Character Creation Challenge 2026

I let my thoughts stew after my first set of ruminations and came back to this challenge in March. Here I'm going to ruminate on a few things related to RPG designs and writing proper in no particular order. My thoughts, such as they are, will be grouped by theme.

Game Styles

Most of the games I generated characters for in this challenge were what would be called “trad” games. This is to say that they are games where each player has a character and there is going to be a GM running the character through the world. Exceptions to this in my selected games were:

• Puppetland
• Tomorrow City

Both of these have mechanisms that flirt with giving players a greater say in the world building than is traditional.

So you prefer trad games over story games?

Well, no, actually, not in particular. Available to me physically on my bookshelf are story games like:

• Story Engine
• FATE Core
• FATE Accelerated Edition
• Spark
• Sig: Manual of the Planes
• Posthuman Pathways
• After the War
• Fiasco (it's an RPG if you squint right!)
• Durance (it's an RPG without a lot of squinting even)

In electronic format I have several more including, but by no means limited to:

• Maelstrom Storytelling
• Masks: A New Generation
• Thirsty Sword Lesbians

I do own more trad games than story games, but that's just an artifact of history. More trad games have been sold since 1978 (when I started in RPGs) than story games.

I like story games. (As long as they're not Powered by the Apocalypse or Blades in the Dark-descended; I can't stand those. They're just absolutely not for me and are thus out of scope for this.) I play them with as much glee as I play trad games. They're a nice change of pace for me and, in many cases, fit my tastes better for gaming.

So why the low representation?

Well, this is one of those areas where story games aren't really going to show their strengths. Some story games have such generic and formulaic characters that just generating a character introduces nothing of interest. (Presumably the interest comes later when actually playing.)

Even story games I like that have much more diversity of character types (FATE, Spark, etc.), however, have a problem: making a character in a vacuum is difficult. There's really not a lot there. The characters have a very small number of fixed defining attributes (Spark and Smoke in Sig, for example, and no fixed attributes in FATE) and everything else, practically, involves some kind of relationship that can't really come across in the vacuum of a character generation challenge. Puppetland could. Tomorrow City barely could (I hand-waved over some steps). The rest of the story games I owned would not work well in a challenge of this type.

Random vs. Design

I made sure to put a good mix of game types on this dimension. Some of the games I used are almost completely random in character generation with only a limited number of player choice points. Some games were 100% designed from the ground up with no random element of any kind. And finally some games had varying degrees in between.

All the 1PG games are mostly random generation. The only choice points are where to put a very limited amount of skill points. Of the rest, about half were pure design systems (e.g. CORPS or Tomorrow City or Talislanta) and the other half were hybrid systems with some random elements (usually stat generation) followed by mostly designs. The most interesting of these was Chivalry & Sorcery where you were able to select several options:

1. Random design of almost everything except skill selection and the like.
2. 100% design of the character from the ground up.
3. An intermediate form where you could roll for some things, or pay for specific outcomes on the table.

And while I was making characters I came to a surprising (to me) conclusion: I like both varieties (plus the hybrids). Because of the toxicity of early D&D/AD&D I'd developed somewhat of a hate-on for random character generation. I always wanted to make the character I wanted to play. But it seems that over time this has mellowed. Indeed in my 31 characters, some of the more fun characters that came out of the system were pure dicely happenstance (like the character for Battleforce Bravo) that were just so perfect for a fun concept it felt like cheating to do it.

And this is why this rumination is so late in blooming. I mulled over why this was and how I decided which I preferred. The conclusion was this:

• If the game has a setting (implied or explicit) that inspire a character in me, I far prefer design systems. If I've been inspired I want to play that inspiration not what the dummy dice serve to me. My Navigator character, for example, for a variety of reasons, had my mind thrumming with ideas for characters in my own self-created setting concept. I spent the rest of character generation fighting with the system because I got an awkward set of stats. In the end I made a character that was a close approximation of what I wanted, but it felt like I was fighting to get there. In contrast the Dhuna Witch I made for Talislanta came out exactly like how I pictured her because I picked the things that got me to her with no muss, no fuss.

• If the game for whatever reason doesn't immediately inspire me to make a character either because the setting just wasn't something that grabbed me at first (Buggin') or I just drew a blank on what kind of character to make in the first place (Blue Rose) the randomness helped me break out of ruts in my thinking and led to interesting characters with potential.

I would prefer to minimize the amount of randomness, mind. The near 100% randomness of the 1PG games works for the beer & pretzels nature of those games, but would likely upset me if I was to play a serious and long term game with them. But the small amount of randomness in HARP, or DragonQuest, or the selectable level of randomness in Chivalry & Sorcery (among other games) really did help me when trying to meet these tightly-scheduled challenges.

So in the end this challenge was valuable for me because it actually allowed me to see that my distaste for random systems has mellowed significantly over the decades and that it's not “which is superior” but rather “which is superior under what circumstance. That's an interesting outcome for me.

Game Writing

Here I'm going to get a bit mean, I think. Most RPGs are absolutely terribly written. There's a long history of this, naturally. D&D and AD&D were pretty much just whatever random thought crossed Gary Gygax's mind as he vomited out his rules. The result, predictably, was incoherence, often internal inconsistency (if not flat-out self-contradiction), and the rules were bizarrely incomplete for their sizable page count. On top of that they were written by someone who historically had the misapprehended notion that the deployment of excessively polysyllabic locutionary constructions was an unequivocal signifier of profound intellectual prowess. (E.g. “Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life forms for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal).”)

But that's OK. It was the first game of an entirely new style. There's going to be missteps. This is all forgivable. What isn't forgivable is that here we are over half a century and literally thousands of games later ... and this is still a problem.

Basic rules

Here are a few rules that I use to judge RPGs. And believe me, I'm a very judgmental person when I spend money for things that are presumed to be for enjoyment!

