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cosmicspearTime for something very silly indeed.
So, on a whim, I've decided that I'm going to do a series where I make characters in Heroes Unlimited, the superhero RPG from Palladium Books. I already like messing around with this game so it's not that much of a stretch to start doing so in public.
For anyone wondering what the fuck I'm going on about, Heroes Unlimited is the third game Palladium ever released, with its first edition coming out in 1984. It repurposes the system Kevin Siembieda developed (well, forked from AD&D, really) for his fantasy RPG into a superhero game, with character classes replaced with "power categories" that give you how you got your powers and what kinds of powers you can have.
It is not a good game.
There was a time when what Palladium had to offer was considered worth at least looking into as far as tabletop RPGs go, but that time is long gone and never coming back. These days if people outside of their dedicated fandom bring the company up it's usually to mock them for stuff like Kevin Siembieda's extremely bizarre writing style, their absurdly outdated concept of what an RPG is, the whole Robotech RPG Tactics shitshow, or their inability at a fundamental level to organize their rules in a way that anyone with a brain would consider passable.
To give an example of that last point, the only place in Rifts where you'll find rules for how long it takes to reload a laser gun is in the descriptions of guns that have underbarrel grenade launchers. Not even kidding.
Palladium's nature as a company stuck in the past even extends to how they make their books. It was only around 2013 that Kevin Siembieda even started using a computer to do the layouts for his books, before then he manually glued them together.
And yet, despite everything, there's a certain amount of charm in Palladium's products. A lot of it comes from the fact that Kevin is genuinely enthusiastic about what he does, as misguided as he is. A lot of the bizarre idiosyncracies that slip into their games also give them a particular type of appeal.
Heroes Unlimited in particular also has the benefit of being full of random tables that are calibrated, probably accidentally, in a way that tends towards the maximum possible amount of nonsense.
Thus, this series. I'm going to make a character in every power category offered in the Heroes Unlimited Revised Second Edition core book, as well as every new power category in the Powers Unlimited 2 expansion. For a few of these categories I'll be making more than one character because some of these power categories have multiple subcategories that are different enough to be worth going over all of them. Whenever possible, I will roll on the random tables that I am provided with. Hopefully we'll end up with some real bullshit.
Part of my motive for doing this is just that it's fun, but I also want to pay some level of tribute to MegaDumbCast, the podcast that really got me looking into Palladium games and seeing just how ridiculous they can be. Its creator recently announced that it's ending due to circumstances outside his control and will almost certainly be going online, so I guess I felt like I had to do my part to carry the torch.
Now, without further ado, let's get started!
And we're off with the first power category offered in the core book: aliens! Aliens are pretty much the most hilariously broken power category in Heroes Unlimited because they can get an entire second power categore which allows for some ridiculous cheese with a bit of system mastery. Or you could be an alien robot whose sole advantage over Earth robotics is being able to buy a little more health.
Not that any of that matters here, because I'm not gonna be calling an audible and pre-choosing the option where our strange visitor from another planet just has super abilities due to being from space. That way I'm not taking away from the other power categories by going over them right at the start.
Anyway, the first thing you do when making a Heroes Unlimited character is, as in every Palladium game, roll some stats and get unreasonably angry at your dice. Palladium's house system has its origins in Kevin Siembieda's ideas for improving D&D back in 1979, so naturally we do that by rolling 3d6 for each stat down the line. Palladium doesn't have any time for kids these days and their choosing what they want their characters to be good at. The main distinguishing factor here is that if you roll 16 or better you get an exploding d6 that adds to your stats, then if that's a 6 you get a second extra d6. I don't know what kinds of odds that creates, except that you're hilariously unlikely to get the really good results (which considering this system gives you absolutely no bonuses for stats below 16, leads to the occasional lottery winner here being ludicrously overpowered compared to their peers).
So what stats are we rolling for? Well, there's eight of 'em: IQ, ME, MA, PS, PP, PE, PB, and Speed. Or, to give their full names and what they do: Intelligence (skill bonuses), Mental Endurance (saving throws against psionics and insanity, as well as psionic ability), Mental Affinity (Charisma #1, makes people trust or be intimidated by you), Physical Strength (melee damage), Physical Prowess (melee attack rolls, as well as parrying and dodging since this game uses opposed attack and defense rolls), Physical Endurance (saves against death, magic, and poison, as well as HP and magic ability), Physical Beauty (Charisma #2, makes people charmed or impressed by you), and Speed (movement rate).
Some things worth noting about those stats:
Anyway, time to reveal what I rolled for our guy's stats: IQ 9, ME 7, MA 11, PS 19, PP 8, PE 6, PB 10, Spd 8. That's...not great, honestly. Only having a PP of 8 effectively cuts off their access to stat-based strike bonuses entirely due to how stingy this game is with PP bonuses, and 6 PE is just pathetic. On the other hand, that PS is very nice and Spd is not something I'm worried about because anyone can take the skill that boosts it.
Next we need to determine how much health our character has. We get two stats for that: hit points and structural damage capacity. HP is explicitly your meat, and there's all sorts of optional rules for getting injured when you lose enough of it. SDC, meanwhile, represents willpower and ability to shrug off minor hits. Kevin Siembieda's description of it references John Wayne movies because he's just that kind of person.
