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This post has been a tough one to write*. The topic of Aspects in DFRPG (or any FATE game) is so central, so important, and so rich that trying to write about it can be daunting. More than the dice mechanics, or the powers, or the stunts, or the skills, Aspects are the beating heart of the system.

Mark Twain famously wrote:

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

The same is true of Aspects. And what I’m trying to do in this post is to help you choose the right Aspect, rather than settling for the almost right Aspect.

Now, Your Story has a nice discussion about picking Aspects that highlights what I call the Aspect trick: you need each of your Aspects to do triple-duty for you:

• You have to be able to invoke the Aspect when you need a bonus or a reroll.
• The Aspect has to complicate your life to some extent, so it can be compelled to gain Fate Points.
• You also want to be able to invoke the Aspect for effect.

Most of the time, an Aspect is going to lend itself better to one or two of these than to all of them, but the ideal is come up with at least one situation you can envision in play where you can use the Aspect for each of the three ways to use them. Let’s take a look at each of these functions.

Invoke for Bonus

A sucky roll is a sucky roll, and that’s the truth from system to system. And sometimes even a great roll isn’t going to be enough to let you do what you need to do. Now, you can always just spend a Fate Point for a +1 to the roll, but you get more bang for the buck (or point, anyway) when you use that Fate Point to invoke an Aspect: +2 or a reroll of all the dice. Now, from a statistical point of view, the reroll only really makes sense if you’ve rolled -3 or worse on the dice, but it’s nice to have that option there. So, for this to work, you need to have your Aspect say something positive about your character or his or her abilities.

Compel

Fate Points are the currency of game play. You want Fate Points. You get Fate Points when one of your Aspects constrains your character’s options in a way that causes you some difficulty. Got an Aspect called Bad Temper? You get a Fate Point whenever you blow up at someone and it makes your life difficult. This means you want an Aspect that talks about a complication in your character’s life.

Invoke for Effect

Let’s say you need to get in to see the CEO of a company. You don’t have an appointment, and none of your skills are up to the challenge of hoodwinking the CEO’s personal assistant. You’ve only got a single Fate Point to spend on trying to get past the gatekeeper. Well, you pay your Fate Point and say, “Because I’m a Wealthy Man About Town, I’ve met the CEO at the Sinclairs’ fundraiser last week, so I just tell the assistant to let him know I’m here. He’ll want to see me.” Boom. You’re in. This is invoking for effect. Getting to do this is an often-overlooked bit of Aspect capability, but potentially the most powerful. To make this work for you, you want your Aspect to state or imply some ability or association that has its own effects.

Beyond the three mechanical functions of your Aspects, there are a few non-mechanical things you want to think about when choosing an Aspect.

You want your Aspect to have a story.

The Aspect should come out of what’s happened to you, and should tell people a little bit about your character. Now, this may seem like a no-brainer, especially with the way character creation phases work, but it can get lost in the mix if you’re not careful. Make sure that, when you choose an Aspect, there’s a reason coming out of the phase that grants you the Aspect that supports it. And make it intriguing enough that, if someone were to find out about the Aspect, they’d want to know the story behind it.

You want your Aspect to link you to stories.

The GM advice in Your Story for creating scenarios recommends looking at the Aspects the characters have, and the Aspects you’ve created along with the city, pick the ones that catch your fancy for this scenario, and work with those to create the situation and opposition. So, you want your Aspects to give lots of good ideas to the GM, because then they’ll get incorporated into the scenarios, and your character will get to strut his or her stuff.

You want your Aspect to support your high concept.

You’ve picked a high concept for your character. All the other Aspects should feed into or flow out of that high concept. Now, that’s not to say that if your high concept is Wizard of the White Court all your Aspects have to be about wizardly magic, but they should all be about what kind of wizard you are, or what kind of person being a wizard has made you, or what made you become a wizard. High concept is very central to the character; your other Aspects add detail, colour, and shading to the high concept.

You want your Aspect to be cool.

Hey. This is your character we’re talking about. You want to make sure that, when you look at each of the Aspects you’ve chosen, they all make you glad you’re playing this character. Each one has to do its share in bringing the cool to your character, reinforcing and supporting the original cool idea you had.

Okay. So now we know what we want our Aspects to do. We still need to figure out what to use for Aspects. I generally take something from the following list:

• Something you are. Your job, your nationality, your hobby, your race, whatever.
• Something you do. More of an avocation – helping the helpless, reading voraciously, good cook, things like that.
• Something you say. A catchphrase, or a line that sums up some facet of your character.
• Someone you know. A friend, an enemy, a rival, a lover, a family member, and so on.
• Something you have. An item with special meaning for you – your grandfather’s sword, a custom car, a friendship bracelet from your daughter.

Now, a lot of these shade over into each other: a friendship bracelet made by your daughter really says more about your relationship with her than about the bracelet itself. But still, the list is a good place to start looking at Aspects. Once you have one, run it through the test: ask how it meets the mechanical demands and the non-mechanical ones. If it’s weak in one area or another, look at ways to fix it.

