2025 Character Creation Challenge, Day 3: Emma Johansen, Teamster

Day three of the 2025 Character Creation Challenge dawns. I've selected Mothership for my third character of the challenge. Mothership is a space horror TTRPG by Tuesday Night Games. It isn't an OSR game per se, but the influence shows through.

Mothership features two character sheets - a basic one for those new to the game and an advanced one. The basic character sheet takes a new player through the generation process step by step. Laying everything out like this help to avoid everybody fighting for the rulebook. I'll be using the basic sheet this time and breaking out the other one in later posts.

Emma Johansen, Teamster

I'll focus on the decisions I made during the process. However, Mothership uses die rolls extensively during character generation. So I'll be commenting on some of the results as well.

Yes, there's a space for pronouns right on the sheet. Don't use it if you don't like it. It won't bite you.

I selected the Teamster class in honor of the reigning queen of space horror - Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. This character's name - Emma Johansen - evokes Ellen and honors a couple of women I worked alongside back in my tech days.

My dice were chilly, but not ice cold. The Stats and Saves are around average. I did bomb the Health roll, so this is not a good character to take into combat against toothy alien critters.

Teamsters automatically get two skills: Industrial Equipment and Zero-G. This reflects their background in blue collar space trucking. Picking a Trained Skill was a toss up between Jury-Rigging, Computers, and Rimwise. I've found that its useful to see what perquisites that the various Expert and Master Skills call for when looking at Trained Skills. Jury-Rigging leads to Explosives and Computers lead to Hacking, which don't fit my idea for this character. Rimwise leads to Hand-To-Hand Combat, which is a bad idea for this character due to her low Health. However, Industrial Equipment leads to Mechanical Repair. So I picked Rimwise as her Trained Skill to reflect her rough and tumble work experiences. Her Expert Skill is Mechanical Repair to represent her ability to fix things properly.

I rolled for a Starting Loadout rather than buy the gear piecemeal. The Flare Gun can be used as a weapon and the Personal Locator could be useful. I couldn't find what a Subsurface Scanner does, but it could be handy as a source of parts for fixing something else along with the Water Filtration Device. I used part of Johansen's starting Credits on Assorted Tools and a Flashlight.

For her Trinket, I rolled "Pamphlet: The Relic of Flesh" for Johansen. Her Patch reads "DO YOUR JOB" and fits seamlessly with what I had in mind for the character.

Emma Johansen has been doing her job as long as anybody here at this mom and pop operation and is not here to take your guff. The smell of cigarette smoke clings to her thanks to a pack a day habit. She wears her greying hair short - sometimes cropped - to keep it out of the way. Her no nonsense attitude doesn't make her many friends, but she knows her stuff.

Oh, and I deliberately didn't include cigarettes on her sheet. She's out and is getting twitchy for a hit of nicotine.