If you're wondering why it's called structural damage capacity, that's because in Palladium's first two gamelines characters gain it entirely from their armour. Heroes Unlimited was their first game to be set in a genre where people don't generally wear armour, so Kevin's quick solution to make the rules work was to just give characters SDC. He then kept this for every subsequent game he made. This is what I mean when I talk about Palladium's system being largely composed of assorted kludges that just get folded into the core rules over time.
Anyway, we determine our HP by adding a d6 to our PE. A roll of 3 means our character has a whopping nine hit points, which can be wiped out by an average hit from almost any handgun in the game. Our base SDC, meanwhile, is taken from our power category. For aliens, it starts at 20. Thankfully it's extremely unlikely that it'll remain that pathetic.
(Normally you'd roll or choose your power category after determining your HP, but I've already decided we're creating an alien so we're skipping that step.)
The next thing we need to do is get into what makes our particular strange visitor from another planet different from every other random strange visitor from another planet you might run into in the street. The first step of that is seeing what we look like. There's a random table to roll on, which on a roll of 63 tells me that this alien is plant-like. That gives our character an extra 40 SDC, gives them the carrying capacity of a character with extraordinary strength, and doubles their healing rate. Nowhere near the best we could've rolled, but perfectly acceptable.
Next we roll for what our alien's home planet is like, which gives us more stat changes. On a roll of 39 we're from a frozen world and need to wear a refrigerated suit to survive on Earth. It also tells us what to roll for our height and weight, which in this case are completely unconnected from each other. The height roll we're given adds 3d6 inches to a base height of 5 feet, and I end up rolling a height of 5'11". The same table tells me to add 2d6x10 pounds to a base weight of 120, and I ended up rolling snake eyes for a total weight of 140 pounds. We are making one lanky motherfucker here.
Frozen worlds also give us another roll to determine just how cold our home is. On a 21 my result is "tropical to temperate latitudes," which gives us the worst bonuses (only 15 extra SDC and a +4 to save against cold) but makes it vaguely possible to survive in Earth temperatures.
The next step for aliens is rolling or choosing our alien's power category, but as previously stated I'm making an executive decision to have this character just use the option where they have super abilities as a natural part of their biology. This option lets me just choose to have one major power and one minor power or four minor powers and no major powers, but it also lets me roll on a random table later in the book to see how many powers I get. Naturally I'm rolling on that table, though I'm rejecting rolls of 86 or more because those give my character psionic powers and I'm not gonna open that can of worms yet. After two rolls of 99 in a row I get a 32, which gives me...one major power and one minor one.
Look game, I'm trying to show off how ridiculous you can be, shit like this isn't helping.
Anyway, rolling on the major power table I get a 58, which gives me the Bio-Ghost ability. I guess the game heard me complaining about not getting enough nonsense because this power is a lot.
Basically, my character is not a vampire ghost who becomes intangible and drains energy from people. This causes a little damage and heavily debuffs whoever I just drained, and draining people enough times gives the character a bunch of bonuses that are honestly pretty damn good (eventually including an extra two actions after enough draining) but on the other hand my character now needs to drain energy from people to survive. The power specifically does not allow them to get this energy from aliens, which raises a lot of very silly questions considering this is a normal part of the physiology of their alien species. So these aliens, who evolved on a planet that is completely different from Earth, will starve to death if they do not drain energy from Earthlings, who can only be found on Earth. Right.
Moving on, a roll of 40 on the minor power table gives us the power of Nightstalking. This is the power to be a vampire hunter, which is now a natural part of the physiology of our species. We can always recognize vampires and shadow beasts (which are something you can summon with magic and are actually worth summoning), we're immune to being turned into undead, we can hide in the shadows and are pretty good at it, we get bonuses to a few relevant skills, we have night vision, we have a horror factor (which makes people scared of us, naturally), we get an initiative bonus, and we get a couple of decent bonuses at night.
Allow me to remind you that these powers are natural evolutionary adaptations for our character's species. These plant aliens from an ice planet have evolved the need to feed on humans, and specifically humans, to get life energy. These plants, who need sunlight, have also evolved to be stronger at night and hunt vampires.
I'll let that sink in for a bit.
Okay, now for the next step, which is to set up our skills. Aliens are one of the few power categories that determine what skills they get differently from the normal rules. See, normally you get skills in skill programs, which give you a bunch at once, and you roll for an educational level to see how many programs you can get and which ones are available. Aliens use their own table for educational level and don't use skill programs. A roll of 93 on the alien education table says my character is an engineer, which gives me 6 electronics and mechanical skills with a very nice 25% bonus, and a bunch of other skills that get only a 5% bonus. Oh, and 5 secondary skills.
I suppose I should explain how skills work in Palladium. It's a percentile system where skills get stronger from leveling up. Some skills are limited in who can take them, while others are available as "secondary" skills that anyone can take.
