Character Creation Challenge 2025 Roundup

Character Creation Challenge 2025

Roundup

Starting a day late and going with an idea that means using one system I can do stats for in four seconds, I hope I still made for entertaining reading.

It’s given me several ideas I’m tempted to run, a blues versus Cthulhu idea I want to make as a TV series or something, and some lovely reactions on RPGnet and elsewhere:

Rich Stokes, creator of Umläut

Seeing this made my day!

Seeing people occasionally still having fun with Umläut 15 years later is wonderful.

Thanks for enjoying it!

Xeni Giardiniera of Velvet Generation

Statting Velvet Generation as a band/character from Ümlaüt is my favorite kind of deranged.

Also managed to only reuse one artist when providing a song every day. (And failed to include Garbage. Hmm. Could edit something...)

Thanks to TardisCaptain for the challenge and everybody who took part or cheered us on.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 Collection

Character Creation Challenge 2025

TardisCaptain introduction and after action report

RPGnet thread

BEHOLD!

Umläut: Game Of Metal

0: Ideas, aka why I started late

1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

2: Vampire: The Masquerade

3: Dungeons & Dragons & Such

4: Call Of Cthulhu and family

5: Cyberpunk / Cybergeneration

6: Trinity Continuum

7: Adventure! Tales Of The Aeon Society

8: Aberrant

9: Aeon

10: Superheroes

11: Masks: A New Generation

12: Monsterhearts

13: Horror One-Shots

14: Starchildren: Velvet Generation

15: Doctor Who

16: Star Wars

17: Star Trek

18: Kids On Bikes

19: Meddling Kids

20: Action Comedy

21: Westerns

22: Ancient Settings

23: Surrealist Drama and 23a: Quieter Weirdness

24: WAR

25: TOON

26: Storybook Story Games

27: Spies And Cons And Capers

28: Underworld City Games

29: Post-Apocalypse

30: Big Bands

31: Umläut: Game Of Metal

Encore

Roundup

Character Creation Challenge 2025 Encore

Character Creation Challenge 2025

Encore: Adventures And Series About Bands

And now, finally, a thought on RPGs and other stories about bands.

There are two extremes, one where it’s all about the story of the band, and one where a band is an excuse for the characters to be together and for some music in the show. In the middle are a lot of series which mix stories about the music with the old “you’re on the way to a show when the adventure happens” setup.

Umläut models the first kind, designed for one-shots that generate the history of a band, the kind of story that gets told in Behind The Music.

I’ve mostly aimed for the middle this month, wanting the band setup to bring at least some adventure hooks and drama for a spin on a setting.

The other extreme would be something like The Monkees, a post A Hard Day’s Night sitcom that happens to star a prefab band and their day job rarely mattered to plots like the first example I saw of a will requiring would-be inheritors to spend the night in a haunted house.

Josie And The Pussycats is also a helpful demonstration here, with the movie being a satire about the band making it big and the effect it has on them with a mystery to solve, the cartoon being a Scooby-Doo thing with added songs, and the comics often being a mix of comedy, light band drama and “on the way to a show when..." stories.

Band stories in comics often go this way, from Scott Pilgrim via various Pussycats runs through Band Vs. Band. Exaggerations of the ups and downs of bands’ lives, often involving action scenes.

(Not always of course, see Love And Rockets.)

Josie And The Pussycats

JOIN THE ARMY

“I’m a punk rock prom queen”

Concept

A small time band with big time dreams and a way of getting in trouble everywhere they go.

Members

Josie, vocals and guitar, really wants this to be a thing

Val, bass, here to support her friends

Melody, drums, what were we talking about

Statistics

Hope 1

Ego 1

Fanbase 1

Cash 0

Performance Traits

Technique 2

Power 4

Stagecraft 1

They can turn their hands to anything so they never Showboat, how dare you

Character Creation Challenge 2025 31: Umläut: Game Of Metal

Character Creation Challenge 2025

31: Umläut: Game Of Metal

YES.

And finally... (Except that of course there’s an encore.)

Umläut has a random band naming system. Draw two cards, first is band type by suit (Classic, Thrash, Glam, Death) and first word by value, second is second word by value.

Spades is Thrash, 3 of Spades is Agony and then a Queen is Kingdom:

Agony Kingdom

“I love rock ‘n roll!”

Concept

Thrash Metal classicists, although unusually their logo is legible

Members

Doug, lead vocals and rhythm guitar, not his natural hair colour (or anyone’s)

Josh, lead guitar, can also play keyboards

Mike, bass, most likely to wear a hat

Carl, drums, also van driving

Statistics

Hope 1

Ego 1

Fanbase 1

Cash 0

Performance Traits

Technique 3

Power 3

Stagecraft 1

Dare they try a Face Melter?

The Galactic Starcruiser lands

Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser, the theme park hotel LARP faux-cruise, is now to be converted to office space for Disney park imagineers, so they can be surrounded by reminders of a massive failure.

Wolf Man

Wolf Man (2025), co-writer and director Leigh Whannell’s follow-up to The Invisible Man (2020) and another Universal monster modernisation, has some great suspense sequences (a couple reminiscent of the first two Jurassic Park films) and good practical effects although the look says Orc more than Wolf Man, one really wince-inducing moment, an interesting take on superhuman senses, and some bits where it will be too dark to see outside of cinemas.

