Usually, you read about some life-changing event involving drugs that sets the hero on the road to who they are now. There is no such thing for Saniyah Burkett. She studied criminal law and maintained a strict athletic regimen not due to trauma, but simply because she was raised to always do her best. And since she always liked cop shows when she was a kid. By now, she is a lot older, of course, and fully aware that working for the FBI has next to nothing in common with the way it is portrayed in most shows. But she still wants to be a part of it. To be honest, she was never too fond of the whole violence part of it, so even better! She applied herself in school and got the grades to show for it. She also never really managed to fit in all that well. And that continued until the day she was accepted to Quantico.
Recently, she graduated from the academy, not top of her class, but she still did pretty okay. Well, the middle of the pack is okay, right? Granted, that was a harsh lesson - she is pretty used to being among the best. Just as much as she is used to other people talking and laughing about her behind her back. While she barely passed on the shooting range, she did excel at all the non-physical tests. She felt pretty good about that, at least. Or she tells herself that she does. Then she received her diploma, and a bit later her orders to join the office in Miami, Florida. Not really her favorite place, and the office there is rumored to be the place where careers go to die. But she is determined to make the best of it. To prove that she has what it takes. To learn whatever the office can teach her. And to be a valuable and valued member of her new team in no time. Maybe, just maybe, she will fit in this time.
Instead, she found herself a hero in a game of Outgunned.
Outgunned is an Action RPG released last year and published by Two Little Mice. The game uses the same basic system as Broken Compass and Household and is designed to tell Action Movie stories. It seems like there will be a lot more flying bullets in Saniyah’s future than she envisioned.
Character creation in Outgunned is fairly straightforward. Each character has five Attributes at either 2 or 3. They also have twenty skills that are loosely associated with the attributes, which also range from 1 to 3. When making a hero, we first choose a Role. In Saniyah’s case, I’ll go with the Brain - she could be an Agent, but for one, I want to avoid having two of those, and I also think she should have been an analyst, but made a bad career choice. That means that she gets a point in the attribute Focus. She also gets one point each in the skills Drive, Leadership, Speech, Style, Detect, Fix, Heal, Know, Dexterity, and Stealth. Then she gets two Feats out of a selection provided by the Role and gets High Culture (meaning she is far more likely to recall general information and the like) and Intuition (for 1 Adrenaline giving her a shot at identifying weak spots in enemies and allowing her to ask for clues when stuck). The role also determines that she starts with a portable computer, a notebook, and a pencil. Next, I choose a Trope she embodies and go with Neurotic Geek. This gives a choice between Focus and Crime for another Attribute point, and since Focus is already maxed, she gets Crime. She gets another choice of Feats, and this time I give her Outsmart, which allows her to pay 1 Adrenaline to roll Know instead of another skill. She also gets another point each in Drive, Speech, Detect, Fix, Know, Awareness, Dexterity, and Stealth.
As for Personal Information, we have a name, a job (FBI new agent trainee), and age (28, adult). Her catchphrase is ‘Not like on the TV at all’, and her flaw is that she cannot ignore injustice - she is a true believer in the official FBI line. She gets to add two points in skills, and I give her Shoot and Stunt - she needs a bit of that, I think. And to finish everything off she gets 1 Adrenaline, 1 Spotlight (both of these are metacurrencies), and 1 Cash.
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