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The Fifth Season RPG Pre-Order Store

Created by Green Ronin Publishing

N.K. Jemisin’s multiple Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth Trilogy comes to tabletop RPGs in The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game!

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Fifth Season Preview: Game Play
about 1 year ago – Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 11:54:49 AM

Game play in the Fifth Season RPG proceeds on two distinct scales. The story of the comm unfolds in seasons, each of which is a “turn” of part of the year, and features an event, a check of the comm’s prosperity, and an opportunity for the comm to work together on an activity to achieve a particular goal. Within the unfolding of the seasons are stories focusing on the individual characters from the comm. These adventures are often tied to the events of the season, but not necessarily, and the encounters the characters have during them may have impact on the comm as a whole. In some cases an adventure is meant to address a misfortune suffered by the comm during a seasonal event, and may be able to mitigate that misfortune or eliminate it altogether.




Comm Turns: Seasons


A comm “turn” is a “season.” Ordinarily there are four seasons in a year. During each season, the GM rolls for a seasonal event, the comm makes a prosperity test, and can initiate a comm activity.


Seasonal Events

Seasonal events represent the random fortunes of a comm surviving in the Stillness. They are not the only things to happen in the entire season, just particularly noteworthy events. The Game Master rolls on the Seasonal Events Table to determine what the key event will be for that season and integrates the event into the narrative of the campaign as desired. 

Many seasonal events are misfortunes that can befall a comm. These are similar to hazards encountered by characters but on a comm-wide scale. Misfortunes can weaken a comm, reducing its Stability and, if severe enough, even bring about the comm’s eventual dissolution. Also like hazards, many misfortunes can be mitigated or avoided altogether. This usually involves a test using one of the comm’s traits, although in some cases the Game Moderator may substitute an adventure for the test if characters intervene in the event.


Intervention

The tests and outcomes for seasonal events assume the comm is bringing what resources it can to bear, but that the player’s characters are not doing anything in particular apart from assisting like any other members of the comm. However, in some cases, the GM may wish to set up an adventure either based on the season’s event, or in place of it. In these cases, the player characters are said to be intervening in the seasonal event, and their intervention may affect its outcome. Essentially, the adventure takes the place of the usual test or tests involving the event and the characters’ actions decide its outcome.


Comm Prosperity

Once the event of the season is determined, the comm’s prosperity is tested. This is a measure of the comm’s overall success and survivability. Failure means the comm suffers misfortune and loses Stability. If the test succeeds, the comm continues to do well, at least meeting its essential needs, perhaps even succeeding well enough to apply an advancement to the comm’s Cache score.


Comm Activity

Each season, a comm can also initiate an activity, similar to a character’s action, such as Conflict with another comm or group, Growth to build up the comm, Improvement of one of the comm’s traits, Innovation to add a new focus to a trait, Preparation to add a bonus to the comm’s next prosperity test, or Recovery to restore lost Stability to the comm.


Comm Conditions

Comms can take on certain conditions to deal with a loss of Stability, like characters do to mitigate damage. The comm then needs to recover from the condition using the recovery activity. Conditions are not as necessary for comms to avoid Stability loss, as they tend to be more resilient than individual characters.


The Fifth Season


“Everything changes in a Fifth Season” according to stonelore, and that is true of Seasonal play and events as well. The Game Moderator ultimately decides when a Fifth Season occurs in the context of the game, although there is a guideline for a Fifth Season to begin as a Seasonal Event. During a Fifth Season, the difficulty of a comm’s tests increase, seasonal events differ, and the comm relies upon its Cache for prosperity tests rather than its other traits, and Cache slowly diminishes over the course of the Season. A Fifth Season makes it more difficult for a comm to survive, and to recover from its misfortunes. A comm with a strong Cache score can last through a Fifth Season … if it is not too long.

Stretch Goal Unlocked and an Interview with Monte Lin!
about 1 year ago – Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 09:05:21 AM

With your help, we managed to smash through another stretch goal last night! We've unlocked the People of the Stillness free PDF!

"This will give the GM a ready supply of named and described characters useful for populating their campaign. If your pledge includes any edition of The Fifth Season RPG, People of the Stillness will be included in your rewards for free."

We're well on our way now to the next one, which will be a Digital Map Pack for all backers, another incredibly useful tool, which we suspect folks who play primarily through VTT platforms will be particularly excited about. We're in the final hours of the campaign now, but we still have a few Signed Bookplates Bundles available, and plenty of add-ons to help us get there! (be sure to check out the Crystal Shard Dice, if you missed that update yesterday!)

