Character Building Guidelines(Megaversal Legion)

First off I would like everybody to take a look at the general Character Building Guidelines, if you haven't already.

In this game all players will be members of the Megaversal Legion. They can be as diverse or specialized as players like, as long as the following guidelines are followed:

• Characters that are ridiculously powerful are not allowed. For example, no Cosmo Knights or Splugorth.
• Characters must be able to fit in a ten man High Speed Hover APC, along with room for the other party members and gearmo, or be able to keep up with it.
• Characters who fill too many niches are not allowed. Please try to specialize in one area so that other players may have something to do, AKA No Amazon Cyber Knights.
• Ensure that your character has a reason for joining the Megaversal Legion and that they would have a reason to accept you.
• I would like one character to play a standard Human Megaversal Trooper, of rank slightly higher than the rest of the party. This trooper will be the sergeant in charge of the new recruits and responsible for training them, managing resources, allocating tasks and other such fun.
• I would like no more than one other character to be a standard Megaversal Legion trooper, from either race or Borg. The rest should be some type of something awesome and new.

Character Ideas

For this game I would like to focus a bit more on who your character is rather than what class she is. As such, here are a few ideas I came up with while trying to get to sleep last night that might help you come up with a character.

First off, consider how your character came to join the Megaversal Legion. The most likely options:

• You were one of the races taken captive by the Dakir back when they ruled the legion.
• You heard of the legion and decided to sign up.
• You were rifted into megaversal legion territory, and signed up for a lack of anything better to do.

Of those ideas, the first one is the most boring and doesn't really add too much to the character, outside of a likely hatred of slavers.

The next one has three possible branches (at least that I've come up with).

• You are native to the region of South America near where the Megaversal Legion is stationed.
• You have crazy contacts who would be able to put you in touch with a multi-dimensional mercenary corps.
• You saw the legion engaged in combat.

The first possibility here makes for coming up with a character fairly simple. Flip through the South America books, take a look at the what you see in there and if something catches your eye, then just come up with a reason for why you would leave your home to join the legion. The second one narrows your choices down to characters with multiversal contacts, certainly not a common trait. However these types tend to be spread throughout a number of different books, so it could take some time flipping through them all. I suggest starting with Phase World, and avoiding some of the overpowered stuff there like the phase adepts and cosmo knights. Shifters and Temporal Mages are also good candidates. For the third option things don't get narrowed down very much. However if you take the idea that the Megaversal Legion will often work against slavers, then there's a lot of possibilities for freed slaves. In that case take a look at the Slaves section of Atlantis and the Splynn Dimension Market book for some ideas. If you go for the slave route, consider who it was that enslaved you and how you were rescued. Perhaps it was another PC that was responsible for saving your life.

Going back to the first list, the item that hasn't yet been discussed is the idea that you were just rifted here. While that sounds like a bit of a cop out, and is as cliched in Rifts as meeting in a tavern is for fantasy games, it works surprisingly well. Especially if you add a little twist to it, like "I followed Player's character into it". Now you have a tie with another player character, as well as a lot of other questions that you can ask to flesh out both of your characters. Why did you follow the other character through? Were you friends, lovers, enemies or had you just met? Did she run through the rift to escape you? Does the other character know you followed her though? Why were you two hanging around a rift anyways? Where you at a nexus point at midnight? Did you have a shifter buddy? Did you two try to steal from a shifter and get banished to a random plane as punishment? Perhaps you were a CS investigator along with your Dog Boy companion, searching for some supernatural trouble within the burbs. Perhaps you were a CS trooper in the Siege on Tolkein and got banished by a wayward spell. Perhaps you're part of a cyber knight raid on Calgary, when you encountered a demon that was too big to handle, and dove through the rift to "saftey". Or maybe you're attempting to find an old friend who disappeared through a rift ages back and so you've started rift hoping to find him.

Well, I hope that helps to get your wheels turning.

As for classes, once you've got an interesting concept we can find something that fits and find a way to smooth out some of the mechanical wrinkles.

House Rules

Take a look at my RIFTS House Rules for information that may affect how your character is generated. We will be using the higher powered rules for generating attributes.

Starting Equipment

Each character can choose either the starting equipment listed under their character class, or the starting equipment for a Megaversal Trooper (South America 2 pg 106) with standard arms being a IAR-20 Inertia Rifle (SA2 pg 113) and NE-2L Plasma Cartridge Auto-Pistol (Phase World Sourcebook pg 53 OR GMG pg 151).