Action, adventure, romance and Indiana Jones - they go together naturally, and they're part of the reason Raiders of the Lost Ark and its two sequels were so successful. Indy's adventures are full of hairbreadth escapes, beautiful, exotic locations and powerful magical treasures. The success of your campaign depends in large part on how well you, the gamemaster, capture the feel of an Indiana Jones adventure, and that's what this book is here to help you do.
This campaign pack consists of four parts. There's the gamemaster screen, for use when you're running adventures. "The Art of the Gamemaster," gives you some advice on constructing and running adventures. When you're ready to begin writing your own scenarios, check out "A Cast of Dozens," below. There you'll find gamemaster characters for you to use in your adventures. They already have all their statistics listed, as well as names, personalities and equipment. All you have to do is set the scene. Think of them as extras in your own Indiana Jones movie.
Finally, this chapter includes several adventure outlines for your use. Until you get used to creating entire adventures, you can use these to get your game sessions off the ground. These are short adventure sketches, without statistics for gamemaster characters or complete descriptions. You can fill these in as you go.
After this, you'll move on to source material you can use to set adventures in 1930s Japan. It's a dark, dangerous place, a country on the brink of war and one very different from modern Japan.
Finally, you'll move on to "Indiana Jones and the Masamune Blade," a fully fleshed-out adventure for your group to enjoy.
Now it's time to fuel up the plane and head off to our first adventure. If you're new to gaming, you may be a little nervous about runnning a game yourself, but don't worry. You'll be fine.
Trust me.
A typical roleplaying game book is immense. It looks like that math book that so overwhelmed you in elementary school. If you've played other games before, you know that it's not necessary for you to know every rule and every facet of the adventure you're going to run.
Roleplaying isn't about competition, and if competition isn't important, then exact adjudication of the players' actions isn't important either. Your job as the gamemaster is to have fun, and to provide your players with an exciting and fun evening of storytelling. This outweighs the importance of knowing all the rules.
There are two main things to remember when you're running a game. Keep these in mind and you'll be a great gamemaster:
Your are in charge. You can make up anything that you want.
Your word is law. What you say outweighs anything in the rule books.
When you are gamemaster for an Indiana Jones adventure, you are not bound by written rules. The MasterBook should be considered a collection of suggestions. You can use the ones that you like and either simplify or ignore the ones which you think are too complicated or unnecessary. To be fair, you should let your players know beforehand which rules you've changed or thrown out. As gamemaster, you have unlimited freedom to improvise once the game begins. As long as you're impartial and stick to the spirit of the game, your players are obligated to accept your decisions without question.
Instead of memorizing rules and details, you should concentrate on three areas: setting, characters and combat. If you put time in becoming familiar with these three things, you'll be a great gamemaster in no time.
As a gamemaster for World of Indiana Jones, you have to become as familiar as possible with the setting of the game. There are several good sources of information on the Indiana Jones setting, including the source material in the basic book and history books, documentaries and the like on the period.
In addition, watch the movies. These are your best source for information on the world of Indiana Jones. They really set the mood for the game.
We can't overemphasize the importance of familiarity with the setting. The cultural, technological and historical details of the roleplaying environment are the actual "rules" of the game and neither you, as the gamemaster, nor your players should be allowed to violate them. If you do, then you're not really playing in the Indiana Jones world, right?
As referee, you need to understand how to create player characters. Specifically, you need to know how to determine the ratings on skills and attributes and how they function in the game. As gamemaster, you'll want to know this so you can help your players create characters during your first gaming session.
It's a good idea to gather your players together before the first game and create characters with them. That way, you can guide them through the creation process and get a feel for the sort of characters they want to play. If you have a group of academics who couldn't fight their way out of the proverbial paper bag, then you'll want to try to gear your adventures away from combat. On the other hand, if everyone is playing action/adventurer types and none of them show any signs of interest in intellectual puzzles, stay away from mysteries.
If you have a concept of what sort of adventures you enjoy running, you can try to steer player characters in that direction. If you're pretty sure that there are going to be lots of fights with Nazi soldiers, but everyone is creating venerable academics, you can suggest to one or more of the players that the game is going to be a bit more action-oriented and ask them to build a character with a few more physical skills.
