Hero Wars Part III: Character Creation

I noted in my last Hero Wars post that characters in the game are simply a collection of ranked skills, traits, and qualities.

Some of those descriptive words and phrases come from the setting material. Your culture, your occupation, and your religion all give your character a set of standard keywords that everyone within those groupings will share. All Heortlings, for example, will have “Spear and Shield Fighting” and “Dragon Pass Geography.” All Lunar traders will have the ability to “Lie” and “Recognize Value.” Each deity has a group of affinities that every initiate knows and feats that every devotee knows.

The core book comes with a chapter of these shared descriptors, called “keywords,” but that chapter covers only a few cultures, a few occupations within those cultures, and a few deities worshipped within that culture too. The plan was to release a set of player’s books for each culture which would be a full-scale overview of the culture for players, providing players with lists of common names, possible occupations, a list of the most common deities, and all the details of daily life and worship within that community. While Hero Wars was held by Issaries, only one such culture book was released, Rebel Thunder: Player’s Book for Orlanthi Barbarians. Another book, Storm Tribe: The Cults of Sartar gives a full overview of all the deities worshipped by the Orlanthi. It’s a pretty clever marketing idea since even just reading the core book I wanted to look at the other books to see what they covered and what the full range of possibilities were. It is of course every bit annoying as it is clever because while you can play with what you get in the core book, it’s easy to feel like you are missing a lot of good stuff if you don’t get the supplementary material as well.

Beyond these keywords, the specific details are entirely up to you, and I do mean entirely. There are no set of words and descriptive phrases for you to choose from. Whatever words you want to use to describe your character you can use. In fact, there are two ways to begin character creation, and both involve just thinking about and describing who your character is. The first, and the coolest, way is to “write a 100-word description of your character” that includes your character’s name, her culture, her main goal in life, things your character can do, and anything special your character may possess. “The 100-word limit encourages you to keep your character simple and provides you with a challenge: The 100 words you choose will determine the capabilities of your character” (17-18)

Here’s the example character from the book:

“Kallai is a mercenary warrior, a devotee of Humakt. He has traveled widely and knows the languages and customs of many lands. Kallai went to the East and learned the secrets of the Six Cuts Silk. There he joined the Shadow’s Breath Alliance, swearing a blood oath of mutual protection to its members. Kallai owns the Sack of Black Winds, in which the Four Collapsing Words have been trapped since the War of the Straw Giants. Now he supports his aging parents and just wants to raise a family. Kallai’s chain Byrnie and equipment are in excellent shape.”

And that’s where you begin. The game encourages you to make shit up, such as the Six Cuts Silk, the Shadow’s Breath Alliance, the Sack of the Black Winds, the Four Collapsing Words, and the War of the Straw Giants. Each of those elements are unknown even to the character’s creator, and were included with the intention of finding out what these things are through play. It’s a free-wheeling form of character creation, and very exciting. The player and narrator together turn that paragraph into a generous list of abilities, traits, and qualities on the character sheet and the player gives them each a ranking following the rules of the text.

The other way to create a character is to just list 10 things about them, amounting to roughly the same thing.

The only other game I’ve seen use this form of character creation is James V. West’s The Pool, in which players are given 50 words to create their character. (I am unaware who influenced whom or if there was no influence at all.)

There are of course other games that use player-created descriptive words and phrases to define a character. Over the Edge was the first to do so (to my understanding), but there was also Everway, Sorcerer, and Fate. This method encourages players to be colorful and sometimes poetic, as the right word or phrase can communicate a ton of information. GMs have been known to be lenient with especially colorful descriptors. But if you don’t have that poetry in you, you will not be punished for an uninspired list, which means that this approach is artistically rewarding for those who want this kind of experience without punishing those who don’t. The biggest risk is that a player is self-conscious about their choices or that another player will try to be “helpful” by “improving” upon what you put together.

Approaching this from the GM’s perspective, I especially like that NPCs and even deities and monsters are nothing more mechanically than a bundle of descriptive words and phrases. Even if you use uninspired language, each word you use to describe a character has weight because you can use each and every descriptor in some contest or another. So when a horse has “large 10W,” that immediately gets you thinking about how the horse can use its size to affect the world. Even negative traits are exciting to think about, as an NPC can have “Drone on about the Weather 20” or “Nitpick 13.” One villain could have “Taunt 15W,” another “Dueling 18,” and another “Strike without Warning 2W2,” and each descriptor comes with both flavor and actionability.

The downside is that to make a fully-fleshed out NPC, you would have to include a ton of information, more than you can make up on the fly, but I imagine most GMs would quickly settle for 3-4 well-defined traits and then make up traits and ratings as they are needed during play.