Being an engineer is a bit limiting because it means I can't take the non-secondary physical skills, which are acrobatics, boxing, gymnastics, and wrestling. As bizarre as it might sound, boxing is the absolute best skill in the game because it gives you an extra attack every combat round, and thus every Palladium character who can learn to box is a trained boxer. Acrobatics and gymnastics are also pretty good, giving a bunch of useful stat bonuses and the ability to backflip, which is how you cheese the infamously stingy Palladium experience tables in order to level up at something vaguely resembling a reasonable rate. And wrestling (which they specifically call out as being amateur wrestling like you'd learn in college) just makes you really tough. Most characters would just grab these through the physical skill program, since it gives you four physical skills of your choice and those four are the only ones you can't get as secondary skills. Given what those four skills entail, you could probably just call it the professional wrestling program instead.
Alas, in outer space you aren't allowed to learn how to box unless you're a soldier, a space pirate, or, oddly enough, a scientist. Well, they do call it the sweet science...
This is also a place where I'm gonna call an audible because rules as written, characters who aren't aliens get four basic skills and aliens do not, but two of those skills are dedicated to being able to speak your character's native language and being literate in it, and it makes no fucking sense whatsoever for an alien not to be able to speak their own language by default. I'm also gonna call another audible because the rules as written give you a skill level of 75% in your native language which is less than what an alien with no familiarity with Earth gets. So I'm just gonna give all my characters their native languages at 98% which is tha maximum because fuck that shit.
Choosing my skills is simple enough, albeit very tedious because the skill percentages are only listed in the detailed descriptions and Palladium doesn't properly set up bookmarks for their PDF releases of their books. The skill percentages themselves, meanwhile, do a good job of demonstrating why percentage-based skill systems are bad because in order to maintain a sense of progress from level to level, they have to make your skills suck at the start. As such, my trained engineer only has a 55% chance to successfully do any sort of engineering, and that's under optimal circumstances. They also only have a 45% chance of successfully operating a computer, which I guess I'd be able to accept in 1984 when computers were nerd shit, but come the fuck on. There's separate skills for basic and advanced math, with advanced math explicitly covering everything more complicated than simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (and since all regular characters get basic math at its default 45% rate, that means that most Heroes Unlimited characters struggle to remember their times tables.)
The fact that secondary skills don't get bonuses didn't really matter in this case, since this character doesn't get any non-secondary physical skills and they absolutely need some of those. With only five secondary skills available, it's not like they even have the luxury of choosing anything else. Especially since they still need a hand to hand combat skill. There are four types of hand to hand combat available, those being Basic, Expert, Martial Arts, and Assassin. Ideally you want one of the latter two because they're that much better than the first two, and usually the one you want is Hand to Hand: Martial Arts because Assassin starts with one fewer attacks. The problem is that getting Hand to Hand: Martial Arts costs three of my secondary skills, leaving only two for anything else. Thankfully there's only really two secondary skills I need, those being Athletics and Running. They can't be used, like most physical skills that give stat bonuses, but between them I'm able to get an extra point each of PS and PE, bump my Speed up to 20, and get 8 more SDC. Not bad, but nothing compared to what a character who can really interact with the physical skill system can do.
Choosing my skills also gives me the opportunity to name the alien species our character is part of via giving them fluency in their native language (which they should've gotten anyway, but Palladium rules writing.) Without skipping a beat, I chose to call them the Blimvoxians. I have no reason for choosing that particular name beyond the fact that it was the first thing that popped into my head when I tried to think of a silly name for an alien species.
Anyway, we've still got some more tables to roll on, so let's get to it! Next up's our reason for coming to Earth, because I guess we need a specific reason to be on the only planet where our primary food source can be found. A 23 says we crashed, and next we roll on a subtable to see how we feel about Earth. A 17 there says we find it to be "an unpleasant world filled with barbarians," which isn't exactly the attitude I'd hope for from a superhero but this character's edgy enough that I can accept it.
Notably, none of the options on this table allow you to have come to Earth because your home planet was destroyed (there's an option for being the last of your kind but that's not quite the same thing) or because you were sent to conquer it but decided not to. Guess Superman and Goku are not valid Heroes Unlimited characters.
Next up, we see how familiar we are with Earth. A 22% says we have "some familiarity" and know 3 Earth languages at 90%, which narrowly avoids the most ridiculous possible result where an alien whose species needs to eat Earthlings to survive knows next to nothing about Earth. I choose to have our alien know English, German, and Mandarin because that makes sense in my mind.
Now there's some tables for equipment. On the "Earth Clothes/Disguises" table I rolled a 58, giving me an unspecified amount of generic everyday clothing. Next I get a special alien weapon, which can be a ranged or melee weapon. Rolling a 29 on the table gives me a ranged weapon, and a 58 on the ranged weapon table gives me a sonic disrupter (spelled exactly that way) that can stun people. I also need to roll 1d6 for how many energy clips I have for it, and that roll gives me 4. I also get a special vehicle, and on a roll of 25 that vehicle is a hover cycle with decent capabilities. Tragically, while the sonic disrupter can presumably be used with no proficiency due to not requiring an attack roll, my character lacks the piloting skill necessary to use their fancy hoverbike. As such, it'll probably just collect dust in their garage forever. Such is the fate of most of this special alien equipment, since you roll it after you've already got your skills sorted out.
