Adventures Into The Unknown - Characters

Design page fo Sgt. Buck Bronco's Wild Raiders by Eli Arndt

In planning the game for Adventures Into the Unknown, I decided that I wanted to use pregenerated characters. This was done for a few reasons but mostly because I was playing with this group for the first time and didn't want to wrestle with trying to get a bunch of relative strangers to make characters appropriate to the game I was running. It also had the advantage of me fudging a few things behind the scenes to allow the characters to be a bit more individual instead of all being generic humans.

I suppose a little information on the cast of heroes is in order. So, here is our international team of Nazi-busting heroes -

Sergeant Buck Bronco - Cigar-chomping, American G.I.. Leader.

Corporal Jimmy Barnes - Freckle-faced, corn-fed American G.I. kid. Mechanical wiz, pilot, and driver.

Bruno - Hulking Russian paratrooper and certifiable brick.

Markowski - Jewish Polish refugee and psychic.

Leiutenant Benchcroft - British demolitions expert.

"Sasha" - French resistence fighter, spy, assassin and all around scary lady.

Pvt. Finnigan - Irish-American pugilist and streetwise thug gone G.I. (late addition and not pictured)

One of the tricks I decided on was to create the heroes using the standard Labyrinth Lord races, applying their modifiers to the appropriate hero and marking his race type with appropriately themed pulp genre archetype. The big Russian in the group, Bruno, would be given the stats of a Goon (half-orc). Finnigan, the street tough scrapping Airborne soldier would be given the stats of a Tough Guy (dwarf). I would do this as appropriate for any of the characters that needed a bit of spice. There would still be humans, but this seemed like fun and an easy re-theming of the races.

I also looked at the various classes in LL and the found that for the most part, they all worked. Sure there wouldn't be any Magic-Users or Paladins and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be seeing anything resembling a Ranger. Using the Rogue (actually a rogue mystic) class, borrowed from Savage Sword of Athanor, I could do a reasonable approximation of a psionic operative for Markowski. Sasha, the French resistence fighter/spy could be an Assassin (fits her character better than Thief). I haven't worked it all out, but I think I'm on the right track here. If I could find or cobble a non-magical version of the Ranger for LL that might apply nicely to one or two of the members of Sgt. Bronco's Wild Raiders.

So, this is my starting point. The picture above shows some of my earlier conceptual sketches for the team. I have this odd urge to try and find somebody to do a good solid drawing of them. Even if this game doesn't go anywhere, I like the characters and could always use them later.

Stay tuned!

-Eli