Eclipsearama - Dr. Hindenberg

Design Notes: Hurray for Hindenburg. The hard part really was making a total sad sack / incompetent guy into someone that you'd actually want to have along while Gatecrashing. But, as Mom once said, he's one of the best xenobiologists in the galaxy, it's just that he's not as good with human biology. So while that's reflected in his stats, this version is actually a good doctor for people too. I was thinking of making him another AGI, this one in a arachnoid morph, but it's just so right to make him an uplifted octopus, even if his source material has him as more of a crab with face tentacles. 

Background: Dr. Hindenburg was created by Somatek to be a doctor for his fellow uplifts. But he wanted to travel and as soon as he could, went to work for Pathfinder as a staff physician on Mars. He met Professor Falkenstein, who was the first human to treat him as a friend. He has remained a close companion to the Professor and happily followed along to Pandora Express.

Dr. Hindenburg is an expert in most forms of medicine, though he will admit that he is weakest when it comes to human biology. However, his skill at xenobiology is invaluable to the team. 

Dr Hindenburg is the team's biologist / medical expert. He's also the team doctor, of course.
   

Eclipsearama - Mercury

Design Notes: Adapting Mercury was tricky. The reason I went with him as a Swarmoid AGI was, well, a gag about how good at Limbo he is. Additionally, there's not much backstory to the original character, so I didn't have a lot of hooks for the Eclipse Phase version of it. I also wanted to make him a field operative, but still remain a stay-at-home kind of guy. I suspect Mercury mostly lives in the Pandora Express servers, and the field version is an alpha fork installed in the swarmoid.

History: Mercury was created by the Solaris Group as a smart accounting program. After spending a few cycles at one of the major banks in New Shanghai, he was leased to Professor Falkenstein. Falkenstein recognized his skills were not limited to simple accounting and purchased a Swarmoid morph so he could assist the field team as their technical advisor. In addition to being an accountant and occasional field crew, Mercury is married to another AGI, LBBR-A, and they have created a joint fork, Dwight.

Role: Mercury is the team's technical expert. He's a very skilled hacker.

Eclipsearama - Amy Wu, of the Mars Wus

Design Notes: Amelia is another character who was hard to poke into. She doesn't have a firm role on the show, so I decided to hook on her science aspect (and, of course, being filthy rich). And since the team would probably run into more scientific issues on the other side of Gates, it'd make sense for them to have her come along more often.

Amelia Wu grew up with a dimondium spoon in her mouth. Her parents put the hyper in hyper-elite, and own large chunks of Martian real estate. Amelia wasn't interested in the family business (though the money is nice) and is desperately trying to stave off her parents' desire for her to settle down and have children. Amelia loves science and wants to be a great scientist like Professor Falkenstein.

Role: Amelia is the team's scientific expert and alternate face. If the goal is to have someone on their side when everything's over, she talks to them instead of Riot.  She's also really REALLY rich, which is a nice thing to be.

Eclipsearama - Lila Tortuga

Design Notes: Lila was a difficult character to adapt. Certainly, one of the most defining things about her is the whole One Eyed alien/mutant aspect. And I thought about her having an eyepatch or having to get a morph that's defective, but body repairs and morph surgery are so darn cheap that it didn't seem to make much sense in the Eclipse Phase 'verse. Additionally, I thought about her being an Earth escapee, with her parents still on Earth. In the end, I thought her upbringing in the Orphanarium was more important than her mutant origin, so she's just another poor Martian Orphan who has managed to make a really good life for herself that gets upset once she meets Cook and Riot, but then settles back down working for Pandora Express.

History: Lila was raised in an orphanarium on Mars. Work was hard to find, but she found a job as a freelance Ego Hunter. The corporation that had purchased Cook's indenture put a bounty on him and she needed the money. However, after capturing him and his new robot pall "Riot", that she was kind of fond of the dork and took the Professor's offer to work for Pandora Express.

While Lila is a consummate professional, she has a few soft spots. She tries to help out the orphanarium where she grew up whenever she can. She's also passionate about the Barsoomian Movement. She also has a pet xenoanimal "Cruncher" she found on a Gatecrashing mission.

Role: Lila's in the team's leader, largely because she's very competent when it comes to Gatecrashing skills. She's the pilot of the Pandora Express and the best at dishing out violence.

Personality: Lila is the boss of things and thankfully nobody else wants to be boss so there's no real conflict there. She's very professional and takes a lot of pride in being the best at whatever it is she does. She's passionate about animals and the environment.

Eclipsearama - R10t

R10T "Riot" Robichaux

R10T was created by the Go-Nin group for construction work on Luna. However, he quickly discovered it was easier for him to get others to do his job for him instead of working. He supplemented his meager income with petty crimes and grift. However, he ran afoul of the Robot Mafia and rather than let their psychosurgeons reprogram him into a "Remade Man", he decided to kill himself and reload from his "birth backup".

By happenstance he ran into Cook who needed help. For reasons Riot can't explain to himself, he helped Cook escape the Moon and get to Mars. The two became best buds. The Professor offered Riot a job at Pandora Express so long as Riot agreed to some loyalty modifications, so he can't betray them. Riot disagreed, but the Professor secretly modded him anyway.

