In Spookshow players take the roles of ghosts…who are also spies!* The premise is that the dead have extraordinary powers, can take physical form, and have been recruited by national, corporate, and other intelligence organizations to serve as secret agents.
Ghost agents have both a physical and a supernatural nature, and the two don’t always operate in tandem. The system uses a D6 to represent the physical and a D10 to represent the supernatural. Before key moments you have to Check Your Bearings and roll both dice to see how well you're functioning in both realms.
Ideally, you’ll have a Concept for your ghost: either a full story from earthly life through death to the intelligence community, or at least an idea of what your ghost is good at or poor at. I’m not committed to any particular details yet, but I think I want to create a ghost-spy whose specialty is obtaining physical items. I’ll leave background and cover details aside for now and focus on building the best burglar I can.
Next you determine Traits via die roll or point-buy. There are nine Traits, grouped in three categories (each grouping is alliterative, which is why we have “Semblance” instead of “Appearance”):
Physical: Speed, Strength, Semblance
Mental: Awareness, Association, Aptitude
Ethereal: Cohesion, Creation, Control
I have 24 points to assign and each Trait must be between 1 and 6 in value; an even spread would give me six Traits valued at 3 and three others at 2.** Agility and dexterity are vital, so Speed will be a priority, as will Awareness. Strength and Semblance are relatively low-priority, but I’m not sure how to prioritize the remaining Mental and Ethereal traits. Association covers memory, which is certainly useful; Aptitude, however, covers analysis and pattern recognition. Of the Ethereal traits, Cohesion measures your ability to stay focused, Creation measures your ability to adapt and innovate, and Control covers willpower and the ability to hold to beliefs and intentions. I’m leaning towards downgrading Cohesion or Control. I think I’d rather be focused. That gives us this balanced spread of Traits:
Physical: Speed 3, Strength 2, Semblance 2
Mental: Awareness 3, Association 3, Aptitude 3
Ethereal: Cohesion 3, Creation 3, Control 2.
Then we calculate two derived stats: Movement and Fortitude. Both are based on Strength, so I know they’ll be below average. Movement scores are simple: your walking speed equals your Strength (in whatever abstract units the game uses), and your running speed is twice that. Fortitude is a little more complicated; overall it’s six times your Strength score, but that’s divided among the various parts of your body:
Overall Fortitude: 12
Head: 1/6 Fortitude = 2
Torso: 1/3 Fortitude = 4
Legs: 1/6 apiece, or 2 for each leg
Arms: 1/12 apiece, or 1 for each leg
So each rating indicates how many Wounds that part can take before it’s disabled.
Now it’s time for a flashback as we figure out the character’s Relic, their life before death. Spookshow characters can originate from as far back as about 1750, and from anywhere in the world. I’m going to take advantage of the game’s random generation tables here, reserving a veto for any results that I don’t think I could play.
Rolling on the era-of-origin table gives me a 6: latter 20th century. I can work with that. I’m going to skip the Ethnicity table and move on to age at time of death: 1, adolescent. So I was a teenager who lived and died between 1950 and 2000. There’s a table for cause of death, so I’ll just assign a decade, region, and name at this point. I’ll put them in Southern California in the late ‘60s-early ‘70s, dying sometime between 1965 and 1975. Social class and ethnicity still TBD.
Next I determine an Occupation, or at least what skills I’d managed to develop in school before dying. This is a 1-12 table, but since we don’t use the d12 I’m supposed to roll 1D6 and add the second one if the first comes up higher than 1. That would preclude a result of 2, so instead I’m going to roll the first one and then roll both if the first doesn’t come up 1.*** That’s a weird distribution of results also, but at least this way they’re all possible. Anyhow, I’ll get a +1 bonus to one Trait with this background detail. The first roll is a 3, so I reroll with two and come up 11: Scribe, with a +1 to my Association score. To make sense of this in a late 20thcentury American context, I’ll make the character a high school student taking secretarial classes and perhaps even getting her first job or internship just before her untimely demise. We’ll call her Veronica Garcia, a resident of Los Angeles; her parents had a store, and she would have been the first member of her family to go to college.
Next is Cause of Death, which because it’s naturally quite traumatic, comes with a Trigger that can affect you in your afterlife. I roll a 2: Capital Punishment. I don’t really want to come up with that story, so I’ll roll again hoping for something accidental. I also pass on Fire (5) because I’m too uncomfortable with it, but the third roll is 4: Automobile, and teenagers dying in car crashes is both something I can handle and all too common for the era. (California didn’t have a seat-belt law until 1986.) That makes cars triggering for Veronica, so she may have some trouble getting around.
Now that we know our ghost’s past, we move on to her qualities as a ghost. There are six categories (or Shades) of ghosts, with a convenient random table to determine which. A 4 makes Veronica a Phantasm; her ghostly nature is to Judge, and the power (or Numina) that she wields most easily is Telepathy, where she gets a starting level of 1. I also have the option of buying another Focus or improving Telepathy; I choose to take a level in Psychokinesis, figuring it will help me steal things.
The third part of creating a Spookshow character is to develop a Persona—that is, the identity you wear now that you are a spy. I start by choosing a classification, which defines the sort of intelligence work Veronica is trained for. The closest thing to the burglar I wanted is the Scout, whose job mostly involves advance infiltration of target sites.
The next step is to purchase Skills. I get Aptitude + Cohesion worth of points, equaling 6. Skills are grouped into eleven different fields, each of which comprises four to five skills. You can buy levels in individual skills at one point per level, or for three points you can buy a Specialty in a group related to your classification, giving you one level in each skill that belongs to the group. So for three points I can get a Specialty in the Scout field of Larceny, which would give me one level each in Escapology, Forgery, Lockpicking, and Stealth. However, that would commit me to raising Larceny skills only as a Specialty rather than as individual skills. So with my remaining three points I could buy another level in Larceny or three levels in non-Larceny skills (but not a Specialty in the other Scout field of Athletics; I’m only allowed one to start with). Although Disguise and Sleight-of-Hand off the Theatrics list look appealing, I think I’ll just take the second level in Larceny for now.
Next, I choose an agency to work for. There’s a random table, but I think I want to stay Stateside. That leaves the FBI, the CIA (though not officially inside US borders, of course) or the NSA. I’ll take the last because it’s the most secretive, so it’s not as clear what they can and can’t do.
Starting grade depends on the campaign; since we’ve never played before, we’ll assume Novice and begin at Grade 0: $30K salary, two weeks’ vacation, and full medical coverage. When I get promoted to grade 1 I’ll get dental, so I have that to look forward to.
More experienced agents get a Sobriquet, or a nickname by which you’re known in the IC. At starting level Veronica will not have one yet.
Her starting Security Clearance is 0, which limits the information she’ll get in mission briefings to location, time frame, and force limit. You’d think they’d also want to tell her what she’s supposed to be looking for when scouting, but what do I know, I’m not a spy.
Her starting Tech Rating is 1, which allows her a slightly wider range of equipment on missions than the basic rating: not just phones, flashlights, computers and cameras but also video cameras, bomb fuses, and modems.****
Veronica’s Weapon Rating begins at 1, which authorizes her to pack knives and multiple handguns on a mission. Though she’s not that highly trained in using them, so maybe she’ll play that conservatively.
Her Contact Rating also begins at 1, which allows her to know find out she can call on for access to legitimate or illegal services, though she won’t be guaranteed to get what she asks for until she reaches a higher rating.
Veronica also gets three levels worth of References—one as a starting character and two more because her life was relatively recent. These are documents to support her cover identity, and at level 3 they include a driver’s license (or state ID, if you’re scared of cars like Veronica is), birth certificate, and immunization records.
Next, we establish some Details about Veronica: personality, identifying habits and quirks, appearance, marital status (ghosts can apparently get married, at least under their cover identities), and finally a name for her cover identity. Veronica was a well-behaved, hardworking kid in her original life, and even now she’s kind of…not stuffy, but a little square, especially for a breaking-and-entering specialist. She tends to click her tongue under her breath (to the extent that’s possible) when someone does something she disapproves of. She’s also not comfortable with the idea of marrying since she died at the age of 17. And she currently goes by the name of Xochitl Maria de la Cruz, and the career of office temp.
OK, let’s give her a stat block:
Relic:
Name: Veronica Garcia
Place of Origin: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Date of Birth: 27 April 1955
Date of Death: 1 July 1972
Cause of Death: automobile accident; hit by drunk driver on two-lane highway after dark
Trigger: cars
Spectre:
Shade: Phantasm
Focus: Telepathy 1
Other Numina: Psychokinesis 1
Persona:
Name: de la Cruz, Xochitl M.
Gender: F Age: 22 Marital Status: S
Height: 64” Weight: 135 lb
Hair: Black Eyes: Brown
Job Specs:
Agency: NSA
Classification: Scout
Grade: 0 Grade Points: 0
Security Clearance: 0
Tech Rating: 1
Weapon Rating: 1
Contacts Rating: 1
Sobriquet: none
References: state ID, birth certificate, immunization records
Equipment: As assigned
Experience Points: 0
Traits:
Physical: Strength 2, Speed 3, Semblance 2
Mental: Awareness 3, Association 4, Aptitude 3
Ethereal: Cohesion 3, Creation 3, Control 2
Movement: Walk 2, Run 4
Fortitude: 12
Skills:
Specialty: Larceny 2 (Escapology, Forgery, Lockpicking, Stealth)
*See what the designer did there?
**This is seven and a half points less than the average result of rolling 9D6 (31.5), a significant disadvantage that is only partially offset by the rule that you have to assign individual die rolls to individual Traits. Between this and the screwup in the Occupation table, I gotta say I’m not impressed with the designer’s math skills.
***The sensible approach would have been to roll 2D6 and ignore the second one unless it comes up 4-6, in which case you add 6 to the result of the first. That would have given an even distribution and I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it when I was doing the character generation.
****First, these equipment lists are very 1990s, and second, I’m not entirely clear how the designer decided on some of these examples.
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