I am always here for universal RPG tools, and Roll & Play do some of the best. I picked up their Gamemaster’s Sci-Fi Toolkit a little while ago and I’ve been having great fun with it. It’s a series of tables, covering everything from Names to Ship Malfunctions, Alien Rulers and Knock-Off Goods. Roll a dice, make a note, do it again, and you’ve got something you can use in a session basically instantly.
I love tools like this because they make you get out of your own way. I’ve been testing it out and across this series of articles, I’ll show you what I came up with, building out from these prompts into unique characters and locations. This week, it’s the crew of the Mist Run, a ship at the heart of the most polite criminal enterprise in galactic history.
Jhaewyn Yornistus (What ho, Undrefell!)
Jhaewyn Yornistus Witchery Bystander Creme du Menthe Smith is from old money. The oldest money in fact. He knows this because almost all of it’s gone and he’s decided he’d rather like to do something about that.
The Yornistus-Smiths are the final form of trillionaires. A venture capitalist parasitic family sat atop every settled system and every business within them. You breathe YS air. You drink YS branded COOLwater. You work for YS Subsidiaries to build YS tech you sell to yourself at a mark up. The family has become the ecosystem. There’s no justice, there’s just them. There’s no capitalism, there’s just YS. The line has gone vertical and it’s left humanity behind it. dodging the wreckage under branded umbrellas.
Jhaewyn was born knowing all this. He was also born as the sixth child, knowing full well that his job, for life, was going to be Vice President of Talent Actualisation in a branch office somewhere. Not especially fond of the idea of murdering his siblings, he decided to embrace his lot, and worked happily for the first few years of his life as the Vice President of Talent Actualisation (Probationary) on Vicos IV.
The poverty he saw there changed his life forever. Jhaewyn is not a man who enjoys anger but three years of countless, avoidable tragedy made him angry. He made waves, he made enemies, he made an escape.
Faking his death, Jhsewyn assembled a crew. His most trusted security officer, a pair of robot ‘specialists’ and his cousin, a mixologist. Worlds had been saved with less, and that was just what he’d do.
Now, aboard the Mist Run, Jhaewyn is a philanthropist crime boss of no fixed abode, waging a one man (And staff) war against his family. Just. sometimes not on weekends. A chap does have to rest.