Making Your Character

Your character is your persona in the game. You’ll play as your character from Time In to Time Out every day, pausing only to volunteer as a monster or to take a break from play. Your character persists from one event to the next (barring death or retirement) and gains new skills over time.

You can have only one active character in the system at a time; once a character is retired, it is out of play (i.e. you may not switch back and forth between characters from event to event).

Concept

You can play any kind of character you want, as long as it fits into the world of Renewal. Every character in the game can be a hero, and you will walk among a host of those who live, fight and die together.

In game terms, your character is chiefly defined by their skills, which determine what they’re trained to do, but it can help to start with a sense of who they are. We call this a character’s concept: they could be a haughty duellist, for example, or a studious wizard, or glamorous courtier. You don’t have to start with a concept – feel free to jump ahead to the next section – but it can help to inspire you and to shape your choices.

A concept is usually broad and simple, expressed in a few words. Players approach it in a variety of different ways.

• Skills: Most players, inevitably, base their concept on the skills they want to pick: a pike-wielding soldier, a potion-stained alchemist, a master of the ritual circle, a skilled tracker, a body-hacking surgeon.
• Role: Many players start from where they’ll fit in their group or faction: a wealthy merchant, a courtly chatelaine, a devoted civil servant, a priest to a flock – or even a hardened criminal.
• Motivation: For a lot of players, of course, it’s all about what drives their character: a power-hungry noble, a knight trying to rediscover their holy zeal, a perfectionist blacksmith, a rogue dedicated to chaos.

There isn’t any one right way to come up with a character concept: you could take inspiration from a favourite book or historical figure, or start with your backstory and work forward – or even start with a costume. Whatever fires your imagination!

Archetype

Most characters in the Renewal campaign belong to one of four archetypes, broad character classes that unlock development paths for specialisation and more powerful skills:

• Creator: Whether weavers or alchemists, blacksmiths or surgeons, tattooists or jewellers, creators are artists who make, repair and alter lasting things.
• Magician: Spellcasters, enchanters, summoners and necromancers, ritualists and oracles – magicians are scholars who channel magic and work miracles.
• Scout: From burglars, assassins and pickpockets, to sappers and siege engineers, to trackers and hunters, scouts rely on wits, skills and guile to survive.
• Warrior: Thugs and berserkers, duellists and tacticians, monster hunters and warleaders alike, warriors master all the arts and modes of warfare.

The four archetypes are described in more detail in their respective chapters, along with the more advanced archetype skills associated with them, some advice for character creation, some example characters, and some common study paths for progression via research and training.

You can choose your archetype at character creation, but you don’t have to – you can get a feel for your character before choosing a path. You must, however, choose one before learning any archetype skills.

Skills

Your character starts with 20 character points to spend on general and archetype skills. You don’t have to spend all your points up front; unspent points may be held back for later use as experience.

You may find, after an event or two with a new character, that the skills you've chosen don't seem to fit. No worries - you have until the end of the your second event to change your mind (see Changing Your Mind).

Background

By now you have a sketch of a character – at least a set of skills, and possibly a broad concept to hang them on. This is absolutely enough to jump into your first event! Many players prefer to develop their characters in play, filling out their motivations and backstory as they get a feel for who they are.

Some players, on the other hand, like to dream up their character’s background – who they are, where they’re from, what life they lived before they joined the warband – before they start. Having a story adds depth and detail to the concept, and can help the character feel more real to you.

Examples

• An armoured sword-and-shield fighter might be a pious knight of Albion, orphaned by war and raised by monks in a remote abbey, who feels out of place in worldly company.
• An elemental spellcaster might be a learned druid of Caledonia, the eldest daughter of a tribal chief who refused to follow in her mother’s footsteps and fled to study the mysteries in the groves of the wise.
• A spear-carrier might be a humble pig-farmer who turns up to fight out of patriotic duty before heading home every winter to tend to his pigs.