Selecting Aspects can be tough. There’s a lot of ground you want to cover with each one, but you also want to keep it fairly short and snappy. The best way I can show you some of the tricks I’ve come up with is to walk through the Amadan example I used for the character creation phases to show what I came up with, Aspect-wise. In the examples below, I lay things out as if I were creating Amadan in a vacuum, but it’s important to remember I was working through the character with two other people, and we brainstormed different Aspects for each of the characters as a group. Some of the brilliant ideas below probably came from either or both of them – one of the joys of group character creation.

Aspect 1: High Concept

This one is often the easiest to come up with. The template you’re using for your character gives some guidelines for what needs to be in the Aspect – Wizard, or Changeling, or Soldier of God, or whatever. But you don’t want to just leave it there, because that’s usually not cool and unique enough.

For Amadan, I knew that I wanted a trickster fey, so that goes into the high concept: Faerie Trickster. But I want something to say a little more about what makes him different from all the other tricky fey concepts out there, so I thought about the rest of his background – too close to mortals, cast out by his court, trapped in the mortal world. And I decided to make him a drunkard. Faerie Trickster Drunkard, however, felt a little too comedic for what I wanted – it didn’t have the sense of hurt and sadness that I wanted to come across, so I twisted it around to Dissolute Faerie Trickster. That, to me, gives the right feeling of partying to hide the pain.

Now, for the test: Invoke for bonus? Check, especially for pranks and tricks. Compel for Fate Points? Hello, dissolute. Invoke for effect? Well, his fey nature and trickster predilections gives me some ideas for that. It is linked to my entire backstory, and gives me an interesting Byronesque (yet pre-Byronic) image of the character, so that fulfills the other requirements.

Final Aspect: Dissolute Faerie Trickster

Aspect 2: Trouble

Well, the common trickster problem is that they often get caught in their own plots, and wind up hoist on their own petard. Hoist On My Own Petard has some potential for this Aspect, but it’s hard to see how it can be invoked for a bonus, so I start looking a little farther afield, thinking about what it is that gets the trickster into trouble. And it’s usually trying to be too clever. Too Clever, though, doesn’t quite have the ring to it I’m looking for. I play with it a little – Too Clever For My Own Good, Not As Clever As I Think, Too Clever By Half. I like the sound of that last one.

The test. Invoke for bonus? Check on the clever. Compel for Fate Points? Check. Invoke for effect? I can see invoking it to just happen to have some obscure item that fits a situation, because of an extensive and convoluted plan involving something else entirely. Of course, that means that I’d have to come up with that convoluted plan to persuade the GM, but that could be fun, too. So, check on that. It ties into the story, supports the high concept, give the GM a hook for stories, and I think it reveals some cool things about the character.

Final Aspect: Too Clever By Half

Aspect 3: Where did you come from?

For this phase of character creation, I came up with the following:

Fox-like faerie trickster of the Summer Court who prefers to spend his time among mortals, enjoying their passionate nature and gullibility.

Based on this, and building on the high concept and trouble, I think of a few of things that could work: Student Of Human Nature, What Fools These Mortals Be, People Are Toys.

I like Student of Human Nature, but it doesn’t really lend itself to compels very well. Also, it’s not very catchy as a phrase, especially not when compared to What Fools These Mortals Be – kinda hard to top Shakespeare for good quotes. People Are Toys has two problems: one, it’s a little too on-the-nose, and two, it makes him seem more like a heartless manipulator than I want him to be.

Of the three, I like What Fools These Mortals Be best, so I run it through the test. Invoke for a bonus? Big time, when fooling mortals. Compel for Fate Points? Well, one of the things that makes Puck work in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that he thinks this about mortals without really understanding them at all, winding up looking more foolish than the mortals in a couple of situations. So, working with that vibe, underestimating mortals makes a good compel. Invoke for effect? I can see using it to produce a number of ongoing scams to net the character resources: “I’ve been running a crooked dice game at the tavern, with these foolish mortals, so I’ve got enough silver coin in my pockets to melt down for bullets to use against the werewolf.” Check. Again, it comes out of story, showing Amadan’s preference for mortals and his sense of superiority over them, which also reinforces the high concept while setting him apart from other fey. It suggests possibilities for stories and it’s a good quote, so the cool factor works.

Final Aspect: What Fools These Mortals Be

Aspect 4: What shaped you?

My story for this phase of character creation was:

After an elaborate prank embarrasses the Summer Knight and, by extension, the Summer Lady and the whole Summer Court, Amadan is shunned by his fellows, and not informed of the decision of the Courts to withdraw from the mortal world. His first inkling is when he tries to return to Court and finds all the Ways barred, and he is trapped in the mortal world.

So, he gets ditched like a geek at a junior high party. The ideas I’m working with for Aspects here are being left out in the cold, abandoned, but not officially kicked out. Just, as I say, ditched. I start with that idea, Ditched, as my Aspect, but it’s a little colourless, and I think I’d have to go through too many convolutions to invoke it in any sort of positive way.

