by Tiago Bonifácio, Loremaster

Very early on in the worldbuilding process, we made a choice about Agnar. The world of our game was going to be a broken one, and the cracks should be visible wherever you look. This means that the geography, the factions, the magic, the characters, everything needed to mirror this principle. There is no perfect society in Agnar, at least not if you are looking at them closely enough. This is valid for both game mechanics and the lore. Don’t get me wrong now, I don’t mean that each faction is not working towards what they consider to be good, it’s just that they are generally working from false assumptions, incomplete information, and within broken systems that are very difficult to fix. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find good within them, it’s just that you shouldn’t assume that their good intentions will pay off, at least not in the way they expect. Everything that is true of the factions is also true of our characters, just on a more personal scale. 

It’s been said before but it bears repeating that perfect characters are not all that entertaining, but I will say that a character can be too flawed as well. We wanted our characters to have some room to grow, but we also wanted them to have something going for them from the get-go. I’ll do my best here to convey the principles that helped us get to where we are. The first assumption we made is that there are at least two sides to a character, and we needed to be careful not to make them too perfect or too flawed. The first is how powerful, while the second one is how good they are. This is a simplification, of course, but it worked for our purposes. 

First off, for us, power means how easily someone can influence and change the world around them, be it through physical might, political influence, magical prowess, or any other means. Characters that can do anything are really hard to challenge and don’t have any room to grow. The interesting stories told about them tend to focus on how they got there or how they will fall. Because of this, they make quite good villains. There’s a reason why there are so many different stories about Superman going rogue or just turning evil. He often becomes the insurmountable challenge for another hero to face. Now, what would a character that is too flawed entail? A flawed or weak character can be built up, they can learn and grow. You can start with a moisture farmer on a desert planet and end up with a mystical space knight with the fate of the galaxy in his hands. Characters that are too flawed or too weak, however, also don’t have many paths to take. They are prisoners of their faults and are unable to surpass them. They become caricatures of themselves, simple tools to expose other characters’ virtues, and whatever their fatal flaw is will manifest itself time and time again. Characters like this tend to fall squarely on the bad guy side of most stories, that is when they are not being annoying sidekicks, and this is not what we are trying to create. This is a good segue into the next topic, but we will come back to this idea soon. For now, just remember that what we are trying to do is reach some balance within all these concepts.

Okay, what does good mean in the context of Relics Untold? Well, with the kind of world that we have, we need to work with a broader definition of the word. Generally something like “helping those in need” or “fighting evil” could be construed as good, but in the world of Agnar “evil” is usually whoever is on the other side of the battlefield, literal, political, or otherwise. Meanwhile, “helping those in need” is a foreign concept for most. If you expect help from the Legion, you can be sure of it, except that it may arrive a little too late… Postmortem even. If you expect help from the Order, you better be on good terms with them. They are really big on helping the worthy, so you’ll have some trouble if they don’t find you “worthy”. Our main characters, the Seekers, were made to be representations of different aspects of their factions. That’s not all they are, but it’s a good chunk of it. When you notice characters that look, sound, and behave like the “good guy”, take a closer look at them and you might be surprised. Again, this doesn’t mean that, at least some of them, don’t have good intentions, but they do have those fundamental cracks, often informed by their environment and by their personal history. If these complicated people are the good guys of our world, what do the bad guys look like?

The truly “evil” heavy hitters won’t be coming into play for a little while in the story, but we did create a couple of characters that are specifically made for the bad guy aesthetic. Why? I will get into details in a later post, but long story short: because sometimes it is fun to play the bad guy. Now, a character like Vorendal, the Dreadheart is ruthless, sure, but he is not razing entire towns to the ground and bringing the corpses back as his undead army because he finds it fun. He has goals, and those actions are simply a necessity of his goals. As for flaws, villains like him are made of them, so what we actually need is the opposite. We need to give people something to admire about him, some good qualities to lessen the bite of the bad. For Vorendal, you can pick his battle prowess, his political and tactical acumen, his devilish charisma, or his magical powers as reasons to be interested in playing him. In the long term, we are betting people will latch on to the fact that he gets stuff done for the Legion, a faction that is often slowed down by foppish aristocrats who refuse to get their own hands dirty.       

Okay, let’s review everything I talked about so far and how it affects the characters we’ve created for Relics Untold and the stories we tell with them. We are creating characters that are powerful, but not all-powerful. They can influence the world around them much easier than regular people, but their reach is not infinite, and, as powerful as they might be, they will face pushback from others. If they are seemingly “good”, they have character flaws, and if they are seemingly “evil”, they have at least some likable attributes. In fact, we have a document with these things written down for each major character, just so everyone on the team is on the same page about it. With me so far? Great! That just leaves us with the question: Why did we make these choices? We are making a game, not writing a book, right? We could probably have gotten away with a much simpler system. Why go through all this trouble?

We wanted to create a living world with characters that felt real, and we wanted this world to be consistent in the future, no matter who is writing it. When we started the world-building process with Tracy, we knew that he would not be able to write every single character in this huge world that we are creating, at least not forever. Eventually, other writers would pick up things that he worked on or add whole new elements to the world. This has already happened and it will keep happening, but it’s not a problem. We know that when the big event happens in the story a couple of years from now, Vorendal will see it as an opportunity to manipulate the situation for his gain, while Sigrith will let her faith guide her, no matter the consequences. Because we know the major virtues and flaws of each character, we know how they should react to the world, we know what would be interesting challenges or choices to put before them, and we know these will hold true, no matter which of us is writing the story. 

We know these characters, with their strengths, weaknesses, virtues, and flaws. Everything that makes them what they are.