It leans into the doomed aspect of werewolf stories and doesn’t bring much fun along the way, or a twist as good as The Invisible Man had. Worth it for some of the suspense, but it’s grim stuff. I can imagine the abandoned Daaaark Universe version would have been more amusing.

The really wince-inducing moment, behind the More.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 30: Big Bands

Character Creation Challenge 2025

30: Big Bands

And now a kind of game that’s about a band rather than a band in a kind of game.

A standard band is the same kind of size as a PC party. For a big band or an orchestra, or a festival with multiple acts playing, you might have to megagame or LARP it.

Live (Action Roleplay) for one night only

Games with large players base, like LARPs or megagames or chats, often cope with this by splitting them into factions. In a festival that’s various bands, but in something like an orchestra it could be sections like brass and woodwind, who should be able to play together but fiction about them often has backstabbing second chair musicians and the like. They’re all trying to push their own agendas, in a one-shot possibly rated for points. And somebody has to play the organisers, promoters, conductors and the like trying to get everybody playing the same tune.

In a smaller group, every player could control a band as in Umläut or a section of an orchestra.

(This game idea in no way influenced by my experience of working arts events.)

Throw in a murder mystery if you really want to get everybody talking.

The Miskatonic University Orchestra

“It’s not over tonight”

Concept

An orchestra with a mix of dedicated musicians, hopeful amateurs and absolute weirdoes

Character Creation Challenge 2025 29: Post-Apocalypse

Character Creation Challenge 2025

29: Post-Apocalypse

Post-apocalypse settings are often more like Westerns than anything else, sometimes war stories if the PCs have enough gear and there are clear enough sides.

The aftermath of a realistic nuclear war would be rather less adventurous, but nowadays we have other ways to destroy civilisation with a few more survivors. (Yay...)

Looking like GWAR do already is optional.

And then there’s Gamma World which due to its cartoony mutations would let you play the Bremen Town Musicians again.

WITNESS

Witness Coma the Doof Warrior

Minimum Safe Distance

“Born into the Age of Panic”

Content warning for violent news and documentary imagery

Concept

Possibly the last band in the world. Nice boys really.

V5: City Of Angels 1.28

Second 2025 TTRPG session as player and no new moral quandaries but did get to be horrified in-character learning something I’ve known about the setting for thirty years.

(For those wondering, it was about ghouls - blood addicted mortal victims - having children and possibly passing on the condition, and the vampire we had to work with studying this for practical applications.)

Paris has realised that the few years she existed as a vampire before the chronicle started were unusually stable and low on dread and revulsion.

Sinners trailer 2

“There are legends of people with the gift of making music so true, it can conjure spirits from the past, and the future.”

Not sure how far it gets but it gives away a fair bit more.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 28: Underworld City Games

Character Creation Challenge 2025

28: Underworld City Games

Gangsters hiding Tommy guns in violin cases has some basis in fact.

That got me thinking about games like Gangbusters and stories such as Peaky Blinders. Misadventures in the Big City as distinct from on the road. They don’t all have to be hardboiled noir stories - Some Like It Hot plays musicians on the run from the Mob for farce.

This would fit Victorian London in a way that the Western ideas wouldn’t despite the time overlap, and in the 1920s and 30s it would feel different than my traveling Adventure! and Call Of Cthulhu ideas. And this kind of trouble can still be a thing nowadays, for the likes of Haven: City Of Violence as well as the Darkness family of games.

The Albany Quartet

“Hey folks, here’s a story ‘bout Minnie the Moocher”

Concept

A band trying to make it big in the Prohibition era, where just about any gig is an adventure in itself.

No not like that

Annoyed enough about Section 31 to want to run a Star Trek game. Note that this is not generally a good way to start planning a game.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 27: Spies And Cons And Capers

Character Creation Challenge 2025

27: Spies And Cons And Capers

(Capers as in the genre, not Capers as in the 1920s proto-superhero game.)

Bands can work as glamorous adventurers like superspies and dashing thieves, getting in trouble in fancy international locations.

The Beatles’ second film Help! is a take-off of pulp adventures and the spy-fi of the era, complete with unnecessary international travel and some plot points that haven’t aged as well as the songs.

See also the Bond story The Living Daylights about a sniper travelling undercover as a cellist, like the classic gangster hiding a Tommy gun in a violin case.

And in the film somehow led to this.

And the Leverage episode The Studio Job about song theft, as well as the times they take over movie and TV productions and magic acts.

And Hustle does the movie con too, and there’s also the time Emma pretends to be Kylie to steal an appearance fee for a millionaire’s private party.

And if Now You See Me can get two movies out of using magic shows to rob places, you could probably do this as more than one adventure.

Thick As Thieves

“Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone”

Concept

A group of con artists posing as a band, having created hype artificially, to get performer access to a super-rich party.

V5 Empire 1.12

First 2025 session as GM, Vampire: The Masquerade, mostly catching back up after six weeks away with some mild horror, but also introducing a new PC with an ongoing occult mystery and throwing the city’s political situation into turmoil.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 26: Storybook Story Games

Character Creation Challenge 2025

26: Storybook Story Games

Games like Wanderhome feature talking animals in a more storybook than Looney Tunes style, part of a genre of cosy games where things largely go alright.

