Character Creation: Modernity

What if it was all true? What indeed.

The Game: Modernity
The Publisher: Wistful Tiger
Degree of Familiarity: None for this game, but I know Fate Core
Books Required: Just the one

This game makes me a little tired. It's just a Dresden/WoD urban horror kind of thing, but every time the setting started to take shape the book shunts us off to "Modernity briefing books" (there are a few on DriveThruRPG). Also, the artwork is god-awful (though the graphic design is nice and clean). But apart from that:

I'm not disagreeing with the larger point the author is making - I was anti "they" as a singular pronoun in RPG books for a long time not because I didn't see the value of that pronoun, but because I felt that using "they" when you could be talking about a player, a character, or both has the potential to get confusing. (I stand by that, but you can avoid that confusion with careful phrasing.) Really, I include this excerpt because the whole book is like this - it's too chummy, too chatty, kind of overwritten, and is trying to be snappy but doesn't actually tell us anything.

Well, in any case, unlike Dresden Files (either version of the RPG), there's really no setting described, just a general vibe and a lot of talk about magic and how it fucks with your sanity, so I'm basically just making a character for a generic "urban horror noir" kind of thing, so let's do that.

(Oh, and the damn PDF isn't bookmarked. Bleah.)

See? Very chatty

OK, so, once again I have no particular concept, so I'm gonna get m'self a theme song. Just a mo.

That's "Cath..." by Death Cab for Cutie. Pretty simple as Death Cab songs go; it's about a woman who married for comfort rather than passion. I like the idea of playing the person asking "what became of you?"

I think my character is a medium, but not as reliable at it as, say, a Cole Sear. Ernest Griffith (for 'tis his name; friends call him "Griff") can hear and see ghosts but it's effortful and hard to sustain. It gets better as he gets to know a ghost (he refers to himself as "demispectral"), and the ghost he knows the best and knows the most about is Catherine. 

He knows that Catherine died in 1958 at the age of 42, that she married at age 20, and that she married because she got pregnant and her boyfriend was a stand-up (but very boring) guy. Griff has slowly learned more about her, but records are few and far between - Catherine didn't have kids (Griff isn't sure what happened to the child she was pregnant with when she got married) and her husband died shortly after she did.

Griff is nominally a paper pusher for an insurance company (that might be how he came into contact with the ghost; maybe her house got condemned or something), but he's been spending more and more time trying to research and contact Catherine. That's all fine...assuming that Catherine is what she says she is. 

Good start! Griff's High Concept is Demispectral Paper Pusher. His Trouble is that he's Obsessed with Catherine's Story (Griff is very much the sort of character who would change radically once his starting story arc is complete, but that's what milestones are for). 

Right, next I'm meant to do Skills & Stunts, followed by the Phase Trio, but of course it's just me so I'm gonna wind up just making up three Aspects. But that's fine, let's do Skills.

Ugh. You get a number of skills based on the game's power level. Fine. The power level section is later in the book, and we aren't told what page. And here's what the table of contents looks like:

Garbage

There's a functional TOC but it's at the end of the book. Argh. Makes me cranky.

OK, the default power level is 4, giving me 5 Aspects, 20 Skills points, and what the hell a coupla corn dogs. Back to Skills!

I'm doing the standard Skill pyramid, so here we go. What should Griff's Great Skill be? Let's do Investigation. Just something Griff has a knack for.

For his two Goods, I'll take Empathy and Will.

For his Fairs, I'll take Contacts, Resources, and Knowledge. 

For Averages, I'll take Driving, Hacking, Lore, and Stealth. 

Stunts! Feels like I should have something relating to talking to ghosts here, but eh. There's a system for occult stunts, but it's all very "man was not meant to know!" and higher power than what I'm talking about. What if we say he's got a stunt called Small Medium: I can spend a Fate point to converse with a ghost briefly once per session. 

I think Griff is easy to miss and kind of naturally stealthy, so I'll give him a stunt called Easy to Miss: I get a +2 to Defend with Stealth when I'm in shadowy, sparsely populated area.

And, finally, I like the Nose for Trouble stunt, which allows one to use Empathy rather than Awareness to determine initiative, but the name is stupid, so I'll call it Body Language. 

Cool, now back to Aspects! I think Griff has been digging into Catherine and the events in her life for a while, and during that he's read a lot of books and news stories of the day, so he's got a Decent Library of Local History (hard to compel, but not impossible). I think Griff is also a Hopeless Romantic. He's not necessarily in love with Catherine, but he's a sucker for a good love story.

And, finally, Griff has insomnia, and is a Night Owl, so he walks around at night a lot. That's a decent way to get into trouble in this sort of setting.

Griff is in his 30s, brown hair, usually parted down the middle. He's got brown eyes, but wears thick glasses, and he's got a halting, nerdy laugh. (I picture him kind of like George McFly, if ol' George was into ghosts instead of sci-fi.)

And that'll do it!