# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 30 - Celestial Bodies - Edgar Vinter, Mild-Mannered Deadly Missile Mech Pilot tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/celestial-bodies > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice The Earth is gone, hundreds of years gone, perhaps longer. It's hard to tell. A calamity hit the planet hard, but humanity was not destroyed. Instead, it pushed out further than the Moon and Mars, the second generation in their massive ships cannibalized the metal bones of one another to extend and expand their own reach. Ships large enough to have their own weather patterns. Mecha began to swarm, scavenging and fighting one another. The third generation fled to farther stars, spreading, growing, expanding themselves and their machines. Pilots and mecha became more than war machines. They became celebrities, explorers, pioneers who lit up the way so that everyone else could follow. The fourth generation discovered the Titans. Massive dead gods with frozen bodies hundreds of miles across. Giant resources in and of themselves. Strange dreams came to those ships near to them, but it served as no warning. Titan bone was integrated into steel and computronium, despite the difficulty of dealing with such a material. You are the fifth generation. And so begins an intriguing game nestled into the far reaches of space. Welcome to… ![[Celestial Bodies (cover).jpg|400]] **[[Celestial Bodies]]**. I'm going to put it to you straight: **Celestial Bodies** is a weird game. Not in the sense that it deals with nearly transhuman/post-human society and technology. That part is par for the course around here, as you've probably picked up on over the last month, at the very least. It's weird because it falls into a very strange niche between minimalist tabletop wargame and structured role-playing with an intended player count between 1 and 6. The reason it's in my collection is because it is solo play compatible, of course. I have a type and I'm not ashamed of it. Mechanically, we are dealing with a 2d6 resolution system and a set of core mechanics which very much focus on strongly reified grids. Mecha are built out of individual chunks of equipment which you arrange on a grid like managing your inventory in an MMO. This is the case both for player mechs and your enemy. Additionally, combat maps and mission maps are on hexagonal grids. And when I say mission maps, I mean the actual determination of what steps you can go to from where in one of the missions. It's a very odd, extremely visually grounded, almost board game-like manifestation of setting up scenarios. I haven't quite decided if I like it or not.^[Foreshadowing!] I find it intriguing, which is at least three quarters of the way to liking it. ## Acts of Creation The combination of a pilot and advanced mech is referred to as a Lamplighter. Those who open the way. They act as reconnaissance and resource gatherers, swords and shields, and occasionally even diplomats. Character generation for Lamplighters is surprisingly fast and easy. ### Name and Registration Predictably, first we come up with our name and give them a 2-3 sentence description. > Edgar Vinter is a small quiet man who largely keeps to himself, avoids the limelight, and as a result is constantly hounded by the media on his home-ship MEGALON. If it wasn't for the nearly constant news coverage, you probably wouldn't think him any different from the most average person you ever saw. He's so average, he stands out for not standing out., Until he gets behind the controls of his mech, at which point he becomes a raging terrifying fire of consuming destruction. ### Provide Proper Attribution We need to distribute 10 points among our attributes, none higher than 5, no lower than 1. There are four attributes which are relevant at character generation as follows: - **Nerve:** Tactical // Strategic // Technological // Systems - **Flash:** Fast // Reflexive // Aware // In the moment - **Precision:** Thorough // Nuanced // Mechanical // Details - **Force:** Direct // Stoic // Strong // Results If we start with every attribute at 2, that gives us 2 extra points to distribute, and they're both going into Force. | Nerve | Flash | Precision | Force | | :---: | :---: | :-------: | :---: | | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Edgar does not enjoy methods which verge on the subtle when he's in control of his machine. Even when he's not, he is almost entirely focused on results rather than finesse. ### Frame the Shot We get to pick from the standard set of eight mech frames to start with. This is where things start to get a bit complicated and surprisingly deep. I'll grab the full spread on the frame that we pick as an example. ![[Celestial Bodies - Ultra UN-BLITZ.webp]] Believe it or not, this is one of the *least* complicated frame choices that I could have grabbed. Let's walk through some of the important things that you can see on this frame description. Firstly, you'll notice that it is an ultra frame. This is one of the biggest, heaviest frames