Making a Character

A character here is a short set of honest answers. There is nothing to calculate and nothing to spend, so you can be playing inside ten minutes.

The four that carry the most weight

• Concept. One line for who they are. A courier for a road guild. A disgraced surgeon. A retired thief who runs a bakery badly.
• Drive. What they want badly enough to take a risk for. This is what gets you moving when a scene stalls.
• Trouble. The thing that complicates their life. Trouble is not a penalty, it is an invitation. The GM is told to let it bite at the worst believable moment, and that is where most of your good scenes will come from.
• Bonds. Who they are tied to, and how. Bonds are the fastest way to hand the world a hook into you.

The example courier @Missing file is built exactly this way. Open that file and steal the shape of it.

The rest of the sheet

The Overview tab holds the plain facts. Age, gender, height, weight, hair, eyes, and a short description of how they carry themselves. The Personality tab holds a snapshot plus five short lists, which are likes, values, dislikes, fears, and flaws.

None of that is mechanical, and all of it gets used. The GM reads it before writing a scene with you in it, so a character whose fears list says deep water is going to be written as afraid of deep water, without you having to remind anyone.

Condition is worth knowing about early

Condition is one plain sentence about how your character is doing right now. Bruised ribs. Two days without sleep. Half drunk and pretending otherwise.

It has no number attached, but it changes what you can do. A wounded expert gets narrated like someone a step lower on the ladder until the story heals them. Condition stays true until the fiction clears it, so a rough night follows you into the next morning.

Then pick a few Feats

Feats are the things your character can actually do. Three or four is a fine start, and more arrive in play as the story earns them. The next chapter covers how they work and what tier to begin at.

You can start with less than a full sheet

Concept, Drive, Trouble, and one Feat is genuinely enough to open a session. The rest can be filled in as it comes up, and the GM will keep the file current behind you while you play.