Dramatis Personae: Ilia Elektrostal, Ex-Corporate Freemerchant Captain

Born on one of the harsher Russian colony worlds, Ilia had a typical colonial upbringing, lacking in excitement or stimulation. Perhaps that was why she had always ascribed a poetic wonder to space travel, and why she eventually decided that it was what she wanted to do for a living. She signed on with Dmitry-Akata, a medium-sized interstellar haulage corporation, who paid her a pittance for her job as a cargo engineer. But it didn't matter to her – she was getting to travel the great empty black.

She worked with them for eight years, rising to quartermaster, then first officer, then captain of her own ship, the CSV Jubilant Snowflake. By the time she was 29, space had lost some of its wonder, replaced by the day-to-day grind of tight deadlines, low overheads and demanding journeys. Perhaps part of her fatigue was from taking so much shit from Dmitry-Akata – pay rises lagging behind inflation, cuts to health insurance, overtime encroaching on paid leave and a million more little insults. All while the unions utterly failed to exert any pressure to improve their working conditions.

Finally, eventually, the camel's back broke. During a night of drinking with her crew planetside, they started all expressing the same sentiment: fuck Dmitry-Akata. Drunken, joking plans to liberate their ship from corporate hands were made, half-assed and filled with in-jokes. When the hangovers cleared the next morning, they all seemed to have decided that the old adage of "drunken words are sober thoughts" had a grain of truth to it.

They were going to steal their own ship.

"Captain" Ilia Elektrostal [100]

ST: 10        HP: 10        Speed: 5.5
DX: 10      Will: 12       Move: 5
IQ: 12        Per: 12
HT: 10       FP: 10         SM: +0

Dodge: 8   Parry: --    DR: 18/6*

Medium Pistol, 7.5mmCLP (10): 2d+2 pi-, Acc 2, RoF 3, Shots 30+1

Traits: Alcohol Tolerance; Appearance (Attractive); Bad Temper (15); Careful; Contact (Smuggling Ring (9; Skill-12 Group, somewhat reliable); Enemy (Dmitry-Akata Concern (6); Medium Group); Fit; Likes (Premium Vodka); Pacifism (Cannot Harm Innocents); Social Stigma (Criminal Record).
Languages: Russian (Native), English (Native), Mandarin Chinese (Accented)
Cultural Familiarities: Slavic, Western
Skills: Carousing-11; Computer Operation-12; Current Affairs (Business)-12; Current Affairs (Criminal Activity)-12; Current Affairs (Politics)-12; Driving (Automobile)-9; Fast-Talk-13; First Aid-12; Forgery-11; Freight Handling-13; Guns (Pistol)-10; Intimidation-10; Leadership-13; Merchant-13; Navigation (Space)-12; Observation-12; Piloting (High-Performance Spacecraft)-10; Savoir-Faire (Mafia)-13; Shiphandling (Spaceship)-12; Smuggling-13; Spacer-14; Streetwise-13; Survival (Woodlands)-11; Vacc Suit-11.
Notes: DR is nanoweave jacket, covering torso and arms; higher value vs. piercing and cutting.

Ilia Elektrostal is a colonial-Russian spaceship captain who, with the help of her crew, stole the spaceship they had been working on, turning freemerchant and smuggler. Ilia and her crew are often called pirates, but they could only be described as such in the loosest possible sense of the term. Their operation of their ship is totally, 100% illegal of course, but only because it's stolen. They spend most of their time taking freemerchant haulage jobs, some light smuggling, and black-market cargoes.

Ilia herself is an odd mix of characteristics; she has an energetic and capricious sense of humour, though is extremely careful and guarded, so she tends to come across as serious, dour and humourless to strangers. This makes her sense of humour all the more shocking when it arises but also provides a good marker for when she's begun to either trust or open up to someone. When it comes to a job, her serious and cautious nature rules supreme, and she never takes a single action without weighing up its consequences and repercussions.

Ilia and her crew are best suited for a space opera setting, fitting especially well if interstellar communications are slower than spaceships. Because of this, she doesn't come with G-Experience, G-Tolerance or the Free Fall skill. If your setting doesn't have artificial gravity, those should be the first additions. Guns (Pistol) can easily be swapped out for Beam Weapons (Pistol) if those are favoured but no more weapon skills should be added – Ilia isn't a fighter, her line of work just demands that she knows a thing or two about how to defend herself. Driving (Automobile) is meant to represent the vehicles that ordinary people use; if contragrav or vertol vehicles take this place, change it to an appropriate speciality of Piloting.

Click here for a GCS file compatible with GURPS Character Sheet. It will look like text; just click the download icon and you should be able to load it in GCS without issue.

Ilia as an Non-Player Character
Ilia is ideal as a Contact for PCs; she's savvy, knows her way around the local area and has information that isn't public. She could be consulted for tips on prices for cargos for speculative trading, introductions to the black market, or help on bypassing customs and proper channels. Even better, she's highly-mobile, so if the PC's appearance roll goes well, she may well be on the same planet or in the same star system.

The same qualities make her a good Ally. Her ship could even be the PCs' ride if they don't have their own; provided the PCs are of the same ilk as her, she'd have no qualms transporting them if they can compensate her in money, favours or other immaterial goods.

Ilia as a Player Character
Ilia would make a great basis for a player character in a Firefly-style game about a group of goodhearted, anti-establishment rogues with a rustbucket starship trying to get by. It would require that the rest of the players consent to one player being the "captain", of course, but Ilia isn't the dictatorial type. She perhaps lacks some depth in her backstory for this; an interesting modification might be if her career in space was partially to escape political instability on her home planet, giving the GM civil war or underground resistance plot hooks to dangle.

Players taking control of Ilia will definitely want to add more traits -- 100 points make a competent professional NPC but as a PC this is underpowered for anything but gritty campaigns. Consider bumping DX and/or IQ up by a single point, improving some weapon skills, or adding a relevant Talent. Past that, GURPS PCs need more breadth of skill than NPCs do, so a few more background skills or improving the ones already present will take you up to the 150 "minimum" for PCs. If running a higher-power game, further levels of DX and IQ and some beefed-up advantages are probably the best investment.