This morning we also have another interview with one of the writers who worked on the book!



Getting to Know: Monte Lin (he/him)


Can you tell folks a little about yourself?
I'm kind of split in between two industries. In one, I'm a writer and copy editor for tabletop role-playing games, and I've worked on Fantasy Flight's (now Edge's) Star Wars, Legend of Five Rings, and Twilight Imperium/Genesys lines, a couple of projects for Green Ronin, Magpie Games's Avatar: Legends and Root, and others. I'm Staff Editor for Angry Hamster Press and I've worked on Afterlife: Wandering Souls and some of their supplements.

In the other industry, I write short speculative fiction, and I have some short stories in Cossmass Infinities, Cast of Wonders, Flame Tree Press anthologies, and other markets. I have a Ignyte nomination for a nonfiction essay in Strange Horizons, and I'm also Managing Editor for Uncanny Magazine, an award-winning publication that produces six issues a year.


What did you do for the Fifth Season Roleplaying Game?
I wrote about life in the comms and touched upon the use-castes. I described basically the day-to-day life of people in regular society, how they govern themselves, what sort of work they might do, how they approach the Seasons. I also got to make up a few "weird" places, leftover technologies from previous civilizations, or just weird phenomenon.


Approach to Writing


What got you started writing?
Maybe it was role-playing games, like the old Red Box D&D set! So I was always writing something down ever since I was a kid, but I really didn't start thinking about writing as a regular thing until the early '00s with a screenwriting workshop, and then not as focused or seriously until about a decade ago, when I got my first assignment on a Fantasy Flight Star Wars splatbook and then published my first short story a few years later.


What kinds of things do you like writing? (In general, not necessarily games)
For short stories, I'm still in my experimental phase, trying out different styles and genres. I think I have a couple of sci-fi shorts, a few fantasy shorts, and some horror shorts out there now. I of course have a notebook of half-scribbled game design ideas, but who knows if I'll flesh them out. I have a horror YA novel I'm trying to hammer into shape. Like a Cthulhu-squid-monster it keeps getting out of control, sadlol


What do you think are some of the signature elements in your writing? What makes a Monte Lin piece?
I'd like to think I'm good at figuring out how an average character would live in a given sci-fi, fantasy, or maybe even horror setting, and that informs my worldbuilding. I've also been told I'm pretty good at making complex NPCs, especially villains or anti-heroes. Since I tend to work on established IPs (Star Wars, Cthulhu Mythos, etc.), I'm also pretty good at imitating the style of that IP, if it's high fantasy or dirty cyberpunk and the like.


Is there anything about you/your background/your skills that you think shapes the way you approach writing?
There's that joke: "I don't have any applicable job skills so I became a writer." But seriously, I used to work in mobile game QA so I think I'm good at finding rules loopholes or unclear language. I'm interested in a lot of things (but I'm just not great at them or have a good memory to be become an expert) so I hope that means I have some breadth of knowledge (or at least know who to ask).


Playing TTRPGs


What was your first TTRPG experience like?
This was the Red Box D&D set, and I suppose looking back there was a lot of lack of reading comprehension! Like for a while I thought if your character gained a level you automatically went to the next level of the dungeon. I misunderstood hit points somehow. I remember not realizing that "staves" was the plural of "staff," so I never used the Saving Throw vs Staves. I also remembering playing at school at the concrete windbreak, so our character sheets took on the texture of the concrete we were writing on!


What’s your favorite TTRPG and why?
This seems to be an unfair question, lol! I like reading and learning new rule systems in general, and I'm impressed at the sheer number of and creativity in a lot of the small press, indie rpgs out there. I had a fun time with Good Society, where you are playing in a Jane Austin rom-com. I'm a fan of Thorny Games's play with language, such as Dialect and the up-and-coming Xenolanguage. I'm a sucker for speciality dice, so I like Fantasy Flight's/Edge's Star Wars Narrative Dice system. I've played almost every edition of D&D. I'm running a Blades in the Dark game. In fact, it's gotten to the point that I've both lost track of what's out there and my to-play list is much too long.


What kind of games do you like playing?
It seems to change every few years. I've answered for ttrpgs in the previous question, but for board games I'm a fan of the Gale Force Nine reprint of the classic Dune board game (but it's hard to get several friends with 6-8 hours to spare to play). There were a couple years in which I was obsessed with co-op games. Lately, it's been small, carry in your pocket games like Scout or Cockroach Poker. For video games, lately it's deck-builders like Slay the Spire, but half a decade ago it was narrative, choose-your-own-adventure style games like from Telltale Games or Life is Strange. Again, there just doesn't seem to be enough time (or money) to play everything...


