The Cool Crew of the Cool Coolie

One of the great things about scenario books from Two Hour Wargames is that most of them have pre-generated characters ready for use as well as a means of generating your own characters.  When I generate the characters, I use the same process that’s in the rule book and then play a few encounters with them and hopefully they aren’t too powerful or too weak.  Anyway, here’s a peek at the minis that popped into my head when generating the crew of The Cool Coolie.

Duck Gozlin

Duck was the last crew member to be generated.  I didn’t want the crew to be a group of travelling mercenaries or bounty hunters, not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I wanted a crew that could handle actual cargo.  I have several of the Zombiesmith aliens, even some that aren’t in any of the 5150 books.  I looked for a big burly guy to lift cargo and the Fezglok jumped out at me.  While in New Hope City PI the Fezglok has an attribute package of several attributes, in 5150 No Limits, NPCs can only have one attribute, so I picked the most prevalent attribute based on the type of New Hope City PI professions available to the Fezglok.  And that’s how the Fezglok got the Slow to React attribute.

By the way, when you buy THW games, they’re your games – you can use mechanics from other games as long as all of the other players are aware of it.  There are a lot of things in THW games that you can take from one game and use in another.  You just need to be willing to tweak and test to make sure you still get the gameplay you are looking for.

Frod Nyko

I love this guy.  He’s the engineer/mechanic.  Frod is a Tip-Tip Glom.  The one attribute I selected from the New Hope City PI package was Initiative.  I figure a spaceship mechanic has to have some initiative to solve the engineering and mechanical problems encountered when trying to keep everything working.  I also like the fact that a Tip-Tip Glom is always armed.  This is one alien I think would make a great detective or bounty hunter in other stories.  Besides, he even has a Hawaiian shirt.

Kynesha Tart

Kynesha is the ship’s security officer and medic.  The two alien figures are from Zombiesmith, the figure used for Kynesha is from the Wargames Foundry Street Violence range.  The Street Violence Range has figures that can be used for a modern urban setting, post apocalypse, near future, and science fiction.  Kynesha has the Hard as Nails attribute.

Gus P. Jones

Gus is the Captain and owner of the Cool Coolie.  He’s also the star character with Nerves of Steel and Charismatic as his attributes.  I have to admit that I was heavily influenced by two anime characters when developing Gus –  Dutch from Black Lagoon and Jet from Cowboy Bebop.  This figure is also from the Wargames Foundry Street Violence range.

Patti Fink, a.k.a. Shortcake

This is the figure that started the whole story.  She’s a science fiction dwarf pilot from Hasslefree Miniatures.  While painting her, the entire story began to emerge.  At first I was going to make her the star character instead of Gus.  But she turned out to be too much of a wise ass to be the star.  She’s a Scrunt.  Scrunts appear in the very first 5150 book, simply titled 5150 Book One.  Their main attribute is Resilience.

The Crew

Once I had a crew in mind, I had to decide what kind of encounters would best suit them.  I would be amiss if I didn’t say that Firefly and Cowboy Bebop didn’t have any influence, but the crew of Black Lagoon had the most influence.

If you haven’t played one of the 5150 No Limits titles, you should give one a spin.  There are currently 3 titles in the series – Maiden Voyage, Night Terror, The Cool Coolie – and a fourth one soon to be released – Bug Breakout.

As always comments and suggestions are welcome.  Thanks for taking a look at the blog!