Character Conversions: A Whole Party for the Really Wild West

Character Conversions: A Whole Party for the Really Wild West

Today I am not doing just one character conversion, but a whole party of them! Inspired by Owen KC Stephens’ Really Wild West setting for Starfinder, I pulled characters from tall tales, myths, and even historical legends. These four characters represent my favorites, the ones I would want to play in that kind of setting. In some of these cases, I added my own spin to their myths. I like looking for connections and putting them together. In these cases, I’ve added bits here and there to bring them together into a single story. I hope that doesn’t offend everyone, that’s not my intention, and I apologize if I cross a line I didn’t see. If I do, please, point it out to me! I’m always willing to learn and correct my missteps.

Coyote

Coyote's Gift by EchoGreens on DeviantArt

Starting off my list is Coyote, of native American myth and legend. And ancient trickster spirit and teacher... usually both roles at the same time. Coyote varies between malicious and benevolent in almost equal proportions. Interestingly enough, as a shapeshifter, Coyote even changed sex. Stories of the shapeshifter’s exploits range across North and Central America. Even the Aztecs knew of him.

One of the most notable things about Coyote is that in most of the stories, he approaches most mortals as relative equals. Coyote will entreat, bargain, cajole, seduce, convince, or curse them not as some god watching over them, but among them as if both parties had a right to be there and make their own decisions in every interaction between them. Coyote was NEVER a ruler over humans. They could even kill him... though, unlike mortals, being killed was somewhat less permanent for Coyote.

It’s that part that made me comfortable deciding to use the shapeshifter as one of the characters in this party; that this is just one more of the stories of Coyote’s exploits.

So what class and race to start? Since this is already going to be long due to including four characters, I won’t go over every option; I’ll be a bit more direct. Coyote was an extremely persuasive individual, with enough skill and knowledge in enough areas to be a successful and believable trickster nearly anywhere. In many stories, the trickster clearly used magic. So after examining the options, I decided to make him an Envoy, with the Magical Exploit alternate class feature from the Character Operations Manual. Owen made a race for his setting that fit’s perfect: the Fenrun. Coyote is an Arbeiter breed.

So far, Coyote will have one spell per spell level (max spell level 4), with the option to trade expertise talents for additional spells known. It also says Coyote will be able to use any variable level spells they know with any spell level it could normally be cast at. I don’t think I will need to pick up too many spells to represent this creature’s capabilities, so I pick up the Convincing Liar, Expert Advice, Gregarious Mien, Slick Customer, and Saving Expertise. If you ever feel like Coyote needs more spells at a level, you can always trade one or more of those for an additional spell slot at one level. He’ll select Token Spell, Polymorph, Mystic Cure, Bestow Curse, and Planar Binding. Polymorph will cover all the shapes change shape doesn’t. The rest of these spells represent powers displayed at various times in the stories, including trapping his fellow spirits.

For improvisations, I would pick Clever Feint, Frustrating Target, Not in the face, Spell Gem Understanding, Infuriating Target, Clever Improvisation, Hidden Agenda, Situational Awareness, Dispiriting Taunt, Quick Dispiriting Taunt, and Universal Expression. Coyote isn’t the greatest team player ever, but this set of improvisations wouldn’t necessarily depend on a team. Instead, it focuses more on disrupting the enemy than it does on enabling your team—just the sort of thing you could expect from a trickster.

Now, for ability scores, I am going to start Coyote off at 12 Strength, 12 Dexterity, 8 Constitution, 13 Intelligence, 13 Wisdom, and 14 Charisma. At 5th level, the boosts would go into Con, Int, Wis, and Cha. At 10, 15, and 20, the boosts would go into str, dex, con, and cha. The reason for this spread is to enable certain feats early on. Likely you would invest in personal augmentations to boost your primary combat stat and HP as early as possible to mitigate the low con and to-hit scores.

For feats, I’m giving the old shapeshifter Toughness to help mitigate the low HP they are will have at the beginning. Improved Feint, Improved Demoralize, Sense Assumptions, and Intuit Relationships to help solidify their ability to manipulate and persuade. Might as well add in Spell Feint, later on, to help Bestow Curse land unexpectedly. And Polymorph Adept is only appropriate for one of the mythology’s most notorious shapeshifters. But most importantly, as soon as they become available, I am giving Coyote Connection Inkling, Technomantic Dabbler, Reality Glimmer. That gives six at-will cantrips and three extra 1st level spells, with up to 6 castings each per day, depending on your level. I would choose Charming Veneer, Hazard, Mending, Transfer Charge, Ghost Sounds, and Detect Magic for the Cantrips. The other three spells would be Build Trust, Comprehend Languages, and Holographic Projection.

