Creating a Hero in our Dark Fantasy RPG

Creating a character in our dark fantasy RPG Of Hearth & the Harrowing is fairly simple. There is a lot of detail to a character, but don't be intimidated by the sheet.

WIP (nearly final) Character Sheet for the Game

It can be broken down to two different lists. The high level overview of the character creation is fairly simple and that list really is only four major decisions:

1. What is your ancestry? This is your biological heritage and in BRP this determines what dice you roll for physical attributes. Intelligence (INT) and Charisma (CHA) are the same across all ancestries. There are alternate ancestries you can make heroes from in the bestiary chapter, but the main four are the intend player character hero ancestries.

   

   Playable Ancestries (Halfling, Dwarf, Human, and Elf)

2. What did you do before taking up the fight against the Harrowing? This is your background profession and helps determine some of your skill bonuses during character creation. These are all non-adventuring professions and what your character did before they became a hero.

   
   

   

   Typical Background Profession

3. What caused you to abandon your previous life and take up the mantle fighting against the darkness? This is called the hero's inciting incident. There are plenty to choose or roll from, or you can make up one yourself. They determine starting Corruption (COR) and also give you an idea for one of your starting Passions (more about them later).

4. Finally, what kind of hero did you become? This is your Adventuring profession and helps round out your skills and gives you some powers to choose from. As you can see from the example below, not all heroes have adventuring professions that seem very heroic. It is a fairly dark world after all.

Typical Adventuring Profession

Other than the choice of Ancestry, each of the choices above give you a single passion. Your hero starts with three of them. You do not have to take any of the suggested passions from your choices. You can replace them with any passion you would like.

These four choices are the backbone of your character creation, everything else are the mechanics and other items that are laid on top of the four choices above. This is the second list. These fully detailed steps are covered in a two page spread in the character generation, with 16 steps. They basically amount to the four steps above plus the details of how to roll characteristics, determine derived characteristics, apply skill bonuses, etc.

Fully Detailed Character Creation

Check back with us next week when we go over character advancement in more detail. It is one of the systems that really sets basic roleplaying (BRP) games apart from most other game systems.

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