Character Creation

This game is primarily character-driven, and it goes without saying that characters have secrets. Furthermore, the Victorian world depends heavily on people’s wearing social masks; secrets lie behind the masks.

You need to develop a whole person, but in Shadows in the Fog you should begin with the Mask. Think about this in terms of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, where analysis of masks is both (almost) totally accurate and a nearly perfect predictor of behavior. In this game, the first is a little less true than for Holmes, but the second is a dangerous assumption, one that holds for most people, but not for people in the occult world. In fact, what sucks people into the occult world is precisely the disparity between the mask and the mental life behind it; when that off-kilter mental life begins to determine behavior, you have someone whose very nature makes him or her a threat to the Victorian middle-class social milieu. That’s going to be you, soon enough.

You will note that this character generation system is not terribly mechanics-heavy, but it is detailed and systematic. Work through the whole thing, step by step, and then go back and revise as necessary until you have a complete person. This game is driven largely by character considerations, and the more you’ve got, the better it will work.

{A Word to the Players <--> Preparation}

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 23 Dec 2004