Ditched By Summer has some potential, because by adding the reference to Summer, I can think of ways to invoke the Aspect to reinforce the fact that he is officially part of the Summer Court, as well as to gain favour with those who don’t like Summer by relying on the Ditched part. Still, though, I don’t like the phrasing – Ditched sounds too modern for a 17^th-century game. Playing with different synonyms, I get things like Exiled, Cast Out, and Outcast, before I get to Cast-Off. This has the right feel of being thoughtlessly discarded, so I go with Summer’s Cast-Off, and run it through the test.

Invoke for bonus? Check, as discussed above. Compel for Fate Points? Check. Invoke for effect? Sure. Tied strongly to the story of the character, supporting the high concept, and offering convenient story hooks to the GM? Check. Cool? Well, I like it. It gives me some thoughts about the spiteful rage that’s probably simmering under the dissolute, friendly-seeming surface of the character.

Final Aspect: Summer’s Cast-Off

Aspect 5: What was your first adventure?

Here’s my first adventure:

The Long Journey Home

Left behind when the fey retreat, Amadan finds all the Ways back to the Faerie Courts closed to him. He travels the world, seeking desperately to find a way back, but eventually comes to realize that he prefers life among the mortals.

The story is there to give the character a reason to linger in Prague, no longer searching so desperately for a way back to the Courts. I can see a lot of different ways to go with an Aspect here, from giving him something that reflects traveling the world, to one that further emphasizes his connection with mortals, to one that links him more strongly with Prague. If this were a PC instead of an NPC, or if the game was more of a road-trip game, I’d probably go with the first or the second. But Amadan is an NPC in a game centred in Prague, so I’m going to emphasize that.

The first thing I thought of for this Aspect was Right Where I Belong. The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. It could be read as either satisfaction or resignation with the current situation, and it has a lot of good uses, both positive and negative. It’s the kind of Aspect that I like most: evocative, flavourful, and generally applicable without being bland. So, it passes the test with flying colours.

Final Aspect: Right Where I Belong

Aspect 6: Whose path have you crossed?

This phase had me co-starring in Izabela’s story:

The Warlock of Vienna

Sent to infiltrate a suspected Huguenot movement in Vienna, Izabela falls in love with a young rebel and they end up working together to stop a powerful warlock from sacrificing a group of children that he has kidnapped. Amadan trades favours with Izabela, using his knowledge of the Mittelmarch to spirit the children out of the city in return for a future favour.

My thoughts on coming up with this section were to make Amadan more of a favour-broker, giving me a way to tie him in with the characters later on. I thought about an Aspect like And What’s In It For Me?, but that felt too mercenary, and didn’t develop the web of relationships I sort of wanted to create here. I settled on A Favour For A Favour, which had more of a bargaining feel to it, and the suggestion that Amadan is keeping track of a complex network of who owes him and who he owes.

So, the test. Invoke for bonus? Sure, especially in the area of bargaining. Compel for Fate Points? Yes, because he owes favours as well as being owed them. Invoke for effect? Definitely, paying a Fate Point to say that someone owes you a favour is gold. It’s tied into the story of the character, and it supports the high concept, and gives story hooks. Cool-wise, it adds a side to the character that I hadn’t been expecting, so score.

Final Aspect: A Favour For A Favour

Aspect 7: Who else’s path have you crossed?

The final phase had me co-starring in Emric’s story:

Blood Eagle

The last of the Svear dynasty resurrects an ancient, bloody ritual to direct the wars of Gustav Adophus. Can Emric save his friend, the new king, and put a stop to the sacrifices? Izabela observes the dark wizard’s preparations and advises Emric on how the ritual can best be interfered with or stopped. Amadan disguises himself and Emric to infiltrate the ceremony. When they are captured and brought to be sacrificed, Amadan magically frees them both, claiming that this was his plan all along.

In this bit of Amadan’s backstory, I wanted to build in the idea that his plans are either very convoluted – his claim – or random guesswork, luck, and desperate improvisation – what most people believe. My first impulse was a very Black Adderish Aspect: I Have A Cunning Plan, but that reference would work mainly for laughs in the game, which wasn’t the vibe I really wanted here.

I did want to hang on to the idea of a plan that seems to go horribly wrong, only to somehow actually work out in the end. See, one of my favourite ex-characters always had these brilliant plans that were terribly, terribly risky: they would either work, or doom everyone involved. Mostly, he had the ability to make them work, but it was often a close thing, and he wound up taking the brunt of the consequences no matter what happened. I just loved the look on the other players’ faces when I said, “I have a plan.”*

But I also wanted a little more flexibility and subtlety, and the ability to adapt things to the game a little more easily. I wanted Amadan to have the reputation for dangerous, risky plans that often came through, but I also wanted the feeling that he was often working on many more layers of plotting than most people suspected. Which led me to think of the Dune series, and gave me the Aspect I needed: Plans Within Plans.

