Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article. You can find all of the posts in this series here.

Today I’m taking a look at Kevin Crawford’s Worlds Without Number. This is one of those games I’ve been vaguely aware of for a very long time but have never actually looked into and don’t know anything about. I’m using the free edition and I don’t know what the differences are between this and the full priced version. Hopefully there’s nothing that will meaningfully impact character creation, but as I can’t currently afford to buy books this is the version we’re going with!

Here’s what the marketing copy has to say about what this game is:

My initial thought here is that maybe I should have started with Stars Without Number, since WWN is based on it, but I prefer fantasy to sci-fi in general and this is the one I chose. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this to be an OSR-style game, which is a pleasant surprise. Everything about the book – the size of it, the cover art, the marketing copy right up to the final paragraph – made me expect a modern trad game with fairly in-depth “paper dolls”-style character creation that was going to take me an hour or more. I’ll be interested to see how wrong that expectation was.

The Character Creation section opens with quite a lot of information about who your character is and how they fit into the world. Honestly it’s the kind of thing that often makes me eyes glaze over (this is a me problem, really), but I’m interested in the idea that this fantasy world isn’t some weird version of the past but is instead the ruins of a far-distant future. It’s an interesting choice to (presumably) take the world of Stars Without Number and ruin it to build the world for this game, rather than dialling the clock back, and it’s a choice that I like. In theory, at least. I hope that it means we aren’t about to be looking at your typical fantasy classes and races, but maybe that’s where we’ll end up. Let’s see.

The next page is a summary of character creation, which I always like to see, but it’s split over two pages and has 19 steps. The character sheet shown on page 7 has a big look of modern trad to it (though smaller than most of those character sheets), so maybe this isn’t quite as OSR as it claims to be. I’m very pleased to find that the character sheet is form fillable, though. One point to WWN.

Step 1 is a classic – roll your attributes in order and assign them to Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. It’s 3d6 down the line, which is my favourite. There’s an option to use an array (14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7) but I always pick rolling when it’s an option because rolling dice is fun and I like seeing what sort of character presents itself out of randomness.

My attributes are STR 7, DEX 12, CON 6, INT 12, WIS 12, and CHA 8. Once we’ve rolled we can pick one attribute to change to a score of 14. I’m tempted to pick Strength, which I expect will dramatically change what sort of character I decide to build, but I’m instead going to take the obvious option and increase my lowest score (Constitution) to 14.

Step two is attribute modifiers. Mine are -1, 0, +1, 0, 0, 0.

Step three is to pick a background from a list on page 11. We’ll have to pick some options, and gain a free skill at level 0. The first time we roll or pick a skill it starts at level 0, and the second time it becomes level 1. The third time we can instead pick any other skill that’s less than level 1, because we’re a novice hero and our skills can’t exceed level 1.

Weirdly the skill list comes before the background list so I’ve had to flip past it to get to the backgrounds. I can already envision there might be a lot of jumping back and forward in this book to make a character, and I do wish that the sections we need were ordered in the same sequence as we need to refer to them.

Backgrounds are described as a “thumbnail description of the kind of life your hero led before becoming an adventurer”. We have the option of rolling from the list, which I will absolutely take. There are 20 backgrounds, and I roll a 13, giving me “Physician”. The backgrounds also have suggestions for what this might mean for your character in the reality of the game world, with suggestions of village healer and healer-monk. I quite like village healer.

We grab our free skills (Heal-0) and then there are a few options for how we pick skills from our background:

• Take the background’s “quick skills”, which are the generic skills of the roll
• Pick two skills from the background’s “Learning” table, except for the “Any Skill” choice. This is the way to go if we have a specific idea of what our character looks like
• Roll three times, splitting the rolls between the “Growth” and “Learning” tables.

I’m of course going to roll. As is obvious from that last option each background has two tables, “Growth” and “Learning”. “Growth” is a d6 table and “Learning” is a d8 table. I assume that when we’re told to roll three times we pick which table we’re going to roll on for each roll first, since they use different dice. That’s how I’m going to do it anyway. I get +2 Mental from the Growth table, Connect from the Learning table, and Know from the Learning table.

Looking at the skill list, Connect lets me find or know people who are useful to my purposes, and Know is a generalised knowledge skill.

I assume that “+2 Mental” refers to Saves, so I’ve added that modifier to the Saves box on my character sheet. The book hasn’t actually explained this yet, though, so I hope I’m right.

Back to the summary of character creation. The next two steps explain what I’ve already done – that is, decide whether to choose skills or roll for them, and explaining how to do those things. This is also where it explains what +2 Mental means, and I was wrong about it being for Saves. Instead I get to add two points to either Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma, or else divide the bonus between two of them. I’m going to add +2 to my Wisdom, bumping my bonus there up to +1.

I think it’s interesting that if you pick skills (either the quick skills or from the tables) you only get 2, but if you roll you get 3. That’s a nice little reward for the possibility of ending up with a character whose skills might not work brilliantly together or make much sense.

The next step is to pick a class. From this summary page it sounds like there was classes of Warrior, Expert, and Mage – very traditional – but that if you don’t like the sound of them you can instead pick Adventurer and mix classes. I like that multi-classing is a default option, and I’ve always loved Adventurer as a cover-all class (which is why it’s the only class in A Dungeon Game). My instinct is to pick Adventurer because I like the sound of it but also because it lets me get a bit deeper into the much with character creation, but I’m going to read them and see what sounds good. Away to page 18.

Based on my background as a Physician I’m very tempted by Expert. I’d expected this to be a classic Thief-type class but it sounds like much more than that. Experts are described as “masters of non-combat skills, such as stealth, medicine, diplomacy, and other practical talents”. It is still a Thief/Rogue class but it’s rolling in some Cleric-type stuff as well, and sounds a bit more like a 2e-style Bard to me. Because I don’t really have a character concept in mind I’m going to go with Expert rather than picking Adventurer, as I think Adventurer is better for people who know exactly what they want to pick.

The first ability the Expert gets is being able to reroll a failed non-combat skill check once per scene. I also gain an extra skill point every time I level up that’s explicitly for use on non-combat skills or raising attributes, and these can be saved up to be spent later.

(While filling in these details and things like Hit Dice on my character sheet I spotted the term “Base Attack Bonus” and my brain has immediately decided that WWN is based on 3rd Edition D&D. Is that true? I have no idea. It’s certainly got some similarities so far, but I have no idea how the system actually works.)

The table that shows us the level progression and benefits for the Expert has a final column that reads “Focus Picks”. I don’t know what this means yet, but I assume it’s going to be covered in the next step. I’ll make a note of what I get (“1 Any + 1 Expert”) and flip back to page 6 and the summary. (Side note, does anybody else read the words “Page 6” and immediately think of the lyric “Collecting page six lovers” from Fall Out Boy’s Thanks fr th Mmrs or is it just me?)

Our next step is to choose “foci”, which represent side talents or particular specialisations. Most characters get one level of a Focus of their choice but Experts (as well as Adventurers) get one level of a non-combat Focus for free as well. The next step here also says that we can spend a Focus pick on an “origin” focus, which is how WWN handles non-human characters. That’s very tempting. I wish there was a page reference here, though, because I have no idea where to find Foci. Time to start flipping pages.

Foci are located immediately after the Classes chapter. As with Skills, Foci come in two levels. The first time you pick one you get the first level, and then you pick it again to get the second level. (Now that I’ve mentioned 3.x I’m reminded of buying skill ranks in that game, which this is a little similar to).

This is where I get a little confused. I’ve got +1 Any and +1 Expert. I thought initially that this meant I got a Foci that’s called “Expert”, but I can’t see one in the text. Then I thought that maybe some are Expert-specific, and that there would be a list of Warrior, Expert, and Mage Foci. But I can’t see that anywhere, either, so I don’t know what this means. I know that it has to be a non-combat Focus, so I’m just going to choose one of them and hope that I’ve got it right.

This is where I wish more games had a tag system like Pathfinder 2, so I could quickly find all the non-combat Foci without having to read each one individually. It would also be helpful for a few edge cases. For example, “Gifted Chirurgeon” lets me attempt to stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person per round as an On Turn action. Since this sounds like it’s something that takes place in combat, does that make it a combat action? Or because it’s not something that directly benefits me when making attacks and doing general combat stuff, is it a non-combat action? I don’t know. Similarly, is Poisoner a non-combat focus? The actions you take to actually make your poisons occur out of combat, but they’re mostly going to be used in combat.

I’m going to pick Gifted Chururgeon anyway, with my +1 Any focus. I gain Heal as a bonus skill, but I already have Heal so it goes to level-1. For my non-combat Expert skill I decide to go with Polymath, which lets me gain any one bonus skill. I treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for skill checks. I decide to take Know again as my bonus skill, giving me a +1 there as well. (Again I have questions about what constitutes a non-combat skill, specifically around Sneak).

Back to page 6, and now we pick another skill. At this point I still don’t really have much of a picture of who this character is beyond “village healer” so I’m not sure what to take, but I think Notice sort of makes sense so I’ll pick that.

The next two steps are to do with mages and I sort of wish I’d built a caster so I could play with that section, but I didn’t so I won’t. Instead I’ll skip those sections and move straight to rolling my maximum hit points. I already wrote down that my Hit Dice is 1d6 (it was on the table when I picked my Class), so I roll that and add my Con modifier of +1 to get 2 max hit points. I’d best not get hit.

The next step is to note down the Base Attack Bonus, which I already did (it’s +0), and then I can either pick an equipment package or roll for silver and go shopping. Normally I’d roll for this but since I’ve not been blessed by the dice today I am instead going to pick the “Mage, Healer, or Scholar” pack, which gives me:

• Daggers, 2
• Staff
• Backpack
• Lantern, tinderbox, 2 flasks of oil
• Writing kit & 20 sheets of paper
• Rations, 1 week
• Waterskin
• Healer’s pouch
• 80 silver pieces in cash

The weapon attributes are interesting and make me want to take a look at what they actually do. What does “Shock 1/AC 15” mean? For some reason this one short tag has made me more interested in the rest of the system than any other part of the book so far, and I’m now adding this game to my list for a future Long Read post.

Each item on that list has a number under a heading that reads “Enc”, which I assume is short for Encumberance. The character sheet also says that my maximum stowed items are equal to my STR score, above which I assume I’m encumbered. The lantern, tinder box, and 2 pints of oil are listed on one line but their Enc is “3 total”, and the week of rations has an Enc of 4. This is hilarious because my STR is 7, which means I can’t actually carry everything I’m starting with. I should have rolled for it.

Regardless, I’ll simply dump some stuff. I drop the lantern, tinder box, and oil, and I’ll just have to hope that my companions (those imaginary companions who are definitely also rolling characters right now) bring some sort of light source along with them.

Now we’ve basically reached the “fill out the rest of your character sheet” stage. I fill in my hit bonus (-2 because haven’t taken any level-0 combat skills), weapon damage, armour class (10, because I also don’t have any armour and my DEX modifier is +0), and my saving throws. Physical saves against poison, disease, or exhaustion are 15 minus the best of my STR or CON modifiers, and I’m now very glad I chose to raise my CON to 14 earlier. Evasion is 15 minus the best of INT or DEX (15, as both are +0), and Mental is 15 minus the best of WIS or CHA (14). Luck is a flat 15. The character sheet expresses these as “16 – level – Modifiers”, so I assume these Saves will be improving as we adventure for longer.

