Bodyguard and Charcoal-Burner

Here's two "new" careers for Warhammer FRP 3rd. They're loose conversions of existing careers from 2nd Ed. A more faithful rendering of the Bodyguard would have had Strength instead of Agility, but then both careers would have had the same Primary Characteristics, and I didn't want that. The result was that the Bodyguard had a slightly less potent set of skills than it might have otherwise had, which encouraged me to give it a better-than-average Career Ability to compensate.



The artwork is original. I bought a Wacom "bamboo" tablet yesterday, and these are two of my first three pieces of art from it. Honestly, it shows on the Charcoal-Burner. I was having such a hard time getting the hang of the tablet, that I really goofed up his body proportions. Which frustrated me so much I never finished his face. Maybe I'll redo the art on him at some future point... but don't hold your breath. I've got nearly a dozen additional career cards finished except for artwork, so I doubt I'll get around to fixing older artwork any time soon.

The card backgrounds are from Hurlanc and Vendolis' WFRP plug-in for Strange Eons. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in WFRP, as it enables you to build your own custom components for the game with a minimum of effort. (Going crazy with a wacom tablet is completely optional.)

Currently, for reasons unknown to me, the Strange Eons program only deals with the front side of career cards. So the back, with all the flavor text and trappings info, is missing. That's part of why I'm converting careers instead of making entirely new ones. Instead of having to type up a bunch of background text and lay it out in quark or office, I can just say "please reference the 2nd Ed main book".

Savagepunk Roles

In Cyberpunk 2020, character Roles are really important. They’re thecharacter classes of CP2020, defining your likely initial skills, andyour special power.

Savage Worlds has nothing of the sort. Butit does have Professional Edges, which allows me to create abilitiessimilar to the Role powers of CP2020.

The primary roles (and their corresponding special skills) of CP2020 are:

• Cop – Authority


• Corporate – Resources


• Fixer – Streetdeal


• Media – Credibility


• Med Techie – Medical Tech


• Netrunner – Interface


• Nomad – Family


• Rocker – Charismatic Leadership


• Solo – Combat Sense


• Techie – Jury Rig

…andthen there’s some variants in sourcebooks. There’s a variety ofdifferent cultural groups (Spacers, Gangers, etc) that have renamedversions of the Family ability. One of the books had some Stripper orProstitute class with a special ability called Vamp.

Looking at that list, I don’t think I’ll have to make Professional Edges for all of them.

• Mostwould be just variations on the Connections Edge. Family (and it’s manyderivatives), Resources, and Streetdeal could all be viewed as justConnections with flavorful trappings.
• CP2020’s Jury Rig isclose enough to SW’s McGyver. Mr Fixit and Gadgeteer kinda catch thefeel as well, but are a bad match since CP2020 doesn’t really allowthings with the power and versatility of Savage Worlds’ ArcaneBackgrounds.
• A Solo’s Combat Sense can be covered in Savage Worlds via Danger Sense or Level-Headed or Quick or some combination of those.

That does leave a few things for me to design before we can start the game…

Me Fix Og

Me play Og. Me like Og. Og fun. ...but it's not quite perfect. Of the 7 classes, 2 or 3 seem underpowered.

• Problem: Banging Caveman's power is inferior. There's two cavemen who are designed to be more effective in combat: Banging and Strong. Out of every 6 attacks, Banging caveman averages 3 damage, Strong averages 4 (1 more). Against a critter with Evade or Armor 1, their damage is 2 from both of them. Against a critter with Evade 2, Banging caveman finally comes out ahead. But even then he's then only averaging 1 damage every 6 attacks. At best that makes for a really long boring battle (he'll forget how to attack once or twice before the fight is over), but it's more likely to result in Banging Caveman becoming Dead Caveman since dinosaurs and megafauna will do 4 to 20 times as much damage. Worse yet, anyone who takes the Throwing ability outperforms Banging Caveman.
  
  Solution: Improve Banging Caveman's attack rating to 3+ (the same value for hitting that one gets if they take the Throwing ability). He'll outperform Strong Caveman most of the time, but it's balanced a little by Strong Caveman's bonus to Lift rolls. Strong Caveman can also take the Throwing skill to do 2 damage at a range, making him again better than Banging caveman, but only if he devotes an ability choice to it. Banging caveman's real advantage then is he gets the good attack without spending a skill choice to do it. It's not a great advantage, nor terribly well balanced, but it's better than it was.


