Creating a character

Player Characters

A player character (PC) is a character designed, managed, and played by a player, in contrast to a non-player character (NPC), a character designed by the staff and played by staff or a volunteer. This guide is in how to create your own PC, but please know that you don’t have to do this all alone! We on the staff would be very excited to help you come up with or build your character: we’re running a LARP because we love to tell stories and make characters and come up with things!

Starting with an Idea

To begin creating a character, you must first decide on an idea. Ideas don’t have to be fully fledged and specific, but they also shouldn’t be overly vague. A fully fleshed out idea one might start with could be a key and defining event in their past, or a heart’s desire and goal for the future. While something like a general tone or archetype (eg. sly rogue, hardened mercenary, haughty wizard) could get the creative juices flowing, those alone are not sufficient for creating a character: there’s only so much depth you can get from a flat archetype like that before you have to come up with something more. A good idea generally will answer the question, “why is this person an adventurer?” though it often will inform more besides that. As a general rule, your character should want to be adventuring, and be willing to work with others. In order to have a game, we need willing participants: if you create a character who would, by all rights, decide to leave every adventure and go do something else, then that’s not a character who can play this game. 

A great example of a solid idea can be seen in the classic story A Princess Bride. Famously, Inigo Montoya is searching for the man who killed his father in order to enact vengeance. This idea covers all the major points, including the defining past event of his father’s death, a heart’s desire for revenge, and a reason to go adventuring, since he doesn’t know where his father’s murderer is, and must go searching.

Another example: a common answer for why a character is adventuring is, “money.” This answer reveals a second part to the question, that is often very useful to consider: why can’t your character get what they want through normal means? In the case of money, there’s lots of different ways we can answer this, and each answer becomes a distinct idea. If we answer with something like, “normal wealth isn’t enough, he wants to be wildly, disgustingly rich,” then we get the shape of a character focused on greed for the sake of greed, hoarding treasure like a dragon, and might try to hide treasure from his fellow players to keep more for himself. If instead, we say something like, “our character needs to pay a debt, and can’t possibly work for that much money,” we get a very different picture. That motivation can even be split further: someone trying to pay for her father’s enormously large ransom is a very different character from someone who has to pay off gambling debts, but was fired or blacklisted from every job in town for stealing from the registers. 

If you’re having trouble coming up with a full idea, remember that you don’t have to come up with something completely original wholly on your own! Lots of characters resemble each other in their one-sentence summaries, it’s the executions that make them distinct. 

Fleshing out the details

For just starting out, it’s not necessary to have more than a one-sentence summary of your character’s motivation: something that answers the above questions is plenty to get playing with! However, if you want to become more involved in the world, and get your character more embedded in the story, you’ll need some more details.

Let’s continue with Inigo from our above example. Since Inigo’s death is the defining moment for his character, the best place to start is that scene. You don’t have to write this out in prose, bullet points work fine, but try to get a good understanding of the sequence of events, and why they happened like that and not another way. You can do this by asking questions, coming up with answers, and asking more questions from there. Eg. Inigo’s father was killed. How? With a sword. Why? Because he’s a sword smith. Why was he killed? A nobleman tried to shortchange him on a commission fee, showing the nobleman didn’t value the workmanship of the sword, and he refused. What was the commission? A beautiful, bejeweled sword. Where is the sword? Inigo has it! Why hasn’t Inigo killed this guy already? Because he can’t find him. Why didn’t Inigo kill him immediately? He tried, but failed. Why did he fail? Because he was a child. Why didn’t the killer kill Inigo, too? Killing a kid was too heartless, even for him, but he did leave scars on Inigo’s face. Etc. etc.

From this line of questioning, we can extract some key details that will help us when filling out our character sheet and putting together a costume. Inigo carries an exquisitely beautiful sword, and has trained for years to use it, so he’s a very skilled fencer. He’s been searching for years, so he is well-travelled and world-wise (or, if we decide, he’s only just started searching, so he’s hot-headed and bright-eyed, perhaps a bit naive). We now have a distinct weapon, a dramatic scar, and core skillset, all of which make Inigo more distinct than just what we can get from the one-sentence summary. 

To continue on to mechanics and the character sheet, head over to Character Sheet!