Character and World Generation

Words and Concepts

Character Development

• The Lie the Character Believes
• The Truth They Must Discover
• Wound or Ghost
• Fatal Flaw
• Moral Weakness
• Psychological Weakness
• Transformation Moment
• Moment of Grace
• Moment of Temptation
• Moral Choice
• Point of No Return (internal)

Arcs

• Hero’s Journey Structure
• Harmon’s Story Circle
• Vonnegut’s Story Lines
• Character Arc

• Positive Arc
• Negative Arc
• Flat/Steadfast Arc

Notes towards process

• Define a very abstract story
  • Start from one of genre, setting, vibe, or theme
    • From your starting point, move to the next thing that seems most obvious
    • Eventually you will have exhausted the list
    • Take a quick look at them and make sure the pieces seem ‘consistent’
      • This is, can you imagine a story existing that blends this genre and setting while containing the following theme and vibe?
  • Now, craft a ‘log line’ or pitch line for your story.
  • This is a single sentence, or if you really must, two, that conveys ‘the gist’ of your tale to another person.
  • Some Examples
    • “A story where a young boy learns there’s more to living than survival in rural post-apocalypse Kansas”
    • “A group of scientists learn what they’re really capable of when they’re stranded on planet without backup.”
    • “After the sun extinguishes without warning, humanity flees into collapsing underground shelters where light, safety, and trust erode day by day.”
    • “An adventure vacation goes horribly wrong, Bob from accounting steps up, but there’s only so much you can do.”
    • “What if Megaman X only woke up after the replicants had removed all the humans?”
• For every following step, before proceeding, glance at your genre, setting, theme and vibe and log line. You want to use these as a north star to guide the rest of your creation.
• Define a character and a very abstract arc
  • Who is the character
    • Name, short physical description
    • Signature ability, role or specialty
      • This is the cool thing they do
      • Let’s not worry about mechanics yet
  • What lie do they believe?
    • Any type of lie in character driven fiction - personal, cultural, moral, etc
    • If you’ve never heard of the lie in this sense, it has a few properties
      • It ‘helps’ the character somehow, e.g. shielding them from rejection
      • It harms the character significantly, e.g. preventing close relationships
      • The lie is somehow integral to ‘who they are’, so laying it down will be hard
    • The lie should be short, pithy, emotional, and aligned with theme and setting, following the examples above
      • The only important thing is seeing tomorrow
      • I am a scientist and incapable of heroism
      • We were always two missed meals away from the social contract dissolving
      • Years of practice and study will let me see these people through this peril
      • I am a living weapon created for a purpose
  • Why do they believe the lie?
    • This could be a number of sources, and maybe even in combination
      • The government reinforces the lie
      • The church enforces the lie, and my mother is devout
      • Nature is capricious and my character drew the short straw
    • This is the seed for your “Origin of the lie” scene in just a second.
    • It may also introduce a faction or a truth about the world, jot it down as appropriate
  • What truth do they need to learn
    • This is ‘the cure’ to the lie.
    • If the character believed this instead of the lie, they would be better, happier, etc
    • This need not be the truth the character discovers during play
      • In negative arcs, we often reject the truth rather than accept it
      • Characters often believe several relies, sometimes related, these may be more interesting to pursue as play proceeds
      • Multiple truths might cure a lie
    • Think of the lie as a fixed starting point, but the truth as a distant directional goal for getting the story started.
    • Some examples of truths
      • There is more to life than survival. Love, friendship, honor, hedonism…
      • Heroism isn’t intrinsic; it’s decisions and actions and anyone can step up
      • Even in crisis, people remain social creatures and kindness exists
      • Sometimes events and circumstances are truly out of your control, and this does not constitute a failure on your part.
