Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Character Creation Guide: How to construct great fictional characters

Character Creation Guide: How to construct great fictional characters

Lumbard, Kim E.

Paperback

Series: Kim's RPG Master Class, Book 1

Role Playing Games

ISBN10: 1503060500
ISBN13: 9781503060500
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Nov 15 2014
Pages: 202
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.43 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English

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.

Also in

Role Playing Games

View All