# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 13 - Those Dark Places :: Jessica Murtowski, Corporate Liason Officer
tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/rpg/those-dark-places
> [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]]
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> ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]]
I'm a huge fan of classic, dark science fiction of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Among my favorite movies of all time are **Alien**, **Outland**, and **Event Horizon**. TV shows? Give me **The Expanse** any day. Friends of mine have identified my taste as *"competency porn,"* stories about people who are just good at their job going out and finding situations where their talents and skills can make a difference – and then they do.
Compare/contrast with **Prometheus**^[Run at right angles to the rolling ship, you fucking retards!] which I would describe as *"incompetency porn,"* where characters who are neither interesting to spend time with for their personalities nor who have insight and useful skill in their profession leave their homes. I get no charge off of that.
Lucky for me, today's RPG is of the first type: **[[Those Dark Places|Those Dark Places: Industrial Science Fiction Roleplaying]]**.
![[Those Dark Places (cover).jpg]]
If you look at the text and immediately think to yourself, "this looks a lot like a simplified, cleaned up, cut down version of the **[[Alien - The Roleplaying Game|Alien: The Roleplaying Game]]** with pretty much the same setting just more generic, mechanics which do many of the same things (including stress rolls) only simpler, and it's all cheaper? Well, you're right. All those things are true.
**Those Dark Places** focuses on a particular type of science fiction experience, that of the largely blue-collar, grunt work [cassette futurism](https://www.reddit.com/r/cassettefuturism/) that takes as its stock and trade a very grounded type of imagery and characters. You've seen this, you've enjoyed this, and thanks to the last 30 years of media from comics to movies, you know exactly what it looks like.
The game itself is set up within a meta-textual frame. The players are playing characters who are themselves being run through a simulation by a company in order to test their ability to work under pressure, respond to trouble, and simply assess their capabilities. On the positive side – and it took me a minute or two to wrap my head around this fact – it provides an excellent *excuse* for explaining why everywhere the players go, things go horribly wrong. Realistically, it wouldn't take too many times for that to happen for the company to go, *"maybe these people shouldn't be employed by us."* If no delivery of cargo ever goes right, if no investigation of a space station fails to turn up aliens, cannibalistic crew, or an infectious disease, no company in their right mind would keep you on. The fact that it's a game within a game helps smooth out the fact that you're only playing the things that go sideways.
Sometimes the in-setting style of the text as it's presented, in character, gets a little bit precious and the moments at which it shifts to a fully OOC mode with just a slightly darker font is a little bit jarring. Pick one or the other, guys, please.
Let's get to character creation, however…
## Chargen
Thank Hades that this is not one of our longer character design processes. In fact, I think it might be amongst the shortest.
Crew sheet, check.
### Name
*Jessica Murtowski*. A good, solid Polish-descendent name. Maybe not quite enough consonants, but it's the future.
### Description
Age 27, 5'10" tall, 160 pounds. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Large mole on left shoulder, biopsy has determined: nonmalignant. Prominent scar from an industrial accident above left hip (which the company has determined she was not at fault for).
Likes 0G, fake chicken nuggets, and people who do what they're told. Dislikes the cold, things that impact the bottom line, and not knowing what the next move is.
Jessica is a company girl, through and through. Someone has to be, after all. It's not *company uber alles*, however – it's "the company pays my bills."
### Attributes
There are four, referred to as your *CASE file*. Charisma, Agility, Strength, and Education.
They're pretty much what you expect except on a couple of points. Strength doubles as effectively your hit points so as you take physical damage or impairment, your Strength goes down. Education is not just the amount of schooling you had but your general intelligence and ability to process information quickly.
Allocation is easy: 1, 2, 3, 4.
| Attribute | Value |
| ---- | ---: |
| Charisma | 4 |
| Agility | 1 |
| Strength | 2 |
| Education | 3 |
Jess can be very persuasive – but not in the charming, flirty way. That's not to say she can't, it's to say she *won't*. On the contrary, she prefers intimidation, strong-arm tactics, and predatory smiles. The company recognized that early and tried to give her an education to match. Management wasn't quite right, engineering was definitely out, and she wasn't really built for security. She's dabbled in all of it, however. She's all arms and legs, lanky and tall, which isn't great for leverage or resilience but even worse for not being able to get out of her own way.
