Characters In Your World

How to make ones that matter

Creating a game that players care about means injecting it with locations, history, and, most of all, characters they care about. Building the latter is an exercise that walks a thin line between your game's linear and more freeform aspects.

But when done right, a character can become not only an essential part of the player’s story but also a reflection of their world.

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The Man in the Mirror

As a first step, it can help to decide on a particular theme you want the character to evoke.

For example, a character may represent a theme of love. That can mean many different things that aren’t implicitly romantic love for another person, like love of kingdom, love of the game, or love of duty to a community.

Think of different themes that can be affixed to characters, especially ones that can be interpreted in subversive ways. Here’s a list of a few off the top of the dome:

• Ambition

• Sacrifice

• Freedom

• Justice

• Power

• Loyalty

• Survival

• Tradition

• Transformation

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Adding Texture

Personally, I find a lot of advice that recommends giving an NPC a notable quirk or affectation is superficial at best. You may find it works for you, but I think there are other ways of adding texture to a character that feels more meaningful (and less likely to dip a toe into the potentially offensive).

Here are some questions to consider when adding texture. You don’t need to answer them all, but even one answer can make a difference.

1. How Do They Fit Into the World? Their beliefs, mannerisms, and speech patterns should reflect their origins, whether they’re soldiers from a frontier town or merchants from a bustling trade city.

2. How Do They View the Players? Do they see the party as a means to an end, a threat, a potential ally, or curiosity? A noble might treat them disdainfully, while a rebel may see them as their only hope.

3. What Motivates Them? Are they trying to climb the ranks of a criminal syndicate? Do they dream of reclaiming their family’s lost honor? Do they simply want to survive another winter?

4. What Do They Fear? A character who is afraid of failure might be hyper-competent but deeply insecure. A warlord who fears weakness might overcompensate with excessive cruelty.

5. What Stories Do They Tell? A mercenary might mention an old battlefield where they lost friends. Scholars might speak in half-finished thoughts, unsure if they should reveal what they know.

You can always give them visual or auditory wrinkles that make them more memorable at first glance, but the questions above can help them become less like tropes and more like extensions of the world.

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Nothing Exists Without Its Opposite

Contradictions are an easy way to humanize characters. Their problems should rarely be one-dimensional with binary solutions.

What texture and contradictions add to a character is tension, which is as good as gold in games. With tension comes choice and with choice comes agency. A few character concepts with themes that contradict themselves:

• The Idealist Cynic. Dreams of a better world but doesn’t believe it will happen.

• The Gentle Warrior. Despises violence but excels at it.

• The Dutiful Rebel. Sworn to serve a system they secretly want to dismantle.

• The Loyal Betrayer. Would do anything for a shared ultimate goal, even selling out allies towards that goal.

• The Wise Fool. Jester’s privilege.

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Other Considerations

You’ll recall I mentioned that creating a game players care about means injecting it with locations, history, and characters they care about.

While the process changes somewhat, you can apply the above steps to make locations and lore more robust.

• A bustling trade city might be a place of opportunity while harboring dens of corruption.

• A sacred mountain monastery might preach peace but demand harsh trials for its members.

• A past war will be remembered (and memorialized) in very different ways between the victors and the defeated.

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Characters That Matter Worksheet

The Characters That Matter Worksheet provides a structured approach to creating rich characters by guiding through three phases: Theming, Texture, and Contradiction.

This worksheet is designed to help game masters, players, and writers craft characters that feel real, making them engaging, dynamic, and integrated into their world’s history and conflicts.

Thanks for reading!

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