When you're playing TTRPGs, what kind of characters do you enjoy playing and why?
I tend to play characters with some kind of overwhelming family obligation to give the GM NPCs to torture me with. Like a Peter Parker-like superhero but with a dad who hates superheroes. Or a guy who just needs one-last-job to provide for his family. But lately I've been going for more comedy: the classic good-hearted himbo who is best friends with the morally dubious PC or the braggy egoist who gets into trouble for opening his mouth.


Games Industry


What kinds of things do you do within the games industry?
Mostly writing (flavor text, background worldbuilding, NPC descriptions, occasional in-game intro fiction) and some light mechanics but more copy editing lately (not just sentence polishing but checking that the text makes sense in the context of the rules and making sure that the text doesn't seem to contradict what the rules say). I've run games at conventions individually and managing a group of GMs for a company. I've done a little production work basically getting the assembled text to the printer, proofed, and shipped.


How did you get started in the games industry?
Early '00s I wrote an adventure for Paizo's Dungeon Magazine and wrote a couple of articles for Dragon Magazine, but I didn't start getting any regular work until the mid-2010s with Fantasy Flight. I emailed the company and asked if they needed freelancers, and they happened to need one at the time. I gave them a writing sample, they liked it, and then they brought me on to write some Star Wars stuff.


What other games have you worked on?
editing: Avatar: Legends, Cartel, Zombie World, Afterlife: Wandering Souls, Nahual, some 7th Sea 2nd edition nation books 

writing: Cthulhu Awakens and 5th Season for Green Ronin; Star Wars, Legend of Five Rings, Genesys stuff for Edge/Fantasy Flight; a setting for Cortex Prime; and currently a couple of projects for Paizo


Is there anything you'd like to see more of in the games industry?
honestly this is a tough and big question... the ttrpg industry and the speculative fiction industry have a lot of parallels... it's hard for a creator to make money, much less a living. Since the ttpg industry relies on freelancers, more support for those doing freelance work, be it union or guild or networking resources. Also, more support for the smaller indie devs, be it eyes on their games or just plain money. I've heard with the recent kerfuffle with a specific big rpg publisher, that sales went significantly up for both mid-tier rpg companies and small press games, and I hope that's a continual trend rather than a one-off


Closing Details


Is there anything else you'd like people to know?
As Staff Editor for Angry Hamster Publishing, the Kickstarter for Witch: Fated Souls 2nd edition is done, but keep an eye out for product updates. It's a horror rpg where you have sold your soul for power, and what you can do with that power. https://www.angryhamsterpublishing.com/
As Managing Editor for Uncanny Magazine, if you are looking for science fiction or fantasy short stories, new releases come out the first Tuesday of each month on the website. There are ways to support the magazine there.
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/


How can people get a hold of you? (i.e. website, social media, etc.)
my site: www.monte-lin.com  

Twitter: @Monte_Lin

Mastodon (fiction): [email protected] 

Mastodon (gaming): [email protected] 

Now with Dice!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 01:16:19 PM

You know what goes great with a new RPG? Dice! That’s why we are now offering AGE Crystal Shard Dice as an add-on! We thought some of our backers—particularly those of you new to tabletop RPGs—might want dice to go with your pledge, and the style of these is a great match for the game. You have your choice of red & white dice or black & purple dice. Each bag contains six dice, which will give you two sets ready for the table of your AGE campaign. 



If you've pledged already, and would like to increase your total to help us reach more stretch goals, you can follow this link to adjust your amount. But the Dice will also be available in the pledge manager after the campaign ends.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/users#pledges

Dice manufactured by Crystal Cast. Crystal dice covered by patents: #5,938,197; #6,318,720; #D455,462.


An Interview with N.K. Jemisin
about 1 year ago – Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 08:29:22 AM

We wanted something special for the last three days of the crowdfunder and here it is: an interview with N.K. Jemisin herself!



Q: Roleplaying games and speculative fiction are close cousins. What did you find most intriguing about bringing The Stillness to tabletop RPGs? Do you have any experience with RPGs yourself?

