Game Wish 85: Inspiration

Game WISH 85 is all about Character Inspirations

What inspires you to create characters? Do you have partially-developed characters in mind for use when you get into a new campaign? Do you shop characters around, or do you come up with new characters when you get into a campaign? Why? If you GM, are you bothered by receiving a solicitation for a "generic" character, or does it enthuse you to get a solid proposal even if it's not closely tailored to your game?

Short answer: it varies.

In games set in detailed fantasy or science fiction universes, I like characters to mesh in with the campaign's setting in some significant way. I believe characters should have some sort of context; if the campaign setting is filled with all sorts of cults, guilds and megacorps, it's a good thing to incorporate at least some of those into the character's backstory.

As a player, sometimes I've had more than one idea for a campaign, and had asked the GM which one he or she would prefer before spending too much time fleshing any of them out. Unfortunately other times, I've just found the creative juices refuse to flow, and I've actually had to pass on some online games because I've been unable to come up with a decent concept in time.

I've seen a lot of batting of ideas back and forth between player and GM from both sides. For example, a recently a new player joined my ongoing Kalyr campaign with a character with 'extensive underworld connections'. I sent the player a list of ongoing underworld NPCs, with the question "so what's her relationship with these guys?". Things like this help to plug the character into the gameworld, which to me is always a Good Thing. I did much the same thing with the GM of my last major face to face campaign, with Javin the river pirate of Pavis.

On the other hand, a 'generic' character should be able to fit somewhere into most gameworlds, although it might not necessarily fit into a narrowly-focussed campaign. One interesting case I had was the submission of a character possessed by a 'demon' (Who I'm told was based on a character from a David Gemmell book). I had to put in a bit of though to work out where this 'demon' fitted in to my gameworld's cosmology. Quite what it is would be a spoiler for any of the game's players that might be reading this, so I'm not going to say.

I've only ever created one PC based on a character from fiction; Karl Tolhurst, of whom I've written about before, and will probably write about again. He was based on Dan Ward, the central character from Iain Banks' Espediar Street, a former rock star who's band had ended in tragic circumstances.

I've also done a little bit of develop-in-play, from a very basic starting concept. Vandal the space pirate was an example of this. Basic concept was "big, tough and dumb as a rock", and I just took if from there. I had a lot of fun playing that that character; he was quite different from the archetypes I usually tend to play.