Character Creation: Don't Look Back

Fun fact: "Don't look back" was the tagline for Orpheus. It didn't make a lot of sense there, either. 

The Game: Don't Look Back
The Publisher: dlb3 Studio
Degree of Familiarity: None with this game, quite familiar with the genre
Books Required: Just the one

Don't Look Back (I guess the full title is Don't Look Back: Terror is Never Far Behind but who's got time for that?) is an odd duck. The title and the cover say "horror game" to me, but the game as presented hews a lot closer to Conspiracy X or Unknown Armies (if a lot less surreal) than, say, Chill or Fear Itself. And that's fine, it's just a different flavor of horror than I was expecting. Reading the book, it's not quite fair to say that there's no setting. It's not as well-defined as Chill (which, yes, is my go-to comparison for modern horror games, go figure) in terms of who the characters are and what they're doing, but there's definitely some context for the larger world and the conspiracies therein. 

Anyway, chargen is pretty quick, so here we go. The first thing I need to do is figure out what the setting is, because like I said, there's not an overarching framework for characters (this is something the Game Host would have to figure out). 

Well, one of the provided suggestions is that the characters are reporters for The Unredacted Truth, a group trying to spill the beans on supernatural shit and related conspiracies. It would actually be interesting to play something like that, because just about all of the "our modern world but there's supernatural shit" games I've played either put the characters in the position of protecting that secrecy (most of the WoD/CofD games) or come down on the "yeah we'd like to tell everyone but we don't want the world to blow up so ssh" side of things (Chill). So, sure, I'll say my guy is doing that. 

First step is a description, name, age, etc. Okies. His name is Everett Burton. He's 25, recent college grad in...something where you don't get a job. Communications, maybe. Ev's father worked for the FBI, and Ev used to joke, when he was younger, that his dad worked on X-Files (which, if this game were set in 2021, Ev must have watched on DVD because he was 6 when the series ended in 2002, sweet jesus). His parents both died of a weird illness - the doctors said it was salmonella, but both of them? And what was up with those skin lesions? - when he was 23. His father said to Ev, on his deathbed, "it's true." It took a year for Ev to figure out that his dad had been talking about the "men in black" nature of his work.

Since then, Ev has been studying his father's life. He notices his dad got sent to the woods a lot, and so Ev has gotten heavily into cryptozoology. He wants to know the truth about what happened to his parents, but he's afraid of getting on the government's radar and getting shot (or "salmonella") so he tries to just do the work himself, and not break any laws in the process. 

Ev is in pretty good shape (he hikes a lot), but he's starting to develop a paunch. He's got brown hair, balding a little. He wears a thin beard, and always carries a cloth mask (even before the pandemic, if that happens in this universe), a pocket knife, latex gloves, and a couple of little sample baggies. You never know. 

Cool, now what? Attributes! These don't get numbers. One gets circled (the one you're good at) and one gets crossed out (the one you ain't) and then the other two you're just OK. I guess I'll make Grace the Unfamiliar one (Everett's not much of a dancer), and I'll make Wits the Focused one (he's just out of college so his studying/research brain is well-honed). 

Occupation. This is a kind of catch-all that represents what the character is really trained at. One of the examples is "Cryptozoologist" and I like that one, so there ya go.

Skills! I get nine, and I can choose if they go under Focused or Unfocused. They have to be specific, and there's a list, but if I need to make something up that's easy. Let's see. Just brainstorming, I feel like Ev might have learned to shoot and handle guns, given his dad's work, so I'll put pistols under Unfocused. Let's say Ev took some Spanish in college and is more or less proficient, so I'll put that under Unfocused as well. Athletics (hiking) is Focused, obviously. I feel like survival or outdoorsman or something would make sense? Sure, but there's nothing like that listed, though Tracking and Climbing are. Well, I'll take both of those (Tracking Focused, Climbing Unfocused), and I'll take Camping at Focused. 

Photography, too, makes sense, and we'll say that Ev has honed that skill in the last couple years so it can be Focused. I think Research makes sense (Focused), and then I'll take Driving under Unfocused, and that's my nine.

Focus Number is the number of my Focused Skills plus one for Occupation, which is 6 total.

Advantages and Disadvantages are optional, so let's see if any are good. I like Gullible as a disadvantage, but none of the advantages say "Ev" to me. Let's say that he's got an old journal of his dad's, and it's got notes in it. No drawings, and everything is in code (and in his dad's writing, which is hard to read), but it's good for a bonus to a research roll now and then.

And that's it, actually.