Basic Information
She was once an Action Girl, kicking butt, taking names, the whole nine yards. Then she met a guy, got married, and had kids. You figure she'd probably settle down right?
Like hell. The Action Mom can change diapers and fight ninjas at the same time. The minivan she uses to take the kids to soccer practice is armored and has a missile rack on top. And if you're late bringing her daughter home from a date, better notifiy your next of kin.
Sometimes she's juggling her day job as an adventurer with her family duties. In other cases, she is mostly retired from the adventuring biz, but adventure tends to seek her out and the old reflexes kick in. And if anything threatens her kids, hoo-boy. The only thing scarier than a Mama Bear is one who's also an Action Mom!
Sources
Game and Story Use
- It's not easy adventuring with babies, and most games encourage retiring a character, or at least temporarily withdrawing her from the campaign, if she becomes pregnant. Running a character with one or more small children in tow can be challenging, but not impossible.
- A female character who takes low capability dependants during character creation is likely to end up in this role by default - these dependants might be children, but could equally well be elderly or disabled relatives. Still tricky for a globe-trotting campaign, but viable for a local scope.
- The Action Mom would probably work better as an NPC the group encounters.
- That harmless peasant woman with the baby the party encountered turned out to be not so harmless after all!
- She probably has half a dozen kids, all of which she has trained to be lethal.
- A PC's background might include being trained from childhood by an Action Mom.
- Or not realising that their mother was actually a badass. Would work very well for games with child or teen characters, but would also be viable in other eras.
- Example - for a '60s era campaign, a PC could very well be the child of one of the immensely scary women that SOE/OSS used as infiltrators into occupied Europe… and then retired back into civilian life once the war was over with strict orders not to tell anyone what they had done.
- Still, makes a good spear counterpart to the warrior-woman-who-was-a-surrogate-son … as in: "what do you mean you learned to fight like that from your mom???".
- Charity Carpenter.