The last thing we have to do is give the character a name and a goal. There doesn’t appear to be a name list in the book (and there isn’t actually a table of contents in this free version for me to check against), so I’m just going to call my guy Joe. Why Joe? I’m sitting next to an empty jar of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and “Joe” was the first name I saw as I looked around my office. His goal is going to be to very simple to begin with – to earn enough money to buy some armour so that he doesn’t get stabbed to death.

And that’s the character built. Here’s how my character sheet wound up.

This process, alongside blogging through it, took a little shy of 90 minutes. That’s roughly what I expected based on the marketing material and size of the books, and not at all what I’d expect of the type of OSR-style game that it claims to be. I’m definitely interested in Worlds Without Number as a system, though, and I’ll be reading the full game as soon as I can afford to pick it up.

Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article. You can find all of the posts in this series here.

Today I’m indulging myself by rolling up a character in my own system. A Dungeon Game is a Pay What You Want dungeon crawler intended to be very fast to pick up and play. My goal is for you to be able to make a character in about 5 minutes. Part of the reason I’m using my own game today is because this is my website and if I want to advertise my own things here I’m damn well going to do that, but part of it is that it’s been long enough since I made a character in the system that I think I’m able to approach the process almost like a new player would. 

To that end, I’ll be using the PDF version available from itch rather than the free web version, which matches the print edition. People making use of the web version are more than likely going to be people who know me and my work and thus are at least a little bit au fait with OSR-style games. Conversely, people with the print edition are incredibly likely to be people I’ve given it to at conventions and zine fairs, and they’re much more likely to be coming to the game without any prior experience. I want to make sure that the text is easily navigable and makes sense.

I’m going to attempt to approach this is the same way I approach all the other books I look at on this blog, but since it’s my game it’s inevitable that I’m not going to be able to be entirely objective here. Yes, I’m my own biggest critic, but I’m also very close to the work. There’s a reason we pay editors rather than self-editing everything.

Let’s begin.

The first page of the game tells us that we are Adventurers who possess 2d6x10 silver pieces “which you can use to outfit yourself prior to the start of the adventure”. There’s a link to the Equipment section in the PDF, as well as a page reference for it (since we obviously can’t yet hyperlink a physical book). I’m very glad that I’ve chosen to do this sort of intertextual referencing throughout the book, though I do wonder if having this link to the Equipment section before any other part of character creation occurs is a smart idea. Will players roll their silver and jump straight to Equipment without making the rest of their character? Possibly.

Anyway. I have 70 silver pieces. 

Below the introductory paragraph is a step by step guide to character creation:

1. Roll Attributes
2. Roll an Extra
3. Determine Health
4. Roll an Occupation
5. Choose Scars
6. (Optional) Learn rituals
7. Name yourself 
8. Spend your silver

Let’s go in order.

Step 1: Roll Attributes

There are three attributes, Agility, Brawn, and Cunning. They do mostly what you’d expect them to do in this sort of game, with Cunning covering all of the traditional “mental” stats and being used for magic. It’s also used for things like spotting hidden things and being sneaky, rather than the more traditional dexterity stat (which is, obviously, Agility) so that it’s not just spellcasters who might want to have a good Cunning.

As is tradition, we generate them by rolling 3d6 in order. We then have the option of swapping two results, though I never do.

My attributes are:

Agility: 8

Brawn: 8

Cunning: 15

Since I know that I’m going to want to interact with the Rituals later in character creation (partly because magic is fun and partly because I want to play with every part of this process) I’m actually pretty happy that I have a high Cunning here.

Looking at these scores, and knowing how the game works, I do wonder if 3d6 down the line makes for slightly too-weak characters. It’s not a huge issue because Exertion exists, which lets you turn failed rolls into successes, but maybe it’s something that could be addressed. An easy fix is to change the weighting of the options in the next step, which I think I might next time I update the game.

Step 2: Roll an Extra

After rolling our attributes, we roll an extra. There’s no explanatory text here, just a list numbered 2 to 12. I would hope that new players can figure out that they need to use 2d6 to roll this, but there’s no explanation here. (The game began life as an incredibly stripped-down game aimed at people very familiar with OSR play, and has slowly morphed into something where I’m explicitly targeting people new to the genre entirely, so there are very likely more moments that just this one where the text is at odds with my current intentions about what it’s doing).

I rolled an 8, which gives me “+2d6 x 10sp”. If I were to change the weighting of this table it would instead increase one of my attributes by +1d3, but I’ll make this character as-written for the time being.

I roll a 7 again, giving me 70 additional silver pieces for a total of 140sp at the start of play.

Step 3: Determine Health

To determine our Health we roll 1d6 and add half our Brawn (rounded down). I rolled a 5 and have a Brawn of 8, so I start with 9 Health. 

Step 4: Roll an Occupation

Our characters weren’t always adventurers, and we roll on this table to work out what we did before we started killing things for money. We always roll with advantage when performing tasks related to our occupation (and “advantage” is defined here in a footnote). Another editing note for myself here is that this text uses the word “vocation”, and it should be replaced with “occupation”.

I roll a 6, which means I used to be a courier.

Step 5: Choose Scars

Scars are the first unique part of the game we’ve hit in this process. Every character begins play with one historic Scar, and you’ll gain more of them each time you reach 0 health. The more Scars you have, the more chance you have of dying due to violence.

There’s an explanation of how Scars work in combat here (“Once per initiative round you can modify a roll you make in combat by +/- X, where X is the number of Scars you possess”) alongside a footnote explaining why it’s phrased as either a plus or a minus (“The rules for rolling dice in combat are on page 23. Because you’re often trying to roll between two numbers, it’s sometimes beneficial to reduce the result of your roll rather than add to it.”). The way Scars function in play is one of those things that seems more complex when it’s explained than it actually is in practice, and it’s a part of the game that I think some people do bounce off when trying to learn it from the text. I’ve done my best here to make it clear and I think the footnotes and internal links to the place where you can learn more about it help, but this is one of those areas where I’m too close to the text to know how well it’s working.

Anyway. To generate our Scar we roll 1d6 to select a body part, and then another 1d6 to work out what actually happened to it. This is the first time we’re going to have to flip pages, but thankfully it’s all linked and referenced for us.

My first roll is a 6, meaning my Scar is on my torso. My second roll is a 2, which says:

“Most bruises heal. This one didn’t. The skin where you were struck is permanently stained a dull shade of piss-yellow, with hints of brown and flecks of purple.”

Since I was a courier in a past life I think the obvious explanation for this is that I was kicked by a horse. That’s a fun little roleplaying thing (and has also reminded me that I need to write stats for horses, and that I need to make them horrible, because horses are terrifying animals).

Step 6: Learn Rituals

Our next step is optional, and it’s where we decided whether we want to try and learn magic or not. All characters can learn magic, but it carries a risk. You can start play with as many Rituals as you dare to learn, but trying to learn them might kill your character during creation. Here’s how it works:

To learn a Ritual, follow this procedure: 

1. Decide which aspect of yourself you will sacrifice to learn the Ritual: Health, Agility, Brawn, or Cunning. Roll 1d3 and reduce your max Health or chosen attribute by that amount. If this reduces your health or attribute to 0 or lower, you have died. Make a new character. 
2. Roll 1d3 to determine what kind of Ritual you know: Phrase (1), Sigil (2), or Ceremony (3). 
3. Roll 1d20 once on each of the Word Lists on the next page to determine the words that form your Ritual. 
4. Repeat this process for as many Rituals as you would like to attempt to learn.

Since Cunning is used to cast Rituals, and mine is quite high (15), I’m going to try and learn at least one. My Agility and Brawn are both sitting at 8 and I really don’t want to reduce them any further. I can choose to sacrifice some health, though, and that’s appealing. Maybe I’ll try to learn two Rituals, spending Health for one and Cunning for another. 

My first 1d3 roll is a 3, reducing my Health from 9 to 6. I roll 1d3 again, getting another 3 to determine that I’ve learned a Ceremony. (The difference between a Phrase, Sigil, and Ceremony isn’t described here and the text also doesn’t tell us where we can learn this, so I need to fix that). Then I roll 2d20 on the next page to find that the Ceremony I know is “Rotting Peace”. It will be up to me to figure out what this does in play.

Back to the start of the process. Another 1d3 and my Cunning is reduced by 1 to 14, which is an excellent result. This time I learn a Phrase, “Concealing Stone”. I’m tempted to press my luck and try to learn a third Ritual, since I have Cunning to spare, but I think I’ll stop here and instead be content with the fact that I have a nice high score with which to try and actually use these things in play.

Step 7: Name Yourself

This is the point at which I wish I’d written some name lists for this game, because I’m always bad at naming characters. A quick visit to an online random name generator gives me “Diya”.

Step 8: Spend Your Silver

The final step is to spend my starting silver. The equipment page tells me that I have Inventory slots equal to my Brawn (8) minus my armour’s AC. I guess the first thing I want to do is to buy some armour so that I know how much stuff I can carry.

Right now the only difference between Light, Medium, and Heavy armour in the game is the cost and the AC it provides, plus how that impacts your ability to carry equipment. Since I’m quite weak I don’t really want to grab Heavy armour, because that would reduce my inventory down to a single slot. Likewise Medium armour will only give me 3 slots to play with. So instead I’ll spend 30sp on Light armour, giving me an AC of 3 and 5 inventory slots to fill. I have 110sp left to spend, and that itself is going to take up another inventory slot, so unless I spend everything I actually only have 4 slots to play with. Thankfully my main weapon won’t take up a slot, since I’m carrying it.

I spend 8sp on a Medium melee weapon (we’re going to call it a staff, since we get to skin our weapons in whatever manner we want and I’m basically playing a wizard) and then I also spend 12sp on a Large ranged weapon (which is slow to reload but ignores enemy armour). 

I also buy a small metal mirror (10sp), 50 feet of rope (10sp), and a flask of holy water (25sp), leaving me with 45sp remaining and a full inventory. I haven’t got any food with me, so hopefully one of my companions will be bringing some along.

If I wanted to I could spend 10sp on a second backpack, which would give me another 4 inventory slots (half my Brawn) but also give me a -2 penalty to initiative rolls. If my Agility weren’t already quite low I’d be tempted to do that, but it is, so I won’t.

And that’s it. I have a character.

Going through the process was pretty painless, and didn’t require any flipping back and forth through the book, which I’m considering a win. You can actually make most of your character just by reading the book in order. It’s only once you’ve learned Rituals and it’s time to equip yourself that you suddenly have to jump forward in the book to the Equipment section, and there’s no real guidance for players. I might spend some time writing some start equipment sets at different price points that mimic some traditional classes, since your “class” in this game is largely defined by what you’re carrying and whether or not you decided to learn any magic. But all in all I’m happy with how this works, and with how fast it is. Doing this has also helped me identify some things I might want to change, both about how some things are written and how the book presents its information, so this was a valuable exercise.

Next time I’ll go back to looking at a game I didn’t write. Please do suggest something if you feel like it!

Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article. You can find all of the posts in this series here.

I’ve been reading the Dragonbane core set, slowly working on a Long Read post about it, but I decided to take a break from that to actually roll up a character in the system. So here we are.

Dragonbane is a translation of Drakar och Demoner, Scandinavia’s first and biggest tabletop RPG, originally launched in 1982. Here’s what the marketing copy tells us about it:

Dragonbane is a classic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game full of magic, mystery, and adventure. It is designed from the ground up to facilitate fast and furious play, with very little prep time and adventures that are a breeze to run. Dragonbane is a game with room for laughs at the table, while still offering brutal challenges for the adventurers.

