Janie the Juicer - When Your Character's Strengths Become Liabilities with JimHasFunOnline (Savage Rifts)

What would you give up for greater power? What do you do when your positive traits become hindrances? And if you had limited time left, how would you go out? Hello friends welcome to characters without stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled. I'm star. This episode I'm joined by Jim s who is an office worker in the Buffalo, New York area and a TTRPG TikToker, which is how we met because I've been following your savage worlds content, because it's something I haven't played. So I'm excited to talk about a savage worlds character. So Jim, I'll give you a chance to plug your projects at the end. But right now, do you have anything else you want to tell listeners about yourself?

Uh, well, my my Tiktok handle is Jim has fun online. And that's just about it. Everything else is contained.

So tell me Jim, who are you bringing to the table today?

I am bringing Janie the juicer from the Savage Rifts setting also known as Rifts for Savage Worlds inspired by the song Janie's Got a Gun by Aerosmith.

Yeah, and for a little background, maybe maybe this needs a little bit of a content warning. Because the song it has some pretty serious themes in it, which me and maybe refresh my memory, but it's about a child essentially, that was abused and takes revenge by killing her abuser.

Yeah, this is inspired a bit by that, but it doesn't get as as into that with this particular character. It's more about her going after someone who abused a family member, but she doesn't really know that yet at the beginning of her story, that's something that would be uncovered in the course of play if she were to play in a campaign.

This character is built for savage worlds what is their character class,

the character class is called a juicer. And a juicer is a kind of chemically enhanced super soldier in a world like rifts Earth, ordinary people don't stand a whole lot of a chance out in the world of adventuring, because threats are just enormous. And so many ordinary humans and other species on Earth will undergo a process where they are fitted with a thing called Bio comp, which pumps these chemicals into their body, making them bigger, faster, much stronger, the super agility kind of enhanced senses and reflexes and very powerful in combat, unable to use big, big weapons and that kind of thing.

When you choose a juicer class are you getting access to all of those enhanced abilities or are you choosing

You start with a core set of abilities and then juicers as they advance as the character advances, a juicer can take additional what are called edges, which are a bit like feats that are exclusive to the juicer. They call it a framework and savage rifts though they are exclusive to this framework that can make them even faster, even tougher, in addition to just taking some of the core combat classes that they might take.

So maybe it would be helpful for the audience to talk a little bit about how you build a character in Savage Worlds. Seems like there's kind of character archetypes. Would that be correct?

They call them frameworks in the setting in the core Savage Worlds rulebook, there are no actual character classes. The character classes are left up to individual settings, such as Rifts or Deadlands, then they kind of separate them out into either archetypes or classes or in this case frameworks. So you would pick a framework and you'd pick a race to go with a framework. Certain frameworks are not available to certain of the core races, but there is a race building system in Savage Worlds where you can actually custom create your own race. If you want it to be something that would ordinarily not have access to a framework, you could just kind of kit bash it into making a version of the race that that would, would work.

That's an interesting approach. I'm kind of curious what options do you have available to you for races in the Rifts setting and what race is Janie?

Janie is a human she she's an ordinary human born and born on earth. About 21 years old. Her started her career as an adventurer, but the races there's enormous numbers of races. There were a few core races in Savage Rifts setting. They just added a whole bunch more races a whole bunch more mutant animals and the Sasquatch. All kinds of other other options available. You can be a dragon in Savage Rifts.

Nice Wow, okay, cool. Yeah, I wouldn't have expected. I mean, I, I played Rifts way, way back in the day. The original Rifts and my recollection of it was that it was kind of a post apocalyptic almost like a little bit sci fi with magic kind of world would that be correct?

