Characters

Your character is a persona entirely of your creation. They might be an exact replica of you, or they can be someone of a different gender, sexuality, age, religion, ethnicity, or even species. Those details are entirely up to you. In addition to your character’s physical description and personality they possess a few attributes that affect gameplay.

Traits

Your character has three traits that reflect general approaches to tackling a challenge: body, mind, and spirit.

• Body — you’ll use your Body trait when you primarily rely on your physical skills and abilities to overcome a challenge.
• Mind — you’ll use your Mind trait when you rely on pattern recognition, puzzle solving, or other analytical abilities.
• Spirit — use your Spirit trait when you primarily rely on your social skills and force of will to overcome an obstacle.

When you create your character, assign three dice to one trait, two dice to another, and one die to the last.

During each round of a challenge, you’ll be prompted to use one of the three traits to reflect your character’s actions. Some challenges will give you a choice of traits to use — in that case, use whichever trait gives you the best results.

Talents

In addition to a set of traits, your character starts with a talent — an ability, item, or companion — that aids you on your adventures.

During each challenge, when it makes narrative sense, you may use one of your talents to gain a beneficial effect on your roll. Choose one of the following effects each time you invoke your talent:

• Convert one failure to one success.
• Re-roll all neutral results.

As your character grows by advancing in level, you can add more talents which grant you additional opportunities to influence dice rolls. Regardless of how many talents you have available, though, you can only use one per round and can only invoke each talent once per challenge.

Talents are a placeholder for genre or game-world specific effects. In Space Junk — a sci-fi game — characters gain virtual or robot companions. In Glorious Quest — a game of high fantasy — characters gain magical wonders.

In a horror game, talents might be more prosaic. Characters in Wendigo, for example, can make use of camping gear to enhance their chances of escaping the terrifying monster.

Advancement

Over time, you will learn, grow, and become better at what you do. Intelligent creatures are funny, though — we often learn more by failing than we do by completing a challenge successfully. Every time you fail a challenge, you gain one experience point. Each time you gain five experience points, your character’s level increases by one.

As your level increases, you gain the following benefits:

• Each time you gain an odd level, increase the size of your base dice by one.
• Each time you gain an even level, you can add one additional talent to your character. You can use the powers of each talent you possess once per challenge.

The following table summarizes the effects of advancing your character’s level.

Level	Base Dice	Talents
1	1	1
2	1	2
3	2	2
4	2	3
5	3	3
6	3	4
7	4	4
8	4	5
9	5	5
10	5	6

The concept of levels works well for games where a character grows and develops across multiple storylines. However, it isn’t applicable to games that have a limited scope or story.

One way to encourage replay is to award the benefits gained each level at the end of each play-through. The player can then apply those benefits to the current character, or apply them directly to a new character for their next play-through.

In Wendigo, for example, any individual character is only likely to run screaming through the woods once. Being able to apply the benefits to a new character gives the player an added boost.