      • To the extent that things have purpose, it is determined by how it is used, not what it was created for. Also, things rarely have one purpose.
  • Why is it hard for them to move from the lie to the truth?
    • Is it a social pressure? Note the group that reinforces the lie in your set of possible factions
    • Is it something inherent in the world? Note it down as a truth of the world.
    • Is it completely internal? Great! Your character has room to grow.
    • Some examples
      • Scarcity breeds desperation, and that leaves little time for leisure.
      • Society overvalued military might for complex reasons, and it has been beaten into me that they are better than I am.
      • People who will violate the social contract also exist, and have heightened impact in survival scenarios.
      • It is more comfortable to believe I failed than that I was powerless to change the outcome, because the latter robs me of agency.
      • I have a cannon where my hand should be.
• Now, we begin setting up the character, the world, and the story
  • We do this by playing a series of ‘flashback’ scenes
  • Each scene should define or support some aspect of the character
    • Why have they honed a particular skill?
    • Demonstrate their burgeoning physical / mental prowess
  • Additionally, it should introduce something important for the fiction
    • A faction in their world that had an outsized influence on their upbringing
    • A family member, friend, rival, or antagonist that helped shape them
    • A significant world event that shaped them, their past, and their ‘now’
  • Not every scene need hit all of these notes, but at the end of three scenes, you should have
    • Two to Three NPCs that the character knows, at least one an antagonist
    • One or two factions that drive the world around them and an understanding of how the protagonist, the player character, feels about those organizations
    • Established the PC mechanically and run a handful of tests using their skills, relationships, and stats
    • Have a short list of locations the character has been to start shaping the world
• Look backwards to when they began to believe the lie
  • Imagine the situation
    • What was going on that made the lie relevant at all?
    • Where did this happen? At Home? On the Trail? In Church? In a Bar?
    • Who was there that made the lie convenient or apparently true?
    • What action did the character take that led up to the lie or that directly resulted from it
  • Form a small scene where the central conflict revolves around the lead up to the lie or the fallout from the lie
  • Somewhere in the scene, there will be a ‘testable event’, something where the character’s success or failure is narratively interesting
    • This might well be you answer to “what action did the character take…”
    • Identify which skill and stat the character should use to solve that problem
    • Increase each of the skill and stat by two steps, (e.g. two die face sizes, two die count, or one die and one count), but do not exceed system maximums
      • If these are the first time they are used, assume a starting value of 1d4
      • So two steps could produce 1d8, 2d6, or 3d4
      • When in doubt, default to 2d6
  • Record the results of the scene however you see fit
    • Bullet points
    • A Vignette
    • A sketch or a comic strip
  • Create a bond with each of the major characters or factions in the scene
    • It may be the case that a character in the scene was acting simply as the avatar of a faction, like a guildmaster or a policeman or judge representing the authority of the state
    • In those cases, build a sketch of the faction that the individual represented instead of a sketch of the individual
    • For now, simply note down
      • the nature of the relationship (romantic, familial, etc)
      • It’s valence (positive relationship or negative)
      • If it’s strong or weak
    • We’ll refine relationships in a bit. We just want notes right now.
  • Think about the first time in their life they were ever presented with the lie
    • Who was there making the lie seem true?
      • Add this person as an NPC or faceless member of a faction
    • How did the character react?
    • What ‘truth of the world’ reinforced the lie or made it believable?
• Look backwards to when the lie became cemented
  • As the first origin of the lie scene, but replace the prompts with this:
    • What event reinforced the lie so strongly that it became part of their identity?
    • Who encouraged or rewarded the lie? How did they benefit?
    • What skill did you lean on because of the lie?
  • This scene should also have a test that advances character stats and skills.
  • This scene should introduce or cement relationships with NPCs and factions
    • For entities that reappear, add a hash mark next to them in your entity list
    • For new entities, add them as before.
  • Similarly, note any locations that appear or reappear
• Look backwards to when they noticed believing the lie had a negative outcome, but they dismissed it
  • As the first origin of the lie scene, but replace the prompts with these:
    • What went wrong because of the lie? How did it hurt you or someone else?
    • How did you rationalize or avoid the truth?
    • Did anyone reinforce the lie in the aftermath? Who? How?
  • This scene should also have a test that advances character stats and skills.
  • This scene should introduce or cement relationships with NPCs and factions
    • For entities that reappear, add a hash mark next to them in your entity list
    • For new entities, add them as before.
  • Similarly, note any locations that appear or reappear
• Cleanup
  • Look at each of the three scenes you just played
    • Choose up to two characters from among those scenes to have positive relationships with
    • One relationship should be stronger than the other
      • Probably 2d6 and 2d4 or 1d6
    • Chose one character from among those scenes to have a negative relationship with
    • The negative relationship should have strength on par with your strongest positive relationship
    • Flesh out the NPCs as denoted in SRD
  • Look at the factions identified in the scene
    • Pick one positive and one negative faction
    • Set your relationship strengths as you think makes sense for the fiction, but at least 1d4 in each
    • Flesh out the factions as noted in SRD
  • Look at the locations that were used in the previous scenes
    • Are any of them critical to your character’s past? Note one down.
    • Are any of them near where your character is today? Note one down.
    • Do any of them represent faction strongholds? Note all of them down.
  • Look at your character skills and stats
    • The used skills and stats are your ‘primary’ skills…
      • Probably, however it’s very natural to want to tell a combat oriented story but to focus on the youth and education of the hero. In those cases, you’ll want to demote the social skills you almost certainly used to secondary skills and artificially promote up to two combat skills as primary
        • You can promote two, you can promote 1 and choose a social skill to keep as primary
    • You know how to do things that didn’t happen in the scene as well!
      • Flesh out your stats and skills according to the table in SRD
  • Take all of that, and fill in the character sheet so you have a succinct reference
• Look at your character’s previous scene, their possible truth, and the world and faction elements you just generated
• Envision an inciting incident and play your first scene starting from your character’s ‘now’.
  • If that doesn’t work, start with a relationship.
  • Which relationship are you most excited to pursue?
  • What would that person or faction want you to do? Try to think of something dangerous, inconvenient, or costly.
  • If that doesn’t work, think about how your character feels about what they ask for
    • Are they afraid? Angry? Resentful? Resigned?
    • What request from that group would make them feel that way?
• Still Stuck? Pick up all your action figures and mash them together
  • Factions you have a positive relationship with needs to talk to faction you have a negative relationship with about something important. You are part of the escort going along with dignitaries, negotiators, and so on to make sure that the group arrives and the talks go off without complication.
  • Obviously the above only works in certain types of fiction, but there will often be a parsimonious version of “put all the toys on the field and see what comes out”
  • The goal of this isn’t to make all of the characters important immediately, though it is cool if that happens, it is to let play naturally filter your attention and focus and have a direction emerge.