Yeah, it's kind of a kitchen sink genre of game or every it just throw everything in together. It's got elements of fantasy, cyberpunk kind of military sci fi, there's horror elements as well. And all kind of mashed in together there's like giant mech like there's like giant robots. The idea is that rifts have opened up around the world at the point of this cataclysm that happens around the year 2080. The leylines, reemerge and criss crossed the globe and North America is just full them. They're concentrated in areas where there had been higher concentrations of people living. So places like New York City are just criss crossed with ley lines and where ley lines intersect are called Nexus and the Nexus a ley line Nexus is a powerful magical area where rifts to other realms other dimensions, other planets are known to regularly open up and things can crossover through these rifts. different people, different species of aliens and fantasy races have just kind of either deliberately or accidentally just found themselves on this post apocalyptic Earth all around the world. And as they've settled in started to form communities, there's just been various conflicts have emerged. One of the main antagonists of Savage Rifts is something called the coalition states which are human supremacist that are determined to rid the world of any kind of aliens are magic. So they're a bit like kind of the Imperium I think in in Warhammer 40k is a society that's xenophobic, and they're one of the more one of the principal villains so a lot of player characters might be had lived in the coalition states and had defected or escaped in some way, and now work to sort of undermine their efforts to expand their their area of influence, as they tried to spread across North America.

Are there other factions within this world besides the Imperium?

There are a number of them.

Is Janie part of a faction?

Yeah, at the start of play, she is part of what's called the Tomorrow Legion, which is a small organization centered near Branson, Missouri, or what was left to Branson, Missouri. Savage Rifts introduced this faction as a kind of starting point for player characters because they're a kind of do gooder organization that's trying to bring peace, stability and safety to just anybody in North America that needs it.

So you mentioned that the Tomorrow Legion is kind of a do gooder Legion and that it's recommended for new players. Would you say that the setting or the game itself kind of encourages, like a do gooder approach? Or is that just kind of where they want beginners to start?

The game system itself I think kind of encourages people to make kind of these larger than life heroic characters. Because in the original Rifts, characters were often they were mercenaries or they were like bounty hunters or something like that. And you could play you could play Savage Rifts that way. But when Sean Patrick Fannon adapted Rifts to Savage Worlds a few years ago, he had come up with an idea to create an organization that player characters could start at that would kind of give them a reason to be adventuring together right off the bat. And to be kind of going around doing heroic more positive things than just trying to collect money or or gear that kind of thing or power.

So what would you say Janie's motivation is for being out in the world for adventuring?

Couple of things one, her main motivation is that she would like to try to find out what happened to her sister Peg. She had an older sister named Peg who was a juicer before Jamie was Peg had been a competitor in a city of Kingsdale, which is not far from Castle Refuge where the Tomorrow Legion is headquartered. And Kingsdale is a city that was founded by dwarves and elves that had come through a rift and was actually an entire town of dwarves and elves had drifted in from a fantasy world so they just kind of settled there and have built a community in a city there. And that's where Janie and her sister her older sister Peggy had grown up and their their mother Sylvia had worked at the Kingsdale Enhancement Clinic, which is a place where juicers and other augmented people go to receive their augmentation either juicer upgrades or other kinds of cybernetic enhancements and And after their mother was killed in an incident at the clinic involving a criminal gang that was trying to attack someone who was a patient at the clinic for gang related reasons, Peg decided to take the kind of next of kin pay out that they'd gotten from the clinic and use it to get herself juiced as they say or undergo the process as juicers call it and she became a competitor in juicer sports in Kingsdale and her younger sister Janie worked as a kind of de facto manager helping out managing her career as a competitive athlete. But then one of the things about being a juicer is that juicers don't live very long, because the chemicals take their toll on whatever body they're working on. And most juicers don't live past four to five years after they are to become juicers unless they undergo a kind of difficult detoxification process. So juicers tend to just try to go out in a blaze of glory, once they start to feel like they're entering something that they juicers call last call, they will go out and seek dangerous adventures, they'll go out into the wild and try to just go down fighting, they'll go attack large animals or that kind of thing. And Peg started to feel this last call coming and she just disappeared for several days. And Janie didn't know where Peg went. And so Peg came home one night to their apartment where they live together in Kingsdale and looked absolutely haggard. Her eyes looked sunken, like she hadn't slept. And she just gathered a few things. And she said, I have to go get out of Kingsdale as soon as you can. But anyone comes looking for me tell them I'm dead, you won't really be lying. Not really. She said she took off out the door. Janie watched her leave, saw her sister Peg get on the back of a motorcycle being driven by what appeared to be another juicer, another big massive juicer, and she got a look at that juicers face and there was something very wrong about it. It had the face of a corpse. And then they wrote away she never saw Peggy again.

