Character Creation Guide: How to construct great fictional characters: Volume 1 (Kim's RPG Master Class) - Softcover

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.

Kim E Lumbard broke open a cherry red Dungeons and Dragons Basic set rulebook in 1982 and was hooked for life. After a short stint as a player, he launched his own AD&D campaign that lasted for five years and started a three decade DMing spree. He’s constantly pushing the forefront of the RPG artform, like when he videotaped and publicized the New World Campaign.

In addition to role-playing, Kim is also an avid gamesman of all sorts. His Beginner’s Guide to Magic the Gathering has been one of the top-rated guides on the internet for over a decade. He’s passionate about writing helpful guides for people about all sorts of topics, not just games. He has a number of useful guides for managing health, finance, and happiness.