There's one last table to roll on, because we need to know how much money we have! Or rather, how much the valuable stones and metals we brought with us are worth. A roll of 85 on this table gives us 2d6 x $5,000 worth of valuables, and I roll 11 on the table for a total value of $55,000. This is almost as good as I could've rolled and if I was actually planning to use this character in a real game I'd be very excited about it.
Now it's time to put the finishing touches on this alien subparhero. I record their level of 1 and zero experience, then give them an alignment. The Palladium alignments are silly, because Kevin Siembieda had issues with the D&D alignments but while most people find D&D alignments too restrictive he appears to have found them not restrictive enough. As such, Palladium gives you alignments that specify a few very specific things about how anyone within them behaves. Kevin also has issues with neutral alignments, believing that neutral would just mean doing nothing, so he renamed the neutral alignments to selfish. The seven Palladium alignments and how they generally map to D&D alignments are: Principled (lawful good), Scrupulous (neutral good), Unprincipled (neutral), Anarchist (chaotic neutral), Aberrant (lawful evil), Miscreant (neutral evil), and Diabolic (chaotic evil). Normally I'd make a Heroes Unlimited character Scrupulous (or Unprincipled for roguish types) but this alien I've rolled up feels like a super-edgy Dark Age antihero so I instead went with Anarchist.
I've been mostly using gender-neutral language for this character because I hadn't decided on their gender, but ultimately I'm sticking to it in part because they're a plant but also because nonbinary people are cool. I also made them 35 Earth years old just because. For a name I wanted something edgy and alien-sounding. For some reason my brain mapped this to "borrow the name "K'Z'K" from Sluggy Freelance, then mess with that until you have something worth using." So they're K'zrelk now. And like all superheroes, they need a codename. Thankfully this one's easy to think of: they're a plant, they work best at night, and they're edgy, so naturally their super name's Night Thorn.
So that's the process of creating an alien character in Heroes Unlimited! My final assessment of Night Thorn is that they suck. Their combat abilities are shit, their powers are situational at best, they have very few skills, they can't ride their cool hoverbike, and they need to wear an environmental suit just to live through the summer. Their comic would probably be cut short after selling less than a thousand copies despite having all sorts of neat collectible lenticular covers, and they'd disappear into obscurity until some random miniseries writer needs a character who can be safely killed off to establish a villain.
The fact that their species evolved to prey on a species that lives on a completely different planet with an environment that actively kills them will never not be hilarious, though.
Next time we'll be going over the first of what I'm gonna call the "shopping list" power categories, Bionics!
Character Sheet:
Name: K'zrelk
Hero Name: Night Thorn
Age: 35 Earth years
Gender: None
Alignment: Anarchist
Level: 1
XP: 0
IQ: 9
ME: 7
MA: 11
PS: 20 (+5, extraordinary)
PP: 8
PE: 7
PB: 10
Spd: 20
HP: 10
SDC: 83
Attacks per Melee: 4
Melee Damage: +5
Parry: +1
Dodge: +1
Roll with Punch: +4
Initiative: +3
Pull Punch: +3
Save vs Cold: +4 (half damage on failure)
Horror Factor: 13
Power Category: Alien
Alien Appearance: Vegetation
Unearthly Environment: Frozen World - Tropical to temperate latitudes
-Height: 5'11"
-Weight: 140 lb.
Number and Type of Super Abilities: One Major, one Minor
Reason for Coming To Earth: Crashed; finds it unpleasant
Familiarity with Earth: Some Familiarity
Earth Clothes/Disguises: Several sets of everyday clothing
Special Alien Weapon: Sonic Disrupter (4 energy clips)
Special Vehicle: Hover Cycle
Super Abilities:
Bio-Ghost
Nightstalking
Education: Engineer
Skills: 6 from electronics and mechanical (+25%), 2 from science, 2 from communications, computer operation, read sensory equipment, and basic and advanced mathematics (+5% on non-electronics/mechanical skills)
Secondary Skills: 5
Skills:
Advanced Mathematics (50%)
Astronomy (30%)
Astrophysics (30%)
Athletics
Basic Electronics (55%)
Basic Mathematics (50%)
Basic Mechanics (55%)
Computer Operation (45%)
Electrical Engineer (55%)
Hand to Hand: Martial Arts (counts as 3 secondary skill picks)
Language: Blimvoxian (98%)
Language: English (90%)
Language: German (90%)
Language: Mandarin (90%)
Literacy: Blimvoxian (98%)
Literacy: Chinese (90%)
Literacy: English (90%)
Literacy: German (90%)
Locksmith (55%)
Mechanical Engineer (50%)
Radio: Basic (50%)
Radio: Satellite (30%)
Running
Read Sensory Equipment (35%)
Weapons Engineer (50%)
Money: $55,000 in precious stones and metals
Items:
Everyday Earth clothes
Sonic disrupter
4 energy clips for sonic disrupter
Hover cycle
So, on a whim, I've decided that I'm going to do a series where I make characters in Heroes Unlimited, the superhero RPG from Palladium Books. I already like messing around with this game so it's not that much of a stretch to start doing so in public.
For anyone wondering what the fuck I'm going on about, Heroes Unlimited is the third game Palladium ever released, with its first edition coming out in 1984. It repurposes the system Kevin Siembieda developed (well, forked from AD&D, really) for his fantasy RPG into a superhero game, with character classes replaced with "power categories" that give you how you got your powers and what kinds of powers you can have.
