Unwritten: System Reference Document/Character Creation

Character creation can be collaborative or a mix of individual work and collaboration. If your group has fun sitting around the table and working on each other’s characters, then roll with it. If everyone needs some time to digest everything and think about their options, take a break, order pizza, and give everyone time to mull things over. You might even want to wait until the next session.

Not every decision needs to be run past the group, but there should be a lot of communication going on. Doing at least some of this together builds a strong foundation of communication between the players and GM, and this process has a number of ways to establish connections between the characters and the setting. Remember that you are all players working together—everyone is there to help each other be awesome.

Your Character Concept

Character creation starts with a concept for your character. It could be modeled after a character from a favorite novel or movie, or it could be based around some specific thing that you want to be able to do (like decipher ancient languages, make deals with other explorers, etc.). Just like we did with game creation, we will interweave some brainstorming in with tying down some details.

Player characters should be exceptional, interesting, and engaged. You must figure out why your character is going to keep getting involved in challenging situations. If you don’t, the GM is under no obligation to go out of her way to make the game work for you—they’ll be too busy with other players who made characters that have a reason to participate.

High Concept

Your high concept is a phrase that sums up what your character is about—who he is and what he does. It’s an aspect, one of the first and most important ones for your character.

Think of this aspect like your job, your role in life, or your calling—it’s what you’re good at, but it’s also a duty you have to deal with, and it’s constantly filled with problems of its own. That is to say, it comes with some good and some bad. There are a few different directions you can take this:

• You could take the idea of “like your job” literally: Investigative Journalist, Civil Engineer, Corporate Drone.

• You could throw on an adjective or other descriptor to further define the idea: Tireless Investigative Journalist, Curious Civil Engineer, Bored Corporate Drone.
• You could play off of an important relationship to your family or an organization you’re deeply involved with (especially if the organization is well-known or one of the factions created earlier): DRC Restoration Engineer, Faithful Follower of the Children of D’ni, The Explorers’ Favorite Gossip.

These aren’t the only ways to play with your high concept, but they’ll get you started. But don’t stress out over it—the worst thing you can do is make it into too big of a deal. You’ll come up with four other aspects after this one—you don’t have to get it all nailed right now.

High concepts can have overlap among the characters, as long as you have something to distinguish how your character is different from the others. If high concepts must be similar among all the characters, such as if the

Your Journey

Unwritten characters are driven to know and discover things, whether it is about the universe, about life, or about themselves. They are on an on-going experience in which they have grown and changed, and will continue to do so in the future. This is their journey.

You define your journey by the steps that you take along the way. Your character is already on their path, so now you will describe what has led them to who they are now. Then, you will use these as the foundation for choosing your remaining aspects.

Steps on the Path

These are key experiences that have shaped who your character is now. They depict what they are seeking, what has happened to them, and what matters to them.

Choose two options from below and answer the prompts. You do not need to go into great detail on these right now—just a sentence or two will do fine now. If you want to go into greater detail later, feel free.

• Choose something your character desires above all else. Describe an event where your character has done something extraordinary in hopes of achieving that goal.
• Choose a belief your character holds dear. You can decide if this is a religious belief, an ethical principle, or just something that your character clings to tightly. Describe when that belief formed or when it crystallized as so important to them.
• Choose a belief your character holds or held dear. Describe a moment where that belief was tested or challenged. Explain how your character responded to the challenge and how it shaped them. You can choose the same belief as the step above, or a different one. It is your choice whether your character continues to hold that belief or not.
• Choose something or someone important to your character. Describe how it came to mean so much.
• Choose an issue you have never resolved. Describe an incident where you struggled to deal with it.
• Choose an Age that your character visited. Describe the Age and what happened there that affected your character deeply.

Crossing Paths

Your Journey also includes the other player characters in the game. You share experiences with them that bind you together.