I ran it through the test: invoke for bonus? Check. Compel for Fate Points? Sure, because plans can grow too complex, fed by or feeding into his trouble. Invoke for effect? Tougher, but doable – if he were a PC, I’d probably want to rethink the wording slightly, but being able to spend a Fate Point to prove that you had planned for a given eventuality is not too bad. Again, it builds on the story, ties into the high concept (and especially his trouble), and gives a GM a whole heaping helping of ways to wire him into a story. And it says some cool things about the character.

Final Aspect: Plans Within Plans

Other Aspects

Well, that’s how I build Aspects for characters, and the sorts of thought processes I go through to get the right sorts of Aspects. Now, when I’m pulling together Aspects for things other than characters, I use the same sort of thought processes, though I scale it based on how important the thing I’m creating the Aspect for is to the story. If it’s a part of the overall setting developed during city creation, you better believe I put the same sort of thought towards it, making sure it’s doing the duty I need it to, though I’m more concerned about how it fits story than with any mechanical functionality. Same thing with the faces.

On the other hand, Aspects on scenes that aren’t going to repeat – a fight in a random alley, exploring an unremarkable cellar, things like that – I don’t sweat the Aspects so much. I make sure there are a few Aspects to every scene, but I just jot them down quickly as the scene starts, based on the description I give to the players. I don’t need to be too precise, here, unless there’s something very specific I need to accomplish with the scene. And if there is, I’ve probably planned it out in advance. With scene Aspects, precision and poetry isn’t really necessary or desirable; you want Aspects whose existence is suggested by the description of the scene, and that the players have a chance to guess. An Aspect on a scene that they can’t figure out is like a secret door in a dungeon that they can’t find – it might as well not be there.

Temporary Aspects – especially consequences – require a middle-of-the-road approach. You want the Aspect to be cool and colourful and serve a mechanical purpose, but you also don’t want to spend five minutes in the middle of combat having to think one up. For these, I generally take a minute or two and brainstorm with my players to find something that fits what we agree is going on.

And that’s pretty much what I have to say about Aspects.

The important thing to remember with Aspects is that they are a phenomenal way to add cool to your game. Yes, they encourage roleplaying. Yes, they work in an interesting mechanical way. Yes, they substitute for a number of modifiers that otherwise would need charts. But the real thing they do is build cool stories.

Keep that in mind.

*Also, a long one. Back

*I miss Julian. Back

Last time, I talked about the three initial decisions that you need to make for creating a DFRPG character. This time, I’m going to walk through the five phases of character, talking about how to use these to really bring your character to life.

First thing we need to do is talk about the phased approach and collaborative character building. I’ve come out before in favour of collaborative character building, and I think it’s pretty much vital in this game. It ties in strongly to the phased approach, and really helps you come up with a group of characters that work together to make great games.

By moving through the process in a phased approach, you get the chance to build on what you’ve done before with the character in a reasonable, natural way. It lets you grow your character, rather than assembling it out of the stats you come up with. It also keeps everyone on the same track for the collaborative process, so that you’re all working on the same part of the character at the same time. This is vitally important for the collaborative aspect. At least, it is if you want to get the benefit out of it.

For the collaborative approach to work well, you need to do a few things:

1. Be enthusiastic. Get excited about your character, and about everyone else’s character. Get pumped about the group.
2. Talk about your character. Don’t keep your ideas to yourself. Make sure you share your thoughts with each other, so that you can get excited about all the characters.
3. Talk about the other characters. If someone is stuck, brainstorm. Pitch ideas for Aspects or events or connections. Talk to each other about how your characters would get along, or how they would fit together.
4. Listen to each other. If someone is asking for help, listen to them. If someone makes a suggestion, listen to it. If someone voices a concern, listen to it.
5. Be respectful. This is the big one. Don’t shoot down ideas you don’t like. Don’t try and pressure someone into changing their character to be something they don’t want. Do offer constructive advice, or elaborations, or concerns, but remember that, in the end, only you get to decide about your character, and you only get to decide about your character.

By following the phased approach, as I mentioned above, the discussions you have as a group during character creation will be focused on the current phase, and will tend to be more productive. To help keep the conversations going and keep everyone on the same phase, when I run character creation sessions, when everyone has completed a phase, we go around in a circle and read what we’ve come up with. That lets everyone know what the other characters are, and gives people another chance to ask for help or offer suggestions.

So, let’s get moving on the phases.

1. Where did you come from?

This phase and the next one tend to kind of blend into each other in a lot of ways. This one deals with your “early history,” whatever that means to your character, and the next deals with your “middle history.” Where one stops and the other starts is open to interpretation, and will change from character to character. For example, if you’re playing a fifteen-year-old changeling, this first phase might last from birth until the month before play starts, while if you’re playing a two-hundred-year-old wizard, this phase might last until your mid-seventies.

What it depends on is having a defining moment transform you from what your were all your life to what you are now. That defining moment is the next phase. This phase is your life up until that moment.

