Adventurer wanted

[ffutures]

I'm writing the stats for the team of intrepid adventurers I'll be using for a Forgotten Futures playtest at a games con next weekend, and would like suggestions for at least one more. The genre is steampunk, and the plot is basically 1900-ish comedy espionage. I've put the rest of this in a cut since someone playing in the game might otherwise see it.


I normally prepare six characters for convention games and expect to use four or five of them, but every now and then I do end up with six players. This time I want the characters to be amateur spies, given the usual "when you're on holiday in XXX keep an eye open for YYY and ZZZ, old chap" vague instructions from a chum in the Foreign Office. So far I've got the following as my tentative choices:

The three characters from Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat", all of them more or less average people with skills more suited to office work and a friendly cricket game than espionage. I might consider replacing them with a comedy duo rather than trio, if anyone can suggest plausible characters for 1900-ish.

Miss Jane Marple, a precocious teenager, niece of one of the above who fancies herself as an amateur sleuth and actually has some talent in that direction (though not nearly as much as she thinks). Accompanied by NPC maid / chaperone who plays little or no part in the plot.

Montmorency the Steam Dog. Your basic steam-powered K9 equivalent. Probably best run as an NPC, but a fun role for anyone who is good at taking instructions completely literally and using them to cause maximum chaos.

And that's it. I'm stuck for a sixth character (or fifth and sixth if I use a comedy duo rather than trio). Preferably not a combat monster, femme fatale, etc. A servant of some sort is a possibility, but not a super-competent Jeeves clone or a Baldrick type.

Any suggestions?

Comments

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

If you have Miss Marple, shouldn't you have Hercule Poirot as well?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Miss Marple appears to have been a relatively young woman during WW1, so precocious teen circa 1900 is just about plausible. Poirot has retired from the Belgian police at the end of WW1 (but sets up in private practice), so he is presumably 40-50 circa 1900. I really don't want a super-sleuth in the adventure anyway, amateurs are more fun.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, I don't know the first thing about Agatha Christie chronology.

40-50 makes him about the right age to have a teenage nephew/niece who badly wants to be a famous detective like his/her uncle, though.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

... it depends a bit on the setting.

However a very old and retired Professor Challenger, very much past it, and on holiday 'taking the waters' might work.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Actually Professor Challenger is only 37 years old at this point - his birth date is given as 1863 in The Lost World, and he didn't make that expedition until 1911.

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest a young Biggles (as a pesky kid that gets involved), but it turns out (http://www.biggles.nl/en/) that in 1900 he was a mere one year old, which I think might be a tad too young.

Will continue thinking.

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... difficult. I'm not sure if it's a gap in my cultural knowledge, or just that there was less popular culture produced during that period (i.e. no pulp paperbacks and no movies) but all the people I can think of are from slightly later on.

Now, if you were doing the early twenties I could give you:

A young couple called Andrew Bond (Scottish) and Monique Delacroix (Swiss), both, it seems, keen climbers, who in 1924 would have a son, James, who would go on to become a rather successful spy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_bond

Come to that, his boss M, and his "supplier" Q, would both probably have been young men in the twenties. (The bloke who played M was born in 1908).

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Someone out of Kipling - Dick Heldar, perhaps? He'd be a challenge to roleplay, all right.

But maybe he doesn't fit the comedy aspect. Are you familiar with Ian Hay? Light romantic comedies before the War to End War, darker stuff thereafter.

One of his post-War novels is almost Buchan-esque: "My Cousin Christopher" is about a chap blinded in the trenches who ends up getting involved in stopping a Bolshevik Plot - there's a wonderful sequence where the hero has been kidnapped and is working out where he's being taken by his memories of the street sounds and smells of London.

There's at least one Hay novel with a hero who's a motor engineer (Knight on Wheels, for one), whose l33t m3ch4 sk1lz (fsvo, of course) may come in handy....

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Knight on Wheels is about the one Hay book I've read, but I was about 14 at the time and don't really recall much of the plot.

l33t m3ch4 sk1lz (fsvo,

Sorry, I'm being slow today. What?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Elite mecha(nical) skills....

if you go for a comedy duo....

