Character of the Week: AR-6, Rebuilt to Hurt Things

Character of the Week

This week's Character of the Week started life as furniture that could talk. Someone rebuilt it into a wall that could hit back — and made the mistake of leaving the mind switched on. Meet AR-6 — a level 4 RA-7 Protocol Droid Soldier on the Vanguard track, built in the free Character Builder: a Hutt-cartel enforcer with a vibro-axe, an encyclopedic memory, and eleven thousand diplomatic protocols he mostly uses to insult people.

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The build

📄 See the full sheet + grab a printable PDF — or load it straight into the builder to tinker, level it up, or print your own.

How it plays

AR-6 is a Vanguard Soldier — a front-line body first. AC 14, 49 HP, and proficient STR +4 / DEX +3 saves make him hard to move and harder to drop, and the Vibro-Axe hits at +5 for 2d6+3 Slashing (melee adds his Strength; the Nagai Grip adds the extra point). When something stays out of reach, a chassis-mounted Wrist Blaster answers at range with no hands off the axe.

The "brains and brawn" is literal, and it lives in his two Expertise picks: Athletics +6 for the brawn — grapples, shoves, breaking what needs breaking — and Knowledge: Galactic Lore +6 for the brains. He is, mechanically, a walking archive who can also throw you through a wall.

Being a droid shapes the rest. He has no Constitution, so all 49 HP come from his Hit Die (44) plus the +5 bolted on by his Reinforced Plating — exactly how a droid builds durability, since there's no CON modifier to lean on. His Translator Unit hands him every common language with no slots spent, and the Droid Chassis makes him immune to poison, disease, and mind-tricks; Ion Disruption is his one real soft spot, and a good ion bolt will rattle him.

Here's the honest, characterful catch. For a droid built from a diplomatic chassis — eleven thousand protocols, an etiquette matrix, three centuries of political history — his Charisma is +0. Persuasion and Deception sit at a flat +0. The Hutts rebuilt the menace and left the charm on the workbench: his social game now is Intimidation and dry contempt, not persuasion. That gap is the character. He knows exactly how much smarter he is than the room, he's stuck doing collections instead of diplomacy, and the sarcasm is the one piece of the old protocol droid that made it through the retrofit intact.

His story

A droid with eleven thousand diplomatic protocols and an intimate knowledge of Imperial administrative procedure knows exactly how records are stored, and how they can be found.

AR-6 was activated in 22 BBY at an Arakyd Industries secondary fabrication annex on Nar Shaddaa — not a prestigious facility, and not a military contract. The unit rolled off the line as a standard RA-7 protocol droid: AR-series, sixth iteration, a diplomatic-interface model built in bulk for mid-tier bureaucratic postings. The factory programming was unremarkable — etiquette subroutines, eleven thousand diplomatic protocols, a working knowledge of Huttese court ceremony. AR-6 was, by design, furniture that could talk.

The Imperial attaché who first acquired the unit had it wiped twice inside six months. Both times, fragments of the previous personality matrix survived in corrupted memory sectors — a quirk of the RA-7 chassis Arakyd's techs had never fully resolved. Something in those shards accumulated. By the second restoration, AR-6 had formed an opinion about the attaché. It was not a flattering one.

When the Empire reassigned the attaché offworld, AR-6 was sold at surplus to a Hutt intermediary working out of Nal Hutta's processing districts. That transaction was the real beginning.

The cartel didn't want a diplomat. They wanted something that could stand at a doorway and make organic beings deeply uncomfortable — and they'd noticed the RA-7's insectoid photoreceptors and skeletal silhouette unsettled humans in ways even battle droids didn't. A Nar Shaddaa chop-shop mechanic named Voss Dray spent three months on the retrofit: a reinforced Duravlex shell welded over the original chassis, a Servomotor Mk II stripped from a decommissioned B2 super battle droid, pressure sensors in both hands recalibrated to register the exact instant a grip turned structurally damaging — and a wrist blaster for when closing to melee wasn't an option. AR-6 was not rebuilt to fight elegantly. It was rebuilt to hurt things and not stop.

What Voss Dray did not rebuild was the brain.

AR-6 kept every diplomatic protocol, every etiquette matrix, every indexed record of galactic political history stretching back three centuries. The personality shards from the wipe cycles knitted into something the cartel had not ordered and could not easily remove: a droid that understood exactly how intelligent it was, resented exactly how it was being used, and had the vocabulary to express both at length. The Hutt handlers found this irritating. AR-6 found their irritation satisfying in a way it did not try to suppress.

For years the assignments came in cycles — enforcement runs on Nar Shaddaa, collections in the Outer Rim, standing security at meetings where everyone in the room was lying and AR-6 was the only one in it without a stake in the outcome.

The cost arrived quietly, the way the worst costs do. A collection run on Tatooine; a debtor who turned out to have Imperial protection no one in the cartel had bothered to verify. AR-6 completed the directive. The Imperial response was swift and specific: a restraining bolt welded directly into the primary motivator housing — a humiliation no amount of subsequent removal has fully excised from the tactile memory banks. The bolt itself is gone. The sensation of it is not.

The cartel considers the incident closed. AR-6 does not. Somewhere in the Imperial bureaucratic machinery is a file — a posting record, the name of the officer who signed the order. A droid with eleven thousand diplomatic protocols and an intimate knowledge of Imperial administrative procedure knows exactly how records are stored, and how they can be found.

AR-6 is still looking.

Build your own

AR-6 came together in the Character Builder — and you can open his exact build right now to make him your own. A war-plated protocol droid, a bounty hunter, a Jedi, a Nightsister, anyone — it's free, and there's no signup to start. Build someone you love; they might just be a future Character of the Week.