Now, if you’ve started with a solid character concept, you probably have some strong ideas about this part of your character’s life already. Here’s where you get it down on paper, and choose an Aspect. Aspects are a big enough deal that I’m going to talk about them in detail in their own post, so let’s focus on just getting the story straight for now.

And that’s what you want here: the first bit of a story about your character. The rulebook suggests looking at things like nationality, ethnicity, family life, schooling, friends, and an explanation of your supernatural origin, if you have one starting out. What I like to do with my characters is look at the High Concept, Template, and Trouble, and think, “Where should I have started from so that these things make sense, and so that the journey is an interesting story?” And then I start from there.

I’m going to use the running example of the NPC I created during the Fearful Symmetries character creation session. Now, he’s not a PC, so I made some choices that are somewhat less playable along the way, but it still illustrates the process fairly well.

The character is a 17th-century version of Amadan, but he doesn’t match the modern version very much, except in basic character. I decided to make him full-fey rather than a changeling, for one thing. For another, I tied him into the whole story of the Faerie Courts closing their gates on the mortal world. So, here’s where we started:

High Concept: Dissolute Faerie Trickster

Trouble: Too Clever By Half

Template: Fey

Now, the idea I had is that he’s too close to the mortals, and so gets left behind by the Faerie Courts. We already have his “nationality,” in that he’s a faerie, so we just need to flesh out the idea and lay the groundwork for the nest stages. I like to keep the stuff I write at this stage fairly short, giving me room to elaborate and expand later, filling in details during play or whenever appropriate. So, I came up with the following bit of story for this section:

Fox-like faerie trickster of the Summer Court who prefers to spend his time among mortals, enjoying their passionate nature and gullibility.

There, I’ve got the foundation for the rest of the story, which hints at a lot of interesting things about the character, but still leaves room for growth and change and revelation. It’s got a couple of good questions hanging from it, as well, like why Amadan chooses to spend time with the mortals, and what the reaction of the rest of the court is to that.

This is the sort of idea you want. A story that tells you something interesting about where your character started from, with good fodder for further character development. Leave yourself room for growth, and a couple of good questions to explore during play.

2. What shaped you?

This section builds the bridge between the previous phase and your High Concept. It is a pivotal change in your character, either a single event or a slow, gradual change, that sets him or her on the path that you will walk during play. It should tie solidly into your Trouble, too; either produced by, or producing, that Trouble.

If we’re talking in terms of the Hero’s Journey, this is when the Hero leaves the village.

This change can be internal or external. For example, it may not be dramatic, but the decision to go out into the world and seek one’s fortune because of boredom is a solid internal change. It could be more profound, like the realization that you’re walking an evil path, and you need to make restitution for what you’ve done – still internal change, but more dramatic. On the external side of things, maybe having your home destroyed to put you on your way, or being given a quest and sent off to accomplish it.

The important thing to look at with this stage is that it should make sense to you that change would come. It can’t be forced, and there must be change, otherwise you’re short-changing the character. The change should grow out of the previous stage, incorporate your Trouble, and lead naturally to the High Concept.

This isn’t as tough as it sounds. We all know stories. We know how stories work, and what this sort of change is like. We know when something rings true, and when it doesn’t.

So, for Amadan, I want something that leads from the basic idea of the first phase to the Dissolute Faerie Trickster High Concept. Particularly, I want a reason for him to be dissolute. I’ve already determined that he’s been left behind when the Courts withdrew (otherwise he wouldn’t be here to be an NPC, right?), so it’s easy to see that the dissolute quality comes about because of being kicked out of his Court. Why did that happen? Well, his Trouble is Too Clever By Half, so it makes sense that he caused his own problem. Here’s what I came up with:

After an elaborate prank embarrasses the Summer Knight and, by extension, the Summer Lady and the whole Summer Court, Amadan is shunned by his fellows, and not informed of the decision of the Courts to withdraw from the mortal world. His first inkling is when he tries to return to Court and finds all the Ways barred, and he is trapped in the mortal world.

I thought of having him formally cast out of the Summer Court, but decided that I wanted the feel to be less formal, more junior high school. So, the cool kids stop talking to him, and don’t let him know when they change the address of the big party. That leaves him alone, bereft, and probably steeped in both spite and self-pity.

If this were a PC rather than an NPC, I might go a different way with this, making it more of an official exile, so that the result is more of an active character, seeking to redeem himself (or avenge himself), rather than just wallowing as a 17th-century emo kid. But as an NPC, having a more passive character is not always a bad thing.

The point is, I looked at where I was starting from, where I wanted to get, and incorporated the Trouble to make a solid progression in the story from first phase to High Concept.

In many ways, this ends the definition of the character – the next three phases are elaborations of the character. You have formed the core and shaping influences for the character; next, you show how those element interact.

3. What was your first adventure?

The next three stages are one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve come across in gaming. Like all the best ideas, when you look at it, you smack yourself in the head and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It not only develops the character, but it develops the relationships between the characters, allowing you to avoid the standard you-all-meet-in-a-tavern-and-decide-to-go-adventuring start to a campaign. With these three phases, the group has a history, and the characters have relationships with each other, and attitudes about each other.