Combat situations usually involve the game's most difficult rules. As a gamemaster, you should understand how to resolve a combat situation, but it isn't necessary for you to know every optional rule. Combat follows a strict sequence of steps. Learn these basic steps and you're home free. When optional rules creep in, look them up then, but concentrate on the basics for now.
One final note on combat: although it's important to use the combat rules fairly, do not let the dice ruin the game. As gamemaster, there may one day come a time when, in the middle of an adventure you've worked on for months, the player characters get lucky and kill or capture your main villainfive minutes into the adventure. What do you do?
Cheat.
It is acceptable for you, as the gamemaster to cheat. There are no real rules to govern this, so we've put some together for you.
1. Cheat fairly: What this means is don't bend the rules on a regular basis or too often for one side and not the other. Keep track of how often you cheat for your villains and try to cheat in the players' favor about the same amount.
2. Try to be plausible: After a player rolls an incredibly high total on the dice and hits the main villain of your adventure, don't just smile at him and say, "You missed." Try to come up with a plausible reason why the villain survives. They can even be cinematically plausible, like a cigarette case blocking the fatal bullet.
Another old favorite is the missing body approach, where it looks like the villain has died, but it's in such a way where it can never be proven: "No one could have survived that crash. I guess Dr. Seidread will no longer be dogging our steps."
3. Don't cheat too often: Nothing seems to make players happier than somehow spoiling all of your work. Wheter they kill the evil Nazi scientist in the first scene of the adventure or come up with a way to skip over your entire "Jungle of Death" scene and get to the jungle temple well ahead of Dr. Seidread, players love outwitting you, the gamemaster. Let them. Unless it's really important, don't cheat too often. You'll spoil all of your players' fun and they'll feel, well, cheated.
Getting an adventure ready to play is the hardest part of a gamemaster's job. Learning the rules is secondary. You can have every word on every page memorized, but if you can't tell a good story, it will all be for naught. A good roleplaying adventure should be richly textured and as solidly plotted as a novel. It takes lots of practice to write a good adventure, but if you follow these few simple steps, it will become far easier:
Step 1: Determine the main goal of the adventure. The World of Indiana Jones goes into a great deal of detail on the kinds of goals you can have in your adventures, and we son't repeat that here. If you're still not sure just what's meant by goals, look at the three movies. In Raiders fo the Lost Ark, it was finding the Ark of the Covenant. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it was regaining the Sankara Stones from the Thuggee cult and returning them to the village, as well as freeing the children. Keeping the Holy Grail out of the hands of the Nazis was the major goal in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as freeing the elder Dr. Jones from his captors.
Determine what the player characters must do to achieve their goal or solve the problem successfully.
Step 2: Determine the core scenes of the adventure. Like a movie, a roleplaying adventure is arranged as a series of scenes. In a roleplaying scene, the characters are usually required to solve a minor problem, explore an area or resolve a confrontation with a creature or character, before they can move on to a new scene. Here are some examples of different sorts of scenes:
The player characters come to a raging jungle river and must figure out some way to cross it;
The characters encounter a hidden temple filled with poisonous vipers and must defeat or outmaneuver the creatures;
The characters go to the library to search for clues to a lost treasure;
The characters meet a beggar in the streets of Cairo. He holds a key bit of information and they must find a way to get it from him.
(The beggar is an example of a gamemaster character. Gamemaster characters are imaginary characters controlled by you, the gamemaster. You will create the gamemaster characters in the adventures that you write by determining the character's skills and statistics, as well as his personality and motivation. This may sound tough, but we'll get into it in more detail later.)
Step 3: Create minor scenes to link the core scenes. Now that you've got the goal and the obstacles to the goal in mind, it's time to flesh out the adventure. This is done be adding minor scenes to the framework. These scenes can be very minor, as little as a one or two sentence mention of something, or a transitory scene (say, a camera shot of a map with a red line going between cities to tell the characters that they're traveling).
Minor scenes are a key part of building the mood in your adventure. Say you're running an adventure where your player characters are traveling to Transylvania to search for the ruins of Dracula's castle. You've got your goal, that is, finding the castle. You have three or four major scenes, things like a night-time border crossing into Nazi territory, a scene where the characters have to get information from a group of gypsies, and the final climactic scene where they discover that Dracula really does exist and that vampires are real.
