Barbarians of Lemuria is a rules-light sword and sorcery game, inspired primarily but not exclusively by Lin Carter’s “Thongor of Lemuria” stories. (Lemuria itself was the invention of 19th-century European scientists trying to explain species distribution before they figured out continental drift, so it’s not protected material.) Characters seek riches and glory (or maybe just survival) in a pulp-Iron Age world of strange magic, fell beasts, mighty thews, and the occasional metal bikini.
The first formal step in character creation is to determine the character’s attributes. There are four: Strength, Agility, Mind, and Appeal. A score of 0 represents the human average, and you have four points to distribute. Before I commit, though, I think I’ll take a look at the options for careers and backgrounds. I note that I can have more than one Career, and also that it’s a pretty wide spread of types ranging from barbarian to magician to merchant to waitress (ok, fine, “serving wench”).*
Anyhow, the upshot for scoring attributes is that I can build a viable character on any of them. They’ll be used as modifiers on thing-doing rolls, which for success require a modified 9 on a 2D6 roll. So with a +2 I’ll succeed a little more than half the time on doing whatever sort of things that attribute enables, but I’ll also be able to add my levels in careers and combat abilities to appropriate rolls so I don’t have to rely entirely on my natural abilities.
So, back to the core question: what sort of character am I trying to build here? I like the idea of combining Dancer with something more martial such as Soldier or Mercenary. This spread should get us there:
Strength 1, Agility 2, Mind 0, Appeal 1.
My starting Hit Points are 10 plus my Strength score, which totals 11.
Next I assign points to Combat Abilities. Same model here: four areas of expertise, 4 points to distribute, values of 0 to 4. There are four combat abilities: Brawl (unarmed and improvised-weapon combat), Melee (hand weapons), Ranged (bows, slings, thrown weapons), and Defence (dodging and parrying). I’m going to spread these evenly and put a point in each:
Brawl 1, Melee 1, Ranged 1, Defence 1
Now for Careers. I get four careers and four points to assign to them, and I am allowed to repeat selections as well as assigning a value of 0 to any of the four. We’ve already committed a slot to Dancer and should give it at least 1 point. OK, so let’s say our dancer kills someone (in self-defense, out of revenge, accidentally in a brawl, who knows) and has to flee justice. She stows away on a ship and joins its crew to become a Pirate. Some way or another she ends up back on land with some polish to her fighting skills and signs on somewhere as a Mercenary. For the fourth career we go back to her past, say she’s a farm girl who ran away from an unhappy home to the city, so Farmer. Now to distribute points:
Farmer 0, Dancer 1, Pirate 2, Mercenary 1
I’ll also start the game with five Hero Points, which can be spent at moments of crisis to change a failure to a success, add extra damage to a successful attack, or be knocked unconscious when you would otherwise have died. I’ll earn both Hero Points and advancement points (for attributes, careers, or combat abilities) as I play.
For gear, I basically get whatever seems appropriate for my career(s) within the limits of what I can carry without excessive burden. It’s pretty loose. Since my most recent Career is mercenary, I’ll need some basic weapons and armor. One sword, one dagger, and one bow should cover my hurting-people needs pretty well. I’m going to forego the chainmail bikini for a a pair of boots (1 protection), a pair of bracers (1), a skullcap helm (1) and a loose, flowy pirate shirt (0 protection, and not actually on the list), giving me a total of 3 points of protection with little sacrifice of comfort. On the downside, the other heroes in their skin-showing battle harnesses and chain bikinis will all make fun of me. I don’t care, I’m not working the pole anymore and I’ll cover what I want to cover.
We still need a name to go with this statblock and background, though. I figure this gal’s on her third or fourth name, since her changes of career tend to be marked by leaving a past life behind, often in a hurry. Currently she goes by Zara the Cutlass, after her favored weapon.
So, we're ready for a statblock:
Zara the Cutlass
Leaving her parents’ farm for the city, the girl now known as Zara became a dancer at a posh inn. After killing a wealthy patron in self-defence, she fled to sea and joined a pirate crew. When her ship was sunk by pirate hunters, she made it to shore and joined a mercenary company.
Attributes:
Strength: 1 Agility: 2 Mind: 0 Appeal: 1
Combat Abilities:
Brawl: 1 Melee: 1 Ranged: 1 Defence: 1
Careers:
Farmer: 0 Dancer: 1 Pirate: 2 Mercenary: 1
Hit Points: 11 Hero Points: 5
Armor: 3 (bracers, boots, helm)
Weapons: Bow d6+1, Sword d6+1, Dagger d4
*I also note that (like the source material) the career list is pretty sexist and implicitly heteronormative, and one wishes the designer had put a little more thought into how the tropes of the genre work and which ones might not be worth carrying forward.
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