I played a little tabletop back in college -- Marvel Superheroes, if I recall, and just a little D&D (back then it was AD&D). My group back then was mostly into adventure with a lot of fighting, which I wasn't much into, but they were my friends. I had fun with them no matter what or how we were playing. Since then, I've been invited to join a couple of groups, but just didn't have time -- juggling two careers doesn't leave a lot of room for leisure. But since I've ratcheted down to just one career, things are better, and I'm gearing up to join a new D&D group now. Also playing around with world concepts for if I decide to try GMing for the first time.

As for bringing the Stillness to tabletop, honestly, I'm still just fascinated by the idea of other people wanting to go to this place where the apocalypse happens every Tuesday! For fun!  LOL. But I can't wait to see people play it.

 

Q: You incorporated a lot of real-world orogeny, geology, volcanology, and plain physics into your novels. What was the most interesting thing you learned in your research for the Broken Earth?

Mount Rainier. This probably isn't super interesting to other people, but I constantly see character in concepts and natural forces, maybe because I partially grew up along the Gulf Coast where hurricanes have names, and we speak of them like they're people... or maybe just because I think like a fantasy writer. I'd been to Seattle before and just thought, "Ooh, such a pretty mountain." Then I read up on it and realized it's a Decade Volcano -- one of the most potentially destructive mountains in the world. It could wipe out Seattle and Tacoma like that, in a variety of absolutely horrific ways. There are worse volcanic threats out there (there's a chance the Yellowstone supervolcano could wipe out humanity), but the specific danger of Rainier is its beauty. People want to live near it, and I can't blame them. I would love to wake up to the sight of that mountain every day -- but a population that size in the vicinity of a mountain that terrible is a horror movie waiting to happen.

Nothing but respect for people who choose to live in such places. I get that the ephemerality of it is part of the appeal. I just prefer for my own natural disasters to be slower-moving, and not so apocalyptic.

 

Green Ronin is based in Seattle so we’re in the blast zone. Lucky us! Nicole, our COO, grew up in Oregon and she remembers the Mount St. Helens eruption vividly. 

 

Q: The Broken Earth Trilogy tells a specific story, but game groups will create their own. What ideas do you think they could explore in the Stillness? 

The Stillness is a pretty big world, and there's lore throughout it that got alluded-to but not shown in the Broken Earth books. I'd love to see people play around with all that hinted-at stuff.  What other secrets do the lorists keep behind their black-painted lips, and why must they stay secret? Were there ever expeditions that tried to sail around the great empty ocean that covers half the world, and did they find anything (maybe like an ancient city full of stone eaters) when they did it?  You've seen some of the ways that terrestrial animals and insects change during a Season, but what about the plants or marine life? If a quiet farming comm discovers a huge and dangerous ancient ruin lurking underneath it, how do they deal with that?  How do people have fun in a world that's constantly on the brink of extinction? There's lots to explore.

 

Q: Can you give aspiring Game Moderators a few things to bear in mind when they are making their own stories in The Stillness?

  • The cultures of the Stillness are different from those of our world in one key way:  They understand that rapid adaptation to change is essential for survival.  A typical comm's structure is modular, with every resource -- food, weapons, labor, knowledge -- meant to be shuffled around as needed in the event of a Season. This means that comms which opt for democracy or consensus at ordinary times turn instantly authoritarian once Seasonal Law I declared.  Hoarding or charging money for goods and services within the comm is instantly illegal.  Having more children without permission is instantly illegal. A wealthy merchant becomes neither wealthy nor a merchant once the Season comes, because any resources they possess are confiscated for the community pile, and the merchant's life becomes governed by their caste and its duties.
  • Every person is trained to expect this modularity from childhood, though some keep the lesson in mind better than others. The formerly-wealthy merchant knows better than to protest if their goods are confiscated -- but they might do it anyway, because they're used to the privilege of wealth.  Too much protest means exile.  Meanwhile, members of the Strongback caste are always aware they can be exiled if they aren't willing to work and obey others.  The partners of Breeders, if not Breeders themselves, must be prepared to accept non-monogamous behavior and to raise a child which might not be their own.
  • The people of the Stillness are exactly like us, psychologically -- especially in being prone to react irrationally under stress. The onset of a Season is a critical time in which a community's survival depends wholly on if its Leadership can overcome the natural human tendency to freak the hell out during an emergency. If they fail, the people of a comm could revolt against their Leadership, wasting resources and effort that should be spent on survival on infighting. Comms that do this rarely survive Seasons.
  • Good Leadership, therefore, requires a balanced approach, discouraging change resistant behavior while not being too heavy-handed. Too much authoritarianism, or totalitarianism, is inadvisable.
  • Seasonal Law is resource-focused but still explicitly anti-eugenicist. Bigotry, which is known to destroy or weaken communities, is illegal at all times. Disability is not a cause for exile in itself, though a disabled person must find a way to be useful; fortunately there are many necessary tasks that can be done by someone with limited mobility or cognition. Medical care is in a permanent state of emergency triage:  those who can be saved more easily are prioritized over those who will need more resources or whose condition is more precarious.
  • Commless people aren't all bandits. Many are "free spirits" who can't or choose not to function within the expected modularity -- or who want to develop their own ways to survive a Season. Some of those ways, such as those of the comm of Meov in the books, are viable -- though the only way to be sure of viability is to wait for a Season and see.
 

