Building a Character Entry

A Character file is the machine-readable heart of the system. Its whole design is one idea: you write the six base attributes and the ORIGIN; everything else either follows by formula or is colour. Getting that split right is the entire craft of building a character.

What you write by hand

ORIGIN — a number 1 to 12. This is the single most loaded field on the sheet. It sets the ceiling: a Mortal Tier 1 has a fraction of the base stats of a God Tier 10, and the derived formulas amplify that gap further. The handbook makes the case that higher is a different story, not a better one — the file should carry that honesty. Do not hand the party a Tier 10 and pretend nothing about the fiction changes.

The six base attributes — Strength, Perception, Agility, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence. Each between BPA and MPAAL for the origin's tier, and all six together must stay within the origin's Total Attribute Pool (TAP). The comfort of the system is that this constraint is easy to verify — see The Computing Layer. As a builder you distribute exactly within TAP, BPA and MPAAL; the sheet will happily report where you went over, and a character over its pool is a cheat the master is told to catch.

The rest is colour — name, appearance, background, personality, aspiration, traits, notes. These have no mechanical weight. They make the character a person the AI can roleplay. Make them specific and usable: a personality that gives the master a lever is worth more than a paragraph of biography.

Skills, abilities and connections

• Skills are rows of (name, level, attribute). They tie to an attribute and exist so the sheet can roll against something. Do not build an unbounded free-text list; a handful of skills that map to the sheet's attributes is what the system wants.
• Abilities are (name, type, description) with type strictly passive or active. The passive/active split is load-bearing for combat and for Act-locking (abilities above the current Act stay locked).
• Connections are one or two short beliefs or bonds. They are mechanical: acting on one earns a +1 and refunds a Fate Point. Make them usable, not decorative — they are the party's way back from bad luck.

Awakening, Karma and Act

A character carries three progression meters: Act (I–VI), Karma (−100 to +100) and Fate Points. Keep their semantics intact when you build: Act is vulnerability-to-mastery (a character's abilities are gated by it), Karma is inner evolution toward wholeness or fragmentation (not morality), Fate Points are a session's safety net. None of these should be hand-gamed per scene; they shift on significant choices, and the master adjudicates that, not you.

Inventory is references, not prose

The inventory is a list of (item, quantity) rows where item is a reference to an Equipment file. This is the system working as designed: a character carries gear that exists as typed, searchable objects elsewhere. Before you write an inventory row, the Equipment file must exist. If the party picks up something new mid-session and it has mechanical weight, it deserves its own Equipment entry — not a line in the notes.

A note on what you must never write

The derived fields — Mana, Health, Carry, Origin name, attribute points spent — are computed, and rejected on write. Never type their values into a Character file. Write the base attributes and ORIGIN; the sheet derives the rest. A hand-typed mana: 140 will either be ignored or become a lie the sheet carries forward. The formulas are the law; your job is to feed them correct inputs.