You will be working collaboratively with other players on this section. Start with a random player. That player chooses another player to work with to create an experience that their two characters shared. Then the player who was chosen gets to choose the next player to do the same thing and so on until the last player left creates an experience with the first. This creates a circle of connections throughout the group, which each character being connected to two others.

For each experience, choose one of the following prompts:

• Describe an event where their character helped yours in a time of need.
• Describe a tragedy you weathered together.
• Describe a moment where you disagreed strongly in a way that has never been resolved.
• Describe someone you both knew and cared about or respected greatly.
• Describe when a problem their character had or caused impacted your character as well.

Like the previous section, don’t go too deeply into detail right now. You can come up with more detail with the other players after character creation, or you may want to add details during play as they occur to you.

Journey Aspects

Now we look at the journey that your character has taken and create four aspects based off of those experiences. Not every experience needs to be represented in your Journey aspects, nor does every aspect need to tie directly back to one of these experiences. Instead, use your character’s journey as inspiration for what elements are important and dramatic to your character’s on-going story.

If you have time, you might want to read the whole chapter we have dedicated to aspects before you go through the process of character creation. In case you’re pressed for time, here are some guidelines for choosing aspects:

Aspects which don’t help you tell a good story (by giving you success when you need it and by drawing you into danger and action when the story needs it) aren’t doing their job. The aspects which push you into conflict—and help you excel once you’re there—will be among your best and most-used.

Aspects need to be both useful and dangerous—allowing you to help shape the story and generating lots of fate points. They should never be boring. The best aspect suggests both ways to use it and ways it can complicate your situation. Aspects that cannot be used for either of those are likely to be dull indeed. Bottom line: if you want to maximize the power of your aspects, maximize their interest.

When you’re told you need to come up with an aspect, you might experience brain freeze. If you feel stumped for decent ideas for aspects, there’s a big section focusing on several methods for coming up with good aspect ideas in Aspects and Fate Points.

If you ultimately can’t break the block by any means, don’t force it—leave it completely blank. You can always come back and fill out that aspect later, or let it develop during play. Ultimately, it’s much better to leave an aspect slot blank than to pick one that isn’t inspiring and evocative to play. If you’re picking aspects you’re not invested in, they’ll end up being noticeable drags on your fun.

Choose Skills

Once you have mapped out your character’s phases and chosen aspects, it’s time to pick skills. Remember that your character is considered to be generally competent; you don’t need to worry about skills that reflect capabilities everyone would have at average levels (average for an adventurous explorer, of course). Your skills point out the areas where the character’s abilities stand out above the average person.

Your skills form a pyramid, with a single skill rated at Great (+4)—which we’ll usually refer to as the peak skill—and more skills at each lower rating on the ladder going down to Adequate (+1):

• One skill at Great (+4)
• Two skills at Good (+3)
• Three skills at Fair (+2)
• Four skills at Adequate (+1)

Mediocre (+0) is the default for any situation where you don’t have a skill. Sometimes, you won’t be able to attempt actions if you don’t have an applicable skill; in those cases, rolling the dice is irrelevant.

Build for Diversity

Protagonists are not just competent, but have some all-around capability. You should expect your character to be able to add something to a wide variety of situations.

When you are choosing your skills, aim for having a diverse range of options. Your skills should not all be in the same discipline or same set of disciplines—no more than two in any particular domain, ideally. A scholar might have a secondary area of interest, for example. If they have worked in the field a lot, maybe they have picked up some hands-on survival skills.

Think about the type of game you will be playing as well. If you have a game heavy on mysteries, you’ll need skills that you help you uncover clues. Exploration games will require problem-solving abilities, or skills that help in varying types of wilderness. If there’s going to be some action, you’d best be able to defend yourself or know when to run.

Diversity also applies to the group of characters as well. Where there is overlap in concepts, your skills should help differentiate you. If you have several scholars, they should have different specializations. Everyone should have a place where they have the spotlight.

