Character A Day, Day Twelve (ish)

Justifiers

Found It Mixed in With “Adventurer’s Club” And Obscure Traveller Supplements

Because I Sort Games By Size, Apparently

No Sign of Villains & Vigilantes First Edition, Though. Sigh.

First, apologies to both of my readers for this being late. I had to deal with family issues yesterday, and by “family issues”, I mean, “spending time with my mother”, and doing that ruins any ability for me to do anything but curl up in a dark room and decompress. Or, more accurately, binge the final episodes of Supernatural w/my wife. Because three hours of despair, suffering, futility, and apocalypse is still uplifting in comparison. But I digress. (Actually, this time, it wasn’t that bad. But my wife had had a lousy day and needed to see Sam and Dean.)

Anyhoo, despite me having quite literally thousands of other RPGs, and despite me having no real personal connection to Justifiers, I have bulldog-like tenacity when it comes to trivial and unimportant things, so I kept searching the Tertiary Game Library because, b’gawd, I knew I had a copy of the damn game in there somewhere. And I found it! The sticker says I got it from Riders Hobby, which I tracked to Michigan by the phone number, but I have never been to Michigan, so, it must have flowed through other hands. Yeah, the sticker on the back says 10.95, but the front says “Sale Price 4.00”, so, who knows where it came from?

Why pick this game? It was there. Well, it wasn’t there, hence the problem finding it, but that’s a minor technicality. I’ve had it a long time, I’ve seen a lot of ads for it over the years, I think it’s gone through multiple editions and a couple of splatbooks, and I dimly recall playing it once at a gaming club in North Carolina. So, there.

The Fast And The Furry-ous

In Justifiers, you play an uplifted animal, called a “Beta”. There’s several pages of decent, if generic, background material, starting with the collapse of world governments in 1999 and their replacement by a global trade alliance. Ah, one of those overly-optimistic utopian settings. Anyway, long story short, Betas are used to scout new worlds for resources or habitability. There’s also a short paragraph on human/beta offspring, so the game acknowledges that no matter what technologies humanity comes up with, it will be used for sex. (The Analytical Engine included a graphing plotter in its plans. I guarantee you, had the thing been built, within a year, someone would have found a way to make it print boobs. And cats. And cats with boobs, thus jump-starting DeivantArt and Tumblr. But I digress again.)

The actual rules, though, are more concerned with traditional RPG concerns, such as weapons, which occupy 10 of the digest-sized book’s 86 pages. Decent enough art for the era, too. Clean, crisp, black and white line art, nothing that’s going to win awards, but competent and professional, conveying a consistent visual style. By this time (1989), my favorite RPG artist from the 1970s, This Guy I Know¹, had mostly vanished from employment.

Let’s make a character! I got two of these things to do today, after all!

Attributes: Roll d100 7 times, order as desired, and raise one to 65 if you want.

90, 23,69,36, 88,96, 65. We’ll raise the 23 to 65, so: 90, 65,69,36, 88,96, 65 . For me, those are good rolls. Lessee, I did a strong brick type, and a sneaky weasel type, so, let’s go for a smart tech/science type this time.

Strength: 36
Dexterity: 88
Constitution: 65
Intelligence:96
Wisdom: 90
Agility: 69
Presence: 65

(I am kind of guessing how attributes will feed into later character generation steps.)

We now have a number of derived/calculated stats:

Mental Strength: 186 +d10/level
Body: 6 +d10/level
Resilience: 9 + d10/level
Base Speed: 15
Base Skill Level: 9%
Base to Strike: 29%
Damage Bonus: 3

I have a 5% chance of psionics:09. Dammit. Closer than usual, but still no psi. Sigh.

I can choose to start with cyborg parts, but these add to the cost of my “Buy-Back”, which I guess is what I owe the company for existing? Since I’m going for a scientist type, and there’s no brain enhancement/skill chip sort of thing, I’ll skip that.

Now, we pick a species! (I would have put this up front, but that’s me.)

There’s a lot of options. Hey, Gila Monster! That’s what I played in the game I dimly remember from 30 years ago! Mantis? That’s cool. Otter. Hmmm. “Dr. Otter Octavius”. Aw, hell yeah. I get Dex +15 and a Swim skill of 99%. Smeg. Now I have to go refigure every derived attribute that uses dex. Hmph. OK, new stats:

Strength: 36
Dexterity: 103
Constitution: 65
Intelligence:96
Wisdom: 90
Agility: 69
Presence: 65

Mental Strength: 186 +d10/level
Body: 6 +d10/level
Resilience: 9 + d10/level
Base Speed: 17
Base Skill Level: 9%
Base to Strike: 34%
Damage Bonus: 3

(You can also play a boring ol’ human, who are assumed to be criminals sentenced to this gig instead of being in jail. Other options include augmented ex-soldiers or heavy-worlders for whom this is better than mining.)