So for a band of non-cartoony smart animals:

Bremen Town Band
Statue by Gerhard Marcks
Photo by Adrian Pingstone

The Town Musicians of Bremen

“Movin’ right along in search of good times and good news

With good friends you can’t lose”

Concept

Four farm animals looking for a better life in the city and hoping to learn to play by the time they get there

The Box Of Delights

The Box Of Delights (BBC TV 1984) repeated for its fortieth anniversary - and when it was first on it was nearly fifty years after the book came out. Which I didn’t know was the second of two, though it does explain some character connections, specifically why the villain discounts the hero.

Title sequence with eerie strings theme and assorted faces that would feel Whovian even without Patrick Troughton, end title cheerful symphonic version

(Compare the crowdfunding video for the official RPG I just discovered.)

The mix of video filming, computer animation like chromakey and traditional animation feels bumpy at times. Likewise the weather, where deep snow is a plot point and represented by effects but there was actual deep snow for some of the filming (which stopped a lot of it) and then it was maybe late autumn an episode later.

I’m more interested in the tonal oddness. Everybody rolling with it after very little alarm when discovering magic. The villains first presented as wolves in human form and then being regular criminals apart from their leader. And the resulting idea of a pretty regular gang of crooks working for an evil wizard. Not really getting what the villain’s plan was for disrupting a Christmas service. The way Kay can casually question adults and only the police inspector seems to remember he’s a child, even more so than the usual teen sleuth types. The pause to go boating while one of the sidekick family has been kidnapped. The reveal of the box’s rightful owner. A Brazen Head and assorted demons. A guy-in-a-costume talking mouse who appears as casually as an old friend.

My favourite part, the idea that one of the villains had to put on a Punch And Judy show.

A lot of this is the kind of thing I glossed over when I was ten, but not all of it. So when it pulls the “it was all a dream - or was it?” ending it seems to fit.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 25: TOON

Character Creation Challenge 2025

25: TOON

TOON was made for cartoon shorts and other hyper-slapstick comedy like that. I wouldn’t use TOON for a Meddling Kids cartoon (or live) band, but I might use it for the Electric Mayhem from The Muppet Show.

Cartoon stars often perform music or form bands, sometimes fronting orchestras for maximum sublime-ridiculous juxtaposition, and some of the classic shorts were called Silly Symphonies by Disney and Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies by Warner Bros. See also recent things like Sing which has spinoff shorts in a full-on TOON style, and oddities like The Beatles cartoon and Gorillaz.

Bugs Bunny in Long-Haired Hare

The Big Noise

“STICK!”

(IDLES cover)

Concept

The house band for the perennially-near-bankrupt Moulin Bleu theatre, prone to getting mixed up in antics involving the shows’ guest stars

The benefits of a cool-sounding name

House Ipsissimus is the Anarch grouping for Tremere in Vampire: The Masquerade V5, but has never caught on because (a) House Carna has cool witches and (b) it sounds like you’re trying to get a cat to come over to you.

And as far as I can tell having a cooler name is also why Star Trek just called its superspy movie Section 31 instead of something with Starfleet Intelligence.

California Wildfire Relief Bundle

California Wildfire Relief Bundle: Savage Worlds, Capers and more, $400 worth of PDFs for $25.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 24: WAR

Character Creation Challenge 2025

24: WAR

What is it good for?

Since I mentioned Warhammer in medieval-ish fantasy, and now ancients, ways that musicians can find themselves in war. Regimental bands have mostly stopped playing music as they march into battle due to more modern ways of communicating, which is the kind of historical-fantasy-ish war I’m considering.

(They’re still around ceremonially, though. Here in Edinburgh, military and other bands from around the world play at the Military Tattoo at the Castle every year, showcasing a mix of traditional and modern instruments. With the right application and audition process you could be lead electric guitar for the Royal Marines.)

Bands in wartime will get into some of the same dangers as other soldiers, though they might be able to get out of some things, playing for parties for the brass instead of the big push.

Equally, civilian musicians and other entertainers could end up performing to troops on goodwill tours.

It’s a good gig for inserting secret agents too...

Players of the Delberz Irregulars

“War! A war! A war on the far side, on the other side of the planet”

Concept

The adventures of one of those musician command groups in Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 23a: Quieter Weirdness

Character Creation Challenge 2025

23a: Quieter Weirdness

For a more Twin Peaks setting that’s slightly odd on the surface with just one or two bizarre dark secrets, maybe something like Chronicles Of Darkness or Fear Itself, with advice and possibly characters from Station Duty in The Esoterrorists second edition.

Julee Cruise at the Roadhouse

The house band in a town saloon, or students at a music conservatory. Drama, mysteries, and room for something like a singer who sometimes channels voices from beyond.

Wild At Heart

“Yet something is different

Are we falling in love?”

Concept

They’ll be heading to college or other futures come the fall, but tonight they’re playing, making the kinds of mistake kids their age should be making... maybe finding someone made a worse one.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 23: Surrealist Drama

Character Creation Challenge 2025

23: Surrealist Drama

Over The Edge is the biggest RPG for the surrealist drama genre. It packs a lot of hooks and other stuff into its city seting so there are ghosts and aliens and talking animals and a threat from the future moving back in time to make itself real, so it feels more like William S. Burroughs’s Interzone or indeed 2000 A.D.’s Mega-City One than something only slightly odd on the surface with a small number of deep weird secrets like Twin Peaks.

Unknown Armies is more under the surface, but the PCs are usually at least partially in the know and active participants in the weird conflicts.

So for a band that would fit Al Amarja, crank up the Weird Level:

Long Live

“Trying to find a clue, trying to find a way to get out!”

