Character Creation Guide: How to construct great fictional characters - Paperback

by Kim E. Lumbard (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.