In our last update, I shared some of the background and details for our example setting, Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell. Now we're going to see how you'd present some of the Core Rules material for that game, focusing today on Character Creation. Since this is pre-layout, you get some See Page XX's built right into the manuscript!
Character Creation
Here’s an amended explanation of character creation, revised to work specifically with Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell.
Step One: Concept
The first thing you should do is consider who your character is and what they do. A more specific concept helps when choosing or creating Paths and assigning points. Note that, although all the player characters in Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell are wrestlers, that doesn’t mean they were originally involved in professional wrestling. Here are some example concepts:
Former police detective who left the force to enact real justice
Community leader who wrestles demons (literal and personal) to protect the less fortunate
Rich college kid who lost everything in the Apocalypse and wants to prove their value
Ex-cultist who realized they were rooting for the wrong side
Example: Michelle is building Natasha Gray. She’s decided Natasha is a former professional wrestler who has been caught up in the war between angels and demons. She chooses “bitter professional wrestler” as Natasha’s concept.
Step Two: Angelic Choir (Major Path)
This step and the next involve choosing Paths for your character. In Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell, the most significant Path is the type of angel who bonded with your character, so your Major Path is always your Angelic Choir Path.
Choose from Concordia (an angel of order), Diligentia (angel of strength), Fides (angel of hope), Patientia (angel of fortitude), and Veritas (angel of truth), then apply the following components to your character sheet:
Assign six dots in Skills (as described on p. XX) among any or all of the 3 Skills listed for the Path. No Skill can have more than five dots.
Example: Michelle picks Diligentia as her Angelic Choir Path, which grants dots in the Athletics, Medicine, and Survival Skills. Michelle decides that Natasha has mostly focused on her athletic prowess, although she’s picked up some first aid from her time treating her own injuries, so assigns three dots to Athletics, two to Medicine, and one to Survival.
Assign one dot to every Attribute as a starting base. Then, assign 10 more dots in Attributes. These dots will be specific for the Attribute Arena listed. You cannot have more than five dots in any one Attribute.
Example: After putting one dot in all Attributes, Michelle reads that the Diligentia Path grants 3 Mental dots, 5 Physical dots, and 2 Social dots. For Mental, she assigns one dot to Cunning and two to Resolve. She puts one dot each into Presence and Composure to cover her Social dots, and finally two dots each to Might and Stamina, and one dot in Dexterity.
Assign three dots to Path contacts. These dots can all be spent on one contact or spread across multiple contacts.
Example: Looking over the example contacts, Michelle decides to put one dot in a physical trainer that she works with (she got a major injury that nearly ended her career before the Apocalypse), and two dots in a construction worker that now repairs houses for survivors.
Pick one other player’s character and define a bond rated at 2 (see p. XX) between the two characters. This should be representative of the Path and an opportunity to interact that came from being part of that Path.
Example: Michelle talks to David, who is making another wrestler — Kit Baxter — who used to be an engineer before the end times came. Now they realize they have more in common than they thought, so Michelle takes a positive 2 bond with Kit.
Finally, give the angel a name and personality, inspired by the choir they are a part of.
Example: Michelle decides that Natasha’s angel is called “Isabell,” after an ex-girlfriend of hers that Natasha still has fond memories of. Like the ex-girlfriend, the angel Isabell speaks in a no-nonsense tone that is sometimes so blunt as to be a little hurtful.
Step Three: Minor Paths
A Minor Path defines background elements that make the character who she is. Choose your Before Times and Wrestling Style Paths and apply the following elements for each Path:
Assign three dots in Skills (as described on p. XX) among any or all of the 3 Skills provided. Again, no Skill can have more than five dots.
Example: Michelle picks Warrior and Hardcore as her Minor Paths for Natasha.The Warrior Path grants dots in the Athletics, Ranged Combat, and Survival Skills. Michelle decides that Natasha has learned to survive in The Y2K World and puts all three dots into Survival. Hardcore grants Larceny and Survival in addition to Close Combat. She decides to put two dots in Close Combat and one dot in Larceny.
