Developmental Notes: Character Creation

A Note on Developmental Notes:
While play-testing and developing the rules for FATE of Stolvorden, I will introduce concepts and comments about the progress of the game here. I'm planning to identify them as "Developmental Notes" and add a subtitle. If you are interested in little details about how the game rules are adapted, applied, expanded and condensed, these are the posts for you. If on the other hand, your interest is in following the story of the characters and their adventures, I will be publishing story summaries on a session by session format.

The back story presented in the previous post emphasizes the information that surfaced during character creation. The option of playing characters that sympathized with the plight of the Xinnian people originated with the players, who might as well have taken the side of the Belomari, in which case the presentation above would have been totally different.

I found that creating the characters in phases led with some discussion from the GM and questions for the players gave richness of detail not only to the interrelationship between characters but also game me plenty of material to borrow for use as a backdrop. There were things discussed that prompted me to plan new plot development, so in general, character creation went well.


One of the challenges we will have in play-testing FATE of Stolvorden is that we will have to be flexible enough to change things that don;t work about the game, while maintaining a semblance of storyline. A few problems surfaced during character creation that will have to be addressed. First, the skill list, which I developed after FATE version 2.0, needs to be updated to reflect current changes in the rules. This means that the players will have to update their character sheets. I will take advantage of the fact that the sheet itself needed to be updated to do this immediately.


Another problem surfaced when one of the players wanted to play a Fae Elementalist. Although I have the rules for Elementalism basically done, the rules mention that the Fae follow a different version of Elementalism based on the seasons of the year. This player's wish to develop a Fae Elementalist represented a stumbling block. However, during character creation, we 'discovered' that this character had "left" (been expelled?) the land of the Fae and that her training had been done by humans (who now are hunting for her, do we have a pattern here?) so her version of Elementalism should be the human one (or more correctly, Dwarven, since humans acquired Elementalism from the Altun Dwarfs).

At this time, I need to work on the new skill list, on a few details for Elementalism, particularly the Alter Elemental skill, and on getting the details of the first session worked out, so the players can start to play as soon as possible.

Since there are many pieces of information that the characters are not aware of, I will try to refrain from spoilers here as much as possible. This way, the players and the readers can both enjoy discovering the world of Stolvorden together. As the GM, I hope I will be able to discover it as well.