Yae Kvyr - nickname "Monster"
Playbook: Muscle. A xeno who loves to fight, and enjoys finding opportunities to do so. Undisciplined but loyal.
Appearance: 2.2m (7’2"), heavily but sleekly muscled. Skin-tone is gray-green (in part through a symbiotic relationship with fungus from his home world). Face is dominated by tapered/pointed ears, a set of dark ram’s horns, black eye pits, and many very pointy teeth. Usually wears a heavy black duster and a black slouch hat (he considers this being subtle); he always wears some sort of head covering, and by preference avoids the sun. His splay-toed, slightly dog-legged feet are usually bare.
Personality: A happy, if savage, warrior who would be happy to challenge you to a brawl, and then either buy you a drink after, help you to the med center, or pay the bartender to see that your remains are disposed with due respect. Despite his low-tech upbringing, he’s quite bright and quick to adapt to new worlds and concepts.
The words his crew mates dread hearing: “Ugh. Need to work out some kinks. Who’s up for some sparring?”
When it comes to “Being Strange” – well, he’s a 2m+ tall unique Xeno who laughs and punches a lot. He embodies strange, even if he doesn’t seem real taken with Way-based strangeness.
Do you have a personal code that you follow?
“If it can fight, fight it. If it can’t fight, protect it until it can.” That is the Way of the Free People.
Times you won’t apply violence no matter the cost?
Like the code says – violence against those who cannot defend themselves, with no point – that is not good. Just mean, dishonorable, a sign of being selfish and weak. Maybe, the foe crippled who will never fight again, then it may be a mercy to kill them. Or the defeated foe who will fight again and and do some evil against one’s family out of their own sickness, then it is for safety, and we drink to them. But, no, to be violent to those who cannot fight? It’s not good.
What caused you to throw your lot in with the crew and not seek employment as a soldier?
Being a soldier? In Hegemony? Bah. Too much standing attention. Too much obeying orders. Why, they even shoot people who hit their commander! For truth! My friends are much easier to get along with.
Heritage: Xeno (see below)
Background: Syndicate - spent several years as a mid-level leg-breaker, with some reputation for his ability, but never rising above that because of impulse control and not snapping to attention before authority.
NPCs
- Friend: Aya, an assassin. Another old colleague and fellow Xeno who went indie in the Procyon sector.
- Rival: Chon-zek, a bounty hunter. The Syndicate has a long memory. So do former colleagues who don’t like to (repeatedly) lose fights.
Vice: Pleasure - Yae loves food. Coming from a world of mushrooms and primitive insect analogs, he remains enthralled with the variety of flavors and flavor combinations in the galaxy. He is not a gourmet, however: he would get as much pleasure (and has) pouring pickled okra, ghost peppers, and root beer into a bowl and slurping it cold as with the finest restaurant dinner on the Hegemony Throneworld. (This occasionally causes vehement protest from waitstaff or chefs; he’s happy to engage them in vigorous debate on the subject). He is constantly looking for something new and different, whenever possible.
The words his comrades also always fear: "Ah! This is new and different! You must taste!"
Stats:
- Abilities: Unstoppable [starting], Wrecking Crew [special]
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Action Dots:
Scrap 2 [playbook 2]
Command 2 [playbook 1 + background 1]
Scramble 1 [heritage 1]
Attune 1 [extra 1]
Skulk 1 [extra 1]
[Pretty much the “Gladiator” recommended build, plus 4 pips.]
PC Relations:
In general, Yae is likely to get along with anyone on the crew who gets along with him, though there’s probably an invitation to be a sparring partner somewhere along the way, and he’s best friends with crew folk those who take that invite. (Nor, in the event, does he mind losing – it’s just a challenge for next time). He considers the crew to be clan, and so worth protecting from others.
- He doesn’t have a lot of respect for bankers and paper pushers and money men (from his Syndic experience), but he does like money, so he’ll get along with our former Counter exec just fine.
