Dylan's RPG and Nerdery Blog
Geek life and custom content for Pathfinder and Savage Worlds
Red November Variant – Characters
Posted by on January 8, 2012
Red November is a fun board game by Fantasy Flight Games (see here) about gnomes stuck on a sinking submarine, trying to survive. The game has a feel somewhere between Jules Verne steampunkiness and black comedy depictions of World War I. It’s quite fun, as you run around the sub trying to prevent one disaster after another before your gnome is killed.
Our gaming group tends to play a lot of this kind of game, and there’s one thing I immediately thought was missing in Red November – distinct characters! Most cooperative games I’ve played (Arkham Horror, Shadows Over Camelot, Last Night on Earth, etc) have each player controlling someone with a unique special ability.
To that end, I came up with this: Red November Characters.
(That’s a PDF – if that doesn’t work quite right, use this instead – it’s a .docx file and the font I used. This is what I printed from, to 3″x5″ index cards. It worked well.)
Here are a couple of them, as a preview.
These are interesting, but at first glance, it looks like they may be a bit unbalanced. Klock-werk in particular seems to be a poor choice for a character since he can’t use Grog and gets an intoxication level half the time he ends in a flooded section. Perhaps in actual play they are all about balanced, but that’s my reaction looking at it. It’s a great idea though.
Also, you might want to turn off the red-squigglies in Word next time you make pictures of these guys.
Well, these have only been used twice in actual play, so they’re still very much in development.
In play, KLOK-WERK was one of the most useful characters in the game we played with him. The player avoided any flooded areas, as I intended, and instead spent time going into burning rooms and firefighting or (in one very useful case) disarming the missiles inside a burning room, saving the ship. I figured the ability to just flat-out ignore fire was useful enough that his corresponding drawback needed to be fairly significant. One of the other characters is also very adept at the Fix-It roll to remove intoxication from KLOK-WERK, gaining a +6 bonus to the roll. If those two work together, they’re able to work around that flaw pretty well.
We tend to not use Grog – maybe we just have bad luck, but we’ve found it pretty deadly to try to use. That means that not being able to use it isn’t a huge deal. The chaplain character can’t use Grog either (though at least KLOK-WERK can carry it around, the chaplain discards it as soon as he draws it).
If you end up trying these in play, please let me know – I’d love to hear other people’s experiences with them. I don’t get to play Red November too often, so I know these still need more polish.
Nice job!
You should consider posting on board game geek as well:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36946/red-november
Looks like somebody already posted a link on Board Game Geek before I signed up.
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/751644/characters
I don’t think you need to tweak or balance them, it’s a co-op game anyway. Pick the one you like and there you go…They’ll finish in the bottom of the ocean anyway.
When we played it, we handed out the characters pretty randomly – we had six players and dealt them out so each player got three to pick from.
thanks for your work!
I translate characters into Spanish language, I want send to boardgamegeek,
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36946/red-november
can I?
tranlation:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54951313/Red%20November%20Personajes.pdf
thanks,
If you want to translate them into Spanish and put them up on BGG, that’s fine by me, as long as I’m credited as the author. Hope you have fun with them!
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