Miniature Monday - Making Our Own Mutant
Miniature Monday is here again! Since the Faceless staff will be off tomorrow, let us take this opportunity to wish our fellow Canucks a Happy Canada Day! We hope everyone's celebrations are fun and safe.
Turning back to toy soldiers, this week we wanted to show off the character creation system. We're taking inspiration from the alternate stats provided in the Trinity: Battlegrounds quick-start poster, and making a new version of one of the existing models. We've chosen Juanos Palmero for this dubious honour, as we're not only re-statting her, we're turning her into an Aberrant!
The inspiration for these choices came from Palmero's claw-like arm and a mention in the rulebook's lore about cults forming around worshipping Aberrants. Our new character will represent either a cultist who's been mutated by her Aberrant masters, or a young Aberrant who is just beginning to mutate into something inhuman. Either way, with our concept figured out, we need to decide what role she'll play in our cadre. We could use some more ranged firepower that doesn't rely on Psi Points, and we want to be able to easily fit her into a force, so we decide to create a character who doesn't cost many points and focuses on ranged combat.
Looking at the character creation section in the rulebook, we see that a 1st Caste Aberrant (the lowest caste possible) starts out costing 125 points. We make a note of that on our character sheet, and move on to assigning her attributes. We have 16 points to spend amongst the five attributes for a 1st Caste character , and we decide to go with a fairly even spread, with our extra point going into DEX to improve her shooting. Once we've assigned her attributes, we use them to determine her secondary attributes. Since we're making an Aberrant and not a Psion, we don't need to worry about skills.
After attributes, we move on to Psi Powers. Each character gets one Psi Power per point of SOC, and our new Aberrant's SOC score is 3. For her first power, we choose Human Form and Equipment. This lets our character take equipment from the Psion arsenal, but at an additional cost of 10 points per item. For her second power, we take Incredible Vision to make her shooting more accurate when it really counts. Knowing we won't be spending many points on defenses, we choose Mist for her third power, so she can make herself a little more difficult to hit. With our powers chosen, we note them down on our sheet and move on to Equipment and Mutations.
We wanted to make a ranged combat character, and that means she needs a weapon. Taking cues from her miniature, we spend 35 points, plus another 10, to give her an L-K Avenger autopistol. We could have chosen a mutation instead, but wanted to follow our theme. We also spend 15 points on Claws to match the blade arm that inspired us earlier. Wanting to keep her cost down, but also knowing she won't accomplish much if she's quickly killed, we spend 15 points on Tough Skin to make her a little tougher.
With all the mechanical aspects of the character done, we just need to fill in the last few sections of the sheet, including our character's name and description. Wanting a name that sounds human but is still uncommon, we decide on Livinia. We then make a note of her Allegiance and Cadre, fill in a brief description, and mark down her final points cost. At 200 points she comes in between Fhata Khan and Caul Fein, but offers some flexibility that neither Aberrant possesses. She may not have the brute force or powerful Psi Powers of those Aberrants, but she would still be a useful addition to any Cadre.
Making custom characters in Trinity: Battleground is easy and fun, and allows you to add a lot more variety beyond the already impressive number of characters originally produced for the game. It's also a great opportunity to bring in other models from your collection, or convert an existing one to make something entirely your own. Once the game re-releases, we'd love for players to share their custom creations with us!