I went into it expecting it to be essentially another D&D. It turns out that it was originally a direct translation of Chaosium’s Magic World, which is itself part of Basic Role-Playing that came out of Runequest. I know of BRP and Runequest but don’t actually know anything about how they work despite having read a lot of RQ adventures. I’m expecting that creating a character for this system will be a much more involved process than for the OSR games I’ve been looking at recently – I expect something closer to a D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e level of complexity, but we’ll see what happens.

Helpfully the book breaks down the process of character creation into steps. There are 13 of them.

1. Choose or roll your kin.
2. Note your innate ability.
3. Choose or roll your profession.
4. Choose or roll your age.
5. Choose or roll your name.
6. Roll your attributes.
7. Calculate your derived ratings.
8. Choose your trained skills.
9. Note your heroic ability.
10. Choose or roll your weakness (optional).
11. Choose or roll your gear.
12. Choose or roll your memento (optional).
13. Choose or roll your appearance.

The game comes with character sheets and it’s suggested that character creation should take place on one of these sheets. The sheets are available to download for free from the Free League website, and come with the digital version of the game (as well as physical copies in the actual box set). Annoyingly the digital version of the sheets isn’t form fillable, so the screenshots I’m going to show you during this process might look a little ugly as I’m editing the PDF directly.

Start time: 15:30

Step 1: Choose or Roll your Kin

There are six “kin” in Dragonbane: humans, halflings, dwarves, elves, mallards, and wolfkin. The game actually gives us the option to roll for a random kin, which I like. It’s a d12 table, with humans and halflings the most common result (1-4 and 5-7 respectively) followed by dwarves (8-9), then elves, mallards, and wolfkin being equally uncommon (10, 11, and 12). Normally I would roll, because I like random generation, but I have no idea what a “mallard” is so instead I’m just going to pick that. I sincerely hope it’s a duck person.

Jumping forward a couple of pages to the description of the Mallard, I’m delighted to find that it is, in fact, a duck person. Here’s the description:

The origin of the mallards is shrouded in mystery. Some scholars claim that they came from a mighty island realm that was swallowed by the sea thousands of years ago; others believe them to be the result of a failed magical experiment. Whatever the truth may be, these feathered humanoids are a common sight in the world. They have a knack for trade, and their agitated quacking is often an integral part of the soundscape around marketplaces and trade caravans. However, some mallards seek their fortunes as brigands, pirates, or mercenaries. Despite their diminutive size, they are fierce in battle and feared by many for their murderous rage.

Honestly I don’t know why you’d bother including boring, run-of-the-mill kin like halflings and elves when you’ve got duck- and wolf-people as options. Lean into the weirdness.

Step 2: Note your Innate Ability

Each kin has an innate ability that no other kin can learn. Mallards get two, apparently. These innate abilities usually cost Willpower Points to use.

The two Mallard abilities are “Ill-Tempered” (WP: 3) and “Webbed Feet” (WP: 0). “Ill-Tempered” lets me “activate this ability when making a skill roll and get a boon to the roll”. After doing so I also become Angry, if I’m not already. I don’t know what that means in game terms but let’s write it down.

“Webbed Feet” just gives us a “boon” to swimming rolls, and lets us move at full speed while in or under water.

The next section header under Kin is “Language”, which gives me pause for a second because the overview of character creation doesn’t mention anything about languages. We’re told that most characters can speak, read, and write a common language, and that non-human characters (presumably such as the Mallard) “often have their own languages that few humans understand”. It goes on to say that the Languages skill is used to understand other languages (that makes sense), but it doesn’t indicate where we need to look to find out what languages we might know. I’ll put a pin in that for now.

Step 5: Name

I’m skipping ahead here, purely because I’m flipping through the kin listings to get to the next step and I’ve noticed that the roll tables for character names are listed alongside the kin descriptions. It doesn’t make sense to flip back to this page later when there’s nothing else I need on it now, so I’m going to roll a name and move on. 

My character’s name is Hackleswell.

(Initially my reaction to seeing d6 lists of names was that this isn’t enough, but actually it’s more than enough for most groups, isn’t it?)

Step 3: Profession

As with kin, we’re given a roll table (this time 1d10) of professions to pick from. From the description – “all the plater characters are adventurers, but you have learned a thing or two before the game begins” – I get the impression that these are closer to D&D 5e’s Backgrounds than traditional classes, but then as I continue reading I can see that they’re responsible for determining lots of your starting skills, the gear you start with, and which heroic ability you get. I don’t know yet whether there’s any advancement in them, and it strikes me as I’m writing this that maybe that’s one of the key differences between a “background” and a “class” – do you get better in it as you adventure, or does it just determine what you know when you start out? (This may be an obvious observation but it’s not a connection I’ve made before, mainly because I don’t think about backgrounds or classes very often).

Anyway. One dice roll later and we’ve determined that I’m going to be playing a bard. Which, given the choice, is what I’d normally go for anyway.

To avoid flipping back and forth in the PDF I’m going to note down some of the information the Bard entry gives me, namely that my Key Attribute is CHA (presumably Charisma), the Skills I can choose from are Acrobatics, Bluffing, Evade, Knives, Languages, Myths & Legends, Performance, and Persuasion, and that my Heroic Ability is Musician.

(Another side note here to complain about a common thing that really winds me up, which is the consistency in how skills are named. It bothers me disproportionately when skill lists use a combination of verbs and nouns, and I desperately want to fix this list to be at least a little more consistent. Even just changing “Evade” to “Evasion” or “Evading” and “Performance” to “Performing” would make me happier despite still being inconsistent).

Steps 11 and 5: Gear and Nickname

As with the Kin entry, we have a couple of tables here that I can see are going to be needed later on and I don’t want to have to scroll back up the PDF, so I’m going to roll them now. I start play with a horn, knife, torch, flint and tinder, 4 food rations, and 6 silver, and my nickname is Talespinner.

Step 4: Age

Age is actually meaningful here. It’s divided into three categories – young, adult, and old – and each one impacts our stats in some way. Older age means that we begin with lower attributes but higher skill ratings, which seems a fair trade-off (though I’m still waiting for a game to account for Old Man Strength when doing this sort of thing).

We’re free to choose or roll for it, and I’m going to roll. Looking at the distribution of results (1-3: Young, 4-5: Adult, 6: Old), “Young” is the default setting. I rolled a 4, which makes me an Adult and gives me 6+4 trained Skills. (I assume it’s written in this manner rather than just saying “10” because 6 of the skills have to be selected from our profession and the others can be picked freely from elsewhere.)

I do wish that there was some indication of what “Adult” means in diegetic terms. How old is an Adult Mallard in years? How does that compare to a human? What sort of life expectancy do I have? If we’re going to make age meaningful then we should make it meaningful, I think.

Step 5: Name

Oh hey, we’ve done this step.

Step 6: Attributes

Now we come to the numbers. Each character has six base attributes that indicate their basic mental and physical capabilities. Each is scored on a scale from 3 to 18, generated by rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest result. We don’t have to roll them in order, but we do have to assign them as we roll them rather than rolling all 6 and then making choices. Here’s the exact wording of this process:

Roll 4D6 and remove the worst die, which gives you a score between 3 and 18. Assign that score to an attribute of your choice. Repeat this process five more times until you have assigned a score to each attribute. You must assign each score as you roll them, but once done you may swap two scores.

I actually really like this as a mid-way point between “roll 3d6 down the line” and “put them wherever you want”. It allows for some randomisation and interesting outcomes while still meaning that you can make sure your highest score is in your key attribute, if that’s what you want to do.

The actual attributes themselves are unsurprising to anybody familiar with fantasy RPGs: Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Willower, and Charisma. My key attribute is Charisma, so I’ll keep that in mind when I’m swapping scores. My rolls were as follows: 12, 13, 10, 12, 15, 10 and I initially assigned them like this:

STR 12 AGL 13 CON 10

WIL 12 CHA 15 INT 10

After my first three rolls were underwhelming I told myself that the first time I rolled a 13+ I’d put it into Charisma, and it turned out that my highest roll when there anyway. I’m largely happy with these scores, and I think the only change I want to make is swapping Strength with Intelligence. That makes my final attributes look like this:

STR 10 CON 10 AGL 13

INT 12 WIL 12 CHA 15

If I were either Young or Old these would change, but I’m not, so they don’t.

Step 7: Derived Ratings

Based on our attributes we have a number of derived ratings. Let’s go through them in order.

Movement

Does exactly what it says on the tin, telling us how many meters we can run in a round of combat. (As an English person who exists in a world that uses a weird mixture of Imperial and Metric measurements, meters for a person moving around feels very weird and doesn’t really mean anything to me. Mentally I’m probably going to convert this roughly to feet if I ever play the game). It starts with a base number determined by your Kin – in my case, 8 – and is then modified by Agility. With an AGL of 13 I get +2, so my Movement is 10.

Damage Bonus

Characters have two separate damage bonuses, one determined by Strength and one by Agility. For scores less then or equal to 12 there’s no adjustment, so I don’t get a Strength bonus, but with an AGL of 13 I get to add +D4 to AGL-based weapons.

I really like a dice-based bonus for damage. Rolling dice is fun and it makes it A Moment when you roll maximum damage on both dice, or roll poorly on your initial damage die but make up for it with a good roll on the bonus die.

Hit Points

Nice and easy, this one. Our maximum HP is equal to our CON, so 10 for me, but can be increased by taking the Heroic Ability “Robust”.

Willpower Points

These are used for magic and, as we’ve already established, for innate abilities and heroic abilities. As with HP our initial number is equivalent to an attribute – in this case, WIL – but can be increased by taking a specific heroic ability (“Focused”). I have 12 WP.

Step 8: Trained Skills

Skills. The things that our characters can do that other people might not be able to do, or can’t do quite as well. They represent knowledge and abilities acquired during – or prior to – our life as an adventurer. There are 30 skills in the base game, each measured by skill level on a scale from 1 to 18. The higher the better, apparently, and each skill is connected to an attribute that determines our base chance in that skill. This is described as “a “free” skill level that you get automatically”.

This is very similar to things like the proficiency bonus in D&D 5e, where every character always adds their ability modifier to a roll when trying to use that skill but only characters with training in that skill get to add their proficiency bonus. Picking skills is, traditionally, my least favourite part of making RPG characters.

(A note here before we go on. The book makes mention of “Secondary Skill” beyond the core skills, which are things like schools of magic. The base game doesn’t give players a base chance in any secondary skills, but we’re told that “future expansions and supplements may modify this”. I’m always interested to see this sort of product line building going on in a core rulebook.)

As mentioned earlier, 6 of my trained skills have to come from the list determined by my profession, while another 4 can come from the main list. The level of trained skills is equal to twice the base chance, so it’s very simple to work out. It just requires a bit of time spent filling things in on the character sheet.

In the end I select the following trained skills: Bluffing, Evade, Knives, Languages, Myths & Legends, Performance, Sneaking, Spot Hidden, Sleight of Hand, Beast Lore.

I’m always interested to see the spread of attributes being linked to skills in games like this. Most of them are linked to Agility, Intelligence, and Charisma, with only one non-combat skill being linked to Strength (Crafting, which seems a strange decision). None of the skills are linked to WIL at all.

Step 9: Heroic Ability

Heroic Abilities are special abilities that give us advantages in the game, based on our profession. I’m not sure why this is a discrete step in this process, since we already picked our Profession early on and I know that my heroic ability is “Musician”. Weirdly, this page doesn’t give me any additional information about what this ability actually does, and doesn’t point me to another page in the book where I can learn about it.