Concept

A group of musicians who supposedly died under mysterious circumstances or were reportedly seen after their deaths. Are they resurrected, ghosts, lookalikes, clones? And more importantly, can they agree on a setlist?

Character Creation Challenge 2025 22: Ancient Settings

Character Creation Challenge 2025

22: Ancient Settings

As distinct from general mediaeval-style fantasy, RuneQuest and other ancient-style settings will still have groups of musicians for armies and temples and rich people sitting on divans eating grapes and that kind of thing.

The ancient Greeks had guilds for musicians as well as actors, Rome had court composers and the like at various points in its many gameable eras, Egypt had gods of music likewise, and bard is a Gaelic word coming from the Celts.

What kinds of sounds can you get out of a Carnyx?

The Sun Square players

“Oh bylar, bylar”

Concept

As long as there has been art there will have been people singing for their supper. So maybe that ancient walled city had a ragtag group of buskers who played the market square, who also paid attention for secrets to sell, and dreamed of a better life.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 21: Westerns

Character Creation Challenge 2025

21: Westerns

“Western” is both a genre of stories and the back half a genre of music. Both often involve drifters in cowboy hats, towns at the edge, and heroic or tragic gunfights.

Bands as we’d think of them were around by then, though “Country and Western” didn’t become the standard term until 1949, replacing “Hillbilly music”.

And there are some Western stories starring musicians, as in the Singing Cowboy subgenre of serial, which I mentioned in Adventure! because the best known example also involves robots attacking from an underground city. Unsurprisingly the most popular Western RPGs add monsters as well.

I also mentioned folk song collectors, and see also modern and space Westerns, and the post-apocalypse adventure has them too. The legend of the stranger arriving in town with a guitar on his back appeals to many a gigging musician.

The Langdon Four

“Ain’t no grave can hold my body down”

Concept

They aim to come to town, play a set and move on. Somehow this seems to lead to trouble.

GEAS 2024-25 part 25

With no rooms to be had on Wednesdays, midweek GEAS is moving to online or Thursday. And as a whole new day, a chance for me to make people play Buffy!

Since it will probably be one semester tops, nothing complicated. Maybe, hey, a band! Or something.

Vampire V5 planned to continue on Sunday evenings.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 20: Action Comedy

Character Creation Challenge 2025

20: Action Comedy

While a lot of RPGs focus on action and many sessions tend towards comedy, RPGs built for action comedy aren’t all that common. Characters aren’t quite TOON level resilient, but not far off it. There’s The Troubleshooters, and the widening of the Ghostbusters system in Awfully Cheerful, and I can’t think of many more.

But anyway I wanted to highlight this option as related to bands because of The Blues Brothers.

Of course what a game based on the movie would really need is a demolition derby car chase system.

Miniatures optional.
Suspiciously similar Lledo Days Gone bank robbers I modified by adding sunglasses.

BB

“Well my temperature’s rising and my feet left the floor

Crazy people knocking cause they’re wanting some more”

Concept

“We’re on a mission from God.” A band getting back together after various good reasons to part, for one show for a good cause. If they get there.

Martin Luther King Day

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Strength to Love, 1963

Character Creation Challenge 2025 19: Meddling Kids

Character Creation Challenge 2025

19: Meddling Kids

Modelling Scooby-Doo if the kids in the band have a possibly-intelligent animal companion and have to solve a groovy mystery in particular.

Being in a band was added in the Josie And The Pussycats cartoon. We’ll get back to them later.

See also Jinkies!, The Mystery Business and doubtless some others, as well as Cartoon Action Hour, and one of the Monster Of The Week playbooks lets you reveal the monster is a guy in a mask.

Could also be They Came From Beyond The Grave! or Bubblegumshoe for a more Veronica Mars take on it.

Scaredy Cat

“Oh the ghost is here and it’s always a fake

The ghost is here, there’s no reason to stake

The ghost is here, aw, give us a break

It’s fake”

Concept

The main question is whether the supernatural is real, or if it reinforces the original Scooby-Doo lesson that the real monsters are old white guys trying to commit fraud.

Happy birthday Buffy!

The canonical one she shares with Dolly Parton, not the other two shown on screen.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 18: Kids On Bikes

Character Creation Challenge 2025

18: Kids On Bikes

And the general tween to teen adventure subgenre. This may or may not involve alien visitors or psychic runaways or Wizard School. Stranger Things has different levels of plot armour for kids, teens and adults. But overall they’re not in as much danger as straight-up horror teens. Usually.

The Breakers

“I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight

Get teenage kicks right through the night”

Concept

Someday they’ll play somewhere outside Franklin’s family’s garage.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 17: Star Trek

Character Creation Challenge 2025

17: Star Trek

Inevitably after Star Wars and Doctor Who, and with the 17th of January being 17/01:

One of the appealing aspects of the Star Trek future is how much time Starfleet crews have for hobbies. In between adventures they’re painting, putting on plays, LARPing on the Holodeck, and playing music.

And there would also be career creatives in the Federation. What kind of adventures could they get up to?

I’d expect a post-scarcity utopia to have really good support for arts and humanities, so the five kids’ space van wouldn’t be a beat-up clunker. See Aeon for another setting working to get there, so that’s a possible model, a group travelling with a cultural outreach program.

Klingon Opera companies would be easier here as they’d get up to the same kinds of adventures as D&D parties and backstabbing Vampire courts.