Fractional Draft In Prose

Before we dive into it, a word on what this RPG is trying to do:

• Fiction is meant to feed mechanics
• Mechanical outcomes should be able to feed the fiction

These are children of a parent belief: RPGs are about telling character driven stories. This isn’t blanketly true of course. Some RPGs are about simulating experiences, like firefighting. Some RPGs are about mastering the mechanical manipulation of the system, like old school dungeoncrawls. This one, though, is interested in characters and their stories.

We’re going to be basing our character generation loosely on some classic ideas from fiction writing and screenplays.

Character creation, and world generation honestly, is about answering the question of who your character is. Small number of words, but a huge question! In most stories focused on a hero, the character’s story turns around the following pivotal elements:

• Who are they, what do they look like, what main-character-vibe do they bring to the table?
• What false thing do they believe that keeps them from being happy or successful?
• What is it the true thing they need to learn to believe instead?

These are, more or less, the fundamental building blocks of a character arc. In this system, we hang both world generation and character generation off of the intended arc of the character.

There are two ways to think about an arc. The first is to come up with a character that sounds fun to play, like a hard boiled noir detective. Then from there, ask yourself how would it be interesting for them to grow. Maybe they could learn that even if success isn’t guaranteed, that struggling against the darkness is valuable. Maybe they could learn that the booze isn’t really dulling the pain, or that no group is a monolith.

Alternatively, you can start with the lesson and then imagine the individual. Maybe we want to learn that individuals matter as much as the group. Who would it be interesting to see learn that lesson? Maybe an ant, or a cyborg that’s part of a hive mind. The lesson gives you your truth and lie compounded. In this case, the lie is that the group is all important, and the truth is that individuals have value.

It’s important to note that not all stories end with the hero accepting the truth. Positive arcs do, of course, any arc where the character grows tends to have them accept the truth near the end of the story and then draw on their new belief in the climactic moments. Not all stories have positive arcs though. It’s possible for the main character to refuse to learn the lesson and reject the truth. In a long enough story, the character often does both (see for example Anakin Skywalker).

So, no matter which direction you go, start with the north star for the story of your game: the person, the lie, the truth. The person and the lie help define your now, and the truth tells you a little bit about the future of your story.

Setting a General Direction

Sometimes a really interesting character arc, a good lie and a really juicy truth, is all you need for a story. Even then, that arc generally plays out against a backdrop, and the shape of that backdrop can help you in keeping your story consistent. You don’t need to do a bunch of world building to get your consistency though. You can do it very lazily:

1. Start by defining a very abstract story. Really abstract. No, even less concrete than that.
   1. Fill in one of genre, setting, vibe, or theme on the worksheet
   2. Move to the next thing that seems most obvious
   3. Eventually you will have exhausted the list
   4. Take a quick look at them and make sure the pieces seem consistent. That is, can you imagine a story existing that blends this genre and setting while containing the following theme and vibe?
      1. Yes, proceed on to step 2
      2. No? Replace the offending element with something that fits better. Alternatively, go back to the top of step 1.
2. Now, craft a ‘log line’ or pitch line for your story.
   • This is one or two sentences, or if you really must, two, that conveys ‘the gist’ of your tale.
   • Think of it like a back-of-book blurb, or pitching a friend on a movie.
   • Here are some examples from stories you may recognize:
     • A young boy learns there’s more to living than survival in rural post-apocalypse Kansas.
     • A group of scientists learn what they’re really capable of when they’re stranded on an alien planet without backup.
     • After the sun extinguishes without warning, humanity flees into collapsing underground shelters where light, safety, and trust erode day by day.
     • An adventure vacation goes horribly wrong. Bob from accounting steps up, but one man can only do so much.

This log line is your north star. It tells you what your game is about, without going so far as to tell you what happens in the story. Whenever you do any of the following character creation steps, glance at the long line, and think “Does this fit here?”

Defining the Character

Log line in hand, we’re going to define our character in a very simple way. We need to answer three questions, and only three questions:

• Why are they cool / why do we as a player care?
• What lie do they believe?
• What truth would they be better off discovering?

That’s nice and pithy, but in more detail, we proceed in the following phases.

Who is the character

• Name
• short physical description
• Signature ability, role or specialty (the cool thing they do)

What lie do they believe?

We don’t mean like, an abstract lie told to them by another person. This is a lie the character tells themselves. Or maybe it was one that was imposed upon them by cultural forces (the state, the church, their parents, etc). The important shape of a lie is that:

• It isn’t obviously wrong (to the character)
• Believing it has to ‘help’ them in some way
• Believing it has to hurt them more than it helps them
• There’s a personal or societal cost to not believing the lie.