Role on the Team: Riot is the team's face man (if the goal is to trick or mislead someone), thief and backup muscle.

Personality: Riot is self centered, greedy and egotistical (and some would say those are his good points). But he is a good friend to Cook (usually) and while he doesn't like working, he's usually an asset to the team.

Eclipsearama - Paul J. Cook

PAUL J. COOK

Backstory: Pre-Fall, Paul lived in the New York Archology, firmly entrenched in the middle class. He had dreams of being a daring space explorer, but lacked the aptitudes for it. Working as a courier, he delivered a package to a Skinthetic facility working on a next generation Hibernoid morph. Due to a mixup, the Skinthetics assumed he was a volunteer for the beta testing. He was backed up, transplanted into the hibernoid, where the morph was placed in stasis, and sent to a satellite where he'd be revived in a decade. During that time, the Fall happened. A few months ago, a salvage vessel heard the "come get me" automated signal and investigated. They picked him up and attempted to sell him into indenture. He escaped and eventually found his way to Mars, where his last living relative, Professor Falkenstein, lives.

Falkenstein originally figured to give Cook a harmless desk job at Pandora Express, but on reviewing the bioscans and hearing Cook's story of how he got to Mars, realized there was more to Cook than he appeared. Something happened to Cook while in hibernation. He shows signs of being exposed to the Watts-Macleod Exsurgent virus. However, the only possible time it could have happened was while he was in hibernation, which is a mystery that the Professor wants to solve. Cook does not know of this, and simply thinks that he's lucky.

Role on the Team: Paul is something of a generalist, assisted by his uncanny luck.

Personality: Paul's a pretty easygoing, happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He's surprisingly adaptable, considering he went from a pre-Fall existence to a dangerous post-Fall career exploring strange new worlds. Of course, that's what he wanted to do all along.

Eclipsearama

So, I've recently become a fan of the Eclipse Phase RPG. The premise of the campaign setting is that humanity was on the edge of the Singularity. Nanotech replicators were becoming commonplace. You could upload your mind into computers, and then download into new better-than-human biological bodies. Octopi and other animals had been uplifted to human intelligence. There were still some bumps in the road, but the sort of techno-utopia some folks dream about was on the way.

And then these self-improving AIs went absolutely insane. And we're not talking "hey baby, wanna kill all humans" crazy.  We're talking the full on Call of Cthulhu, Great Old One, soul destroying reality warping crazy. And then they left through these possibly alien portals to parts unknown and haven't been seen since.

So Earth's a smoking ruin and the refugees are scattered across the solar system on colonies we'd made everywhere from Mercury to beyond Pluto.

The default assumption is that PCs are members of a secret society called "Firewall" that makes sure that "transhumanity" doesn't get wiped out.

So after listening to the Role Playing Public Radio Actual Play Campaign "Know Evil" I was totally hooked on the setting. The rules seem pretty straightforward, and there's a FATE conversion in development that's going into playtest this summer.

But I wanted to play with the actual character creation rules and I was going to make the cast of Firefly but someone already did it.

So then I thought, what about Futurama?

My initial idea was that the team was a Firewall Cell, the Professor was their Proxy and the "Pandora Express" was just a cover for them. Then I thought it wasn't really a good fit and instead threw away the Firewall connections. Don't get me wrong, they are Gatecrashers, and that is not a job for the faint of heart. These guys have a lot more on the ball than their counterparts onscreen. But Firewall is a meat grinder, and what I was writing was moving the characters so far away from their original conceptions that it was only connected in a "see what I did there" way.

So here's the core idea. In the theoretical game, the Professor in an NPC who owns and runs "Pandora Express," a scrappy little Gatecrashing supply company. They're not the guys who go through the gates first and get eaten by exo-threats. Pandora Express takes these guys supplies. Their primary vehicle is a GEV, "The Pandora Express", but it is modified with what is essentially a tow hitch for when they have to haul larger amounts of cargo through gates. Of course, due to nanofabricators and such, they rarely need to haul large cargo. More often, they carry plans or data back and forth through the gates.  Additionally, they often ferry unique artifacts back and forth.

Professor Herbert Falkenstein (PhD, Mars University) is a Professor of SCIENCE at Mars University. He spent a long time in the public sector at Omnicorp, but a bad experience led him to abandon his career and return to academia. He was one of the initial consultants when the first Pandora gate was discovered, and is considered to be an expert in many fields. However, his cantankerous personality (including his refusal to resleeve into a new body until this one finally breaks down) have diminished his reputation somewhat. He formed Pandora Express as a way to supplement his income and further his experiments.

Notes: The Professor has a rival on the faculty of the University of Mars (Professor Vernon Wormwood), and was once in a relationship with Dr. Margaret O'Malley, his former boss at Omnicorp and eventual chairman of the board of the Pathfinder corporation. He is sleeved in a basic synthmorph with only a few basic modifications.

Role: The Professor isn't a PC. He's the quest giver NPC. As such, I haven't bothered to give him stats.

{Side Note: Certainly Gunter the uplifted monkey and his clone/child are viable side characters. Cubert was slow-grown so probably doesn't have the problems the Lost do. He's a jerk, but he's not psychotic.}