### Crew Position
Everybody has a place on the boat. There are seven officer slots and you can be assigned, a primary and a secondary. *Helm, Navigation, Science, Security, Liaison, Engineering, and Medical*. A ship doesn't fly without a Helm and Navigation, though they don't have to be primaries.
Jess is primarily a Liaison Officer, making sure that settlements, outposts, colonies, and ships keep on the straight and narrow when it comes to corporate oversight. She is evenhanded, however: she's never hesitated going head-to-head with one of the bigwigs in bad suits when it's in the best interests of the company.^[Why, yes, Burke is my favorite character in **Aliens**; why do you ask?]
Currently she's assigned as backup Navigation Officer, mainly because there's no one else that really wanted to do it and it's a fine excuse for spending time "studying stellar cartography," which in this case means literally studying stellar cartography. It's not interesting but it's her job.
### Pressure Bonus
Bad things *will* happen in space. That's normal. Bad, terrifying, *immediately shocking* things will happen in space much more rarely, things that immediately put you into a state of psychological stress. Being trapped in a small room with an air leak. Staring out the window and watching a black hole preparing to consume the ship you're on. A desiccated corpse with the bottom half gnawed off. These are the sorts of things that can leave you disquieted and possibly disturbed. They call for a Pressure roll.
Your *Pressure Bonus* is your Strength plus your Education, representing how inclined you are to go into freak out. If you're in better shape, if you can fall back on your training, you're in good shape. If not – you might have a Episode, which could lead to psychological degeneration, impact to your Attributes, and possibly going catatonic. Plus a greater sensitivity to whatever triggered the Episode in the first place for extra fun.
Jessica's Pressure Bonus is 5. That's not bad, really.
The problem is that as you accumulate Pressure Level, by rolling a D6 and adding your Pressure Bonus, versus a target of 10 (strict roll under). The first one's no big deal – but starting with the second you have to start rolling to see if you have an Episode.
You're going to want to avoid stress. Things can get bad quickly.
## Character Sheet
![[Jessica Murtowski, Corporate Liason Officer (sheet).jpg]] ![[Jessica Murtowski, Corporate Liason Officer (portrait).jpg]]
## Exunt
And we're done. That's it. Some standard equipment, a little reference to the stuff that you can find on pretty much every ship, and out the door. You're ready to go.
I particularly enjoy how lightweight this system is. There's no need to go through a long list of skills, a whole pile of things that might come up or might not. The whole premise of the game is that you are probably going to be sent into situations that you aren't prepared for because no one is. No one could be.
Deal with it.
The core resolution mechanic is extremely simple: What do you want to do? Pick the most relevant Attribute. Do you have a ship position that might be applicable? If it's your Primary, add +2. If it's your Secondary, add +1. Do you have a tool or something that would make the job easier? Add a +1. Roll a D6 and add it all up. Is it under 7? You succeeded. Is it over 7? You failed. Is it exactly equal to 7? Then you succeeded but there's a complication which might be a partial success right now or it might just be a problem that comes up later. If working on the problem is harder than it normally would be, for instance trying to pick a lock with someone firing a shotgun right behind you, the difficulty becomes 8. If it's easier than normal, 6.
There you go, that's the whole thing aside from some specifics about combat which you should be avoiding as hard as you can for reasons which should be obvious now that you've seen the way the numbers fall out.
Even the Security Officers are going to have a hard time with serious physical threats – and there really aren't that many guns on a spaceship. Everybody's got a Dazer, there are a couple of pistols and a single shotgun locked up in a security locker, and that's it. Also you probably don't want to fire a projectile weapon on the inside of a vessel or station which is surrounded by hard vacuum or toxic gasses and a serious leak could kill you all. Just saying.
I really like **Those Dark Places**, possibly more than I like **Alien: the RPG** at a mechanical level. It's more focused, it's more straightforward, and it does all the things that you need and want it to, which goes a long way in my book.
Oh, if you want to go in a more military route – that is if you want to follow up your **Alien** with **Aliens** – pick up **Pressure**, the sort of standalone expansion for TDP which gives a little more crunch to combat, a few more tools to do it with, and an expectation that it's going to happen more often.
It very well may be, in fact, a bug hunt, sir.
I've got flamers to fabricate. Out.