Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Ad Astra Iconics (not with stats... yet)

Crew of the Wayland's Hammer (or Dub-H for short)
  • Donovan Flint; (Dono, Donnie) — a knight, trained by his father as an independent.  His father was killed by Shadow Knight assassination team years ago.  He is the nominal owner of the Dub-H, a repurposed and heavily modified (to the point that it's original model is almost completely unrecognizable) UX-83 corvette with an expanded cargo hold.  While not particularly angry, he does have a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the Seraean Empire, but mostly he resents any authority.  He's somewhat friendly with the Monarchy (from whom he has a Letter of Marque, although he doesn't use it too often), as long as he stays in the fringes where the Monarchy’s influence is relatively light.  His main goals are to keep themselves in enough money to keep flying and maintain their freedom and nomadic lifestyle, so he tends to make shipping runs (sometimes of questionable legality and political expediency) between what are essentially little backwaters.  Dono is fairly tall, with light brown hair and hard gray eyes.  He tends to have a laconic smirk on his face.  Think somewhere between Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name and Han Solo, but a bit younger and played by someone that looks like Richard Spencer.
  • Surt — an alien, a former soldier of the Monarchy, and an electro-organic Tearexian hulk.  Surt is an incredibly large example of the species; at over 8 feet tall and 600 lbs.  He has bright red skin and dark hair; his eyes have a black sclera but an almost chrome-colored iris.  There is a organic electronics system that the Tearexian hulks have evolved and are born with.  Physically this means that he has a tiny series of markings, mostly on his torso and limbs that have the appearance of a circuit board schematic.  Usually they are very fine and difficult to see, but sometimes they flare up brightly.  This organic electronics system in the Tearexian hulks offers them some modest benefits to purely regular organic beings (like humans) but mostly it’s the very large size and strength of the hulks that makes them in demand.  Surt is a former janissary of the Monarchy, who would probably be considered a deserter by them if anyone cared to chase him down, although Dono makes sure to keep the crew in the backwaters and fringes where this isn't much of a serious risk.  Surt is relatively gentle and friendly most of the time, but when provoked, becomes a seriously dangerous opponent.  He carries a massive radium chaingun sometimes, and fights with two high tech seaxes.
  • Jeiry Edwards — The pilot.  He grew up on a hot, dry world drag racing and hot-rodding speeders, and was press-ganged by a Revanchist merchant marine crew.  His talents as a pilot were quickly recognized, and he also showed the ability create to learn bulk drive technomagium, so he was trained as a full pilot.  In spite of this investment, he was always angry at the Revanchists for kidnapping him, so when Dono raided the ship he was on—at the time, Dono did not have bulk drive capabilities (although his ship did have an bulk drive) so he was only raiding locally, Jeiry eagerly jumped on the opportunity to ditch his erstwhile crew.  Jeiry is a bit nerdy.  He doesn't socialize that much with the crew (and when he does, he's wont to talk too much about things nobody else is very interested in) and he seems to get along better with the mechanical aspects of the Dub-H than with his crewmates, in many respects.
  • Had Kulan — an Idachar spy; he was a double agent who was informing handlers from both the Monarchy and the Revanchists on the activities of the Seraean Empire.  When his cover was blown on Omad Gan, he was nearly killed.  Luckily for him, Dono was running an operation of his own in the system and took Kulan with him, making him the third member of the crew to be on the run from someone at least.  Kulan is an alien human of the Idachar race, which is the majority race in the Seraean Empire.  This means that his skin is a chalky kind of gray color, as are his eyes and even his hair.  Kulan is actually an accomplished spy; not just in terms of procuring information as a double agent, as he did, but also he is trained as a cat burglar and assassin.
  • MP15-22 (Empie) — a bot.  He belongs to an older, slightly obsolete class of combat bot, but as with the ship itself, Empie has been fairly heavily "hot-rodded" into high performance.  Painted black and bright yellow, with a nearly featureless face-plate, Empie is surprisingly sarcastic in the way that he talks, and crows frequently about his emotionlessness—belied by his smugness, of course.

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