1. Rules writing is a form of technical writing intended to communicate complicated procedures in an accessible way. All other rules stem from this axiom.
2. The vocabulary and register of rules should be appropriate to the intended audience and the subject matter. The use of dollar words in penny contexts is forbidden. (C.f. “antithesis of weal” above.)
3. While flavourful text is an asset, if there is a conflict between flavour and clarity, clarity must prevail.
4. Information design is a thing. We know how to write effective instruction manuals. The rules for making these clear and accessible have been known for all my life at least, and likely longer. Pick up a book on technical writing and browse it!
5. Cross-referencing is essential when communicating complicated ideas. Use it. Frequently.

So now that we have this out of the way, let's look at some prime offenders in each category. And, perhaps, too, some stand-out winners.

Vocabulary and register

In this place most recent games are actually very good. Some of the older games ... not so much. Some standouts for bad are:

• Gangster!: Half the time the rules can't commit to one term, switching randomly between synonyms. Technical writing is, of necessity, very precise writing. Terminology use should be consistent, even if it is “obvious” to the writer that two words mean the “same thing”. I'm not sure that Gangster! ever used words the same twice. It's a slim volume of rules, but a very hard thing to read with loads of ambiguity (right down to how some aspects of character generation even work) and a plethora of undefined terms.
• Space Opera: This one hurts, but I have to be honest. As many dozens (hundreds?) of hours enjoyment as I've had from this game, making a character for it decades later was active pain. It was painfully obvious that the team who made it had people from three countries with three different dialects of English at a minimum (possibly more): Canadian, Australian, and the USA's dialects. And it was clear that the people writing the rules didn't get much of a chance to speak with each other to normalize their writing style and terminology. And that the editor basically just (literally) cut and pasted paragraphs from the contributors into the rule book with little to no change. As a result the vocabulary and register ranges from legalistic and technical (because Wilf Backhaus was a lawyer in Alberta) to chatty and conversational from section to section and, in extreme cases, from paragraph to paragraph. This is by no means the end of the list of sins for Space Opera, however. Look on for more.

These are, however, standouts. It's not all bad writing in this realm, and indeed most games are at least passably competent these days. One standout for good, however, was the Navigator game; lots of games had decent vocabulary and register in their writing but Navigator was a joy to read. I have to give the publisher of that piece kudos.

Flavour vs. Clarity

I get it. I really, really do. Most people making RPGs are creative people. They're playing RPGs. They're running entire worlds as game masters. And now they're taking this a step up and publishing rules! This is actually really impressive effort and they're going to want to bring that creativity to the rules writing.

Don't.

Just don't.

Rules, to be effective, should have the following traits: Clarity, Conciseness, Completeness, Correctness, and Courteousness. Let's deal with these in order:

Clarity

I've touched on some of this in addressing vocabulary and register. But clarity also involves consistent use of terminology (don't say “hit points” in one place, “hits” in another, “concussion hits” in yet a third, etc.: pick a lane and stay there). It involves using the right grammar to communicate concepts with a minimum of fuss. It involves knowing when to repeat yourself, when to paraphrase yourself, and when to stop talking. It also involves a uniformity of voice. The rules should sound like a single person wrote them, even if it was a writing team. (Fiction segments, or examples of play can break this rule, naturally.)

In this regard, most games published after about the mid-'80s are at least fine. The true standouts from the games I made characters in were Space Opera (again), and Gangster! (of course). Space Opera because it didn't consistently use terminology, while Gangster! tended to use tortured (or even incorrect) grammar to the point it was difficult to figure out what they were on about.

Oh, and if your rules are very complicated, there's this thing called “examples of play” that really help to keep things straight. Look no further than CORPS for some excellent use of these to make what would otherwise be very terse wording actually comprehensible.

Conciseness

I'm looking at you here, C&S. God damn was that opening section on medieval times a tedious slog to get through. Was it valuable information? Hell yeah! But was it well-written, engaging, or interesting? Well, maybe the last one was OK, but it was delivered in such a pedantic, academic way that it was a really hard slog ... and I'm a person who's been a fan of this game since 1982!

Other games also have this problem. Space Opera (because of course it does!). Mythras to a point. But Chivalry & Sorcery is the undisputed reigning champ of unreasoned loquaciousness.

CORPS again gets kudos, however. Greg Porter is (in?)famously terse in his rules, perhaps by some standards even a little too terse. But for me he hits the sweet point, because where he's too terse he at least has timely and well-placed examples that clarify those momentary patches of opacity.

Completeness

Everything you need to play a game should be in the book(s) containing the rules. Period. Unfortunately several designers seem to disagree. The original D&D, for example, was literally unplayable out of the box because it needed the rule book of another game from another publisher (!). But as before, this is forgivable because these guys were breaking new ground and best practices hadn't yet developed.

There's no excuse for this in any game written after about 1980. Having a game with incomplete rules (whether the incompleteness is in the design or a byproduct of printing issues is irrelevant) is inexcusable. And for this one DragonQuest gets the dungeon hat and stands in the corner.

The character I made for DragonQuest is a Namer. It's a very powerful college of magic in DragonQuest and it is also basically incomprehensible because, get this, when publishing the game they had to remove some sections and the full explanation of how Namers worked and where they fit in the milieu was cut from the text.

Nobody else in my 31 characters fell afoul of the completeness requirement. They weren't all well-written and clear, but at least they were complete.

Correctness

This comes in two flavours. Again, infamously, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fell afoul of this because of internal contradiction. Quick question: how much does magical armour encumber and/or weigh in AD&D? It's a trick question because there are three answers: one in the Player's Handbook and two in the Dungeon Master's Guide. But again this gets a pass (even if it's an exasperated one) because they were inventing whole new kinds of games here. It's not good, but it's forgivable.

None of the games I made characters for fell afoul of this flavour of the rule. Yay! Unfortunately there's a second flavour.

