# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 18 - The Flexorcists :: Buster Blue, Flexorcist Researcher tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/rpg/the-flexorcists > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] I love the bizarre. Not a surprise. I can see that even the people in the back row have a complete lack of being stunned by this news. But if you can take two things that are ostensibly not connected in any way and slam them together at high speed such that they merge and form a coherent entity which threatens to destroy the world… I'm your huckleberry. What if we took *lucha libre wrestling* and **The Exorcist**, stuck them in CERN, then set the whole thing to frappe? ![[The Flexorcists (cover).jpg]] You'd have something like this: > **Earth, 20XX** > > It started in the late year 200X. Ghosts, demons, and other occult forces grew resistant to conventional exorcisms. Minor possessions, the kind that would previously have been resolved with a sprinkle of holy water and a few minutes of half-hearted praying, suddenly became multiple-hour-long, life-or-death ordeals. > > Major possessions swallowed entire townships and broke holy men. > > Worse, the unspoken rule that a possessing force had to operate only through the local environment became snapped and frayed. > > Possessors could now manifest physically, and they were extremely swole. > > Thus, the world entered a new age of banishments. Gone were the days when any reedy man could cast out a demon. > > Fighting the supernatural was now a job for… > > **[[The Flexorcists]]**. Yes, *that's* the name of the game. No, I'm not kidding. You might think that this would be a really good concept for a solo game, and I would normally agree, except for the fact that if you're going to be this over-the-top goofy and insane you really deserve an audience, one who is willing to go along with you at high speed, jump off the top rope, and put the People's Elbow down on that hideous mummy that's been tormenting the village. Imagine a mix between Scooby-Doo and El Santo and you're really onto something.  It's into this morass of insanity we lay our scene. This is not a long or complicated game. In fact, during several phases of play, if a character has an appropriate Skillset, it's assumed that anything they do within that purview simply succeeds. Investigation? Do you know something about it? You find out the secret! You need to accomplish something? Is it part of your Skillset? You do it! There's something charming and explicitly excellent about that idea, about the Announcer (the local term for GM) explicitly being a fan of the PCs, wanting them to succeed, wanting them to get the clues and the information that they need/want to get into the *real* conflict with the Supernatural Presence (the BBEG of the session). There are other games which provide that advice but I can't think of any other that makes it so mechanically explicit in the text. Enough of that – [let's get ready to rumble!](https://youtu.be/xoSJCzLlgk0)^[I'm a rebel. Hell no, I ain't paying a licensing fee to say that!] ## Chargen I have been breaking character generation down into subsections but this is straightforward enough that we'll just put it together. It's cool. We can handle this. We've got it. We start with Stats. There are three of them: Style, Faith, and Brawn. Style is how cool you look, Faith is how unshakable you are in your purpose – which is not necessarily religious but it certainly can be, and Brawn… Well… > **Brawn:** Brawn is how shredded, ripped, chiseled, and otherwise made-of-meat your body is. It's used to put the hurt on monsters---and also maybe as part of your day job. It's that kind of game. Each Stat starts at one and then we add six more wherever we want, except no Stat can be higher than 5 and of course not lower than 1. | Stat | Dice | | ---- | ---: | | Style | 4 | | Faith | 2 | | Brawn | 3 | We'll go with having a decently steadfast personality, as El Santo has inspired us. That's no excuse not to be buff, of course, so that goes up, which means that we are _ludicrously_ cool and inventive. This'll work out. I know it. Next we get two Skillsets, and for this there's a list. We'll grab a couple. Again, a concept is forming in my mind as we go which we will finalize at the end. > - **Religion:** Religion is a series of icons, philosophies, and rituals that give context to a belief system. The Religion Skill is used to pick out facts relating to those icons, philosophies, or rituals in your environment, or to deploy those icons, philosophies, or rituals as part of an exorcism. > - **Science:** Science is a methodology for exploring the truths of the world, often split into varying fields such as psychics, biology, and chemistry. The Science Skill is used to pick out facts in your environment relating to scientific apparati or theories, to use scientific equipment or methods to gather and interpret data, or to deploy scientific apparati or theories as part of an exorcism. Are you seeing it? Is it coming clear in your mind where we're going? I'll give you a hint – *Saturday morning cartoons*. The kind of Saturday morning cartoons I enjoyed back in the deep time, before known history. We've got the Stats. We've got the Skillsets. Now we need the Gimmick, the thing that sets us aside, the way we look, the way we operate, a little bit about our background. It's actually more than one sentence long and has to include at least one sentence explaining why we work part-time for the Flexorcist Talent Agency (or Flagency for short).