Tabletop Character: Gun person (process) 🔫

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Candy, by Mandy Moore. 🎵

I described Homage and Gorlif, now for something different: a character I'm actively creating!

I'm about to enter a Fate campaign, and was late in producing a character. The GM established the following guidelines:

• The world is 2018, and fairly close to realistic (it'll get Fantastical in ways later, but for now, we're to assume it's all brass tacks 2018).

• The party needs someone fight-ey, and in this world, that means full of guns.

• The party isn't directly hired by Blackwater, but some private contractor like them (I joked that we get our dispatches via radio, prefaced with "Good morning, Angels"). So create a character who would be hired by such a firm.

This goes against a lot of Pablo favorite tropes, but here were some concepts I threw together:

The Mike Ehrmantraut idea

Per Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I love the idea of a Mike Ehrmantraut-type character who's old and hyper competent.

If you don't watch the show, you should know that the actor is 71 years old. He's a former cop and he moves pretty slowly. He's usually thought things ahead of time and knows "the game" pretty well. He's frequently underestimated and rarely in danger. I can't find the full scene, but here's a short demonstration where someone who got hired for the same protection job is teasing him for not carrying a gun (he's not carrying a gun because he did legwork on the dealer executing the drug trade and learned enough to know there won't be a gunfight).

The IG-88 idea

The idea is that the party would be accompanied by some kind of experimental Battle Cyborg - some weapons/DoD project that the mysterious owner got a hold of somehow. If we have a Hacker in the group this could lead to an interesting dynamic. They'd be built for combat (so guns, explosive launchers, short-range welder... I imagine their demo looked something like the ZF1 from The Fifth Element).

It can have an independence story a la Short Circuit? Maybe it's a pacifist who hates that it's programmed to kill? Maybe it makes commentary about other digital systems (like "ooh, she's sultry" when they see a thermostat).

The Barrett Wallace idea

I always thought Barrett's gun-arm was cool:

So I might like the idea of someone who went a little too wild with guns and prosthetics and had detacheable "parts." Maybe she was part of DoD and went a little wild in the lab, or maybe she was from a backwater town and did it all herself (and is missing some fingers and/or facial features from when she's played too much with explosives).

The Artiste idea

Skies of Arcadia had a great gunslinging character, Gilder:

He was a bit of a playboy, had that very cute parrot, and would yell "Dance for Me!" when firing in rapid succession. I'm kind of into the idea of a character who does it for the style points, names guns, and draws little faces into the bullets. Maybe mods the guns to make their gunshots "sing" with certain pitches. Basically, they're insufferable, but they do make things go BOOM when needed.

Explosives dude (the .5 idea)

Some combination of "Left Ear" from The Italian Job and Basher from Ocean's Eleven, some character who really just identifies with explosives. It's not that they can't use guns! They'll even have a few! But they'd really rather launch grenades, set off careful plastic explosions, or engineer smoke bombs.

Don't have as much inspiration for this one though.