# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 11 - Hellsquad - Hank Star, Saviour of the Human Race tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/hellsquad > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice Let's continue down the relatively lightweight and straightforward path today. Some of you, perhaps even many of you, have played **[[Paranoia]]** over the last several decades. It's a game about a twisted, cynical version of the world, constrained to a single vast underground habitat run by a clearly insane artificial intelligence. It's also incredibly funny. Others have probably played **[[Warhammer 40k]]**, which is itself vastly dark, twisted, and often cynically funny. What if I could bring you another RPG set in the far future, which is twisted, hilarious, cynical, and ridiculously funny? That's what we have today with **[[Hellsquad]]**. ![[Hellsquad (cover).jpg|400]] Mechanically, it reminds me of several fiction-forward RPGs, but it insists that it's an OSR game. This probably sounds a little schizophrenic, and it very well might be. Nothing about it particularly *offends* me in terms of design, though it does lean heavily on some random trait generation (which is forgivable within the context of the setting — more on that later). It uses a relatively straightforward dice pool mechanic with a base die which ranges from d4 to d12 plus a characteristic die with a similar range and an equipment die which has a default of d4 for any tools or weapons, but some come with a larger bonus. If your GM says that you have *"Guidance"* (advantage), you reroll your action die from the pool with the lowest result. If you have *"Misguidance"* (disadvantage), then reroll the action die with the highest result. Compare all the dice as rolled with the standard difficulty or adjusted difficulty (defaults to 4), and any dice which are higher or equal to the difficulty count as a success. Successes after the first can be spent for narrative advantages rolled into the next test as a bonus (guidance). They can activate special tags on items (we may talk about tags) or just pump up the damage in combat. If there are no successes, then the action fails, causing a *"Disgrace,"* which can give you narrative and fictional position disadvantages, damage or destroy your equipment, give you an ongoing condition, or roll over into your next test and give it misguidance. This probably sounds a *lot* like other games that I talk about a fair amount when I point out that it makes heavy use of clocks as timekeepers, as threat tracks, and for other purposes. You're going to start getting a very strong *[[Blades in the Dark|FitD]]* vibe as well. You should. I did say *"I have no idea why this is considered a particularly OSR game."* It is deliberately high lethality and does lean heavily on structured scenario play, but if that's all it takes… well that's another rant. Enough about mechanics. ## Acts of Creation Our story begins sometime after the year 3000, when World War 5 was almost single-handedly ended by mankind's greatest hero, *Hank Brawn*. He was muscular, he was handsome, he was badass, and he was at the top of his game. However, now it's 5000 years later. Humanity is effectively run by an artificial intelligence designed originally as a marketing system, the board of directors is a bunch of brain-addled old men, and the galaxy is being invaded by psychopathic killer crab people. It's time for Hank Brawn to rise again! Unfortunately, he's been dead for a very long time. So the best that we can do are thousands and thousands of mass-produced clones of Hank Brawn, the greatest ass-kicking, gun-firing, world-saving action hero the world has ever seen. The AI SUGAR has grown you and all of the other Hank Brawn clones in vats of goo and educated you with everything that's known about Hank Brawn through some sort of weird TV thing. Now you're in the Hellsquad, a team of Hank Clones of variable numbers and sent on perilous missions to save humanity. Hank Clones have three essential rules: 1. You are the greatest hero ever. Everyone is, but you're the best one. 2. You must save Earth and humanity and kill the invaders by any means necessary. 3. If you really have to die, do it in style. ### Nomenclature Now that you understand what you need to know, we need to pick a name. It's always some kind of variant of Hank. I like **Hank Star**.[^lonestar] It has a certain air about it. ### In Character That covers the important bits. Everything else is really secondary. We have three characteristics: **Vigor**, **Cunning**, and **Instinct**. All we need to do is roll 4d6 and choose the three highest numbers, add them together, and that's the total number of sides that we can assign to dice across all three characteristics. It sounds more complicated than it is. For each characteristic at 0, we get +1 **Blood**. (Blood is hit points, stamina, and a pool to power certain abilities, all in one. You run out of Blood, you fall down dead. Seems reasonable.) > [3, 6, 3, 3] That's surprisingly easy to add up. 12. - **Vigor:** d4 - **Cunning:** 0 - **Instinct:** d8 Hank Star is pretty effectively not going to die if you sneeze on him and he does have really good reflexes, but you might generously refer to him as dumb as a brick. He certainly doesn't *think* that *he's* dumb as a brick, but bricks are constantly calling in and complaining that Hank Star is doing stupid shit. What can you do? ### Cut to the Core Every Hank clone has a **core memory**, something residual that appears to be built in to the genetic inheritors. We could choose from the list or we can roll 1d6 and have it determined for us. Let the dice decide, and we get +2 Blood right out the gate I'm never going to pass up on free blood, so… > [1] **Skin as Silk**.