You start with 10 Luck, and will spend it during deign, and hopefully keep 3-7 by the end. Then in play you use it for some very important things – it refreshes each Chapter (aka adventure).
- Roll or Choose your High Concept, and spend 1 Luck.
- Roll or Choose your age, get 1 LifePath per decade (1 for teens, 2 for twenties, 3 for thirties, 4 for forties. If older, get 5 for age 50-99, and 6 for age 100+. If this is possible in your setting, you must also take an Age trait for those.
- For each LifePath:
- Spend 1 Luck
- Pick one Trait from those for your LifePath.
- Roll or Choose an Event for your LifePath
- Roll the Outcome
- Assign your Skills (see next post).
- Decide whether or not to spend more Luck on Special Qualities (in most games, you won’t).
- Describe your character’s name and appearance.
- You are done.
What are Lifepaths?
LifePaths are the main way you make your setting distinct, at least during character design. A LifePath is a period of life where the character pursued some activity like a vocation. So it’s a good idea to build a table of Vocations that fit your campaign.
A fantasy game might have fantasy professions like Adventurer, Pit Fighter, Assassin, Sorcerer, Wizard, and so on. Then you roll the appropriate number of LifePaths and we see what kind of life this character has had up until now.
If desired, you could let the player choose their LifePaths, and even go full narrative, and let players invent their character history – just make sure to put it in LifePath format.
How To Choose LifePaths
When creating a table, you need a nice number of Vocations. I normally start with 6 general categories: Warrior, Traveller/Explorer, Academic/Healer/Knower, Scoundrel / Rogue, Bard / Talker, Mystic / Occultist. Then for each category, create 3 Vocations, which gives 18 options in a nice distribution, then I create 2 special ones that could be anything – that gives 20 Vocations, perfect for a d20 table.
You might leave these things vague, especially if you want to offload a lot of the work to the PCs!
A Sample Set of LifePaths
Let’s say we are playing a modern ghost-hunting kind of game. Let’s build a set of LifePaths that fit the implied tone.
- Thug: You used violence without official sanction. A bounty hunter, enforcer for a protection racket, defender of your oppressed community, etc.
- Grunt: You were a soldier or cop, and maybe saw something you shouldn’t have.
- Special Forces: Your served in some elite military unit. Feel free to name it. Did you leave it in good standing?
- Trailblazer: A pilot of a small aircraft, you travel the world bringing important supplies and maybe contraband to remote areas.
- Dilettante Daredevil: A wealthy n e’er-do-well, you made your days livable by taking up various extreme sports, and travelled the world seeing places of excitement.
- Missionary: You have spent much of your time far from civilisation, living among ‘primitive’ tribes perhaps as a kind of anthropologist bolstered by your faith.
- Gearhead: A wizard with technology, you were recruited by a startup to work on experimental technology. You might not have been keen on human trials..
- Doctor; You don’t tell many people you worked for a medical insurance firm. What made you leave the business? You are a doctor.
- Hacker: A computer expert who found other avenues for their skills. Maybe you broke into the wrong company.
- Corrupt Cop: A prison guard, parole officer, or cop who somehow got drawn into criminality. It probably wasn’t intended, or at least that’s what you claim.
- Scoundrel: A small-time criminal – pick-pocket, burglar. fence, or even con artist,
- Driver: an expert car thief, and getaway driver for various jobs.
- Venture Capitalist: An expert at encouraging financiers to give you the big bucks, or at least you were. You are a skilled economist, and know how business works..
- Conspiracist: You strongly believed in some conspiracy, where flat earth, fake moon landings, vaccine denialism, or something even wackier.
- Paranormal Youtuber: A charismatic and charming con artist, you have faked numerous scares while hunting the paranormal. And then you found the real thing…
- Parapsychologist: A scientist studying the paranormal. You faked the occasional ‘finding’ , or maybe you were honest and starting to lose hope…
- Practicing Medium: You brought people hope, and felt you were doing good, until you stumbled across a real ghost…
- Scammer: You had one or more occult conspiracy scams, and when you stumbled across something real., yiu still believe it was a scam somehow.