Sometimes there's editing problems. MegaTraveller, for example, infamously had entire columns of tables shifted to the right by one with the final column missing. As a result there were large sections of the rules on starships that could not be used because the information needed was absent. I didn't make a character for that game, however, so I won't belabour the point.

Instead I'll belabour ... sigh ... God DAMN it C&S! I really do love you but sometimes you make it so hard to!

The character I made had a background skill called “Wood Carving”. There is no skill called “Wood Carving”. There is no skill that is a renamed version of “Wood Carving”. Nothing really fits a skill with that specific a name. I had to presume some things (because of time limitations) and basically made up that skill. (Later, I received a response to a query I had had put in to the publisher: “This is covered by the Bone, Horn and Ivory skill as it states it covers the carving of hardwood items.” Because of course I would look up a skill that doesn't contain wood in its name as the name of “Wood Carving” skill...)

Courteousness

This is going to be a more general thing because none of the rules I read felt discourteous (aside from some low-grade sexism from earlier publications). I can't provide any examples from this set of games that are particularly good or particularly bad. Instead I'll just cast a bit of general advice based on my broader experience with games since the late 1970s.

1. Don't talk down to your audience. Don't tell them, implicitly or (sometimes, shockingly!) explicitly, that if you don't play and enjoy games the same way you do that they're somehow inferior to you. That's how entire game lines with promise, mechanically speaking, die. You can think whatever you like. Don't say it. Don't even hint at it.

2. Don't assume too much from your audience, and whatever assumptions you make of your audience, make sure they're stated up front. For example, don't assume that everybody knows how D&D works when you're explaining your rules. There's entire generations of people who've not played D&D because D&D wasn't a thing where they were or for other reasons of experience and access. (Japanese players, for example, are far more likely to be aware of Call of Cthulhu than D&D.) The same can be said for tropes like elves and dwarves and the fae and such. Different people have different ideas of what these are; make it clear what yours actually are in your rules.

3. Pay attention to modes of address. In the early days of the hobby it was fine, for example, to say “we use the masculine as the generic pronoun” because that was the mode of the time. By the '90s this was no longer the case and people used many techniques to resolve this. By the 2020s it's become somewhat of a land mine and you may want to be extra careful about third person pronoun usage. There's no perfect answer, but there are answers that are going to land you in hot water of sufficient temperature to cook your game line.

4. Be aware of the diversity of your readers. Don't use fonts that are too small. Don't use colours that are common among the color blind in your text. Don't try printing text over background graphics because that isn't something everybody can clearly resolve. Hire a UX expert or at least read a book on the topic.

Information Design

Hoo boy. So much bad information design. Again, as with vocabulary and register, most games are ... passable—if barely so!—but some really got hit with the ugly stick. Repeatedly.

• Space Opera: Once again I whine about Space Opera. It is, however, richly deserved. And before the objections from the fan base pour in, I get it: FGU had limited resources and did the best they could with what they had back in the early '80s. That being said, having reasons for being bad doesn't change the fact that it is very bad. Even ignoring the pseudo-random organization of the rules because of the widely separated authors and the overworked, harried editor at FGU, there are still problems internally. Section headers that don't stand out because they're in a barely larger font without white space before or after. Tables with bizarrely aligned contents making it hard to reconcile values with what they're intended to be. Cross-references to those inadequately-emphasized section headers ... without the section numbering that would be an instant disambiguation. (Why would you even put section numbers on sections if you only ever refer to them by name?!)
• Chivalry & Sorcery: And this one again hurts. Chivalry & Sorcery is a game I love so much I went through tremendous expense and difficulty to get its 5th edition in hardcover. But it's also a textbook case in poor information design. The book opens with 30 pages of just information dump about the medieval world. And don't get me wrong, it's valuable information, but ... it's written like it's intended for a scholastic journal, has no graspable examples that would ground it in the game logic, and is essentially context free. It feels like you just opened up a university textbook with an overview of medieval culture. After that it spends another 20 pages on the core game mechanisms (“Skillskape” and Influence). You're fifty pages into a role-playing game's rule book and you still have no idea what a character even looks like. There's nothing grounding the concepts, so they float around in your head freely and get forgotten within two minutes. FINALLY, then, you move into character generation. But because of the poor information design you find yourself flipping back and forth as never-ending TLAs and FLAWs (Three Letter Acronyms and Four Letter Acronymic Words) have long fled your memory; you have to go back and hunt them down. After this point the rules are better. Competent. Not great, but competent. But you're 50 pages in before competence is achieved.

Information design is definitely a weakness in this industry. I'm not sure I can call out any excellent examples of it. I can call out a couple of good efforts though: Mazes & Minotaurs (a free game!) is very easy to follow along with to make characters, and I also found HARP pretty good as well. Both of them start with what's important in an RPG: the character. Everything from the beginning onward is framed in terms of the character. You have to flip forward to details of each stage (and we'll talk a bit about that need in cross-referencing) but the actual design of information in these two made generating a character, even for the moderately high complexity of HARP, a breeze.

The rest ... well, they're passable. If only just, sometimes.

Cross-Referencing

Complex procedures live and die by navigation: tables of contents, indices, and cross-referencing. Tables of contents are easy and most games have decent ones. Indices are really difficult to get right, and having a bad index is often worse than having no index. RPGs being a very fringe field for most publishers means that a proper indexing editor is not within the means of most companies; it's probably better to not waste the time and page count on trying.

This leaves cross-referencing.

Above you noticed that I very “subtly” indicated that a good (not THE good, but A good) way of structuring information was by grounding it in the character, the point of interaction between player and rules. That two games in specific stood out in how they structured things, and that I foreshadowed cross-referencing as the magic tool that makes it all work.

So let me be explicit: my favourite rules organization as a player or GM is character-grounded. You start with the character and you specifically start by going through a checklist of character generation. For example HARP starts with, after the table of contents and a brief introduction, character generation. Choose a profession. Generate statistics. Choose a race/culture. Buy skills and talents. Etc. etc. etc. The terms needed get introduced so you know what's happening at each step.