You'll probably want a horror movie feel for an adventure like this. Some minor scenes that will help to build this feeling are listed below:
1. Whenever the characters are outside at night, they can glimpse someone following them, but can never get a clear view of who, or what, it is.
2. They notice a great number of bats and other creatures in their vicinity.
3. A wolf pack stalks and attacks them when they get close to the castle.
4. A gypsy fortune teller offers to tell a random character's fortune. When she looks at his hand, she is visibly shaken and demands that the character leave. She will only tell him to give up on his quest or he is doomed.
You've got the idea. Minor scenes can be as involved or as trivial as you like. It's a good idea to list a few when you're creating your adventure to maintain the mood you're trying to build.
Minor scenes are also a good place to introduce subplots or continue with an ongoing subplot. Subplots are covered in the MasterBook rulebook as well as in the World of Indiana Jones. Take a look at these sections when you create your first few adventures to familiarize yourself with the different sorts of subplots.
If you create a gamemaster character or two that you really like, try to bring them back in minor scenes. Having reoccurring characters in your campaign makes it more realistic, as well as helping to ease player characters into unfamiliar settings.
In this short adventure, we have 10 scenes. The major scenes are listed in bold type, the minor ones in standard type. The goal of this adventure is to recover an ancient sword from a secret tomb. The enounters are as follows:
1. The player characters discover a musty old map, hidden inside an old volume. It gives the location of the secret burial place of Sir Lancelot duLac. As the characters prepare for their journet to England, the map and book are stolen by Dr. Seidread, a rival archaeologist.
2. On their way to the airport, the characaters come across an accident. The occupant of the vehicle is a beautiful heiress. She is badly shaken and has suffered amnesia as a result of the crash. Will the player characters help her? If they do, one of them may very well become involved in a Romance subplot with her. Wheter they take her with them or not won't directly affect the outcome of the adventure, so this encounter is a minor scene.
3. The characters arrive in England, but Dr. Seidread has planned a reception for them. Four thugs wait to "convinve" them to go back home.
4. The characters arrive in a small town near Fountains Abbey. They can arrange to obtain a guide and spend an evening in peace before trying to find the site. If the villagers are questioned, the characters can get clues to the location of a "haunted glen" in the woods outside of town.
5. Characters get to the "haunted glen" and discover some good news and some bad news. The good news is they've made it to the area where the tomb should be located ahead of Dr. Seidread; the bad news is there's a small church on the spot. This doesn't seem too bad at first, but the "priests" in the church are actually a bunch of Nazi spies and saboteurs. The characters will be invited in for a meal, then be drugged and imprisoned.
6. The player characters awaken to find themselves in a cavern under the church. They are interrogated by the Nazis and tortured. Dr. Seidread is also a prisoner here. He will tell the Nazis about the tomb and offer to split any loot with them.
This is a good place to really play up the evil of the Nazis and Seidread.
7. Escape! If the players come up with an escape plan for their characters, let them do it. If not, one of the townspeople followed them out to the church and creates a disturbance to allow the characters a chance to escape. They discover the entrance to the secret tomb and can get in first.
8. The tomb is filled with traps to protect Lancelot's body and possessions. This section will be a lot like the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
9. The characters find the heart of the tomb and can recover the prize.
10. The characters must deal with the remaining Nazis, led by their old rival, and escape.
One of your most important jobs as a gamemaster is controlling the gamemaster characters and creatures (for our purposes, we'll define a "creature" as an unintelligent animal or monster). To do this effectively, it's necessary to be familiar with their personalities, motivations and combat abilities.
For gamemaster characters, you need to know four things:
General Personality. Is she pleasant or grumpy? Honest or deceitful? Cheerful or morose? Bright or stupde? How will this character interact with the player characters? In most cases, you can keep track of these things with one or two words jotted down next to the character's game statistics. For instance, n the sample adventure, we could describe the young woman in encounter #2 as helpless, trusting and grateful. Dr. Seidread, on the other hand, is deceitful, vengeful and hostile.
Now that we've given the gamemaster characters some sort of personality, we know that when the player characters approach the young woman in encounter #2, she'll be in a confused state. But if they help her, she'll be appreciative and help them in any way that she can. When the player characters run into Dr. Seidread, he'll try to trick them and harm them in anyway that he can.