Star Trek Adventures needs some work to support PCs who aren’t highly capable starship crew, to the extent that the skill list is the Starfleet departments, so maybe use a different system.

(Hmm, a system for bands where the stats are things like Lead and Bass with the instruments’ personality stereotypes you roll Bass to keep your cool in trouble...)

Star Trek Gibson Flying V guitars. Nerds.

Drift

“Maybe together we can make a mark

In the stars

We embark

And keep us together as the lights go dark”

A travelling band collecting songs and stories from planets isolated after a quadrant-wide war or some other disaster.

I think this would be an interesting hook for a lot of settings, like Ashen Stars or various Traveller eras, and the American folk song collectors during the 1920s and 30s might fit something like Firefly as well as Call Of Cthulhu.

David Lynch

“Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film.”

“Why, ah, elaborate on that?”

“No, I won’t.”

David Lynch’s Weirdness Cannot Be Separated From His Empathy

Reactor retrospective 2024

Character Creation Challenge 2025 16: Star Wars

Character Creation Challenge 2025

16: Star Wars

We see a band in Star Wars before we meet Han Solo.

I imagine Tatooine is one of those towns planets where all the venues are owned by or giving kickbacks to the Hutts so if you want to play you have to deal with that.

But the Cantina is just going for some smooth jazz for the afternoon crowd so it’s probably a steady gig. Not as lucrative as Jabba’s Palace, but you’re less likely to get fed to a Rancor.

And Jabba letting a band play is the only episode of Visions season one that isn’t about a lightsaber fight.

Anyway, there’s room for bands in Star Wars.

Kids on dead-end planets with junk instruments to megastars on interstellar tours, court musicians for space royalty, punky underground renegades attacking the Empire with their art...

You could also go all in like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas’s Michael Jackson Disney park ride film Captain EO with “a ragtag band” with Droid members-slash-instruments and music as the hero’s Force-style power. Skeleton Crew threw in a reference with the butterfly gopher KB releases from captivity.

Freddie Mercury riding on Darth Vader’s shoulders is not canon, however.

Parsec

“There’s a star in the night sky, the kind of star we would be hoping for”

(For Ash I could also have gone with Lose Control opening their album 1977 with the TIE Fighter roar, or Clones as featured in the Republic Commando trailer, or indeed their version of the cantina band tune.)

Concept

A small time band with big time dreams, playing dives on the Outer Rim, shuttling around in a beat-up freighter.

Star Trek: Voyager at 30

Star Trek: Voyager premiered thirty years ago tonight, as I looked back five years ago along with the start of the Reactor rewatch, and was the launch of a new network, explaining its reliable back-to-basics structure.

And now, the secret lyrics for the opening theme.

Voyager

It’s Star Trek: Voyager

Voyager is a Star Trek TV series

The voyages of Voyager

Voyaging for home

Kate Mulgrew stars as Captain Kathryn Janeway

Robert Beltran as Chakotay, XO

RoxannBiggsDawsonJenniferLienRobertDuncanMcNeillEthanPhillips

Tim Russ, Garrett Wang

and ROBERT PICARDO!

Based 'pon Star Trek createdbyGeneRoddenBERRY

Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor

(cre-a-ted-by)

It’s Star Trek: Voyager

Character Creation Challenge 2025 15: Doctor Who

Character Creation Challenge 2025

15: Doctor Who

In case Velvet Generation wasn’t David Bowie enough, I’ve been taking Bowie’s song titles for Doctor Who episode ideas since Blackstar, with a Stranger who is at least sometimes based on him.

But going the other way, a band as characters in the Whoniverse:

John Smith And The Common Men

“Who are you?”

Concept

A bandwagon-jumper starting to enjoy playing, in this case a flagrant attempt to get into the Merseybeat movement despite being from Chichester. Briefly considered disguises and full anonymity to avoid alien surveillance or help with the gimmick before realising they could get on Ready Steady Go! but by then the name scheme had stuck.

And given the setting they live in, likely to get mixed up in stories involving aliens invading Swinging London, falling into a parallel universe where the Beatles never recorded anything (ahem) or records that drive people mad if played backwards, and the time travelling PCs have to work with them to save the day.

Time travellers in a phone box having to save a band? Hmm.

Not going to try and fit in the audio play backstory as it gets even more Starchildren.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew ends with a morally unambiguous turn for our morally ambiguous pirate.

“Everywhere we went, even the worst places, there were good people willing to help us.”

First session of the year (V5: City Of Angels)

First RPG session of the new year, back playing Vampire: The Masquerade 5, and yes my PC has a new moral quandary to fret about. Yay!

How do you tell somebody that a vampire’s planning to turn them?

Character Creation Challenge 2025 14: Starchildren

Character Creation Challenge 2025

14: Starchildren: Velvet Generation

A game that’s actually about bands.

Bands of aliens, but anyway.

Relaunched as Velvet Generation, both versions concern aliens who first experienced music in rock radio broadcasts from Earth, and arrived a century later to find the world dystopian and disappointing, ruled by censors cracking down on artistic expression.

Space Oddity

“There’s a starman waiting in the sky

He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds”

David Bowie by Helen Green, from Time May Change Me

Concept

Strange visitors from another planet, saved by Rock and here to return the favour.