Assign four dots in Attributes. As with the Major Path, these dots will be specific for the Attribute Arena listed, and you cannot have more than five dots in one Attribute.
Example: The Warrior Path grants Mental 1 and Physical 3, so Amanda assigns one dot to Resolve, two dots to Might, and one dot to Stamina. Hardcore grants Mental 2 and Physical 2, so she assigns one dot to Cunning, one to Resolve, and two dots to Dexterity.
Assign one dot to a Path contact.
Example: Michelle decides to put a dot into a sparring partner contact for Warrior, and a back-alley medic contact for Hardcore.
Pick one other player’s character and define a bond rated at 1 (see p. XX) for each Minor Path.
Example: Michelle needs to create two more bonds. She decides that Natasha and Mercedes used to tag team together before Mercedes turned on her and assigns a level 1 negative bond to Mercedes. Natasha and Tony met at the boxing gym and have been training together casually for a few months, so she assigns a level 1 positive bond to Tony.
Step Four: Angelic Template
Angelic wrestlers have some advantages over other survivors of the Apocalypse, which means these characters have a few additional modifiers.
First, every angelic wrestler starts with one dot of Grace. Grace dots determine both their prerequisite for how many miracles the host knows, and how many points of Grace they can spend on miracles and Graceful Moves. Grace is explained in more detail on p. XX.
Secondly, choose if you want to take a second dot of Grace, or add a dot to your attributes. Some hosts prefer to focus on their inherent talents, while others want to increase the potential their angelic partners offer them.
Example: Michelle feels like Natasha would focus her time after the Apocalypse on getting to know Isabell and assigns a second dot to Grace.
Next, note your Wrestling Style Path Enhancement bonus (p. XX) and take three miracles according to your Angelic Choir Path (p. XX).
Example: Natasha automatically gets the Summon Ring miracle. For her second universal miracle, Michelle chooses Demon Sense, to make sure she isn’t ambushed by sneaky demons or their cultists. Her Angelic Choir Path also gives her access to one Strength miracle. She looks them over and decides on Power from Pain.
Finally, assign a positive 1 bond to your angel, and either a positive 1 bond or a negative 1 bond to the Audience (p. XX).
Example: Natasha was always the most comfortable playing a villain in her former life and decides to continue the trend. She takes a negative 1 bond to the Audience.
Step Five: Finalize Statistics
At this point, the bulk of your character’s life and story has been determined. Now, you can choose to give the character a bit of flavor, determine who she knows, and describe her to the other players at the table.
Add an additional three Skill dots to any Skills on your character, even those that aren’t Path Skills. As before, no Skill can have more than five dots. If the character doesn’t have any dots in Close Combat, one of these dots must be in that Skill.
Example: Michelle looks over all the skills available. Ultimately, however, she decides that Close Combat is going to be the most useful for her, and assigns her three dots in Close Combat.
Record your defenses and Injuries: Your character’s Defense and Integrity are both 1. Your character has 3 Injury Levels made up of 7 Injury boxes.
Record the character’s Initiative. Players roll the higher of either Athletics + Cunning or Empathy + Dexterity. Record this number in the appropriate slot on the character sheet.
Assign tags to your contact dots. Contacts are rated from 1 to 3 and can carry tags that define what they are good at. Each dot a contact has conveys one tag.
Example: Michelle looks back at her contacts. For the one dot in her physical trainer contact, she assigns the tag Mentor. Her construction worker has two dots, so she gives him two tags: Informant and Sneaky. Her sparring partner contact gets the Dangerous tag, and the back-alley medic contact gets Security.
Step Six: Aspirations
Characters start with a single long-term Aspiration and two short-term Aspirations. It’s perfectly fine to start the game without any Aspirations on the character sheet and then fill them in as the players learn more about the plot of the game, and how their characters wish to interact with it.
