a little help with some npc's

[jaggeh_ie]

My players have just freed a pirate slaver vessel, but their own ship is pretty much a paperweight now (they dont know this yet)

I need a bunch of npc's fleshed out, now although they rescued 75, i only need to flesh out their crew to man this new ship
at the moment we have
2 capital/small vessel pilots (one of which is away from the game)
1 fighter/shuttle pilot/gunner
1 remote ops/sensor operator
1 ships engineer/robotics specialist
1 Security specialist
1 mechanic/weapon engineer
1 Passenger (ex spec ops, currently hiring mercs for a guerilla war)
1 Captain (pretty much useless at anything except computers so he got the seat)
NPC's on board
1 Syndicate underboss (syndicate cell destroyed)
3 assistants for the weapon engineer
1 rickity robot the engineer has been tinkering with for the last year.

Im looking for a couple of crew to fill out the requirements for a full compliment on an 1800dt ship.

I have no experience making non-terran/solomani characters so this is where i need help. Among the slaves are vargyr, vegans, villani, a couple of aslan.

any help is appreciated

 

[Xenon]

okay, two main points here- first, these freed slaves are people who have undergone serious trauma. a few are probably wounded, and many will likely have psychological scars, maybe PTSD. decide who has the worst of it, and maybe have them make an endurance test when under stress to see if they snap.

secondly, how these people interact with one another will be a key issue. if guy A was a snitch who brown-nosed the slavers for extra food, then someone will probably try to hurt him.

now on other npcs... maybe throw in a weak psionic, that the slavers kept drugged or frozen? and dont forget the option of minor races not detailed in the books, you can simply make up a weird primitive race to add in if it fits the story you want to tell.

 

[pendragonman]

Also, npcs don't have to have a full set of stats or a fully developed career path.

As you need, decide who has what stat for whatever comes up. Same with skills, figure out as necessary if a particular NPC would have a particular skill or not.

You need not worry about fully mapping them out unless one of them becomes a major NPC or full fledged member of the party that some new player just took over. Until then, wing it.

MOARN is the word here. Map Only As Really Necessary.

 

[Shonner]

I need a bunch of npc's fleshed out, now although they rescued 75, i only need to flesh out their crew to man this new ship

You want them fleshed out. But only to man the ship?

 

[jaggeh_ie]

the idea was to only flesh out the 5 or 6 extra crewers required to fully man the ship they find themselves on, but also to throw in something alien for them.

imtu mankind has literally just encountered aliens in the last couple of years and the terran/imperium war is just kicking off. so the players in particular have seen vargyr and villani but none others until recently.

 

[Easterner9504]

The most common aliens on Rim would be Vegan's, Chirpers & Droyne. Vargr would be rare unless your deep into 1st Imperium territory. Geonee would also be rare but very interested in Terran's.

I use 10,001 characters for quick NPC's. I flesh out their ZERO skills if needed and roll events if needed.

My favorite is to push PDF slider up and down and pick at random. Example I needed characters at beach hotel. Up came a Hiver and a gambler. Needed two bikini clad girls and up came the two females aboard the A2 Hotshot. I rejected several criminal types.

Another technique is to use GDW COTI and flesh out if needed. Another source of pre-gens is Spica Publishings three career books that stands as a worthy successor to COTI.

 

[jaggeh_ie]

i settled on rolling up a vegan interpreter, an aslan scientist and a vargyr engineer. IMTU the villani use Vargr as slaves and small enclaves are present further south.

They decided to wake one of the vargr from stasis. a random roll determined it was the engineer. he was immediatly distrustful of these strange smelling villani who spoke a different language.

ill do several more chargens this week as they finally get around to deciding to wake more.

on a side note, how can i stop my players from deciding everything through committee, we constantly joke about the crew requiring meetings to do everything.