# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 16 - Notorious Style - TractR-Ted Whately, Farmgrown Graffito tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/ > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice This may come as a bit of a shock to many of you, but my inclinations toward criminality, like most of the things in my life, are preferentially grandiose. If I were to engage in criminal behavior, it would be something like running guns to prohibited organizations, organizing coups, or working in the logistics arms of the cartels. My usual thing is not something like petty vandalism, even in my fantasies, which makes **[[Notorious Style]]** a very odd game for me to pick up. Yet here we are. ![[Notorious Style (cover).png|400]] Here's a game which is all about petty vandalism. Every protagonist is a graffiti artist. The process of playing the game is very much based on the core mechanics of **[[Ironsworn]]**, of all things, though not with a die pool matching system but instead a more traditional add dice and mods versus target numbers architecture. The actual process of play is managed with Moves, which directly represent the ways in which your decisions interact with the mechanics of the setting filtered through the fiction. Obviously, it's a game design I'm quite fond of given how often I refer to it and that is part of why this game is in my collection. It's also here because in terms of sheer graphical layout, it made me think *"What if **[[Mork Borg]]** had a sense of style and clarity?"* I know that's a mad concept, but here we are. In fact, let me just show you the opening two-page spread because you'll see immediately what I mean. ![[Notorious Style - Reference Spread.webp]] What's this? Color coding to designate particular information? Clear and concise typography, with choice of font communicating something about the game itself? Careful choice of tasteful imagery inserted to guide the eye and educate the reader? What *is* this madness? Good layout. Now, from time to time, the editing is a little spotty, particularly in the lexicon section where they define terms in the graffiti scene. There are a number of places where you have words repeated from the bottom of one column at the top of the next and one case where a term isn't properly bolded or structured at all. Still, for all that, it's a lovely piece of work. Let's get about the heavy lifting, shall we? ## Acts of Creation The short version of Character Generation starts on page 11, and that's pretty much all you need. That and the example pre-generated characters, which for some reason are referred to as *"playbooks"* in this rule set. That's a weird borrow from elsewhere,^[**[[Powered by the Apocalypse]]**, of all things.] but I suppose we'll allow it. I'm not going to start with a playbook character because part of the point of doing this is that we walk through all of it from the beginning. We're going to go all the way together. Trust me, it'll only hurt a little bit. ### Status Quo I'm not even going to try to sound hip and cool like all the young graffiti artists because that would come across as entirely fake. You want me to sound like an 80s or 90s-era hacker? I can do that.^[It's not really pretending. I was there, man. I had an accoustic modem!] You want me to sound like a 20-something graffiti artist who lives in a dense urban center? I'm not even going to try that. That would be silly. We are in a very classical position picking our stats. They are simultaneously quite familiar and unusually nuanced. **Style** is your ability to stand out among the other graffiti artists. How distinct are you? How unique? **Craftiness** is how good you are at dealing with *"imperial entanglements,"* finding new spots, working a deal. **Creativity** is how much art that you make is new and original. Are you doing cutting-edge stuff or are you chasing the trends? **Physique** is your physical capabilities, particularly in regards to things like running, climbing ladders, dropping down walls — all of the fun stuff that you probably have to do to get to the best spots. **Stealth** is about what you think it would be, your ability not to be seen or recognized everywhere, whether it be down on the street corner or posting to DeviantArt. (I actually appreciate that stealth applies to how unseen you are online. It's a huge opening. If you want to keep your head down, it has to be everywhere.) As I said, we're not going with the playbook values for stats, but it is terribly tempting just to go faster. We need to distribute nine points across all five stats. I think I'm just going to go with the usual **Ironsworn** distribution. | Stat | Values | | ---------- | -----: | | Physique | +3 | | Creativity | +2 | | Style | +2 | | Craftiness | +1 | | Stealth | +1 | Our guy is in tremendous shape and does things in his art nobody else does. As such, it's fairly recognizable. However, he is not very lucky when it comes to talking his way out of trouble and probably just a little bit too recognizable to go dark. ### Track IR Now we have to set up our tracks, which is not something that we do in the games which inspired this. We actually get to start without having things be absolutely full or absolutely empty. It's kind of refreshing. The six tracks are Stress, Heat, Health, Money, Supplies, and Time. Of course, hitting an extreme in any of those kicks off a Move, and doing so twice for Stress or Heat kicks off your Retirement Move, where you drop out of the graffiti gig and go do something else with your life. We get to drop two points distributed between Stress and Heat and 11 more across the rest. Stress and Heat you want to remain low, the others you want to remain as high as possible. I think we're going to go with **Stress** 1 and **Heat** 1 for the moment. Nobody knows who this guy is, and he just recently moved to the area.