For Day 17 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge I am going to be using The Witcher Pen & Paper RPG to make a character. This game is based off of the series of The Witcher novels, video games and later a television series. The roleplaying game was published by R. Talsorian Games in 2018 and was written by Cody and Lisa Pondsmith. The PDF contains 337 pages and the character sheet is four pages long. I had picked up this game with several supplements (as well as other R. Talsorian titles) in one of the bundle sales. This will be a cold read as I haven’t had a chance to do any prep work on this. I recall watching some of the TV episodes with my wife as I know she likes the main actor. So I have a little knowledge of the world this game is set in. In fact that’s where the “toss a coin to your blogger” line that you see in the “About This Site” sidebar comes from.
There is a “Dice You Need” sidebar on page 5 that advises the player to be prepared with two D10s and some D6s. There is another side bar note on page 20 where the Creating Your Own Character list starts that states that the explanation of the game mechanics will be explained over the next several chapters. So it appears that the writers took the explain and create at the same time procedure that we’ve seen in other RPG books. Depending upon how this is done, it can be really good, or really confusing. We’ll find out very soon.
OK, the list is as follows. 1- Pick your race (thank you for not asking me to come up with a concept first), 2- Run a Lifepath, 3- Pick Your Profession, 4- Pick Your Statistics, 5- Select Pick-Up Skills, 6- Get Your Coin and 7- Outfit Yourself.
So for this unknown character I’m looking over the races. The available options are Witchers (Humans raised as Witchers), Elves (The Aen Seidhe), Dwarves and Humans. According to the book the Humans are the most prominent across the lands so let’s go with that.
On to the lifepath and for once, it’s actually a lifepath. There is a flow chart with a start box and a, go here guide depending upon what is rolled or chosen. This gives me hope. As a Human I need to know where this character’s homeland. An even roll guides me to Nilfgaard, I then go down to Nilgaardian Origin and I roll a 3 which is The Heart of Nilfgaard (and the character gets a bonus +1 to Deceit). Now the line takes me to the Northern Origin or Vassal Origin, so I’m assuming that I follow the path down to the Family chart. With an even roll, some of the character’s family is still alive and I’m directed to the Parents chart. Another even roll says both parents are alive, go to Family Status chart. My roll results in “Born into servitude” led a simple life as a servant and worked a lot. But he gets a trained bird or serpent as part of his starting gear (uh… OK). We are directed to roll on the “Most Influential Friend” chart which resulted in A Mage (and more starting gear). Perhaps the parents of the character worked for this Mage in their servitude. Next is the Siblings chart and he has two living siblings. An older sister that likes the character and her personality is romantic. For the second sibling they are another sister that is a twin of the character and looks up to him with a stern personality. Interesting way to roll this up. Heh, the book states that when your character dies, he dies. So your siblings could be used as a replacement character. Or they could be a possible rival to the character. Next on the lifepath is the life events of the character itself. You roll a d10 for ever ten-years that the character has been alive. I haven’t seen anything about the character’s current age, so I’m going to pluck the age of 25 out of the air. So I roll twice and both came up Fortune or Misfortune. The first one was a misfortune of an accident that resulted in four-months of healing. On the fortunate side apparently the character helped a Witcher at one point in time and he now owes me a favor. That’s interesting as the next step is Allies & Enemies. If I’m reading this correctly I’m only getting one randomly rolled. A roll of 4 is even for an ally who is male, Mage that the character saved from something and is now a friend who lives in the Northern Kingdoms. Based off of that roll, I’m going to assume it’s not the same mage that the parents worked for. Wow, this is still going (I think, we’ve moved to different pages that don’t say, move to next chart) and we have Romance. I rolled an 8 which resulted in Whores & Debauchery. Kids? Who knows, but I’m sure the character is light a few coins. Wow, this is still going. We are onto Your Personal Style (what is this style thing you speak of?) I roll a d10 four times and this character is wearing traveling clothing, is contemplative, has a complicated hairstyle (uh… what?) and a shadowy cloak. Um… OK. Now there’s a chart for values and three rolls later this character’s most valued person is a friend (who?), their value is hedonistic pursuits and his feelings on people is “people are great”. I don’t know how this is relevant to the game? The last list has some example names for by speech or region, but none of them really excite me so I reached out to the random name generator and selected Styd Rarlart. I haven’t read the books so I don’t know how accurate this generator is. But wow, that was a long section.
Styd’s profession is next. I haven’t made a bard yet, so he’s a bard. I wrote down his defining skill, vigor, magical perks, skills and starting gear. See, that was quick and easy (looks at last section).
We are finally to the statistics. Each character has a rating in Intelligence (INT), Reflexes (REF), Dexterity (DEX), Body (BODY), Speed (SPD), Empathy (EMP), Craft (CRA), Will (WILL) and Luck (LUCK). There were two ways to generate these stats, roll a D10 (ignore any 1s or 2s) and place the scores where you want or point buy. Yes, I’m rolling. After I assigned the scores there is some derived stats for Stun, Run, Leap, Health Points, Stamina, Encumbrance, Recovery, Punch and Kick. I mathed the maths and boy are there a lot of charts and side charts.
Skills are next and each skill can have a rating from 0-10. We already received a bunch of skills from the profession and I’m allotted 44 points to use between all of them and I stated them out. Next are the pick-up skills which are the non-profession skills that your character has also learned. Add your INT and REF scores together to get your total number of points to assign to the non-professional skills that you have picked up.
Step 6 is money money money and step 7 is outfitting the character. The coin is called a crown and your starting amount is based on your profession. I rolled up how much money that Styd and set him up with his equipment. I need to wrap this up so I’ll just say it’s the standard buy piecemeal, but there is some recommended items. Gah, everything has a special name because it came from the source material.
Wow, half the items from the lifepath do not have spots on the four page character sheet. I also have some blank spots but I’ve got to wrap this up. This only re-enforces my belief that a character sheet should not be more than two pages. I didn’t scan one of the pages because it had to do with spells and magic.
Afterthoughts:
I liked the lifepath in this game. I don’t think I would have come up with the concept of a twin unless the dice came up with it. However towards the end of the lifepath process I was wanting to get past all of this and move on.
When the book was providing the skill descriptions, I like how they said “A base 10 can do this, a base 13 or base 20 can do this”. It helped me decide where to spend the various skill points.
The system sounded pretty straight forward. d10+stat+skill (if present)+modifiers to meet or beat a target number.
I don’t really see myself playing this game beyond a one-shot at a convention. I also don’t see myself homebrewing for this system. Not because of anything bad, but because my fantasy itch is already covered by other games that I know very well.
Additional Notes:
Still chipping away at the block of marble. This will be something good when I’m done with the challenge.
Thank you to everyone who has been posting on social media with the hashtag #CharacterCreationChallenge. If I’m using that social media site, I’ve been re-posting your entries for others to see.
Coming Up Next:
Traveller: The New Era
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.