Feng Shui (the roleplaying game) describes itself as an Action Movie Roleplaying Game.
This means that this game is entirely built around the cinematic action game rather than attempting to emulate anything like real life.

The world of Feng Shui involves time travel to give you 4 main tech and magic settings.

You have 69AD (mostly China), 1850s, Contemporary (i.e. present) and 2056.

69AD is high magic China, ogres and demons roam the countryside and China is secretly ruled by demon-summoning Eunuchs call the The Eaters of the Lotus.

1850s and the present are low magic and secretly controlled by a conspiracy of transformed animals called The Ascended, that are deliberately supressing magic because high magic levels would return them to their animal forms forever.

2056 is utterly controlled by the Architects of the Flesh and the Buro which control the world and attempt to make the world a single monoculture, right down to attempting to eliminate racism by making everyone the same colour (how? Penalise people who many others of the same racial background).

These time periods are linked by the Netherworld, a strange series of tunnels and wide caves (complete with an ocean) which can be molded by its inhabitants.

The key to power in the world of Feng Shui is its namesake. The geomantic art of Feng Shui determines fortunes in the world, if one controls and is attuned to sites of powerfully good Feng Shui events naturally flow to their favour, if they are a crime boss, their enemies will naturally fall for ruses and raid your warehouse the day after you moved your goods and your boys will manage to get their stuff by chancing upon attacking their stores just as their defences are down.

Those who control the most Feng Shui are able to control various aspects of the world including the power of magic and technology. (Hence how the Ascended can keep down magic).

Character creation in Feng Shui is remarkably simple, one simply picks one of the archetypes from the various sourcebooks, goes through the short, archetype dependant customization process, picks guns/spells/fu schticks and comes up with a name and melodramatic hook that pulls them into the plot.

For this I have decided to create an Old Master, I'll have him come from the present.

Attributes:

Bod: =4 (cannot change this at chargen)
Chi: =10 (Fortune =0)
Mnd: 6
Ref: 8

Skills:
Info/Calligraphy +5 (11)
Info/Chinese Painting +4 (10)
Info/Chinese Philosophy +7 (13)
Info/Chinese Poetry +7 (13)
Info/Noodle Making +5 (11)
Leadership +2 (8)
Martial Arts +8 (=16) (My martial arts skill was actually REDUCED from default due to increasing reflexes, since the final stat+skill must =16 at chargen, this is to make everyones combat abilities set by archetype)

Schticks: 5 fu Schticks, fu Schticks are done in trees, so I have decided to use the The Path of the Broken Island path from Blowing Up Hong Kong for most of my fu schticks
- Fist of Disharmony Chi: 1*/Shots: 2
- Typhoon Season Strike Chi: X/Shots: 3
- Angry Mountain Chi: 5 + X/Shots: 3

My last 2 I shall grab from another tree, Path of the Passive Wings
- Crane Stance Chi: 1/Shots: 1
- Wing of the Crane Chi:2/Shots: 1

This guy does a lot of property destruction, and it was tempting to get the next schtick in the PotBI chain which lets him to destroy a vehicle with a punch or a kick straight off, but Angry Mountain is an area effect knockdown type attack with stuff based on strength, which old masters are fairly low on (Str being a substat of Bod), but Wing of the Crane lets him substitute his Str with his Chi on tests for a while, which gives it a significant boost.

Now, all we need is a name and a hook.

We shall name him Angry Chen.

And for a hook, well Path of the Broken Island is taught only by monks from a remote monastery on a volcanic island to the east of HK's SAR, who only head into HK once a month for supplies. So his brief background will be:
When visiting his grand-nephew and gathering the monthly supplies, his grand nephew was gunned down in the street.

Making the hook: Finding his grand-nephew's killer.

Sadly Feng Shui lacks an errata or FAQ and is mostly out of print so if anyone wants to point out any chargen mistakes, please go ahead.

Tags: character generation, create a character, feng shui

Iron heroes

Iron heroes is a low magic d20 variant, where the core classes are amped up considerably, but magic is rare, and magic always has a price.

This has a side effect of basically removing the wealth by level guidelines since, after all of your stuff is masterwork and you have a decent horse, who the hell cares? Start buying land and make yourself a lord or something

Money merely becomes a plot hook and way of keeping score

In Iron Heroes, all players abilities start out at 10, and they have 24 points which they can spend, in the standard, <15 - 1:1, < 17 2:1, <19 3:1 set up.

To make things easy they also just give precalced spreads, such as Standard, which is 16, 16, 14, 14, 12, 10 or Jack of All Trades, which are flat 14s.

