Who’s that girl with the pig and braces? She puts smiles on everyone’s faces!
Welcome to Essential Builds, the blog that takes popular culture icons and bedazzles them with Essence20 options.
Today we’re turning Mabel Pines into an Essence20 player character, and the Night Vale setting into Gravity Falls, Oregon.
If you haven’t watched Gravity Falls, I’m jealous. It’s on the shortlist of series I wish I could watch again for the first time. The intricacy of the writing, the depth of the characters, and the multiple layers in which you can experience any one episode makes it one of the best shows ever produced, and a miracle of a creative mind bringing a vision to life.
Who Is Mabel Pines?
Curious, weird, and kind. Smart, brave, and worthy. Mabel may have her issues with reality, but she shows up when friends and family need her, or when a boy calls. Any boy. Except Gideon, ew.
Mabel is a ball of positive, creative energy, with a sense of self greater than Bill Cypher’s powers. She knits her own sweaters, sees the best in the world, and appreciates the big and little things in life. She’s also a quick thinker, springing into action when any wrong needs to be righted.
Building Essence20 Mabel Pines
If you want to run an Essence20 adventure set in Gravity Falls, you need the Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game boxed set. In fact, if you want to explain Welcome To Night Vale to someone of a certain age or taste in cartoons, describe it as the kind of radio show you expect would play in Gravity Falls.
That said, I would probably use more options from Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide to build Dipper, Grunkles Stanley and Stanford, and maybe even Soos than Maple. The supernatural elements of the setting roll off her like water off a ducktective’s back. Still, between her Origin, setting, multiple Influences and Hang-Ups, and her ranks in the Weird Skill, the Welcome to Night Vale RPG makes this build possible.
Outside of Night Vale options, I need a Role that doesn’t shy away from combat but centers around having a big heart and being there for her friends in need. Mabel is a force of personality force of nature.
Role
Black Ranger (Power Rangers Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook)
Need to choose a Role when you know the vibe you’re looking for? Read the flavour headers. If we’ve done our jobs as designers, the mechanics and the rest of the flavour will all work to bring these three and four word summaries to life.
Case in point, the Black Ranger says it’s all about “Dance, Song, Jokes”. I can hear Kristen Schaal enthusiastically shouting out these three words in her Mabel voice. Throw in Good Leaders and Stalwart Anchors, we have a Role that says Mabel.
Speaking of saying stuff, the Black Ranger’s core mechanic is a resource pool called Quips and Speeches. Whenever an ally needs wisdom or motivation, Mabel knows just what to say. She starts with an ability to provide bonuses. As she levels, she gains the ability to provide temporary Health, and later give herself bonuses on Skill Tests to look after her allies. Eventually, she gains All For One, a Perk which lets her allies return the favour and provide her with similar benefits.
While I have you, who’s up for an Essential Builds fun fact?
Black Ranger was the only Power Rangers Core Role I hadn’t used yet for a build. That makes Power Rangers the first Core Rulebook from which I’ve used every Role.
For anyone curious, I haven’t built a Commando or Officer from G.I. JOE (although I’ve used Focus options for both), a Scientist or Scout from Transformers, or a Spirit of Generosity or Spirit of Magic from My Little Pony. I’m surprised that these are the remainder Roles because I can think of a dozen pop culture characters for basically all of them (Generosity being the overly specific outlier). I’m going to try to knock the rest of the Roles off my list over the next half dozen blog posts.
Setting
Welcome To Night Vale (Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide)
I thought about using the My Little Pony Setting, but as much as that fits Mabel as a character, and could be the setting of Mabelland, her imaginary world where she makes all the rules, that’s not the world she lives in. As I said earlier, Gravity Falls and Welcome To Night Vale have so much in common. They should totally date. Besides, how is Mabel supposed to find a vampire boyfriend in the My Little Pony setting?