A quick scan of the PDF bookmarks tells me that this information is at the end of the Skills chapter. The requirement to use Musician is “Performance 12”. That means that we need at least a 13 in our prime attribute (Charisma) and to have chosen Performance as one of our trained skills in order to be able to actually use our heroic ability. It’s probably a safe assumption that most Bards will pick Performance, but it would be nice to have some indication that actually it’s a key part of the class and you can’t really function as designed without it.

Step 10: Weakness

Basically just a roleplaying prompt, but let’s roll one. I rolled a 19, giving me “Cynic. I always think things will turn out for the worst”. A cynical duck sounds like fun to play.

Step 11: Gear

We already did this step earlier. Hurray for us.

Well, we sort of did this step. We’ve got the items from our profession, but in skipping ahead in the book I can see that there’s an encumbrance limit equal to half our Strength. My limit is 5, and I have 5 items here. That’s without including a musical instrument, which I don’t appear to have, or a weapon beyond the knife I’m starting play with (though reading a bit further tells me that I can have up to three weapons at hand which don’t count towards encumbrance limits).

Given that all musical instruments cost gold, and I don’t have any gold, I’m going to assume that I don’t actually begin play with an instrument. The same is also true for armour, which I can’t afford either. I am very squishy right now.

Step 12: Memento

A memento is an item of sentimental value that we carry with us, something small and unobtrusive without much value that’s basically just a roleplaying aid. Other games call them trinkets. I roll a 6 and get “a wooden figurine you got as a child”. I like the idea of my mallard having a little wooden duck painted yellow, so that’s what we’re going with.

Step 13: Appearance

And finally, a d20 appearance table. With a result of 13 I develop a limp.

And that’s my character done, as far as I can tell. Here’s the sheet.

I’m missing some information about my weapon, but otherwise this looks pretty complete. This whole process, including typing up the blog post while making my character, took about an hour and a quarter to complete. If I hadn’t been blogging I think it would have been much quicker. 

Having done this, I’m very interested to see what this game looks like in play. It occupies this strange space where the books – and the character sheets – look like big crunchy trad games, but actually there’s not a huge amount going on here mechanically. I don’t have tons of feats and unique abilities. I have some equipment, a skill list, and not much else. I think this might feel much more like a rules-lite OSR game than I’d expect if I got it to the table, and I’m curious to see if that proves to be the case.

Last week I resurrected the emaciated old corpse of this blog series and I’m going to keep writing them until I inevitably forget for the second time. Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article.

Since I got started with Luke Gearing’s Swyvers last time, I figured it might not be a bad idea to look at his other game Wolves Upon The Coast this time. Swyvers character creation reminded me a lot of Wolves – brief and to the point, with a focus on getting you to the table sooner rather than later. My experience of playing Wolves is that most of what makes your character a character comes out of play, especially once you start making use of Boasts (the advancement mechanism in the game), so this post might well be very short. But let’s do it anyway.

Wolves Upon The Coast is a free download, intended to be used with &&&&&&&&& Treasure and Volume 2: Monsters &. Luke also put out a ludicrously huge hexcrawl for the game called the Grand Campaign which is in my opinion one of the best things in all of RPGs and well worth the $50 asking price. The demo area Ruislip is a free download, though, and you could easily run an entire campaign just in that area without any issue.

Anyway. Enough marketing. Let’s look at the marketing. Here’s what Wolves Upon The Coast tell us about itself:

Your history is gone. It was taken from you, or you from it.

You were thralls.

Now your master lies dead in the bottom of a raiding vessel, equipped for adventure.

You are free.

The Grand Campaign occupies an area “roughly analogous to Northern Europe during what used to be referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’”, and the setting itself comes out through the hex fills (as well as the bestiary entries in Volume 2: Monsters & and the items in &&&&&&&&& Treasure), but otherwise that small introduction is close to all we get from the system itself when it comes to setting. (There is some other setting stuff buried in the rules document – the use of hacksilver for currency, the different kinds of vessels you can buy, etc. – but it’s subtle and easily missed).

Let’s roll up a character, a process which is covered entirely on a single page.

The first thing to do is to generate our Characteristics. There are three of them – Strength, Agility, and Constitution. They represent what you’d expect them to represent. They’re generated by rolling 3d6, with scores of 15+ gives us a bonus to associated rolls (To Hit for Strength, Dodging Saves for Agility, and Physique Saves for Constitution). We’ll get to that in a minute.

I start with the following scores:

Strength: 12

Agility: 11

Constitution: 10

Pretty average scores, with no bonuses. Task resolution is a matter of rolling under your Characteristic on an amount of d6s determined by the difficulty of the task, with a base of 2d6 for easy tasks, rising to 4d6 for hard tasks. The amount of dice used can be modified up or down by items, abilities, and fictional positioning.

The next step is to write down our Saves. There are three of them, too, each with a set value. Since I don’t have any Characteristics above 15, I’ll use the starting values. That gives me this:

Dodging: 15+

Physique: 13+

Warding: 17+

Dodging is used to “avoid peril”, Physique is used to fight poison and disease, and Warding is used to resist magic. Saves are rolled on a d20, aiming to match or exceed your Save value. 

One thing I’ve been unsure of for a while is if or when these starting values ever change. I’ll show you the two pieces of text that are interacting here and then talk through my thoughts. (I’m resisting the urge to ask Luke directly, since most players approaching RPG texts don’t have the luxury of being able to ask the author for clarification. Including me, in most cases).

Here’s what we’re told about Characteristics:

There are three Characteristics:

• Strength – measures raw physical power.

– A Strength of 15+ gives a +1 to Hit rolls.

• Agility – measures speed and deftness of action.

– An Agility of 15+ gives a +1 bonus to Dodging Saves.

• Constitution – measures endurance.

– A Constitution of 15+ or more gives a +1 bonus to Physique Saves.

And here’s what we’re told about Saves:

There are three Saves:

• Dodging – used to avoid peril. This begins at 15+.

• Physique – used to fight poison and disease. This begins at 13+.

• Warding – used to resist magic. This begins at 17+.

Functionally, adding +1 to a roll is exactly the same as reducing the Save value. (That is, rolling against a target of 15+ and adding +1 to your roll is identical to rolling against a target of 14+ with no modification). I can’t see anywhere in the text that indicates when these Save values might change, so I suspect that the original intention was for your Characteristic to modify your Save values but that that it was phrased as “gives a +1” for uniform phrasing when put next to the Strength bonus (“gives a +1 to Hit rolls”). Regardless, this is a minor quibble of a text that is – as far as I’m aware – largely unedited at this point, and it has absolutely no bearing on character creation, so I’m going to stop wasting my time on it now. Let’s move on.

The next set of information we’re given is to do with how armour impacts our Dodge Rolls. We begin play with 3d6*10 hacksilver worth of equipment, and are explicitly told that anything we don’t spend will be lost. I start with 100hs, so let’s turn to the equipment lists on the next page and kit myself out.

My Strength and Agility are roughly the same and neither is exceptional, so I’m not drawn to any particular style of play immediately (by which I mean if I had a high Agility I might decide to pick up a ranged weapon, for example). So I’m just going to buy stuff that sounds fun. Here’s what I pick up:

• Warhammer (25sp, Heavy (2d6 take the highest damage), two-handed, those struck are thrown backwards if unable to make a Physique Save. Use the damage rolled to determine distance, minus the HD of the creature struck).
• Leather armour (Light, 15sp, AC7)

After grabbing a weapon and some armour I’ve got 60sp left over. Characters can carry items equal to their AC plus 5, so in my case 12 items, with worn or wielded equipment not counting towards the total. Here’s the result of my shopping trip:

• Mirror, small silver (20sp)
• Sleeping bag (2sp)
• Backpack (5sp)
• Trail rations (x5, 10sp total)
• Crowbar (5sp)
• Hammer & wooden stakes (5sp)
• Net (10sp)
• Torches x6 (1sp)

This left me with 2sp remaining, which I lose. If I’m being honest, this is basically what I always buy in fantasy RPGs when I’m equipping a character unless there’s some glaring reason (like a high Agility score, as discussed above) to do otherwise. Nets in particular are criminally underutilised in games are are, frankly, a shit-ton of fun.

Because I’m wearing Light Armour I add 2 to my Dodge Rolls. This means that my Dodging Save is functionally 13+.

I have an Attack Bonus of +2 and 1 Hit Dice, a d6, which determines my HP. I start play with 4HP. 

All characters begin play knowing 1d6/2 languages. These can be “half known”, meaning you’re conversant in it, or you can “know” it twice, meaning you’re also literate. The text tells us that we can hold our language slots “in reserve”, allowing players to declare that they know a language the first time it is encountered in play rather than having to pick from a list ahead of time. I really like this, because it always sucks to pick out languages you know and have them never be useful. The game itself doesn’t give us a list of languages, presumably because these will be specific to the setting that you’re playing in (for example if you’re using the Grand Campaign, your characters might start play knowin Ruis, the language of Ruislip). My character knows 2 languages to begin, so I’ll keep them in reserve until a hypothetical game when I use this character.

Your characters begin play sharing a small raiding vessel with twelve rowers, ex-thralls who look to the group for leadership. There is enough food and water for all hands to survive for four days, and you have travelled two days from the home of your captor.

And that’s it. We have a character. We know where we came from, and where we are right now. The only thing left to do is to give them a name (I googled “viking name generator” and got the result of Kerr) and to find out where we’re going by beginning play. Time to go raid a coastline.

Ages ago I started a short-lived series of blog posts where I grabbed a system and rolled up a character in it. I can’t remember exactly why I stopped doing them – I tend to flippantly blame Burning Wheel for killing my love of RPGs for a few weeks, but in reality the answer is more than likely just “I have ADHD and I forgot once”. This also started as an excuse to read more RPG books and engage with them critically, and it sort of morphed into my Long Read posts.

Anyway, I’m bringing it back at least once, because Swyvers is on Kickstarter and I’ve been hearing a lot about how good the tables for generating its setting are. I want to play with them a little bit, and this feels like a good excuse to do that.

Full disclosure here, Luke Gearing is a friend and I’ve seen bits of Swyvers over the past couple of years. (Most notably I’ve been using the carousing table in my games for ages). Nobody has asked me to write this post, though, and I’m using the publicly-available quickstart to generate everything you see here.

Here’s the pitch for Swyvers:

While this blog series has traditionally been about character creation specifically, today I’m mainly looking at generating The Smoke. This feels like the kind of game where the setting is as important a character as anyone else, and I really want to see what comes out of these tables. Plus it just sounds fun. I may also roll up a PC, but we’ll see. Swyvers is described as “a grotty system for running a grotty game”, and I’m expecting the city I roll here to be suitably horrible.

The very first page of the quickstart (after the same introductory/marketing copy we see on the product page and a piece of really stunning, evocative black and white art by David Hoskins) is character generation, so I guess I’ll do that before I jump ahead to creating The Smoke even though the city is really what I’m here for.

Character creation looks to be incredibly fast. You’ve got three attributes (Constitution, Dexterity, and Strength, which all do exactly what you’d expect them to do), each generated using 3d6. Hit Points are equal to constitution, and you have a 25% chance of being literate. The text tells us that “a reason for literacy must be determined in under 5 seconds, or else literacy is lost. (e.g. “A mouse taught me.”)”. I love this, frankly. This really stripped-down, simple approach to characters reminds me a lot of Luke’s other game Wolves Upon The Coast.

