# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 13 - Retrograde - Anatolev Ygnozvy, Blood Ink Presser Pilot tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/retrograde > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice I'm really going to continue loading you up with two things this month: - Tons and tons of indie RPGs that you have probably never heard of or even rumors of - All the pay-what-you-want you can eat Today is no different. In fact, it's so niche and so strange, I almost skipped over it in the interests of building characters for games which might be more accessible to people. But then I realized that would be cheating you out of one of the few things I can offer, which is entirely unique: my collection of RPGs both popular and obscure, but particularly the latter, is possibly unmatched by many people on this planet. That sounds like exaggeration, but it's not. Even leaving aside the ungodly number of linear feet of shelving I have devoted to books, the digital collection is immense. The PDF revolution was incredibly powerful when it came to independent RPG publishing. Some people trace that back to desktop publishing in its infancy, but the widespread acceptance of PDFs changed the world for indie publishers. Meaning that no one had to pay for storage space, warehousing, or shipping, or even printing to get your work in front of people. All you needed was a free DTP application and some place to store it. But enough about the history of RPGs, you're here for character creation and obscurantism. I'm going to drop both of them on you right now with **[[Retrograde - A Retrofuturist Letterpress RPG|Retrograde]]**, a retro-futurist letterpress design which postulates a universe in which secret occultism underlies almost every mystery and starships are giant Linotype printers scribing star charts in the mutant blood of their pilots. ![[Retrograde - Retrofuturist Letterpress RPG (cover).jpg|400]] It's a weird place, quite frankly, but we are going to have fun. Let's run down the basics of the core mechanics because I think that helps understand what's going on when we make characters. The Librarian (the GM) can call for a skill check for specific skills. The player will roll 2D6 and compare the result to their current skill points, which are the success threshold. If they roll less than or equal to that, they succeed. If they roll greater than the current success threshold, they fail. If they fail, they can decide to spend a point of the skill to turn the check from a failure into a success, but that expenditure drops the skill level by one point. The more you fail, the harder it is to succeed. Roll a 12 and you get a critical failure, which costs you a skill point no matter what, but it remains a failure. Roll a 2 and get a critical success, which is just better. If any skill reaches zero, the character goes unconscious. Each of your attributes (Sanity, Health, and Spirit) have an associated hit point pool and you can spend those instead of skill points to pass a skill check. If you have an advantage on a skill roll, such as having a particular specialty, you roll twice and take the best. If rolling with a disadvantage, you roll twice and take the worst. No one will force you to turn a failure into a success. You don't have to spend a skill point; you can just take the failure. That's literally pretty much the whole system mechanically. You could run any setting in your brain with that amount of design. It's crunchier than I would normally go for, but I get it. All that on the table, it's time to make a character. ## Acts of Creation Extremely Short Version: We need to assign values for our attributes, hit points, and skills; choose a star sign; develop a specialization; and acquire weapons and gear. I know that sounds ridiculously normal compared to my usual taste in games. You are correct. ### Attributed to No One We start with the three core attributes: **Mind**, **Body**, and **Soul**. One of them gets an 8, one of them gets a 6, and one of them gets a 4. The **hit points** for each attribute start at exactly the same value. I feel like doing something different than my usual, so we're going to go with an unusual priority. I envision playing a ship's pilot, but one who leans more on their knowledge of the obscure and sheer force of will than knowledge of the machine itself. So our ranks are going to be: - **Soul:** 8 (*Spirit:* 8) - **Body:** 6 (*Health*: 6) - **Mind:** 4 (*Sanity:*: 4) How could it possibly go wrong to have the cosmic navigator of your starship have a low sanity when passing through the esoteric space beyond physical space? I can't imagine how that could possibly go wrong. It's going to be all right. ### Inhumanly Skilled All the skills on the sheet start at 2 points (that's 6 skills per attribute), and then we distribute an additional 36 points however we please. At the end, we'll have a total of 72 skill points. Can I step in for a moment here and tell you how much I hate skill systems in general, and in particular skill systems like this? You dump a ton of skill points on me for a fairly large number of skills and then just walk away. I hated it when BRP did it and I hate it today. I much prefer a complete absence of skill systems and just 2 traits which describe what the character is good at and what the character is bad at. Then just get the system out of my way and let me play. Alas and alack, we have what we have. Let me go poke at my digital version of the sheet because you don't want to hear me walk through all of this in text I assure you. ![[Many Unbearable Hours later (reaction).png]] *(Or maybe it just felt that way as I ended up throwing together a quick spreadsheet to track the numbers.)* You'll end up seeing the character sheet when I'm done, but rest assured that it has a bunch of colored in circles, which is a right pain in the ass to do digitally, incredibly easy to do when you have a pencil in your hand, but not so great with publishing software, especially if you want to retain vectorization. But I digress. Knowing that we need at least six points in any skill in order to pick up a specialization later, I decided to start with the skill that I knew I would want, *Esoterica*, and put four points into that. Likewise, since we'll be a pilot, I thought it might be a good idea to put a whole pile of points into that, so there's six additional, in *Piloting*, bringing it to eight. There are a spatter of other points dumped into skills as well, but you'll notice that none of them went into Empathy or Charm, but there are three in *Intimidation*. This is not a man who goes lightly through life. He gets by on almost pure inborn talent and magical luck effectively, with almost nothing of that coming from intellectual fervor. That's not to say he's stupid, but it is to say that he's luckier than he is good. Except when it comes to piloting, and even then — yes. ### It's All in the Stars Every character in **Retrograde** has a star sign, but since humanity has spread throughout the galaxy, clearly the constellations involved can't reflect those of the night sky on one single planet. Instead, astrology