This is extremely well done. The general overview is there, and details for the larger parts are located elsewhere in the text. Obviously they also tell you what page this information is on, right?

Wrong.

The organization is correct, but the lack of page (or even section) referencing knocks it down a peg. It means instead of flipping forward directly to the required information, I have to flip back, find that in the table of contents, then flip forward. It's irritating. It's annoying. And it's unnecessary. All this could have been solved by adding a page reference (or two or three or whatever you need) at the end of each of six steps of character generation.

I can't overstate this enough. Missing page references. The infamous “page XX” references that litter so many games. The use of section numbering in older games followed by a refusal to reference by section number. This is all bad and it's all unnecessary. Mazes & Minotaurs, a free game that started its life as a joke is better than this!

TL;DR Summary

I started this challenge for a lark. It was a fun way to test myself, and adding “31 different games” to the challenge was ... well, it turned this into a real challenge because that meant reading (or re-reading) 31 sets of rules.

A lot of what I discovered over that challenge was stuff I had in the back of my mind for decades. The challenge put it into sharp relief, however. This really was fodder for these extremely long ruminations.

With luck you'll find some value in my meandering thoughts as well.

31 characters. 31 games. 31 days. This didn't seem all that hard when I first heard of it at the end of December, provided I did some planning.

The Planning

In retrospect perhaps sticking to the “31 games” thing was a bad idea, because even with the planning it added unnecessary overhead: either learning new rules while creating the characters in my Copious Free Time, or re-familiarizing myself with rules that I hadn't touched in decades. It might have been easier (though perhaps not as interesting) to stick with games I knew well and made several characters for them. Still, between planning and a little bit of cheating, I got it done.

For the planning part, I started making the characters in advance, building up a queue of characters to present. I also selected several “beer and pretzel” games (the 1PG games, Kobolds Ate My Baby!, and Ninja Burger) to quickly generate characters for days I fell behind. Between both tactics I got 30 days done fairly easily (though I almost didn't make the 18th's goal, Mythras was more difficult than I thought it would be, quite different from the BRP-alike I'd presumed it was).

And then there was the cheating. My personal goal was 31 games. But nobody said anything about 31 different game systems. All the 1PG games share the same system: learn one, and the rest are tiny variations on the same game. They're thematic skins over a simple core game. The same applies to the two XPG games, as well as to Ninja Burger vs. Kobolds Ate My Baby!, (though XPG is a more complicated and more serious system). Finally both Mazes & Minotaurs and Vikings & Valkyries are the same game (indeed you can't use the latter without having the rules to the former: it's more like a supplement). By cheating I cut down the amount of learning/familiarization time to be tolerable with only one serious risk of failing to meet the schedule, and one minor one.

The Games

My selection process was essentially whimsy. While I had some games that were “must have” in my list (Mazes & Minotaurs, HARP, and my grand finale with Chivalry & Sorcery), mostly I just opened sizable list of gaming PDFs and browsed, picking things at a whimsy. This has led to some retrospective regrets.

For example with FGU games, which were the gaming backdrop of most of my gaming life, I picked two games (Wild West and Gangster!) that in retrospect I'd not have chosen. This was out of curiosity of what they were really like, since I'd never actually played them, only having read the first, and kind of flipped through the latter. My absolute favourite FGU game—Psi World—didn't make it into the queue, as a result, because I spent so much time with these two rather substandard games. Wild West is … OK, but it's not a game I'd ever play with its gimmicky way of working out your chances to succeed, and Gangster! is an incoherent pile of nonsense. There's barely a game there, and what's there is … well, I'll leave the allusions to faecal matter to your imagination. It's just a very large pile of that imagination.

Additionally, Space Opera, despite being a game that brought me many hours of joy in the past, was probably also a bad choice because I let multiple decades of not using it blunt the memory of how astonishingly badly-written and badly-edited the game is. It's a game infamously complicated, but much of the complexity could have been mitigated had information been presented in a fashion that didn't resemble computer software documentation: a pile of technical jargon and drivel splattered over the page like the writers had the authorial version of dysentry. (Yes. Another faecal reference. I need to tone those down I think, if I want to be taken seriously … while talking about pretendy fun-time games.)

As the number of slots began to run out near the end, along with the time to fill them, I made difficult choices. I made, for example, a CORPS character, but I really also wanted to make one from the same company called EABA. Both games, however, take a sizable effort to make characters in, with the latter requiring more, so I whittled it down to one.

Still, I think that I made a decent enough selection showing enough breadth to illustrate both the diversity of games available and the diversity of characters you could make to play in them. Which brings us neatly to …

The Characters

I'll be going into more detail into some of this later, but I personally think I did OK here. (I even managed to make a few male characters despite, you know, being pretty shit at playing them.) I made:

• a ranch hand
• a ranch owner
• five priestesses
• six warriors/soldiers
• three thieves
• two police/detectives
• six mages/psychics
• two explorer/adventurers
• a monster
• two socialite/diplomats
• three pilots
• a reporter
• two victims for slasher flicks
• a monster hunter
• a puppet
• a bug
• several comedy characters

(The numbers won't add up to 31 because there's overlap. My final character, Alruna, for example, slots in as a mage and as a priestess.)

This is not bad in terms of breadth of character types. In addition, even when a category has multiple entries, there's a large difference across individual characters: all five of those who count as “priestesses”, for example, in some form or another are quite different characters, ranging from naive and newly untested to battle-hardened.

So which of these are my favourites? That's a question for a later rumination. I strove with each one to make a character I would want to play. I succeeded, I think, in most of them. (Why a later rumination? Because I want to talk about that and about how the game systems impacted which ones I connected to and which I didn't. The conclusions will not be the obvious ones.)