It's interesting to me that choosing a juicer really severely limits your lifespan. Why do you think a character would make that choice?

Well, the thing about juicers is they're very celebrated individual there's there's a juicer sports and things that are broadcast in areas that have say broadcast television, to sports are recorded and video recordings of to sports are exported around to various other regions and cities where they're watched by people craving, excitement and that kind of thing. And so they're celebrated. And there's an entire culture around juicers. It's a kind of nihilistic action centered culture. And so people are attracted to that, especially since you can often just going around being an unpowered person in a world where there's demons and aliens and robots and things like that any number of which can do all kinds of harm to an unpowered squishy little person becoming a juicer that's able to fight back even if it's only for four or five years looks rather attractive.

Did Janie become a juicer before her sister went missing?

No, she took the money that she had put aside her sister had been putting aside money they had been trying to pressure Janie and also becoming a juicer. And Janie resisted it because their mother really didn't want either one of them to become juicers or to become augmented because she had seen at the clinic Peg had put money aside for Janie to undergo the process if she ever changed her mind. And once she disappeared, the money was still there. So Janie decided to go ahead, something kind of switched in her mind and she decided to go ahead and undergo the process herself.

What is that process like?

It's really just a surgical procedure with a bio comps installed. And the chemicals are gradually introduced to a juicers body you have to be done, you know, when under strict supervision and with expert care. And then there's a recovery period of I believe it's a few weeks as the juicer has to get used to the chemicals and retrain their body to use this this newfound strength and ability. But once they recover, they actually physically grow so it's a bit like Bane in Batman, they physically become much larger, they'll actually gain height, typical juicers anywhere from seven to eight feet tall, very muscular, extremely fast juicers mostly at a competently run clinic. Most juicers make it out intact.

But some don't.

Some don't yeah, some don't survive the process. In the actual setting more the Kingsdale enhancement clinic as a success rate of 98% I don't know if the other 2% don't survive the process or simply reject it in some way.

Was there anything in particular that drew you to choosing this type of character?

Well, I made this character initially for a one shot that I was running called Mayhem Squadron, and the juicer was going to be kind of the on the ground combat heavy character. Although everybody in the in the one shot there were six all the characters are good combat character, but Jamie was going to be the juicer.

So Janie is a woman and you're a man, why did you decide to play a different gender? And is that something that you often do?

I haven't done it a lot in campaigns. I've done it many times, get one shots that people have run I'll select a female character.

Have you found any particular challenges? Or has it been pretty easy for you?

I think it's been straightforward for me, because, you know, it's just it's a person, you know, I just play the character as a person. I don't I don't think of a character as being any different than a masculine character. They're going to have their own motivations, their own abilities, their own goals, their own fears, it's on the character sheet. You know, if the character has like a phobia, then you play that they have a code of honor, then you play that sort of thing.

Are those kinds of things for example, phobias, is there any mechanical kind of built in system for that in Savage Worlds?

