The newbie with the questions again. The tips I got in my last post are invaluable, thank you for that! Question for today: Has anyone Created/Gathered custom Origins or Careers?
I love the approach used here: http://tangent-zero.com/map_gen.htm of tagging planets with origins. This will be a great Starting point to get the creative juices going instead of a total blank slate.
I am looking for custom ones because… Currently there are a total of 15 Origins and 17 Careers (Including FBH) These numbers are horrible to roll. 🙂 I know many of you will probably find that weird, but as someone who loves OSR and it`s approach of randomly generating content I always try to get stuff in roll able tables. Especially since I am really not a very creative person while I prepare stuff, it comes super easy to me during play, but not in isolation in front of my monitor.
When it Comes to Careers I specifically miss a real “law man”. The clandestine works only for a certain subset, especially with his skills more geared to subterfuge and murder and less on investigation and tracking fugitives.
Double up on the items in the tables to make them d20 tables. Maybe primitive twice, industrial twice, things like that.
I’d actually probably take the strange origins and careers and put them on a secondary table you only hit if you roll a 20.
Huh, I hadn’t thought about ‘Police’ being a career, I’d been so distracted with the rest of the game. A ‘cop drama’s where some or all of the PCs are LEOs would be interesting.
Aaron Griffin Weighing is always an option I am already pondering with. I wanted to check if there is some stuff out there that may be of interest to add before I finalize my tables 🙂
Noah Doyle For some reason the first thing I think of is “Space Marshalls” in every Space Game. No idea why.
On the careers, there’s no LEO career because that’s an archetype. A beat cop might be Clandestine-Military, with a detective being Academic-Clandestine maybe.
Aaron Griffin That was my thought as well. But both careers, Clandestine and Academic are the only ones “kind of” fitting but they are fitting very badly in my opinion. For one, the advancements do not fit that archetype at all. On the skill front under Academic there is “Deduction” and under Clandestine “Surveillance” and “Interrogation”. All the other skills though do not really fit that role. 3 out of 10 is not great I feel. If I want to be the Archetype “Repairman” I choose Industrial and can use all of them. If I want to be a “Space Merc” I can make use of all the skills under Military. The divide between an “Archetype” and a “Career” is not so clear as well. As you say “beat cop” or “Detective” are Archetpyes, but I would say “Investigator” or similar could also be a Career. I appreciate the input!
Not every advancement fits every archetype. This is almost a true-ism across every RPG – you will almost never find a list of skills designed for a thing that match the specific guy you want to play. A smuggler (scoundrel-commercial) probably has no use for… “luxury” and the like.
Heck, I’d have a Smuggler (Scoundrel Commercial) take Luxury to show that he’s finally made it.
Yeah it’s like the retirement skill. I’d probably change archetypes at that point 🙂
Aaron Griffin I don’t want to go into a discussion on this here, I see your view but I feel UW still has some minute holes to be filled. It all depends on what is important to you. My primary question is for homemade origins or careers anyway and not one specific thing.
As a suggestion, perhaps filling the missing Origins (to make a nice round d20 roll) with the 4 non-humanoid Species types. Plus “Dead” as a fallen civilization. Like, if the Origins are 1-15, it could be
16: Robotic
17: Evolved
18: Xeno
19: Symbiotic
20: Dead
So you could have a Dead Privileged world, or a Symbiotic Productive world, or a Robotic Spiritual world, etc.
That is an excellent idea! Thank you Sean Gomes.