This is Archie’s homemade robot companion. See Archie’s write-up for more details about the back story of this character.
Boilerplate preface (feel free to skip to character description!): This character is another example in the a set of completed characters I’m posting for the Deeps of Lyrae campaign. I made them for my players, or my players made them.
I’ll refer to them later on if I post recaps, and I thought that other GMs might want them–you should be able to just offer them to new players as a menu of pre-made character options that will work well together.
I didn’t do my own templates for this campaign, so these characters are worked up from templates in the list of published templates I posted a little while ago. The character designs I’ll post were also designed in response to my required character creation prompt for this campaign, and they usually take into account my campaign advice for character creation.
To refresh your memory, the prompt is: “Your character is on a boring backwater planet and has a good reason to want to become a space pirate.”
Eight Ball
A hovering metal orb with one retractable arm, “Eight Ball,” is a robot built out of junk to serve as a pet for an angst-filled teen-aged roboticist. Or maybe to serve as his missing family member. As his name implies, he has a black and white paint job. As a companion, Eight Ball isn’t very useful. He’s got the intelligence of a smart dog and can be taught to do very simple things–he likes fetch. He bobs along about six feet off the ground, following his owner, floating slowly.
If things turn dangerous he’s a little more help. While his owner might be unarmed, Eight Ball packs a built-in electrolaser and the uncanny ability to duck any punch you throw at him. He’s not fast when he’s just bobbing around, but somehow you can’t hit him. It helps him that he’s so small (SM -2).
Eight Ball has 360 degree radar instead of vision. Sure, you can’t use him as a remote camera (unless you want a radar “camera”), but on the other hand no one can sneak up on him. He can’t talk, but he sometimes plays bursts of music through his speaker.
He’s also a hovering stash box. He can hold a little bitty thing if you don’t want anyone to know you have it. His whole body is made of junk, so it’s hard to scan him and see just what is supposed to be in there and what isn’t. He wasn’t assembled from any standard plans, and there aren’t any other robots like him.
It’s not immediately clear how he stays aloft, but it works in space too, and in a vacuum. He’s battery powered and a little sturdier than he looks (DR 7).
Character Sheet
IMAGE CODA: This image was generated with DALL-E 3.
Requires Concentrate 
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