• Problem: Grunting Caveman's power almost never works. Obviously, that's intentional - he's not a wizard, he's a proto-shaman. However, it's also "balanced" by the power only being attemptable once per scene. Scenes in Og aren't clearly defined - the PCs wander about largely randomly, and the GM improvises wildly. As a result, Grunting Caveman could fail the roll early in the game, and think he's not elidgible to Grunt again the rest of the night.
  
  Solution: Treat the roll for Grunting more like it's an unskilled action, but allow only two successful uses per session. That is, roll a d6 when you Grunt. On a 1 you get a disasterous result (ala double 1's in the default rules) or forget how, GM's choice. On a 2 through 4 the Grunt does nothing, but you can try again next turn. On a 5 or 6, the Grunting is a success and it saves your bacon. You can keep trying as often as you want, subject to the normal forgetting how rules, until you've had two successes. This makes it more readily usable, but still far from a sure thing, and a series of bad die rolls can leave you uselessly accomplishing nothing for 5 or 6 turns in a row.


• Problem: Eloquent Caveman's bonus is kinda small, if you're using random word assignment (which is my preferred method - I have the PCs draw words out of a hat).
  
  Solution: Next time someone makes an Eloquent Caveman, I'll have them pull half their words out of the hat, and then decide on the other half.
  
  Alternate Solution: For an on-going campaign, this problem could be solved by just working into the plot a semi-friendly tribe that the Eloquent Caveman can trade words with. This is the intended balancing feature in the game, but considering the plot tends to be pretty random (and player-driven, or more likely feigned-stupidity-driven), it's hard to force it to happen in the game. A semi-friendly tribe becomes an enemy tribe with one bad roll or goofy moment. Still, if you plan for it, you can make Eloquent Caveman's advantages pay off.

Those solutions should get all the PC classes back into rough parity.

22 more Orky Careers (Updated)

Months ago, I did a bunch of ground work for "Orky Heresy", an Orky companion piece for the Dark Heresy RPG. I put the first few Orky Careers up on this blog at that time. I intended then to keep working on it, and put more stuff up over time, but I never got around to it. I got caught up on other projects, and I decided that in general the rules of Dark Heresy and the Warhammer Fantasy RPG were more fiddly and complicated than I like to game under.

However, I'm running a streamlined, cut-down version of the system for GwenCon. Since I'm going to be doing work about it in the next couple weeks, I might as well stick the preliminary work up here. With that in mind, I posted 22 more orky careers yesterday, bringing the total up to 32. To use them, you need to read the older posts:

• Character Creation
• Character Advancement and XP
  
• Money
• Why I chose Warhammer Fantasy RPG (instead of Dark Heresy) for Career System.
• New Skills and Talents
  

The careers posted today are intended as Advanced Careers. You can't start with them, but you can develop into them as you spend XP. I don't have time to index them at the moment, but I may do so tomorrow.

Roll up a starting career via a d10 on this chart:

1. Bad Moons Clanboy
2. Blood Axe Clanboy
3. Deathskullz Clanboy
4. Evil Sunz Clanboy
5. Goff Clanboy
6. Snakebitez Clanboy
7. Yoof
8. Freebooter
9. Stormboy
10. Wild Ork

Here's an index of links to all the careers hosted on this blog:

• Bad Moons Clanboy
• Bannerboy
• Big Boss
• BigMobBoy
• Blood Axe Clanboy
• Boss
• Deathskullz Clanboy
• Drivahboy
• Evil Sunz Clanboy
• Freebooter
• Goff Clanboy
• Grotherd
• Lootah
• Nob
• Oddboy
• Outcast
• Pig Dok
• Runtherd
• Runtmaster
• Skarboy
• Slaver
• Snakebitez Clanboy
• Snakehandler
• Snotherd
• Spannerboy
• Stormboy
• Squigherd
• Syringeboy
• Waaghlord
• War Boss
• Wild Ork
• Yoof

This statement should be obvious, but I'll mention it anyway: Dark Heresy, Warhammer 40k, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying and several of those career names are the copyrighted terms of Games Workshop. It is all used without permission. In order to make use of the Orky materials presented here, you'd pretty much need to have access to Dark Heresy and the WHFRP main books. I drew upon both of those books for the mechanical framework, and upon those books plus a variety of sources from 3 different editions of the Warhammer 40k tabletop miniatures game for the setting information. The orks presented here are clearly based upon the intellectual property of Games Workshop, and no challenge is intended to their copyrights.