[akicif.livejournal.com]

A somewhat younger Caldicott and Charters - possibly just down from Oxbridge (where they may or may not have played cricket at varsity/county level) and off to do a bit of travelling before ending up in the Foreign Office (come to think of it, didn't Carlton-Browne of the FO begin with a montage of his ancestors' distinguished diplomatic careers?)

Oh! What about Clive Candy from the Powell and Pressburger film. At the turn of the century he was a dashing young officer just back from South Africa?

Re: if you go for a comedy duo....

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Caldicott and Charters.

Ooh, I like this - the guys from The Lady Vanishes? Could work very nicely.

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

Again, if it was 1920 (and not supposed to be funny either, or at all cool come to that) you could have a 25 year old WWI veteran from Manchester:

http://www.corrie.net/profiles/characters/tatlock_albert.html

But if anyone is doing a 1920s League of Un(Extraordinary) Gentlemen, could I suggest Albert Tatlock. :)

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Richard Hannay, he'd be a teenager at the latest (sorry not able to find a date of birth for him.) On school holiday, and he's just the sort of person to get into trouble.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Couldn't find a birth date either (or for Edward Leithen, Pieter Pinaar or Sandy Arbuthnot), but did find this, which may be of use.

[paulofcthulhu.livejournal.com]

Passepartout?

Hillary (Chris Barrie's part as manservant in Tomb Raider) - just take him back a few decades...

Paul

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Alberto Santos-Dumont
Rudolf Rassendyll
A younger not-quite-Major-yet Plank (from Wodehouse)
Sebastian Melmoth
Almost anyone from The Importance of Being Earnest
Someone from Gilbert & Sullivan?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The Wodehouse one sounds promising - was he the barmy one that later founds the black shorts?

Hail Spode!

[akicif.livejournal.com]

No....

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

No, that's Roderick Spode, another excellent choice. Or Gussie Fink-Nottle, the newt expert. Or Wodehouse himself: he would have been 19 in 1900. There's rich diggings there, and I don't think you'd have any trouble finding a suitable character in that crowd. Think of the horror of a young Aunt Agatha!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Wodehouse, now there's a thought. He would be ..um.. 18-19 at that point and working (according to the web site I just checked) for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank as well as writing in his spare time. I think you've just given me a character! Shouldn't be hard to find a way for him to be travelling for the bank...

[original-aj.livejournal.com]

Either a very old Harry Flashman, as he appears in Mr. American, or possibly a descendant (actually or spiritually) might be amusing. It'd be a bit difficult to arrange the same level of fortuitous coincidence while still being fair to the other characters.

What era did Raffles come from?

Missionaries can cause all sorts of grief for their fellow players, as can opinionated old ladies. One other option is to have one of the male characters actually be a woman in disguise - there are plenty of examples - or have two versions of the character to give the player the choice of gender (might help if you can't predict number of male/female players?)

I know you said not a combat monstrosity but (from http://www.lothene.org/others/women.html ) these sound like fun ideas and needn't be spectacularly good:

Ella Hattan, also known as Jaguarina "Champion Amazon of the World," the "Queen of the Sword," and the "Ideal Amazon of the Age," fought competitions with knife, rapier, foil, sabre and broad sword in the United States between 1884 and 1900

Edith Garrud opened a dojo for jujutsu close to Oxford Circus.She trained a group of "fighting suffragettes", the bodyguard unit for Mrs Pankhurst. (A suffragette could be quite a problem for the male characters actually. I'd do it!)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I like both ideas (and I wonder if Edith Garrud ever ran into Barton-Wright, who reinvented Jujutsu as "Bartitsu" and thus inspired the Sherlock Holmes martial art "Baritsu") but I think both might be a little bit powerful. Like I said, this one is strictly amateur time.

[original-aj.livejournal.com]

Doesn't need to be Edith - could be a keen but not very good student. Plenty of comedy value there. Very proactive "Don't patronise me" character, who gets totally carried away and really wants to prove she's as good as (or preferably better than) the men? "I know Jujutsu you know! You have been warned!" There are after all no shortage of real people who aren't as skilled as they think they are.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

List of characters now up as a separate post.

Many thanks to everyone who commented, I hope you'll be happy with the results.