showers, he seems to be perpetually covered in dirt or grease, especially when he’s had to do a major repair or go crawling through maintenance ducts. Kyle keeps his hair short, periodically hacking at it with a knife, so as not to get in his eyes when working. Baggy and hard wearing clothes, patched cargo pants and work boots. He wears a “swat-style” vest with dozens of pockets which contain tools, parts, memory chips and candy bars. Always seen with a pair of oversized headphones.

Background: Kyle Mitchell, fifteen, was born on board the space platform orbiting a newly colonised world of Progeon IV. That platform serviced the many terraforming outposts on the surface and acted as a central space port for all ships and shipments to and from the colony. Kyle’s father owned a workshop at the platforms space docks and specialised in minor repairs to visiting starships and maintaining the fleet of orbital transports that shuttled goods and people to and from the surface. From an early age, Kyle spent a lot of time in and around the workshop and soon learned the business end of hydrospanner.

By the time he was ten, he was competent and skilled enough to work unsupervised on repair jobs for clients. The fact that he was small enough to get in to even the tightest of crawl spaces certainly helped. Sadly, two years ago, Kyle’s father died in an EVA accident leaving young Kyle alone. Although the station authorities threatened to evict Kyle and send him away down to the surface outposts, a group of friendly captain’s who had come to know and trust the boy’s skill convinced them to let him stay and continue working in the workshop that now belonged to him.

The last two years have been hard for Kyle on his own, but he has survived and even been able to put a bit of money away for the future. He might not be the best known mechanic this side of the rim but he hopes his little side project will change all that. Six months ago, in lieu of credits, a transport captain whom Kyle had done some work for gave the boy an old beaten down Hyun Industries Mk4 Survey Scout. Stripped down and rebuilt as an in-system racer, Kyle hopes to proof his worth as an engineer by building the fastest ship in the sector and winning the Spinward Rim Cup.