Q: The Fifth Season RPG will be lavishly illustrated. Will this be the first time (apart from cover art) that readers will get to see visual interpretations of the Broken Earth?

No.  The Subterranean Press special editions of the Broken Earth books feature astounding art by Miranda Meeks, and since the books have been published in many other languages, several of the foreign editions have had unique cover art that's astounding. I also regularly see fanart from my readers that blows me away! But I always love seeing new depictions by skilled artists, and I'm loving what I've seen so far from you guys.

 

Q: We understand that the Broken Earth trilogy has been optioned for a television or streaming series. Can you tell us anything about the progress of that project?

Just that it's not going to be a TV series anymore, but a feature-length film series; the rights were bought by Sony Tristar. I turned in the first movie script a few months ago.  Beyond that, I can't say, sorry!

No worries, a feature film series is exciting stuff! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. 

Fifth Season Preview: Character Creation
about 1 year ago – Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 09:40:04 AM

Continuing our previews of things-not-in-the-quickstart, this week Steve Kenson is back to talk about how character creation will work!



Once a Fifth Season game group has created their comm (detailed in Fifth Season Preview: Comm Creation) they can get down to creating individual characters. Those familiar with Adventure Game Engine character creation know it often involves choosing a character Background, a Class or Profession, Talents or Specializations, and a Drive or Goals. The Fifth Season RPG is similar in many regards, with a few notable differences. Let’s take a look at the steps of character creation:

Step One: Concept


Come up with the sort of character you’re interested in playing. Talk with the GM and the other players in your group about your character concept and how well it will fit into the kind of game the GM is looking to run, the kind of characters the other players want to create, and the comm you have co-created for them.

What About…?


Orogenes and Stone Eaters? Yes, they’re mentioned in Fifth Season. The Orogene talent allows for the creation of feral orogenes, but there’s no provision to play a Fulcrum-trained blackjacket with one or more rings yet. Likewise, there are no rules yet for playing a Guardian, much less a nonhuman like a Stone Eater. The focus in the core game is on the human inhabitants of comms in the Stillness. Further development of character options will appear in later Fifth Season supplements.

Step Two: Caste


In the society of the Stillness, each person has a role to play in the survival and well-being of their comm. These roles are broadly defined by use-castes, or simply castes: the ways in which people are useful to society. People are generally born into the use-caste of their same-sex parent  by default, although it is not unusual for someone to apply to change castes, or to be encouraged to do so, as particular talents or inclinations emerge as they reach adulthood or even later in life.

Fifth Season focused on five of the seven primary use-castes (the other two being Guardian and Orogene), as follows:
  • Breeders have a bonus to Perception and choose from the Companion, Crafter, and Safeguard specializations.
  • Innovators have a bonus to Intelligence and choose from the Geomest, Geneer, and Lorist specializations.
  • Leadership has a bonus to Communication and chooses from the Diplomat, Organizer, or Trader specializations.
  • Resistants have a bonus to Constitution and choose from the Caregiver, Cultivator, or Stalwart specializations.
  • Strongbacks have a bonus to Strength and choose from the Guard, Hunter, and Laborer specializations.

Step Three: Abilities & Focuses


All AGE system characters are defined by nine abilities. They’re scored on a numeric scale from –2 (quite poor) to 4 (truly outstanding). A score of 0 is considered average or unremarkable. The abilities are:
  • Accuracy measures aim and precision, and your ability to hit targets with lighter and ranged weapons.
  • Communication covers your character’s social skills and ability to deal with others.
  • Constitution is overall health, fortitude, and resistance to harm, illness, and fatigue.
  • Dexterity encompasses your character’s agility, hand-eye coordination, and quickness.
  • Fighting is your character’s ability in close combat with heavier weapons.
  • Intelligence measures reasoning, memory, problem-solving, and overall knowledge.
  • Perception is the ability to pick up on and notice things using any of the character’s senses.
  • Strength is sheer muscle power, from lifting heavy things to feats of athletics.
  • Willpower measures self-control, discipline, mental fortitude, and confidence.

