Curse of the Alien Pre-gens

If there's one thing I don't like about prepping for one-shots, it's making pre-gen characters.

I've thought about past convention games and one-shots I've run:

• Don't Rest Your Head.  Character creation consists of thinking of two powers.  We did it at the table.
• The Sprawl and other PBTA games.  Character creation involves ticking boxes.  We did it at the table.
• Scum and Villainy.  FITD isn't much different to PBTA.  We did it at the table.

But now I've started branching out a bit and running different games.  Fortunately some games make it easy for me.

• I've run a lot of Liminal recently, but it's all been the quickstart adventure that comes with a complete set of pre-gens.  When I start running other adventures, there's pre-gens in the main book I can use.
• I'm going to be running a Delta Green one-shot.  Not only does the Delta Green quickstart provide a bunch of pre-gens, but there's also over 900 characters available to download via the Delta Green website.

Plenty of games provide a set of fairly generic pre-gens that you can slot into most adventures, which I really appreciate.  Writing the adventure is the fun part for me, while bringing the characters to life is the domain of the players.

However, I'm writing a cinematic one-shot for Alien.  And that's more of a challenge.

The actual stats part isn't too hard.  The pre-gens for the characters in Chariot of the Gods are all available online, and wouldn't be too hard to reuse.  I haven't actually done this, because running up an Alien character is pretty damn fast.  Six characters, statted and equipped and ready to go in under an hour.

No, the challenge for making characters for an Alien one-shot is the agendas.  For each character I've had to come up with a brief backstory, and then something that they want to achieve in all three phases of the game.  And to at least some extent these need to be tailored to the adventure.  "Search the ship for information on X" doesn't work if the adventure isn't taking place on a ship.  All this is significantly more work than I'm used to doing on something that's not the adventure itself.

That said, if I can pull this off, it will be thoroughly worth it.  And I'm going to laminate these character sheets.