Today marks the start of shelf two, currently the everything-that’s-not-fantasy RPG shelf in the nook. That means today’s game is the first modern-at-the-time-era one: the self-published 2003 actioner Haven: City of Violence. Truth be told the only reason I even knew the thing existed was because of an extended review/rant by one of my favorite YouTubers, tetsubo57. But there it was for $6 at the Half Price Books booth at Gen Con one year, so why not?

Anyhoo. Haven is supposed to be a game of hyperkinetic, brutal action in a grimtastic noir city. Throw The Raid, The Warriors, The Crow, The Night Comes For Us, & a couple scoops of direct-to-video bashers in a blender & hit pulse a few times & you’ll get the idea.

Chargen in Haven is by point buy. You’ve got 100 Character Points (CP) to spend on Primary Attributes, Skills, Languages, Benefits (advantages/merits, you get the idea) & Special Abilities (borderline supernatural abilities). You can take one or more Drawbacks to get more CPs. Let’s cleave to the source material here & take a stab at creating someone analogous to The Operator from The Night Comes For Us.

Step one according to the book is to buy your Primary Attributes, but considering you buy everything from the same pool, it strikes me as wiser to budget for the Skills, Benefits & Primary Abilities you’d like your PC to have & then buy Attributes with what’s left. The problem, though, is that the number of skills your PC begins with is equal to their INT / 3 round up, so you can only approximate how many you’ll get. On the other hand, if you buy Attributes first there’s no guarantee you’ll have enough CP left to pay for the Skills. Well, let’s just make a wish list & then fiddle the Attributes later.

Skills in Haven: City of Violence include … not a single weapon or hand-to-hand one.

Buh?

That’s because your melee & projectile capabilities are measured by Primary Abilities. I guess in the City of Violence your ability to inflict it is just another personal attribute like your shoe size or blood type. (Although maybe I really shouldn’t sneer at that; WFRP has Weapon & Ballistic Skill in a character’s main profile too.)

What skills does The Operator demonstrate, apart from a gift for slaughter? Well, she’s very clever with shaped charges, a hell of a motorcycle rider, & knows how to treat a plethora of gruesome injuries, including her own. That’s four Skills: Acrobatics, Demolition, Driving, & First Aid. We’ll need to make sure her INT is at least 12. Each Skill in the game has four increasingly costly levels. The first level costs no CP & provides a +1 bonus (to the target number, since this is a roll-under system); each subsequent level costs L-1 CP & provides a +L bonus.

The number of languages the PC knows also depends on their INT. The Operator speaks Indonesian, I think Chinese & probably some English to boot. That makes the minimum INT she’ll need a 13.

She’s got three obvious Benefits: Gifted Fighter (3 CP), Iron Will (2 CP) & Marksman (1 CP). (Weirdly, Gifted Fighter increases the number of actions you get in combat rather than improving your chance to hit.) Total cost for those is 6 CP, which would leave 94. We can balance the minimal cost of Marksman by taking Pursuing (1 CP) as a Drawback, to model The Operator’s goal of destroying Chien Wu’s criminal empire.

For a Special Abillity we choose Predator (5CP), which lets a PC use some combination of luck, talent & gut instinct to predict where the target of their pursuit is going to be at any given moment. Sounds like just the thing for someone who keeps showing up out of nowhere to kick everyone’s ass.

Right, that’s 90 CP to divide among the Attributes, one CP/Attribute point, & maybe goose Skills. Keeping in mind her necessary INT, let’s give her these stats:

Strength (STR) 13
Will (WILL) 15
Agility (AGL) 14
Stamina (STA) 15
Intelligence (INT) 16
Perception (PER) 15

There are a bunch of Secondary Attributes derived from the Primary ones. Most are self-explanatory. Subterfuge is the PC’s ability to lie or mislead; Countermeasures is their innate capacity to detect or disable traps & devices. Concussive Health measures how much non-lethal damage you can eat before falling unconscious (though if the PC drops to -1/2 base Concussive Health they’ve been beaten to death). Fractions are rounded up to the next whole number.

Influence (INFL) (Perception + Will / 2) 15
Movement Value (MV) (Strength + Stamina / 2) 14
Accuracy (ACC) (Agility + Perception / 2) 15
Fighting Value (FV) (Strength + Intelligence / 2) 15
Subterfuge (SUB) (Intelligence + Perception / 2) 16
Countermeasures (CM) (Agility + Intelligence / 2) 15
Concussive Health (HEA-C) (Strength+ Will + Stamina) 43
Lethal Health (HEA-L) (Strength+ Will + Stamina / 3) 15

At this point a starting PC would spend up to $1000 on starting gear, but let’s just assume this version of The Operator starts with her motorcycle, her rifle, a courier bag of claymores, & a couple of pistols tucked away here & there. Done & done, she’s ready to take on missions for … well, whoever the hell it was, the Ministry of Extrajudicial Killings or something, I don’t know. Note that she’s got one more Skill & one more Language than I had planned on because I boosted her INT to raise her FV.

The Operator

STR 13
WILL 15
AGL 14
STA 15
INT 16
PER 15

INFL 15
MV 14
ACC 15
FV 15
SUB 16
CM 15
HEA-C 43
HEA-L 15

Skills:
Acrobatics +1, Demolitions +2, Driving +2, First Aid +1, Streetwise +1

Languages:
Indonesian (native) 18, Chinese 11, Arabic 7, English 6

Benefits:
Gifted Fighter, Iron Will, Marksman

Drawback:
Pursuing

Special Abilities:
Predator