Alien: Genresis

Alien is a great horror film, Aliens is a great action film. They should have kept doing this instead of rehashing Alien and Aliens. Alien full-on war film. Alien political thriller. Alien heist movie. Alien buddy cop okay maybe not

Yes of course the comics have done all of those.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 13: Horror One-Shots

Character Creation Challenge 2025

13: Horror One-Shots

Chronicles Of Darkness, Dead Of Night, Dread, Fear Itself, FiveEvil, World Of Darkness, and so on.

As noted while considering music and horror, there’s a whole subgenre of stories about rock and especially metal bands messing with the occult and possibly selling their souls, in some cases most or all unknowingly so there’s a chance they can escape at the end. The metaphor for music business legal trickery is transparent, and the imagery goes along with a lot of the scene.

There’s a subset of occult-tinged rock bands getting into deals collectively, often with some of the band not knowing it: see American Satan and its sequel series Paradise City, This Damned Band by Paul Cornell and Tony Parker, We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix, and my early exposure through the Dark Forces book The Bargain by Rex Sparger.

So having brought up the crossroads legend for the Blues already, here we are.

Lucky 13

“You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan

Designed and directed by his red right hand”

Concept

They’d all heard the stories, bands literally selling their souls to get ahead in the business, but when “Mr. D.” offered them some useful connections in exchange for a show of willingness, what harm could it do? Sure, they’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, but...

Character Creation Challenge 2025 12: Monsterhearts

Character Creation Challenge 2025

12: Monsterhearts

A second PBTA game, and also one about teen drama. Urban fantasy supernatural teen drama, very much not for kids. In Monsterhearts they could be full supernatural or full metaphorical or somewhere in between.

I already covered a band of vampires, this is a band of assorted different kinds of monster.

See also multi-monster settings like Curseborne, which could have less adolescent and chaotic monster bands as well.

And in comics there’s Scare Tactics, a group of runaway young monsters pretending to be a band pretending to be monsters.

Broken

“You bring out the monster in me”

Concept

A band as a cover for some other activity, like in this case being monsters.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 11: Masks

Character Creation Challenge 2025

11: Masks: A New Generation

A superhero RPG that focuses on a specific subgenre, Masks: A New Generation is a Powered By The Apocalypse game (so it has playbooks for different archetypes that you customise) about adolescent heroes trying to make names for themselves and figure out who they are.

Umläut starts with young bands starting out full of hope and clashing ego, and that sounds more like Masks.

For the comparison to work it has to be a setting with quite a few established superheroes and teams, otherwise the PCs would be big news too quickly. They may not even be the only superpowered band in their high school. Everybody can change the world, but they’re not going to do it before play starts.

Will this team make it? Or will they split up and take the city with them?

Breakout

“Let your feelings slip boy but never your mask boy”

Concept

In a city of millions with hundreds of supers running around, the new generation can’t all be protégés of legends or students at mutant school. A would-be teen band with some powers that are going to complicate their lives but boost their stage shows.

7,777

Well, it has been almost 15 years.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 10: Superheroes

Character Creation Challenge 2025

10: Superheroes

Superheroes overall, especially four-colour and lighter MCU styles.

Larger-than-life figures with mighty clashes, often with striking visual styles and presence...

It’s more of a side gig in general superhero universes than something like Aberrant but can still be the focus of a series.

Marvel and DC both have superhero singers with sound-related powers fronting bands, and for the most recent music-focused Black Canary series the creators actually released a couple of EPs.

Black Canary on tour, by Annie Wu

Real bands sometimes get powered up in comics, often relating to their stage personas and gimmicks.

(Though not always - CHVRCHES can fly because they learned from Hayley Williams.)

And Gerard Way created an askew superhero universe between My Chemical Romance tours.

An early GURPS Supers adventure Deathwish is about a band who are secretly supervillains, though not in a Satanic Panic way despite the name, though their fan club is basically a militia to add some mook fights. (The suggestion of the PCs taking time out to attack a crack den while following the band to Los Angeles didn’t age well.)

Were I to do this I’d probably use ICONS. And Rose Bailey adapted ICONS for Scott Pilgrim style comic supers youth and music scene action with FRETS, in case you really want to blow the roof off the venue.

Rolling Thunder

“We can be heroes, just for one day”

Concept

A musically powered superhero forming a band as a side project for her hero team.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 9: Aeon

Character Creation Challenge 2025

9: Aeon

The original Trinity game, set a century in the future where artificially-activated psionic power is widespread and humanity beings to move to other worlds, with different planets, Earth nations and Psion Orders allowing different SF subgenres in one setting.

While the focus is more on missions and mysteries, there are still details of popular culture, music trends and shows and fashion and the like.

Van-sized private spaceships aren’t really a thing if you want to go further than the moon, but there are ways to travel without them and ways to get on the bigger ships starting to make interstellar voyages after a few years of isolation. So this is a time when a world tour might include more than one world.

Wild Ride

“I’m not afraid to go if it’s with you”

Concept

Young up-and-comers in the synth and percussion heavy Casablanca Bang scene in Tanger, touring extrasolar colonies as part of a cultural exchange program. Travelling light, with just mics, a guitar, force feedback drum pads and air-touch synth: if they need something bigger and louder they find it on site.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 8: Aberrant

Character Creation Challenge 2025

8: Aberrant

A Trinity game set in a near future a decade after the emergence of Novas, superhumans capable of just about anything. The Aberrant setting plays them as celebrities, featuring an active “Novox” music scene as well as other areas of celebrity like acting and powered-up wrestling, and a Nova singer is the biggest music star of the moment.