Example: Michelle thinks for a while about her Aspirations, but aside from wanting to win a match (a great short-term Aspiration for early in the game), she decides she needs to play a bit before she can settle on them. So she starts with two of her Aspirations blank.
Under the Mask: Character Creation While you don’t need to reprint the character creation rules, the individual steps are relatively short, so there’s not much harm in putting all the character creation rules, both core and unique to your game, in one place for ease of reference. Besides, it allows you to integrate the changes specific to your game, to avoid flipping back and forth between two sets of rules.
You may notice that step four allows the player to choose between an additional dot of Grace or an additional attribute dot. Not all dots on the character sheet are the same, but if you check the advancement chart on p. XX, you’ll notice that an attribute dot and a power dot cost the same amount. So, in this case, it’s possible to offer a choice because either option is equivalent on the final character. You can offer similar equivalent choices, such as awarding characters bonus contact dots in lieu of bonus Skill dots.
Similarly, notice how in step five there’s a requirement to have at least one of the Skill dots go into Close Combat. Since that’s a vital skill for Pinfall in Grace, Body Slams from Hell, you want to make sure no player ends up with no dots in it. If you’ve looked ahead, you’ll see that every Wrestling Style Path has Close Combat as a Path skill, but it’s still possible that players might decide to put zero dots into it. Adding a quick rule here ensures that no player is completely bereft of a vital Skill.
Example Character
Here’s the completed version of “The Empress” Natasha Gray.
“The Empress” Natasha Gray
Concept: Bitter professional wrestler Angelic Choir: Diligentia Before Times: Warrior Wrestling Style: Hardcore Wrestling Style Bonus: +1 Enhancement to purchase Hardcore Moves Skills: Athletics (Angelic, Before Times) •••, Close Combat (Wrestling Style) •••••, Larceny (Wrestling Style) •, Medicine (Angelic) ••, Ranged Combat (Before Times), Survival (Angelic, Before Times, Wrestling Style) •••• Attributes: Intellect •, Cunning •••, Resolve •••••; Might •••••, Dexterity ••••, Stamina ••••; Presence ••, Manipulation •, Composure •• Contacts:Angelic Choir: Henry, physical trainer • (mentor), Frankie Walker, construction worker •• (informant, sneaky); Before Times: Genevieve Dupont, sparring partner • (dangerous); Wrestling Style: Spider, back-alley medic • (security) Short-Term Aspiration: To win a match Short-Term Aspiration: To be determined Long-Term Aspiration: To be determined Grace: 2 Miracles: Demon Sense, Power from Pain, Summon Ring Bonds: Kit Baxter (positive) ••, Mercedes (negative) •, Tony (positive) •, Isabell (positive; Angelic bond) •, Audience (negative) •
Under the Mask: Example Player Characters Providing some example player characters does a few things for your game. First, if a player wants to just jump into the game, it’s great to be able to hand them a character so they can start playing. Secondly, it illustrates to the player what a correctly constructed character looks like, so they can double-check to make sure they didn’t miss anything. Finally, as the person making the setting, they help you to make sure you didn’t miss anything while compiling all the rules you want to use in your game.
Again, this is just a portion of the rules and systems in our example chapter. Backers will have access to the full draft version before the campaign is over, but we'll be seeing a lot from Pinfall from Grace as we delve into each bit of the Storypath Ultra system. Tomorrow, backers will get access to the next section of the manuscript, which is all about Expansion of the rules and new options, and then on Monday we'll see those options in action as we explore some Angelic Choir Paths for our example setting.
This is the kind of stuff that will be created in our two additional example settings, a Sci-Fi game and a Fantasy game. As a reminder, voting is going on right now to determine the theme and direction for the Science Fiction example setting.
For the first poll, you're be voting on a Sci-fi setting example. Your options:
Cyber-enhanced humans fly corporate-owned starships in search of new life and new financial opportunities.
Futuristic superheroes fight interdimensional monsters in order to keep them from destabilizing reality.
An experimental space flight flings the player characters into a distant galaxy full of strange and alien sights.
