Character Sketching
Since I hate to make important decisions like what system do I want to use or what do I want for dinner, I'll cover these articles in a duality. The first half will be the Storyteller System. The second half will be the D&D system.
Characters are an important part of the game. In fact they are the game. Without the characters the players sit and listen to the gamemaster describe scene after scene and they all go home unfulfilled. The characters give definition to what the players can and can't do. And charactes in turn also define what direction the game takes. Vampires for example usually lead to a dark game of horror. I haven't often heard of a game in which vampires are doing the daytime ballet for the artistic enjoyment of all their friends and neighbors. (Nosferatu is a pink tutu.)
So in Arachnia our characters will help define the game. It isn't very difficult to begin the process of deciding on character types for Arachnia. We only have to consult the encyclopedia or the web (no pun intended) for character types. To help myself out a little bit I'm going to combine a few basic ideas of the other storyteller games, from Werewolf my division shall be called tribes, from Vampire they will share in part the feeding habits, and from Mage they will adopt 9 divisions. This leaves us with 9 tribes of new bloodsuckers.
Our nine tribes come from the class of Arachnida: Tarantula, Widow Spiders, Recluse Spiders, Wolf Spiders, Jumping Spiders, Harvestmen (DaddyLongLegs), Mites, Ticks, and Scorpions. This gives us a good selection to work on and leaves room open for supplements to cover Lobsters and Crabs in the future as well as branching into the insect world for alternative player characters.
For each category we will need a few things to help define the character type. We will need a description, a good picture to show it off, and some personal philosophy of the character type or some characteristic behavior or both. You'll probably want to go through once devoting special attention to each one. When writing a description maybe try to work some history into the mix as well. This will be edited after you've done them all so that you can rewrite it to include strife among the divisions and reasons for truces and so forth. But don't write an entire history. Something as simple as the following will do.
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