What Do I Know?

I’m playing catch up in joining an Age of Rebellion game after my gaming hiatus.  The setting is being shared between myself, and the Edge of the Empire campaigns I have run, and the current GM, and his EotE Beta game and his current Age of Rebellion game.

Fantasy Flight does a great job of emphasizing the roleplaying aspect of a Star Wars roleplaying game.  Emphasizing Obligation, Duty, and Motivation, and spending the amount of time they do when it comes to explaining what a Destiny Point actually represents, as well as the multiple outcomes that can be derived from the dice pool really drives storytelling over number crunching.

But despite all of those tools, I do like to have a guide to encourage me to create enough background for a character to hang some roleplaying on, without spending pages and pages on pointless backstory.  What occurred to me was utilizing the character creation concepts from Fate.

Essentially, for those of you that haven’t seen Fate yet, each character creates a set of Aspects that define that character.  The first aspect you create is your High Concept, a summary of what you are.  The next aspect is your trouble, the thing that most likely bites you in the rear end when it comes up.  In a lot of ways, these aspects show you what you are now.

The next three aspects you create are, for lack of a better term, what brought you to this point.  The first of these three should be an aspect based on your first adventure.  The next two aspects are statements about your character that came about from adventures you shared with other characters in the party.

Here are the aspects I came up with for my character–

Clone Trooper Insurgent:

Orts was initially created secretly as a backup plan by the Kaminoans, harvesting a portion of each batch of Clone Troopers and training them in secret to use in case the Republic (later the Empire) turned against them.

After the 501st shut down the Kaminoan rebellion, Orts managed to escape from the planet and lose himself in the galactic underworld.

The Empire Knows Me Even If They Don’t:

Orts has had to hide from Imperial officials for years, since his features mark him as a Clone Trooper, which automatically marks him as either a secret insurgent or a deserter.

Bred to Hate Stormtroopers:

Culled from a Clone Trooper pool created towards the end of the Clone Wars, Orts was always trained to distrust other Clone Troopers and eventually Stormtroopers, so between his flash training and conditioning, he’s got a hard time not jumping anything in an Imperial uniform or armor.

You Have to Have Standards:

After a few years of wandering from job to job in Wild Space and the Outer Rim, Orts wasn’t overly picky about his jobs, but never really fell into any jobs that were unpalatable.

Several years after working as a merc, however, he fell in with a band of mercenaries that included Monstro Ybom.  A Moff in the Mid Rim was having difficulty requisitioning troops and hired mercenaries through an intermediary to put down an insurgency.

Orts killed many insurgents without thinking much about them, but on the planet Urchalang, most of the insurgents were simply common folk hiding rebels and giving them food and supplies.  Orts didn’t want to take action, and Monstro lined up civilians and used them for target practice.  

Orts attempted to kill Monstro and deserted the mercenary company he was associated with, but Monstro survived the encounter.

Cynical Heroics:

Orts nearly starved after the Urchalang Massacre.  He didn’t trust himself to choose jobs for himself, and ran through his savings.  Still on the run from the Empire, Orts eventually had to take a job as hired muscle for the bounty hunter Mundo Korr.

Orts was hoping that the job would just be one crime lord working for another, but instead, the job had to do with tracking down a double crossing gun runner for one of Mundo’s Rebel contacts.

While Orts was still cynical about the nature of the galaxy and the odds that the galaxy will ever be “right,” he also saw that there were good people that lived by a code of honor that could make a difference at least on a small scale.

Families are Complicated:

Hired to assist in an action against pirates in the Mid Rim once again, Orts was very concerned about taking this job, but did so, always planning an exit stragety.  In the end Krevs, the Trandoshan mercenary captain that hired him, convinced him give the job a shot.

In the end, the mercenaries were hired to aid a group of Stormtroopers that were given an impossible mission, who then gathered their life savings to hire mercs to help them in their final stand.

Orts was torn, because the pirates were vile foes that deserved to be put down, and the Stormtroopers that he was bred to hate were honorable characters being “disposed of” by the Empire on suicide missions.

Since I haven’t been at the other sessions so far, I wasn’t able to figure out where my character would fit in with his party members, so instead of tying his last few aspects to other party members, I instead tied those aspects to NPCs that already exist in the shared universe that we have been developing.

Not only do the aspects give me some guidance in how much and what kind of backstory to create for the character, it gives the GM a few phrases that might make it easier to remember aspects of my character’s past.  In addition to the above, the aspects should make it easier to narrate Triumphs, Despairs, and Destiny Point expenditures in the game.

Why do I have to upgrade the difficulty on my Streetwise check for asking around about illegal equipment?  One of those Imperials looked at me a little bit too long, like they might know what I am, and now I’m looking over my shoulder.

Why am I upgrading my dice pool to make this shot?  I’m letting my inherent anti-stormtrooper conditioning get the better of me, and everybody in ST armor looks like they have a target painted on them.

I’m looking forward to taking this character for a spin, and to see of having these concise bits of character knowledge helps me play him the way I think they will.