The first two phases deal with what made your character the way he or she is; these next three deal with what your character does.

The conceit is simple: you write a short blurb describing a story about your character, and what your character does in that story. Then, you pass the story to one of the other players so that they can add their character to it, and then it goes on to a third character, building a shared story with three characters involved. There’s the history and relationships built right in.

Now, in my group, we’re pretty much all word-whores. It’s easy for us to fill up a page with a brief (for us) story about the character. The problem with that is that it usually doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for other characters to fit in, or at least it limits what they can do, which restricts their character development. The solution that I came up with is limiting the story you write in this phase to two sentences: one to set up the situation, the other to say what your character does. It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course; sometimes we go over, and we always seem to come up with lengthy complex sentences. But it’s a good guideline to make sure that there’s enough room in the story for future elaboration, either by other characters adding in their bits or later during play.

When you write your story, you want to look for ways to illuminate facets of your character that have not been covered by the previous phases – things that are important to your concept, but not necessarily as central as the first four Aspects and the Template you’ve picked for your character. Maybe you need one more step to get you past the formative story you completed in the first two phases, or maybe you want to show another opportunity for change and what impact it has on your character. Or maybe you just really want to make sure you cover a certain relationship or character trait you have in mind.

The important thing is that it should grow out of the character you’ve already defined, and toward the character that you want to play. It should fill in some blanks, move the character closer to the ideal, and generally just make him or her more cool.

So, for Amadan, I wanted to put a little bit of resolution to the story about him being left behind when the Faerie Courts left. I decided that the logical thing for him to have done is to have gone looking for a way back to the Courts – and to fail, so that he’s still here. But I also wanted to make him a little more content with the way things are right now, so that he sticks around and I can use him as a recurring NPC. This is what I came up with:

The Long Journey Home

Left behind when the fey retreat, Amadan finds all the Ways back to the Faerie Courts closed to him. He travels the world, seeking desperately to find a way back, but eventually comes to realize that he prefers life among the mortals.

With this story, I bring his quest for a way home to a close off-screen, satisfying the dramatic imperative of the character to try and find a way back, while still keeping him active for play. And I’ve left plenty of room for other characters to jump in and interact – indeed, with Amadan’s search, it makes perfect sense that he would run into the other characters in the course of his travels. I’ve made it easy for them to add their own touches, which is what happens in the next two phases.

4. Whose path have you crossed?

One of the nice bits about this phase is that you’ve got another player helping you think about your character in a different way. I try not to have any ideas for this phase before I get to it, so that I’m not trying to shoe-horn a preconception into the story I get handed. That way, I can read what the other player has written, think about how my character might contribute, and then come up with something cool.

But not too cool – this is the balancing act of the last two phases. You want to do something cool so that your character gets cooler, but you need to remember that this is not your story. Your character is not the main hero of the tale. He or she is a supporting character. So, you need to find a way to do something that, while it makes your character cool, helps make the main character of that story cooler. Don’t steal their limelight; help shine it on them.

What I like to look for at this phase is inspiration for my character to be a little bit different than I had originally envisioned – affected by the situation, or the other involved character(s), or just struck by a new idea. I like to see if there’s something that the new story suggests to me that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. At the same time, of course, it’s got to build on what I’ve already done with the character, staying true to the original concept.

Again, when I run the character creation sessions, I usually impose a one-sentence limit on this phase. Mostly, people wind up going to two or three sentences, but a limit of one sentence generally means they don’t write more than the original character.

So, here’s the story I got for this phase from Izabela’s character:

The Warlock of Vienna

Sent to infiltrate a suspected Huguenot movement in Vienna, Izabela falls in love with a young rebel and they end up working together to stop a powerful warlock from sacrificing a group of children that he has kidnapped.

Now, I want Amadan to be important to that story, but not central. He’s got to contribute in some definite way, but not steal the show. Here’s what I came up with:

Amadan trades favours with Izabela, using his knowledge of the Mittelmarch to spirit the children out of the city in return for a future favour.

With this addition, we find out how Izabela got the children to safety, but it’s still clear that she’s the one that saved the children. It also establishes a good, solid relationship between Amadan and Izabela, in that now she owes him a favour. And it sets him up as a crafty fellow, willing to barter favours, but never giving anything away for free, which is in keeping with the character up to this point, though not explicitly stated, nor anything I had thought of before.

5. Who else’s path have you crossed?

All of the above concerns pertain to this one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What this whole process leaves you with is your character’s story, from origin to start of play, mapped out and linked together, with the Aspects you choose at each phase showing how history has shaped him or her. It gives you a solid background, and understanding of the forces driving the character, as well as some history with the other characters. It’s an incredibly rich way of putting together a character, especially if done as a collaborative exercise.

Give it a try.

Next time, I’m going to tackle the beating heart of the FATE system: Aspects.

So, I’ve talked about picking the power level for a DFRPG campaign, about choosing the setting, and starting to flesh it out. At this point, if you’re following the recommended sequence in the book, it’s time to start creating characters.