The PCs could easily start out world famous, so if the players want there’s plenty of material to play as the focus of a media circus - the first edition has an adventure where one of the PCs could run for President.

Kelly Bryant

“Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know?”

(sad piano cover)

Concept

Kelly is the new It girl of Novox crossover pop, although her powers actually have nothing to do with music. Management are a little more careful around her than most manufactured pop stars because a breakdown might result in her starting city-wide riots.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 7: Adventure!

Character Creation Challenge 2025

7: Adventure! Tales Of The Aeon Society

A Trinity game set a century ago, a time of pulp action, larger-than-life or slightly superhuman heroes and an increase in the world’s overall “weird level” to include zeppelin armadas and ways into the Hollow Earth. The kind of time when a swing band might have to fight killer robots.

Compare Call Of Cthulhu which is the same era but a whole different vibe.

Lady Lou and the Flying Orchestra

“Adventure is out there, it’s heading our way”

Concept

A swing band and torch singer touring on a private prop plane and finding all kinds of trouble.

Ludonarrative Dissidents: Vampire: The Masquerade

Ludonarrative Dissidents looks at Vampire: The Masquerade V5 as well as the game family’s overall options and its history, with Greg Stolze talking about being there for Revised and Requiem.

“If this is your favourite thing, it’s probably someone else’s least favourite thing. Which is I’m sure as a game developer hard to deal with when you’re doing a new edition or a new version.”

Content warning for some examples of bad things characters might do.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 6: Trinity Continuum

Character Creation Challenge 2025

6: Trinity Continuum

The Trinity Continuum has a space travelling psionic future, a people-with-powers near future, a pulp action past, and more, including the core rules featuring an action-adventure present. (Bias note, I wrote same of that bit.)

It would work nicely for modern-day action series about bands having adventures, and optionally being covers for international superspies, daring art thieves, anti-corporate hackers and that kind of thing.

Here, a band that will dive in to the setting’s push to make the world better.

Three Sides You See

“Get up and show no fear!”

Concept

A Detroit rap trio known for social causes and blistering rap battles.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 5: Cyberpunk / Cybergeneration

Character Creation Challenge 2025

5: Cyberpunk / Cybergeneration

R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk has always had Rocker(boy) as one of its Roles, which didn’t fit the game as often played with basically mercenaries but appealed to the politically rebellious side of the genre and suggested a different way to play.

There are musicians and bands and other artists in the source media, but only a few are protagonists rather than targets for kidnappers like hardboiled fiction and film noir torch singers, as in Streets Of Fire and at least two major early Shadowrun adventures. Though they sometimes do their own fighting in power armour as in Bubblegum Crisis. Or use intelligent computer hologram tech to battle rival bands like Jem...

But the idea of rebellious firebrand artists is still tempting. Some other games support it better out of the box as a result.

The spinoff/sequel Cybergeneration went all in on the revolution, and accidentally techno-powered kids forming bands and making noise and agitprop artistic dogmas seems to fit much better.

It’s a future where the country was subject to a corporate takeover. The rich can afford to live forever. What are you gonna do about it?

Generation Zero

“It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”

Concept

“It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.”

George Bernard Shaw

I Went Down To The Crossroad

Artists selling their souls for talent is the origin myth of rock and roll.

Tommy Johnson was said to have sold his soul at the crossroad before the story attached to Robert Johnson instead because he had songs about the subject and because he died young and badly.

It’s such a ubiquitous idea that I have a book about musicians misbehaving which opens with a fiction piece about Johnson offering the Devil his soul to be the greatest player ever and the Devil upping the ante to the souls of everyone who follows his example.

There’s a subset of occult-tinged rock bands getting into deals collectively, often with some of the band not knowing it: see American Satan and its sequel series Paradise City, This Damned Band by Paul Cornell and Tony Parker, We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix, and my early exposure through the Dark Forces book The Bargain by Rex Sparger.

The idea comes up in games as well. One of the PCs in my first Buffy game about a band stole her talent from an ex through magic. Vincent’s sire in Last Dance joked about being the origin of the story, and that reference goes back to Robert Johnson being the un-canon Prince of New Orleans in GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade.

Johnson’s world was lawless and chaotic enough that he could count as a wandering adventurer. Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories have a travelling guitarist and magician as a hero.

Call Of Cthulhu has period sourcebooks for Harlem, Chicago and New Orleans if you want a base for a games about the Blues and all that followed. And who might be waiting at the crossroad?

Character Creation Challenge 2025 4: Call Of Cthulhu

Character Creation Challenge 2025

4: Call Of Cthulhu and family

There’s a lot of horror in music, and not just in Metal and Goth and the like that really lean into it. We have a whole lot of murder ballads, violent operas, blues singers going to the crossroads, and heroes like Silver John.

Call Of Cthulhu and relatives like Trail Of Cthulhu usually have groups of investigators chasing its mysteries to the bitter end, but the 1920s-30s base and other historical settings could allow for different kinds of groups getting caught up in the danger for other reasons.

Here picking up Harlem Unbound and looking to Lovecraft Country:

The Dev Longford Five

“There’s a hellhound on my trail...”

Concept

A Chicago jazz quintet with a side of the blues, whose members play ghoulish to show the monsters they do not fear them.

