Character Archetypes

The following characters are provided as guides for the players and Game Masters. Players new to Victorian Science Fiction often have difficulty developing a character that fits the genre. Unless they are well read in history and historical fiction envisioning the types of people that might be involved in Victorian adventures does not come easily. Each of the archetypes below have references to movie characters that exhibit some of the qualities that would make interesting role playing adventurers.

Depending upon the rule system used some of these would not be beginning level characters but seasoned, veterans or even elite. Against the Hive they will need all the advantages they can get.

 

Royal Navy Officer

Background

            Born into a Nation with a victorious Naval Tradition you have been schooled from birth to bear the mantle of Nelson. From the crib you could hear the sea breaking against the beach near your home. At thirteen you became a First Class Volunteer, sailing in the real navy and enduring the hardships of the Gunroom. It made you a man; more importantly it made you a British Naval Officer, which is a far more rare and exalted item indeed. You mastered the demanding trade of sailor before you were twenty. As technology has changed the Navy has changed with it. As a modern officer you can not only sail a three masted ship through a cyclone at Cape Horn, but also know the best way to storm a native fortress or fire a turret mounted 100-ton gun. All of these are just in a days work for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.

 

Quote: Stand the ship closer to the shore. We must put as much fire as we can upon them!

 

Best Movie Character:

Gregory Peck as Captain Horatio Hornblower in Capt. Horatio Hornblower, R.N 1951.

Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World 2003.

Jack Davenport as Commodore Norrington in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 2003

 

British Army Cavalry Officer         

Background

            From the ends of your bristling mustache to the hooks on your booted feet you are the model of traditional war. Your horse means more to you than your wife or mother, your Regiment far more than all three of them combined. If you are hidebound and poorly educated it is certainly not your fault, in fact it is no fault at all. Within you are embodied the qualities of unswerving devotion to the Colonel and the Regiment and a limitless faith in the power of horse borne men to ride over any obstacle. It would never occur to you that these are exactly the qualities that drove on the Light Brigade in the Crimea.

Quote: Of a certainty, one charge with good steel will send them back to their Hive

 

Best Movie Character:

Trevor Howard as Lord Cardigan in The Charge of the Light Brigade 1968

 

 

British Army Engineer Officer                   

Background

You are one of a new breed of officers. Your family had no military tradition and no money to speak of but you had always dreamed of seeing distant lands and having grand adventures. The Royal Engineers is one of the most merit-based parts of the officer corps. So what if the “real” officers of the line regiments look down upon you. In this war it will be the new weapons that win the battles and you are the master of steam, paraffin and steel! Whether you wear the simple crest of the Royal Engineers alone or with the Air Detachment’s winged scarab it doesn’t matter. You represent the future of warfare, and in this terrible struggle the only hope of England.

 

Quote: They may wage warfare as they have for a million years, but we will fight in a mode never seen before!

 

Best Movie Character:

Stanley Baker as Lt John Chard R.E. V.C. in Zulu 1964

Val Kilmer as Col. John Henry Patterson in The Ghost and the Darkness 1996

 

British Army Infantryman              

Background   You took the Queen’s shilling and you have never looked back to the London slum that bred you. Discipline is rightly harsh, but how could it be any other way? You have seen more of this World, and a couple of others, than any of the high and mighty landlords back in the East End. Your Sergeant is a strict man, but fair for all that, he grew up in a slum no different than yours. You are a simple man well versed in your trade. Since you would fight hard for your regiment on any planet in the solar system it takes little imagination to know what you will do for an inch of Good English Soil.

 

Quote: Well at least we’ve fighting out of the bleeding desert sun for a change.