In Savage Worlds if a character has something like a phobia, or in case of someone like Janie, like juicers automatically have a death wish hindrance, which means that she'll seek out dangerous encounters, she doesn't shy away from them, she'd be perfectly happy with just going into a situation that you've maybe even seems hopeless. If you play up a characters hindrance, you will generally be rewarded with a Benny, if you can bring up the fact to the GM that you're playing up a hindrance, the GM should award a Benny and Benny is a token that allows it's a bit like inspiration. I think in d&d, you can spend a Benny to have a reroll on a trait or damage roll. Trait roles are skills or attributes. So if you roll, say to shoot something and you miss, you can spend a Benny and get another roll. And then you can take whichever roll is better. Same with damage and Bennies, these can be used for other things, too, they can be spent to influence the story in some way. Like if you if there's a piece of gear that your character really needs to have in a specific situation. If the GM has permission, you can spend a Benny and say I happen to pack this particular gear. And there's a couple other uses for Bennies as well. such as getting a better draw in the initiative.

Do you have any idea of what Janie's sexuality might be?

I have a feeling she'd be pretty fluid with it. She's kind of driven to be heroic and to find out what happened to her sister. So I think that any kind of love interest that came along her way would probably catch her by surprise. She would probably be I would imagine bisexual I think she'd be pretty familiar with that kind of thing. I don't think she would be dead set one way or the other.

Can you tell me what does Janie look like?

For one thing, she's very big because she's a juicer. She is about seven feet tall and muscular. She has auburn hair. She wears medium plate armor, she wears special armor that's built for juicers. She has a side cut hairstyle with a kind of swept over. She has a laser rifle on her back. And she carries a kind of a short sword that's called the vibro short sword as electrically powered, technologically advanced sword that she could really could cut through even like a steel door with that given enough time. She wears her armor most of the time. But that's kind of her her appearance.

I don't know if you're someone who enjoys doing character voices. But if you do, is there a voice for Janie?

Janie would probably because of how big she is. Like most juicers, she would probably have a kind of deep voice. Because she's gotten larger in size. I think that enhanced lung capacity, she could probably yell pretty loud. Probably she would probably talk like this. Gotta help those kids and find out what happened to my sister.

Sounds like she has a very kind of like serious vibe.

She's a pretty serious character she wants to do right by the world. She has the heroic hindrance. There's a number of hindrances characteristic hindrances and character creation. And she has four hindrances Deathwish, which comes from the framework that she took as a juicer she has the heroic endurance which means that she will always try to do right by people showing us how to protect the innocent and save people from danger. She has the loyal hindrance, which means that whatever group she's with, you know, she she will fight for that group. And then she has a vow of revenge In her sister's death, although what she doesn't really realize is her sister's not actually dead dead.

Have you decided what happened to her sister?

If I was running in a campaign with this, I would leave it up to the Game Master, but the strong implication would be that Peg feeling the last call coming feeling her own death as a juicer encroaching closer and closer, sought out a cult of necromancers known as the Grim Reaper cult. And the Grim Reapers are known to be able to extend the life of a juicer to immortality but at a cost.

And what would that cost be?

Well, their soul basically.

What does it mean to lose your soul in this game?

Oh, yeah, so it was a big part of Rifts to lose one soul or to have one soul sort of corrupted, it is a very serious thing. Canonically in rifts, the soul can be taken out of a body and they can be put back in by certain alien beings and powerful creatures or gods. So the soul is very much a real thing. And the Grim Reaper necromantic cult has the ability to change the juicers bio comp, replace the chemicals, that the bio comp uses that kind of mundane sort of super soldier serum and replace it with this necromantic fluid, and kind of converts the juicer into a nightmarish creature called the Murder Wraith all the strength and power of a juicer with immortality and near imperviousness to mundane attacks.

Is there a risk associated with this kind of procedure besides losing your soul?

Oh, it means becoming a Murder Wraith? Yeah, I think a juicer could perish. It's like another process that's like a ritual that's conducted. And it's a particularly unpleasant thing for the juicer to undergo. It's also unpleasant for anybody who, who happens to be there in the presence of this ritual happening, who's not part of the cult because they're probably not getting out. The cult is one of the main nightmarish evil organizations in the game.

So going back to Janie's hindrances, it's interesting to me that the things that are described as hindrances actually sound like ideals. For example, if you're playing d&d, something with a positive spin, but it's actually something that's hindering your character.