A toast to Tolkien

“His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Character Creation Challenge 2025 3: Dungeons & Dragons & Such

Character Creation Challenge 2025

3: Dungeons & Dragons & Such

Now one I haven’t actually run a game of, but anyways.

Strolling players with optional wagon are the medieval-ish fantasy equivalent of a band in a van, and D&D has Bard as one of the mainline PC options to the extent that Edgin leads the party in Honour Among Thieves. All-Bard parties are a popular one-shot gag idea but you sometimes hear about groups really going for it.

This would also work with similar setups like Warhammer Fantasy, where Kim Newman’s classic novel Drachenfels is about the Shakespeare of the setting putting on a play about a legendary undead sorcerer and you can guess how well that goes...

The Lambert Players

“When the battle is over...”

Concept

Strolling players who have a habit of getting in trouble on the road, sometimes play to grand and not-so-grand courts, once had to put on a show for a ruined castle full of restless spirits, and are always on the lookout for a catchy new tune.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 2: Vampire: The Masquerade

Character Creation Challenge 2025

2: Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampires and live music fit together well. Nightclubs are a vampire setting archetype and the dangerously alluring rock god translates really easily. David Bowie played a vampire first seen at a Bauhaus gig in The Hunger, The Vampire Lestat became a megastar, Chill’s first non-Dracula vampire hunting adventure was Death On Tour, and Vampire: The Masquerade suggested a band as a coterie in the original rulebook and had vampire-run clubs and a Kindred band in Chicago almost immediately.

I ran a game about one for friends recently:

Last Dance

“Just how deep do you believe will you bite the hand that feeds?”

Concept

A local alternative band fronted by vampires, with more established bands on the scene and some conflicts with other clubland Kindred. We could have gone famous but decided to stay street.

Nosferatu (2024)

Nosferatu (2024) is much what you might expect from a Nosferatu adaptation from Robert Eggers. Probably Eggers’s least interesting film to me because I know the playbook so well, but absolutely worth a look.

It adds a few interesting harsh dramatic beats and a way in I wasn’t fond of, though not compared to Werner Herzog’s miserabilist 1979 version, which it inevitably looks a lot like.

It makes Orlok more a pervasive force than a character until the end - it might have been interesting to go all in on this and not characterise him at all.

Orlok himself is unfortunately not that striking visually as Nosferatus go, although he sounds horrible, if rather like the Black Speech of Mordor.

Of course it looks fantastic if often rather gloomy. My main evil glee was in the castle sequence and the build-up to it. I particularly liked one small touch.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Character Creation Challenge 2025

1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

A band is one of the obvious side jobs for a bunch of kids in a van solving mysteries, hence it being one of my immediate Buffy The Vampire Slayer series ideas. (See at least one actual post-Buffy TV series.)

And has happened a few times, currently in a PBP, as well as a long time using it at the Nationals.

Hence a series outline of adventure hooks.

And a title sequence

Almost There

“It’s just me against the world and the world is winning”

Concept

College rock band who have to fight monsters. Expect some conflict about wishing they could just be a band and duty to save the world, episodes about haunted recordings and evil record companies and that kind of thing. On a metaphorical level it’s about how hard it can be to do what you want, and balancing it with what you need to do.

Character Creation Challenge 2025

Character Creation Challenge 2025: Bands

Since I regularly cycle around to games about bands, because it’s a classic reason for a party-sized group in a van getting involved in adventures...

So the idea is to create bands that would fit in various settings.

Series about bands are pretty common in TV, books and comics - not just media that actually have music. And there are some RPGs about bands and the like too.

Some of these could be playable series, and indeed some of them are...

Using Umläut: Game Of Metal where you create a band as your “character” and run them through a one-shot of their entire career.

While there are other games about playing members of bands, and you can play bands in other games and this is where the idea came from in the first place... I have Umläut!

(2021 CCC example)

Concept

Who are these people?

Members

Name at least one

Statistics. “Set each to 1, except Cash, which starts at zero.”

Hope is how happy your Band is

Ego is how angry they are

Fanbase is how popular they are

Cash is how much money and free time they have

Performance Traits. Assign 7, none of them can be less than 1 though. (I have definitely heard bands with less than 1 in these, but never mind.)

Technique is how skilled the musicians are

Power is how loud the Band can play

Stagecraft is how good they look on stage

Character Creation Challenge 2025 ideas

I’ve drawn a blank for the Character Creation Challenge this year.

After the first year of 31 systems, two years of PCs groups covering most games I might actually run and a year of Buffy The Vampire Slayer characters, what else?

I could probably manage Vampire: The Masquerade 5, I certainly have enough PC ideas I haven’t had a chance to use, but would that make for entertaining writing or reading? Maybe a city’s court, but I’ve done that as brief sketches on the level I could use as SPCs already.

Trinity Continuum sure, but too complex for me to do casually.

I could probably make 31 Relics for Relics but I used my best ideas for that for publication.

Star Trek Adventures, the thing I’ve actually played in the last year, too simple even without an online generator. And after some sensible Starfleet officers last time, what else? Maybe some Klingons as they have their own rulebook, and so on, but hey, I’ve never actually run Star Trek.

Star Wars sure, but the D6 system has templates aplenty. Maybe hopping to different systems for different feels? Hrm.

I could do that with supers too, though I already made two ICONS teams in 2022 and 2024.

The only new system I looked at it 2024 that could sustain that many characters baffles me.

Bands?

Hmm.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, as and when applicable! May it be a good one.