Orky Careers

The next several posts will be Careers for the "Orky Heresy" variant/port for the Dark Heresy 40K RPG. They follow the format used in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and as such are predicated upon the following observations:

A typical Basic Career in WHFRP has:

• 8-10 advancement ticks
• nothing above +10% or +2 unless it’s a very specialized role
• nothing above +15% or +3 ever
• 7 to 9 skills
• 2 to 4 talents
• combined skills and talents of 10 to 12

Advanced Careers, however, vary significantly. They typically feature:

• 13 to 42 advancement ticks!
• combined skills and talents of 11 to 23!

And they tend to be far more varied and specialized than basic careers.

In general, I've tried to follow those parameters. For example, most of my starting careers use the following template...

---

– Clanboy –
Restriction: Orky
Description: This isn’t a real career - it’s just a placeholder. If a career exit refers to Clanboy, you may choose a clan and go to that clan’s boyz entry. If the listed Career Exit includes “by Clan” that means you can choose any of the exits of the Clanboyz from your clan. You may only have one Clan at a time, but any Ork can pay 200 xp to become a Outcast. Doing so allows you to choose a new clan when you exit the Outcast career.

Skills: 7 skills - Common Lore (Clan), Survival, Climb or Swim, Carouse, Intimidate, Dodge, +1 more by Clan

Talents: 3 talents - Pistol or Basic Weapon Training (SP), Melee Weapon Training (Prim), 1 other by Clan

Trappings: Axe or Hunting Rifle, Autopistol or Knife, hairsquig or squigpet or 1d6 eatin’ squigs, Flak Vest or Heavy Leathers, Back Plate with clan symbol, 1d10 teef

Career Exits: by Clan, plus BigMobBoy, Outcast , Others
(NOTE: when it says "Others" that's just a reminder to me to come back and update this when the system is done. It doesn't actually reference some weird "Others" career)

Attributes: 8-10 advancement ticks (+5% is a tick) The spread below is typical
nothing above +10% or +2 unless it’s a very specialized role nothing above +15% or +3 ever. In most cases the spread is something along the lines of the following...

WS	BS	Str	Tuff	Int	Will	Fell	Perc	Wnds	Psi
+10%	+5%	+5%	+10%	+5%	+0%	+5%	+0%	+2	Nil

---

More individual classes to come.

Orky Career Paths

So, I've decided I'm going to slap together an Orky patch/port/supplement for the Dark Heresy RPG. It'll be fun - the humor level will be bumped up a bit, and the fear of PC death will be lessened. I considered three approaches to the character class model:

1. Dark Heresy's Career Paths, which are kind fiddly, and really hard to balance. What's more, while the paths allow for a lot of variety in skills and talents chosen, they straight-jacket you conceptually. That may be fitting of the regimented society of The Imperium, but it ain't Orky. A good bonk on the head can send an Ork down an entirely new path, and the rules need to reflect that.

   
   

2. Something completely unique and Orky. I could make a new system that's really flavorful, but it'd not only be a lot of effort, it would also limit the system's usefulness. Basically it would have minimal value to random Dark Heresy players who stumble across this via search engine. That's no good - the point of sharing things on the net is to make it so players anywhere might stumble across your ideas and find them inspiring.

   
   

3. WHFRP's Basic and Advanced Careers. This is what I settled on. It's a framework that's already familiar to myself, and to much of the Dark Heresy audience. It contrasts against the Imperiums lifetime Career Paths, yet isn't so different as to feel like a whole other game. Best of all, I don't have to spend a lot of verbiage explaining how it works - I can just direct the reader to a book (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) published by the same folks who publish Dark Heresy.
   

I add one little caveat/houserule to the system in WHFRP - ignore the WHFRP rule about spending 200 XP to change to any new Basic Career. Instead, there's an Advanced Career called Outcast that anyone can join at any time by spending 200 XP and acting kinda weird or crazy for at least one session. Outcast has a lot of different career exits, and even lets you change Clans. I'll post more when I have all the details (for at least a few dozen careers) worked out.