Otherworld:Character Creation

Building a Group

While Elysium is a game which is generic by nature, allowing you to create any kind of adventure you want, Otherworld: Dieselpunk is a vivid world which is already laid out for you. Still, a savvy GM will endeavor to tell the players what kind of game to expect so they can build their characters appropriately.

• Thieves
• Cops
• The Unit
• Spies
• Monster Hunters - While protecting citizens usually falls under the domain of the local police and military, sometimes a professional monster hunter has to be called in to dispatch a particularly nasty or evasive pest. A giant mechanical terror built by the Guild of Inventors malfunctions and begins tearing down the city! A malicious Animal-God decides the city has encroached on his territory one time too many. A scientific experiment goes horrifically wrong, turning the large team of scientists into bloodthirsty savages. The quarry doesn't necessarily have to be found in the civilized world either: animal and monster pelts obtained in the Wilds are valuable, as are spare parts from renegade mechanical constructs. Maybe scientists need a live specimen of a dangerous animal?
• Archaeologists/Treasure Hunters - For GMs who love The Delve, aka the Dungeon Crawl, there is hope! Relics left over from the Old Ways fetch a high price among occultists and collectors, and can be found in the ruins of abandoned cities, in the labyrinthine fortresses of forgotten warlords, and in the tangled forests and caves of primitive cultures. Who better to dig these treasures out of the Wilds than the PCs? They could be professors of a prestigious and powerful university, they might be hired by the government or by eccentric millionaires, or perhaps they want the artifacts for their own.
• Gangs - I hesitate to suggest playing as members of a gang, given the rather serious implications of gang warfare on our own streets, but gangs could have noble motivators just the same as vulgar ones. Usually this means banding together to fight off some oppressive force: perhaps the police in a given city are corrupt and start terrorizing the common citizens. Maybe vampires run rampant at night and a militia is formed to stop them. Or maybe you and your buddies have a squabble with another group that turns into a violent street-war, Romeo and Juliet style. Even Shakespeare had to deal with gangs, man.

Carte Blanche

Meaning literally "Blank Check," here it refers to when a GM gives his or her players complete freedom to create any kind of characters they desire. This is usually a good thing, but GMs should be ready for anything in this case. A good rule of thumb to remember is if you don't give your players parameters during character creation, their characters will be varied and strange indeed. Take for instance tho case of my first Dieselpunk campaign. It was a large group I was running: I had seven players cramped into the confines of my modest living room in my apartment. We were all in our late twenties, so we were all pretty busy folks. So over the next few sessions our core group of four grew to seven with only two players actually being able to sit down with me and ask me questions about the setting in order to hammer out their character concepts and stats. The rest made their characters at home and with free rein. The result was the most motley assortment of characters I'd ever seen: a pair of Goblyn brothers, one of which was mute, a werewolf chemist, a cowardly pyromaniac, a bossy Sobaki warrior-diplomat, a tribal Zjenithi gladiator, and a smooth-talking, six-shootin' con-man. The campaign saw the inclusion of a sassy mechanic, a ditsy courtesan, and a noble-minded ex-deputy. The thing that made it confusing was that the characters were all really cool, but they didn't fit together very well. Some of them were on the right side of the law, some of them on the other. Some of them were very combat-oriented, while others barely stayed alive. Even the Goblyn brothers were as different as night and day. My players had created very distinct, memorable characters who didn't have much reason to like each other or work together and I struggled the entire campaign to get them to do just that. My first mistake was that I didn't do a very good job of describing exactly what Otherworld or Dieselpunk was. The players were confused as to the relevant levels of technology in the world, the racial demographics, and the rules of behavior. The party's Zjenithi just went around cracking skulls and killing people who ticked him off and had Johnny Law on his trail the entire time. That player thought the world was largely lawless, since I hadn't explained that it wasn't. My second mistake was that I didn't give them a common goal or establish any pre-existing bonds of affection. I just threw them into the frying pan and they eventually learned to get along... sort of. Along the way it was a bumpy ride with characters frequently coming to blows with each other (one died because of this), running off on their own to do something unrelated, and the whole time they were begging me to give them more information on the setting. So when it comes to giving your players Carte Blanche with character creation, my advice is simple: don't. But if you do, make sure they understand the setting, get a chance to talk to the other players about their ideas, and make sure they have an idea of where they are headed.