Characters in RPGs are typically disconnected from the world around them: exiles, wanderers, adventurers. They don't belong to the spaces in which they act. This post is about the opposite: characters who are embedded within an environment.
Tales told in the setting of the Wyrd Lands are designed to be about the place and its people. In my mind I think of the characters as embedded characters.
Why I think embedded characters matter
When I say embedded characters, I mean characters that have a stake in the place where they act. They emerge from that space and their motivations are tied to its motivation, not simply their own personal ones.
This is in contrast to the dungeon-tourism of adventurers that I have been writing about recently. In this, the adventurer is typically coming into a place, solving its problems or getting some kind of wealth from it, before moving on. They are knights, ronin and gunslingers.
A quick aside: I am not saying that these kinds of characters are bad, or this style of play is worse. I also think what I am calling "embedded characters" are likely the majority(?) of characters that actually get played. Any counter-points please put them in the comments or @ me on twitter.
In contrast, embedded characters are those who, when they fight, they are fighting a threat to their community. When they experience hardship, it is the hardship of their neighbours and loved ones. When they achieve glory it is glory in the eyes of their peers and their families.
Embedded characters are tied into networks of belonging. Their motivations emerge from this network and tend, like our own, towards the betterment of the lives of the people around them. They do not quest to earn gold or xp, but to rescue a lost friend, to discover new sources of food when the crops fail, or to defend their people against the raids of their enemies.
Embedded Characters from The Wyrd Lands
My game is about the world and the setting. I have tried to make so that creating a character in this world means to create an embedded character of that world. Let us make one now by rolling on my secret tables:
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| Very rough draft of character sheet |
- Character Name:
- Age: Young
- Position in Household: Child of head
- Appearance and Habits: Notches on weapon for counting kills, always being picked at
- Training: Apprentice Raider (Blood-lust, Speed and Silence, Attack! Attack! Attack!, Terror, Wayfarer)
- Alignment: Of Wild and Wyrd
- Doom: To die in Judgement, with a hero, on the sea.
- Equipment:
- Sources of will:
I am not going to explain what all of these things mean here (though you can find my overview of Alignment on my itch.io page) but I am going to point out that there are gaps in this character. In order to fill these gaps we need to understand more about the context of the character, i.e. their household:
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| Very rough Draft for Household sheet |
- Head of household: Raider
- Household role in settlement: Warriors
- Household caste: Thralls [this household is socially bonded to another]
- Bonded household:
- Household culture: Jutes
- Cultural belief: Odin is the last [This household are converts to the Odinic cult]
- Cultural Practice: Reciting of loss [A coming of age ceremony including sacrifice]
- Household Ancestry: Wild - Savage forebears
- Household Story: Death
- Household Members:
- Head of household
- Child
- Household equipment:
- Members of a household may be hungry without aid.
- A couple of sheep or other small animals.
- Some dull farming equipment owned.
- Old Cookware.
- Bad Clothes (dress, shirt, trousers, cloak) for each member.
- Two bad spears
- Enough bad shield for half the household
- Two other very bad simple weapons (bow, seax, war axe, spears)
- Two bad wood axes/wooden mallets
- Wooden, stone, or cloth charms and amulets.
- Specialist equipment from Trades.
We are starting to see the context of our character. We see the fact that the head of the household, our character's parent, has the same training. They are Jutish. They are warriors in their settlement but also thralls, socially and legally tied to another household. We also see the shared equipment our character will be drawing from. That equipment is not the best quality (in the background is a system for determining relative wealth).
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| An example of a culture's details, here the Angles |
In another post I will go into the settlement and region creation tools. But now, let us give our character a Jutish name, and return to them.
- Character Name: Eana (born to die)
- Age: Young
- Position in Household: Child of head
- Appearance and Habits: Notches on weapon for counting kills, always being picked at; a Jutish tattoo of a square in a circle on their neck.
- Training: Apprentice Raider (Blood-lust, Speed and Silence, Attack! Attack! Attack!, Terror, Wayfarer)
- Alignment: Of Wild and Life
- Doom: To die in Judgement, with a hero, on the sea.
- Equipment:
- Old Clothes
- Cumbersome Shield
- A damaged and bulky axe.
- A wooden charm of Odin.
- Sources of will:
Our character is almost done.
The element that I have left for last is the 'sources of will'. These are parts of their character which they have used in the past to succeed against the odds or to achieve great feats of strength, wisdom or bravery. In the Wyrd Lands these sources of will are called on to resist the Wyrd (fate, luck, chance, destiny, etc.) but in so calling on them, you pull the Wyrd's attention to them.
As a character aligned with life, Eana has two sources of will. I am instead however going to give them one, and say that they have called upon it twice:
- Sources of will: their relationship with their parent, the household head.
I see Eana as being raised in the image of the head of the household and being very desirous of living up to that image. Their thrall status, and their wild ancestry - which hugely impacts their social status - suggests to me a close-knit, even insular household. The fact that I rolled the head of the household to be a raider as well (and also the same alignment and a few other things when I made them in full) puts their relationship at the core of Eana's identity.
However this source of will could have been any part of this character, including features of the household, settlement or region, that defines them. Perhaps there is a mystical site from which they draw strength, or the lord of settlement's example inspires them, or their beat-up old axe which they have still used successfully is what gives them strength.
Conclusion
Hopefully my character has come across as someone who is embedded in the world around them, and acts for as well as within it.
If you have any thoughts or comments about this approach to building embedded characters, examples of other games that do it well, or whether that is a necessary goal at all, I would love to here them.
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