- He appreciates the sort of competition that racing entails as a distant cousin of his own nature, so he can respect our Pilot figure just fine.
- He has an unusual wariness about Way artifacts and Ur remnants and the like, so really doesn’t understand our Scoundrel Archaeologist’s passion about it.
Notes:
Yae is a Folian from Vil, a planet in the Spica Sector. Vil’s ecosystem is largely fungus-based – vast forests of fungal growths, reaching hundreds of feet into the skies, cover its land masses.
The Folians are a relatively primitive race, Bronze Age in tech level. While there are strong indications that they are not native to Vil (biological inconsistencies with the Villian ecology and genetic pool, low population numbers concentrated in a specific region, as well as Folian legends [see below]), there is no sign of a higher, space-faring tech base remaining.
The Folian culture is, as noted, low tech, and focused on small tribal groups not much larger than a few families, with a strong cultural pattern of inter-tribal and inter-individual conflict, both ceremonial and chaotic (the line between the two being difficult even for the very few Hegemony xenologists to study the Folians to discern). While battles (of either kind) can be fierce, they are usually followed by joint celebrations with all parties, where the living and dead are both celebrated, and, if a family or tribe has reduced in size beyond viability, adoptions and mergers are agreed upon.
Vil came to the attention of the Guilds approximately fifty years ago, certain of the fungi there having strong pharmaceutical possibilities (both as legal medication and illicit drugs). Guild pharma-mining crews moved in to exploit the resources wholesale, and ran into the Folians. Faced with an intractable, high tech enemy bent on destroying their tribal zones, the Folians did what came naturally: fought.
It did not go well.
While the Folians were more than a match for any given Guild merc (or even several at the same time), valor and fury do not render one immune to blasters, especially when Folian tactics tended toward uncoordinated wave attacks and poorly-maintained ambushes. The Folians were, within a few years, largely wiped out. It’s possible that there are some still deeper in the fungal woods, biding their time, but it’s altogether likely, given their already limited numbers, that they are too small of a genetic pool to be viable as a race.
Yae was a rare case (singular, to his knowledge): an adolescent, he was rendered unconscious during an assault on a Guild spaceport, and the leader of the merc team that was hired to protect it decided to up her take by selling him to some Syndicate contacts as "a strong guy you might make some money off of". By the time Yae came to (the buyers were warned to keep him tranqed until someplace secure), he was off-planet. He has never returned.
The advantage of an undisciplined culture is that, for the individual, forced adaptation to new things is relatively easy, and Yae took to his new life well, demonstrating in short order his suitability to directed acts of violence. While not always good at following orders, he became a mid-level leg-breaker in a short period of time, all the while learning about the galaxy, adapting quickly to technology … and pursuing his long-range plan, steadily taking assignments that would bring him closer to where he wanted to be.
Folian myth has it that they came to (what would become) Hegemonic space thousands of years ago, and did so through what Yae’s research indicates was the Hama (?) gate, the Ur stargate that has remained, stubbornly, unopened. Why they came here, why they settled so far from the Procyon sector (and on a world largely lacking in Ur ruins or artifacts), how they lost their technology, and why the gate is closed … well, the myths don’t go into that.*
Yae’s plan, then, is straightforward (just as he is): hang out in the Procyon sector until someone figures out how to open the gate, then go through it himself, find the progenitors of his people, and then see what happens.
A year or two ago, he left Syndicate employ in a fashion more informally and more alive than most ex-Syndies achieve. He used forged ID and his nest egg to travel to the Procyon sector. He took some odd jobs there as a muscle, eventually [insert TBD fun story here] becoming a member of the crew. He dropped his Syndicate alias (“Twigs” – as in, “liking to break bones like”) when he left that employer, using instead what his first hire called him: “Well, ain’t you an intimidating Monster?”
*Player speculation: They were running, and didn’t stop until they were well away from whatever they were running from and/or couldn’t go any further. Which, given the Folians, is a bit disturbing.
