Designing your own Inquisitor can be a fun and rewarding process, but can seem daunting. Fantasy Flight has provided a step-by-step process for building an Inquisitor on pages 419 – 421 of the Force and Destiny Core Rulebook. While I will be going through the steps here I won’t be retyping the entire section, so you should follow along in your books.
Now you can just go through steps 1 through 7 quickly and run a generic bad guy Inquisitor. I prefer to customize my NPC adversaries to my story. You can come up with a completely new character and concept of your own for the Inquisitor. However, I like to sprinkle in bits of canon for my players to get excited about.
For my Inquisitor I selected an established character Barriss Offee. I did this because one of my players, specifically my nephew, had worked into his backstory that he had met and was mentored by Ahsoka Tano for a time. So I thought a good counter to that would be her old friend turned enemy.
There is a lot of information in the Legends concerning Barriss, but I am going to stick to canon and some of my own campaign backstory and player choices and requests, specifically what we know from Star Wars Rebels.
Since we now know the naming conventions used by the Inquisitorius I have chosen to give her the Title First Mother. So let’s get started. (For the final stat line and other backstory info see my other article Wanted By Cracken – First Mother.
Step 1: Select NPC Type
Inquisitors should always be the Nemesis type of NPC allowing them to voluntarily take strain. This also gives them a Strain Threshold.
Step 2: Assigning Characteristics
You get to assign the following values to the characteristics of your choice: 5, 4, 3, 3, 3, and 2. For Barriss I decided to go with Brawn 3 and Agility 3. From what I remember of the Clone Wars series, she seemed physically fit and graceful. Intellect 2 and Cunning 4; most Jedi seemed to be of average Intelligence and would get inventive with tactics. Also I think the 4 in Cunning represents her ability to pull off the framing of Ahsoka. Finally Willpower 5 and Presence 3; I saw Barriss as being very Disciplined in the way she carried herself and she is a capable leader.
So we have Brawn 3, Agility 3, Intellect 2, Cunning 4, Willpower 5, Presence 3.
Step 3: Wound and Strain Thresholds
All Inquisitors should have a base Wound and Strain Threshold of 20 before applying characteristics. That gives us a Wound Threshold of 23 and Strain Threshold of 25.
Step 4: Skills
This is broken into 3 sections: Combat, Knowledge, and General skills.
For Combat skills you should choose 3 skills to give the Inquisitor ranks in. The book recommends assigning the following numbers: 4, 3, and 2.
For Barriss I choose Lightsaber 4, Melee 3, Ranged (Light) 2.
Knowledge skills are the simplest to assign. Inquisitors should be educated in a wide variety of fields. So we will simply assign 2 ranks to each Knowledge skill.
Finally for General skills you should give the Inquisitors whatever skills seem appropriate. I would not assign more than 13 – 16 ranks between 6 General skills. The book actually has 7 different skill packages for you to use, which is where I got the idea for the previous suggestion. I looked these over and found one I liked, I used it with a few modifications.
For Barriss I assigned the following skills: Coercion 2, Discipline 4, Leadership 3, Perception 2, Piloting (Space) 2, Vigilance 3, for a total of 16 ranks.
Step 5: Talents
All Inquisitors have the Adversary talent at rank 3. Depending on how powerful you want to make your Inquisitor you should give them a Force Rating of 1 to 3. I chose to give Barriss a 3 she is an experienced Force user at this time. The book also give you a selection of 9 talents to choose from. The recommendation the book gives is to pick 2 of these talents. With the large groups that I tend to run I chose 5: Drive Back, Lethal Blows 2, Parry 4, Reflect 4, and Improved Scathing Tirade. Some might call this overkill, but I also tend to run high XP campaigns and want to challenge my players. Plus, it is always fun to watch them be reminded that you don’t always have to kill the enemy in order to survive the encounter.
Now there are some story reasons I picked these Talents. Parry and Reflect are your standard go to talents for Lightsaber wielders. I chose Lethal Blows so in the case of a critical hit on a PC it really made them think about trying to stand toe to toe with her. Drive Back also helps reinforce the PC’s doubt about trying to take her head on. Even though the Inquisitor missed with that attack, maybe the miss was purposeful–to steer the character to a more advantageous area, or to separate the from their colleagues. Finally Scathing Tirade fits in with one of the Special Abilities that I have chosen for Barriss.
Step 6: Abilities and Force Powers
Now comes some more fun. Selecting Force Powers and other abilities. Depending on what Force Rating you give your Inquisitor you will want to consider which of the 9 choices you take, 10 if you consider the optional sidebar entry. Again the book recommends selecting 2 of these, but I think you can safely take 3 or even 4 without it being too overpowering for your PCs, especially if they are optimizers like mine tend to be. I chose 6: Lightsaber Mastery, Imperial Valor, Terrifying, Unleash Force Power, Move Force Power, and Enhanced Nemesis Combat.
I gave Barriss the ability to use Willpower instead of Brawn with her Lightsaber skill. Terrifying ties back to the Scathing Tirade talent. I wanted the ability to drive home the idea that the PCs were in over their heads. I chose Move because we saw Barriss make extensive use of that in the Clone Wars cartoon. Unleash was selected because, lets face it, most people expect a dark side force user to throw that power around.
I always, always, always, give my Main Villains Enhanced Nemesis Combat. I think you should always do this, the only exception being is if you are going to have several rivals or another Nemesis in the encounter. However I wouldn’t put more than 1 Nemesis in an encounter with fewer than 6 PCs at the table.
Step 7: Equipment
This is probably the easiest section after Wound and Strain Threshold. You have 7 choices. 5 are weapons and 2 are armor. I chose to give her a standard Lightsaber, a Heavy Blaster Pistol, and Armored Robes.
With Breach 1 and Sunder I felt that I didn’t need to upgrade the Saber any more especially after taking Lethal Blows, Parry, and Reflect. I also chose to give her Armored Robes. Most of the Inquisitors we saw in the Rebels cartoon and in the other Legends sources wore armored robes.
I am considering an idea for my next campaign of having a low-level Inquisitor or Inquisitor’s acolyte begin harrying the PCs around the time they reach Knight-Level and show up at other key moments before the big finally all complete and ready to give the PCs that big cinematic ending.
Wesley Goodwin
Latest posts by Wesley Goodwin (see all)
- Inquisitive Design - May 20, 2016