Motivation. What is the gamemaster character's function in the encounter? Is she an innocent bystander? Is she guarding something? Does she have an interest in helping or hindering the characters? (The woman's goal is to get help and medical attention. Dr Seidread's goal is the same as the player characters', to get to the tomb. He also has a secondary goal, to make the player characters' lives miserable in the process.)
Knowledge. Does the gamemaster character have any information which might be helpful to the characters? Make sure that you're clear as to what your characters know and don't know. Keep in minds that your characters shouldn't just give their information to the player characters - they'll have to ask the right questions or appeal to the gamemaster character's motivation in the right way.
What will she do in a fight? Just in case violence ensues, you need to be familiar with the gamemaster character's combat statistics and fighting style, as well as what weapons are available and any special powers she has, if any. Will she fight to the death or will she break off at the first opportunity? Will she throw herself to the ground and beg for mercy or will she call for reinforcements and close in for the kill?
For creatures you need to nkow only three things:
Its personality. This should be nowhere near as sophisticated as the personality of a gamemaster character. These can usually be summed up with one word. Words like hungry, vicious, dkittish, neutral, content, etc. should suffice.
Its motivation. Much more basic than those of gamemaster characters, these can be described with words like fear, hunger, anger, maternal instinct, etc.
Its combat routine. As with gamemaster characters, you need to know what the creature will do in a fight and how it will do it.
Players are unpredicatable. No amount of thought and work on your part is going to be able to prepare you for the unexpected things that may happen during the course of an adventure. For many gamemasters, this is all part of the fun and challenge of roleplaying. You'll soon learn to love watching your players stumbling down one blind alley after another, jumping from here to there and never coming close to the adventure that you had planned. As you become more experienced at running a roleplaying game, you'll be better prepared to either get your players back to the adventure at hand or to make up a different and exciting adventure for them as they go.
If you're not comfortable with running "off the cuff," here are some suggestions for getting characters back on the right path:
1. Make up a new gamemaster character, such as another archaeologist or scholar and have him cross the player characters' path and offer his guidance in exchange for their assistance. (There are a number of Subplot cards in the MasterDeck that can help with this as well.)
2. Have the player characters discover a diary or scrap of parchment with a clue on it. This is perhaps the least "heavy-handed" approach, if you make the clue fairly cryptic.
3. Rethink one of your scenes and adapt it to fit where the player characters are now. Maybe their current approach to their goal isn't so bad, after all. Getting to know how your players think and react will make it easier for you to predict what they will do in future adventures.
Writing a good adventure is like writing any other work of fiction, and your adventure should contain these five elements:
1. An intriguing introduction that provides player characters with a strong and clear goal.
2. A strong plot which unfolds and develops in a logical manner as the player characters move through the adventure.
3. Vivid gamemaster characters with interesting and unique personalities. Try to avoid stereotypes and characters lifted from other adventures. Remember, not all villains should have the same character traits and motivations. If you take the time to develop your gamemaster characters, they will seem much more realistic and lifelike than those produced with the "cookie cutter character" approach.
4. Adventures should have a variety of encounters, including violent confrontations, nonviolent interactions and situations that require problem solving.
5. A dramatic climax where the player characters achieve their goal and earn a meaningful reward, or fail and suffer serious consequences.
There are a number of resources that can help you improve your adventure design. Books on writing fiction are available in book stores and libraries. Published adventure modules are worth a look at - if the adventure is not to your liking, elements of the plot can be grafted on to your original idea. Movies and television can be a great tool for a beginning gamemaster.
The most important thing to remember is that to get good at anything, you have to practice. Write as often as possible and be big enough to learn from your mistakes. Your players will let you know what they liked and disliked about your game.
Listed below are several adventure hooks for use with your Indiana Jones game. These hooks are bare bones oulines which, with a little bit of work, can be fleshed out into full-length adventures. When preparing these hooks for your game, ask yourself the following questions:
Who? Who will the characters be most likely to encounter in the course of their adventure? Who will be their enemies and who will be their friends?
You may want to invent new gamemaster characters for these roles in the adventure or you may decide to use some of your existing characters. As was discussed above, you'll want to list the gamemaster character's abilities, knowledge, motivation and personality before you attempt to run the adventure.
What? What is the goal of this adventure and how does it fit in with your long-term goals for the campaign? What long-term effects will this adventure have on the player characters, and are they ones that you can live with?