That adds up into a package that can rely on wits and charm in and out of combat to disrupt, destabilize, and manipulate opponents. As someone who wanders around teaching people lessons, they’ve got everything they need.

Pecos Bill

 

An illustration by Laurie A. Conley

That brings us to the next character on the list: Pecos Bill, abandoned as a child and raised by coyotes... wait, coyotes? Coincidence? Nope! In my version of this character, he wasn’t just raised by coyotes, Coyote himself raised him. Reading through his exploits, I can only imagine Coyote laughing his mythological bum off as he watches the cowboy he raised go at the world. Only someone raised by Coyote would use a snake as a lasso, try (successfully I might add) to ride tornadoes, or try to profess his love to someone by shooting all the stars out of the sky. Did I mention he was also a Texan? Sounds completely crazy, but the more I thought about this nutjob, the more I realized I wanted to make this character. I mean, I could attribute almost everything in his story to something I have seen some RPG character try at some point.

To get started though: his race is pretty easy, he’s just another human. His class is a little harder to pin down exactly, because everyone uses guns, and can even ride animals. My initial thought was that we could rule out any intelligence-based character. Still, the more I thought about it, the more I realized despite his activities seeming like they were complete insanity, a mechanic or technomancer might be able to pull every one of them off. The more I considered it, the more I leaned towards technomancer. That meant he wasn’t really insane, just brilliant in a way that leads others to believe he was insane in a way only a Texan could be.

Now, before I get into building the rest of the details, I am going to point out two of his feats from tall tales and focus on them: He wrangled tornadoes and rode them, and he shot all the stars out of the sky to impress someone. Rather than just saying “he lied about those,” I realized there was a way he really could have. A figment spell could pretty easily accomplish shooting the stars out of the sky. And what if he wasn’t lassoing tornadoes, but instead he was lassoing air elementals in whirlwind form?

But riding the whirlwind form air elemental? What would be the effect? Damage every turn, off-target, flat-footed, and grappled. That’s a whole pile of penalties and restrictions, but I looked carefully, especially at the grappled condition. You can still do two things at the very least: shoot a small arm and throw a grenade. That is important because it is shaping up that Pecos Bill was an illusionist and summoner, and check out the list of grenades available: hologrenades, and summoning grenades. That tells me this little nutjob was a grenade specialist. Even with the pile of penalties one might get from hanging-out inside a whirlwind, it is pretty easy to put grenades where you want them. And if your illusions and summons are still coming despite being in the funnel, it’d be pretty impressive, especially if they can’t tell you are cheating with grenades. And if the whirlwind you are riding was there because it was your summoned elemental, it’s going to be cooperating with you just fine. You’ll still be taking damage from it, but we’ll see if we can find a way to mitigate that too. And the best thing: it can always turn back into air elemental form and let you ride it around that way as well.

So with all that in mind, let’s look at the class features and magic hacks available. Right off the bat, I’m going to say he has a Holographic Artist’s Cache Hack (an alternate feature from Character Operations Manual), as it provides some at-will holograms and permanent summons. Any summon monster two or higher is good enough for an air elemental that can produce a whirlwind big enough for a medium-sized creature to ride, so it all fits my image of this tall tale.

Technomancers come with a surprising number of magic hacks that would work well with a gunslinger/grenadier-esque sort of build. To start, though, I’ll give him Subtle Spells, as his tall tales tell me he’s got some sleight of hand going if no one picked up on the fact that he was casting spells the whole time. Shadow Grenade will reduce the cost of your grenade lobbing lifestyle a great deal as it lets your trade spell slots for free grenades. Fabricate Explosive can do the same, with fewer restrictions, and even help you get around some of Shadow Grenade’s restrictions. Spellshot gives you some interesting options for casting your spells by shooting them at people and having the point of impact be the spells point of origin. Enhance Weapon lets you trade spell slots to boost a weapon’s damage. Eternal spell lets you use Supercharged Weapon at will, without the limitations you would have using it from your spell cache. Seeking Shot lets you hit targets from inside your whirlwind even after it’s picked up enough debris that you have a hard time seeing. Lastly, rain of fire lets you just shoot everyone, all at once, like the crazy pistol-slinging Texan you are.