My character has 12 Con, 11 Dex, and 8 Str, and is illiterate. We start with 1d10+10 shillings (I get 13), a Ropey Shank, and some ‘Orrid Rags. We also get to roll one item from a 1d100 table of trinkets, and I come up with a diary and writing material. What is my illiterate Swyver going to do with them? I have no idea. These seem like pretty decent starting stats, since most of the time we’re going to be trying to Roll Under them.

The final step – which I missed initially – is to roll a Trait. I think this (optional) step could probably be mentioned up top before the long trinket tables, because the way it’s laid out means that the trait table looks like an extension of the trinket table and can be easily missed, but it’s not exactly a big problem. My trait is “Always fumin’” – presumably because I’ve got this notebook and pen but no idea what to do with them.

And that’s it. That’s the whole character. All the other details – who am I? What do I want? Why do I have this notebook and pen? – will emerge during play.

The next section gives us some “alternate starts” – effectively classes, which we can use instead of rolling a character in the way we just did. “Some players might not want to be bog-standard scum,” the book tells us. “These [alternate starts] all change the game significantly, so use with caution”. We’ve got a Ruined Nob (“Your house has fallen, and now you must mingle with the muck.”), a Ratman Exile (“A ratman ejected from their clan. The bounty on your tail is still very appealing.”), and a Hedge-Swyver (“Any old twat from out of town.”). I’m not going to make a second character here, but these do look really fun. I will note that two of them say “Does not roll on the normal Contact table” and I don’t yet know what that means (though I can guess, of course), but I’m assuming that we’ll roll Contacts when we generate The Smoke. This is possibly another case where some guidance up top might have been useful, but it’s also the case that reading the book generally (hopefully) answers most of the questions raised by reading the book.

After the alternate starts we’ve got some Starter Kits of equipment to aid fast play, and I’m just going to grab one of them. Using 10 of my 13 shillings I grab the Pick-pocket’s pack, giving me a Decent Shank, Clobber, a Sack, and a Ratty Leather Coat. What is Clobber? It’s just my clobber, innit. Does it do anything? No idea mate. (A few pages later we find out that Clobber is “Shoes and a shirt without ‘oles. Nice.”) 

Before we get to The Smoke we’re treated to lots of equipment lists, including prosthetics and pets, and I think my partner will be very happy to learn that you can save up to buy a trained bear. I really like the way pets are made useful here, and the way they learn new tricks as they survive more heists (meaning you can teach them to keep watch, follow people, etc). I’ve got 3s left over so screw it, I’m buying a pig (“Less big, less tasty. Smarter than you think.”)

Now let’s turn to the generators for The Smoke and see what sort of place my weird little pig-bothered is going to occupy. Here’s what we know about The Smoke before we start, the things that are always true:

The writing in this section is exactly what you’d expect from Luke – punchy, evocative, and visceral. I get a really good sense of how grimy and horrible this city is, and I’m excited to see what my specific iteration of it is going to look like. The “Building The Smoke” section tells us that The Smoke has 1d4 rivers (I get 3) which merge into one and flow into the sea, and that all versions of The Smoke have Palace, Royal Gaol, Mayoral, and Docks districts. We’re encouraged to physically map the place and given a “simple, abstracted method” to use, and so I’m going to do that and show you my progress as we go. I’m going to split this into steps just to make it easier for you to follow what’s happening.

Step 1

Draw coastline, connecting the rivers of your Smoke. Then place each of the districts above on this map, drawing ovals and labelling them appropriately.

Nice and easy, this. The idea is that you draw the bare bones of the city and then, as and when you need to add districts, you simply add them to the map. Here’s my initial map.

Step 2: Expanding The Smoke

The Smoke is sort of quantum and potentially infinite, at least at the start of play. There aren’t a fixed number of districts. Instead we generate them as needed, though we’re advised to generate about 5 before play in order to “give players options without over-burdening them”. We also need to decide some key facts about our Smoke, including its True Name, who the Monarch is, how they rule, and how strong the Church is. There are tables for all of this, so we’ll do that now.

True Name: Kaergate

A melancholic, war-hungry teenager wears the crown. The Smoke itself is oppressively powerful, while the Country and Continent themselves are only of middling power.

The Church of Our Vengeful Lord of Salt and Wrecks is pitiful, but violent and driven. I assume there has been some sort of reformation in the not-too-distant past, and that the Church is now attempting to recover from this.

As far as the man on the street is concerned, the War is being waged against “another sodding Continental monarch”, and we’ve got the advantage now.

District Generation

I’ll talk through the steps used to generate a district, and then I’ll roll up my starting 5 and place them on the map.

First we roll a name from a d66 table. Then we generate its size, density, wealth, “Royal Visits”, crime levels, and watch presence. From here we can generate the “average house and carried wealth” according to the overall district wealth. Then we roll for the dominant function of the district, plus some opportunities and rumours alongside notable denizens and secrets.

After this we’ve got tons of tables that we can use during play – things like “why is this district deserted”, some very granular random encounter tables (arranged by wealth level of the district plus the time of day), street names, jobs, and detectives, plus extensive tables for generating the Midden – the undercity that I expect a lot of our adventures will descend into quite quickly.

All of this is very cool, but right now we don’t need it. We just need the bare bones of some districts. So let’s do that, and add them to our map.

District 1: Wrought Moors

Huge (60 minutes to cross), deserted, destitute, vanishing royal visits, pervasive crime, average watch presence.

These rolls honestly fell perfectly. A huge, deserted area that’s effectively a no-go zone filled with crime and nothing else, right in the middle of the city, is very compelling. A quick roll on the “why is the district deserted?” table gives me the result, “A bumbling necromancer was crushed by a wagon, and his uncontrolled creations stalk the area still”, and I basically have enough to run a full campaign in this area alone.

I think that the reason the watch presence here is “average” isn’t that they actively patrol the area. I think they’ve hastily walled it off, and the watch presence is in the form of guards walking the walls to keep people out – and to make sure that whatever monstrosities are inside stay inside. Looking at my map I also have a pretty perfect place to put this.

Even though it’s deserted I’m also going to roll up a notable denizen and a secret, just to have something currently going on in the place. The dice give me a Disgraced River-man, and tells me that “the accidental sprawl of the district functions as a magic circle”. That works perfectly with our bumbling necromancer, who presumably was trying to make use of the magic circle for… something.

District 2: 66 Keystone March

Large (45 minutes to cross), normal density, rich, rare royal visits, common crime levels, average watch presence.

This one is less immediately evocative than the Wrought Moorts, but I think a deserted district is always going to be more interesting on its face. Given that this is a rich area there must be a reason why royal visits are rare. Let’s roll up the dominant function and some rumours and see what we get.

Dominant Function: Barber-surgeons

Opportunities & Rumours: A traveling carnival has set up in the area.

So we’ve got a nicer part of town with surprising crime levels but no increased watch presence to account for it, and it’s largely left to its own devices by the nobility. I think this might be a place for the nouveau-rich, barber-surgeons who’ve made themselves wealthy off the back of the ongoing War. It used to be a less affluent area on the outskirts of the city, which is why the royals and the watch don’t pay it much mind. The traveling carnival is just the latest in a long line of attractions, as the residents throw increasingly rowdy parties and splash their cash around. 

Rolling on the Secrets table also tells me that “someone is conducting experiments on corpses in The Midden”, which immediately gives us some ideas for heists/adventures as these experiments spill over into the surface world and wreak havoc during one of the ongoing parties.

District 3: Grim Downs

Tiny (10 minutes to cross), quiet density, affluent, occasional royal visits, pervasive crime, high watch presence.

I immediately really like the juxtaposition of a ton of wealth concentrated in a tiny area with a name like “Grim Downs”. Given the pervasive crime and the high watch presence I think this is mob central. This is where the heads of the crime families of the Smoke live, in what is essentially a gated community. We’re talking mansions behind high walls, and guards walking the streets who are all on the payroll of various mob bosses. This is where our Swyvers aspire to live.

The “Dominant Functions” table also gives me tailoring as the main trade in this area, as well as a rumour that animals have been vanishing in the area – even the rats.

I used to work for someone whose husband was one of the richest men in England (or at least claimed to be). I visited his house once and was amazed to find that he had a large aviary in his back garden. He kept peacocks (among other birds), and he had an ongoing problem with someone stealing a specific peacock from his grounds. Peacocks are, in my experience, horrible animals, and I desperately want to put them into this rich gated community full of horrible bastards, so that’s what we’re doing. One of the mob bosses keeps peacocks, and nobody really cared about the animals in this district going missing until one of his prize birds vanished. That’s our hook. 

District 4: Chunt Towers

Large, normal density, affluent, rare royal visits, fleeting crime, high watch presence.

Based entirely on the name I wanted to make this either a university district or a place where wizards hang out, but I’m going to roll on the Dominant Functions table rather than going with my initial (obvious) idea to see if we can make something interesting out of the results.

The result I get is that this is the legal district, and that unexplained lights have been appearing in empty buildings. I’m picturing court houses, lawyers in offices high up in their towers (and cheaper lawyers in relative shitholes on street level), and all the known entrances to the Midden being secured under lock and key. This area is probably close to the Gaol and the mayoral district.

I also rolled up a mute scholar, and a cell of anti-monarchists embedded in the area. I wonder if they’re what’s behind the weird lights in empty buildings?

District 5: Thatcher’s Hole

Tiny, quiet, rich, royal visits sometimes, common crime, small watch presence.

Another interesting one here. What’s going on in this district that the royals occasionally show up despite the relatively unchecked crime? Maybe this is a residential area where the teenage monarch’s mistress lives with the royal bastard? Maybe it’s a district of brothels and prostitution, and the monarch occasionally visits in disguise? 

I was going to roll on the Functions table for this, but given that “‘Gentleman’s Clubs’” is one of the possible entries I’m just going to go with that, since it fits what I’ve already come up with. The rumour table tells me that “a noble scion, missing for a week, was last seen here”, and that immediately gives us our hook. I don’t think I really need to roll anything else for this district, but I’m going to grab a secret anyway.

A result of 9 gives me “a foreign nation has installed a spy in the area”, and that’s basically all we need. One of the monarch’s new favourites happens to be a spy from the nation we’re at War with, and nobody has figured it out yet.

And that’s it. Here’s my final map:

This whole process took about an hour, inclusive of writing it up for this blog, and I feel like I could run a game in this city immediately without needing to do any more prep. The city feels alive in my head, and I can picture how to spin a lot of play out of this without ever needing to generate more districts.

Swyvers is on Kickstarter at the moment. Whether you back it or not I’d definitely recommend picking up the quickstart, which is currently free. Maybe next week I’ll do one of these posts for Wolves Upon The Coast, too, since rolling horrible viking bastards is always a laugh.

Thanks for reading.

The first time I ever played a roleplaying game was in June 1994, when I was given the AD&D First Quest boxed set for my birthday. I remember it fondly and still have it on my shelf in surprisingly good condition (I even still have all the minis, and the CD still plays). But while First Quest was the first time I actually played the game, it wasn’t my first experience of D&D.

The reason I got given that present, and the tender age of 8 years old, was because I used to go with my dad to his friend Henry’s house, where I’d sit and watch them play a game I didn’t understand that involved a lot of shouting, some really intricate, beautifully painted models of ruins and caves and graveyards and stuff that looked metal as fuck, and some books with bright red covers.