^[I don't make the rules, I just follow them.] > The Flagency doesn't pay particularly well, and you are expected to provide your own supplies and transportation, but its work is both flexible and steady and it hires anyone who is willing to suplex a Dracula for sub-minimum wages. - **Gimmick:** I am – Buster Blue! With a PhD both in Religious Studies and Parapsychology (along with a Masters in Physical Education), I roam the earth looking for ghosts, goblins, things that go bump in the night, and the perfect protein shake. Unfortunately it's difficult to find funding for that in academia at this point so the Flagency provides an excellent opportunity to earn a few dollars while putting together my next book, *"Odysseus's Spirit Guide."* When on the job I wear a blue or tan firefighters jumpsuit unbuttoned to the naval, black Doc Martin boots, and a backpack with a jury rigged nuclear accelerator that's mostly safe. Usually. We also need a Signature Move which is the expression of our soul. You know what I'm talking about. There is a three-part table to generate it randomly if you don't have a solid idea. - **Signature Move:** Electric Proton Blast Obliteration! I couldn't help myself. Finally, perhaps the most important thing for a character in this game – we need an *Entrance Theme*. The music that plays when we walk into the ring or burst into the hotel ballroom boot-first before starting to dish out hot justice. There's actually a mechanical reason to have Entrance Themes on your sheet, and it's not just because it's ultimately cool. The *Blasting Entrance Themes* mechanic essentially lets you invoke your entrance music if you can win a round of rock-paper-scissors against the Announcer during a phase, and as long as your entrance music is playing you get a +1 die on any tests that you make, only so long as the music is going. Yes, your music can cut be cut off by the Presence if the Announcer wins rock-paper-scissors with the same effect for the bad guy. We've seen it happen. Let's see if we can find something appropriate for Buster Blue, shall we?  I couldn't help myself. You understand, right? You know what it's like? I had to do it! I had to! ![[Buster Gray, Flexorcist Researcher.jpg]] ## Exunt That's it! That's the biscuit! The rest of the book, such as it is, is about how to run jobs for the Flexorcists. Each job has five phases, The Hook, the Arrival, the Ritual, the Beatdown, and the Resolution. There are random tables in each phase to help get your mind rolling on putting something together, and just as a taste of the game, as I've given you samples along the way, this is on the Paranormal Presence table: > A weird man in a costume (roll again to determine what the costume is, rerolling 10s. If you've already rolled an 8 and that sent you here, you've got a creature wearing a costume of a different creature. Roll again to see what the costume is. If you roll another 8 or a 10, what you've got is an endless succession of costumes of different creatures on top of costumes of different creatures with seemingly no person at the center of it.) Like that. If you grew up during the 80s and watched cartoons, I think you have a pretty good idea of the mode and median this game is going for. Goofy wrestling gimmicks, goofy supernatural bad guys, and everything is resolved with a good old wrestling match – one way or another. It's lighthearted, it's silly, and yet… I started working on this feeling a bit of absence of motivation and excitement and I'm finishing this off with a big smile and a burst of energy. I'm grinning ear to ear thinking about converting the entirety of the Ghostbusters into a bunch of wrestlers who essentially do the same thing, and the visuals alone have me giggling. That's what this game is for. You can pick it up for cheap, you can run it as a bunch of one shots in between your normal sessions with the barest thread of continuity, and you have the excuse of blasting ridiculous songs right before your characters do cool stuff. I think you should do it. Now excuse me, there's a guy here from the EPA about my laser containment grid. It's true, this man has no dick. Out!