Many characters belong to a group with a shared past. Even so, there’s always the scope to have a unique story of your own.

Faction and Culture

The most important part of a character’s background is where they’re from: their faction is both the land your character calls home – although not necessarily where they were born – and the camp you’ll be based in at events. A faction is something like a nation, with political institutions, shared religions and a shared identity. Most factions are loosely based on historical real-world cultures, albeit with a fantasy twist.

The current factions are available to all players. Every faction has a website and/or social media presence where players can learn more about them and develop group and character ideas before turning up. Which isn’t to say you have to do homework before playing, but making contact with your intended home can help hit the ground running.

Every faction is home to several cultures – kingdoms, regions, tribes or noble houses – with their own identity and institutions within the larger faction. Most of the factions foster a certain amount of friendly rivalry between cultures, to generate roleplay.

Some cultures have not just distinctive identities, but characteristic appearances. Horns and blue skin may be common in one community, while the neighbouring tribe are thickset and broad-shouldered, with full beards. Cultures aren’t the same thing as races, but they play a similar role. Of course, a character may be of mixed heritage – and not all children look wholly like their parents.

Each culture in turn may consist of one or several player groups at events, each representing a family or clan, a military company, a trading house or gang or similar.

Religion

Your character might not believe in them, but gods do exist and they can literally walk the earth. Your response to these giants of power and belief is your own. Some characters are loudly pious and devout, some more irreverent; some see the gods as merely very powerful spirits.

Each faction has some sort of official religion, although plenty of groups – and individuals – have their own private faiths.

Note: Players are not permitted to practice any living, real-world faith in character, except for reconstructed historical European religions. You may draw inspiration from real-world religions, as long as you don’t use real names and terms, and as long as you mix elements and practices from different sources so as to obscure their origins.

Personality

While many players find it easiest to play characters who are much like them – especially for sixteen hours a day, three or four days at a time – some enjoy the challenge of inhabiting a very different persona.

Your character’s personality might be shaped by their skills, or it could convey their social role or background. A warrior might be taciturn and grim, while a scholar is verbose and enthusiastic and a thief is evasive and given to euphemisms. A courtier might be gracious and charming, or a priest stern but kind. The last survivor of a slaughtered village may be anxious and skittish, or filled with simmering rage.

Some players find a distinctive costume or make-up helps them find their character. Some use a particular posture or gait – and many use an in-character style of speech . Accents are of course permitted, but players are asked to consider how they come across to others when choosing one; in particular, accents based on racist or otherwise offensive caricatures are unacceptable.

Goal

One way to develop a character and drive roleplay is to have an in-character goal. There is, of course, no official way to “win” Renewal, but players can absolutely create win conditions for themselves.

Examples

• Be appointed governor of a Siberian city-state
• Lead Teutonia’s warband in battle
• Seek immortality as a vampire
• Find and kill the werewolf that mauled your brother

Appearance

Inevitably, your character will look more or less like you! But there are ways to make a character distinctive and recognisable.

Costume

Your character’s costume can say a lot about them: a vain noble might wear rich fabrics and jewellery, while a pauper scrabbles by in dirty rags; a hardy ranger will prefer rugged, practical garb, while a scholar or magician dresses in magisterial robes.

Many factions have a definite flavour of dress. The Norscans style themselves in furs and chain, while Estragaleans favour doublets and capes. A character’s group may even have a specific uniform, to clearly mark them as a member.

You may have more than one costume for your character, of course, if you can afford the investment – after all, in real life, people have more than one set of clothes. Weather at events can vary between swelteringly hot and cold and wet, and being able to add or remove layers while staying in character can be a lifesaver.

Make-Up

As in the real world, the people of the world of Renewal come in all forms and features; but being a magical world, that includes green or blue or purple skin, fur or scales (or bark, or stone!), spots or stripes, pointed ears or horns. Some features are more common than others, but almost anything that fits a living person in a fantasy setting is appropriate – but you should avoid looking like a demon, or undead, or any clearly supernatural or unliving creature.