Where? Is the suggested setting one which you like? If not, how will changing the setting affect the adventure, if at all? These are all things that you should keep in mind.
As you determine where the adventure will take place, take the time to decide which of the settings should have maps. You should prepare them ahead of time, or at least give some serious thought to the look of the setting.
When? Is the time period that the adventure is set in the same as the one in which your campaign takes place? This can make a difference, due to the level of technology available and the general "feel" of the game. An adventure set in France before the German occupation has a very different feel than one set during it. These are all things that have to be considered.
Why? Plot and motive make up the "why" of an adventure. What you have to ask yourself is, "Is this plot right for my group of players?" If the answer is no, you'll have to determine what you have to change to make the adventure one on which your players would go, or how to make them want to go on it.
How? How do you involve your players? Motivating player characters can be a frustrating experience for even long-time gamemasters. Sometimes players will do everything in their power to avoid becoming involved in an adventure. It only seems like they enjoy watching you squirm - the truth is that often their reluctance arises from the way you presented the adventure. Players don't like feeling that they're being "forced" into an adventure. They like to feel that their characters have total freedom of choice at all times.
Does this mean that you shouldn't try to get players involved with the adventure that you have prepared? No, of course not. What you have to do is give the players the illusion of free will.
There are several ways of achieving your goal of having the characters tackle the adventure that you've prepared. Below is a short list of some of the more popular methods:
1. The Wandering Adventure Hook (or, "Wherever you go, there you are.") This method is the best for maintaining the illusion of player free will. You present the players with a choice of where they want to go and no matter what they decide, the adventure hook you want to use is there waiting for them.
Example: Yourlast adventure ended in Washington D.C. The next adventure you have planned deals with saboteurs in the capital. You ask the players where they'd like to go in Washington. No matter where they tell you they're going, they see the same sleek black roadster speeding down the road, with the police in hot pursuit. Their car is nearly run off the road during the chase. Don't you think your players will be the least bit curious and want their characters to get involved?
2. The Carrot. This method involves your dangling a reward in front of the players to get their characters into the adventure. Some examples of carrots are: money, fame, money, power, money, wealth, and especially money. A little greed goes a long way and it's ususally very easy to get characters to do something for the promise of cash.
3. The Stick. This is the opposite of the Carrot. You get the players to go on the adventure by promising them unpleasant things will happen to their characters if they don't go on the adventure. The list of sticks can include death, imprisonment, loss, pain, arrest, etc. This method works well if one or more of the others have failed. (Don't use it too often or your players will lose their illusion of "free will.")
4. Higher Destiny. When you use this hook, you give the player characters vague hints that the adventure at hand is crucial to the fate of the world and that they are fated to be a part of it. This makes the players feel good about being in on the adventure. Suddenly, they're no longer the "little guy," they're movers and shakers and the fate of the world is in their hands.
This is another hook which can't be overused without losing its effectiveness. If every adventure is earth-shattering in its importance and they're always the only hope, they'll soon get jaded and bored.
5. Right Place At the Wrong Time. To use this hook, you merely have to start the adventure without the characters. That's right, they come into the action when things are already underway and get swept up in the action. Before they know it, they're involved and can't help but play it out.
Those are some of the means you can use to get players involved in scenarios against their will, and there are many others.
Now let's look at some scenarios:
Nazi spies are operating in the United States. They are planning to steal a diamond displayed in a museum that the player characters have some connection with. The Nazis will use the diamond to build a machine which projects a ray that causes people to become invisible for a short period ot time. The machine requires diamonds of a particular grade and size to be ground for the lens. They have a small prototype of the machine now and will use it to rob the museum.
The player characters' goal is to prevent the Nazis from returning to Germany with the prototype or to sabotage it so it will be discredited.
If your group of adventurers are already linked with a museum or university, the diamond that the Nazis are after can be part of the collection there. If they aren't linked with an institution of that sort, they can be called in by a gamemaster character to help out with translating hieroglyphics or cataloging a new find.
The adventure starts late one stormy night, when the power to this section of the museum is cut. Let the characters decide what they'll do and then have them make an Intellect or perception check to see if they hear the sound of breaking glass.
There are four thugs in the process of entering the building. All four are invisible, but one has a flashlight. Providing that the characters stop this first attempt at stealing the diamond, what happens next?
