The apocalypse goes on with a Gallic shrug in today’s game, Wasteland: les terres gâchées. It’s a French RPG, so I’ll give the original terms from the text along with my translations for them.

A thousand years ago (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), civilization came to a crashing end. Battles for dominion between genetically engineered super-psychics didn’t just cause wholesale slaughter, it reshaped the land & seems to have warped the very nature of reality so badly that monsters, psychic abilities, & even magical powers have become part of everyday life. Into the void created by the collapse of society stepped religious fanatics who have succeeded in keeping the recovering world in a neo-medieval dark age where superstition & authoritarianism run rife. (The fact that monsters & weird powers are real isn’t helping matters either, frankly.) So far as anyone knows the habitable world has been reduced to northern France & southern England, which together make up the Malroyaume (literally Ill Favored Realm), possibly parts of Spain, Ireland, Italy, & the Mahgreb, plus a frozen land somewhere in the distant north whence issue raiding bands of terrifying lycanthrope Vikings. As in the previous Middle Ages most people live & die within the borders of their farm, village, or city. In fact you need papers just to be allowed on the road, never mind to pass the city gates. The PCs, however, are Voyageurs (Travelers), a small caste of adventurous souls who brave the open road to roam the kingdom for the common good.

PCs start by distributing scores among five attributes: Adresse (agility), Puissance (might), Clairvoyance (let’s call that “clarity”, since it’s a general measure of perception as well as intelligence), Présence, & Trempe (mettle, your physical sturdiness). Choose one to get a 5 (slightly above average), one to get a 3 (slightly below), & the others get a 4.

Adresse 4
Puissance 4
Clairvoyance 5
Présence 3
Trempe 4

All PCs start with three points of Bonne Aventure (Good Fortune) & one point of Éclat (literally brilliance or outburst, but a more familiar English gaming term would be Inspiration). These are both a sort of bennie point, but as you would expect Éclat produces more powerful effects.

Simple enough. Next, we choose a Peuple (People). The Malroyaume has four living in it: humans, kobolds (innately magical Gollum lookalikes), dwarves (descendants of a Spanish army brigade that came to help the resistance against France’s super-powered dictator but got military crushed & forcibly mutated for good measure), & scroungers (child-sized uplifted bipedal lab rats with hands). Each People has associated stat modifications; those other than standard humans also have natural inclinations for certain skills, as well as innate abilities. I’m envisioning someone who strikes a balance between the mental & physical, so I go dwarf. Dwarves aren’t a nimble People so that’s a -1 to Adresse, but a +1 to Clairvoyance because they highly value learning & intelligence. Dwarves are also the most technologically advanced People, partly because their bodies naturally generate electricity! (Which is why in certain circles they’re referred to as “Piles”, literally “Batteries”.) A dwarf gets five points to put into Knowledge skills but take a -2 to all riding tests because almost every animal finds their presence profoundly unsettling. The one known exception is corvids, who prefer them to all other Peoples. (So much so in fact that the main dwarven city, Corbuse, is called “City of Crows” because of the vast flocks that gather there.)

Once you’ve chosen your People, you choose your birthplace & your heritage. There are 20 birthplaces to choose from or roll for, as you prefer. We choose randomness & get an 11: Lambrefeux, a sleep rural county in Bretagne (Brittany) near the vast Brocklaine Forest. The city of Lambrefeux is particularly welcoming to dwarves, so there’s a bit of luck. Those from Lambrefeux get a +1 in the Knowledge skill of their choice, or one of two possible skill “prédilections” (specializations). For simplicity we just take a Knowledge skill.

Next, there are 10 heritages to choose or roll. A result of 4 means Noble! Our PC is scion of the plus petite of the petite noblesse, the classic big fish in a small pond. Our family’s influence doesn’t extend far beyond the borders of their estate, never mind outside of Lambrefeux, but we start with some pretty good gear & a name that may open doors for us. Each heritage has its advantages & disadvantages. The Noble gets the skill specialization Commandement (Coercition), i.e. Command (Influence), but suffers a -2 penalty when trying to assume a disguise or go about unnoticed. Also handy, they begin play with a weapon, armor, & a good horse. (Which may turn out to be a bit of a white elephant, since as noted the horse is going to find our PC distressingly weird.)