That leaves us some feats to pick. There are four feats I’d consider must-haves for anyone intending to use grenades heavily: Grenade Proficiency, Cook Grenade, Grenade Mastery, and Ricochet Grenade. Enhanced Resistance will seriously help mitigate the damage dealt to you inside any whirlwind you ride. It stands to reason that regularly riding air elementals would have you use to that kind of weather, so Environmental Adaptation (rain and snow, winds) seems appropriate. And if you are going to be casting from in there, you’ll need Combat Casting and Focused Spellcaster. And your remaining feats can go towards Weapon Focus Small Arms, Double Tap, Deadly Aim.

Alternatively, if you pay attention to the stories about him, he had several dangerous, wild animals at his beck and call, from the rope and lasso snakes, to his horse Widowmaker, and at one point he was even riding a cougar. So switching out some of these feats for any of the creature companion feats from Alien Archive 3 would also be appropriate.

Ability score-wise, Pecos is focused on Intelligence, Constitution, and Dexterity, covering his spells, HP, gunslinging, and sleight of hand. Skill-wise he’d invest in Mysticism, Engineering (to craft his own grenades when needed, and general explosive knowledge), Survival, Acrobatics, Athletics, Perception, and Sleight of Hand.

And that only leaves his spell list. At every level, he’s going to take the highest level of Summon Creature and Holographic Image available. Supercharge weapon, and Create Ammunition are must-haves for any aspiring gunslinger. Anyone riding an air elemental better take at least the first level Flight spell, and consider the higher levels as well. Patch Tech will help with your fixation on explosives. The Biotic Taclash spells would be a good substitute for the snakes Pecos used as lassos and ropes. Make Whole and Mend to keep your gear at it’s best. Mirror Image and Displacement are vital spells in any illusionist’s arsenal. The Resistant Armor spells may or may not help mitigate damage from riding your whirlwinds, depending on how quickly you pick up Enhanced Resistance. Arcing Surge, Chain Surge, Explosive Blast, and Heat Leech will be great when you get Spellshot. Planar Binding and Planar Barrier will let you summon some longer-lasting Air Elementals if you can bargain with them for service.

John Henry

That rounds out my favorite American tall-tale and gets us ready to move on to the next member of this party. Now that we have the father-son duo of a trickster spirit and an insane Texan, we need some more reasonable party members to reign them in a bit and bring some sanity to their adventures. Now, there is one American tall-tale that we have records of not only having lived but of having done exactly what made him famous. That man is John Henry, an African American steel driver who competed with a machine... and won. Other legendary figures in American folklore never managed that last part. Paul Bunyan, for example, lost his contest. Who better to reign in the crazier party members than someone who can take on impossible odds and win?

Now, you might point out that John Henry won, but then his heart gave out immediately after, and he died. That’s where I add my own spin to his tale. I say the wording is critical. His “heart gave out” and “he died.” What if those were two entirely separate events, but some deceptive individual says them together on purpose, knowing the listener would assume the worst, that he died because his heart gave out... but that’s not what the tale says. He beat the machine when the company he worked for was testing it to see if they could start replacing skilled workers with a machine they wouldn’t have to pay. He won, but what if the company decided the difference still made the machine the better choice? “Your heart gave out” can also mean you lost faith. So maybe John Henry simply lost faith in the company he had worked so hard for, only to be betrayed by that same company. And the “he died” part, that’s merely an acknowledgment that he’s mortal. They never said when he died. In the story I’m weaving here, he certainly didn’t die immediately. He simply left. He traveled west, looking for a new life. One day he met the strangest pair while fending off a Martian Tripod. After helping them topple it and free its prisoners, the African American steel-driving titan has been with them ever since. Sometimes he wonders about the father, though. That man reminds him of the spider Anansi an awful lot, of whom his grandmother used to tell him stories.

One of the interesting things Owen has done with his Really Wild West setting is that when he added races, he didn’t replace existing cultures with them, he added them. That means all human cultures are still present. Because of this, I see no reason to spend any time considering a race for John Henry, he’s human, through and through.

Now, what I never understood when I was a child, is that as a “steel-driving man” what Henry was doing was making the holes for dynamite to create passes and tunnels for the railroad. That means he had to understand not only how to break a thing, but how to break it exactly how you want it broken. You could almost say he worked very closely with entropy. John Henry is a Vanguard, straight out of Character Operations Manual.

