I’ve been wanting to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for a while. It’s a weird situation in that the regular gaming group plays many different types of games but some of us have that lingering need to play in an actual D&D campaign again once in a while.
Through the benefits of online play, a new group has formed to play Rime of the Frostmaiden and this is how I got to the character I am playing in the campaign.
How I create my characters
I’ve covered how I create my characters before, but I don’t expect you to read that. The process consists of the following elements that happen in no particular order and potentially in parallel. I have tried to put them in the rough order they happened in this case, to aid clarity.
- The lonely fun ideas
- Mechanical build
- Establishing visuals
- The core idea
- Framing events
- Key relationships
- Nailing the premise
It’s not surprising this post is structured into these sections.
The challenges
There are new challenges to creating a character for this campaign but one of them isn’t ideas. For reasons I can’t fully divine D&D is the only game I create characters for in my head despite not having a game on the horizon.
The challenges are: –
- New group and I wanted to create something that fit the vibe
- It’s an adventure module; would personal narrative be accomodated
- I’ve not had much success with playing in adventure modules
- The character should fit in, not broadside the adventure module
Basically, how do I create the type of character I like, who exists to tell a specific story, who is burdened with a premise, when it’s entirely a new group, a new GM for me and it’s a pre-written adventure module!
The lonely fun ideas
I had a few ideas from those lonely fun moments of creating characters in my head just in case the regular gaming group decided to play D&D.
The reincarnated dragon. Take an evil Green Dragon who ruled over a region via a web of lies. She falls in love with a human Paladin, Oath of Ancients, in her human form. One thing leads to another and the Green Dragon makes a pact with a powerful fey entity to save her dying lover. Her life for his, but she will be reincarnated as a human a many years later to atone for her actions. A Paladin, Oath of the Ancients, seeking redemption for who she once was. Needless to say, her arch-nemesis, Red Eye the Red Dragon, is still alive.
A swashbuckler out for vengeance. The youngest child of triplets. As weak as her sister is intelligent and her brother is strong. She is given health and vitality by making a pact with a patron and becomes a lethal swordswoman and killer out for vengeance against her family. Low Warlock levels and the rest Rogue. Yes, this is essentially a whole Monzcarro “Monza” Murcatto idea from Best Served Cold. Steal liberally.
I dropped the second one pretty quick, it just didn’t feel right for the vibe of Rime of the Frost Maiden. That character felt like she needed warmer weather and waring cities and nobles! I rogue swashbuckler just didn’t feel right in the snow and darkness all wrapped in furs.
This left the first one, but that idea felt way too epic. It felt exactly like something I didn’t want to do and that was insert something way too epic and a full-on broadside to the story that already existed in the adventure module with some grand insistence the DM would incorporate it.
And that’s where the process began.
Mechanical build
We discussed class pretty early across the group, you sort of have to in D&D to get a vaguely balanced group or at least know if you don’t have one. Once I knew I wasn’t going with an idea that fits the Swashbuckler Rogue I firmly decided to go with the Paladin class.
I locked in my class choice early. I was for playing a Paladin in the last 5E campaign but got gazumped. It’s a physical class with some light spellcasting.
What did change was the subclass selection. I went from Oath of Ancients to Oath of Vengeance. Why did that occur? Once the whole reincarnated Green Dragon seeking redemption went the Oath of Ancients idea was less core to the idea. The Oath of Vengeance sounded cool and seemed to fit better with a character who is uncomfortable with who she is and what she might become.
Initially, I chose the half-orc ancestry because it went well with Paladin, but this would change as the idea developed.
Establishing the visuals
Choosing art for your character by randomly picking images off the Internet is a hot topic these days. At the risk of getting well and truly trounced, I am posting the image here while not obsessively posting it on social media. The artist seems to have vanished off the internet as her Instagram does not exist so it’s hard to give credit currently.
The above image locked down a lot of stuff. I became comfortable with combining the half-orc ancestry with the Paladin class. The very human look of the character fed eventually fed into things percolating around the core idea.
Ultimately, I started to imagine her more like a Bride of Dracula than a half-orc, slightly unsettling yet oddly charismatic, athletic, preternaturally strong for her build and sort of predatory. The various elements of the half-orc ancestry seemed to fit that well.
The image was a thing of beauty and really sold the character to me.
The core idea
So, I was still wrestling with the reincarnated dragon idea while accepting it was just too big for the campaign in question. It just percolated in my head as other parts of the process moved forward. The locking down of class and ancestry. The selection of the half-orc image for the character.
Then I discovered the Haunted One background and the idea of having a ‘harrowing event’ and there it was, literally listed as one of the examples of harrowing events: A hag kidnapped and raised you. You escaped, but the hag still has a magical hold over you and fills your mind with evil thoughts.
The rabbit hole of Hag research began.
This led to all sorts of awesome images of Hags as well as the discovery that they eat human children to then birth a human female child who transforms into a Hag when they come of age. That was it. She’d be a Hag’s daughter who didn’t fully transform.
Framing events
I framed minimal events. I just established that she was from Icenwindale but not where. She was the daughter of a Hag who for one reason or another didn’t fully transform into one when she came of age. That was pretty much it. Nothing about who her family is. How she avoided transforming into a full-on Hag.
I just figured I’d get to that at some future point. It was literally just a 250-word capsule.
As it happened I did nail down her home town, Lonelywood, before the first session started. As I wanted the one furthest north for the remoteness which also happened to have a forest for the Hag!
Key relationships
I always embed key relations along with the character. They always have one principle, deep and intense relationship with someone be it an enemy, an ex or destined lover or something more fluctuating in that Batman and Catwoman sort of way.
The Hag is the key relationship in the sense of how will their destinies now intertwine since the transformation did not take place. There are also numerous others which I have as potentially in play but I’ve not thought about a lot like her mother, father and she is returning to Icewindale so who took her away and so on. At the point of character creation, this was cool, but I left it to figure it out later.
Nailing the premise
I wasn’t going to go with a premise. New group. It’s often just a way for me to focus at the best of times. I also thought I could get a close enough approximation via the personality trait, ideal, bond and flaw concepts in D&D. As a result, I didn’t actually write the below premise down until after the first session when I decided to go with one.
External: Defeat Adrasa Dagnastra, the northern Hag.
Internal: Am I still human?
Philosophical: Is my fate my own or Dagnastra’s?
It was inevitable, those three things allow me to see the character more clearly and without them, I felt I’d be adrift for most of the game or not connected to the character sufficiently.
Getting the story out
How will this character’s personal story actually emerge in play? I have no idea because the general expectations, tools and shortcuts the regular gaming group can assume aren’t necessarily present. Different players. Different GM. It’s an adventure module rather than it being written around the protagonists.
So, I have zero expectations in this area and it’s just going to be interesting to see how it all pans out.
I think I can take responsibility for authoring it in, ideally in a way that enhances the game for everyone rather than is just me engaging in ‘personal story wank’ but event that’s going to take a session or two to figure out the best ways to do that.
…And, Finally
That’s how I tend to create my characters. I know, it sounds long and overly laboured when written down in this post, but it doesn’t actually play out like that. It’s moments of thought occurring across days or weeks which eventually coalesce into some sense of a whole. Then I stop just before I go too far so the majority of it can be figured out in play. The whole purpose of the premise is the character is cast into the future rather than being a creation with everything in the past.
You can follow along with the campaign via player reports so let the campaign begin!