Right, the player can act on the hindrance, especially if it's in a way that's against their own interests, or against the interests of the character of the immediate character or against the entrance of like the team they're in, they should definitely get a Benny for that. For example, if Janie were to get a clue about what happened to Peg, she might wander off from the group if the groups that we really have to go do this other thing. She'd be torn between her loyal hindrance and her vow hindrance, she would either have to act on one or the other hindrance, she should probably get a Benny because of how torn up she'd be over that she either be going against her own interest by not going after the information on her sister and staying with the group. Or if you have to go against the group and go off to chase down some lead that sort of thing. Or if she were in a situation where she saw something horrible about to happen to like immunization group of people, but to go after them might in some way endanger the group, it might give away the presence of the group, that sort of thing. If she acts on that, she would definitely get a Benny for doing that.

So would you say that the game rewards characters making difficult choices?

I think so. The GM was encouraged to reward the players for doing that. That's kind of mechanically how it works in the game.

So this character was inspired by a song, would you say that that is common for you the finding, like kind of a spark from a piece of culture? Is there any sort of through line to how you start creating characters?

For myself, inspiration come from all kinds of places, I can be inspired by a character on a TV show or a movie. I've had characters that were inspired by former roommates. I want to base the character in a campaign on a guy I used to live with that person's personality and their interests. So yeah, inspiration was trike and songs have inspired characters going all the way back to like my earliest days playing RPGs

Oh, would you say that you start with a vibe or a personality first?

Uh, yeah, a lot of times, I'll think of kind of a backstory, a motivation, something that would motivate somebody to be an adventurer. And then I kind of work from there. I've done things where I've taken a song and made the song kind of the character's backstory. I even had a character one time that was a gnomish Bard in an Eberron campaign, who was inspired by The Pink Floyd song The Gnome. And I took the lyrics of the of The Gnome and I took the title character from that song. And so that was my character's father. So I use the father's story from that as kind of the backstory for my character and nobody caught on. Nobody in the group was familiar with that songs. I go up into somebody who go, Wait a minute, that's in the Pink Floyd song. Nope.

It's always a little disappointing when that happens. I did like a whole D&D combat that was based on a mix between Indiana Jones and Tremors. And some of the players didn't get it. And I was like, Oh, come on a big boulder was rolling at you.

How do you miss that?

Yeah. It's disappointing when nobody gets your references. I play with a lot of people who are younger than me, so it's pretty common for me.

I once came up with an entire fantasy version of the Robocop plot from the 1987 movie Robocop. I took that entire plot and made a fantasy version of it. And I posted on Reddit at one point, maybe one or two people were like, do Footloose. Next, you know? But everybody else is like, what is this? Yeah. So I was like, okay, Footloose. Yeah, sure. There'd be a town. No one's allowed to use magic. There's like the stern cleric that kind of runs the town and, and no one's allowed to use magic convinced the townspeople to allow it.

A no bard town for sure.

No bards. Yeah, no bards allowed. No, no, no dancing.

You were talking about how you know you're often bringing in family that family is important to you in building characters. And obviously this character is sounds like that's definitely the case for them because they're so motivated by their sister's disappearance. You also mentioned her mother. What was her life like growing up?