focuses on sectors of the galaxy and there's a strong belief that your destiny is guided by the influence of the stars that you were born under. Mechanically, that translates to having a bonus to your success threshold for certain saving throws. It's not much, but every once in a while it should come in handy. Our pilot was born under the influence of **the Copperplate Sector**, which gives him +1 to success threshold for Soul Saves. I'll quote the bit from the text regarding the Copperplate Sector because it is fairly evocative. > The Copperplate Sector sits on a celes- > tial convergence, drawing many alche- > mists seeking the unlock new powers > of Blood Ink. Vast Blood Ink laborato- > ries can be found on most populated > worlds in the Copperplate Sector, and > those hailing from these worlds seem > especially attuned to Blood Ink and > able to better resist psychic influence. I probably should have mentioned that Blood Ink is *literally* what the human galaxy runs on. Some percentage of the population has a useful mutation which allows them to have their blood used as the ink which drives starships across the galaxy and for various other powers some have deemed mystical. Our pilot doesn't have this mutation, but he does have a certain gift for using Blood Ink to navigate starships, which in and of itself is unusual. Very few people can do so without being mutant navigators themselves. (I suspect part of his long-term narrative would be discovering how to activate this gene in himself, giving him access to more of the esoteric powers. But that's a story for another day.) ### Specialization is for Insects As I was saying, *specializations* require that you have at least six points in a skill in order to give you the ability to specialize. There is no master list of specializations, unlike skills themselves. They are generally freeform. However, one is specific: **Blinking**, which is a mystical practice which allows you to navigate the vast presses which are starships by teleporting them from place to place. Not surprisingly, that is definitely the first specialization that we're taking. Not only do we get an advantage when doing something within our specialty, we get two more things. Firstly, we get a unique piece of gear that we use when using our specialization. Since Blinking is actually a specialization of Esoterica, I think it would be appropriate for the unique piece of gear to be *a specially treated eyedropper* which allows him to drop Blood Ink directly into his eyes in order to "see space" more directly, like those with a native Blood Ink mutation. We also get a contact within our specialization's field. In our case, *a fascinated Blood Ink mutation researcher in the Copperplate sector* who finds it difficult to believe that someone who is not inherently a mutant can use such a significant Blood Ink effect. He considers us somewhere between a patient, a client, and a research animal. We also can do things which are impossible to perform without our particular skills, training, and expertise within our specialization for anyone else. We have a second skill which is even higher than our Esoterica, though, Piloting. The unique piece of gear that we're taking to go along with that is *a specialized set of sleek gauntlets*, which add multiple mechanical fingers coming off of our natural ones in order to provide greater finger span and flexibility and speed. We need a contact for our specialization though. As an extremely rare large craft pilot it's *a contract negotiator within the Pilot Guild*.^[Is there a Pilot Guild in the setting? Sure there is; I just made it up, didn't I? What I have spoken, exists. You have the same power.] The Guild gets a significant cut of our pay (though even after the cut, the money is generous), and they consider us a significant resource and occasional useful pawn. What's the specific specialization, you might ask? *Large ships, particularly extremely large ships, like interstellar presses.* Our particular talents provide unique opportunities when it comes to moving ships frigate size and up. ### Armed to the Teeth Gear is pretty straightforward. Effectively, you can have anything that makes sense to go with your job and your specializations. Our character is more industrial than military. - **A hand welder**, which does 1d6 damage, can be used in melee, is destructive, and can be cut through doors, including airlocks. - **A handgun** because you never know when pirates are going to show up. And that's a straightforward 1d3 damage and medium range. - **A vacsuit** because when you work in deep space you never know when the pressure is going to go away in a hurry. It has AP 1 and an oxygen tank with 8 hours of personal supply and looks incredibly snazzy as befitting a high-end pilot. And that's it. We are done. The entirety of character generation is complete. ![[Retrograde - CCC2025 - Anatolev Ygnozvy (sheet).webp]] ## Exunt Now you may be wondering why this character sheet doesn't have a character illustration on it, even though it clearly has a place for it. The answer is, *I'm feeling lazy tonight*, and I have already been frustrated by dealing with the skill system. I didn't want to have another half hour of tinkering with something to get it just right, especially to fit into a lozenge-shaped image space and not even a vertical portrait. You also may be wondering why there are *two* places on the sheet to put in your specialty and why there's only separated slots for the specialty and the contact above each other. Does the game actually not expect anyone to have more than one specialty even though it's clearly possible even at character generation? That's an excellent question and I have no idea. You've probably worked out that this is an extremely early version of this game and there are obviously more things to knock out, including a much broader and deeper exploration of the universe as the author envisions it. If you're curious about more of the details, [go and check out the website for the game](https://studiozosimos.com/retrograde), and you're going to learn several things you probably hadn't thought of before. It's an intriguing idea, a very retrograde, if you will, throwback design in certain ways, with some very modern tinkering going on mechanically. I love the idea of spending trait points in order to turn failures into successes; that part is brilliant. I'm not crazy about the sheer number of narrow, tightly defined things which you have to put points in. I think you could keep the same mechanic and maybe even lose the skill system altogether and focus on something tighter with more focus on the specializations. Any time I have to split points between hand-to-hand and ranged combat skills I get a little grumpy unless the character is literally about showing off the differentiation between hand to hand and ranged combat. It's an unnecessary distinction unless it's a very necessary distinction. Otherwise, I quite like what I've seen of this and I'd like to see more of it. Hopefully you do too. Tomorrow we put together two things that I really like: giant robots and the apocalypse. Tune in for that.