The lie should be short, pithy, emotional, and aligned with theme and setting. The following go in the same order as the log line examples above:

• The only important thing is seeing tomorrow
  • This excuses anything in service of survival (helping)
  • It sacrifices the character’s basic humanity (hurting)
• I am a scientist and incapable of heroism
  • Society rewards me for staying in my lane (helping)
  • Inaction because I do not believe myself able (hurting)
• We were always two missed meals away from the social contract dissolving
  • Being jaded precludes vulnerability and being taken advantage of (helping)
  • It promotes isolation which limits what you can achieve (hurting)
• Years of practice and study will let me see these people through this peril
  • Confidence and practice in crisis are essential (helping)
  • Over-confidence and demoralization can be lethal in survival settings (hurting)

Once you have identified your lie, you need to know why they believe the lie. That is, where did the lie come from? This could be a number of sources, and maybe even several in combination:

• The government reinforces the lie
• The church enforces the lie, and my mother is devout
• Nature is capricious and my character drew the short straw
  Whatever the case, this short reason is the seed for your origin of the lie scene. We’ll get there in a second. But now that we know the starting point of our arc, we need to think about the endpoint.

What truth must they learn?

What truth does the character need to learn to be a full, complete, happy person, or at least happy as they are capable of being. You can think of the truth as ‘the cure’ to the lie. If the character believed this instead of the lie, they would be better, happier, etc.

It’s important to note that this need not be the truth the character discovers during play. They may never learn a truth at all. In negative arcs, characters often reject the truth rather than accept it, reinforcing the lie. Characters often believe several lies, sometimes related, these may be more interesting to pursue as play proceeds, and so we may only get to some of the truths.

I find it helpful to think of the lie as a fixed starting point, but the truth as a distant directional goal for getting the story started. Here are some examples of truths, pined on the log lines above, to help get you started.

• There is more to life than survival. Love, friendship, honor, hedonism…
• Heroism isn’t intrinsic; it’s decisions and actions and anyone can step up
• Even in crisis, people remain social creatures and kindness exists
• Sometimes events and circumstances are truly out of your control, and this does not constitute a failure on your part.

Why is the truth hard to believe?

It’s not enough for the truth to cure the lie. It also needs to be hard to believe for some reason. Something has to be in the characters way, when moving from the lie to the truth. If it wasn’t, they’d already believe the truth and would be a better version of themselves. Here are some possible hurdles:

• Is it a social pressure? Note the group that reinforces the lie in your set of possible factions
• Is it something inherent in the world? Note it down as a truth of the world.
• Is it completely internal? Great! Your character has room to grow.

Here are some example obstacles to believing the truth:

• Scarcity breeds desperation, and that leaves little time for leisure.
• Society overvalued military might for complex reasons, and it has been beaten into me that they are better than I am.
• People who will violate the social contract also exist, and have heightened impact in survival scenarios.
• It is more comfortable to believe I failed than that I was powerless to change the outcome, because the latter robs me of agency.

Using the Lie to Build the Character & World

Now, we begin setting up the character, the world, and the story. We’ll do this by playing a series of ‘flashback’ scenes. Each scene should define or support some aspect of the character. You won’t need to start from this notion. Somewhere in the scene, the character will need to do something, hopefully something interesting. They’ll need to listen in on a conversation, or run really hard. Your instinct to have them act in this way in that scene tells you that is something the character should be able to do in the mechanics of your system, whatever system you might be using.

Beyond defining the character mechanically, it should introduce something important for the fiction of the world you’re playing in. Who is your character experiencing friction with in this scene? A faction in their world that had an outsized influence on their upbringing perhaps? A family member, friend, rival, or antagonist that helped shape them? A significant world event that was formative in their upbringing?

Not every scene need hit all of these notes, but at the end of three scenes (one for the origin of the lie, one for the reinforcement of the lie, and one for a consequence of the lie) you should have:

• Two to Three NPCs that are related to your PC
• One or two factions that drive the world around them and an understanding of how the protagonist, the player character, feels about those organizations
• Established what the PC is mechanically in your system and run a few tests against their stats, skills, etc.
• Have a short list of locations the character has been to start shaping the world

The Origin of the Lie

Look backwards to when they began to believe the lie, and imagine the situation:

• What was going on that made the lie relevant at all?
• Where did this happen? At Home? On the Trail? In Church? In a Bar?
• Who was there that made the lie convenient or apparently true?
• What action did the character take that led up to the lie or that directly resulted from it

Form a small scene where the central conflict revolves around the lead up to the lie or the fallout from the lie. Somewhere in the scene, there will be a ‘testable event’, something where the character’s success or failure is narratively interesting:

• This might well be you answer to “what action did the character take…”
• Identify which skill and stat (or relevant element in the system you’re using) the character should use to solve that problem
• Use that to narrow down or define your PC mechanically as you go along playing these scenes.

