So I had picked up the Fantasy Age dead tree version when the publisher had a massive sale at the end of 2022. Since I had already done a Character Creation Challenge with the Modern Age version, I figured that I would create a Fantasy Age persona as well and see if it makes a little bit more sense. I haven’t had a chance to do a deep dive into the Age books. But I have been very impressed with the quality of these publications. According to the text on the back of the book, Fantasy Age was used in Wil Wheaton’s RPG show Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana. I remember seeing a few episodes on one of the FAST channels and wondered what they were using.
The Fantasy Age basic rulebook is 144 pages long. The character sheet is a single page and the character creation summary is listed on page 8 with nine steps in total. The first step is to create a character concept. I flipped through the races and classes to see if anything caught my attention. I don’t think I’ve made a character who is a Gnome yet, so I’m going to create a mage named Yost Rocktapper (thank you for the name suggestions in the book).
Step two is determining one of the nine abilities. They are Accuracy, Communication (aka social skills), Constitution, Dexterity, Fighting, Intelligence, Perception, Strength and Willpower. These sound pretty standard for abilities. You roll 3D6 and add the results together and check the total on a chart. This can result in a bad score (such as a -2) up to the highest score (which is a +4). I’m going to roll all nine and then select which attribute gets which score. Yost is going to be an average character as the highest attribute has a 3, but none were in the negatives.
I started writing down the racial bonuses that my character receives. There is an item called an Ability Focus. Kind of a specialization within that focus. I’m assuming that I write it down under the ability since I don’t see anywhere else on the character sheet for it to go. You also roll for two random benefits which resulted in Yost getting one ability increase and one additional focus.
On step four we are determining the social class and background for Yost. This is what the character did before they started adventuring. Both of these are randomly rolled. So for social class we ended up with a Middle Class. From there we rolled an Innkeeper. One of the focuses from innkeeper I already had, so I picked the second one. I decided that Yost grew up in an Inn, but left the family business when he discovered that he had magical abilities (he was tested by one of the patrons who was passing through and was taken under his wing). Yost had little desire to serve drinks all day so he was more than happy to learn new magical skills.
We are finally to the class section and as mentioned above, I selected mage. This provided my starting health, my weapon groups (brawling and staves) and class powers. Of the starting talents, I selected Linguistics (picking up the dwarf language, they served a lot of dwarves at the Inn). For magic talents, the book (in a much later chapter) talks about Arcana and Magic Talents, which I think are the same thing if I’m reading this correctly (scratches head). From these arcanas I received Yost’s four starting spells.
Step six is to select starting equipment. Thankfully there was a list of items that every character starts out with. There wasn’t much in the weapons category for brawling (why do mages have brawling?) Typically magic user classes at least know how to use a dagger, but apparently not in Fantasy Age. Starting money is determined by the social class (makes sense) so I rolled up 150 silver pieces. From this I picked up a few additional equipment items.
The last three steps are calculating defense (not much), pick a name (already done) and choose a goal and character ties (how is Yost connected to the other characters in the part?) These last two I would have talked it over with the GM and fellow players. However since there is none, I’ll just leave these open.
I noticed that the move, charge and run sections of the character sheet were blank. I did a quick search for these and filled them in. I believe this guy is done.
Afterthoughts:
I went back and re-read my entry on Modern Age and I noticed that the process got a little lost towards the end of the steps. Fantasy Age was a lot better in taking you through the steps of making a character, however there were still a few rough spots (a page number letting us know where the talent descriptions were at would have helped). I may want to go back and re-read the Modern Age book now that I’ve looked at Fantasy Age and see if I missed something.
I wonder if I could have asked the GM to let me select a background if I really had a character concept in mind?
I had noticed after I had scanned the character sheet there there is no space to note the race of the character. Weird.
I’d actually like to try this game out to see how the system runs. Especially the magic system using the points.
Additional Notes:
I’m noticing that more people on Mastodon are participating with the challenge using the hashtag #CharacterCreationChallenge than on Twitter. Sometimes participants will create their own hashtags to use. Has anyone noticed entries under another hashtag?
The past few days have been really challenging for me on a lot of fronts in my life. Yes the challenge has been a, well challenge, but it’s been more than that. So if I haven’t responded to you on something, please send me a reminder. On the new TardisCaptain dot Net Discord server we have an “ask the blog” section that I hope to expand soon.
Coming Up Next:
Traveller T20 (D20)
This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.