Character Generation

In Generation, you play one of the crew of the generation ship Asimov, travelling through interstellar space carrying humanity's last hope. You have grown up on the ship your entire life — as did your parents and their parents before them, stretching back to distant legends of Earth. You are one of the unique few selected for the Advanced Crew Training Programme — and it will be your job to lead the rest of the crew through the upcoming trials facing the ship.

To create your character, you'll want to come up with an idea of who you want to play. This can sometimes be the trickiest part — have a look through the various setting pages and see if anything takes your fancy, and think about what sort of things you might want to be involved with onboard the ship. If you need any advice feel free to contact the GM team and we'll do our best to help.

Once you've done so, you'll need to create them in the system; you can buy skills to represent your character's training and natural ability, and quirks to represent other aspects of your character. You'll then want to bring them to life by filling in the other details, like where they live and what their job is. Once you're done, send it to us and we'll give you a wiki account.

• You have 5 points to spend on skills and quirks.
• Each rank of a skill costs one point to buy.
• Each quirk also costs one point.
• Each flaw you take gives you an extra point to spend, up to a maximum of four extra points.
• You may take more than four flaws for roleplaying reasons if you so choose, but you will only get extra points for the first four.
• All points must be spent at character generation, or will be lost. None can be saved for later use.

See the Skills page for the full list of skills you may choose from.

• Your skills represent the abilities of your character, whether through natural ability or through extensive training.
• Skills enable you to carry out plans, though they don't necessarily make those plans more effective.
  • Higher ranks in a skill allow you to more reliably carry out more complex plans.
  • Attempting a difficult plan without the necessary skill ranks may result in complications and possibly failure.

• Each rank of a skill costs 1 point. Therefore:

• Being Competent at a skill costs 1 point.
• Being an Expert at a skill costs an additional point (2 points total).
• Being a Specialist in a skill costs a further additional point (3 points total). When you choose to become a specialist, you must choose a particular aspect of your chosen skill to which your specialism applies.
  • You may only ever be a specialist in a single skill, though you may spend additional points to gain addition specialisms within that skill. Choose carefully!
  • For example, someone specialising in the Medical skill might choose psychiatry or a cybernetics implantation, but could never specialise in Stealth or Engineering even if they were a expert in those skills.

• In addition, if you can get the Computer to help you, it will be able walk you through the use of basic skills — allowing you to be Competent at any skill when the Computer is able (and willing) to help, and you're not under pressure.

See the Quirks page for a list of quirks and flaws you may choose from.

• Quirks and Flaws represent some aspect of your character, assets, or character's relationships that doesn't fall under a skill.
• If you can think of a good Quirk or Flaw that isn't listed, feel free to contact the GM team — we may let you take it.
  • Positive Quirks cost 1 point.
  • Some Quirks are neutral and do not cost you any points.
  • Flaws give you additional points. For each flaw up to and including four that you take, you gain an extra point to spend on either skills or quirks.
• As mentioned above, you can take more than four flaws if you want to be GM fodder for roleplaying reasons, but you only receive extra points for the first four.

Everybody on the ship has a job and a place Computer has assigned for them to live (unless you have taken a quirk that explicitly states otherwise). Almost everyone at least pretends to support a football team.

• Please choose a department you work for from the Departments page. Different departments will give you access to different resources, but will also come with different responsibilities.
• Please choose a sector you live in from the Sectors page. Each sector has its own ethos and force of personality. There's almost always someone who will hate you just for where you live. We recommend players new to roleplaying pick a named sector as their home, rather than the Grey Sectors. This will give you more opportunities to interact with various plots.
• Choose a Null-Grav Football team to support. Usually you'll support a team based on which sector or department you're in, but sometimes people's loyalties lie elsewhere. You might support one of the big two teams, Red or Green, as well as your 'local' team.
  • Some people don't care about sports nearly as much as the Computer mandates they should. If you're one of these rebellious types, please let us know!

Many on board the ship have a set of ideals they subscribe to above and beyond their job and abode. The most common sets of ideals are represented by ship-board factions. A list of the more well-known factions is on the Factions page.

• Belonging to a Faction is optional, but we strongly recommend that players new to the society game join one.
• Belonging to more than one faction may result in conflicting instructions and hostility from one or more of your factions (depending on which ones) if you're caught with divided loyalties, but feel free to be in as many as you like.

• Naming a character can be the most difficult bit. There's no particular convention to names onboard the ship — sometimes people are named after their relatives, and sometimes they're named after words that their parents thought would be pretty. Sometimes the Computer even names children. Nicknames are common for people with popular (or terrible) names.
• Unless you have the Dynasty quirk, your surname (if you have one) is likely to be the name of your home sector, e.g. “Red”, “Green” or “Rainbow”.
• A background tell us what your character did before the game starts. A background can be as long or short as you like (and isn't mandatory, so don't worry if you don't have one). The GM team will be available to help you fit your background into the setting.
• Please let us know what your character's major goals are, if any (it's fine not to have any at the start, characters have a habit of picking them up in play).

When you're done, copy and paste the following into an email to gm@generation.chaosdeathfish.com.

Name:
Skills:
Quirks:
Department:
Sector:
Faction(s):
Football Team:
Goals:
Background:

Every 3–4 weeks, you will gain an additional point to spend on skills (not quirks). See Character Progression for details on when and how you may spend them. Briefly, however:

• Unless you're picking up a brand new skill, you can only advance a skill you have used.
• You don't need to devote actions to training (so please don't do it, it won't help you).
• You may only ever specialise in a single skill, though you may specialise multiple times within that skill.