The
Character Creation Guide shows you step by step how to create an iconic character essential to an engaging story. It is intended for players in Role-Playing Games (RPGs) who want to develop an awesome character, or for authors with a story they yearn to tell. The guide can be used with any RPG and by any profession to
raise your game to an artform. We'll gain a keen understanding of what really matters in role-playing and story-telling, so you can focus your design and play efforts more effectively. You'll spend less time and effort, and have more engrossing fun!
Specifically, we'll learn about:
How To Make a Character - in four phases: Inspiration, Concept, Mechanics, and Performance
Fractal Blueprints for Great Role-Playing - the ideals, objects, and policies that really matter
- Four Cardinal Ideals - Direction, Structure, Emotion, and Synergy
- Five Objects Of Development - Plot, Premise, Character, Environment, and Theme
- First Design and Play Policies - Only create stuff that matters and Only do stuff that matters
Finding Inspiration - drawing from sources like Setting, Proposition, Exemplars, Archetypes, and Tropes
- Four Qualities of Good Inspiration - Resonant, Specific, Original, and Promising
Imagining Concept - gives us methods to design our concept and measures to test its quality
- Four Qualities of Good Concept - Clear, Distinct, Engaging, and Interactive
Designing the Character - With the concept designs that naturally develop action story structure
- Thematic - Theme, Goal, Motive, Conflict, Destiny
- Mutual - Appearance, Links, Connections, Hook, Backstory
- Dramatic - Alias, Stakes, Persona, Instinct, Limit
- Cooperative - Aspects, Mystery, Belief, Lure
- Setup - Name, Gender, Occupation, Catalyst
Planning Performance - learning enough to execute a character transformation matched with your story
- Structure - Phases and points of an action story
- Portrayal - Managing clichés and imbuing dimensions
- Presentation - Unfolding your story over key scenes
In addition, we provide specific Kim's RPG resources to help you create your character:
- Mad-libs and Questionnaire - Designed to prompt you through a useful character creation process
- Universal Character Concept Sheet - Usable in any RPG and easily customized to other fields
- Character Examples - Real characters drawn from the fantasy genre used to illuminate design
Our approach for character creation is useful for far more than just role-playing games. It applies universally to any fictional character and their performance, so these same methods are of great interest to all story content creators and performers: authors from any field, actors of stage and screen, producers of movies, improv troupes, and even songwriters. Behind the scenes the Kim's RPG Master Class is actually a distillation of best practices from those various fields.
