Peter Newman
SOC-12
The cannibal, not that there is anything wrong with that [1], was played by me. I used DGP's Grand Census to randomly roll the customs of my characters (randomly rolled) homeworld. The first trait I got was cannibalism. I went to myself 'No, that's too weird, lets roll something else'. So I rolled again and got cannibalism on the second (of three) rolls. So I show the character sheet to Aramis and I have the randomly rolled customs of my home planet as 1) Eating Habbits - Cannibalistic, 2) Dressing Habits - Unusual clothes for all (always cover all their skin) and 3)Miscellaneous Custom - Unusual Sleep Period for all (daytime). He's, shall we say, a bit dubious about the cannibalism so he pulls out his copy of the book and rolls for a custom. He also rolls cannibalism.
Now the tables had 216 different customs on them so with 3 customs on my planet the odds were about 1.4% that I'd roll canibalism. The odds that I'd reroll it, and get it again were about 5,000 to one against. The odds that Aramis would then also roll it, IIRC and he only rolled once, were more than a million to one against. After all that, we went with it, and it seemed to work. I still remember the bit about how well 'marinated' the meat of the homeless alcoholic guy we acquired on Aramis (the planet), after his demise from natural causes of course - Murder is against Imperial Law after all, was. I labeled the leftovers as mine before I put them in the ships freeezer - how was I to know that the Vargr wouldn't pay attention to the label before eating it....
My characters homeworld, Dojodo - Spinward Marches (right next to Mora) had stats of C 512311-7. Given the low TL, low population corporate government, and trace atmosphere my conception of the planet was similar to Lunar Colonies depicted in 50's SF. I decided that they were very short on food, and 'recycling' only made sense. The planet also had a chirper population so I figured that Chirper was the other, other, other white meat to them, but that eating people was a sign of prosperity - as a well to do merchant it would have been tacky for me _not_ to eat human flesh sometimes if I didn't have to do anything that would have been illegal on my home planet or pay too much for it. The bits about always hiding all your skin and sleeping during the day I explained away as intended to help protect us from the radiation, since TL 7 doesn't have the best radiation shielding. I figured that the planet had once had a much thicker atmosphere, which had leaked off in the last 300,000 years, maybe as a result of the Final War. The Chirpers were the degenerate descendents of the Droyne population who all lived in a big pressurized underground cavern. Everything was fine until the humans showed up and enslaved, and sometimes ate, them. Since the system didn't have a gas giant I figured the class C starport and only town must be near some of the ice deposits which I figured were frozen atmosphere, as in Leiber classic 'A Pail Full of Air'.
[1] Well, yes there is something wrong with that, but as long as you cook it well and don't eat the brains you should probably be o.k.
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