Well, she was living in Kingsdale. And in Kingsdale, humans are kind of shunted off to the side because the dwarves and elves just kind of deal with each other, just kind of give humans the brush off. They get to get along, there isn't really any strife between them. But there's not a lot of cooperation, that kind of thing between them. They lived in a decent place because their mother had a regular professional job, a stable full time employment. So they lived in a nice apartment building. And so growing up they were both kind of captivated by the the juicer sports that take place in Kingsdale because getting sales a big popular area with juicers, and there's juicer football, there's dead ball and murder thon, the big juicer sports as they grew up watching knows, Peg particularly was the one who wanted to become a juicer. But the mother had discouraged that. As far as education goes, I would imagine, since it's the future, they are educated by some sort of technology. So I imagine they probably learn things like learning to read and write and that sort of thing through technology, perhaps, but they had to have a relatively good life. Oh, one other big plot hook that would be there for the GM is that they don't have any real idea who their father is. And their mother always brushed that question off. She's just, you know, all your father and he just he left, you know, you don't remember him, he left and they're like, Who is he is a guy. He's not important, you know, that kind of thing. So that would be a plot hook there to do kind of a Luke Skywalker thing, where you know, she could find out that her father was somebody interesting. And maybe there's a reason why her mother brushed that off and didn't want them really to know.

You built a couple of hooks into the backstory, you've got the sister hook, obviously, that's the big one. And then this hook of having this unknown father, when you are building hooks into a backstory, is that something that you leave open for the GM to interpret? Or is that something that you decide on and then share?

I might have ideas for where it could go. But I think it's really cool to leave it up to the GM. I've done that in a couple of a few characters in the past. I had a character who were both of his parents disappeared, and he had no idea what happened he just vanished. The character had no idea why and then oh, boy when the GM had me find out. It was wild.

It is really fun. One of the things I particularly enjoy when playing in more of a longer term campaign is that moment of surprise when you find something out about your backstory, whether that's something you create as a player yourself or whether that's something that your GM builds into the narrative for you. It's something that I always really enjoy.

Great way to go. Especially you build up to it a little bit with hints you're dropping hints here and there.

At the point where Janie figures out that Peg has gotten to the point of working with these grim reapers to gain immortality at losing her soul in the process. How do you think Janie would react to that?

Well, she, of course, would be absolutely horrified, she would have had no idea that such a thing was even possible, kind of a hidden fact of the magical underworld, so to speak, that someone like Janie would never have had any contact. So she would be absolutely shocked. And she would be very torn between thinking there was some way she could rescue Peg from this, and just having to cope with the much more likely scenario that that she's going to have to try to take Peg out of the picture so that she doesn't hurt anybody else.

What kind of campaign do you think Janie needs?

Janie would definitely be good in a balanced, well rounded team. If she doesn't have a spellcaster at her back, when she would have say confront her sister, she would have really no chance she would need to be buffed. Her sister would just put her down immediately, because she would have no way to really hurt the murder wraith.

What did your mother expect from you when you were born?

That's a difficult question. I think my mother expected me to go into medical administration like she did. Or maybe to become a physician or a Cyberdoc. think she'd be a little shocked at what I'm doing right now. I hope not too disappointed. She certainly never wanted me to be a juicer.

It's interesting to have the weight of a parent's expectations and then to go completely against them. So it'll be a fun story to eventually get to be a part of. Thank you so much for sharing your character with me and with my listeners. How can people find you?

Online Tik Tok is just Jim has fun online. Do a search for like hashtag Savage Rifts and you'll find me right there immediately right there because I post a lot of content just posted another video this morning about it. And I'm on Twitter as just Jim has fun, where I talk a little bit about some of my ideas.

Yeah, I recommend if anyone listening wants to know more about Savage Worlds I highly recommend you checking out Jim's Tik Tok. There's a lot of really interesting things on there about how to play the game. You can find me on TikTok at starmamac. You can also listen on YouTube just search for characters without stories. Please like subscribe, rate, review, share with your friends, talk to your doctor about characters without stories. Every little bit helps. I want to give a special shout out this time to a friend called Bill Cool Guy on Apple podcasts. He gave me my first review. I so so appreciate it. I don't have any merch. So I don't know what to give you. But please accept my sincere thanks and I would love it if anyone else wants to give a review. I will also give you a shout out so please go ahead. You can write a review on Apple podcasts. I'm currently accepting submissions, particularly for non d&d characters. So if you'd like to share your character, you can go to the submission form at characters without stories.com. Thanks for listening, and may all of your characters find their stories.