In every fortnight, there is a chosen one. They alone stood out in popular culture. They are the essential build.
October is spooky season, so we’re building humanity’s best line of defense against everything supernatural and scary. When things go bump in the night, she bumps back. She’s Buffy, The Vampire Slayer.
Who Is Buffy The Vampire Slayer?
Buffy Summers was a typical California teen until, oops, destinied.
Every generation, a Slayer is chosen. Buffy was The Slayer of the 1990s. She was the one girl in all the world chosen to stand against the forces of darkness.
Being the Chosen One meant more than just having her name pulled from a hat. This destiny comes with superhuman speed, strength, and stamina. There are even unspecific vampire-sensing powers that Buffy slacked at developing. Unless she mistook them for attraction. She dated multiple vampires, and they only occasionally had souls.
Of course there’s more to Buffy than the powers she gained and the vampires she dated. Buffy’s headstrong and determined. Sure, most of the time she’d rather just be a typical teenager worrying about dating, grades, and fashion. But once chosen, she consistently rose to the occasion. She put the safety of others before herself, holding the good of the whole world on her shoulders even if it killed her.
Which it did.
Multiple times.
Building Essence20 Buffy The Vampire Slayer
I’ve really set myself up with this one.
Whenever the topic of what licenses Renegade could adapt to Essence20 comes up, there are some I dismiss because of “The Buffy Problem”. That is, when a franchise is built around a specific character (and usually named after that character), it’s hard to build a roleplaying game set in that universe. And yet here I am intentionally choosing to build Essence20 Buffy.
Luckily Essence20 covers everything from peak human characters to the supernatural (and giant robots, but that’s not relevant here). Buffy may be kilometers ahead of Xander when it comes to fighting skills, but we know she’s only meters ahead of special forces soldier Riley, the Buffyverse equivalent of a member of G.I. JOE.
There may not be any vampires in Essence20 (officially), but there’s more to being The Slayer than just staking fang faces. Over seven seasons and multiple novels and comic books, Buffy and her allies (affectionately known as the Scooby Gang, or the Scoobies) fought ghosts, werewolves, constructs, and demons. So many demons. More demons than vampires, I’d estimate.
Influences
1st Technostalgic (G.I. JOE Roleplaying Game Quartermaster Guide To Gear)
2nd Destiny (Power Rangers Roleplaying Game Across the Stars)
3rd Popular, with Showoff Hang-Up (Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game Citizen’s Guide)
A rare build where I list the Influences first.
For those who don’t know, I change the order in which I list the three big choices based on how important they are to the build. In this case, our Origin and Role are pretty straight forward. It’s our Influences that stand out.
Other than the time she used a rocket launcher, Buffy exclusively fights with medieval weaponry. The Technostalgic Influence exists for anachronistic Joes who use weapons from the past, like Budo. I don’t love that the Influence Perk gives a bonus to Smarts and Social Skills related to outdated weaponry instead of a bonus to using them (between Technostalgic and Martial Artist, it feels like we were intentionally avoiding Influences that let characters be good with swords), but I can’t deny that the flavour is on point.
Destiny makes its third appearance on the blog. What can I say, pop culture characters have destinies! Also, it’s such a clever and on-point Influence, letting you reroll your d20 result if it’s less than the maximum you could roll on your Skill die. It’s a powerful bonus, perfectly in line with the flavour, and comes with a Sword of Damocles Hang-Up where the GM can turn any of your failures into epic fails.
Finally, this wouldn’t be a Buffy build without a little Night Vale in the mix. Popular fills a couple of purposes here. First of all, the whole concept behind Buffy is that she’s the boppy girl who usually dies early in horror movies. This basically represents who Buffy was and would have gone on to be if not for being the Chosen One. Second of all, Buffy has reputations. At Sunnydale, she’s the bad girl who burned down her old school’s gym. Around the cemetery, she’s the boogey madam to vampires and demons.
This being a Night Vale Influence, we get to pick from the Hang-Up menu. I went with Show Off, not because Buffy is such a showboat, but because the penalty is that we refuse assistance, something she regularly does in the show.
Role
Commando (G.I. JOE Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook)
Honestly, I expected to go with a Power Rangers Role, specifically to give Buffy a superhuman among mortals feel (with Morphing representing her dropping the facade that she was a typical teenager). However, while perusing Spy’s indispensable Essence20_All_Character_Options PDF, Commando stuck out to me. Bonus, I’ve never built a Commando for the blog. Another unused Role off the list!
Buffy uses trickery and stealth to close the gap and get her stab on. That’s the Commando’s whole deal. What really sold me on the Role was level 2’s Friend of Darkness. It basically gives her night vision. You can’t slay vampires unless you know how to navigate the shadows.