I actually only vaguely remember the books that my dad and his friends used – my memories are filled with an enormous, intricate dungeon spread across a tabletop, which I assume was some kind of ongoing megadungeon they were playing through. I don’t know what edition they were playing. This would have been some time between ‘90 and ‘94, so there’s probably equal chances that it was AD&D, BECMI, or 2nd Edition. And I have the rulebooks for all of those editions, inherited from my dad, so that doesn’t help at all.

What I do know is that I’ve played AD&D and I’ve played 2e, but I’ve never fucked with BECMI. And as last week was horrible, I want to do something that I’m at least tangentially familiar with. So today we’re rolling up a character in the dragon game.

The first thing that surprises me is that BECMI contains a solo adventure to teach you how to play the game. How has nobody ever told me about this?

Well, the answer to that question is that it isn’t really a solo adventure at all. It’s an overly long, not very well written story with some mechanics thrown in that slowly introduces the basic concepts of the game and asks you to roll a d20 a few times while you go through it. I can imagine it was quite helpful if you had no conception of how an RPG worked. Nearly 40 years later it’s nowhere near as relevant or useful, but that isn’t the game’s fault. (The two alternate endings to this “adventure” absolutely remind me of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Maybe one week I’ll roll up an Advanced Fighting Fantasy character, though that would be a very short post.)

The second solo adventure really does feel like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. I don’t bother to read it or play through it because frankly I just want to get to making a character, but I’m back to being surprised that nobody ever told me this is how BECMI taught the game. I’m also surprised I’ve never heard of M1: Blizzard Pass or M2: Maze of the Riddling Minotaur before.

Time to jump forward past the rest of the book to get to character creation. Will I regret skipping the next 20 pages or so? Very possible. Is that going to stop me? Not at all.

BECMI tells me that my first character will take about an hour to make. Since I’m writing this post at the same time I assume that’s going to be closer to 90 minutes. I’ll be interested to see how accurate that guess is (and whether the fact that I’m familiar with later editions of D&D helps at all).

The first step is one I’m definitely familiar with: roll 3d6 in order for ability scores. I get the following scores:

STR 11 INT 13 WIS 11

DEX 15 CON 9 CHA 13

I rolled surprisingly well. I can’t complain about those scores at all.

Step two is to pick a class. My first ever D&D character was Slinker, the thief from First Quest, so I’m going to make a thief. I’d decided this before I rolled, and it’s very convenient that my highest score is in dexterity since that’s the prime requisite for Thieves. (I promise I actually rolled 3d6 in order and came out with these results).

Also, using the words “prime requisite” again for the first time in 20 years makes me very nostalgically happy.

Step three is to exchange ability score points if you want to, raising one ability score by 1 point at the cost of lowering another by 2. This feels like an early form of point buy, and it’s something I don’t ever remember being allowed to do in AD&D. Maybe it was removed from later editions, or maybe I just didn’t know that was a thing I could do. Who knows? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.) I decide I’m going to drop my Wisdom by 2 points (to 9) and my Intelligence by 2 (to 11) so that I can raise my Dexterity 2 points to 17. I would have liked to have dropped my Charisma to get the Dex up to 18 (because if 27 years of playing dragon games has taught me anything it’s that 18 is a good score to have) but that’s not allowed for some reason. Now my abilities look like this:

STR 11 INT 11 WIS 9

DEX 17 CON 9 CHA 13

Step 4 is to roll for Hit Points. Thieves have a d4 hit die, which is ludicrous and tells me that the play style for thieves has really changed a lot in the past 30 years or so! With a Con of 9 I don’t have any modifier to my roll, and I end up with 3hp to start.

Step 5 is to roll for money. My character starts out with no possessions except for normal clothes and a little money, and now I see where Mӧrk Borg gets it from. (I’m realising as I write these posts that I’m really showing off how little I know about the history of this hobby, and honestly I’m fine with that.) I start with 100gp, which seems okay? I guess I’ll find out in the next step, when I have to try and equip myself with this money.

In checking the description of the Thief I learn that I should carry missile weapons, plus a sword or dagger for situations where I can’t avoid close combat. I’m only allowed leather armour, and I can’t use a shield or two-handed weapons. I’ll also need Thieves’ Tools if I’m going to open any locks – and since that’s literally my job, I guess I’d better buy them!

With all this in mind, I turn to the weapons and equipment list on page 29. Leather armour, a short bow and quiver with 20 arrows, a normal sword, backpack, set of Thieves’ Tools, hand mirror, 10’ pole, and 50’ length of rope costs 97gp. That means I can’t afford rations, which I assume I’ll also need. I put the normal sword back and instead buy a short sword, freeing up another 3gp. 1 week’s worth of rations and a waterskin takes me up to 100gp even. Now I see why I’m a thief – gear is expensive, and I’m flat broke after outfitting myself. I also realise I don’t have a lantern – hopefully, whichever theoretical adventuring party I join will have ample light sources with them.

In step 7 we work out the rest of the mechanical stuff – AC, Hit Roll chart, and Saving Throws. With leather armour and a Dex of 17, I have an AC of 5. I suddenly remember that THAC0 and “lower is better” AC is a thing that I might have to contend with, but I also remember that I never hated it as much as everyone I speak to about early D&D seems to. I imagine it’s different in BECMI to 2e, and I suppose I’m about to find out.

It turns out that every starting character uses the same Hit Roll Table. So that’s handy – I don’t need to work anything out, and won’t need to until I get to at least 4th level. I grab my Saving Throws from my class description, figure out my modifiers (called Adjustments in BECMI), and now my character looks like this:

• Saving Throws
• Death Ray or Poison: 13
• Magic Wands: 14
• Paralysis or Turn to Stone: 13
• Dragon Breath: 16
• Rods, Staves or Spells: 15

Can I just take a second to say that I love that in a set of five saving throws, there’s one that’s explicitly for dragon breath? Dragons have never really shown up in the D&D games I’ve played in, but this tells me that the early dragon game expected you to be fighting them quite regularly. Which makes sense, since they’re in the title of the game and all.

I know two languages, Common and my Alignment tongue, but I haven’t actually chosen my alignment yet. I assume we’ll get to that. I know – just through cultural osmosis rather than reading the game – that alignment was a lot more important and impactful in early D&D. I’m not 100% sure on the how or why, other than knowing that alignment languages exist and that only creatures of the right alignment can speak them. (Very historically accurate, right?)

I don’t have to wait long to figure this out, because step 9 is to choose a name and an alignment. I’m just going to call my character Slinker because that was the name of the 2nd Edition thief I played and I don’t fancy making up a name at 2:40am (don’t ask me why I was writing this post at nearly 3 in the morning).

As far as alignment goes, I follow the suggestion of turning to page 55 (not 59, as the book states) and reading about it. I hadn’t realised that BECMI just uses Lawful/Chaotic/Neutral, with no Good and Evilm and honestly I prefer that to the later iterations of alignment. I decide on Neutrality for Slinker – they’re self-involved and out for their own personal gain, but they’re not so untrustworthy that they can’t work with a group. They wouldn’t last long as an adventurer if that were the case.

And that’s it! Even with typing up this blog post at the same time as creating the character, it only took around 45 minutes. I know absolutely nothing about who this person is (other than that they’re Neutral, with the brief character traits I came up with to justify that decision) and that’s fine, because it will come out in play. I know my role, I know why I’m adventuring (because I’m flat broke), and I’m ready to play.

Having made this character I can definitely see where the OSR games like Mӧrk Borg come from (and really that’s not a grand revelation, is it? I already knew that they’ve got their roots here even if I hadn’t experienced it for myself). I’m interested to see how B/X differs (especially as OSE and Labyrinth Lord are retroclones of B/X – I’m curious to know why they chose that over BECMI). I’m also interested to dig into some of the more modern OSR games like the Black Hack, Whitehack, and maybe Macchiato Monsters just to see how games approach the source material from a different angle.

Next week, though, I’m going to go in a completely different direction. BECMI was fun and familiar and scratched a nostalgia itch for me, so next time I’m going to delve into territory I know nothing about. It’s time for Rolemaster. 

Here’s what I know about Burning Wheel.

1. Mouse Guard is based on it and I like Mouse Guard a lot
2. It’s got some kind of lifepath character creation system
3. The book on my shelf is still wrapped in the plastic it came in when I bought it

That’s it. I don’t even know whether the book I’ve got (the Gold Edition) is the most recent edition. And, frankly, I’m not about to spend the time finding out. This is the edition I own so it’s the edition I’m going to use.

Let’s crack the spine and make a character.

The Foreword to the book is encouraging. It states, boldly, “Burning Wheel’s character creation drips with character history. History breeds conflict. Conflict means taking a stand. What will your character stand for?” I’m into it. 

The book then goes on to say that there’s no default setting for the game, and that gives me pause. This might be a frustrating exercise, making a character who’s a collection of meaningless numbers and abilities with no ties to any fiction. We’ll see what happens I suppose, though any excitement I was feeling about this process has just drained out of me like…I don’t know, something that drains. Quickly.

The next thing that saps any remaining enthusiasm is this paragraph: “The basic rules for play are presented first. We recommend starting by reading the first 75 pages of Burning Wheel. After digesting the basics, make […] a character.”

Seventy. Five. Pages. In a book that’s already told me there’s no setting or lore.

75 pages of pure mechanics is my nightmare scenario but I guess this is what’s going to happen now. I’ve got some reading to do.

I have a confession to make. Reading mechanics makes my head hurt. I learn games best by doing, not reading, and if your game book frontloads all the rules for play without giving me the ability to jump in and start playing, I’m probably not going to read them.

That’s exactly what happened with Burning Wheel. I got about 20 page in, did a big frown when it started talking about exponents and shade, and skipped the rest of the rules to get to character creation. Let’s see if that had any ill effect on the rest of the process, shall we?

After another 5 pages of lectures and explaining what’s about to happen and why it’s so very important (I’m really not enjoying the tone of this book at all – can you tell?) it’s time to get down to Character Burning. It’s broken into three categories:

1. Developing a concept
2.  Choosing lifepaths
3. Spending the points earned on those lifepaths

Within these three categories there are twelve steps, and the rules say that I should expect to take 45 minutes to an hour the first time through. 

I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll enjoy this little character creation minigame. That optimism is tempered by the fact that I haven’t enjoyed reading anything preceding it in the book. Maybe that’s a me problem.

The first step is developing a concept, which is meant to tie in to the kind of story your group wants to tell and the world they want to tell it in. Since I’m doing this solo and don’t have anything to go on, I’m going to take the concept of the character I made last week in Mӧrk Bӧrg – a fallen royal called Arvent whose kingdom has crumbled into extreme poverty, who is trying to reclaim their former glory.

The next step is to choose a lifepath limit. I guess this is like the number of reenlistments in Traveller? The book says that three-lifepath characters make good starting characters so I’ll do three. Unless I hate it or this post gets overly long, in which case I’ll do fewer.

At this point I decide to read the rest of this chapter before I do anything else (which breaks down the 12 steps for character creations and is one big example). It’s 20 pages long and as I go through it any residual enthusiasm I had for making characters in this system evaporates.

But anyway. Step 3 is to choose “character stock” – Dwarf, Elf, Orc, or Man. Since there’s no inherent setting to the game I don’t really know what this means, if anything. I decide on Man purely because the character I made in Mӧrk Bӧrg was human so I guess this one should be, too. And that’s the default option in most games, right? In theory it will be the most straightforward, and that’s what I need right now.

There’s no page references here. I turn pages until I find the section titled “Man”, with a finger in the book so I can turn back to the instructions to remind myself what I’m meant to do.