It is not a good game.
There was a time when what Palladium had to offer was considered worth at least looking into as far as tabletop RPGs go, but that time is long gone and never coming back. These days if people outside of their dedicated fandom bring the company up it's usually to mock them for stuff like Kevin Siembieda's extremely bizarre writing style, their absurdly outdated concept of what an RPG is, the whole Robotech RPG Tactics shitshow, or their inability at a fundamental level to organize their rules in a way that anyone with a brain would consider passable.
To give an example of that last point, the only place in Rifts where you'll find rules for how long it takes to reload a laser gun is in the descriptions of guns that have underbarrel grenade launchers. Not even kidding.
Palladium's nature as a company stuck in the past even extends to how they make their books. It was only around 2013 that Kevin Siembieda even started using a computer to do the layouts for his books, before then he manually glued them together.
And yet, despite everything, there's a certain amount of charm in Palladium's products. A lot of it comes from the fact that Kevin is genuinely enthusiastic about what he does, as misguided as he is. A lot of the bizarre idiosyncracies that slip into their games also give them a particular type of appeal.
Heroes Unlimited in particular also has the benefit of being full of random tables that are calibrated, probably accidentally, in a way that tends towards the maximum possible amount of nonsense.
Thus, this series. I'm going to make a character in every power category offered in the Heroes Unlimited Revised Second Edition core book, as well as every new power category in the Powers Unlimited 2 expansion. For a few of these categories I'll be making more than one character because some of these power categories have multiple subcategories that are different enough to be worth going over all of them. Whenever possible, I will roll on the random tables that I am provided with. Hopefully we'll end up with some real bullshit.
Part of my motive for doing this is just that it's fun, but I also want to pay some level of tribute to MegaDumbCast, the podcast that really got me looking into Palladium games and seeing just how ridiculous they can be. Its creator recently announced that it's ending due to circumstances outside his control and will almost certainly be going online, so I guess I felt like I had to do my part to carry the torch.
Now, without further ado, let's get started!
And we're off with the first power category offered in the core book: aliens! Aliens are pretty much the most hilariously broken power category in Heroes Unlimited because they can get an entire second power categore which allows for some ridiculous cheese with a bit of system mastery. Or you could be an alien robot whose sole advantage over Earth robotics is being able to buy a little more health.
Not that any of that matters here, because I'm not gonna be calling an audible and pre-choosing the option where our strange visitor from another planet just has super abilities due to being from space. That way I'm not taking away from the other power categories by going over them right at the start.
Anyway, the first thing you do when making a Heroes Unlimited character is, as in every Palladium game, roll some stats and get unreasonably angry at your dice. Palladium's house system has its origins in Kevin Siembieda's ideas for improving D&D back in 1979, so naturally we do that by rolling 3d6 for each stat down the line. Palladium doesn't have any time for kids these days and their choosing what they want their characters to be good at. The main distinguishing factor here is that if you roll 16 or better you get an exploding d6 that adds to your stats, then if that's a 6 you get a second extra d6. I don't know what kinds of odds that creates, except that you're hilariously unlikely to get the really good results (which considering this system gives you absolutely no bonuses for stats below 16, leads to the occasional lottery winner here being ludicrously overpowered compared to their peers).
So what stats are we rolling for? Well, there's eight of 'em: IQ, ME, MA, PS, PP, PE, PB, and Speed. Or, to give their full names and what they do: Intelligence (skill bonuses), Mental Endurance (saving throws against psionics and insanity, as well as psionic ability), Mental Affinity (Charisma #1, makes people trust or be intimidated by you), Physical Strength (melee damage), Physical Prowess (melee attack rolls, as well as parrying and dodging since this game uses opposed attack and defense rolls), Physical Endurance (saves against death, magic, and poison, as well as HP and magic ability), Physical Beauty (Charisma #2, makes people charmed or impressed by you), and Speed (movement rate).
Some things worth noting about those stats:
- The description of IQ says that you multiply it by 10 to get your character's actual IQ. Which means that you don't get any benefit for having it be high unless your character has an IQ of at least 160, and you need to get into actually impossible numbers like 240 before the bonus you get is at all significant.
- MA and PB do nothing outside of diplomacy. They don't even have the effect charisma does in early D&D editions of making people like working for you more. Guess Kevin either didn't know or didn't care about that particular rule.
- PE affecting both health and magic means that the best mages are also fairly tough physically, though the way the system works if you're taking hit point damage you're in pretty serious trouble.
- Speed's effect on how far you can move is for the entire 15-second combat round (or "melee round" to use Palladium's terminology), but you can have a variable amount of actions within that round and each character gets to use an action before anyone gets to act again, with characters falling off of the initiative order as they run out of actions. This means that you can move faster if you're fighting someone who gets more actions than you, which can easily break your brain if you think about it too much.
Anyway, time to reveal what I rolled for our guy's stats: IQ 9, ME 7, MA 11, PS 19, PP 8, PE 6, PB 10, Spd 8. That's...not great, honestly. Only having a PP of 8 effectively cuts off their access to stat-based strike bonuses entirely due to how stingy this game is with PP bonuses, and 6 PE is just pathetic. On the other hand, that PS is very nice and Spd is not something I'm worried about because anyone can take the skill that boosts it.