Then there’s Expertise. This Perk gives you a significant bonus to two Skills at 1st level, and another two at 7th. It’s such a useful tool for making builds happen and giving them the feel of excelling in their field, I kind of wish it was a G.I. JOE Faction Perk. It means we can either diversify our Skill Points so we don’t rely too heavily on Speed-based Skills, which go up very quickly as we level, or we can specialize early, because two Skill Points invested into an Expertise Skill nets us +d6 specialized.
The whole Role juggles devastating attacks and unexpected defenses. Buffy may not be Snake Eyes, but the two of them could own a vampire den together.
Own as in, like, dominate. Not as in a co-signed mortgage. But I would read that fanfic.
Setting and Focus
Night Vale, StrexCorp Rebel (Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game Citizen’s Guide)
I really didn’t set out to cover Night Vale this often in the blog, but so many builds became that much better since the boxed set became available.
Night Vale and the Buffyverse share a cocktail of horror and humour, they just invert the proportions. Tone down the comedy and the Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game perfectly services an Essence20 Buffy campaign. Particularly the Threats.
Because we switched to the Night Vale setting, we need a Night Vale Focus. I don’t love StrexCorp Rebel for Buffy, but it’s more than adequate.
The 1st level Perk, Guerilla Tactics, sounds a better fit than it is. It only gets us a grappling hook and a bonus to Wealth Tests to obtain contraband. Squint and you can see how the Wealth Tests benefit can represent The Magic Box, Buffy’s mentor Giles’ later season kitsch shop that also sold magical artifacts. And while I don’t believe Buffy ever used a grappling hook, I wouldn’t put it past her.
Level 4’s Immortal Rebel Soul fits much better. Once per adventure, we can ignore death a little bit. As Buffy once famously sang, she’s died twice. I didn’t expect to incorporate that into our build, but I won’t say no.
Origin
Student (Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game Citizen’s Guide)
Because the Destiny Influence covers Buffy’s thematic origin, I wanted something unspectacular for her mechanical Origin. Before becoming The Slayer, Buffy Summers wasn’t on track to change the world. Probably the biggest hurdle to this build’s needs is balancing being this exceptional Chosen One but also grounding it in a suburban setting.
Student does that nicely, especially because Buffy was either a student or worked in a school for the majority of the series. I just wish the Origin’s two mechanics—treating a non-Smarts-based Skill as a Smarts-based Skill, and gaining extra Story Points for Fumbling that Skill— weren’t tied together. The ideal Skill for the Story Points benefit would be Culture, because Buffy’s lousy at book learning (both from textbooks and ancient tomes), but she learns through experience. However, because Culture’s a Smarts-based Skill, I technically can’t choose it.
Essence Scores and Skills
Strength 5: Athletics +d6, Intimidation +d4
Speed 5: Finesse +d2 (Martial Arts), Infiltration +d2, Targeting +d4
Smarts 3: Alertness +d2, Culture +d4
Social 3: Deception +d2, Streetwise +d4
A nice, well-rounded build that’s secretly Speed focused. Expertise gives us ↑2 to two Skills, so we’ll go with Finesse and Infiltration. That +d6 Infiltration doubles as our Initiative bonus as of level 2, when Commando gives us Think Fast.
I struggled with what Skill to make Smarts-based by way of our Student Origin Perk. I settled on Intimidation. Commando’s Smarts doesn’t go up that quickly, but it goes up more quickly than Strength. We might need those rare Strength boosts for Conditioning.
Conclusion
I’m a big Buffy fan, so this was a blast to build. Honestly, it got me wanting to build the whole Scoobie Gang in Essence20. Willow would be the easiest thanks to My Little Pony’s magic system, and Night Vale makes Xander and Cordelia —the basic humans of the group— viable options as well. Guiles, the former bad boy turned stuffy mentor with magical proficiency, would be the most fun to figure out. I might even be able to pull off Oz the werewolf as a Psycho Ranger.
Back to Buffy, I think Commando is this build’s secret weapon. Expertise specifically. Those extra upshifts make her an effective fighter while also being competent outside of combat. Her fighting Skills will skyrocket thanks to all her Speed boosts as she levels up, so 7th level Expertise will probably go into Alertness and maybe Deception, depending on how often she needs to lie to her mom at that point.
Resources
Field Guide to Action & Adventure
G.I. JOE Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
G.I. JOE Roleplaying Game Quartermaster Guide To Gear
Power Rangers Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
Power Rangers Roleplaying Game Across the Stars
Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game 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.