One major thing I've come out of with this challenge is … “never again”. Not “never again will I partake of this challenge”. More “never again will I commit (to myself) to 31 different games”. Making the characters was fun. Making them for 31 different games was insanity. I'll stick to at most five games I know well instead of this insanity.

Note: This character is built using the points based method. In C&S this means that some things are paid for from a pool of character points, or they may be rolled for at a reduced cost (or even free). It is built to the “heroic characters” frame, meaning 150 PC points. The setting is High Chivalric

Alruna was just an ordinary daughter of an ordinary man, a carpenter in the countryside. She had the usual upbringing of an impoverished freeman. She was a creditable daughter, bright of eye and ready to take up the mantle of wifery and motherhood until she heard the voices of the Lost Ones. The ancient gods of her people whom they'd worshipped until the temples of The Lady and The Lord of Light arrived, sweeping away the old worship with their new ways.

Hilda paused and checked up and down the path. None in sight. She eyed the trail that branched off before she sighed and set down the basket of vegetables from her cottage garden, carefully placing it on the stump that marked the trail. Father Bruin would not approve, but Father Bruin didn't show up at her cottage, pressing poultices into her hand that saved her Thomas from the wasting cough that was slowly killing him.

Her affinity for the voices cost her. Animals sensed in her something eldritch. Something dangerous. They shied away from her, and this caused the villagers some nervousness. When she met the old crone Vesna, creaking along the road in her wagon, she was inducted into the mysteries of the Lost Gods whose voices she heard. She began to worship the old gods, first in private, then with other villagers. She began to become their spiritual leader, barely tolerated by the Mother of the Temple.

Arthur carried the wrapped bundle from which the scent of meat pies wafted. The missus had selected some of the Earl's own venison to make them. He wouldn't notice the little piece missing. He was obligated to the witch; when his wife's garden wilted, she'd spent the day there, cross-legged, swaying, crooning. By the time she was done, the blight had gone. They could sell produce again.

She studied hard under Vesna whenever the crone came around. She learned the ways of the Lost Ones. Learned how to coax them into doing her bidding. She learned how to hear and treat the land. She learned the ways of plants and the ways of change. The Laws of Magick and Correspondence. Her powers grew, and with them her Faith in the Lost Gods and her standing among her growing following; good parishoners of The Lord and The Lady of Light.

Eldric paused at the edge of the copse of trees. They'd dared him to do it. Called him coward. To prove them wrong he had to return with two apples from the witch's grove. He looked nervously, toward where the cottage was. He'd kept all the trees between him and her home, but he had the feeling she saw him anyway. He snuck through the rowans that shielded her cottage from sight and found himself among the apples.

“What do you plan on doing, Eldric?” the voice asks, gently chiding with an amused tone. “I can't let you steal from me, son.” Eldric's skin crawled with chill. He turned to see the witch, only feet away, arms behind her back. “This is why I will instead gift you the apples.” She pulled the basket she was concealing from behind her. “Fill this. Show those others you had the courage to talk to me and ask.” She suppressed a grin and winked. “We'll keep it our secret that you didn't.”

This is how things stand. She's in an uneasy relationship with the local Temple. The Mother tolerates her presence even though she is not a believer. What powers she receives from these Lost Ones she uses for the benefit of the village, never asking for pay, never doing harm.

But she has her eye on the witch. She has her eye on her.

Character Name	Vocation	Age	Sex
Alruna	Witch	22	F

Eyes	Hair	Skin
Blue-Grey	Dirty Blonde, Braided	Untanned, Silky

Social Class	Father's Vocation	Status	Race	BIF
Average Freeman	Rural Carpenter	10¹	Human	25

Parental Status: Father living, mother dead, has stepmother, one elder brother, no step-siblings. Family Status: Credit to the Family Cash: 260

¹ Intragroup Status +1

Physical	ATT	AR%	PSF±	Mental	ATT	AR%	PSF±	Social	ATT	AR%	PSF±
Strength	10	58	0	Intellect	21	92	11	Appearance	18	85	6
Constitution	12	66	0	Wisdom	15	76	3	Bardic Voice	15	76	3
Dexterity	13	70	1	Discipline	15	76	3	Spirit	22	94	12
Agility	12	66	0	Ferocity	12	66	0	Charisma	15	76	3

Body	Fatigue	BAP	LCAP	CCAP	Jump
36	27	16	127	64	8

Experience Earned	Experience Spent	Character Level
7000	7000	2

Height	Build	Weight	ASR
5'10”	4	152	11

Horoscope	Birth Omens
Capricorn	Poorly-Aspected

Curse: Animals uneasy in presence, -13% animal handling, riding, can never learn animal training, 13% chance animals react badly within 10', dangerous animal may attack within 30'.

Flaws, Deficiencies, Defects: Cannot hold liquor.

SKILLS

Competencies: Accurate Counting, Conditioning, Endurance

Masteries: Witchcraft Mode, Faith, Plant Method, Lore of Correspondences, Healing

Primary:

Skill	LVL	BCS%	ATT	LVL%	VOC	PSF%	TSC%
Witchcraft Mode	3	10	23	9	20	52	62
Faith	3	20	24	9	20	53	73
Plant Method	3	20	14	9	20	43	63
Transmutation Method	1	20	11	3	10	24	44
Laws of Magick	2	40	22	6	20	48	88
Lore of Correspondences	3	20	22	9	20	51	71
Faerie Lore	0	40	22		-10	12	52
Herbalism	2	30	14	6	10	30	60

Secondary:

Skill	LVL	BCS%	ATT	LVL%	VOC	PSF%	TSC%
Illusion Method	0	30	14			14	44
Transcendental Method	0	20	14			14	34
Interpret the Omens	1	20	6	3	10	19	39
Bee Keeping	1	30	14	3	10	27	57
Chirurgy	0	30	12			12	42
Finding Water	1	40	3	3	10	16	56
Fruit Crops	1	40	14	3	10	27	67
Alertness: Sight	-	5	—
Alertness: Sound	-	5	—
Brawling	0	40	0			0	40
Carpentry	0	40	1			1	41
Clothes: Sewing, Embroidery and Knitting	0	50	12			12	62
Cooking	2	40	14	6		20	60
Dodge	0	40	3
Knife & Dagger Fighting	0	40	1			1	41
Local Geography	0	60	22			22	82
Language: Spoken (Own)	0	60	14			14	74
Stamina	0	40	0			0	40
Wood Carving	0	50	1			1	51
Willpower	0	40	6			6	46

Cooking Specialies: Baking Bread, Butchering Fresh Meat, Baking Meat Pies, Herb Spices & Seasonings, Cooking Meat

Tertiary:

Skill	LVL	BCS%	ATT	LVL%	VOC	PSF%	TSC%
Conditioning	0	—	36
Endurance	0	—	27

MAGIC

PMF	ML	MR
62	3	0

Vocational targeting modifiers: Transmutation +15; Wards, Summoning, Command +10; Transcendental, Illusion: 0; Arcane, Fire: -10; Water, Earth, Air: -15

Spell	MR	FP	AP	Mode	Method	Other	Target%	Notes
Enchant Materials	0	3	—	62			62	30-minute ritual
Demeter's Touch	0	13	—	62			62	1-day ritual
Restore Plants	0	7	—	62			62	1-day ritual
Grow in Haste	0	7	26	62			62
Thorn Darts	0	3	8	62	15		77
Armoured Skin: Leather	0	3	9	62	15		77
Night Vision: Cat's Eyes	0	4	9	62	15		77
Calm Pain	0	7	29	62	15		77
Clairvoyance	0	3	H	62			62

Focus: Simple focus in the form of a copper cauldron.

FAITH

Primary Religion: Lost Gods (Witchcraft)

PFF	Current SPR	Belief Status
49	33	Devout

Divine Aid: self + 99 Acts of Faith: 3×

Act of Faith	PFF Min	Succ%	FP	AP	Notes
Blessing	5	—	-1	3	Succ% is recipient's SPR AR, FP from supplicant
Common Prayer	5	94	-1	—	-1 FP per hour of prayer
Prayer for Forgiveness	5	94	-1	—
Prayer for Guidance	5	37	*	—	-Crit FP from supplicant
Prayer for Insight	5	73	*	—	-Crit FP from supplicant
Prayer for Luck	5	73	-3	—
Prayer for Protection	5	73	*	—	FP/AP variable by circumstance
Prayer for Skill or Craft	5	73	*	—	-Crit FP from supplicant
Prayer for Strength	5	49	-3	—
Courage of the Righteous	10	122	*	*	-Crit FP from supplicant, 15 seconds to perform
Minor Miracle	10	49	—	—
Miracle	25	37	—	—
Purify Food and Water	35	73	-6	*	1 minute to perform
Restore the Faithful	40	98	-9	*	1 minute to perform

Puppet Name	Puppet Type
Brandy Casks	Hand Puppet

This Puppet Is: medium size, quite heavy, not very fast, sort of strong, very charming, good at seeing things, a little slow of mind

This Puppet Can: move at a normal pace, dodge things thrown at them if they see the coming as soon as they are thrown, throw things, grab things, hit things weakly, and move quietly if they are lucky and careful, drink large amounts, spot hidden clues, make people happy

This Puppet Can Not: kick things (because they have no legs), move quicker than a finger puppet or move quieter than a finger puppet, tell convincing lies (never believed), stop from talking, form complex thoughts

Note: This game has a special place in my heart since it was my first non-D&D game and was effectively responsible for my breaking away from D&D entirely and in place owning, learning, and playing a bewildering number of games between 1983 and now.

Name: Brynne Gender: Female Race: Human Handedness: Right Aspect: Sun Age: 18 Social Status: Craftsman Legitimacy: Legitimate Birth Order: 2nd of 5

None know the power of names better than does the College of Naming Incantations. It is for this reason that Brynne is only known by this name: her temple name. Long gone are her personal name, her milk name, her generational name, her family name. They are lost to the dust of history as her family gave her up to the Halls of Syrinx, the marble-white slender towers that dot the landscape, one for each town over 300 people, each containing the local Namer in the small towns to entire Namer conclaves in the larger towns and cities.

Brynne. Long-term novitiate. Newly-minted Namer, off on her sabbatical tour of the lands, wearing her simple white robe with its large red star indicating her status within. Her slender form and symmetrical, if suspiciously bland, face concealed by the wide hood of her Order.

She has memories, of course, of her life before the Halls. Before the iron discipline. Before the years of memorizing all of the generic Names of things, and the Names of the powers of the other Colleges, ready to annul them with but a word. She has memories of this, but no attachment to those memories any longer, they having long been displaced by memories of her new family: the Namers of the College, and the walls of the Halls of Syrinx she was taught in.

Now she faces the world, her blue eyes watching, studying, learning, as she prepares to found a Hall of her own, in the mean time serving the populace with her talents and knowledge.

Experience Points: 60 Silver Pennies: 500

CHARACTERISTICS

Characteristic Points: 94 Characteristic Maximum: 21

Primary	Value
Physical Strength	10
Manual Dexterity	16
Agility	13
Endurance	13
Magic Aptitude	21
Willpower	20

Secondary	Value
Fatigue	20
Perception	8

Optional	Value
Physical Beauty	17

Tactical Movement Rate: 5

SKILLS

Language: Common/8 Horsemanship/0 Stealth/0

MAGIC

College: College of Naming Incantations

Generic True Names: – all are known at level 0 unless otherwise specified

Individual True Names: – (self)

Talents:

• Detect Aura/0

General Knowledge Spells:

• all counterspells are known at level 0 unless otherwise specified

General Knowledge Rituals:

• Ritual of Dissipation/0

Special Knowledge Spells:

Special Knowledge Rituals:

Note: I used the first edition because the second has some of the worst writing I've ever seen. I had no idea how to choose a “Risk Factor” when making this character until I read 1st edition. Character was built from 2-player point value.