This is a skill based game, and “like most skill-based it relies on Career Classes”. Yes, this was key to Hero, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu… no, wait, it wasn’t. It sounds more like the system used by Palladium and… er… Palladium. Anyway, one of the four is Field Scientist, so Dr. Otter is going for it. His Intelligence of 96 easily passes the minimum of 65. I will also pick Life Sciences Specialist.

I get a bunch of skills to which I add my Base Skill Level of 9%.
Basic Math: 59%
Communicator Operations: 24%
Computer Operations: 24%
E Suit Operations: 34%
Emergency E Suit Repair: 29%
First Aid: 24%
Hand to Hand Combat: 24%
Navigation: 24%
Pilot Ground Vehicle: 24%
Projectile Weapons (Hand): 24%
Scanner Systems Operation: 24%
Speak Native: 84%
Transmatt Operations: 34%
Read & Write Native: 84%
Zero-G Training: 24%

From my Life Science specialty, I add:
Analytical Chemistry: 24%
Aquatics: 29% (No bonus for being an otter? Discrimination!)
Biology (marine): 34%
Botany: 34%
Chemistry: 29%
Ecology: 34%
Surveillance: 19%
Zoology: 34%

I also get 1d10 (rolled 5) cross-training skills from the other Scientist careers, base skill chance only:

Archeology: 9%
Linguistics: 9%
Chemistry: 9%
Demolitions: 9%
Cryptology: 9%

I get 1d10 elective skills (rolled a 4), at my base skill chance only:

Carousing: 9% (The doctor likes to par-tay! And with 9%, he does it about as well as most scientists do.)
Cuisine: 9% (“You hit the oyster with a rock. You eat the oyster. How hard can it be?”)
Pick Pocket 9%
Smuggling 9%

Hey, a few “samples” of possibly recreational alien plants go missing, what’s the harm, right?

I’m starting to like this guy.

And that’s, uh, it for character creation. I had assumed we’d get a chance to raise skills, but, nope. That doesn’t happen until you gain a level. So, uhm… yeah. I’ve checked the rules for something to indicate your chance of skill use is not the literal percentage, but, except for combat (you add your Base to Hit to your weapon skill), seems not to be. If you lack a skill, there’s a -50% modifier and you can only use your Base Skill Chance… which can’t be higher than 10%, since it’s Intelligence/10. Even with bonuses to Int from something, I can’t imagine it being more than 11 or 12 percent. Yowza. This is the kind of rules system that encourages players to be “creative”, by which I mean, “force the GM to let you attempt an action not covered by the rules, as they’re likely to give you better odds than the rules do”. Fortunately or unfortunately, the number of skills and the explicit calling out of “If you lack a skill…”, plus some harsh modifiers for raw Agility/Dex attribute checks, means that’s unlikely to work. You only get d10+8 (or less!) skill points per level, too.

Oh yeah, buy-back. I got lucky there: I only owe the corporation 100,000 credits. With 40,000 credits in the bank, I’m almost half there, but I do need to buy gear.

Plastic Plate (armor, not flatware): 1500
Knife: 10
Medium Pistol: 200
Atmosphere Analyzer: 100
Tissue Analyzer: 1500
Binoculars: 250
Hiking Boots: 75
Computer: 950
CD Player: HA AHA HA HA HA HA HA
Hot Pot: 150, plus an Instagram channel where you talk about it all the time.
Sleeping Bag: 25

That’s 4760, plenty left if the mission profile calls for things like scuba or e-suits.

So, Dr. Otter Octavius is now ready to go earn his right to exist. (Note: It isn’t clear what happens after you pay off your “buy-back”. Do you quit the job, and the campaign? Do you get to find a cute moose-beta and settle down to make… erm… motters? (There’s a supplement for hybrid species, so, yes, this is possible.) Or are your career choices constrained enough by racism that you’ll keep “Justifying” because it beats being a hyper-janitor or a space-porter or cyber-elevator-operator? Mebbe I’ll find the numerous supplements for sale at a reasonable price somewhere and find out.)

1: Not his real name, of course. His real name was “This Guy I Know, He Did This Bitchin’ Dragon On My Cousin’s Van That One Time”.