#space undead

Name: Bertha Mourne

Age: 53

Starting Statistics:

Strength 10, Dexterity 14, Constitution 13, Intelligence 16, Wisdom 8, Charisma 12

The Wisdom flaw is a little bit painful because I do want her to have Survival/Perception, but our theme and class can compensate for that a bit.

Starting Skills:

Acrobatics, Athletics, Computers, Engineering, Medicine, Perception, Stealth, Survival

Race: Borai

Neither alive nor dead, but just too stubborn to quit. She’s going to be an ex-human borai, so we’ll get Skilled as well, for an extra skill rank per level. It’s been a few years since she ‘died’, and she’s in her fifties now, but she still looks 47. One benefit of being half-dead, you don’t show the passing of time as much.

From Borai we’re going to get darkvision, a +1 racial bonus to saves against various conditions, immunity to negative damage, no penalties from energy drains, and the ability to be healed and resurrected like a still-living person, though we can also be affected by both things that affect the living and things that affect undead.

Description:

A short, stocky ex-human woman, apparently middle aged, wearing battered but well-maintained spacer gear. When she was more alive than she is currently, her skin was a light brown, and it's still trying to be, but there's a definite grey undertone now, and black veins web across her features. Wires, too. Her eyes are brown, sharp, and tired, and her normal resting expression could politely be described as ‘set’. And less politely described as ‘pugnacious’.

Theme: Crisis Refugee

I’m going to theme it slightly differently, it’s less that she was thrown somewhere by the Drift Crisis, and more than she was marooned by a Marooned One on a derelict ship for a while, became half-undead, and now has no place to go because of the leeriness around borai. It’s not that her homeworld is physically unreachable anymore (she’s from the Diaspora, I just like the Diaspora), it’s that it’s socially unreachable now. Like many of the half-dead, she is looking for somewhere new to call home, but in the meantime she’ll stubbornly carve out a space for herself. And, maybe, find a better crew, one that won’t abandon her.

So at first level, we’re going to get +1 to Con, Survival as a class skill, and we can reduce the DC of culture checks about new/unfamiliar cultures.

Class: Mechanic

A space scrapper, salvager and engineer, Bertha wasn’t going to let a little thing like a derelict ship and a homicidal undead stop her from going anywhere. While the limits of her resources on the ship did result in her not-quite-death, she did eventually manage to hijack the distress beacon the Marooned One had used to lure her ship in in the first place, and get a mostly-dead shuttle out to meet them without that undead arsehole interfering, and managed to augment herself to survive long enough for a new ship to reach her.

I did flipflop a lot on exocortex vs drone. A drone would make sense for a starving salvager who wanted access to places she maybe couldn’t go herself, but … The thing with borai is, it’s a physical metamorphosis. Which kind of makes me want to have her focus on herself? Trying to rebuild herself to try and survive, to get via machinery what flesh couldn’t manage. So … I think exocortex. When she felt herself starting to fail, she started trying to mechanically arrest the process. It didn’t work, and in the end it was raw stubborn that actually stopped her slow slide into death, spit and vinegar more than ingenuity, but hey. She tried.

So as a baby exocortex mechanic, we get proficiency in light and heavy armour, small and longarms, basic melee weapons, grenades and shields. We’ll get Skill Focus in a skill via our exocortex memory module, which we can change every level, but for the minute I think we’ll put it in Perception to help compensate for our Wisdom, and because she was stuck on a ship with a hostile undead, so she built her exocortex to help her track her surroundings. We get a bonus to Computers and Engineering, and a Custom Rig, which counts as personal comm, hacking kit and engineering kit all rolled into one. The Custom Rig can be external, but it can also be an augmentation, in brain, eyes or arm. Given how we’ve already gone with exocortex, I think we’ll install it in our arm. Bertha wanted everything she needed to be part of her, if at all possible.

Starting Feat: Toughness

We’re surviving on spit and vinegar here. We’re still even as barely alive as we are on raw stubborn. Of course it’s toughness. Bertha’s made of leather and spite and homemade wiring over here.

Summary:

I’ll be honest, I saw that one line in the borai description, someone just too stubborn to fully die, and it merged with the Marooned One in my head, and Bertha’s entire character concept fell out whole cloth. She’s smart, yeah, but more than that she’s just plain stubborn. This undead jackass wants her to die? Well then she’s just gonna not.

I do also want to play with the whole … borai searching for a home and acceptance, and the crisis refugee theme of relying on and helping others, and the Marooned Ones dying alone, that their rage and their grief is that no one came and they were left to slowly die alone, and have her … decide to be stubborn about that too. Her crew flew blithely off without her and left her to die, but sod that. She’ll find a new crew. A better one. One that won’t. People flinch from her mostly-dead ass? She’ll find someone who doesn’t. She’s not welcome in her old home anymore? Well, time to find an unclaimed asteroid and build a town there. Not a house, a town. She’s not dying alone. She’s not dying full stop, but she’s also not dying alone. She plans to be stubborn about this.

And if she sometimes wonders how much difference there is between that and the Marooned One luring people towards itself, well. She’s not planning on letting people slowly die, so she’s already a step up, right?