Name: Candi Appelcline Player: 张殿李 Character Concept: Slinky Exotic Dancer Risk Factors: Horny, Dismissive Worst Thing Ever Done: Got her job by getting her competition so high that she couldn't perform. Sources of Stability: My secretary roommate, Sandra. My performances. Personality trait: cynical shell. Louis, my manager. My Goal: Get enough money together so Sandra can get her degree.

Candi Appelcline (Candy Apple, as her totally original and inobvious stage name would hvae it) is one of those who was genetically gifted to appeal to the eye … and little else. She was not exactly a Rhodes Scholar. She was not exactly noted for any bankable talent whatsoever. Zoolander-style, though, she was suited for being professionally good-looking.

In her case Patricia-style. Candi, though a dancer, also removed all of her clothing. Because Candi was the best stripper in town her neighborhood. (It's a competitive industry, doubly so for those who don't numb themselves with booze and drugs.)

It was a no-brainer really. Get over the shame and instead of being some phone jockey hit on by men with higher amounts of change lost in their couches than she got weekly as salary, or instead of being some clerk in a sleazy bodega, she can bring in, on a good month, high four digits and sometimes even five digits. And all she has to do is writhe around while taking off clothing, letting the saddest and most desperate men in the world have a glimpse of what lacked in their lives.

Of course she didn't fall into the job. She had to work for it, and she did so by sabotaging the friend she was working with to join the industry. Paulette Carmichael (Polette her badly-chosen stage name) was getting ahead of her and Candi needed the money. So she fed Paulette, her friend, so much in the way of edibles that she got fired for being so high on the job she couldn't stand up. That's how Candi became the top act at Pete's Finger Bar & Girl.

Now of course, easy come, easy go. Candi has all the ability to control her finances that she has to control the water flow of the Mississipi. She gives it to anybody with a hard luck story. She gives it to her roomate, Sandra, who is plain as a dormouse and wants to go to university. She buys all kinds of bric-a-brac that fills her shared apartment. She often reaches the end of the month broke, only to start the cycle over again.

And every night she eats at Lou's, the only diner in the neighbourhood open when she gets off work, meeting up with a bunch of other night owls to shoot the shit and just, well, exist. As opposed to being killed off one by one from supernatural beings from beyond the Veil. Because that's just silly!

ABILITIES

Academic	Rating
Trivia	1

Interpersonal	Rating
Bullshit Detector	1
Flattery	4
Flirting	4
Negotiation	3
Reassurance	2
Streetwise	1

Technical	Rating

General	Rating
Athletics	3
Drive	3
Fleeing	20
Filch	12
Health	10
Sense Trouble	10
Stability	12

Psychic Powers	Rating

Note: This character is built from a 2-player level of point allocation.

Name: Dr. Tarini Desai Player: 张殿李

Dr. Desai was a brilliant and compassionate forensic psychologist for a federal investigative agency. Her work was then rooted in a profound belief that understanding a broken mind was the first step toward protecting society from it.

Then came the “Clayborne Case”, a string of horrific mass killing events where each suspect was not 'broken' in any known, meaningful way until three days before their acts. Each reported, in post-crime interviews and assessments, seeing a figure of fractured light and whispering static.

Her profiles were useless. Evidence trails led to tangles of nightmare logic. The final subject of her investigation, a quite, soft-spoken, perfectly ordinary librarian looked at Tarini with terrifying clarity before saying: “You think you protect people from monsters. But who will protect you from the very idea of monsters?” She then, to the shock of all onlookers, without making any sound, without flinching, without any show of pain, grabbed her own windpipe and pulls so strongly she tore it out of her neck, leaving a cooling corpse and a hellish mess while calm, now dead, eyes continued to stare at the traumatized doctor.

Dr. Desai was declared medically unfit for duty after a severe dissociative episode not long thereafter. She could not continue in her work and was put on medical pension pending some sign of recovery. The Ordo Veritas, recognizing in this broken asset, someone of value to them, someone primed to believe already what the OV fought, helped recover her, setting her up, post-recovery, in a small consultancy which she could use as her grounding day job, but which served too as a perfect front for investigating the thinning of the Veil.

She no longer profiles criminals. She diagnoses memetic infections, psychic plagues, and ontological wounds to the world, fighting to protect the world from that which further fractures her own sense of what is real each time she encounters it.

Off-Duty Occupation: Organizational Psychologist (corporate consultant) Current Cover: Desai Group: Organizational Health & Diagnostics, a small consultancy hired out to corporate interests, non-profits, and even government agencies to assess workplace trauma, cultural breakdowns after scandals, or to implement wellness protocols for HR departments.

Hit Threshold: 3

Health: 7 Stability: 9

INVESTIGATIVE ABILITIES

Academic	Rating
Anthropology	1
Art History	1
Bureaucracy	1
Forensic Psychology	4
History	1
Law	2
Natural History	1
Occult Studies	3
Pathology	3
Research	4
Textual Analysis	2

Interpersonal	Rating
Bullshit Detector	2
Bureaucracy	1
Negotiation	2
Reassurance	1

Technical	Rating
Chemistry	1
Document Analysis	1
Forensic Anthropology	1
Photography	1

GENERAL ABILITIES

Ability	Rating
Athletics	3
Driving	3
Health	7
Medic	15
Preparedness	7
Scuffling	3
Shooting	3
Shrink	15
Stability	9

Name: Veronica (“Ronnie”) Vance High School: Townesville Senior Clique: Gear Heads

Ronnie just plain doesn't fit in. She's a gear head, but where they obsess over horsepower and torque and every kind of enhancement imaginable for cars, she feels the soul of machines. Memories of crashes. Yearning for the open road. And this isn't poetic license. This is literal. It's the main manifestation of her psychic powers: mechanical empathy.