Your Stunts

Stunts are knowledges, talents, abilities or other assets that apply to your character. They are not dramatic focuses like aspects (meaning that, among other things, they cannot be compelled), but they are capabilities that are always at your disposal. Stunts follow the basic format of “when trigger, I can do effect.” So you will decide what capabilities you want to have under what conditions. Sometimes stunts will be mechanical in nature, or they will be entirely narrative.

Resources are like stunts, except that they connect to specific people, places, or things. Their trigger is that you have access to the item or can get to the person or place.

Your character starts the game by creating three stunts.  You can take up to two more stunts at the cost of lowering your refresh by one each. (The gist is this: the more cool tricks you can do, the more you’ll need to accept compels to get fate points.)

Figuring out stunts can take a while, so you may want to pick one for now and determine the rest of them during play. At least one of your stunts should describe a primary skill or knowledge that your character has, such as a profession or focused area of study. If you only choose one for now, choose one that reflects this.

Finishing Touches

Record your character’s refresh. A player character starts with a refresh of 3, which means they’ll start each session off with at least 3 fate points. If you picked four stunts (your three free plus one), your refresh is 2. If you pick five stunts, your refresh is 1.

Every PC also has three consequence slots. One is mild, one is moderate, and the last one is severe. Stunts could potentially add to these defaults.

Oh, and if you haven’t come up with one yet, choose a name.

Quick Character Creation

If you want to skip making a detailed character and just want to play, you can leave most of the character blank and fill in as you play. After all, the Myst games start you off immediately in the game without telling you much else.

At minimum, you need to have the following filled out to start:

• High concept aspect
• Your Great (+4) skill
• Name

When it comes to your high concept, you can start off vague and refine the aspect later. Rugged Archaeologist is an okay high concept for this method, and later you might discover something about your character that puts a spin on it. When that happens, rewrite the aspect to reflect that spin.

You should know your best skill to start—that gives us further ideas about your character. If you have any other thoughts on skills, either skills you’re good at or skills you’re bad at, write those down. (Since you don’t normally write down any skills you have at lower than Adequate (+1), just make a note on your sheet about those skills you’re intentionally saying you don’t have.)

And, of course, you need a name! Maybe a first name is all you need for the moment, or a nickname. (There’s also the trick of giving yourself a name, only to later reveal that you’ve been hiding, are undercover, or have amnesia, and write down what your real name is.)

Adding Aspects in Play

With your Journey aspects, you’ll just make up whatever aspect seems interesting to you at the moment. Typically you’ll do this when you need an aspect on your character to achieve something, or you want to turn a situation that’s happening into something that’s compel-worthy.

As with high concept, don’t stress about getting this aspect dead-on. After the session’s over, take some time to look over and tweak the aspects you’ve created on the fly.

Adding Skills in Play

At any point, if you are using a skill that isn’t on your character sheet, one of two things happens: you’ll assume the skill is Mediocre (+0), or you’ll write it down on one of your empty skill slots and roll it at that level. This choice exists until all of your skill slots are filled in.

If you roll for a skill not on your sheet and choose to assume it was Mediocre rather than write it down, you can later fill it in on your sheet as something higher. Likewise, if you roll well on a skill when you chose to take it at Mediocre, maybe that’ll inspire you to take that skill later.

Adding Stunts in Play

You get three stunts for free, which you can fill in at any time. You can fill in other stunts at any time, but you must pay a fate point for each one. That’s because your refresh tells you how many fate points you start the game with, so by taking a stunt, you should have started with fewer.

If you’re out of fate points, but want to note down a stunt you have because you’re suddenly struck with the idea, do so. But your character doesn’t actually have it until you gain a fate point and spend it.

You’ll also need to reduce your refresh by one for the next session for each extra stunt you take.

After the First Session

After the first session is over, if you’re planning on playing your character again, you should take time to fill in the rest of the aspects, skills and stunts. Revisit your previous choices and make sure they fit what you want to do with your character as you continue to play.