Character Creation
So let’s make a character in GLAIVE. Before anything else, let’s decide on a basic concept for this character. I like wizards, so I want to make some sort of wizard adventurer. Let’s see how we do that.
Going to page 3 of GLAIVE’s book, I see that there are five steps. Let’s go through these steps one at a time.
Step 1: Choose or roll your PC’s traits, motivation for adventuring, and their bonds to other PCs using the random tables on page 4.
Well, I already decided on a wizard, so let’s look at the tables and see if can’t pick some wizardly options. At the end of these choices, I have these traits:
- Gender: Maculine
- Hair: Cropped
- Skin: Pale
- Looks: Sharp
- Speech: Precise
- Bonds: We’ll skip this one for now, since we’re not going to playing this character with anyone else.
- Personality: Stoic
- Starting Rations: 1 week (this one I did roll)
- Starting Gold: None. Broke. (same here)
- Motivation: To escape a series of poor decisions.
Looks wizardly enough (for certain definitions of wizardly). Let’s move on to…
Step 2: Player Characters (PCs) have four abilities: Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Wisdom (WIS), and Willpower (WIL). Each ability has a bonus value. Distribute the following bonuses however you like: +3, +2, +1, +0
Since we want a wizard, and peeking ahead to see a lot of the wizardly talents revolve about Wisdom and Willpower, we’ll put our +3 into WIS and our +2 into WIL. Then we’ll put our +1 into STR and our +0 into DEX.
That’s it for Step 2.
Step 3: Select your Ancestry and Talents beginning on page 14.
I don’t really want anything special, so I’m going to pick Human, which lets me begin play with 2 talents of my choice. Going through the talent list, I pick Familiar and The Manifold Cerebrum from the Magic User list, because they look fun.
Familiar gives me a small companion with My Level + 5 HP (so 6 right now) and can hold one of my spells. Excellent.
The Manifold Cerebrum lets me make a WIS save when I cast a spell to try and recover it. Seems useful given how spells work in this game.
With those selected, we’re going to move on to…
Step 4: Note your starting Hit Points (HP) and armor class (AC) value.
My HP is 11 (10 + STR) and my AC is 10 (10 + DEX). Ouch.
Step 5: PCs start with a random assortment of gear and one weapon of choice. See the tables on page 5 for gear.
I pull out some dice and go to Page 5. There is a table called During the War that it doesn’t tell me to roll on, but I’m going to because why else would it be there when nothing else in the book tells me to roll on it?
During the War: Played both sides: Item of Choice (we’ll pick this later)
And now we move once (ones?) on each of the rest of the tables:
Dungeoneering Gear: Candles, 5
Dungeoneering Gear: Caltrops, 20
Dungeonerring Gear: Incense
I also get a weapon of my choice, which I’ll pick a Sword.
Looking back on page 3, I have 11 item slots (10 + STR) to put gear before my character is encumbered, so let’s look at the tables on pages 6 and 7 and see what my item slots look like.
- Candles, 5
- Caltrops, 10
- Caltrops, 10
- Incense
- Sword
- Rations, 2
- Rations, 2
- Rations, 2
- Ration
- 2 free slots
- Free magic slot (Familar)
For my Item of Choice, I’ll take a Spellbook of Magic Missile and slot that into my Familiar’s free item slot. In hindsight, I probably could have swapped DEX and STR because the extra item slot and 1 HP isn’t doing me a lot of good, but that’s fine. We’ll make due.
We look to be done, but don’t have a name for our character yet. I’ll call them Rowan Greenhanded.
In total, this took about 20 minutes, including the time to write this all up. Let’s see what our character sheet looks like:
