Part One, Part Two

The Story

Later, in a cafe around the corner from Independence Mall called Neutral Grounds, PJ and Percy compared notes after a tacit truce (there was tension between them stemming from PJ’s romantic feelings toward Debra and Percy’s protective feelings toward her). Between the two of them, they had found out that more than twenty people had disappeared from in and around the Mall, and six of those had been found again, as corpses. In addition, of those twenty plus, four of them had been police officers, one of them a member of the Thin Blue Line, the mayor’s unofficial task force for dealing with supernatural threats.

Percy also asked PJ for information on the biker war going on in the city; PJ told him that the best place (though not the safest place) to look would be a bar outside the city in New Hope called the Alomeda Bomb Range, the hangout for the Warlocks biker gang.

Meanwhile, Boop-Boop went back to Bartram Gardens and met with her mistress Lily, the Summer Lady. Boop-Boop informed Lily that something was killing people in the city, and that it was likely vampires of the Black Court. Lily agreed, and told Boop-Boop that they were likely after something in the park.

Boop-Boop then called upon a contact of hers, Grendel, a shape-shifting raven. Grendel told her that there were actually more people missing as a result of the Black Court than anyone realized, and that he suspected what they were after. He agreeed to take Boop-Boop inside the building in Independence Mall, which he did shape-shifted as a police officer. Inside, he took her to the Liberty Bell, which he explained was a powerful magical artifact. Its power was held in check by the fact that it was broken, but if it were repaired, it could grant vast supernatural power to the one who did it.

Later that night, Percy and Debra met for dinner and discussed the day’s goings on, as well as whether or not Debra had any feelings toward PJ.

Meanwhile, PJ girded himself against the Black Court and when to Independence Mall to stake it out. Boop-Boop, at the same time, was scrying around the city, trying to find the Black Court hideout. She found a vampire walking down the street; it became mist a block away from the park and glided gently in, reforming out of sight of the police. Boop-Boop also saw PJ there. She immediately flew as fast as she could toward Independence Mall.

PJ watched as the Black Court vampire approached a homeless man sleeping on a bench, bent over to him for a moment, then straightened. The homeless man stood up and started walking out of the park. PJ decided to follow him.

Boop-Boop also saw this as she arrived. The vampire, she saw, was now heading toward a policeman on patrol. Acting quickly, she flew down to the police officer, lowered her veils, and shouted, “RUN!” The police man ran, Boop-Boop on his tail, and the vampire following quickly behind. Boop-Boop told the man to get to a public place, then to radio to the others in the park and tell them to be on guard, and to stay together. Once the police officer was safely out of the park, she flew up into a tree and, exhausted, fell asleep.

At midnight, Percy met a contact of his, Maximillian, at Babylon, the night club center of power for the vampires of the White Court in the city. Maximillian appeared as a tall, thin black man with vertically-slitted pupils; this was not his true form, however. In his true form, he appeared as a black cat.

Percy asked Maximillian what he knew about the Black Court in town, and Maximillian told him that they were building strength for an attack on Independence Mall, likely to perform some sort of ritual on the Bell. That, he told Percy, would not be good.

The Game

My preparation for DFRPG was considerably different from what I was used to. In D&D, you prepare discrete encounters, usually focusing on combat. This can sometimes make combat the focus of the actual game, as you don’t want to let all that time you spent prepping encounters go to waste.

In DFRPG, I used a different tactic. I statted up all of the NPCs that were likely to come into play, as well as some faceless mooks, and I came up with three situations that were going on in the city. Then I let the players discover what was going on, and allowed them to guide the story in the direction they found most interesting. That happened to be my Black Court storyline, though some focus was also given to the war between the Warlocks and the Pagans.

I deliberately left these storylines entirely skeletal, so that the the players and I could fill in the blanks through play. I knew that I could probably have come up with some pretty cool stuff ahead of time, but I also knew that the players would likely come up with a lot of awesome stuff, too, and I decided to capitalize on that. It worked out pretty well.

Part One: It Begins

The Story

Each one of them blinked, and was somewhere safe and familiar. PJ was in his apartment; Percy was at work, in City Hall; Debra was in her dorm room at Drexel; Boop-Boop was in Bartram Gardens, her home. They had each recieved a glimpse of a possible future, three days from now.

PJ, determined to get photographic evidence of supernatural goings-on, called City Hall to schedule a time when he could be there, taking pictures. He talked to Percy, pretending to be an architectural reporter doing a story on the buttresses of City Hall. He got the name of an architect (who he would likely not contact), and scheduled a time to come take pictures of the outside of the building.

Meanwhile, Debra was procrastinating, trying not to think about mid-terms. She was cleaning up around her dorm room, and began idly scrying around the city. At the exact same time, Boop-Boop was also scrying around the city, and the two of them wound up scrying at each other. They were both stunned–Debra because she was looking at a fairie, and Boop-Boop because Debra could see her, despite her glamours. Before they could communicate, though, they were both immediately redirected to an image of Independence Mall, where they could both feel something distinctly unclean.

Debra, recognizing Bartram Gardens, quickly drove there to find the faerie. She found a very surprised, very confused fairie (“How can you see me?”), and after a brief introduction, they both agreed to go to Independence Mall to investigate the feeling that they had had earlier.

Meanwhile, PJ was eating his lunch in Independence Mall, which was across from his apartment. He noticed a distinctly heavy police presence (which made him uncomfortable), and decided to find out some information by Listening to a couple of officers. Shutting out his other senses, he focused on his hearing and was able to eavesdrop on the two. They were speaking, in hushed tones, about disappearances happening around the park. He decided to call his police contact, Detective Mark Harrisson, about the disappearances.

Meanwhile, Percy was called into the mayor’s office. The mayor, Kenneth Darmon, told Percy that there were some troubling events afoot, and that he needed a man like Percy, who had numerous contacts both politically and . . . otherwise, to investigate these rumors. First, there were rumors of disappearances around the park. Then, there was talk of escalating gang violence, a turf war between two motorcycle gangs: the Warlocks and the Pagans. Finally, more disappearances, though these ones were around South Street. Darmon told Percy to contact Detective Mark Harrisson for more information on the disappearances in Independence Mall. Percy called Harrisson, who agreed to meet in Independence Mall in half an hour.

In Independence Mall, Debra and Boop-Boop arrived to find PJ there; PJ was overjoyed to see Debra (and couldn’t see Boop-Boop at all). Boop-Boop, however, recognized that PJ had been in her prophetic dream (as did Debra). She appeared, and the three quickly realized that something larger than them was going on. Percy soon arrived on the scene, and came up to say hello to Debra. Then everything clicked: all four of them knew that they would be in a car chase together, three days into the future. The wheels were in motion.

The Game

This segment of the game was almost entirely player-driven. There was a lot of in-character banter and dialog between the players, and I mostly just kept my mouth shut. Occasionally I’d chime in with a compel (or to reward a de facto compel, when the role-play was going particularly well), and I’d answer questions when they were asked of me.

Initially, I had wondered how I was going to get this group together. The car chase that I started the session with gave them some impetus to find each other, but they all started in different parts of the city when I asked them where they were when they “woke up” from their prophetic dream.

However, the players made this pretty easy for me, all things considered. Sean (PJ) connected himself to Mike (Percy) with a phone call, which was a good start (and a great roleplaying scene that resulted in the line, “I like big buttresses, and I cannot lie,” from Kathleen (Debra). I awarded a fate point for that.). But where it really started to click was when Kathleen (Debra) and Denise (Boop-Boop) both decided that they were scrying at the same time. We had already established during city creation that mystical “crossed wires” were common in Philadelphia, so a simple compel on a city aspect allowed me to connect them together. I was able to connect that to Independence Mall, which got the ball rolling.

From there, I really only had to figure out how to get everyone else there. Sean (PJ) again made it easy, by simply saying that he lived across from the Mall and ate lunch there every day. In retrospect, I probably should have given him a fate point for that as a thank-you. Percy was the hardest to get to the Mall, but an audience with the mayor solved that, and also gave him some goals to work toward. Once they were all in one place, it became clear that Fate had something in store for them.

One final note. After the prophectic flash-forward sequence, I told all of the players that there was an aspect on the city: Threads of Fate. I told them I could compel this aspect any time I wanted to steer them toward that future. I didn’t have to; not once. The players did so much of my work for me, I feel like I probably should have given out twice as many fate points as I did.

Cast of Characters

PJ O’Toole is a journalist from Chicago. In Chicago, he dug a little too deeply in pursuit of the truth, and ran afoul of the White Council. They were going to execute him, but he managed to talk his way out of it, with Harry Dresden’s help. Dresden told PJ to go to Philadelphia, where there was plenty of weirdness afoot, but a very small White Council presence. PJ agreed, and moved to Philadelphia where he went freelance, and tried at every turn to avoid attention from those in power. While in Chicago, PJ met Debra (below), interviewed her for an article, and promptly fell in love with her. In a happy coincidence, she moved to Philadelphia, too.

Debra “Heather” Spivey is a grad student from Chicago, where she was raised by two lesbians.She is currently studying mythology at Drexel. She has some minor magical talent, mostly in the area of divination, and she has trouble figuring out where to draw the line when she’s using her power. She knows PJ, but thinks he’s a little creepy, especially since he pays so much attention to her.

Boop-Boop is a pixie of the Summer Court. She heard about the Za Lord’s Guard in Chicago, and decided to create a similar organization in Philadelphia, which she calls the Rose Guard. Lily, the Summer Lady, wanted to encourage her, so she granted Boop-Boop the ability to use seelie magic, which complimented the pixie’s already potent ability to cast glamours.

Percy was raised by a single mom, along with his sister (who is away at college in Alabama). He got a job in City Hall, working as an aide to the mayor, in order to help his mom pay the bills. However, his supernatural connections also landed him a job working for a shape-shifting black cat named Maximillion, who uses him as a spy within the mayor’s office. Percy is able to transform into a bat, though he only does so when it’s necessary and he’s unlikely to get caught doing so. He is very protective of Debra, seeing her as a surrogate little sister.

The Story So Far

Tires on asphalt squeal through the night, shattering the silence. It is Halloween night, and PJ, Debra, Boop-Boop, an Percy are in a car, running from agents of the government, speeding down I-95. They are likely being chased because PJ has photographic evidence of the mayor turning into a werewolf (which Percy would like to obtain for himself).

As the two car’s speed down I-95, Boop-Boop takes out her scrying bowl (a plastic water bottle cap invested with seelie power) and scries into the pursuing car. She sees three large men in nondescript clothing, one of them loading a handgun in the passenger’s seat. Boop-Boop warns the rest of the car that the others have a gun, and likely mean them harm.

Deciding to try to give the other car the slip, PJ (who is driving; it’s his car) turns on his left turn signal, then veers to the right, trying to shake them. At the same time, Boop-Boop throws a veil over the whole car, and PJ kills the engine. The other car goes speeding by, losing them. Boop-Boop continues to scry their car, and sees that they soon pull over, realizing they’ve lost their quarry.

The group knows that they have precious little time before the hunt begins again, and they try to decide what to do, but . . .

. . . they open their eyes. They are each somewhere safe, and familiar. It is three days before Halloween, and none of this has happened yet. They are each, however, armed with foreknowledge, a glimpse of a future that may come to pass.

To be continued . . .

Running the Game

The above represents about the first twenty or thirty minutes of play of our first session of The Dresden Files RPG. We started with four fairly different characters. PJ O’Toole is a vanilla mortal, Debra is a minor practitioner (she had the Ritual power initially, but at the end of the session traded it in for Thaumaturgy), Boop-Boop is a full-on fairie with a whole host of supernatural powers, and Percy is a shapeshifter who can transform into a bat.

I decided I wanted to catch everyone’s attention right from the beginning, so I started in media res, with the car chase. I told them they were running from someone, and asked them who they were running from. PJ’s player, Sean, immediately said “the government”, and everyone else agreed. I then held up a FATE point and asked whose fault it was, and why. Again, Sean volunteered, saying that they were being chased because he had photographic evidence of the mayor turning into a werewolf. He got the FATE point, and that became true.

This led to a nice little exchange between Sean (PJ) and Mike (Percy), where Percy was trying to convince PJ to give him his camera’s memory card (he wanted the photos for his own reasons), and Sean refusing. Sean wound up taking the memory card out of the camera and hiding it in his watch’s band (which Percy, being very observant, saw). He then gave Percy his camera, and Percy promptly threw it out the window.

I had initially planned on an extended chase scene, but the players threw me a curveball. PJ’s fake to the right would have been easy enough to handle, but Denise (Boop-Boop) decided to veil the entire car, which ended the chase pretty quickly. It was clever, though, so I let it happen. It allowed me to put the next part of my opening into play a little more quickly: the flashback.

The idea was that the whole chase scene was a vision of a possible future. The PCs all now had that knowledge, but they didn’t know how they’d get to that point. It’s now up to them to get to that point, and up to me to nudge them in the right direction. To help facilitate that, I placed an aspect (Threads of Fate) on the whole city that I can compel to get them to go in the right direction.

What’s nice, though, is that, in the entire first session, I didn’t have to compel it once. The players are doing a pretty good job of getting there on their own. More on that in a future post.

Bulldogs! Is coming out at GenCon this August. What is Bulldogs!, you ask? I’ve heard it referred to as Han Solo: the RPG. And Han Solo, as we know, is all about freedom, individuality, entrepreneurship, being the scrappy underdog, and all the rest of the things that make America great. So really, if you don’t like Han Solo, you’re saying that you don’t like America, you Commie fascist. So, if you love America, you’ll go to GenCon and buy Bulldogs!, or you’ll wait until after GenCon and you’ll pick it up at the store, like a good American patriot.

Also, there’s a kickstarter campaign, which is going very well. If you really like America, you’ll go donate to it and buy the book. Also, it’s really, really good. And I’m not just saying that because my name’s on the cover (it is). I’m saying that because I’ve played it, and it was awesome. So go buy it. Please. I need new socks.

Well, I guess you’ve all noticed that I’ve been away for a while. There are two reasons for this:

1. I’ve been a little bit burned out on blogging lately. I was getting to the point where I didn’t have as much free time as I was used to, and it was competing with other things that I wanted to do more. I can’t promise that that has changed, but I’ve been feeling the itch again lately, so here I am.
2. I’ve become a little bit burned out on running D&D, which has dulled some of my enthusiasm for the game. I’m not completely off D&D; I’ll be participating in the upcoming season of Encounters, which I’m pretty excited about. But my current D&D game is on hiaitus for the moment. Too much time was spent away from it for various reasons, which kind of killed momentum. We may go back to it in the future, but for now I feel like some time away from DMing might be good for me.

Which is not to say that I’m going to stop running games. I’m very much a GM at heart, and I generally feel more comfortable running the game than playing in it (though I do enjoy the latter quite a bit). And that brings me to the second reason for this blog.

I’m starting up a game of The Dresden Files, which I’m pretty stoked about. This is intended to be the first of many different games that I and my group will try; I think of it as something akin to Dice of Doom’s great experiment, though somewhat less regimented and not nearly so grandiose. I’d like to try a few different games with my group, primarily as a sort of palette-cleanser/injection of variety, but also to get the people in my group to branch out a bit, experiment with different styles of play, and generally improve all of our roleplaying chops a bit.

Anyways, back to Dresden. We’ve had one session (which not everyone could make it to), and it was the city creation session of the game. I wasn’t sure what to expect, quite honestly. The game dedicates an entire session to just making characters and fleshing out the city you’ll be playing in, and while it sounded cool on paper, I honestly wasn’t sure it would be all that much fun.

It was freaking awesome. Everyone got really into it and we came up with some fantastic stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that we didn’t have enough room on the city sheet to track it all. We’re setting the game in Philadelphia, largely because it’s geographically close to us and somewhat familiar to most of the group. We’ve decided that Philly is a gathering point for a lot of minor practitioners who come to make use of the city’s role as a crossroads for mystical information. The White Council, on the other hand, has only a token presence here, probably because of the current mayor’s role as a Freeholding Lord, and the city’s (largely unenforceable) role as Accorded Neutral Ground.

The mayor wants to maintain this status quo, while a network of minor practitioners (colloquially referred to as “Fatesbook”) want to depose him and put one of their own in power. There’s also the White Court night club owner who controls the flesh trade, the mobster with a little bit of supernatural power and a big opinion of himself, the Voodoo priest who will give anyone information for a price (he collects favors, not money), the ectomancer who runs the ghost tours and lives in a haunted ship, the biker gang, a number of shapeshifting animals associated with Edgar Allen Poe’s residence in the city, and the Summer Court’s presence in the botanical gardens. Oh, and did I mention that there’s a scourge of Black Court vampires in town, who want to repair the Liberty Bell because doing so will plunge the world into eternal darkness? Add to this the Coalition for Family Moral Order, and you’ve got yourself a party.

I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

I was reading through the Dresden Files RPG, and came across the above phrase. It really made me sit up and think for a second because it’s an idea that I believe a lot of people forget about when they play many RPGs, most notably D&D and its ilk.

Here’s what I mean. Say you’re at the table, playing D&D. You’re fighting a frothing band of orcs, and you’re rearing to go. You take up your sword, and you say, “I activate Cleaving Stance, then I use my move to get over here. Then I’m going to charge this orc.” Notice anything? You’re describing your character’s actions in terms of the game mechanics. This is a clear example of mechanics preceding story, and while it might not be a terrible thing (it does have the advantage of making your actions mechanically clear and precise, and eliminating confusion), it’s not all that exciting.

Now, what if you instead said, “I draw my sword as a run over here to get into position. Then I barrel headlong into this orc, and my blade cleaves through his flesh to lodge into his ally over here.” That’s a little more exciting, a little punchier, and it says the exact same thing. The main difference here is that you’re leading with story rather than mechanics; you’re describing things from your character’s point of view instead of your own. Intent is preceding mechanics.

This is easy enough to do when you know exactly how you want to handle your actions mechanically; you just figure out how to describe what you’re doing narratively and you’re golden. But here’s the awesome thing about leading with story: you can do it even when you don’t know what powers or abilities you want to bring to bear on a given action.

This is a great tool to use when you’re unfamiliar with a character’s specific abilities, or even the game in general, but you have a decent amount of familiarity with the concept of your character (which you should, if you made him). When it comes to your turn, don’t worry about what’s on your character sheet. Think about what your character would do, how he would react, given the situation. Would he move to intercept an orc charging at one of his companions? Try to fry the chieftain with arcane fire? Cry out in defiance and lash out at everyone around? Think about what your character would do, and describe it in terms of narrative. Then, work with your DM to come up with a way to model it mechanically.

As a DM, try to encourage this kind of play. In general, I’m willing to bet you’ll see your players doing interesting things more often, like using the environment and taking improvised actions. Powers are great, but they can be a crutch, too. Most importantly, your characters don’t know what powers they have, or what they’re called. They only know what they would do, or try to do.

I recently got together with my friend Dean to have a brainstorming session about a couple of RPG ideas that we had. We had gotten into a conversation on a previous get-together about game design (apropos of Bulldogs! and its upcoming release), and he mentioned that he had an idea for a game that he wanted to run by me. I listened to his idea (which I thought was awesome), and then ran an idea past him (which he thought was awesome). We made plans to meet the following week (today) to brainstorm for our ideas and see where we could go with them.

I’m very pleased to say that the brainstorming session was extremely productive for both games. We’re both energized now, and I think we may actually wind up designing these things to completion. I feel like, when I’m designing, it helps me a lot to have a partner. I like to do things collaboratively, and it helps a lot to bounce ideas off of someone who’s just as invested in the game as you are, but might be coming at it from a different perspective. It also helps to have a partner who’s enthusiastic about the project, because enthusiasm is contagious and it keeps me on track.

Now, I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on either of these games. Both may wind up changing quite a bit between now and when we’ve got something finished that we can playtest, and there’s always the fear that someone might steal our ideas and publish them first (though I know that nobody who reads this blog would do such a thing). I will give you some teasers, though.

Anabasis (working title) is a game about crossing hostile territory, isolation, and zombies. It’s got some collaborative world-building elements, and is suited for long-term, campaign-style play, though it might not be quite as long-form as something like D&D. We may also wind up using Saga for the rules. This one is Dean’s brainchild, and I think it’s fantastic.

The other one, which we’re currently calling Doppelganger, is also about isolation, but also paranoia and negotiation. There’s a lot of table-talk in this one, and it’s designed to be a one-shot, playable in one or two sessions. It also incorporates a lot of board game elements. This one was my idea, though Dean offered a lot of great ideas when we were brainstorming it.

At any rate, I just wanted to share my excitement. I’ve been wanting to get back into designing my own stuff for a while now, but I just haven’t been able to motivate myself to do so. As I said, enthusiasm is contagious, and now I’m ready to go!

Yesterday, I ran a playtest for Bulldogs! that went quite well, from my perspective. The group seemed to have fun (I certainly did), and I got an idea about what works and what needs work within the system.

One thing that struck me, though, was how effective my preparations were. In general, I think I prepared fairly well; I knew the system, and I had in idea of where things were going. There were areas where I think I over-prepared, and others where I feel I didn’t prepare enough.