In this step, you allocate points to your character’s abilities, modified by their caste. You also choose focuses. An ability focus (or just focus for short) is an area of expertise within the broader ability. For example, while Communication determines in general how effective a communicator your character is, the Persuasion focus describes a particular expertise in convincing other people to agree to the character’s proposals.

Step Four: Drive


Your character’s Drive describes what motivates them to act, to say “yes” to an opportunity. Drive gives you cues for action as a player and provides the GM with “hooks” to encourage your character to take action. While some drives are more common for particular castes than others—Leader for Leadership, for example—any drive can be combined with any caste or specialization as the player sees fit. Interpret your character’s drive based on their other traits.

Your Drive provides you with a quality and a downfall, one ability focus, and one talent.

Step Five: Improvement


In this step, round out your character’s traits by improving two of them. You can choose the same option twice, but the benefits don’t stack. So, while you can choose two Ability Improvements, you cannot apply them both to the same ability score.
  • Ability Improvement: Increase an ability score of your choice by +1. This can increase the ability to a score higher than 3.
  • Ability Focus: Gain a new ability focus of your choice.
  • Talent Improvement: Gain the novice degree in a new talent, or improve an existing talent by one degree.

Step Six: Finalize Abilities


Once you have allocated abilities and chosen caste and drive, along with their associated choices, and made your improvements, now it’s time to finalize your character’s abilities. You can make any tweaks or adjustments, shifting an ability point here or there, or changing around some of your focus or talent choices, to get the final set of your character’s abilities.

You also use this step to calculate your character’s secondary abilities like Speed, Defense, Toughness, and Fortune.

Step Seven: Goals


While a character’s drive moves them forward, the character’s goals are what they move toward. Ideally, goals should help to define what is important to your character, and offer the GM inspiration for stories and ways to involve your character in adventures. You’re asked to come up with at least one short-term and one long-term goal for your character.

Step Eight: Relationships


Comms are made up of people, held together by a complex web of relationships: parents and children, siblings and cousins, lovers and spouses, friends and rivals, and more. All of these various relationships define the comm and the place of the individual characters in it. Certain relationships are especially important to characters, and Fifth Season reflects that by giving those relationships a description (the relationship bond) and a numerical value (the relationship intensity).

Your Fifth Season character starts out with an intensity 1 bond with their comm, defined as they see fit, along with additional relationship intensity ranks equal to the character’s Communication ability score, if it is 1 or higher. Relationship bonds can be spent as bonus Stunt Points for actions related to that relationship.

Step Nine: Challenges


As an optional step of character creation, you can define one or more personal challenges for your character. A personal challenge is similar to the kinds of challenges the characters face and overcome in the course of their adventures, but this challenge is both specific to your character and something they carry with them wherever they go. It can show up in the course of the game, by your choice, to challenge your character. A personal challenge can be a physical disability, a psychological difficulty, or a social challenge, as you define it.

Encountering and dealing with a personal challenge in the context of the game provides a bonus to the character: they gain Fortune. The Fortune gained from overcoming personal challenges is temporary, so it can restore lost Fortune, but if it raises the character’s total over their usual Fortune score it only lasts until it is expended, then it is gone.

The key thing about personal challenges is that they arise as challenges only when the player wants. Otherwise, that aspect of the character still exists, it just doesn’t particularly pose a challenge. This allows players to portray characters who have particular qualities without feeling burdened by them, if they don’t want to be, or when they are not in the mood to deal with that particular challenge in game. We don’t always have the option of consenting to challenges in our real lives, which is why it is important to give players that option when it comes to their characters at the game table.

Step Ten: Description


Finally, you take the opportunity to gather up everything you’ve learned about your character during this process and put together a description of them: their name, what they look like, how old they are, what their personality is like, and some of their likes and dislikes. It doesn’t have to be long, just a paragraph or so to briefly introduce others to who the character is, just like you’re describing a character from a favorite book, movie, or television show. In fact, if you like, you can even “cast” an actor or personality in the role of your character and use that to enhance your description!

Next: With the comm and the characters in place, we look at moving the story forward on two different levels of game play.