Next we need to determine how much health our character has. We get two stats for that: hit points and structural damage capacity. HP is explicitly your meat, and there's all sorts of optional rules for getting injured when you lose enough of it. SDC, meanwhile, represents willpower and ability to shrug off minor hits. Kevin Siembieda's description of it references John Wayne movies because he's just that kind of person.
If you're wondering why it's called structural damage capacity, that's because in Palladium's first two gamelines characters gain it entirely from their armour. Heroes Unlimited was their first game to be set in a genre where people don't generally wear armour, so Kevin's quick solution to make the rules work was to just give characters SDC. He then kept this for every subsequent game he made. This is what I mean when I talk about Palladium's system being largely composed of assorted kludges that just get folded into the core rules over time.
Anyway, we determine our HP by adding a d6 to our PE. A roll of 3 means our character has a whopping nine hit points, which can be wiped out by an average hit from almost any handgun in the game. Our base SDC, meanwhile, is taken from our power category. For aliens, it starts at 20. Thankfully it's extremely unlikely that it'll remain that pathetic.
(Normally you'd roll or choose your power category after determining your HP, but I've already decided we're creating an alien so we're skipping that step.)
The next thing we need to do is get into what makes our particular strange visitor from another planet different from every other random strange visitor from another planet you might run into in the street. The first step of that is seeing what we look like. There's a random table to roll on, which on a roll of 63 tells me that this alien is plant-like. That gives our character an extra 40 SDC, gives them the carrying capacity of a character with extraordinary strength, and doubles their healing rate. Nowhere near the best we could've rolled, but perfectly acceptable.
Next we roll for what our alien's home planet is like, which gives us more stat changes. On a roll of 39 we're from a frozen world and need to wear a refrigerated suit to survive on Earth. It also tells us what to roll for our height and weight, which in this case are completely unconnected from each other. The height roll we're given adds 3d6 inches to a base height of 5 feet, and I end up rolling a height of 5'11". The same table tells me to add 2d6x10 pounds to a base weight of 120, and I ended up rolling snake eyes for a total weight of 140 pounds. We are making one lanky motherfucker here.
Frozen worlds also give us another roll to determine just how cold our home is. On a 21 my result is "tropical to temperate latitudes," which gives us the worst bonuses (only 15 extra SDC and a +4 to save against cold) but makes it vaguely possible to survive in Earth temperatures.
The next step for aliens is rolling or choosing our alien's power category, but as previously stated I'm making an executive decision to have this character just use the option where they have super abilities as a natural part of their biology. This option lets me just choose to have one major power and one minor power or four minor powers and no major powers, but it also lets me roll on a random table later in the book to see how many powers I get. Naturally I'm rolling on that table, though I'm rejecting rolls of 86 or more because those give my character psionic powers and I'm not gonna open that can of worms yet. After two rolls of 99 in a row I get a 32, which gives me...one major power and one minor one.
Look game, I'm trying to show off how ridiculous you can be, shit like this isn't helping.
Anyway, rolling on the major power table I get a 58, which gives me the Bio-Ghost ability. I guess the game heard me complaining about not getting enough nonsense because this power is a lot.
Basically, my character is not a vampire ghost who becomes intangible and drains energy from people. This causes a little damage and heavily debuffs whoever I just drained, and draining people enough times gives the character a bunch of bonuses that are honestly pretty damn good (eventually including an extra two actions after enough draining) but on the other hand my character now needs to drain energy from people to survive. The power specifically does not allow them to get this energy from aliens, which raises a lot of very silly questions considering this is a normal part of the physiology of their alien species. So these aliens, who evolved on a planet that is completely different from Earth, will starve to death if they do not drain energy from Earthlings, who can only be found on Earth. Right.
Moving on, a roll of 40 on the minor power table gives us the power of Nightstalking. This is the power to be a vampire hunter, which is now a natural part of the physiology of our species. We can always recognize vampires and shadow beasts (which are something you can summon with magic and are actually worth summoning), we're immune to being turned into undead, we can hide in the shadows and are pretty good at it, we get bonuses to a few relevant skills, we have night vision, we have a horror factor (which makes people scared of us, naturally), we get an initiative bonus, and we get a couple of decent bonuses at night.
Allow me to remind you that these powers are natural evolutionary adaptations for our character's species. These plant aliens from an ice planet have evolved the need to feed on humans, and specifically humans, to get life energy. These plants, who need sunlight, have also evolved to be stronger at night and hunt vampires.
I'll let that sink in for a bit.
Okay, now for the next step, which is to set up our skills. Aliens are one of the few power categories that determine what skills they get differently from the normal rules. See, normally you get skills in skill programs, which give you a bunch at once, and you roll for an educational level to see how many programs you can get and which ones are available. Aliens use their own table for educational level and don't use skill programs. A roll of 93 on the alien education table says my character is an engineer, which gives me 6 electronics and mechanical skills with a very nice 25% bonus, and a bunch of other skills that get only a 5% bonus. Oh, and 5 secondary skills.
