We have reached our first week in on the 2024 #CharacterCreationChallenge with Day 7. Today I’ve elected to make a character for The Dark Eye. The version that I own is a hardback copy printed in 2003 by a company called FanPro. From my research, this appears to be the 4th edition of this game. The earlier editions had been very popular in Europe. Apparently this game was started when a German publisher was snubbed over the German translation of Dungeons and Dragons, so they ended up making their own RPG. I wonder if it has blackjack and hookers? There is a 5th edition of this game that was recently published by a company named Ulisses Spiele.
I had picked up this book at a game swap at SaltCON-Summer for a decent price. I figured that I could use it for the Character Creation Challenge. There is 184 pages in my book (which includes the map and character sheet at the back) and the ISBN number is 1-932564-02-0. The cover price listed is $29.99. On page 14 is a breakdown of the character sheet with the character creation steps listed on page 22.
Enough chat, lets get to creating. New characters start out with 110 Generation Points (GP) that are spent through out the character creation process. There are option to buy more points by taking disadvantages or restrictions. The first step is to think of a concept you’d like the character to be. Talking with the Highlord (aka Gamemaster) would be needed here to make sure the concept would match the campaign (for example, no underwater basket weavers). There is a background world already created for the game and most of the options are based off of those works. I think I’m going to keep things simple and create a mercenary type fighter who is looking for someone to help pay for his next bar tab.
The next step is to select your race, of which there are only three. Human, Dwarf and Elf. But in step three you select the culture your character came from. Now we’ve got some variety. These are based on historical cultures found in medieval/renaissance times. They borrow form Viking, European or Middle Eastern cultures and give some examples. This guy is going to be a Thorwalian (aka Nordic Viking type) which is going to cost 10 CP. He will have blonde hair and blue eyes. I rolled his height to be 177 centimeters (5’8″ basically). Then the rules stated that his weight would be the number of his height in centimeters minus 95 to equal greatpounds. Uh…. what? If I’m reading this right, he would only be 82 pounds and that doesn’t sound right. Screw it, he’s 190 lbs. because I understand that weight. I started ignoring the fluff and concentrated on the game stats that the race came with. I wrote them down in my notes for the character and finally selected a name of Halmar. Before I elect to stop lets move onto the next step.
This step would be cultures. Luckily there was only one for Thorwalian, so I wrote down the items the character received and took off the 10 CP it costs.
Step four is the profession, aka the job that Thorwalian does. Since some of these had already been talked about earlier in the creation process (haphazardly) I knew that he was going to be a Mercenary. I spent the 10 CP and noted the minimums that I would need to be of that class… er… profession.
It was at this point when I actually found a step-by-step guide on page 36. So I stopped slogging through the other fluff and just started using these guidelines.
OK, so far what I’ve done has matched what is on this step-by-step guide and I have 80 CP left to spend. Next comes buying the attributes. These are: Courage (CO)- Strength of nerve and willpower. Cleverness (CL)- Intelligence and logical thinking. Intuition (IN)- Deciphering clues and quick assessments. Charisma (CH)- Personal magnetism. Dexterity (DE)- Best use of the hands. Agility (AG)- Body coordination and grace (i.e. dexterity for the non-hands stuff). Constitution (CN)- Yea we know this one. Strength (ST)- And we know this one as well. Social Standing (SO)- status in society and reputation. All attributes other than SO range from 8-14. SO ranges from 1-12. I’m still having to flip back and forth in the book to make sure that I have it correct. I made sure to buy my minimum needed for Mercenary (counting what I gained from my Thorwalian adjustments) and averaged out the remaining CP for the other attributes. This left me with exactly 0 CP after all was said and done.
Step six was the advantages and disadvantages. I already have two disadvantages from selecting Torwalian. I’m assuming the points gained from these disadvantages were already calculated in the CP costs that I’ve already paid. If I take any additional advantages, I need to take an equal number of disadvantages so that I’ll still be at 0 CP. I looked over the two lists and selected the Rapid Healing advantage (as recommended in the mercenary description) and the rage disadvantage (Thorwalians get 18 points instead of just the 15 for taking this disadvantage. This leaves me with 8 CP left that I’m going to go back and raise some of my attributes.
Now to step seven and we talk about talents. I believe these are just skills. There are some talents that I already received from my race/culture/profession. There are some basic talents that I get at zero if they hadn’t already been bumped up from the gains in race/culture/profession descriptions. The character sheet had some of the talents listed, and a lot of blank spaces afterwards. Ugh. I then calculated up how many points I had to spend on new or advancing talents, and decided to skip it at this time since I was running up against a deadline.
Now there are some base values for thinks like health and endurance and attack and stuff. I calculated these and wrote them down on the sheet. But then I started running into terms that hadn’t been provided (what the smeg is GE?). Skip! Equipment was given from my profession, then there was an odd calculation to buy more, but since there is no place to add it to the character sheet, I skipped it.
There was also a 20 questions to flesh out your character and choose a name (I already did). I’ll look at this later since this has taken longer than I expected. Here is the character sheet.
Afterthoughts:
I was very grateful for the character sheet breakdown just before the character creation steps. Quite a few times I’m searching over the character sheet wondering where a specific item is located. After this listing was a very good breakdown on how the system worked (what the attributes were used for, how they were used in an attribute test, etc.). I was able to get a quick grasp on the system. It was making me wonder how it would play at the table.
When describing the different steps of the character creation, there was a little bit of info-bleed from the different steps. I think it would have made it easier to keep them in their proper lanes. I was starting to think that certain steps were combined together when they were not.
They had to come up with some interesting measurements that may not have needed to be used. A pace is basically one meter or yard. Is this a European thing? I’ve only heard meters used for this type of measurement on British TV shows. And what the smeg are greatpounds? Are they pounds that people really like? Even Google gave me a shrug when I asked.
There was also a LOT of page flipping through the book. I was using a lot of physical bookmarks (and praying that the referenced pages were correct, which one was not). There would definitely need to be a re-write of the character creation steps to make everything flow smoothly. Which I then found halfway through on page 36. Gah!!!!
There is no place for equipment on the character sheet. I would have been writing these items on the back of the sheet had this been for an actual game.
Will I play this game? Well some of the concepts sounded interesting. But I think I’d probably borrow the best parts for a homebrewed system instead. At the start of the process I was impressed with the system, then it slowly descended into frustration. I’m not really a big fan of point based creation systems, especially when there are a lot of skills. Let me roll some dice please.
I wonder if the latest edition of this game will be any better?
Additional Notes:
There has been a participant who has posted quite a few Dungeon Crawl Classic characters on the TardisCaptain do com discord server. I’ve played DCC at a con, but never played in a campaign yet.
I haven’t come across any new blogs or message boards participating in the Character Creation Challenge. If you see any that I am missing, please let me know.
Coming Up Next:
Star Trek Alpha Quadrant
This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.