The following guidelines apply:

• Prosthetics: Pointed or shaped ears, nose-ridges, horns, fangs, fur, feathers or scales, a wig, stick-on beard or sideburns, or any other fantasy-appropriate prosthetic features are permitted.

• Patterns: Make-up may include a coloured stripe or flare over the eyes, painted forehead, dots, stripes or other patterns or any sort of partial cover.

• Colours: If covering the whole face, make-up must use at least two colours, either to pattern or highlight, and the predominant colour may not be brown, black, yellow or red. We do not permit Blackface of any kind at any time in the game.

Make-up can represent your character’s past as well as their heritage, of course: it’s a dangerous world, and some players incorporate scars, burns, plague spots, tattoos and other markers of a full life into their make-up.

Can I Play An Elf?

There are no “races” in the world of the Renewal campaign: only the immortal fae who once ruled the world, and the mortals who have ultimately supplanted them. And now that the fae are all but gone, destroyed in the recent war, mortals are all that remain.

In the last world, mortals were labelled according to their features: all mortals with pointed ears were called “elves,” for instance, and all those with green skin “goblins.” But since the world’s remaking, mortals have seen the truth: that all mortals are one great family, and all are uniquely themselves.

There are still whole communities with similar features in the world, where almost every child is born with pointed ears, or where almost everyone has grey, stony skin, or where almost all men have one horn in the middle of their foreheads. But it’s no longer assumed that all communities with pointed ears are descended from one “race” of pointed-eared folk. And it’s understood that not all children inherit these features from their parents.

So the answer to the question “Can I play an elf?” is both yes and no: you can absolutely play someone with pointed ears, from a culture who share those features, live in the woods and love music and dancing, but those are markers of that community, not of a global race that can be neatly lumped under a single name. Or you could play a child of round-eared folk who was blessed by a woodland spirit in the womb and was born with pointed ears and an affinity for nature, or someone born with round ears whose features were transformed in a magical accident.

How you look, and what you call yourself, is up to you – but it doesn’t put you into a neat box, and it has no mechanical effect in the game.

Starting Equipment

Your character starts with whatever equipment they need for the skills they’ve chosen – all you have to do is bring some sort of props to represent them, known as physical representations (or phys reps). Props are available to buy from vendors on site at all main Curious Pastimes events, or can be sourced online or from charity shops; it may be possible, at first, to borrow items from faction commands or other players.

Starting equipment should include:

• Weapons: You’ll need weapons to fight! LARP weapons must be constructed within strict guidelines, and are subject to rules regarding safe and appropriate use.
• Armour: Any armour your character is wearing must be represented in your costume. Armour doesn’t have to be “real,” but should look the part.
• Workspace: Creator skills all require some sort of workspace: a crafter’s workshop, a surgeon’s bed, an alchemist’s laboratory.
• Tools: Various skills require tools for some or all of their functions, such as lockpicks, blacksmith’s tools or a surgeon’s blades and bandages.

Check skill descriptions for what props you will need for your character.

All starting equipment is standard quality and doesn’t need an item card.

Special Items

Your character may acquire special items in play with specific game effects, including:

• higher-quality or enchanted equipment
• potions or poisons, or magical scrolls and trinkets
• Crafting materials such as wood or metal or alchemical ingredients such as herbs and venoms
• Consumables such as bandages and armour staples
• Mystical ether stones

All such items and materials will be issued with item cards to record their existence and confirm any relevant effects.

New characters do not start with any special items or consumables.

Income

By default, characters in the Renewal campaign do not receive any automatic income, whether in coin or otherwise. Players may receive an income at the beginning of every event by taking one or more levels of the Income and Resources skills.

During time in, the skills Foraging, Gathering and Scrounging allow the character to venture into the woods or the camps and find, collect or steal coin or resources each day. Results may vary from day to day – and there is always some risk associated with the effort.