Now, in the previous step, I mentioned that you create faces for the various locations and themes you’ve built for your city, but I sort of glossed over that step, saying I’d deal with it in detail when we got to creating characters. The reason I did it that way is that there’s a fundamental idea that you need to understand to make good characters using this system, whether you’re building PCs or NPCs: the High Concept.

Most RPGs have something analagous to the High Concept, whether its the Race/Class combination, or the Profession, or the Archetype, or Template, or whatever they call it. DFRPG lets you make up your own, but that is, in some ways, tougher than choosing off a list. And the fact that it becomes the first and most central Aspect of your character means that it’s an important choice that you need to think about.

The system also uses templates to define characters, showing what powers you need to buy to play a Changeling or Wizard, for example, and picking one is usually the first step in building a PC. I personally have found that it’s most helpful to think about the two things at the same time: while you’re picking through the templates, think about what the High Concept for your character will be, and let the cool ideas you come up with for your High Concept influence the choice of template.

That bit of preamble is mainly to explain why I’m breaking this post up into the categories I am. I’m going to deal with High Concepts first, mainly because they are important both for PC and NPC creation, then I’m going to move on to Templates, and close with a discussion about Troubles. I’ll follow this up with a post on the rest of the character creation process.

Sound good? Good. Here we go.

High Concept

There’s a nice discussion in Your Story about picking a High Concept, with lots of examples to illustrate the ideas. The important points to make sure you hit are that the High Concept should distil the basics of your character into a short phrase, and that it should describe what you want your character’s role and flavour to be in the game. The first part can be simple; the second tends to be somewhat more difficult.

Let’s look at some examples. Harry’s High Concept is Wizard Private Eye. Now, that three-word phrase is loaded with information about who Harry is, what he’s like, and what he’s good at. See, he’s not a Private Eye Wizard, for one thing. Wizard comes first for Harry – that’s how he defines himself. It’s the most important thing for him. But the Private Eye bit is also important: it tells us that Harry pokes into things, that he has investigative skills, and that he helps people. If you want to stretch things a little farther, based on what you know about the White Council, it also implies that he’s not fully on board with their secrecy and their non-involvement, that he’s something of an outsider among them, associating more with the mundane world than many of them.

Now, I’m going to use an example from Fearful Symmetries. Emric Sordason has the High Concept of Rebellious Son of Surtr. From that we have the information that he is half-fire giant and that he and his dad don’t get along. If we extrapolate a little, based on how the fire giants appear in Norse legend, we see that he is probably much more pro-mortal than Surtr is, and not all that keen on Ragnarok.

What you want, in short, is something that’s both definitive and evocative.

Definitive is easy. Simple High Concepts like Cop, Wizard, Changeling, Hit Man, whatever. They give you the information that you want, but they don’t give you any of the feeling. That’s where evocative comes in. When I create characters in this system, I use a simple test to see if my High Concept is both evocative and definitive. I imagine one character in the setting telling another character about my character: “Him? Yeah, he’s…” and I insert my High Concept in to finish the sentence.

“Him? Yeah, he’s the rebellious son of Surtr.”

“Him? Yeah, he’s an outcast trickster spirit.”

“Him? Yeah, he’s a Wizard private eye.”

If I can imagine the other character reacting the right way, then the High Concept works. If I can’t (“He’s a cop? So what?”), then I need to rethink it. the reaction I’m looking for will vary from character to character, but we all have an idea of how we want our characters to be seen by the others in the setting. That’s the reaction that should be inherent in your High Concept.

It’s important that you get the High Concept right, both for aesthetic and mechanical reasons. Aesthetically, you want the High Concept to capture the cool of your character – when you trot it out in play, you want to feel proud of it, not apologetic. It should make you glad to be playing this character, not just sit there as a compromise that you use as a tool.

Mechanically, this is your primary go-to Aspect. This is the one that guarantees you have an Aspect to call on when you’re doing the things you most want your character to do, and the one that guarantees you’re getting the compels for the behaviours you want to be central to your character. For example, the Rebellious Son of Surtr has all the half-giant, mighty magical warrior stuff inherent in the Norse fire-giant mythology to draw on, and also a nice source of Fate points whenever he defies his role as  the mortal-hating, Ragnarok-bringing monster his father wants him to be.

In short, I recommend you spend a little time working the High Concept to get it just right. To paraphrase Samuel Clemens, the difference between the right High Concept and the almost right High Concept is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.

High Concepts for NPCs

The above is mainly aimed at creating PCs, but a lot of it is relevant to creating the NPCs – the faces in your game – as well. You need High Concepts that are both definitive and evocative. Instead of White Court Aristocrat, you want something like White Court Eminence Gris. Instead of Jewish Kabbalist, you want Heir to the Wisdom of Rabbi Loew. Instead of Pious Man of God, you want Saint Hiding in Plain Sight.