Night Vale may be the perfect fit, thematically, but it sets up a mechanical hurdle for our build: We don’t have formal crossover rules for the Welcome To Night Vale setting. We know what we swap out of our Power Rangers Role to make it setting neutral thanks to the Field Guide to Action & Adventure (our Grid Powers, Zord and its Zord Features, and Ranger Prime). What we gain takes extrapolation. It ended up being easier than expected. At least at first.
The Night Vale Roles don’t have any Role Perks shared among them, but all characters gain a General Perk at level 1. Since that’s not true of any other Essence20 setting, it stands to reason that this is a Night Vale Setting Perk. Furthermore, Night Vale Roles have Focus options, which are Setting Perks for the other settings that have them.
Here’s where we lose the thread: Night Vale Roles only go up to level 5. That means we don’t know what to get instead when the Black Ranger normally gains Grid Powers and Zord Features at levels 6, 10, 11, 16, and 17, and the Black Ranger Prime capstone at level 20. That’s a lot to give up for a General Perk and two Focus Perks.
I can see two easy solutions:
Option one: We gain a General Perk any level we would gain a swapped out Role Perk and nothing else. That means only one at 6th level, even though Black Ranger gains both a Grid Power or Zord Feature at that level, and nothing at levels 16 or 17, since there are additional Role Perks at those levels. That may still seem uneven, but the flexibility of General Perks gives a setting-swapped Role the potential for broad and deep power boosts.
Option two: We follow the philosophy of Welcome To Night Vale and treat level 5 as the upper limit a typical citizen can achieve. That’s what I’ll be doing with this build. Mabel is 12 years old for most of the series, only turning 13 in the last episode’s epilogue, so maxing out at level 5 feels right. We only need 5 levels to capture everything we see her do in the series.
Focus
Rancher (Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide)
This was a happy accident. As previously mentioned, swapping the Black Ranger to the Welcome to Night Vale Setting means we gain a Focus instead of a Zord. I was actually worried about that. None of the Night Vale Roles (Farmer, Journalist, Politician, Scientist, and Soldier) fit Mabel at first blush, so I didn’t see how a Focus derived from one of those Roles could.
Enter Rancher. This Focus grants an animal pet. And wouldn’t you know it, I already planned on dedicating a General Perk to giving Mabel a pet to represent her pig companion Waddles.
However, for Setting Swapping reasons, she gains her Focus’ parent Role’s Equipment Training. And Night Vale (source material appropriately) skimps on Equipment Training. Farmers are only Trained or Qualified with pitchforks. Luckily Rancher frees up the level 1 General Perk that would have gone to Waddles to now be used to get a Grappler to represent Mabel’s trusty grappling hook.
Origin
Outsider (Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide)
Technically the Outsider Origin is about someone leaving their normal world behind and showing up somewhere weird. That completely applies to Mabel and her trip to Gravity Falls. However, there’s a second layer there. Mabel fully embraces the whole world with everything she has, but most of the world wiggles its way out of her grip. She tries to keep her chin up about it, but nothing hits Mabel harder than rejection.
The Outsider Origin Perk rewards her out-of-the-box thinking. Normally, when you critically fail a Skill Test, you gain a Story Point to show how you learn from your failure. As an Outsider, Mabel gets *two* Story Points for fumbling a Skill Test. She’ll learn from her mistakes all right. Twice!
Influences
1st Stylish (My Little Pony Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook)
2nd Stalwart (Transformers Roleplaying Game Transformers ONE) with Obsessive (Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide) Hang-Up
3rd Wandering (Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide) with Loudmouth (Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide) Hang-Up
I love a build with a fun variety of Influences and Hang-Ups.
Starting with the Influences, I needed an option to represent Mabel’s sweaters. Yes, they’re that important to her character. Stylish covers that thematically. Mechanically, it gives a bonus to Social Skill Tests when making a first impression. We don’t actually see this a lot in the series, but ask any Gravity Falls fan: Mabel’s sweaters make her more lovable. The fact that her name card in the opening credits is all about one of her sweaters backs this up.
