[Europol-X] Career preview - Soldier

Soldier

Project advancement

I've started the first play test round with friends, even though the system is not totally finished (but I know where I wanna go), because it's motivating for me to have a kind of urgency...

As sure as 1+1=2 , they chose careers that I had not developed, so I had no "Past problems table" for them, therefore I let them roll on the existing tables (I present here the 5th - I do not post all of them on the blog), and luckily they rolled some entries that were not too specific to the career and generic enough to be adapted easily on the fly...

The Soldier Career

Europol-X recruits for their cell on two criteria:

• You had contact with an unexplained phenomenon and survived
• You have interesting skills

In the case of a soldier, it can be both, since their skills are always in high demand (in RPG at least), and in Europe (where guns are much less  available than on the other side of the Atlantic), it is rarer to find shooters without a military background (shooting ranges exist, and so does hunting, but you don't get to practice outside a controlled environment).

The Table

As always, remember that the "past problems" are optional... You can also just use them as inspiration for your character's past, but having troubles to add to the game will help your DM (or GM, or Storyteller, or Control, whatever you want to call them) personalize your troubles and make them feel more real. Up-close and personal, if you will...

My players

The characters that have been created are:

• A marketing Expert that was Head of Marketing at the Royal Dutch Shell (the oil company), where he has a lot of enemies - (expert in Manipulate skill) - He has a 12 y.o. daughter in a closed private School in Switzerland. A lawyer wants to put him in Jail because he influenced his star witness in a case against Shell.
• An intrusion specialist - like a white-hat-hacker, but for security systems (expert in Sneak skill), from Frankfurt. Her ex boss still long for their past relationship, and his secretary hates her for her special status in his eyes. She was abducted as a child and the only surviving abductor just got out of jail.

Plot Preview

Next week, they'll be confronted with the corpse of a Duplicate (a dupe) - Half robot / half human creatures that can copy the apparence (and therefore steal the identity) of any corpse...

Quick question

If I were to create a tipee/patreon page for this project, would you be interested?

Discord

If you wanna join my Discord ("from outer space games" is the name my publishing entity), click here:

From outer space games Discord

[Europol-X] Career preview - Olympic Fencer

 Europol-X's system is starting to really take form.

I will not post all the "past careers" (you should still want to buy the book someday 😁) but from time to time, so you see the work advances.

Remember that the "past problems" are optional... You don't have to have one, and it doesn't have to be one from the list, but they are a good help to help create some drama for your storyteller (or DM, or GM, whatever you call him).

This is the 3rd career from the twelve I want to develop (one per skill).

This time with the illustration included

By the way, I've opened a discord around my creations (all of them, not only what's posted here), so if you like my work and use this platform, come over and chat !

https://discord.gg/usYXJG7zBu

[Europol-X] Career preview - Brute

Brute

 I've decided to create a system extra for Europol-X.

It is heavily inspired by 5E and the Year Zero engine.

4 Attributes, 12 skills (3 for each attributes).

And a previous Career, for before you joined your EU-X-cell. These can be compared to the backgrounds of the 5th edition, but without a feature.

I present you the first Career, the "Thug" which can be any kind of very bulky and physically imposing character, specialized in demonstrations of shear strength.

I will probably make an illustration for the rest of the page...

Anyway, tell we what you think of this ! 

And happy start in the new year !

And I've opened a discord around my creations (all of them, not only what's posted here)
https://discord.gg/usYXJG7zBu

Edit: I renamed the Career Brute bc of the negative connotation that Thug has gained in the last few years

[Europol-X] Which game system ?

 Europol-X

Game system

I envision Europol-X as an investigative RPG, with an healthy dose of action and then some sense of wonder, once the possibility to "step sideways" has been discovered.

Therefore, I need a game system which will support these ingredients.

I could certainly brew a D&D based system (3rd edition proved it was possible, with Spycraft for example), but somehow, it feels like too much work, for a system that would be working, sure, but not supporting the gameplay any more than any other generic system.

GURPS has a lot of support for this kind of elements (even a completely described ecosystem for time and dimension travel), but as much as I love reading the GURPS books for their ideas, I can't see myself running that system (Don't like how perception is handled, for example)

TORG also has support for dimension travel (dimension war, to be precise), but the power level is a notch too high for this project, nearing cinematic level.

Don't start me on Rifts, I've never put my nose into one of the books, but from what I heard, the system is too outdated too, for my taste.

My favorite Game of the last 10 years is Mutant Year Zero.
I love the game for its perfect support of the system to the kind of fiction to be emulated (post-apocalypse).

So I started to work on a "Year Zero Engine"-adaptation for dimension war. There is a SRD online, it's actually quite easy.
I developed a 1st draft for a character sheet, and I like it.

But after a dinner break, I had one of these moments of realization:
This is not the right system for this project.
So I lose some work, sure, but in the end, better see now that attrition is not an important part of this game and that this system does not support the investigative play-style more than any other generic system (so it basically has the same problem as D&D)

Square 1 ?

Somehow yes...

There are still alternatives that I can think of:

• Savage Worlds is a good candidate (it can run Rifts, so it could definitely work), but the power level might be too high and the system is not OGL
• The Strange by Bruce Cordell is also about dimension hopping and could work quite well, but is also not OGL
• The Chronicles of Darkness would work too, and normally they'd be my favorite (they have the right amount of support for action and investigation) but I'd like to maybe publish Europol-X one day in a zine format, so I need an OGL game system (or one I've developed myself)
• The same problem exist with Modern AGE: they have a multiverse setting, but the system is not OGL either (and probably too technical for my taste)
• Develop something else, unique? If I had a second life, maybe?

But as you see, nothing seems good enough. There is a very cool, simplified, and streamlined version of D&D3 to play investigative cases in a native reservation (like the books of Tony Hillermann) that was published in France. The processes of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are certain.

Well, we'll see... I'll sleep on it and you'll be amazed at the wonderful character sheet i've built, that probably will never be used