available. What can I say? I have an affection for ultra heavy mechs. I also have a real affection for missile mechs, which can simply rain damage down via a ridiculous pile of missiles. In that sense, this is a *perfect* mech design for me. You can see that it is built on a 5x6 grid and has 30 hull points as a result. We aren't going to run through the entirety of the combat system, but it's worth noting that hit locations are rolled on an assumed 6x6 grid, and mechs have a grid size scaled to their physical size. Smaller mechs have smaller grids, but locations are still rolled on the 6x6 using 2d6. All of the equipment on the mech must fit within its grid. If a shot hits a piece of equipment, it's damaged, and that damage is marked on the grid and HP is depleted. If HP hits zero, the mech's destroyed. If all squares of a part have been hit that part is destroyed and can't be used until it's repaired. As you can imagine, this makes life really hard for light mechs since they have small grids and quite a lot of shots which land are going to do critical damage. Luckily, they have a lot of high speed movement and that translates to a lot of evasion, which lets you manipulate the dice rolls into something that will hit you someplace you can either take the hit or don't care about. Ultra-heavies like the Blitz don't have so much in the way of movement, but they make up for that by having armor, which allows you to simply ignore a certain amount of damage at the cost of armor in that location. You can see our grid layout at the bottom of the left-hand side, and you'll notice that everything has an actual physical representation in that space, including the mech's reactor, the thrusters, the proximity missiles and swarm missiles, the shield generator, and the missile control processor. What those things actually do are listed here, which is very convenient, but be aware there is a pile of equipment and weapons in the mech construction section which allow you to deliberately reconfigure your gear and entirely build new mechs if you want to. Doing so can actually be part of your downtime activity between missions. In our case, we have swarm missiles, which allow you to pull off an *Itano Circus*;[^1] proximity missiles, which allow you to hit things really hard and quite explosively; the processor, which lets you change the speed of missiles in flight on the board to exchange a harder accuracy for more chance to be shot down or vice versa. Plus we have a lovely shield which actively covers all of the squares which are orthogonal to it, so three squares of both missile launchers and the processor. That's it. Character creation is done. We've assigned our attributes and picked our frame. Now we can go off and get crazy. No, there are no character sheets. You've got four attributes and a grid, man. It'll fit on a 3x5 card. Show a little ambition. ### My Little Hexflower Okay, fair enough, we're not quite done. I have to say that **Celestial Bodies** has one of the most *interesting and intricate* faction systems I have ever seen in an RPG. I'm not kidding about that. It includes 22 different factions, all of which you can interact with, all of which have at least 3 custom mechs of their own, a custom technology, a couple of characters that it briefly outlines, and a short description of each of their Sparks (well-known combat teams), plus a quick outline of their goals and the way they are seen by the other home-ships. The faction section runs from page 38 to 163. For comparison, the combat system runs from page 20 to page 34. Not only that, in order to track your ongoing relationship with each of the factions, they are literally tracked on a three-dimensional hex grid referred to as a hexflower. You know what? I think it's okay. I'm going to show you that spread. ![[Celestial Bodies - Faction Hexflower.webp]] No, I wasn't kidding when I said that it was a three-dimensional hex grid. There are three axes of movement that you can move along in regards to your standing with any and every faction. I love this thing. This is brilliant. I haven't seen anything like this in any other game. And I can't stop staring at it. It's so straightforward and so simple to understand that the description literally fits on two pages, one of which is mostly just a largely empty diagram. I sit speechless before this level of design. That is not sarcasm. That is literally how I feel. I may actively steal this or some sort of variant for some other game that I'm playing in order to track the relationship between factions. It's that good. Technically, this isn't a part of character generation, but understanding where you're going when you're running missions and how it's going to affect your interactions and thus how various missions shake out (because they refer to factions with which you have a particular affinity or disaffinity) with built-in dynamic change is useful to know at the beginning of the game. So that's the *faction* hexflower. There's also a *mission* hexflower which guides the things that you can do in the course of a mission to