The actions the player takes aren’t the only interesting things in the scene of course. You’ll also want to record interesting NPCs that you invent, or factions that seem relevant going forward. At a minimum, I suggest capturing:

• the nature of the relationship (romantic, familial, etc)
• It’s valence (positive relationship or negative)
• If it’s strong or weak

If the relationship is with a person acting as a representative of a faction, you might want to capture some notes about how the faction acts.

Reinforcing the lie

Now that we know when the character was first presented the lie as an interpretation of the world, let’s think about when they first really believed it. When they accepted it as their own truth. Obviously, we don’t accept things all at once, but usually there’s one pivotal moment where it really clicks in, and that’s what we’re trying to capture here.

This runs just like the origin of the lie, but replace the prompts with this:

• What event reinforced the lie so strongly that it became part of their identity?
• Who encouraged or rewarded the lie? How did they benefit?
• What skill did you lean on because of the lie?

Just like before, we’re looking for mechanical things that the character does in this scene (running, jumping, casting spells, singing, spycraft, etc) to tell us how they interact with their world and to further refine the kind of character they are in your fiction. And just like before, we’re on the lookout for NPCs or factions that are introduced in this scene that can be used later on in your solo game.

Consequence of the Lie

We’ve just found the origin of the lie, and we also know when our character really internalized the lie. If we want our characters to have an arc, they need to know there must be something better for them to reach for. They don’t need to know what it is, but there needs to be something about their current beliefs that’s uncomfortable enough for them to want to change.

They don’t have to want to change yet, but we do need to see the armor start to crack, just a little bit, and we see that by looking at how their lies hurt them. Look backwards to when they noticed believing the lie had a negative outcome, but they dismissed it. Run this as the previous two scenes, but replace the prompts with these:

• What went wrong because of the lie? How did it hurt you or someone else?
• How did you rationalize or avoid the truth?
• Did anyone reinforce the lie in the aftermath? Who? How?
  Just like before, take note of any NPCs or factions you introduce in the scene. For use in your further work.

Inciting Incident

If you (or your module) don’t have an inciting incident in mind already, the previous exercise gives you a really good place to start from. Look at your character’s previous scenes, their possible truth, and the NPCs, world and faction elements you just generated. These should provide fertile grounds for imagining a starting scene:

• Treat the first scratch in your characters lie like their ‘now’, and imagine what comes next.
• If the first hurt of the lie needs to be in the past for reasons, envision an inciting incident and play your first scene starting from your character’s ‘now’.
• If that doesn’t work, start with a relationship.
  • Which relationship are you most excited to pursue?
  • What would that person or faction want you to do? Try to think of something dangerous, inconvenient, or costly.
  • If that doesn’t work, think about how your character feels about what they ask for
    • Are they afraid? Angry? Resentful? Resigned?
    • What request from that group would make them feel that way?
• Still Stuck? Pick up all your action figures and mash them together
  • Factions you have a positive relationship with needs to talk to faction you have a negative relationship with about something important. You are part of the escort going along with dignitaries, negotiators, and so on to make sure that the group arrives and the talks go off without complication.
  • Obviously the above only works in certain types of fiction, but there will often be a parsimonious version of “put all the toys on the field and see what comes out”
  • The goal of this isn’t to make all of the characters important immediately, though it is cool if that happens, it is to let play naturally filter your attention and focus and have a direction emerge.