The chief area where I was over-prepared was simply in the length of the adventure. We played for a good three and a half hours, and got through about half of the adventure. In a more traditional, longer-term play setting that might be fine, but in a one-shot playtest, it’s really better if you can get through the entire adventure in one sitting. I decided partway through that I was going to cut some of the fights out of the adventure because it simply didn’t need it, but we still weren’t able to finish (I had to get home and feed the dogs, after all). I think the reason that I prepared so much was simply because I’ve never run a FATE system game before, and I had no idea how long it would take to resolve a single conflict. Practice, I think, will solve this problem.

Bulldogs!, like any FATE game, is fairly easy to improvise with; it gives you a lot of tools with which to adjudicate player actions on the fly, and doesn’t require nearly as much preparation as, say, D&D does. In fact, the adventure that I prepped (the one that was too long) was only two pages long. I also had a set of cards with character stats and notes on them, though that stuff could have easily been included in the adventure document, and would likely only have increased its length by half a page or so.

It was pretty easy to run the adventure from this document, but I could definitely see areas where I could have prepared more. For example, simply putting stress boxes for the enemies on the document would have saved me a lot of time that I spent hand-drawing them before encounters. I also think that some of the fights that I planned were a little too hard for the party. This is partly due to inexperience, I think, and partly also due to the fact that it’s difficult to gauge how difficult an opponent should be for a particular set of PCs.

Despite these hitches, I do think that everyone had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed running the game (and I had a good, creative set of players), and I’d definitely run it again.

This is the final member of the Dawn Chaser’s crew.

Larson grew up on an Arsubaran colony world, Heska; it was a rough and tumble world, but also highly industrialized. He learned to fix things and monkey around with machines at an early age, and it was clear he had a gift for it. When he was seventeen years old, TransGalaxy offered him a job as a ship’s mechanic on a luxury cruise ship, a job he readily accepted, if only to get off of Heska. The lack of excitement was not good for Larson, though; he began drinking too much, and getting into fights with crew and even passengers aboard the cruise ship. During one altercation, he killed someone, and he was sentenced to several years on a prison planet.

TransGalaxy continued to monitor Larson while he was imprisoned, and they noted that his exceptional mechanical skills got even better. He seemed to thrive in the rougher prison environment than he did on the luxury liner, though he still got into the occasional brawl. On one such occasion, his opponent got the better of him and used a piece of heavy industrial machinery on him, crushing his right side and nearly killing him. Mysteriously, TransGalaxy paid for his hospitalization and his new cybernetic prosthesis, and had him released from prison on one condition: that he would be the ship’s mechanic on a class-D freighter, the Dawn Chaser. Larson has no idea why TransGalaxy is so interested in him, and he doesn’t care. As long as he gets to work on machines and gets more-or-less left alone, he’s content.

Here are two more members of the Chaser’s crew; only one more to go!

An’k T’rbrik was born amongst her people, in Templari space. She was raised to believe that she was superior to members of other species, physically, mentally, and in every other way. She grew up being taught to strive for perfection. She strove for physical perfection, studying Templari martial arts and other physical disciplines, and she strove for perfection in her chosen career: the path of the space pilot. She became one of the better-known pilots in the Templari navy. Something, however, in the back of her mind always nagged her, some doubt as to the entitlement that was bred into her, the superiority of her race.

Then, one day, she made a near-fatal choice: she refused to fire upon a defenseless ship full of refugees from the Frontier Zone. For this, she was sentenced to execution; rather than face death, she chose exile. She ran from her home, haunted by her perceived failure. Even now, as a pilot for a rag-tag group of spacers on a Class-D freighter, she has trouble getting past the Templari indoctrination; she believes that she is superior in most ways to her crew, though she tries to get along with them. In the end, she is an exile and and outsider, tentatively accepted by the crew of the Dawn Chaser.

Lexi Stardust, like most Ken Reeg, started making deals at an early age. She had a natural talent for gaining peoples’ trust, and she used that talent to make a lot of money. Her penchant for compulsive risk-taking and her love of games of chance meant that she rarely held onto that money for very long, and she often made enemies just as easily as she made friends. When the chips were down, though, she managed to talk her way into a job on the Dawn Chaser, as the ship’s front-woman and dealmaker.

Since that time, she has more than earned her keep. She has contacts everywhere, and where she doesn’t have contacts already, she makes them quickly. She leverages those contacts to procure discounted goods that the crew ships and sells at a significant profit. Though she sometimes gets the crew into hot water with her thrill-seeking behavior, she is often worth the trouble.