Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Weird Adventures: List of Adventurer Templates


One of the many excellent illustrations in the
book Weird Adventures.
The thought-provoking idea of mashing up old school D&D tropes with the pulp genre made me rethink how to group together the various types of adventurers. I wanted to adhere somewhat closely to the Fighter / Mage / Cleric / Thief approach, but there are certain pulp tropes that break out of those archetypes. I figure that Fighters are Muscle, that Clerics and Mages are Arcanists of different flavors, that Thieves can be broadened into different types of Expertise. Last but not least, there's the folks who have different types of Smarts and are quite useful in the modern idiom.

Along these lines, I began organizing a starting list of package deals (the standard HERO way of doing things), but looked at tweaking them more as templates ala the classic d6 Star Wars RPG, for faster character generation.

Here's my first pass on the list of customizable templates I'll be building for my attempt at Weird Adventures in the HERO System:

MUSCLE
Famous Athlete
Crusading Cop
Tough Gangster
Great White Hunter
Hulking Sailor
Sharp-eyed Soldier
Two-fisted hero
Wild Man

SMARTS
Eccentric Archeologist
Amateur Detective
Bookish Professor
Nosy Reporter
Curious Scientist
Sultry Spy

EXPERTISE
Reckless Aviator
Suave Dilettante
Grizzled Explorer
Eager Gadgeteer
Grease Monkey
Jazz Musician
Thrillseeking Criminal

ARCANA
Traveling Priest
Haunted Missionary
Gifted Innocent
Craven Wizard
Exotic Sorceress

I'm going back to the book to find out if I've missed some more setting-appropriate terminology for the templates.

1 comment:

  1. That illustration (just in case you need an NPC ;)) is suppose to be the young consulting detective, Professor Pao.

    Those look like a great list, and follow a similar break up (based on D&D archetypes) that I had thought of. Take a look at the posts "Two Tough Guys" and "Magic Men" for a couple of sample character ideas.

    Also, on clerical types its were remembering the divide between (say) an Oecumenical Hierarchate Priest of of Theurgical Order, and a Gifted Old Time Religion Revivalist Preacher.

    ReplyDelete

That's my side of things. Let me know what you think, my friend.