One of the things I enjoy about learning new systems is to take an existing character and see how it can be shoed-into the new system. I\u2019ve decided that my victims for this article will be the Tephra RPG from Cracked Monocle, and the Final Fantasy X-2 character Yuna. I\u2019ve used Yuna as a steampunk character before, and her basic traits, that of a twin-pistol-wielding guncaster, are fairly easily-modeled in most games. Before I begin to put her into the Tephra system, however, let\u2019s quickly look at what the character of Yuna is really all about.<\/p>\n
History: Yuna is a mixed-heritage woman in a world where such relationships are heavily frowned upon.\u00a0 Her upbringing was strict and religious, giving her both an honorable and noble bearing and belief system, but also forcing her into the role of a would-be martyr. In her first exposure to the world at large, she began the question the need for martyrs at all and eventually rejected much of the trappings of her upbringing, while keeping her own faith and beliefs intact. As she\u2019s gotten a little older, she\u2019s adopted an adventurer\u2019s lifestyle outright, doing what good she can while undergoing a quest for something far more personal, while using the singing skills she acquired in her former life to gain some fame, notoriety, and much-needed income.<\/p>\n
Personality: Though she\u2019s largely come out of her shell, Yuna is a quiet, slightly-submissive woman in her behavior and attitudes. She seeks always to do the right thing, even though it can cause her serious internal conflict and emotional stress when the right thing to do isn\u2019t an obvious choice. While it\u2019s common to see Yuna frustrated by others and in bad situations, it\u2019s exceedingly rare to see her outright angry.<\/p>\n
Appearance: Yuna is an attractive, mostly demure, young woman of slight frame and short build. She generally possesses cropped brown hair. Yuna is visually unusual in that she each of her eyes is a slightly different color. Both eyes are a color of aqua, with her left eye trending more bright blue and her right eye trending more green.<\/p>\n
Equipment: Yuna doesn\u2019t wear any notable armor, and her clothes, while stylish, are a bit to the \u2018revealing\u2019 side for polite society (she keeps more formal attire for these purposes). She carries two \u201cTwin Bee\u201d light box-pistols which have been modified for automatic fire and can house unique bullets of unusual properties.<\/p>\n
For obvious reasons, I\u2019ve skipped a lot of the specifics of the Final Fantasy X and X-2 setting and well as details on her previous role as a summoner. After all, we\u2019re putting her into the Tephra setting and system, and she had abandoned her earlier powers outright at the end of Final Fantasy X anyway. So what we\u2019re going to focus on is her Gunner form.
\nAll right, so now we crack open the Tephra manual to get started, keeping in mind that we\u2019re modeling a character rather than just rolling one up.<\/p>\n
Race
\nTo keep things simple at this point, we\u2019re going to assume that Yuna\u2019s mixed heritage is only an ethnic one, and for game mechanics she\u2019s simply a human with an unusual physical trait, her eyes.<\/p>\n
As a human, Yuna gets to choose two racial traits and roll one random one. We\u2019ll give her the \u201cFavored Attribute\u201d of Dexterity, the \u201cPeerless\u201d trait, to let her win ties, and, since we\u2019re modeling a character rather than outright creating one, we\u2019ll give her the \u201cEmotionally Driven\u201d attribute as well.<\/p>\n
Nationality
\nThough Yuna becomes a free spirit, she begins life as a noblewoman and uses that to her advantage at times. To keep things a little simple, we\u2019ll assign Yuna to the Evanglessians and list her as a noble of that empire. Her mother was Paldoran, causing her father to be a subject of scandal for some time.<\/p>\n
Skills
\nNow we start to choose her skills. Yuna, as a starting character, gets one skill at three points (her primary skill). She gets two skills at two points each, and three skills at one point each.\u00a0 We\u2019ll chose the \u201cAgility\u201d skill as Yuna\u2019s primary, given how she\u2019s known for her grace and dynamic movements. As a gunner, she\u2019ll also get the obvious \u201cMarksmanship\u201d skill, and we\u2019ll give her the \u201cShowmanship\u201d skill to fill in for her singing prowess. These two will be her secondary, or two-point, skills.<\/p>\n
Yuna\u2019s background has also given her a bit of the \u201cFaith\u201d and \u201cGrace\u201d skills, gaining one point each in them. Lastly, her adventures thus far have given her a little bit of general \u201cExpertise\u201d, so we\u2019ll wrap up her skill allocation with that.<\/p>\n
Attributes
\nTephra determines attributes by adding together each of the skills taken in each attribute category. We\u2019ve taken three points in \u201cCunning\u201d skills, giving us a \u201cCunning\u201d of three. So Yuna\u2019s Tephra statistics are Brute:0, Cunning: 3, Science: 0, Dexterity: 5, and Spirit: 2.<\/p>\n
Specialties
\nYuna gains three specialties at first level. Since we\u2019re really going to focus on her relative speed and gracefulness rather than her firepower, we\u2019ll start off with the \u201cFree Movement\u201d specialty. This lets her act more quickly (and slightly more often) in combat. She gains a +2 priority, a +5 speed, and a +6 HP bonus for this.
