Two Characterful Decks

This one's about two decks of cards that I have been using to help me generate ideas for interesting characters. Primarily, as GM, I've been using them to inspire GMCs (GameMaster Characters), but you could easily use them to inspire Player Characters too.

Story Forge Cards

I'd not heard of these until recently but, having received a deck a couple of weeks ago, I've been using them to generate major and minor GMC backstories.

Story Forge Cards are a deck of 88 cards, organised into five suits, which represent "dramatic elements" from which stories can be built. Designed originally as a tool for writers, these also come with encouragement for roleplayers to use them to build characters.

You use them by laying cards into Tarot-like "spreads", designed to generate ideas within a story-structure. There are spreads for classical story structures (mostly useful for writers), and also spreads for character generation: an extensive character backstory spread, and a useful "quick pick" spread for lesser characters.

I've been working on a Major GMC Nemesis for my Tikhon fantasy campaign and, using the cards to generate a backstory, came away with a far more interesting character than I anticipated. The cards also suggested an accomplice minor GMC and so, using the "character quick pick" spread, I also conceived a rather nifty "Lieutenant" for the bad guy.

Very quick and easy... maybe 30 mins for both. Also relatively inexpensive for any GM to add to their arsenal of tools. Recommended!

Archetype Cards

Although I consider the writings of Caroline Myss to be somewhat questionable and "hokie", she has published a rather natty deck of Archetype Cards.

The deck contains 80 large and very attractive cards, each depicting a key Jungian archetype. The cards are cool, however, because they contain notes on both the "Light" and "Shadow" aspects of each archetype - in short, how each can have a positive and a negative aspect within our persona.

Designed for self-examination, the cards come with a useful booklet of notes on the archetypes - useful if you're new to Jungian ideas - but I've been experimenting with using them to generate ideas for characters.

As a GM, I can draw (say) three cards and then choose one to inspire a minor GMC. I could combine two or three cards to make a more complex major GMC.

As a player, you might draw a bunch of cards (six might work best) and select 2-4 to build the elements of your character. Because the cards represent Archetypes, you can be sure that your hero will combine both positive and negative aspects of the various classical heroic... erm, archetypes. That makes for cool story-telling that taps into the "collective unconscious" sitting around your gaming table.

Developing Ideas

All in all, these two decks are fast becoming useful tools to inspire and deepen the generation of GMC ideas for my game. They are quick and easy to use, don't require me to reference clunky "idea tables", and tap into my latent but active imagination.

In time, with some practice, I'll try to develop some ideas for using them in a more structured manner... but, to be honest, I don't think there's much more to add other than to shuffle the deck, draw some cards, and see what sparks in your creative firepit.

Hope that's of use to someone.

Game on!

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire

This weekend, having left the book on my reading pile for months, I finally took the time to take a look at Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.

My usual approach to new games is to browse through the introduction and then design a character. Having already played the system, using the excellent Introductory Game, I was able to jump in and do just that.

What I have found was... very encouraging.

Fringers, one and all...

The first thing to say is that this incarnation of the Star Wars RPG is focused on the thing that I love most about the whole setting: edgy fringers clinging on for dear life in a hostile universe.

This isn't a Jedi game, like the Saga Edition, and it's grittier than the old d6 version. It's also designed to encourage story-telling and cinematic action, despite the funny dice. 

In an hour, working from scratch and reading the rules as I went, I was able to come up with my very own Star Wars character... and it was pretty straight-forward to customise him to my taste too.

Careers and Specialisations

What I particularly liked was the way in which you pick an archetypal Career for your hero and then get to choose one (or more) Specialisations - easily thought of as "the job you do right now" - to fit your concept. 

I've chosen to build a thief - a kind of ex-ganger who steals for a living. That made him a pretty good fit for a Smuggler with the Thief specialisation. What is neat is that the game gives you lots of cool choices to make your hero your own, whilst retaining a template-building system.

Obligation

Of all the things that I like about this game, however, by far the best is the system for Obligation. Basically, everyone owes someone for something... and your obligations can get you into trouble. This wonderfully emulates the kind of things that come up in the Star Wars movie - think of Han getting a "talking to" from Jabba, all because Han owes the Hutt a dropped cargo, and you've got the idea.

My hero betrayed his gang boss and had to flee Coroscant, stowing away in the smuggling compartments of a friend's freighter. He owes his friend and he may have to face the consequences of his betrayal. Both of these past events might rear their heads during the campaign. It's a neat system to encourage some cool background stories... and include the past in the present action.

Getting a Game

The only barrier to a game will be, as mentioned last week, persuading players to take an interlude and try a session. With all the games vying for my attention, including Shadowrun5, this game is going to have to wait in line. And yet... it's really slick, neat and very atmospheric. It leaves me itching to play it now.

Game on!

Random vs Designed

This week Will started his campaign at the school club. Or at least he got us rolling up characters.

We're playing Imagine and he has outlined that we have travelled by boat down-river to a port city on the edge of the kingdom of Albion.

There are three players and it's up to us how our characters came to be there.

First step... create characters.

"I fancy a Mage"

So, here's the thing. I fancied playing a Gray Elf Mage. I rolled crappy. I am now playing a Civilised Human Priest. How did that happen?

Don't get me wrong: this is not a complaint. It's just an observation: I'm not playing my character. 

I'm playing a character that fits the group's game. It came about largely by chance and mixed only a little bit of choice. 

Oh, and it was my third choice.

Rolling Up

I never used to really think much about the age-old tradition of "rolling up" a hero. You know, roll the dice for each attribute and see what you get. Maybe that's because, when playing D&D (for example) the GM would let us roll the six stats and then assign the numbers to whichever ability we wanted.

Imagine defaults to a rolled attribute system. You roll multiples of d4 to discover each of the stats, removing lowest dice from several of individual rolls. It's very simple but totally emphasises luck. While there is a Points Buy system in the GM's Guide, our newbie GM wasn't using it. 

For me, the process was fun but it also destroyed my plan to play a Mage. The problem was further compounded when, shortly after quietly discussing (with the GM) the possibility of playing an Assassin, another player bellowed, "Hey, I'm gonna play an assassin!"

In the end, given my collection of scores, I decided to play the Priest. The party has a Mage and an Assassin. Neither of them is played by me. 

Is Random Wrong?

Random isn't wrong. It's just wrong for me. 

When we began to write UbiquitousRPG I chose to emphasise my own feeling that characters should be designed, not randomly rolled. We use a simple "spread the points around" system which lets players customise the attributes to fit their character idea. 

The downside of design, as opposed to random rolls, is that players can min-max the numbers. That's already happening in our Tikhon campaign, especially as (due to frequent rules changes) I have permitted massaging the numbers after the first few sessions. 

Yet... at least the guys are playing the characters they chose to play.

What do you think?