Can you feel the crackle of energy in the air. A new Character Creation Challenge will soon arrive in January 2023. Swords are already being sharpened, blasters charged up and battle plans drawn. Soon the dice will roll and 31 new characters will be born.
For those of you learning about this for the first time, the Character Creation Challenge is for fans of various role playing games. You may have looked into a game or collected the books with the intention to play but never have. Or perhaps you have a favorite system that you always turn to for RPG sessions. Well the Character Creation Challenge is an event to create a new RPG character for each day in January (running parallel to the “new year, new you” theme) from what ever system(s) you choose. Once you have the character ready to play, post it on a website, blog, social media (use the hashtag #CharacterCreationChallenge) or online message boards. The forums at RPG.net was a popular forum where a lot of participants had posted their completed characters. You can find the official RPG.net forum for the 2023 challenge here.
I’ve been collecting a few new games to use in the next Character Creation Challenge. Besides picking up a few physical books at various sales and PDFs online, I also had some trades. On the RPG.net forums there is a trade board and one fan wanted my Judge Dread D20 books. He sent me several core books that I’ll be using for the next challenge. Also the creator of Bare Bones Fantasy sent me a PDF of the core book. I told him that I would be using it in this challenge as well.
I also updated the Character Creation Challenge page itself. In the past I would post links to the various blogs and sites that were participating in the challenge. I will do the same this year, but in order to keep the page itself from getting to unwieldy, I moved the links for the 2021 and 2022 challenges over to their own pages.
There was also a special graphic that was made for those who completed all 31 days in 2022. A badge of honor (bragging?) that participants could display. It was designed by my daughter who is going to college for graphic design and production art. I may bribe her again to make a graphic for the 2023 challenge winners.
If you would like to participate, email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or find me on social media/message boards and let me know where you will be posting your challenge characters at. If you are posting them on a website, I’ll add the link to my Character Creation Challenge page.