\nWe\u2019ll also give her \u201cInstant Draw\u201d, so that she can pull her two box-pistols out as needed. This gives her a +1 Accuracy, another +3 on her priority, and a +7 HP.
\nLastly, just to keep with her \u2018healer\u2019 background, we\u2019ll give her \u201cPatch the Bleeding\u201d which will allow her to treat wounds in the field. This also gives her a +2 DEF, +2 PRI, and a much-needed +11 to her HP.<\/p>\n
Final Attributes
\nAll right, we\u2019re nearly done now. Yuna gets 18 HP and 12 wound points as a starting character. She also starts with three action points, a 7 total priority, a 2 defense, and a 30 base speed.<\/p>\n
Twin Bees
\nRemember how I said we would get back to these? The Twin Bees are weapons that I tend to call \u201cGuncasters\u201d. In essence, they\u2019re guns that shoot magic rather than bullets. This might be the trickiest part to convert to Tephra, so let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n
Yuna\u2019s guns are light, accurate, and automatic. They also can deliver magical effects such as fire, ice, and so on. This means, in Tephra terms, they\u2019re accurate, crank-free weapons with the delivery attribute. Despite being \u2018light\u2019 pistols, they\u2019re not derringers, so they fall under the \u201cMedium Firearm\u201d category.<\/p>\n
So, computing the prices for each Twin Bee is just taking the market price for the gun, 5p, then adding the costs of its crafting modifiers. These come out to a substantial 175p. So, we\u2019re at 180p for each Twin Bee, making Yuna packing seriously-expensive heat at a cost of 360p on the outset!<\/p>\n
Finishing Up
\nThis pretty much wraps it up for our modeling experiment. Yuna isn\u2019t known for armor (or much in the way of clothes, for that matter), so at best we\u2019ll just give her \u2018light\u2019 armor for the time being. Other gear will be left up to the player\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n
So Tephra can effectively handle making Yuna in her Gunner form, though it\u2019s understandably not a perfect fit. Her Twin Bee guns are fairly expensive toys, which isn\u2019t too surprising, and have to be somewhat kludged into the game. But it\u2019s still a passable representation.<\/p>\n
So how does Tephra stand up for character creation? It\u2019s fairly simple to get together a character but it does involve a great deal of flipping around in the book to find everything. An \u2018as you go\u2019 character-building example would have gone a long way to help, if only to show where to find all your options. Mechanically it\u2019s simple and elegant, if not innovative. The numbers and powers given give a good indication of what your character can do without being mired in gaming arcana.<\/p>\n
Overall a fairly solid effort, and one worth revisiting, which I plan to do soon enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things I enjoy about learning new systems is to take an existing character and see how it can be shoed-into the new system. I\u2019ve decided that my victims for this article will be the Tephra RPG from Cracked Monocle, and the Final Fantasy X-2 character Yuna. I\u2019ve used Yuna as a steampunk… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelsagas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}