change the context by using out-of-combat actions. It's très magnifique. I'm going to go ahead and show you that spread as well, because you really need to appreciate how cool this is. ![[Celestial Bodies - Mission Hexflower.webp]] Again, movement on a three-axis grid lets you maneuver between mission events, and by spending your attribute points you can change the circumstances or the details. Note that this is a *generic mission framework*. In order to define a specific mission, all you have to do is put together a list of events that make sense transitionally as you move from one hex to another. As you move to the bottom left, things become a little more violent. As you move to the top right, things get a little more controlled. And as long as you vaguely adhere to that structure in your events, the whole thing just sort of works. There are of course multiple mission hexflowers given in the book, each of which is a two-page spread with the setup and hexflower on the left page and the list of 19 events on the facing right page. There's also a quick mission generation which doesn't have a hex flower because it's not intended to be that complicated. There's also an entire section which I haven't shared, which talks about how to set up who you encounter and how they feel about you, and is in turn affected by the faction hexflower. It's all unbelievably cool. Between missions you get downtime actions where you can do all sorts of things which generally fall into what you do during free role play in other games. Things like manufacturing a new basic frame or building one square of a structure or reallocating a built structure… Oh yes, I should probably point out that you live on your own home-ship and you can expand it, develop advanced structures, build out more decks in order to put more gear on it and build more buildings, which allows you to build more unique equipment or do more things. Yes, it involves a square grid of 6x6 cells, just like your mechs. Certain things must be adjacent to other things in order to allow them to function, so you can end up having to rebuild one of your ship decks and taking things offline for a couple of missions as you build up the support architecture to use something you couldn't before. ## Exunt I'm going to stop before I give away some of the secrets that you could be learning by reading and playing the game. There are some things which are surprising and weird and come out of left field but make perfect sense when you actually start to think about the setting. I have no idea how I never hear *anyone* talking about this game. I spend a lot of time in circles where people talk about science fiction and mecha games in particular, and this has never come up. It is an entirely invisible game, as far as I can tell, and that seems horribly unfair. Maybe it's because it comes across as extremely combat focused, and yes, that's true. It is a game about running missions to provide resources and access to your home-ship and inevitably coming in conflict with others. But you're not *required* to engage them violently, it's just that it's a violent universe and you probably will have to sooner or later, with sooner being the default state of things.[^2] Mechanically, the use of grids as such an elegant shorthand for tracking things and making mech construction something which is as much puzzle solving as it is simple creativity or math balancing is beautiful. Gorgeous stuff. If you find there's too much focus on combat for you and you would like to use this setting but leverage a mechanical system which is a little more friendly to non-violent solutions and gives you some more support for active exploration and discovery, rip it off wholesale to move to your **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** game. I am very tempted to write up something specifically to do that. The factions will translate over extremely simply; you can use **[Starsmith: Mecha Mercs](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/421157/starsmith-mecha-mercs)** as an expansion for **Starforged** to cover building your own mechs inspired by the ones given here and give you resolution mechanics for doing the violent nasty when you absolutely have to. That said, I would absolutely give playing this game as written a shot. You might discover that pushing tokens around on a hex combat map is more fun than you expect. I fully believe that's the case if you give it a chance. **Celestial Bodies** gets two tentacles *way* up from me and an enthusiastic endorsement. Today we went to the stars and played amongst the bodies of dead gods. Tomorrow we're going straight to Hell. [^1]: See also *[Macross Missile Massacre](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacrossMissileMassacre)*:  [^2]: In that sense, it reminds me quite strongly of **[[Transit - The Spaceship RPG|Transit: The Spaceship RPG]]**, wherein you play artificial intelligences embodied in massive ships with much the same goals and mechanics which are strangely reminiscent. Definitely something to look at if this intrigues you.