Hi all. So I am loving Genysys so far and plan to run a few games I have been looking for systems for in the future (Dr Grordbort, Lone Wolf, Fighting Fantasy to name but 3), but so far I am being underwhelmed by Archetypes. I totally get them as a perfect way to create species, and star wars really nailed things well. Archetypes would work very well for contemporary settings, but for others they seem rather pedestrian and somewhat mundane. For non-contempory settings I think they needed to be handled like warhammer 3rd ed and Star Wars, so should reflect individual cultures of whatever worlds you are playing in, such as the examples for Reiklander or Corellian Human. Hopefully the setting books will explore these ideas more fully, and I appreciate its difficult to include such examples for a baseline generic system, but at the moment I feel they are a little uninspired.

For the time being we are stuck with creating our own culturally flavored archetypes, I guess. The ones that are available are a way of showing us how to build them and get some ideas on Abilities a species or archetype might possess. A generic corespondent will never be able to come up with specific archetypes based on specific properties. But we get lots of generalized ideas. Which is perfect as a starting place.

I find the generic 3 are boring but the ones given in each Theme are much better. In particular the Bioroid and the Mongrel

I think the danger is that Species are inherently more interesting than human archetypes as is. Perhaps Archetypes could be more like the cypher System Descriptors, so a player could be Tough, Agile, Charismatic, Intellectual etc rather than a labourer. I think as is, Aristocrat and Labourer sound more like careers rather than an Archetype, while Average Human just sounds dull.

Justin, take a look at the "Blackwater Character Options" in this folder: Blackwater Setting Stuff

I created a number of archetypes for various cultures in my swords and sorcery setting, you may find some of it useful to work from. The only one I realize is not accurately balanced to 100xp is Vultavian, as the fear resistance they get is equivalent to a Tier 2 talent, but I'm not worried about Fear coming up so often that that will be a huge advantage.