I’m not going to document every little detail of the character creation process as I flip back and forth in this book. I’m going to list the lifepaths I choose in the same format the book’s example gives, and then go into the mechanical decisions. Let’s see what happens.

The fun part of this process is that I’m writing this blog as I’m making the character, not afterwards, and so I don’t know what’s going to happen.

What happened is that I gave up. I started picking lifepaths, beginning with the Born Noble path as required. I tried to figure out how to make a character from fallen nobility, and assumed this would require me to pursue some Leads. I wanted to choose the Prince of the Blood lifepath before having the fall happen, and that was where I hit a wall. That lifepath requires the Your Grace trait, which is something that comes from the Born Noble path. But I couldn’t fully get my head around how Traits work. Do you need to choose them in order? Can you buy any trait from your lifepath once you’ve taken the first one (which is required)? I have no idea, and after half an hour of flipping back and forth in the book trying to work out what the fuck I was supposed to do I gave up.

I refuse to believe that anyone has ever made a character for this game in less than 15 minutes, as the book claims is possible once you’re used to it. If I ever suggest to you that we play Burning Wheel, come round to my house and kick me in the throat.

Next week I’m going to make a character in something that I actually enjoy.

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for more than five minutes then you’ll know that Mӧrk Borg is one of my favourite games. I run it a lot, but I’ve only had a chance to play it as a player rather than a GM a couple of times – and each time we used the fantastic Scvmbirther character generator to make characters. What this means is that I haven’t actually had an opportunity to create a character from scratch in one of my favourites games.

Today I’m going to fix that.

For those not in the know (I assume you’ve been sheltering in place under a rock or something), Mӧrk Borg is a very rules-light OSR game by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr with the most visually stunning rulebook I’ve ever seen. Here’s how the game describes itself.

A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Light on rules, heavy everything else.

MÖRK BÖRG is a pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy RPG about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness or the last remaining riches in a bleak and dying world. Who are you? The tomb-robber with silver glittering between cracked fingernails? The mystic who would bend the world’s heart away from it’s inevitable end? Confront power-draining necromancers, skulking skeletal warriors and backstabbing wickheads. Wander the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead, the catacombs beneath the Bergen Chrypt or the bedevilled Sarkash forest. But leave hope behind – the world’s cruel fate is sealed, and all your vain heroic efforts are destined to end in death and dismay. Or are they?

Mӧrk Bӧrg

There’s two ways to go about character creation in Mӧrk Borg – with a class, or without. I can’t remember at which point in the process you decide, so I’m just going to start at the beginning of the book and see what happens.

As with Spire (the game I played around with last week – and this may well be the first time Spire and Mӧrk Borg have ever been directly compared, so we’re making history here) Mӧrk Borg opens with setting information. Spoiler alert: that’s going to be true of most games I look at. Although it isn’t true of Traveller, which is what prompted this whole exercise. And what a setting it is. I could write a dissertation on my thoughts about the world of Mӧrk Bӧrg and how it’s presented, but that’s not what we’re here for. That’s getting perilously close to review territory, and that’s not a pool I’m about to wade into.

Actually that’s a lie because the book doesn’t open with setting information. The end papers contain random tables – names, occult treasures, traps and devilry, weather, and corpse plundering that tell us a huge amount about the game before we’ve even properly opened the book. But again, I’m getting diverted from my purpose.

Let’s roll a goddamn character.

Spire starts us out with what you used to do before you joined the resistance. Mӧrk Bӧrg doesn’t care who you used to be. Instead, “to begin with, you are what you own.”

Immediately I get to do my favourite thing – roll dice. And my first roll is fucking great. My character starts with 120 silver (2d6x10 – yes, I rolled double sixes), a waterskin, and 2 days worth of food. Presumably I’ll have to spend some of that silver if I want to eat, unless I get stabbed for it first. I don’t know where that silver came from but apparently I’m rich.

The game does warn me that “your soul and your silver are your own and equally easy to lose” though, so there’s that.

Then we roll some more dice to see what else we own. I start with a backpack for 7 normal sized items, a medicine chest with Presence +4 uses, stops bleeding and infection and heals d6 HP. I’ve played Mӧrk Bӧrg before so I know what Presence is for, and so I have no insight about whether this is one of those occasions where a rules overview might have been useful before character creation or not. I don’t remember being at all confused the first time I read the book, though. I also have exquisite perfume worth 25s.

The fact that I’m rich, carrying a medicine chest, and have some very fancy perfume tells me I’m probably playing someone who’s relatively upper class (whatever that means in Mӧrk Bӧrg). We’ll see what else comes out as I make the character.

After rolling the starting equipment, we now get the full rundown of how to create a character – and this is where we have a choice. We can either:

1. Randomize the starting equipment (which we’ve already done)
2. Randomize weapon and armor.
3. Roll abilities.
4. Roll Hit Points.
5. Name the character. (The exact wording is “Name your character if you wish. It will not save you”)

Or we can use the optional rules:

1. Start by choosing or randomizing a class (page 46 and on) and follow the class’ instructions on rolling for equipment, weapons and armor.
2. Roll on the tables on pages 39–43.
3. Roll a number of Omens (page 38).

For completion I’m going to do both. We’ve already rolled starting equipment, so I’ll carry on with that method first and then make a new character using the optional rules. 

So. We have our starting equipment. On to weapons and armour, which involves rolling a d10 and consulting the illustration of Wound Man. I roll a 6, which gives me a Sword (d6). Fitting for someone of higher class, I suppose. Armour is a d4 roll, and I come away with heavy armour which has some mechanical concerns. The full entry reads “heavy armor (splint, plate, etc, -d6 damage, tier 3) 200s. DR +4 on Agility tests, defence is DR+2”. 

Again, if I hadn’t played the game I wouldn’t know what all this meant and that might be confusing. But the good thing is that because this is randomised, there’s no option paralysis here. I don’t have to wonder about whether I’m choosing the “right” things or not, because the dice choose for me.

The bottom of this page also tells me that scrolls will never work when wielding medium/heavy armor. So I’m not a spellcaster, unless I want to take my armour off. 

The next step is to roll Abilities. Mӧrk Bӧrg has four of them – Agility, Presence, Strength, and Toughness – and they all use a modifier of between -3 to +3. It’s generated by rolling dice and consulting a table. Initially the rules tell you to roll 3d6, but then it goes on to say that if you’re not using the optional character classes you should instead roll 4d6 and drop the lowest for two abilities.

It’s implied here that you roll in order, but the fact that you can choose to roll 4d6 for two abilities tell me we get to make some decisions about who our character will be. I’ve already established that this character is quite wealthy, and I suspect that means they’re probably relatively well educated. That says to me that my Presence should be quite high (although with my armour I’m not going to be able to use Scrolls, but whatever). The massive armour and the sword also tells me that I’m probably quite strong, but the medicine chest has got me wondering if maybe I’m some kind of apothecary (in which case maybe I’m trained in poisons, and should think about Toughness).

In the end I decide that I’ll roll 4d6 for Presence and Toughness and 3d6 for Agility and Strength, and I get the following scores:

Agility – 10 (which becomes +0)

Presence – 14 (which becomes +1)

Strength – 8 (-1)

Toughness – 13 (+1)

They’re not bad scores really. A +1 makes a lot of difference in Mӧrk Bӧrg. It’s also interesting to note that the range to get +0 is 9-12 – a span of 3 numbers right in the average roll range, with results of -2 to +2 having tighter ranges of 2 numbers each. The game expects you to be average.

The final step is to roll hit points and pick a name. You begin with Toughness + d8 hit points, with a minimum of 1. I have 5 hit points, which is pretty good for a Mӧrk Bӧrg character. As for my name? The problem I had with naming my character in Spire doesn’t exist here, because there’s a d68 table of names on the inside front cover. My character is called Grin.

In theory I’m now done, but I know that there’s something missing because I’ve played the game before – Omens. The optional rules tell you to roll your Omens (which are a currency in the game you can use for rerolls, neutralising crits and fumbles, etc) but the standard rules don’t. Every character I’ve generated with Scvmbirther has had Omens as standard, even when I haven’t used the classes, so I turned to that page (pg 38) just to check. It turns out that every class gains a number of Omens specific to that class, and if you don’t use classes you start with d2 Omens. GrinI starts with 1.

This actually marks the first criticism I’ve found of Mӧrk Bӧrg in all the times I’ve read it and played it. This part of character creation isn’t clear. It’s not game breaking, it’s not a large issue, but I’d like it to be mentioned earlier in the book.

Right now I have a vague sense of my character and their place in the world. I have stuff that I’m not entirely sure how I came by, and my character doesn’t have much purpose, but that will come up in play. If I hadn’t been writing this post while rolling this character the process would have taken less than 5 minutes – which is great for Mӧrk Bӧrg, because lethality is high. (Last time I played the game I had two TPKs, and we just kept introducing new characters. Aside from the one who got cursed with immortality and therefore couldn’t die. It was a blast.) This process gave me a good sense of the tone of the game and the way it views characters, but not a huge impetus for my character to actually venture out into the world and explore it.

Let’s see if that changes when we use the classes.

As a reminder, here’s how we make a character with the optional classes.

1. Start by choosing or randomizing a class (page 46 and on) and follow the class’ instructions on rolling for equipment, weapons and armor.
2. Roll on the tables on pages 39–43.
3. Roll a number of Omens (page 38).

There’s no list of the classes, but right at the top of page 46 is the header OPTIONAL CLASSES (D6). So let’s roll a d6.

I roll a 4, which gives me Wretched Royalty – weirdly, that’s quite fitting for Grin. Maybe I’m about to make the same character twice by accident. The flavour text tells me I’m “Bowed down only by the memories of your own lost glory, you could never submit to anyone else. Not you, of noble blood! (Not that you expect any of these peons to understand the depth of your sorrow.”

I start with 4d6x10 silver (140) and d2 Omens (2, this time).

I’m “painfully average”, so I adjust no abilities. (I assume that this is when I’m meant to roll my abilities, though the book doesn’t tell me to. I end up with Agility +2, Presence +1, Strength +0, and Toughness +0 after rolling 3d6 in order. Decent scores.)

I roll a d8 on the weapons table to end up with a Knife (interesting that Wretched Royalty are unable to access the crossbow or the zweihander, which are results 9 and 10 on the weapons table respectively). I’m also told to roll a d4 on the armour table, rerolling if I receive heavy armour (why not make it a d3 roll, Mӧrk Bӧrg?). I guess Grin wasn’t royalty after all, since they have heavy armour. Anyway, this character ends up with light armour (fur, padded, cloth, etc) after having to reroll twice.

Then we’re given a list and told that we begin with two items from it. It’s not explicit that we should roll, but each entry is numbered from 1-6 and it seems in keeping with the way the rest of character creation works to randomise it. I end up with “Poltroon” the Court Jester, who accompanies me on my adventures and distracts enemies in combat, and the Horn of Schleswig Lords, which I can blow in to bolster my companions and make them succeed at tasks they might otherwise fail. That’s pretty good.

There’s also a roll table scrawled down the side of the page titled, “Things were going so well, until…”. Rolling on it I find that my caravan kingdom of Tveland fell into penury. This is what I was missing from the classless character creation – something to tie me to the world in a concrete way.

The next step is to roll on the tables on pages 39-43. These are tables of traits, traumas, and history – things to flesh out your character and give them some life. There’s nothing telling us we can’t use them when we generate characters without the optional classes, but similarly there’s nothing saying that we should and that’s why I didn’t touch them when we were making Grin.