- Ghost Hunter: You know the truth (at least your truth). You use your dwindling supplies to hunt down and fight the supernatural. You are the only LifePath that can start with the Occult skill above Poor.
- Roll Twice: You didn’t stick at anything for long.
Don’t forget, LifePaths also need Events, though the LifePath might prompt the Event. If you do create events tables, you would ideally create 6-20 events for each LifePath, but you could create one event table for all. The events should fit and encourage the game’s theme.
LifePath Events
An Event is a description of roughly what sort of things provided the focus of the character’s adventurers. It’s not enough to know they were an Adventurer – maybe they were a Dungeon Delver, or a Troublemaker who fought oppressive nobles, or maybe they became rich and were a noble. You could create a single table of events that can be used by all LifePaths, or create a separate table for each LifePath. This could be a lot of work, but it is rewarding.
You might create a fixed number per LifePath. like 6 or 20, to make it easy to roll. Create some number that’s easy to put into a rollable table (usually an even number: 6, 8, 10, 12 or 20). And if playing free-form, just ask the player to describe the events of each LifePath – what trouble did they get into?
LifePath Outcomes
So we have a bunch of LifePaths and Events for each of them. The Outcome tells us how the character succeeded or failed in that LifePath. I use this table and a d6 with no modifiers:
| Score | Outcome Effect |
| 1 | MURDER OR DISASTER: You are thought responsible for one or more deaths, or a terrible event affects the world around you and you are considered responsible or failed to stop it. |
| 2 | BETRAYAL: People who trusted you were betrayed. Or you were betrayed by those you trusted. You are thought to be some kind of INFIDEL, someone who did treacherous things. Maybe you did. |
| 3 | DEFEAT: A rivalry with a Nemesis goes badly for you. The Nemesis, or those close to them, bear a grudge. |
| 4 | VICTORY: A rivalry with a Nemesis goes well for you. The Nemesis, or those close to them, bear a grudge. |
| 5 | ADORED: An ally, romantic partner, or mentor is instrumental in your victory. The adoration may be one-sided or mutual. |
| 6 | HEROISM: Whether by action, contrivance, or taking credit for the actions of others, you were victorious and are thought responsible for brave deeds. |
If you want to introduce a bias and make the list more heroic (not a bad idea, really), add one to rolls of 3 to 5, and treat BETRAYAL as BETRAYAL/DEFEAT.
This Outcome table is what other people think – it may not be actually what happened. You can define that. Use the LifePath, and it’s Event and Outcome to weave a full description of this period.
Use the outcome to influence why you went into the next LifePath. Make a story of it.
LifePath Traits
The Traits are the main reason to have LifePaths. By virtue of your character’s background, you have some benefit in play. This is something GMs will have to rule on (perhaps with the guidance of their group) – how exactly do Traits work? See the coming post on Traits.
Note that you have a Luck property. Each time you use a Trait, you spend 1 Luck Point. You cannot use the same LifePath again in the same Scene. A Scene ends when the situation changes enough – either the location or people involved change.
There are also Chapters, which are basically adventures – it might be one long session, or 2-3 shorter ones. At the end of each Chapter, your Luck refreshes.
So, you get special bonuses from LifePaths, but you can use them only a limited number of times per adventure.
LifePaths and Interventions
LifePaths – more specifically their events – are used by the GM when creating Interventions. This is described in the Threat chapter.
What Is The High Concept?
This is your top-down character concept, like Smuggler With a Heart of Gold, or Adventurer Farmboy, or Cunning Wanderer. This is meant to be very broad. You generally have a Trait of the same name, and spend one Luck for your High Concept.
You can use the Trait just like any other, once per Scene, and if you are playing true to your character, you’ll frequently be able use this and remind people what you are. When spending the Trait, narrate it in a way that fits your concept.
