Action! Danger! Redshirts!

Cthulutech being a rather grisly game of supernatural powers beyond rational thought and with city destroying powers unsurprisingly expects quite a high amount of action, death and insanity. Lets face it we'd hate to disappoint.

Most of the sample missions presented in their books add in various NPC's who are designed only to die or go insane rather than being of much help to the group, although they often have several very useful skills or knowledge's. Groups I have played with before have wound up basically letting the GM use these NPC's to basically play against himself. Useful and "realistic" as this may be is is boring as hell and introduces needless bureaucracy into the game. Having NPC's come in and drop off like flies to the nasty supernatural horrors doesn't emphasis how nasty they are to the PC's, in fact it can seriously undermine the attempt.

In an attempt to remedy this and stop NPC's from stealing the lime light I will be giving all the players a redshirt in addition to their normal characters. In true redshirt fashion will at best have only a first name or a job title and defining characteristics (personality basically) with any further details being up to the players to flesh out if they should choose to. The redshirt should fill in gaps in the main characters abilities. In Cthulutech players can have a group with a mecha pilot a beat cop and librarian (for example). In any combat that involves mecha the cop and librarian aren't going to be much use and so 2/3 of the group is out for a whole fight scene, which can be a bit dull. Add in a couple of redshirt mecha pilots and a redshirt investigator and all the players can be involved all the time. Rules wise the redshirts will be slightly worse off than the PC's starting with lower stats and skills. As the players advance they can choose weather their main character or the redshirt will get the xp. If at anytime they give the redshirt a last name (or a name if they didn't have one) then the red shirt will become their main character prompting the swift retirement/insanity/horrific death of their previous character, they will also get a xp boost to bring them in line with the other main characters.

Redshirts give players have more of a chance to be daring and take risks which they might not otherwise take. Games can have high mortality rates or incidences of insanity and importantly these should have more impact to the players when one of their characters is lost to them. Rather than some random NPC. Hopefully making the game more fun more bloody and more involving for all!