On the first table, Terrible Traits, we roll 2d20. My character has a loud mouth and is prone to substance abuse. The Broken Bodies table tells me that I’m corpulent, ravenous, and drooling – which ties in nicely to the substance abuse, and the overall theme of Wretched Royalty. I’ve lost myself to excess in response to losing my ancestral seat. The Bad Habits table tells me that I’m a pyromaniac. And, after throwing a knife at page 43, I learn that my flesh heals twice as fast, but my companions twice as slow, and that I see a many-eyed “guardian angel”.

This is not a nice person to be around. 

I also realise that I need a name, so I turn to the front cover again and learn that this disgusting, fallen monarch is called Arvent. And that’s my second character done.

All told, it took less than hour to create both of these characters while writing this post. Grin would have taken 5 minutes on their own. Arvent would have taken a little longer – maybe 10 minutes, since there was a bit of flicking back and forth in the book and finding the right pages for things.

It’s interesting that the classes have very little mechanical effect in the game. They’re a collection of thematic trinkets and hooks to the world, and they change the way you generate your abilities and equipment to make things slightly more fitting to your role. One of the potential things the Wretched Royal can start with is a talking horse, which is ludicrous and incredible.

Whereas my Spire character felt anachronistic to my expectations of the world, both Grin and Arvent definitely met my expectations for what a Mӧrk Bӧrg character looks like. I’m a little disappointed that my random rolls generated two such similar characters thematically, but that’s not a problem with the game. In fact, the theme of fallen nobility was something I attached to Grin myself as a result of my interpretation of the equipment they started with. 

Of the two systems I’ve played around with so far, Mӧrk Bӧrg’s character creation definitely suits my preferences as a gamer more than Spire (even though Spire is a game I thoroughly enjoyed playing and shares a lot in common with Blades in the Dark, which is one of my favourite games).

Next week I’m going to play with a system I know nothing about as I roll up a character in Burning Wheel.

This past 12 months has seen a surge in the popularity of solo games (something I’ve very happily benefited from). I haven’t written anything on this blog in a while – not since I finished writing trinkets for all of the sets of starting equipment in the dragon game – and I’ve been looking for a new reason to do small bits of writing that I don’t try to make money from.

The current Bundle of Holding is for Classic Traveller, and last week I picked them up and ended up playing through the character creation mini game in a Twitter thread. I really enjoyed the emergent storytelling that came out of that lifepath system, and I felt like it taught me a lot about what kinds of stories Traveller is meant to tell.

So I thought fuck it, why not turn character creation into a series of blog posts? At least until I get bored of it or forget that I was meant to be doing it. I’ve got a ton of games that I probably won’t get a chance to play any time soon and the books are simply gathering dust on my shelves, so I can at least crack them open to roll up a character. And then I can write about it, maybe.

These aren’t reviews. They’re a look at the first part of a game that players engage with, annotated with my thoughts as I’m going through the process. Since I’m writing this introduction before I’ve actually done the thing I don’t know whether these posts are going to be worth reading, whether anything will come of them, what kinds of conclusions (if any) I’m going to draw, etc. I imagine the format will refine itself as I go along and I’ll have more interesting things to say as I engage with more systems and am able to draw comparisons.

We’ll see how it goes I guess. 

I also couldn’t figure out what to call this series. Chant Evans suggested Naming The Faceless and it’s better than anything I could come up with so I’m stealing it. Thanks, Chant. (Also you should pick up his Wretched & Alone game Final Girl).

Today I’m doing Spire by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor. I picked it first because I’m playing it tonight and need a character. Which goes directly against what I just said about having these games I won’t get a chance to play, but whatever. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want.

Here’s the pitch for the game:

You are a dark elf. Your home, the towering city of Spire, was occupied by the high elves two hundred years ago. Now, you have joined a secret organisation known as the Ministry, a paramilitary cult with a single aim – to overthrow the cruel high elves and restore the drow as the rightful rulers of the city.

What – or who – will you sacrifice to achieve your aims? Will you evade the attention of the authorities, or end up shot in the street like so many before you?

Spire RPG

I know literally nothing else about it other than that. So let’s roll up a character.

The first thing to say is that the character creation rules seemed like they were buried really deep in this book. They’re actually only on page 25, but I think it’s the fact that some of the stuff that came before them wasn’t needed that made it feel like they were further in. I don’t mind having the core rules come before character creation – it’s nice to know what you’re going to be doing in a game and how the numbers work before you make a character (sometimes) – but I don’t need to see equipment lists that span multiple pages, and I don’t need to see things that won’t be relevant until later in the game (like crafting rules, to give a specific example from Spire). That’s only a mild criticism, though – that stuff has to go somewhere, character creation can’t always be the first thing in the book, and figuring out the right place to put character generation rules is often the most difficult part of laying out a rulebook.

Anyway. I’ve found the character creation rules, so let’s get down to it.

The first thing to do is choose my character’s Durance – the 4 year period of indentured servitude that all Drow undergo before play begins. I’m immediately drawn to the Duellist – a prize fighter for an aelfir lord who’s equally at home in a brawl or at a fancy party – the Hunter (I love the idea of hunting prey across the rooftops, that’s very atmospheric), and the Occultist. In most games I play I end up as a melee character of some kind, so I’m going to pick Occultist. Here’s what it says:

You plumbed the depths of arcane knowledge for your master, risking your sanity by poring over forbidden tomes in an effort to unlock the secrets within. You are used to concealing your activities from the authorities and decoding ancient spells.

I note down that I start with +2 Shadow and Occult.

Now we select a class and two Low abilities. If the Durance is what I was doing before I joined the resistance, the Class is what I do now. (Another note on the rulebook here – I would have appreciated a list or a table showing all of the classes with a one-sentence description of what they are, rather than having to flip through them all to figure out what I want my character to be.)

I’m drawn to the Idol (I’m a sucker for a bard and this feels close to it) and also the Vermissian Sage, which is the kind of class I like to see in a game – something that doesn’t really have an analogue in any other games, that is a product of the specific setting that we’re playing in. In the end I choose the Idol. I like the idea that after 4 years of fucking around with weird magic, I’ve come out the other side filled with ideas and a strange means of manifesting them,

With that chosen I write down my Resistances – Silver +1, Mind +1, Reputation +1 – and my Refresh trigger (“Someone feels deeply moved when they witness your art”). 

This is where I hit a snag. The Idol class gives access to the Occult domain, which I already have from my Occultist Durance. It’s not clear here whether I should just pick another one myself. I assume I should, since the game seems to want me to have 3 of them. I decide to pick Academia, and I figure I spent a lot of time pulling dusty tomes out of libraries for whichever aelfir bastard I used to work for.

Now for Bonds. The first states that I have a street-level bond with my adoring fans, and asks me to name 3 of them and say what they’re most excited to see next. (Another note – I don’t like it when games ask me to come up with a name without giving me some examples of the kinds of names that exist in the setting.) I do a quick search of the PDF for names and spot an NPC called Quince, and that reminds me of The Eve of St Agnes by Keats, so I name my three adoring luvvies Quince, Plum, and Gourd because I have a Masters degree in English Lit and I’m going to fucking use it, damn it. They’re most excited to see a piece I’ve been teasing for months, a living meat sculpture formed by summoning different bits of demons (do demons exist in this setting? I don’t know) that I smash together in real time into some weird chimera creature, before banishing it again. What could go wrong?

The other bond says, “You have a bond with another PC who you know has feelings for you, even if they wouldn’t admit it. Describe the moment when you knew for definite.” Since I’m making this character on my own I can’t answer that yet, so I’ll figure it out when I get to the table.

Now I have to choose two Low abilities. I pick Incorruptible (“Your mind is crystal, shining and pure, and madness rolls off you and onto others.”) and Majesty (“You become so beautiful that none would dare raise a hand against you”)

The final thing to do is to name my character. Again, I’m struggling with this because I don’t really have any examples of names in the setting (and searching the PDF again didn’t help this time). So I go back to the poem I used earlier, choose the name “Porphyro”, and decide that my character exclusively wears purple. And I’m done.

So, conclusions. The first thing is that when I read the setting and rules before the character creation section, I wasn’t expecting to come out of this with a character quite so fabulous. The mood I got from the rulebook was definitely more Blades In The Dark with drow than anything else, so to end up with a flamboyant artist who people worship was quite a surprise. The character feels fairly anachronistic to the setting, and while I enjoy that in games I know well I’m not sure how it will pan out in a game I’ve never played before. We’ll see.

Maybe the trad gamer in me is showing, but I missed getting to roll dice during character creation. There’s something about random number generation to dictate a character that I really enjoy, and that itch wasn’t scratched here. Choosing backgrounds and classes felt a lot like making a character in the latest edition of the dragon game, and I don’t like making 5e characters. Being asked to pick starting abilities is tough when you don’t know how often they’re going to come up in play or how useful they’re going to be. (I had the same problem with BitD, where I had a lot of fun building a ritual that I have never once used in ~10 sessions of play. But that’s for another day).

This possibly wasn’t the best game to start this series of posts with, but that’s fine. I expect that some games will work really well for this and others just won’t, and I’ll deal with that as it happens. 

Next week we’ll do Mӧrk Bӧrg, because I always run that game and never get to play it and I want to roll up some horrible bastards.

Some of you may be aware of a Kickstarter promotion running this month called Zine Quest, which encourages creators to launch short campaigns aimed at funding small RPG zines.

I’ve been hard at work on my campaign, a rules-lite game based on The Borrowers called Under the Floorboards, and the Kickstarter campaign is now live. I’m also very, very pleased to say that I hit my funding goal in the initial few hours of the campaign, and that we’re now heading towards stretch goals!

Under The Floorboards is a tabletop collaborative storytelling game for 2-5 players about tiny people living in a giant, hostile world, inspired by The Borrowers.

Build your family and the house in which they live, then embark on an expedition into the land of giants in order to collect the things you need to survive – without being seen.

The game uses a simple 2d6 system for conflict resolution and an easy-to-pick-up story-building system to help GMs build engaging scenes on the fly.

Under The Floorboards is a low-prep game designed for one shot play but with tools to enable campaign play over multiple sessions. The game provides locations, hazards, and tools to quickly design your own content to keep surprising your players, and is perfect for convention play or to keep on your shelf for game nights when your whole group can’t be there.

You can back Under The Floorboards on Kickstarter here.

As a small preview for readers of Loot The Room, here is the first section of the game’s character creation rules!

Character Creation

Pick your pronouns and give yourself a name. You can choose any name you like, but if you need inspiration you can roll 2d6 and pick the corresponding entry from the table below:

Decide as a group whether you all share the same family name or whether you have come together from disparate backgrounds, then either pick one family name to share or choose individual names. You may also decide that your character does not have a family name.

Family names for Floorboard Folk are generally descriptive, and reflect the area in the giants’ house where the family lives. Sometimes, of course, Floorboard Folk find themselves displaced and are forced to move. This may be because their home comes under threat – maybe the giants block up the mouse holes, or hire an exterminator who pumps lethal gas into the walls – or perhaps it is because they have been spotted by the giants and need to find a new home before theirs can be discovered.

As a group, discuss whether you live in the traditional home indicated by your family name, or decide whether you had to move somewhere else. If you have had to move, you should collectively decide what prompted this.

The zine contains:

• All the rules you need to create characters and play Under The Floorboards
• 10 unique locations for Expeditions
• 12 Enemies and Challenges to populate your Locations
• Tools to create your own Locations, Enemies, and Challenges
• Guidelines for campaigns and extended play

Find out more and back the project here!