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| Source: RPGGeek.com |
One of the upsides of the genre, however, is that it is a place where Regular Folks can shine, so that's the kind of character I plan to create for it. Several years ago Pinnacle released a zombie-attack adventure (and quickstart set) for Savage Worlds, and ithe first scene goal was for survivors to reach a gas station convenience store where they could barricade themselves in for a little while and stock up on supplies. It stuck with me (I ran the adventure at my FLGS that year) and I tend to associate the zombie-survival genre with convenience stores and similar establishments. All this being a long-winded way to saying that our character for today will be the proprietor of a convenience store.
There's a gas station with a tiny store near my workplace; it's run by a taciturn, middle-aged Vietnamese guy who seems to spend most of his on-duty downtime scrolling Vietnamese-language news websites. I don't know him well enough to actually model this character on him, but I can imagine someone like him sticking it out with grim determination in the event of a zombie apocalypse, and if he can't be a model he can at least be an inspiration. (Though my keyboard regrettably can't seem to cover the full range of Vietnamese diacriticals, so I'm going to do what a lot of Westernized Vietnamese apparently do and drop them.)
Our shopkeeper is going to start with the usual Tiny d6 allotment of 6 hit points. We'll give him three Traits, a Weapon Proficiency group and a particular Mastered Weapon, and then add a Family Trade and a Belief to round him out.
Without a clear idea of our hero's backstory, I'm going to focus on Traits that you might expect to see in a convenience store operator. Insightful is good for the small businessperson who's often worried about being cheated or robbed. Vigilant, which gives advantage on initiative rolls, has a similar utility,l especially when dealing with the occasional holdup. Lucky comes in handy for just about anyone.
A gun behind the counter is a common trope for a shopkeeper in action fiction, so Ranged is a solid choice for Weapon Group. As far as Weapon Mastery goes, Shotgun is a popular choice for people who don't have a lot of time or ammo to practice marksmanship, such as a merchant who only packs to protect himself and his store.
Family Trade is kind of tricky; it's entirely possible our guy did something entirely different back in Vietnam (and in my headcanon he came to the States well after the war on a family-reunification visa and family members who preceded him here helped him get set up with the store); on the other hand, he would have been a small child or even a baby when the war ended, so he basically grew up in Communist Vietnam and his parents (assuming they survived) would very likely have had to give up whatever business they might have operated before 1975. It's a lot of factors to weigh, and it might be easiest to say he was some kind of low-level store clerk, using a similar skill set, back in Vietnam before his cousins contrived to have him join the part of the family that made it out of the country in 1975. So that puts us back where we started with Small Retail as his Family Trade.
Earlier in this process I suggested "grim determination" might be his mode of dealing with the horrors of this new era, so his Belief should embody that somehow: You can't know whether it gets better if you don't persevere. A heavily tempered optimism in that.
OK, let's put it together. Phuoc* Nguyen was running a convenience store in a Los Angeles suburb when the big outbreak happened. He was fortunate to get word of it on his laptop before the first waves of zombies reached San Dimas, and he had time to load up his car with canned goods, bottled water and other necessities from the shop's inventory, driving through a pack of shamblers as he reached the Foothill Freeway. But then the car broke down close to Pasadena, where Phuoc found a band of survivors delighted to see his supplies and eager to prove themselves worthy comrades in a quest for safety.
Family Trade: Small retail
*the given name means "lucky" or "blessing," Phuoc isn't yet sure whether the cosmos has decided it should be ironic.
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