Character Generation for God Machine Chronicle game

We'll myself and the other five players for my God Machine Chronicle game met up last night to define some more details about the setting and create characters ready for the first actual session on 05/07/13; this was my first experience of using the Game Creation advice chapter from the FATE core rulebook so I was interested to see how it would go.

Designing the Setting

You might ask why I needed to design the setting when (if you've read some of my earlier posts on this subject you'll know that) I'd already specified that the game was going to be local scale and take place in a fictional East Midlands council block called Specto Vale? Well I'd left the setting of the game world fairly loosely defined, of course I had a few ideas kicking about that I wasn't immediately going to reveal to the players (since part of the idea behind a God Machine Chronicle game, and indeed any World of Darkness game is discovering the horror behind strange occurrences) but I wanted to get the players involved in coming up with some of the other setting elements. The rationale behind this is simple, if players create parts of the setting then they are invested in it and are more likely to be interested in it.

Setting Issues

Following the guidelines in the FATE corebook we decided to come up with a couple of current issues (that already exist within the setting) and a couple of impending issues (problems or concerns that have just started to make themselves known). After a bit of head scratching and discussion we arriving at the following:

Current Issues

• Organised crime.
• Racial tension.
• Milk/local cats going missing.

Impending Issues

• Residents being evicted.
• Potential demolition/repurposing.

I wrote these issues down on index cards as we discussed them and, during the discussion, any interesting people or places that we mentioned were also added onto there own cards; we ended up with a stack of about 15 or so cards at this stage, including concepts and things such as:

• Crime/racial tension.
• Eastern europenas.
• Tension between long time residents and influx of immigrants.
• Graffiti tagging, racial slurs.
• Conflict between new/old criminal elements.
• Flags hanging from balconies.
• Evictions.
• Manager evicting housing association people to cram in the more profitable immigrants.
• Residents association pettitions.
• Missing milk/animals.
• Escalating problem.
• Has been reported- no action taken.
• Connected with crazy cat lady?
• Connected with chinese restaurant?
• Residents association.
• Do-gooders.
• Door knocking Christians.
• Leaders of the local scout movement.
• Community events.
• Crazy cat lady.
• See the character from The Simpsons.
• The manager.
• Conservative MP.
• Similar to the fat hacker from Jurassic Park.
• Eastern European Immigrants.
• Wage slaves.
• 500 to a flat.
• Right wingers (organisation).
• Owner of the Red Lion, won't serve them.
• Illegal immigrants.
• New criminal element.
• Youth criminals/new blood.
• Gangsta wannabees.
• Chavs.
• "Attack the Block."
• "Kids."
• A stalker.
• Huge coat and hat.
• Scary male.
• Hangs around.
• "1 Hour Photo."
• "The Watcher."
• "Mine Hunters."
• Infatuation?
• Old polish criminal element.
• Dying breed.
• Boris the Blade - "Snatch."
• A man smuggling in immigrants.
• Bartek Prusees.
• Bringing in Polish Immigrants.
• New blood.
• Scarred, tattooed villain.
• Danny Trejo.
• Robert Kcvepper.
• Nasty piece of work.
• Newsagents/bargain booze.
• Asian man running shop.
• Illegal poker nights in back room.
• Dodgy cigs, bootlegged booze, misc cheap meat.
• Chip shop.
• Legitimate family business.
• Old patriarch.
• Always open.
• Once a week does free meals for homeless.
• Red Lion pub.
• Plastic, sticky floored pub.
• Known rough pub.
• Boarded up window.
• Cig machine with no cigarettes.
• Mesh over bar.
• Man who knows a man.
• Old man drunks.
• Chinese takeaway.
• Cat meat?
• Human meat?
• Sex trade cover.
• Young prostitute.
• Taken under wing of older prostitute.
• Likes older men.
• Older prostitute.
• Over 50.
• Doing it to put her daughter through ollege.
• Cougar.
• Has a thing for old Polish men.

We then started creating the characters; it took a little while for people to get the idea of Aspects, but once the ball had started rolling most of the players seemed fairly comfortable with the concept, Stunts were a lot easier to explain.

After some discussion and noted down of stats we ended up with the following character concepts:

• An eccentric old shut-in with ties to the Polish mob.
• A multi-lingual hospital worker and self-confessed 'Lambrini Girl.'
• A young female ex-chemist turned drug dealer.
• A jack-of-all-traders bar stool philosophising lorry driver.
• A wiry criminal problem solver.

Following the creations of concepts we moved on to creating links between the characters; I asked each person to come with an incident in their character's life and link two of the other characters in with it. This section of the character genning was very good fun as the players discussed things between themselves and began filling in some more detail about theirs and other people's characters.

• The criminal problem solver: Hired the truck driver to retrieve a shipment of drugs from Eastern Europe (via his contact the shut-in) in order to provide them to the dealer.
• The truck driver was approached by the problem solver to move some of the drug dealers supplies up north as a favour, he was injured whilst on the job and trying to effect a minor repair to his lorry and get chatting to the hospital worker whilst in the waiting room.
• The drug dealer was providing the criminal problem solver with a cut from her dealing, she knows the truck driver as the "pick up man; she frequents the same chip shop as the shut-in and has spoken to him a couple of times.
• The shut-in has chased away the stalker when he was following the hospital worker.
• The hospital worker was feeling sorry for a patient in pain and, knowing that there was a dealer living in the same block as her, bought some weed for the suffering patient; she bumped into the criminal problem solver (who was there to pick up his cut) whilst she was there.

So how did the character generation session go overall?

Overall I thought the character/game creation session went extremely well; it took a few minutes for the players to wrap their heads around some of the elements that are most different IMO from standard roleplaying games (Aspects for example), however, once this hurdle was out of the way and I had explained to the group that the best Aspects were those that could be used in a positive way but that also suggested elements of plot or complications that could occur this progressed fairly rapidly. It was extremely gratifying to see all of the players getting excited by their characters and talking about how they were connected and what parts of the setting would most influence their characters.

In total the character generation probably only took us an hour of so, even with me explaining some of the concepts and going through how some of the FATE rules worked; the rest of the time was spent elaborating on various plot elements and discussion of the game setting.

So to sum up I have a stack of index cards full of interesting plot pointers and things that capture the players imagination, five very interesting and different (but connected) characters and several interesting threads (such as the missing milk/animals, the stalker and the crazy cat lady) with which to draw the characters in to the machinations of the God Machine.

Really happy with how that turned out and can't wait to run the first session in a couple of weeks :)