 

Best Movie:

Sean Connery as Daniel Dravot in The Man Who Would Be King 1975

Michael Caine as Peachy Carnehan in the Man Who Would Be King 1975

James Booth as Pvt. Henry Hook in Zulu 1964

David Kernan as Pvt. Fred Hitch in Zulu 1964

 

Australian Militiaman

 

Background

“Mother England calls her children home”, that was what the bastard said at the O’Dells cattle station. Ever since you’ve gotten here it’s been nothing but Pommie Bastard horseshit. If it wasn’t for you Diggers there wouldn’t be a mother country left. The Regular Army spends so much time on polish that they can’t shoot for piss. This spring it was Colonials on more than half the line, and the breakthroughs by bloody Hell didn’t come in those parts. It was Colonials that was chasing the Bug swarm raids across the South of England and back behind the line. It will damn well be Colonials that storm into the hive and kill the Queen. And for all that it wouldn’t be such a bloody shambles if these Pommie bastards could brew a decent beer.

 

Quote: Only 600 yards?

 

Best Movie Character:

Edward Woodward as Lt. Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant in Breaker Morant 1980

Mel Gibson as Frank Dunne in Gallipoli 1981 (anyone else from this film as well)

Entire cast from The Lighthorsemen 1987

 

62 St John Fusiliers (Amazonians)

Background

It all started as a lark. Some of the other girls had joined the drill club and you thought it would be fun to sign up as well. When the hard-shelled devils invaded England and the call went out for volunteers no one thought they would actually take women. Somehow A Company was shipped to England and was assigned as Provost Marshals in the backwater, in “safe” Exeter. Their epic stand around the Duke of Cambridge as the tide of aliens washed forward has become legend. Women had stood to the last, where so many men had routed. When other Companies, and then Battalions of Amazonians were formed you left your safe life, your little pretend army and even the role of a woman to stand by your sisters. You chafe in the rear areas, waiting for the stupid and foolish men to see that every hand needs to be turned against this otherworldly enemy.

 

Quote: For all our fallen sisters, forward!

 

Best Movie Character:

Geena Davis as Dottie Hinson in A League of Their Own 1992

Cate Blanchett as Lady Gertrude Chiltern in An Ideal Husband 1999

Minnie Driver as Miss Mabel Chiltern in an Ideal Husband 1999

Rachel Weisz as Tania Chernova in The Enemy at the Gates 2001

 

 

Inventor

Background  

You come from a tradition of eccentric British inventors. Didn’t many call Babbage himself insane? Well that stopped when the first Difference Engine began to clack, didn’t it. The naysayers will change their tone when they see what your imagination has designed and the skill of your hands built!  Just a few more turns of the wrench and some filing and she’ll be right as rain and ready for the Worlds!

 

Quote: Now to field test it!

 

Best Movie Character:

Lionel Jefferies as Joseph Cavor in The First Men in the Moon 1964

Dick Van Dyke as Cartacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 1968

James Mason as Captain Nemo in 20000 Leagues Under the Sea 1954

 

 

Adventuress

Background  

The Worlds have always been a tough place for a woman, especially if that woman is no lady. You are no lady, but men; even gentlemen seek your company. They marry for England; they come to you for companionship. Whether it be in bed or at the gambling tables, or perhaps on safari in Kenya, it will be you, not the pallid woman they forgot at home that has their fire.

 

Quote:

 

Best Movie Character:

Lesley-Anne Down as Miriam in The Great Train Robbery 1979

Diana Rigg as Miss Winter in The Assassination Bureau 1969

Natalie Wood as Maggie DuBois in The Great Race 1965

 

 

Great White Hunter

 

Background  

Born in the colonies you know the wild as few men of this age. You can smell your prey and know their habits as a Londoner knows the underground. You are steady before a charging rhino, and have killed the vicious Venusian Tidedragon with a single shot. Living in the field is your idea of heaven, no matter what world it is upon. You have never been a man for the Army, and it isn’t the bounty that has been placed upon these strange creatures that brought you back to a homeland you were not born in. It is the challenge of stalking and killing such dangerous prey that made you take ship.

 

Quote: It takes a bigger rifle to bring a super major down with one shot, and one shot is all you get.

 

Best Movie Character:

Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley in Quigley Down Under 1990

Michael Douglas as Charles Remington in The Ghost in the Darkness 1996

Walter Pigeon as Captain Thorndike in Man Hunt 1941