These four characters appear throughout this book's rules examples. They are fully built, ready-to-play, and designed to illustrate the kinds of scenes the R10 Engine produces at the table. Use them as-is, adapt them as starting templates, or treat them as reference points for building your own.

Where a rules example calls for a specific character, we pick the one whose niche fits the mechanic being taught. Nothing about these characters is normative — the system does not assume this cast, and a table that never uses them loses nothing. They exist to make the examples concrete.

Angus Keefe

A Confederate pirate with more scars than commendations. Grew up on a Gaelia merchantman that stopped being one during the Sixth Interstellar War, when the crew took a Letter of Marque against Terran shipping and kept running the same route afterward without the paperwork. Angus came up on that ship, learned his trade on boarding actions, and stayed in the business when the old captain finally took a round she didn't walk off. He runs with the same crew now, mostly. Most weeks.

He is loud, vain, and quicker than either would suggest. He picks locks because it's quieter than picking fights, which he will also do. He owes several people money and at least one person his life. He tells neither story the same way twice.

Hanako Watanabe

A League Navy officer in the middle of a career she is no longer sure about. Commissioned out of Calysto Academy at the expected age, rotated through the expected postings, promoted to Commander on the expected schedule. Then she caught a case the League would have preferred she drop, did not drop it, and has spent the last two years being handed the assignments nobody else wants. Her record is still clean. Her superiors find this inconvenient.

She is patient, direct, and harder to rattle than she looks. She does not lie to another League officer. She does lie to almost everyone else. She can put a round through a pirate at fifty meters when she has to, and she has, twice.

Priya Acharya

A Terran expatriate engineer, born into House Acharya of the Surya Sector and trained at the Neptune Shipyards. Commissioned into a Republic fleet as a junior engineer and assigned to a light cruiser that she loved for about nineteen months. In the twentieth, a fusion-plant diagnostic came across her desk that she refused to sign off on. The ship went out anyway. It came back with half its crew and a story that did not match the one she had been told to repeat.

She left the Republic quietly, in the way that Acharyas leave things, and has been running Freelance contracts since. She does not discuss why. Her house has not formally disowned her, which she regards as a problem rather than a kindness. She is careful, thorough, and slower to trust than the rest of the cast. When she jury-rigs something, it works. When she refuses to jury-rig something, there is a reason.

Venlyn

Formally Ven'lyn — "Shield-Guide" — though she drops the apostrophe around humans. A Lyndri Embassy attaché, raised in the Diplomatic Corps from childhood. The Corps takes children and schools combat and charm interchangeably, on the standing logic that both will be needed in roughly equal measure. Venlyn came out the other side competent in both and was assigned to a deputy ambassador on Tycho Station as personal bodyguard and companion. She does not particularly like her posting. She is excellent at it.

She reads a room before she steps into it, which is the Corps-trained half of her reflex. The Lyndri half finishes the read before her conscious mind does. She is courteous, observant, and slow to anger — Corps discipline, carefully maintained. Lately, the rooms have been stranger than she was warned about, and she is no longer certain her reports back to the embassy are being read the way she files them.

Using These Characters

Every entry is a legal character built with the standard rules. If you want to play one, read the sheet and you're at the table. If you want to adapt one, the same guidelines that apply to archetypes apply here — swap a Background, swap Flaws, swap a skill rank, swap a Feat. See Archetypes for the longer discussion of safe swaps.

For rules examples later in this book, each of these characters appears where their niche fits. Angus is the face of stealth and boarding actions. Hanako anchors social contests, investigations, and leadership calls. Priya handles technical scenes — reactors, drives, damage control. Venlyn works close protection, threat reads, and melee. The assignments are not rigid; a scene that needs a specific ability or specialty will pick whoever has it. But that's the shape of it.