Starting Character Creation for Broney's game

[David Price]

(Note: I am not officially Mage ST yet and might not be. The following is to be used for the mage game that Broney will be running that may or may not become the mage sphere depending on the other ST's decisions. The rest of this post will use phrasing referencing myself as ST because I will be ST of the game that these rules are for. This is not an attempt to claim that I am the SBC Mage ST. If another person becomes Mage ST, please move this thread to somewhere unofficial.)

For the intro to Broney's game, all characters are going to start as mortals. The following will be the rules (and suggestions) to create these mortals.

First off, we're looking at a mortal, so you're going to want to design a character around that idea. You don't get to live off the land like werewolves or camp in freeholds like changelings or leech off humanity and control influences like vampires. You're going to want a job or some other form of income. If you're taking out student loans or are living of government subsidy for disabled or unemployed people, that's valid, but you're not going to have many resource dots, and you're going to be pretty vulnerable to anybody poking with your reputation. Also note that Mages start with a minimum of willpower 5 and you're going to eventually end up with an Avatar rating, so make sure your character isn't some beat-down and beraggled drug addict. You might use drugs or be tortured by people yelling at you and abusing you, but you're stubborn enough and willful enough towards freedom that you're unlikely to have drugs controlling you and you're likely going to end up breaking the abuse pattern by some change in your life rather than giving into it.

For the purposes of this game, I'm requiring all characters to have a "job" within one of the influences listed on the influence chart: Bureaucracy, Church, Finance, Health, High Society, Industry, Legal, Media, Occult, Police, Politics, Street, Transportation, Underworld, and University. These influences have been created with the idea that they can cover most anything interesting, so feel free to come up with your profession and then try to figure out what influence it'd be in. I'd appreciate professions that have a clear "boss" and the ability to have the person go and travel to accomplish their goals- a waiter or waitress might be considered in the Health influence, but I'd probably ask you to be working for a chain of restaurants with the option of getting transferred to a building that's short-handed, or request you twist the concept a little to fit (health inspector focusing on waiting staff?), or even have a secondary job that you want to fit into one of the categories (aspiring actress might be in High Society (despite not actually getting to do anything with it), with waitressing as a second job to pay the bills (or even being a waitress _at_ High Society functions).

Once you've figured out your concept and job, go ahead and place dots if you'd like (mortals are 6/4/3, 11/7/4, 5 backgrounds, 21 freebies). This is not necessary immediately if you'd like to do it later in the process. Also, the Mage charsheet is different than the Vampire or Werewolf char sheets, and can be downloaded from Whitewolf's website, so make sure you're filling out the right charsheet. If you are interested in (or think you might possibly be interested in later) Mage specific merits, flaws, or backgrounds, go ahead and save some freebie points to be spent when you Awaken. (Yes, I'm aware mages get 7 backgrounds and I'm only giving you 5. You get Avatar 1 for free and 1 background dot that I'm not telling you about yet. If you want more of either, save freebies.)

Once you've got your concept fleshed out a little, I'd like to know more about your background. Figure out how your character got to this point in life, what kind of relationships s/he's made during that time, and what choices they've made about the world and their place in it. Some examples of questions I'd like to know:
1) Does your character have family living in Washington? Are they close emotionally to their family?
2) Does your character have a current romantic relationship? Kids? Has your character never had a romantic relationship? Frequently?
3) What does your character want to be doing five years from now? Ten? What would your character like to accomplish before they die? What would your character like to do within the next month?
4) What about the world has always made sense to your character? What don't they understand? People? Machines? Animals? Good? Evil? Are they religious? How does your character view their place in the world, and the world's place to them?
5) How did your character do in school? Did they go to college? Did they care about college? What did they learn from school that doesn't have to do with classes?
6) What friends do they have? Old friends that they don't talk to any more? Do they have an active social life?

And the big question that I'm really, really going to need you to think about (although don't need answers _quite_ yet)-
8) How could your character have met people from various different lifestyles? Do you have a banker/financial planner that you talk to? Psychologist? Ever volunteered at a hospital? Gone to the hospital from an injury? Is your neighbor maybe a police officer?

Once you've gotten this far, you should let me know so I can look it over and possibly start working you into the plot. There's a bunch of prologue scenes that I'd like to run before we get officially started and the more time I have to arrange them the more detailed your character interactions will get to be.

[Lady Dagger Rose]

Dude.....that's scary. I already had most of what you want already planned out. *grins* Now I just have to write it up.

[David Price]

I've found that for most of the players, those kinds of questions and such just fall into "good background", so it's an easy sort of thing to accomplish. I'm just letting people know that I'm intending to use it from the very beginning so there are a few things I should know. Incidentally, feel free to use the SBC board messenger here to send me your backgrounds, or email me at Zane314 with a hotmail.com afterwards, or poke me at any of the AIM/MSN/blah things on my profile.

And while I'm at it, the Mage character sheet can be found at: www.white-wolf.com/Images/CharacterSheets/MageRevisedcharactersheet.pdf

And once people have read down this far, they can know the other little bit that's the whole reason for question section 8- due to various plot reasons, all of the starting characters will have known each other. I would like one major relationship among the other characters (ex-lover, good friend, professional relationship, penpals, neighbors, etc), and three minor ones (have had a conversation, been introduced. Might not remember their name offhand, but will probably figure it out fairly quickly). All others you'll have to figure out a place where you'd have at least seen them before- you don't have to remember them or know their name, but they'll seem familiar and you'll think you should recognize them (even if you don't).

Just for a quick runthrough on how this could be done- let's say I'm playing a cameraman for a news station. I easily fit into the Media category. If one of the other characters is playing a reporter, there's an easy major relationship right there. If somebody else went to a tech college, I could've been roommates (although we'd have to work our ages around to be reasonable). Three minors go immediately also- the reporter interviewed them and they talked to the cameraman in casual conversation, or ran into them in the supermarket, or they could be a cop that gave the cameraman a speeding ticket on the way to work... the trivials are easy- as a cameraman, I'd be going to all sorts of functions, and anybody could just "walk by" the scene. And considering how many people do the "wave at the camera" reflex, having them be noticable is trivial. Remarkable or memorable is a little harder, but that's not necessary.

If you'd like to do more than this, please feel free to. If you'd like to work with another player to come up with characters together in a joint concept (like the above reporter and cameraman, which is a concept pair I'd love to see), all the better. If the necessary "this is how you know the person" sounds vaguely contrived- "Why, you're my ex-boyfriend's roommate's friend's little brother that came to the party that one time!", that's fine. There's a lot of Correspondence and Entropy going into this starting relationship grid, it can absorb a little silliness (and that sort of thing would probably end up being one of the trivial relationships anyway). These sorts of "this is how I know you" scenes will be run whenever you like until we get things running and into the prologue, so feel free to add to the relationships as you think of ideas over the next few weeks. Once you send me your character concept and I know a little more about it I'll work with you and the other people who have sent me concepts to suggest where you guys can start, and then you can go wild from there.