Ever since her Dad was killed in a hit-and-run, an event that Ronnie felt miles away, the impact shattering her mind as she clutched at a toy wrench. When the police came to inform her mother of her father's demise, they found her in the garage screaming in the space where her father would have parked the family car. It was dismissed as trauma. It was a vision.

Ever since then she's got flashes of cars' history, can sense when parts are about to fail (the cars complain to her), and in general finds herself more comfortable with vehicles than people. This has had, naturally, an impact on her popularity. So do the sometimes very strange things that happen to people who upset her ...

So does she have what it takes to be the Final Girl?

Let's face it. Probably not. She'll be the one found mangled in the engine bay.

Height: 5'6” Weight: 135lbs Gender: Female Eyes: hazel Hair: dark brown, ponytail Age: 17

Buffness: 3

• Gym/1
• Hold Liquor/-2
• Shooting/1
• Whup-Ass/1

Looks: 2

• Fashion/0
• Pose/0
• Seduction/0

Craftiness: 3

• Dance/0
• Drama/0
• Driving/0
• Gearhead/3
• Mixology/0
• Shopping/0

Brains: 3

• Bookworm/0
• Debate/0
• Geekery/2
• Pop Culture/0

Status: Psychic Powers

Wits: 1 Guts: 5 Blood: 11 Popularity: -1 Character Points:

Name: Alice “Ace” Fitzroy Occupation: Associated Press-affiliated Reporter Race: very Caucasian Age: 28 Height: 5'8” Weight: 140lbs Eyes: green Hair: ruthlessly pinned-back auburn with highly symbolic rebellious strands

Alice grew up in a comfortably middle-class family in Minneapolis. She was destined for the usual track of women in that world: marriage, housewife, mother, quietly desperate alcoholic. Then fortune smiled upon her.

She of course didn't view it as fortune smiling upon her when her family, due to complicated legal shenanigans found itself the inherited owners of a failing agricultural estate. She was put to work trying to keep the estate from sinking the family's fortune, and it was a crash course in rural life and independence she would never forget. Four years later, the estate's fortunes reversed, she engineered its sale, paying down the family-crippling debt and managing to score an additional $250 on top of it for her troubles.

That newfound independence got her a gig in a county newspaper where her writing started to attract notice. It turned out she had a gift for words and colourful language that brought what she was reporting to life. People bought the paper to read what she had to say about the local cattle auction, even if they had nothing to do with cattle.

And that's when Henry blew into her life. A seasoned AP reporter who read her work and convinced her that she really had what it took to be more. Much more. A word with an AP editor and Alice (now “Ace” in a bid for being taken seriously that was more bravado than fact) found herself being sent all over America to report, and found success in the process. When Henry disappeared in Calcutta, she cashed in all the chips she had garnered in the AP to be assigned his beat. There she tracked him down (or, rather, his body) and brought down some very powerful men in the Calcutta Police in the process. That force resents her to this day for it.

Now an international rising star, her fans in Minnesota turned her into an American Midwestern celebrity. She's not an international name yet, but she's well on her way with the Midwest sealed.

By personality Alice is a driven woman who seeks out corruption and vice and mercilessly glares the arc lamps of the press upon it to shrivel it away. The only thing she loves more than dispensing justice upon the wicked with the sharp sword of her pen (or her sharp tongue) is her beloved Minnesota sports teams. (All of them!) The quickest way to her heart is to give her hot news of her beloved teams when she's half way around the world from them.

Luck: 1

PRIMARY STATS AND SKILLS

Agility: 4 (Riding 2, Athletics 1, Pilot (Wheeled: Team) 1, Dance 2) Dexterity: 5 (Craft 1, Repair 2, Firearms 1, Thievery 1) Perception: 6 (Bargain 4, Social 3, Survival 1, Awareness 4) Strength: 3 Intelligence: 6 (Education 3, Cultural Sciences 4, Language (Hindi) 3, Lore 2, Natural Sciences 1, Literary Arts 3) Willpower: 5 (Cool 3, Resist 3) Essence: 1

DERIVED STATS

Initiative: 10 Shrug: 4 Save: 8

LIFELINE

• Middle Class
• Urban
• Lowlands
• Agriculture (4 years)
• Inheritance: $250

PERSONALITY

Assets: Charisma, Network, Reputation: American Midwest Liabilities: Enemy: Calcutta Police, Fanaticism: Minnesota sportball teams Behaviour Tags: Driven: always get the story!, Pet Peeve: taking down to women

Money: $2450

It's the oldest story in the world. Young high elf goes out to see the world, meets the love of her life in a woodland elf, marries him against the will of both their peoples, and flees to the city of Tarkar where she and her husband beget a daughter.

This is where Illya enters the picture. Her parents, impoverished and despised by both their kinds, led a hard life. Illya was brought up in hard times, and this was hammered into her by the tales of her father's familial wealth in the old city. She grew with a chip on her shoulder larger than her actual body, always seeing around her the injustice and inequality that kept her and her family down.

And one day she reached out and took a piece of it. This was so successful she took another. Then another. And then another. Soon she found herself a professional thief with a penchant for second-storey work and sense of visual flair, always leaving her calling card behind her when she strikes: a single, white rose.

Hit Points: 9 Fate: 5 Mana 4 Defense: 4

ATTRIBUTES

Warrior: 3 Rogue: 5 Mage: 2

SKILLS

• Thievery (Rogue)
• Daggers (Rogue)
• Acrobatics (Rogue)

TALENTS

• Sixth Sense

SPELLS

• Magic Light (1)
• Telekinesis (1)

EQUIPMENT

• Dagger (×5)
• Leather Armor
• Normal clothing
• Lockpick

Money: 170