The player characters will have several problems with this adventure. The first thing they'll have to figure out is just what it is that the thieves were after. If they do some investigation, they'll learn that there have been several diamonds stolen recently, all of a similar size and grade to the one on display here in the museum.
They'll also discover that several thefts of electronic components have occurred in recent weeks. A newspaper story calls the rash of crimes the "Wraith Robberies" as a watchman at one firm swears he saw components loading themselves into a truck. When he attempted to get closer, he heard the ghost shout something at him in German. He was then hit on the back of the head and knocked unconscious. The police said that they had some strong leads in the case and expected to have it solved in a matter of days, but that was two weeks ago.
The player characters will have to figure a way of either combating the invisibility ray (pouring paint on the floor or spraying it in the air are two good ideas) or find some way to follow the thieves back to their hideout. It's then a matter of bringing in the police or fighting the spies and putting an end to their spree once and for all.
The characters are on a dig, high in the remote mountains of the Canadian north. While investigating some strange runes carved into the wall of a cave, the characters are captured by a tribe of primitive people dressed in the style of ancient Norsemen.
The Norsement live in a network of underground caves, heated by volcanic activity. They believed that one of the characters is the reincarnation of one of their greatest heroes and want him to go on a quest to retrieve their most valuable possession, the "Hammer of the Gods," which has been stolen by a tribe of "giants" who also dwell in the caverns. They explain that, without the magic of the hammer, they cannot possibly defeat the giants.
There are several ways to involve the characters in this adventure. The most obvious is to have the university the characters are involved with send them on the dig. If characters aren't linked to a school, they could be hired by a reporter to accompany her to the dig site, either as guards or as guides (if any of the characters is familiar with that portion of the world). Another idea is to have the characters investigate a previous expedition to the area, which has vanished without a trace.
The "giants" that the tribesmen refer to can either by real giants or another tribe whose members happen to be much larger and stronger than members of the other group. Whether the Hammer has supernatural powers or not is up to you. What really matters is that each group strongly believe that it is the key to domination over the other. The "giants" hope to use the Hammer to destroy the Norsemen.
If the characters use modern weapons against the "giants", they will find that the tribe has not way of dealing with them. The "giants" will try to arrange a truce so they can talk. They will propose a series of non-lethal contests for possession of the Hammer. The contests are based on similar ones from a Norse myth, which pitted Thor, Loki and companions against a group of giants for possession of Thor's hammer. As in that myth, the giants will cheat.
The games are as follows:
1. An Eating Contest: In the original myth, Loki tried to out-eat the ravenous hunger of fire and failed. The giants used illusion to make the fire appear to be an impossibly thin youth. As Loki ate everything placed in front of him, including the bones, the fire consumed all, flesh, bone, plate and table. Non-mythical giants will lace the food of the player character with an herb which suppresses appetite.
2. A Foot Race: In the original myth, Loki had to outrun the wind, which was disguised as a feeble old man. Loki ran faster than any other being, mortal or god, but the wind ran circles around him. Non-mythical giants plan a race course through a cavern filled with sinkholes and pits, which their racer knows like the back of his hand.
3. Weight Lifting: In the myth, Thor was challenged to lift a small cat from the ground. The cat was actually the Midgard Serpent, which encircles the entire globe. As he lifted the "cat's" midsection, its legs would stretch and continue to touch the ground. Non-mythical giants will use two boulders, one made of actual stone, the other crafted from petrified wood.
If the plater characters can win even one of the contests, the giants promise to return the Hammer. The Norsemen suspect that the giants will cheat and suggest that one character be excluded from the contest to search for the Hammer during the games.
Once the Hammer is found, a battle will break out between the Norsemen and the giants, with the characters caught in the middle. In no time, the Norse warriors will overcome and drive off the evil tribe of giants.
Characters that helped recover the Hammer will be made honorary members of the tribe and be gifted with furs and jewelry. If the characters ever attempt to make their way back to the mountain site, they will be unable to find any trace of the caverns or the two ancient tribes.
The following section is a collection of gamemaster characters you can use on the spur of the moment. When an adventure you're running calls for a police officer or perhaps a librarian, and you don't have one prepared, no problem. Just check this section of the book and pull stats for the gamemaster character from here. If you'd like, you can also give them some background advantages and compensations. You may not find the exact character type you need here, but you'll probably find something that will work just as well with a minimum of effort on your part.