LEVELS 1–7
This is a fantasy idiom generator.
This will help you determine your character’s alignment based on the level of personal risk he or she is willing to take to save a cat.
In the place you grew up, there was an annual celebration that stuck with you. No matter where you are, you try to introduce this custom to the people you are with. This uses random tables and fill-in-the-blanks to create a wild holiday and determine how people react to it.
In setting out to adventure, your character abandoned things. These bittersweet prompts will create objects that your character put down, never to touch again.
Through foolishness, carelessness, weakness, or some combination of the three, your character has lost your party’s fortune to a swindler. This will help readers form a picture of how their characters react to an unavoidable social crisis.
Your character learned five lessons he or she carries on the road and into dungeons. Some have saved his or her life; others have put him or her in danger; all of them make your character a hero. This provides a framework for ideology and behavior.
Picture an app that helps adventuring parties find one another. This is a list of hero profiles. Whom do you swipe right?
An inventory of surface-level thoughts about the group your character travels with. Questions that will guide readers to think about the other characters at their table.
Inns tend to have at least one cloaked figure seated in a dark corner looking to offer a job to the right heroes. What would one of these people notice about your character?
Many heroes are motivated by tragedy, but without compelling details, those stories tend to run together. This exercise helps readers add evocative detail to clichéd tragic backstories.
A guide to defining what your character wants from his or her companions.
Learn the concept of status within a scene and how you can move it about. Create modifiers to help people abstract your character’s social status.
An exercise to help develop the ways in which your core motivations spur your decisions.
Create a snapshot of where you came from and your life there.
Your character happens upon the body of a fallen adventurer. How do you handle the situation? A flowchart game that asks players to make tough moral decisions and decide what they owe a stranger.
The objects carried by heroes are tools as well as a form of self-expression. This exercise helps you further define your look by adding a wealth of small details to your equipment.
17 Five Things You Packed but Shouldn’t Have
What five things does an inexperienced adventurer take with him or her?
Charts to help players visualize different ways to play a character whose religion is a major theme.
At this point in your career you are vulnerable and know little of the world. What fears has that led you to carry?
20 What Does It Mean to Be . . . ?
This exercise will help you construct an identity based on your character’s race. You can play into it or against it.
This exercise invites you to focus on a detail about your game world and learn more about it over the course of play.
An exercise to help you generate a prophecy known by or about your character.
This exercise guides you through a memory of the first time your character risked her or his life for something.
At what point does your character decide a job is too much trouble?
What complaints do older generations of adventurers make about heroes your age?
Create a foil for your character, someone to clash or compete with.
27 The Taming of the Wolverine
How should you play a rebellious antisocial character in a game that calls for collaboration?
An exercise to add personal detail to your spell book.
29 Familiar, but Not Too Familiar
Familiars and animal companions all too often get left out of the game. This exercise will add quirks and personality to your animal friends to give them a shot at longevity.
Staying at inns can feel exhausting. What do you do to make strange rooms feel like yours?
You are visited by a version of yourself from the future. Prompts for humorous self-reflection.
Create a mentor for your character: reputation, relationship, resources, skills, accessibility. Assign priorities.
One of the most insidious magical devices is the magic mirror. It whispers lies and truths that beguile heroes and lead them astray. What will it try to tell you?
There is more than one flavor of smart character. Creating a visual guide to your approach to intelligence can help you diversify your playstyle and keep characters feeling fresh even when they have the same stats.