Simon Washbourne's Lashings of Ginger Beer is an RPG ode to the sort of children's adventures and mystery stories exemplified by Enid Blyton's Famous Five series-- a cozy (cosy?), mostly safe world where stakes are small, authorities are trustworthy, villains tend to be outsiders, and childhood is idyllic in an anachronistic (and simultaneously ahistorical) sort of way. In the manner of much recent children's entertainment, I'm going to update the diversity without making the setting much more realistic. Prepare, then, to meet the Primrose Lane Irregulars, a group of average kids whose nosey-parkering often roots out genuine skullduggery.
Player Characters in Lashing of Ginger Beer come in three Types: the "average" Good Kid, the rather bookish Swot, and the mildly rambunctious Truant. They range in age from ten to fifteen (either chosen by the player or randomly determined via d6+9), and their age determines the start values for their four Attributes (Tough, Deft, Clever, Charm). Tough and Clever vary directly with age, whereas Deft and Charm vary inversely. I'm going to start with random generation, but as the group fills out I can't promise I'll stick with it if I keep getting the same results.
My Age roll is a 1, for a ten-year old who is likely to be the youngest of the group, possibly a tag-along sibling or somesuch. The starting scores for a ten-year-old's Attributes are Tough 1, Deft 3, Clever 1, and Charm 3. I can add 1 to any single attribute and am inclined to select Charm for talking one's way out of trouble. So my stat line looks like this:
Tough 1, Deft 3, Clever 1, Charm 4
The next step is to select my Type. I'm going to be a bit dull and make our tagalong a Good Kid; I'd rather put the Swot and the Truant in the middle of the pack, agewise. Type determines my skill list or Things I Am Good At. All Kids are good at Hiding and Snooping; as a Good Kid I can also be good at Acting Innocently, Camping, Hobbies, Sports, Riding Bicycles, or Spotting Nasty People. (I can also purchase from other Type lists at double the cost.) I'll get a d6 for every point in one of these, added to a d6 for every point in the relevant Attribute to create a die pool in which 6s count as successes.
Snooping and Hiding start at 2 dice each; other skills default to 0, and I've got 8 points to spend. I'll want Act Innocently at 2 and Spot Nasty People at 1 to start with, add a die in Ride Bicycle, then spend the remaining 4 dice by adding one die to each skill. That puts me thus:
Act Innocently 3; Hide 3, Ride Bicycle 2, Snoop 3, Spot Nasty People 2
Next I can obtain three Useful Items. There is a list; I can choose the first freely, then roll against a sort of rarity number to see which two others I manage to score. For my free choice I select a Scruffy Dog, every kid's best friend, especially whe you're the youngest in the gang. For my second item I roll on a Bicycle, which I can get on a 2 or less. A 2 puts it into my hands. For the third I go frivolous--a dog and a bike are eminently practical things for a kid to have--and try for a bag of bullseye candies. Five or less wins the sweets, and a 2 on the die finishes my list:
Scruffy dog, Bicycle, Bag of bullseyes
I can teach the dog one behavior for each point of Clever I have, which means it knows one trick. At least one of these must be to come when called, so that settles that.
Finally, I have d6-1 siblings, one of whom will likely be an older member of the Specials. I hit the jackpot with a 6, and so have five siblings of the following types:
1) older brother, age 12
2) younger brother, age 6
3) younger sister, age 5
4) older brother, age 14
5) younger brother, age 8
There's a dearth of girls in this family, so our protagonist is going to be female. Ten-year-old Lizzie Hill is one of the middle children in her large family and tends to get overshadowed by her older brothers Desmond and Trey (Freeman Hill III), not to mention the babies Chris and Melanie--her eight-year-old brother Lucas is in the same boat, but he's the quiet type and doesn't seem to mind so much. Fortunately, she has a best friend in her mixed-breed dog Scruffy (who answers to his name but not much else) and a talent for endearing herself to adults (even her harried parents are not entirely immune). She also has a knack for noticing when somebody's up to no good, which earns her the grudging acceptance of the older Irregulars.
It doesn't really come up in the mechanics, but I envision the Hills as a third-generation Caribbean-British family, with Black grandparents from Jamaica and Barbados (and possibly points elsewhere, haven't worked it all through yet) and parents born in England.
And now for a statblock, patterned after the game's character sheet.
My name is Lizzie Hill
I am a Good Kid
I have four brothers and 1 sister, and I am ten years of age.
My attributes: Tough 1, Deft 3, Clever 1, Charm 4
These are the things I am good at:
Act Innocently: 3
Hide: 3
Ride Bicycle: 2
Snoop: 3
Spot Nasty People: 2
This is my stuff:
Scruffy dog named "Scruffy"
Bicycle
Bag of bullseyes
No comments:
Post a Comment