Because you’re probably not going to flesh all of your NPCs out in detail, it becomes even more vital that they have a solid, interesting High Concept. Charity Carpenter, for example, is not just Michael’s Wife. Her High Concept is Tower of Faith. Corpsetaker isn’t just a Necromancer, she’s a Body-Jumping Necromancer. With these High Concepts, you don’t need to put a whole lot of extra work into making the character unique and special – you can, but you don’t need to. You can focus on filling out the ones that get the most use in your setting.

So don’t stint on the High Concepts for NPCs, either.

Templates

This is the other big choice at the start of character creation – while the High Concept tells you who your character is, the Template outlines what your character can do. One important thing to keep in mind as you look at the Templates is that they are not exhaustive; they’re mainly a starting point, helping you to flesh out some of the character types we see in the novels.

You don’t need to use a Template to create your character, but the game does a lot of the up-front work for you if you want to play something like a Wizard, Werewolf, or Changeling. It shows you the mix of powers that will make a character feel like the character type in the books. That said, it’s easy enough to mix and match your own version of the various character types.

It’s also easy to tweak the Templates to fit what you imagine your character should be, and the book encourages this. There’s a nice little section on how to build new Templates, as well as a specific discussion on how to use the Changeling Template to reflect other half-human, half-supernatural creatures.

Whether you’re using a Template, tweaking a Template, or building your own character concept, this is a good time to start looking at the Supernatural Powers you want to buy. You’ve got your Starting Refresh set by the Power Level, so you know your budget. Start looking through the Supernatural Powers chapter, either looking at what your Template recomends for you or making a shopping list.

I pretty much guarantee you won’t be able to afford everything you want, but the picking and choosing is part of the fun of creating a character. And if you got everything you wanted up front, character advancement wouldn’t mean all that much, would it?

In my experience, there are two main approaches to this part of character creation. If you have a good, solid character concept, you look for the Template or powers that will most reflect the concept. If you don’t have that solid a concept, you look for stuff you like, and then ask yourself what kind of person would have these abilities. Either way works fine – two different roads to the same destination, where you character has powers that reinforce and are supported by the concept and behaviour.

You may find yourself wanting to do some fine-tuning of your High Concept at this stage, as well, as different powers and abilities may suggest different things for your character. Go with it, is my advice; just remember to keep it both descriptive and evocative.

Troubles

Troubles are the third of the three main pillars of your character. In some ways, it can seem like the second-string Aspect compared to your High Concept, but really it’s the engine that powers your character, both mechanically and dramatically.

See, all good characters, whether in games or in fiction, have some sort of problem that they have to deal with. It helps to lend depth to the character, to show that they aren’t one-dimensional cut-outs. Hercules has a terrible temper. King Arthur has that whole love-triangle thing going on. Sherlock Holmes has problems with both boredom and addiction. Spenser has a code of conduct that makes his life difficult. Harry’s got the dark past that keeps calling to him.

Picking a Trouble for your character is a big decision, because you’re telling the GM, “This is how I want you to mess with my character.” It’s got to be something that is going to complicate your character’s life, but it also has to be something that you, as a player, find fun to explore. If it doesn’t do both things, you’ve got the wrong Trouble.

So, what makes a good trouble? Well, like the High Concept, it’s got to be both descriptive and evocative. The GM has to be able to see how it fits into the world and how to use it (that’s the descriptive part), and it has to illuminate aspects of your character and his/her story that you want to come across (the evocative part). It’s got to be something that will persist in the game world, as well – this is an issue that’s central to the character. If it can be easily resolved, then it’s no good beyond that time. If your Trouble is something simple like I Hate My Roommate, and the first thing you do in the game is move out (or kick your roommate out), then you’ve missed the point.

You want the Trouble to stick around and mess with you all through play, because every time it does, you get a Fate Point. Whenever your Nemesis shows up to make your life difficult, you get a Fate Point. Whenever you lose your Hair-Trigger Temper and scare off a contact, you get a Fate Point. Whenever you decide to do a job the hard way so as not to violate your Code Against Killing, you get a Fate Point. Yeah, it’s going to cause you problems, but you get a reward. And you decided what sort of problems you wanted when you took the Trouble, right?

Of course, as with all Aspects, you want to be able to do more than just get compelled by your Trouble, so you’ve got to pay attention to the wording at least as carefully as you did with the High Concept. Invoke your Code Against Killing to gain the trust of the cops, or your Hair-Trigger Temper to go berserk in combat.

It’s easy to think of the Trouble as a disadvantage, but it’s really not – no Aspects are, even ones that sound negative. All Aspects are tools for you to use to bring your character to life, and to make the stories you’re playing be the ones you want to tell. The way you reveal character is through choices made under pressure, right? Your Trouble is one of the main sources of pressure for your character. How he/she deals with it will go a long way to defining who he/she is.

As with the High Concept, take the time to make your Trouble right. Make sure the wording works for you, and strengthens your concept.

These three pieces give you the skeleton of your character. By this time, the concept should be pretty clear in your mind. Next time, I’m going to talk about the rest of the character creation process, and how it helps fill out the structure you’ve built with these three decisions.