My plan here is to make a harrier (ultra mobile spring attacking fighter), and I think I will start with a Standard layout

Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha
16 16 14 12 14 10

The next step is to pick traits, which are the Iron Heroes equivalent of races. As this is a low-magic setting, non-humans are not really part of the playable races by default, it would take only minor effort to convert them. The flavour is made up by allowing backgrounds to have mechanical influence on a character's abilities. Up to one trait can go into background, one or both traits can be spent on mental or physical aspects.

Because I intend to be a dodgy bastard, I shall take dextrous as one trait, which gives me +2 Dex, -2 Con

As for other traits, I was considering getting the Lithe Acrobat one, but on closer reflection it would seem I pretty much get that ability from being a harrier.

Looking through the backgrounds I am now thinking of a parkour type concept, maybe a little Prince of Persia-ish running around and taking advantage of the terrain. I can see 2 background traits fitting in with this, either City Born to represent the begger on the street aspect, and the parkour, or Desert Born which also fits, especailly Dune Stalker, which boosts Balance and Tumble.

I think I will take my old friend City Born (Bravo) however, since it gives me 1d6 Sneak attack, and this guy will be in a position to flank a lot, and to self-flank if a team mate is not present. (In Iron Heroes, if you start your movement on one side of an opponent and make your attack form the other side, say by tumbling around or jumping over him, then you get the benefits of flanking).

So that leaves us, post traits with:

Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha
16 18 12 12 14 10

+2 to Survival (Urban), Can use Survival to track down specific dealers and informals, can use survival when searching for items to find a seller, +1d6 Sneak attack

Now we add Harrier to the mix giving me

Simple and Martial weapon proficiency, Light armour proficiency, Combat Speed (+10 ft) and Combat Mobility.

I also have 9 HP, 36 skill points and 2 feats to choose, as well as a BAB of +1 and a Base Defense Bonus of +1.

Skills:

In Iron Heroes, there are no cross class skills, every skill can be bought for a single skill point per level, each class does get access to skill groups instead, which are a set of skills which can be raised as one for a single skill point.

As Harrier, I get both Athletics and Agility as skill groups, so I will max both of those.

Giving me 4 ranks in Climb, Jump, Swim, Balance, Escape Artist and Tumble.

I now have 28 skill points left.

The skills and thinking of are Hide, Move Silently, Sleight of Hand, Bluff, Survival, Use Rope, Spot

And now finally I need to pick feats, Iron Heroes has feat trees, and as a harrier I have access to non-tree feats, and to the first level of Defense and Finesse feat chains.

I am going to take Weapon Finesse [Base Mastery] for the use dex on your to hit roll with finesse weapons as well as Combat Expertise [Base Mastery], which is at the moment purely defensive, but as I level it up, I can use it in reverse.

Now for gear I am going to use the starting package as the base, because less effort and it even kind of fits.

So, here is our harrier.

Fleet Nashir

Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha
16 18 12 12 14 10

Hit Points: 9HP

Defense: 16/10 Active/Passive, +4 vs attacks of opportunity

Weapons: Rapier (+5 to hit, 1d6+3 damage, 18-20 x2 Crit), 4 javelins (+5 to hit, 1d6+3 damage, 20 x2 Crit), Dagger (+5 to hit, 1d4+3 damage, 19-20 x2 Crit)

Armour: Padded (DR 1)

Skills: Climb 4 [+7], Jump 4 [+7], Swim 4 [+7], Balance 4 [+8], Escape Artist 4 [+8], Tumble 4 [+8], Hide 4 [+8], Move Silently 4 [+8], Sleight of Hand 4 [+8], Bluff 4 [+4], Survival 4 [+5], Use Rope 4 [+8], Spot 4 [+5]

Feats and abilities: City Rat: Bravo, Weapon Finesse [Base], Combat Expertise [Base]

Gear: Backpack, bedroll, 50 ft of silk rope, torches (6), flint and steel, waterskin

Gold: 13

Tags: create a character, d20, iron heroes

Shadowrun Third Edition.

Using: All of SR3, from the core rules through to System Failure (The closing SR3 sourcebook)

Shadowrun is a game of where Man meets Magic and Machine. The year is 2065 and the world is a different place.

Plague, magics resurgence, the return of dragons, trolls, orks, elves and dwarves and the destruction and replacement of the internet have resulted in many changes to the way the world works.

America and China have balkanized into many smaller countries and many corporations have achieved minor nation status, complete with their land being sovereign territory.

Shadowrunners exist as deniable assets for hire by various factions within this work in order to perform acts of sabotage, kidnappings ('Extractions'), theft and assassination upon the assets of other companies.

Character creation in Shadowrun Third edition is by default the Priority system, where players assign A through E to the categories of magic, money, attributes, skills and race.

The attributes for this character are:
A: Money (1,000,000Y) (Y in this case being nuyen, the main currency in the 6th World.)
B: Skills (40 points)
C: Attributes (24 points)
D: Race (Dwarf/Ork)
E: Magic (Mundane)

The priority of D to race is kind of a cheap thing to do because for magic both D and E are mundane, i.e. no effect, so in this case I can pick Dwarf or Ork with no cost to my character, and as Dwarf has no racial penalties other than slower running speed I have chosen to go with Dwarf.

Dwarf gives +1 Body, +2 Strength, +1 Willpower, Natural Thermographic Vision, and +2 on body tests to resist disease and Toxins.

The other choices were to go with my character concept, which is an infiltration specialist, he is designed around being able to break into an area ahead of the main party and disable the security system. The A to money is to give me enough money for all of the shiny cyber and squidgy bio that I want for this concept, which is one of the primary equalisers between my character and the various spellslingers and adepts out there.
B in skills gives me a large number of skill points to spread around to give my character a wide variety of abilities, and C gives me a decent base attribute line, which can be shored up by extensive spending on personal enhancements.

This character is meant to be able to get into hidden place and attack from there, I plan for him to be great with a rifle and fairly good with various close combat options, probably a pistol and shock baton.

Having access to the NSRCG app is both great and terrible, in that it means I don't have to pull out the books, on the other hand, this character may have mistakes because I am relying on my memory of SR3 and I have not made a third ed shadowrun character in a while.

Okay, so here we are, the output from NSRCG, sorry about the mess.

( Sneaky Ed's Character Sheet )

Sneaky Ed was made with a fairly clear thief/sniper concept in mind, and as such I bought his cyberware before his skills and stats, this is mainly because skill costs are influenced by stats, and cyber and bio boost stats, allowing me to use a different distribution.

Sneaky Ed has some very twinky stuff, Enhanced Articulation for instance is the single most taken bioware in SR3, because it adds 1 die to combat, physical, technical and B/R tests, which means in otherwords, pretty much every non-magic, non-social test in the game gets boosted by this single piece of bioware.

Sneaky ed does have some disadvantages, he really wants to hide, as it is very hard to heal him using magic, and rather difficult using technological means, he simply has too much metal and foreign flesh in him for the heal spell to be very effective and medics to have a fun time. He also is badly in need of some thermal damping in his armour, as due to his suprathyroid he pumps out a lot of heat, making him fairly obvious to those sensors, but to foes that rely on their eyes, he can vanish before their eyes, vanish beyond the point of invisibility in fact according to the rules, as using ruthenium allows one to give a bigger penalty to perception checks to find him than being invisible does. The wonders of technology.

As far as characters go, Sneaky Ed is definitely one I would play, though I might look through a bit further and decide if I want any edges/flaws and probably go ahead and grab some thermal dampening. But other than that, Ed is precisely the kind of SR3 character I did play.

Tags: character generation, create a character, shadowrun, sr3

I'm going to go through my various RPGs and make starting character for them.

This was inspired by Finn doing precisely the same thing (at http://tribunefinn.blogspot.com/). However here I will use the default character creation rules, no attempting to add further randomness. This may make my progress slower.

I am starting of course with a 3.5 character.

Abilities roll:

13, 13, 11, 11, 13, 12

What a terrible statline.

Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha
13 13 12 13 11 11
Human Fighter

Hit Points: 11

Feats: Combat Expertise (Req: 13 Int), Power Attack (Req: 13 Str), Dodge (Req: 13 Dex)

Skills: Climb 4 [Str] (+5), Ride 4 [Dex] (+5), Craft (Weaponsmith) 4 [Int] (+5)

Saves:
- Fort +3
- Will: +0
- Ref: +1

Armour: Scale mail (+4 AC, armour check penalty -4, speed 20ft, 30lb)

Weapons: Greatsword, Shortbow

Attacks:
- Melee +2 to hit, 2d6 damage, 19-20 x2 crit, 2-handed
- Ranged +2 to hit, 1d6 damage, x3 crit

Gear: Backpack with waterskin, one day's trail rations, bedroll, sack, flint and steel, quiver with twenty arrows

Gold: 9gp

Why? Because if your best 3 stats are 13s you might as well take feats that use each of those 13s

Similarly with skills, I wished to continue this theme.

However, that said, this crappy set of rolls for the statblock basically demonstrated to me, why, in most games, random character generation can suck horribly. Getting that statline, which fails to be interesting in any manner, lacking any real highs or extreme lows completely killed my enthusiasm for continuing his creation. However, for this plan, I will continue with only using the default character creation rules.

The next stop is either Shadowrun 3rd edition, or Iron Heroes to continue along Finn's path.

See Finn's Create a Character blog at http://tribunefinn.blogspot.com/

Tags: character generation, create a character, d&d, d&d3.5, fighter