Stalwart is a fairly generic “heroic” Influence that gives a bonus to Initiative. Mabel may be the less adventurous Pines twin, but when Dipper’s escapades breach Mabel’s bubble, she rises to the occasion.
Wandering’s mechanics cover a lot of ground. First, it grants Mabel temporary Specialization under certain circumstances. Mabel often shows unexpected abilities in stressful situations that we don’t see from her the rest of the time. Second, and this is so specific I’m just going to copy the text from the rulebook: “The first time you interact with a space-time anomaly, you can ignore the first effect from it.” This reinforces that we went with the right setting for this build because that is equally likely to happen in Night Vale and Gravity Falls.
Night Vale uses Transformers’ independent Hang-Ups, disconnected from the Influences we chose. That freed us up to take two perfect Hang-Ups. Most Mabel-centric storylines are about her current obsession, often but not exclusively a boy. The Obsessive Hang-Up acknowledges that obsessions can change, stating “whenever you make a Skill Test that doesn’t directly relate to your current obsession,” you suffer a penalty. And Loudmouth penalizes Mabel’s Infiltration Skill Tests, a nice counterpoint to how Quips and Speeches rewards her talkative nature.
Essence Scores and Skills
Social 9: Animal Handling +d4, Performance +d8, Persuasion +d6
Speed 4: Finesse +d6, Infiltration +d2
Smarts 2: Weird +d4
Strength 1: Might +d2
I love a super Social build.
Mabel may be a Rancher, but she mostly fawns over the animals she sees. I was OK limiting her Animal Handling to 2 Ranks. Conversely, when she sees a problem, her solutions are creative. This is a case where Ranks in Performance making a character good at all art works, because we see Mabel knit, sing, dance, and sculpt, and it’s easy to imagine her being skilled at a lot of other art forms.
I couldn’t settle on a Smarts Skill for Mabel, but then I realized I didn’t have to. Night Vale introduces Essence20’s second Essence Score agnostic Skill, Weird. It covers the supernatural, the unnatural, and the ubernatural. Mabel may not be as in tune with whatever’s going on in Gravity Falls as her brother and uncles, but she’s also unfazed by the majority of the strange happenings she encounters.
The only other noteworthy Skill choices I made was giving her 3 Ranks in Finesse. That’s because the grappler is a Finesse melee weapon. Even though Mabel’s grappling hook fires like a gun, treating it mechanically like a lasso still works pretty well.
Unfortunately, because Black Ranger forces us to invest a Rank in Might, it does mean we have a redundant Skill. I don’t actually know where I would have put that Strength Skill Point, so it’s not the worst Skill Point tax. As a GM, I’d allow a player to Invest it in another Strength-based Skill given the circumstances.
If we were making a 20 level Mabel, Strength being her Gold Essence Score would leave us drowning in Strength boosts that don’t work with our build. Because we’re capping this build at level 5, we only have 1 other Strength Skill Point to worry about, which we’ll put into Conditioning. Mabel’s one tough cookie.
Conclusion
Do I like this build?
Yes
Definitely
Absolutely
Mabel got a pig, a grappling hook, and can be there with a joke or a speech when needed. Like me, it checked all the boxes!
I’d love to see how this build plays, because it’s so unusual. Black Ranger is supposed to be an effective fighter, but by giving Mabel a grappler (and a pitchfork, technically), she’s more of a battlefield controller than a frontline damage dealer. Between that and our emphasis on Social Skills, this is a super supportive character.
Resources
Field Guide to Action & Adventure
My Little Pony Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
Power Rangers Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
Transformers Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
Transformers Roleplaying Game: Transformers ONE
Welcome To Night Vale Citizen’s Guide
Ryan Costello is one of the designers of the Essence20 system and an author on the G.I. JOE, Transformers, and My Little Pony Roleplaying Game Core Rulebooks. As of this writing, he’s written over 300 000 words for Essence20, contributing to over a dozen products and counting.