Time to choose a profession. The choices are a mix of traditional Medieval pursuits & post-apoc icons: tinkers, traveling players, knights, soldiers of fortune, psykers, relic hunters, smugglers & so on. The concept I had in mind was a dwarf who seeks out ancient technology to tinker with, a task made considerably easier by dwarves’ ability to generate current. Our hero’s profession is Fureteur, from the French verb meaning “to search or root around” – or as we would say in English, to ferret something out. So let’s call them Ferreters. Unlike the Wastelanders who venture beyond civilized lands in search of booty, Ferreters explore the ruins that lie within the bounds of the Malroyaume. That’s more convenient, but not necessarily safer.

A ferreter gets double the bonus when spending Bonne Aventure to boost a Perception test while searching a location, a +2 to Adresse, a +1 to Clairvoyance, a set of preferred skills, & some starting equipment (a crowbar, a tough leather sack, & a decorative “téchno” (a non-functional scrap of Before Times gadgetry).

Among their profession’s favored skills, starting PCs distribute a set of six values. Depending on the profession, that may mean there are some skills in which they remained untrained. When that’s done, there’s still a bit of customization to do. The PC gets five points to distribute among attributes & Bonne Aventure to represent “le don du Voyage” (“The Traveler’s Gift”), that certain je ne sais quoi that makes a person cut out for a perilous life on the road. Lastly, the PC gets ten more skill points to put into anything they like, favored skill or not, to reflect personal interest.

A few derived values & we’re done.

Santé (Health) = [(Puissance + Trempe) x 2] + 5 = 27
Psyché (both powers & resists psychic/magical attack; also lost like SAN when confronted with special horrors) = [(Clairvoyance + Trempe) x 2] + 5 = 31
Défense = Trempe + 5 = 11

Our PC has ten zinc pieces to spend or keep in reserve; their origin has set them up with transport, protection & a weapon, so we hold onto those to spend on the road.

So here we have a young & restless dwarf of noble name who has turned his back on what could have been a quiet life of middling influence in County government. Instead he has shocked & dismayed his respectable family by not just joining the ranks of the Travelers – all of whom are considered a little mad for going on the road in the first place – but by actually choosing to go poking around in filthy, noxious, dangerous ruins looking for who knows what, & to what end? To satisfy his curiosity! It’s positively shocking.

Baldomero Puente Galán

People: Dwarf
Origin: Lambrefeux
Heritage: Noble

Good Fortune 4, Inspiration 1

Agility 4
Might 4
Clarity 5
Presence 3
Mettle 4

Health 27, Psyche 31

Initiative 4, Damage Bonus 0, Speed 4, Defense 11 base, Defense 12 with short sword

Skills:
Commerce 1
Influence 1
– Command (Influence)
Knowledge: Before Times 2
Knowledge: Etiquette 1
Knowledge: Literacy 1
Knowledge: Machinery 3
Knowledge: Malroyaume 1
Knowledge: Old Inglandish 1
Knowledge: Wasteland 1
Melee 1
Navigation 2
Perception 2
Persuasion 1
Stealth 2
Survival 1

Special Ability:
dwarven electricity generation

Equipment:
short sword +3 attack / +1 defense, 1d6+1 damage; maille jack, protection 3; riding pony (perpetually skittish); crowbar; leather sack; fidget spinner with multicolored LEDs worn as a medallion (makes the lights blink on special occasions)

As an aside, the fact that merely being a Traveler puts you outside society is a nice way of letting the players avoid having to deal with the pervasive bigotry that goes with a new dark age. Travelers are a group apart & can’t be expected to conform to convention, so no one bats an eye – or at least bats harder – at any other distinctions of gender, orientation, ability or whatever else.