Victoriana

Well, another day, another PC. This time Fuzion powered steampunk game from Heresy Games, Victoriana. I'd never heard of this game before, and on checking out RPG.net, neither had many others. Though released in '93 the game seems to have found only a small amount of success after its 2002 reprint, or atleast thats only when people seem to have heard of it.

I picked this game up on a whim while looking for SLA industries stuff on eBay and thought, "steampunk....good.....dwarves.....good.....beastmen? That's novel....£10! sold!" To be honest, i wasn't ever inspired by it once it came through the letter box, the whole thing is a little messy and at times amateurish (especially the spelling mistakes, they can't even spell Edinburgh right on the world map, which by the way is useless anyway). So, for the last few years its sat languishing on various shelves. But when this challenge came along i thought "Perfect, maybe I'll actually read it". So, onwards to character creation:

Right, I'm going to be frank, this was bit of a pain in the arse. You know those books where you spend all your time flicking back and forth? yeah? this is one of them. Nightmare. Very frustrating. Added to the fact that i have never used the Fuzion system before and you have a recipe for me stomping about the house and shouting at the book.

Anyway, enough of my inanimate object abuse:

The first thing you do is chose your social class and race. Class in this game effects how many characteristic points you have to spend. The game does seem geared toward you playing lower class reactionaries, so there is a bit of a balance issue here. Race wise its fairly standard fayre : Dwarves, Elves (elderen), Gnomes, Halflings,Beastmen, Ogres and Humans. Though there a other races mentioned in the GM section aswell as some race smaller than either Gnome or Halfling that is shown on the two pages concerning races, but there is no text telling you what it is.

I chose:

Race: Human
Class: Lower

So as a member of the lower classes i have 36 points to spend on my attributes, as opposed to 24 for Upper class characters. Interestingly anything over 6 is considered
super human, especially in a human, yet with 36 points to spend its impossible not to go over 6 in at least one of your stats. Seems a tad silly to me...

Stats:

DEX : 7
BODY: 8
INT : 6
PRE : 4
RES : 6
Luck: 5

So, that was easy, appart from searching around to find out how many points i actually had to spend, which turned out to be listed about 6 pages back in a little table, thanks Heresy.

Now we move on to skills, this shows how free form PC generation is in Victoriana, and how a solid back story is useful in creation. I had decided that my character is Male, in his early 40's. A one time cabin boy, he has spent his whole life in the navy, becoming a Marine (soldier) at the age of 15 and being dishonorably discharged last year for assaulting a superior officer. He now lives on the barge he uses to haul small amounts of cargo up and down the Thames and is heavily involved with the Bolsheviks and Unions he would, as a soldier in His Majesties Navy, have vehemently opposed.

So, first we choose a childhood experience:

I chose Cabin Boy

Then a past career (apparently you can't have a current career?):

Which is Soldier

With these come five skills:

Dodge
Rifle Marksmanship
Sword Play
Small Boat Pilot
Brawl

On which i have 30 points to spend. Now as i can't have any at this stage with a rank over 6. They ALL get to be rank 6 (30/5=6). Another silly mechanic.

Now that the basic PC is built. Get some option points to spend. Twenty five to be exact and finding out that number had me grinding my teeth too, but the less said about that the better.

I can spend my option points on:

Skills (boosting them above 6)
Talents
Perks and privileges
Contacts and Favours
And Property and Assets

I can also, if I choose, gain some back by introducing a Complication, no surprise there, not exactly new mechanic is it?

Oh and they all have different costs.

Well, here's how i spent them:

Property and Assets
Barge (2)
Irregular income(1)

Talents
Direction sense(3)
Combat Sense (3)
Light Sleeper (3)

Perks and Privileges
Union Member (3)
Blackguard (3)

Contacts
Revolutionary (2)

Which leaves me five left over. But what the hay, lets give him a disadvantage (Alcoholism) which gives me 5 more points to spent, which I'll keep with the rest and turn into shiny £'s at the beginning of the game.

So now would normally be time to buy equipment with my total cash of : £16 but we're not doing that, and thank god. As its all in old money, and i don't know how that works.

EDIT: Iforgot to name him...i call him 'Stinky' Pete Henderson. Good luck fighting oppression and all that...