I suppose I should explain how skills work in Palladium. It's a percentile system where skills get stronger from leveling up. Some skills are limited in who can take them, while others are available as "secondary" skills that anyone can take.
Being an engineer is a bit limiting because it means I can't take the non-secondary physical skills, which are acrobatics, boxing, gymnastics, and wrestling. As bizarre as it might sound, boxing is the absolute best skill in the game because it gives you an extra attack every combat round, and thus every Palladium character who can learn to box is a trained boxer. Acrobatics and gymnastics are also pretty good, giving a bunch of useful stat bonuses and the ability to backflip, which is how you cheese the infamously stingy Palladium experience tables in order to level up at something vaguely resembling a reasonable rate. And wrestling (which they specifically call out as being amateur wrestling like you'd learn in college) just makes you really tough. Most characters would just grab these through the physical skill program, since it gives you four physical skills of your choice and those four are the only ones you can't get as secondary skills. Given what those four skills entail, you could probably just call it the professional wrestling program instead.
Alas, in outer space you aren't allowed to learn how to box unless you're a soldier, a space pirate, or, oddly enough, a scientist. Well, they do call it the sweet science...
This is also a place where I'm gonna call an audible because rules as written, characters who aren't aliens get four basic skills and aliens do not, but two of those skills are dedicated to being able to speak your character's native language and being literate in it, and it makes no fucking sense whatsoever for an alien not to be able to speak their own language by default. I'm also gonna call another audible because the rules as written give you a skill level of 75% in your native language which is less than what an alien with no familiarity with Earth gets. So I'm just gonna give all my characters their native languages at 98% which is tha maximum because fuck that shit.
Choosing my skills is simple enough, albeit very tedious because the skill percentages are only listed in the detailed descriptions and Palladium doesn't properly set up bookmarks for their PDF releases of their books. The skill percentages themselves, meanwhile, do a good job of demonstrating why percentage-based skill systems are bad because in order to maintain a sense of progress from level to level, they have to make your skills suck at the start. As such, my trained engineer only has a 55% chance to successfully do any sort of engineering, and that's under optimal circumstances. They also only have a 45% chance of successfully operating a computer, which I guess I'd be able to accept in 1984 when computers were nerd shit, but come the fuck on. There's separate skills for basic and advanced math, with advanced math explicitly covering everything more complicated than simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (and since all regular characters get basic math at its default 45% rate, that means that most Heroes Unlimited characters struggle to remember their times tables.)
The fact that secondary skills don't get bonuses didn't really matter in this case, since this character doesn't get any non-secondary physical skills and they absolutely need some of those. With only five secondary skills available, it's not like they even have the luxury of choosing anything else. Especially since they still need a hand to hand combat skill. There are four types of hand to hand combat available, those being Basic, Expert, Martial Arts, and Assassin. Ideally you want one of the latter two because they're that much better than the first two, and usually the one you want is Hand to Hand: Martial Arts because Assassin starts with one fewer attacks. The problem is that getting Hand to Hand: Martial Arts costs three of my secondary skills, leaving only two for anything else. Thankfully there's only really two secondary skills I need, those being Athletics and Running. They can't be used, like most physical skills that give stat bonuses, but between them I'm able to get an extra point each of PS and PE, bump my Speed up to 20, and get 8 more SDC. Not bad, but nothing compared to what a character who can really interact with the physical skill system can do.
Choosing my skills also gives me the opportunity to name the alien species our character is part of via giving them fluency in their native language (which they should've gotten anyway, but Palladium rules writing.) Without skipping a beat, I chose to call them the Blimvoxians. I have no reason for choosing that particular name beyond the fact that it was the first thing that popped into my head when I tried to think of a silly name for an alien species.
Anyway, we've still got some more tables to roll on, so let's get to it! Next up's our reason for coming to Earth, because I guess we need a specific reason to be on the only planet where our primary food source can be found. A 23 says we crashed, and next we roll on a subtable to see how we feel about Earth. A 17 there says we find it to be "an unpleasant world filled with barbarians," which isn't exactly the attitude I'd hope for from a superhero but this character's edgy enough that I can accept it.
Notably, none of the options on this table allow you to have come to Earth because your home planet was destroyed (there's an option for being the last of your kind but that's not quite the same thing) or because you were sent to conquer it but decided not to. Guess Superman and Goku are not valid Heroes Unlimited characters.
Next up, we see how familiar we are with Earth. A 22% says we have "some familiarity" and know 3 Earth languages at 90%, which narrowly avoids the most ridiculous possible result where an alien whose species needs to eat Earthlings to survive knows next to nothing about Earth. I choose to have our alien know English, German, and Mandarin because that makes sense in my mind.
Now there's some tables for equipment. On the "Earth Clothes/Disguises" table I rolled a 58, giving me an unspecified amount of generic everyday clothing. Next I get a special alien weapon, which can be a ranged or melee weapon. Rolling a 29 on the table gives me a ranged weapon, and a 58 on the ranged weapon table gives me a sonic disrupter (spelled exactly that way) that can stun people. I also need to roll 1d6 for how many energy clips I have for it, and that roll gives me 4. I also get a special vehicle, and on a roll of 25 that vehicle is a hover cycle with decent capabilities. Tragically, while the sonic disrupter can presumably be used with no proficiency due to not requiring an attack roll, my character lacks the piloting skill necessary to use their fancy hoverbike. As such, it'll probably just collect dust in their garage forever. Such is the fate of most of this special alien equipment, since you roll it after you've already got your skills sorted out.
There's one last table to roll on, because we need to know how much money we have! Or rather, how much the valuable stones and metals we brought with us are worth. A roll of 85 on this table gives us 2d6 x $5,000 worth of valuables, and I roll 11 on the table for a total value of $55,000. This is almost as good as I could've rolled and if I was actually planning to use this character in a real game I'd be very excited about it.
Now it's time to put the finishing touches on this alien subparhero. I record their level of 1 and zero experience, then give them an alignment. The Palladium alignments are silly, because Kevin Siembieda had issues with the D&D alignments but while most people find D&D alignments too restrictive he appears to have found them not restrictive enough. As such, Palladium gives you alignments that specify a few very specific things about how anyone within them behaves. Kevin also has issues with neutral alignments, believing that neutral would just mean doing nothing, so he renamed the neutral alignments to selfish. The seven Palladium alignments and how they generally map to D&D alignments are: Principled (lawful good), Scrupulous (neutral good), Unprincipled (neutral), Anarchist (chaotic neutral), Aberrant (lawful evil), Miscreant (neutral evil), and Diabolic (chaotic evil). Normally I'd make a Heroes Unlimited character Scrupulous (or Unprincipled for roguish types) but this alien I've rolled up feels like a super-edgy Dark Age antihero so I instead went with Anarchist.
I've been mostly using gender-neutral language for this character because I hadn't decided on their gender, but ultimately I'm sticking to it in part because they're a plant but also because nonbinary people are cool. I also made them 35 Earth years old just because. For a name I wanted something edgy and alien-sounding. For some reason my brain mapped this to "borrow the name "K'Z'K" from Sluggy Freelance, then mess with that until you have something worth using." So they're K'zrelk now. And like all superheroes, they need a codename. Thankfully this one's easy to think of: they're a plant, they work best at night, and they're edgy, so naturally their super name's Night Thorn.
So that's the process of creating an alien character in Heroes Unlimited! My final assessment of Night Thorn is that they suck. Their combat abilities are shit, their powers are situational at best, they have very few skills, they can't ride their cool hoverbike, and they need to wear an environmental suit just to live through the summer. Their comic would probably be cut short after selling less than a thousand copies despite having all sorts of neat collectible lenticular covers, and they'd disappear into obscurity until some random miniseries writer needs a character who can be safely killed off to establish a villain.
The fact that their species evolved to prey on a species that lives on a completely different planet with an environment that actively kills them will never not be hilarious, though.
Next time we'll be going over the first of what I'm gonna call the "shopping list" power categories, Bionics!
Character Sheet:
Name: K'zrelk
Hero Name: Night Thorn
Age: 35 Earth years
Gender: None
Alignment: Anarchist
Level: 1
XP: 0
IQ: 9
ME: 7
MA: 11
PS: 20 (+5, extraordinary)
PP: 8
PE: 7
PB: 10
Spd: 20
HP: 10
SDC: 83
Attacks per Melee: 4
Melee Damage: +5
Parry: +1
Dodge: +1
Roll with Punch: +4
Initiative: +3
Pull Punch: +3
Save vs Cold: +4 (half damage on failure)
Horror Factor: 13
Power Category: Alien
Alien Appearance: Vegetation
Unearthly Environment: Frozen World - Tropical to temperate latitudes
-Height: 5'11"
-Weight: 140 lb.
Number and Type of Super Abilities: One Major, one Minor
Reason for Coming To Earth: Crashed; finds it unpleasant
Familiarity with Earth: Some Familiarity
Earth Clothes/Disguises: Several sets of everyday clothing
Special Alien Weapon: Sonic Disrupter (4 energy clips)
Special Vehicle: Hover Cycle
Super Abilities:
Bio-Ghost
Nightstalking
Education: Engineer
Skills: 6 from electronics and mechanical (+25%), 2 from science, 2 from communications, computer operation, read sensory equipment, and basic and advanced mathematics (+5% on non-electronics/mechanical skills)
Secondary Skills: 5
Skills:
Advanced Mathematics (50%)
Astronomy (30%)
Astrophysics (30%)
Athletics
Basic Electronics (55%)
Basic Mathematics (50%)
Basic Mechanics (55%)
Computer Operation (45%)
Electrical Engineer (55%)
Hand to Hand: Martial Arts (counts as 3 secondary skill picks)
Language: Blimvoxian (98%)
Language: English (90%)
Language: German (90%)
Language: Mandarin (90%)
Literacy: Blimvoxian (98%)
Literacy: Chinese (90%)
Literacy: English (90%)
Literacy: German (90%)
Locksmith (55%)
Mechanical Engineer (50%)
Radio: Basic (50%)
Radio: Satellite (30%)
Running
Read Sensory Equipment (35%)
Weapons Engineer (50%)
Money: $55,000 in precious stones and metals
Items:
Everyday Earth clothes
Sonic disrupter
4 energy clips for sonic disrupter
Hover cycle