As someone whose job it was to put steel rods through rock and stone with little more than muscle power, John’s first vanguard aspect is going to be Exergy, and his second will be Cascade. This form of mastery over entropic forces is why he beat the machines other tall tales failed to. John Henry’s disciplines are Antagonize and Swift Antagonize, Dampen, Energize, Friendly Fire, Flatten Bullets,

Blindsense, Blindsight, Accelerate, and Living Effigy. His skills are focused on Profession Mining, Athletics, Intimidate, Engineering, Physical Science, and Perception. His ability scores should focus on strength and constitution entirely to start, and when you level up high enough to get increases, add dexterity and wisdom.

The feats I select for him are going to focus on how quickly, accurately, and powerfully he can deliver blows. Improved Initiative and Constant Alert represent that he’s fast off the block. Deadly Aim, Lunge, and Penetrating Attack cover his powerful strikes. Weapon Focus, Cleave, and Great Cleave show that he can move from one target to another swift and smoothly. That leaves a couple of feats to customize how you want. I recommend versatile specialization, so you can apply weapon specialization to the excavation lasers his skill in mining makes him proficient with. Toughness could be another great choice to round out his build.

And there you have him, John Henry, a man who can drive steel through stone faster than a machine. He’s left the railroad and found new friends in the deep west. Friends who respect and value his prowess and value him as a person. Our party just needs one more person to be complete.

Bessie Coleman

Have you ever heard of Bessie Coleman? She was born in Texas but dreamed of flying. With no opportunities in the United States for any such dream, she saved up, went to Europe, and returned not only with a handful of firsts and an international sport aviator license, including being the first African-American female aviator, but also the first Native American one too. She performed dangerous and dazzling aerial stunts for shows, and even test flew planes. Till one day, test-flying a new aircraft, she died when it crashed.

Like John Henry, that’s where I come in. She was thrown from the plane and died on impact. It was found that a wrench used to service the plane had jammed the controls. Now, in reality, her body was recovered. That’s what I am changing. She survived the fall, knowing her plane was sabotaged; that someone tried to kill her. It would be a while before she hit the ground because she fell into the grasp of an air elemental being stalked by Pecos Bill. When he saw it had trapped someone in its funnel, the hunt ended, and a chase began. He chased it down the coast, through Mississippi, then Alabama, and finally into Texas. It continued until it all came to a head when a Martian Tripod killed the elemental with its deathray. That’s where Bessie finally finished falling to the ground. Though she was injured, she joined the people fighting off the tripod, finishing it off before collapsing from her injuries.

During her recovery, she bonded with the strange group, and from that time on, she regarded the other three as brothers-in-arms. She joined in their adventures. She salvages what she can from the martian machines, always trying to build a new airplane for herself. She believes the martian nanotech is the key to making an un-sabotage-able plane, and she intends to show the people who tried to kill her a thing or two when she eventually returns.

Bessie Coleman is a human drone mechanic. The plane she is trying to build is her drone, which has incorporated portions of the martian tripod’s AI, patched together with code of her own. Her custom Rig takes the form of a utility belt. Her mechanic tricks are Repair Drone, Portable Charging Station, Overclocking, Hyperclocking, Overcharge, Improved Overcharge, Superior Overcharge x4. Her stats would focus on intelligence and constitution first, then dexterity and charisma. Her feats are Three Point Stance, Sky Jockey, Toughness, Diehard, Environmental Adaptation (cold dangers, thin atmosphere, smoke effects, winds), Double Tap, Amplified Glitch, Enhanced Resistance (kinetic), Mobility, Shot on the Run

  

Bessie's Drone resembles these robots from the movie "Skycaptian and the World of Tomorrow."

Her Combat Drone will take mods that will help it act as a flying machine. Riding Saddle, Flight System x2, Enhanced Armor, Medical Subroutine, Skill Unit (Medicine), Speed x4. The drone’s feats will be Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, Mobility, Shot on the Run, Deadly Aim, Penetrating Attack, Far Shot, Extra Resolve.

I think she perfectly rounds out this party. She can join Pecos’s Skyborne insanity with a bit more of a rational (and safer) approach. She complements John Henry’s technical expertise. And with her Native American roots, she has a chance to get to know a figure from her ancestor’s mythology.

I’ll conclude this post with a question: if you were going to bring a Tall Tale to life in Owen’s Really Wild West, who would you pick?

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