^[Honestly, that'd be better phrased as **Skin Like Silk**, but what do I know? I didn't write this game.] I'm just going to bring this over from the original text. I can't do it justice with a rephrasing. > [!quote] **Hellsquad**, p20 > Uh… apparently, Hank Brawn had an excellent skincare routine. Nice. While not wearing Armor, you gain +1 Absorption. While wearing a tank top and no armor, you gain +2 Absorption and +1 Defence in stead. Essentially, we get a free point of absorption, which is damage reduction, whenever not wearing armor at all. But if wearing a tank top and no armor, we get +2 absorption and +1 defense instead. That's right. If we wear *less* armor and dress appropriately to our badass action hero selves, we get free armor. I did mention that there's a certain amount of silly involved, yes. Our core memory also establishes what gear we get as part of our loadout. All Hank clones have a standard kit: - One pistol (small ranged weapon) - One knife (small melee weapon) [thrown] [silenced] - Two rations And from the core memory … - Light armor [integrated radio] - One large weapon - One medium weapon - One earpiece (works as an [integrated radio], if not wearing armor) While we are working out how *much* gear we have, we also need to work out what amount of *weight* we're carrying because there's only so much we can do before we start getting bogged down. The rations have 1 weight for every five of them, so that's easy. Our earpiece and any other trinkets that we're carrying count as 1 weight altogether. To figure out the rest of it, we're going to have to decide which weapons we are personally carrying. The pistol and the knife are obvious enough and have 1 weight each. The light armor is going to be a Hellsquad battlesuit, which has no tags, 1 absorption, and 1 weight. The large weapon is going to be a machine gun, which has the tag automatic 4, a damage die of 1d10, and a weight of 2. The medium weapon is going to be a tactical sword, which has a tag of parry, a damage die of 1d6, and a weight of 1. That brings our total weight to 7 because the first thing Hank Star is going to do is *take off the damn light battlesuit*, throw it on the ground, and straighten out his perfectly white tank top. That's just what's going to happen. Nobody can stop it. With a weight of 7, we are considered to be carrying medium weight, which has no penalty to rolls but movement is noisier and clumsier than usual. Not that big a problem, *we're not sneaking*. The pistol has a tag of handy, which means that we don't get misguidance when trying to use it in tight quarters. Perfectly sensible. Thrown and silenced on the knife are obvious what they do. The machine gun has automatic 4, which means that it blasts out a lot of shots and you can fire multiple shots by dropping more dice equal to your base die, up to four of them. Of course, if you roll a 1 then the gun jams and becomes useless until the end of combat or it takes one level of degradation. (Yes, weapons, gear, armor, and equipment degrade when used in this game. Easily fixable, but this can be an issue.) The tactical sword lets us parry, which essentially lets us spend a raise during an attack to increase our defense by one until the start of our next turn. Successes translating to defense makes perfect sense. ### Blood, Blood, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Roll 2d6 and add +2 for the random Core Memory. +1 for 0 Cunning! > [6, 4] **13 Blood**? Okay, maybe we won't die as quickly as I originally thought. *NARRATOR: He's still going to die.* And that pretty much does it. Hank Star complete! ![[Hellsquad - CCC2025 - Hank Star (sheet).webp]] *(Play "Spot the Typo" on the sheet, shall we?)* ## Exunt That's it. That's the whole thing. You now know enough not only to be able to put together your own character but to know whether this is the sort of thing you're interested in. I'll be utterly honest with you, I feel like this might be a perfectly lightweight replacement for what **Paranoia** has become. Mechanically, it is far more modern and up to date. In terms of concept, you still have the idea of endless clones and an out-of-control AI, but you don't have quite the same conceptual overhead with the radical swarm of secret societies and security levels. ![[Hellsquad - SUGAR.webp]] As much as I enjoy all those things, I can certainly see where it would be a lot easier to get people into playing the game without the overhead. Plus, you can get right to the meat with a bunch of cloned over the top, but still weirdly incompetent action heroes put together by a galaxy-spanning corporation which is itself ridiculously incompetent at multiple levels while doing the most ludicrous action hero posturing imaginable. I think I could sell this concept at any convention I went to simply by sitting down with the book in front of me and telling anybody that even briefly paused what the premise is. I think they'd be into it. Make sure that you read through the included additional scenarios because you might feel a little bit of drift without them as examples. Once you see them, you'll know exactly the sort of thing that you're supposed to do as a GM of this game. By the way, did I mention that this is another pay-what-you-want game? You want it for free, you can have it for free. If you want to throw the creators a few dollars, you can do that too. It's very likely the most fair pricing scheme that you're going to find in the hobby. I encourage you to check it out, and if you enjoy it, go back and throw some money. It's the best way to show a creator that you appreciate them. Tomorrow, we go back to the Old West in a weird sort of way. And I do mean weird. Hold on for that insanity. [^lonestar]: Only one man would *dare* give me the raspberry!