^[Don't try to make sense of the number allocations on the playbooks because they don't even add up to the same values across one another. This is one of those things that I really wish had a lot more discussion or had been worked out more specifically by the creator because it bothers me.] | Track | Value | | -------- | ----: | | **Health** | 4 | | **Money** | 2 | | **Supplies** | 3 | | **Time** | 2 | Guy is healthy as a horse and has a fair number of supplies or at least knows where to get them, but like most of us, is short on both money and time. ### But What Was the Motive? Why does the character get out there and do what he does? After all, throwing yourself head first into physically challenging and often dangerous situations needs to have something kicking you along the way. You don't just get out there and do it because you're bored — unless you're just getting out there and doing it because you're bored. There's a table that you can roll on if you don't have something that comes to mind, but glancing down through it, I feel like I have a good idea about what this guy is up to. **Motivation:** As a coping mechanism This guy has just moved from rural Alabama to inner-city Atlanta, and he knows absolutely nobody. He's from a little farming community where he literally toted hay bales and raised animals his whole life. Now he's been dropped into the sheer insanity of the big city. He always had an eye for creating a scene with a little bit of paint and some elbow grease. Now he's fallen in with *"the wrong crowd"* who have offered him a way to fit in, which he isn't really interested in, but the overwhelming ridiculousness of the city is forcing him to find a way to create his own private peace. He finds peace in creating these extravagant pieces of art. Big pieces of what normally would be seen as pastoral farm scenes but through the lens of more classic graffiti styles. ![[Notorious Style - CCC2025 - Farnfitti.webp]] ### What's Your Name, Kid? Finally, we get to this guy's name. His government name is *Ted Whatley*, but he goes by **TractR**. He misses his older brother Wilbur, but some stuff happened and he had to get fostered.^[No prize for figuring out the backstory, intrepid readers!] He is 15, but anybody can be forgiven for thinking that he was in his early 20s because he's built like a workhorse. ### The Spotted Hyacinth We need to put together three spots that we know about. Places that are prime opportunities for putting down some tags or pasting up something. We can just think of some, though there are a list in a 5x5 table here in the text itself. Each spot can have different levels of hostility, accessibility, the harder it is to get to the more likely you are to earn reputation but of course there's a certain amount of danger that comes with that. I have a decent idea for a first one, but we'll just roll for the other two. **Spot:** Side of a MARTA train **Hostility:** Hot, very Hot. Surveillance all over and they run until late. **Accessibility:** Fences, cameras, but a big place. Limited, due to the sheer size. ![[Notorious Style - CCC2025 - MARTA.webp]] > [5, 10] (Rounded up, that's [3, 5].) **Spot:** Pair of Kicks **Hostility:** Chill. Nobody cares if you do up some sneaks. **Accessibility:** Easy. See above. ![[Notorious Style - CCC2025 - Kicks.webp]] > [7, 7] (Or [4, 4].) **Spot:** Shipping Containers (down at the actual trainyard) **Hostility:** Hot; cameras, patrols. **Accessibility:** Limited; fences and the sheer size works both for and against. ![[Notorious Style - CCC2025 - Atlanta Trainyard.webp]] *(You get photos because while I might not be an artist, I am an excellent curator.)* ### P-Zombies Our man Ted is new in town so he's not running with a crew yet but he has run into some people, which is a good thing since we need to make three NPCs. The challenge increases. Each NPC has a name, a crew that they belong to, and a level of notoriety. One of them is going to be your close friend and one other is going to be randomly determined. The last you won't have a relationship with to begin with. Let's get to rolling because we have another 5x5 grid that we can start with some things going on. **Name + Crew:** **Notoriety:** **Relationship:** > [2, 5] (I'm just rolling 2d5 because I'm not constrained to *mere physics*.) Name's 3 letters, contains K or Q or W > [4] Crew's 4 random characters. > [3] Notoriety's Up. **Name + Crew:** KRK [MZRN] **Notoriety:** Up **Relationship:** **Name + Crew:** WRR [LL] **Notoriety:** Up **Relationship:** Casual friend **Name + Crew:** A4A [LLMA] **Notoriety:** Getting Up **Relationship:** Close friend That was a surprisingly annoying set of rules because damn it, can't we get people with actual names around here? I feel like I'm on the set of [**The Crow** calling out for Tintin's bunch of jolly pirate nicknames.](https://youtu.be/HgvQu96v2xU?t=92) Man, I'm old. Regardless, our close friend is A4A^[It probably stands for Angel-to-Angel in tribute to her dead sister or some other such shennanigans. You know how these stories go.] who is this lovely Hispanic girl Ted ran into by accident at school who immediately twigged to the stuff he was just scribbling in his blackbook. She runs with LLMA, but Ted's not sure that he is much of a joiner yet. Sometimes they hang around with WRR who they're both pretty sure does a bit of meth and is an absolute weeb. But he does run with LL, which is LLMA's parent crew, and they've been established for a little bit. Let's try not to imagine what KRK gets up to. Maybe he just likes to mix music, right? ![[Notorious Style - CCC2025 - TractR-Ted Whately, Farmgrown Graffito.webp]] ![[Notorious Style - CCC2025 - TractR-Ted Whately, Farmgrown Graffito (NPCs and Spots).webp]] ## Exunt And that's it. We're done. We have a guy who is doing his best to fit in. And he has the tools and the skills, theoretically, to get somewhere. We shall see what we shall see, I suppose. The book has a really nicely done extended play bit, which talks not just about the mechanics and how they're used, but what the player is thinking in the sections between making moves, constructing the fiction, figuring out what's going on. If more games did this, there would be fewer confused players who don't actually understand what the point of the game is. I can honestly say that's not a problem here. Not only that, you get a concise history of graffiti thrown into the mix. Do I like it? Quite a bit actually. Am I likely to *play* it? I'm not sure I'm empathetic enough to the plight of little vandal punks looking for a way to show off on other people's property to make a really good player. While I'm certainly anti-authoritarian enough, I'm also private property oriented enough to smack around anybody that I found doing it to something I owned. It's a little awkward to do the shift and throw the brain in the other direction. That's not to say that I can't and definitely not to say that I *shouldn't*. Not every game has to conform to your personal, political/social/ethical nature, and it can be fun to step outside who you see yourself as to be someone else. It's certainly on the list, as evidenced by the fact that we are here talking about it now. We shall see what we shall see. Tomorrow we are definitely doing something directly in my personal line of fire, and I'm quite looking forward to it. Hopefully you are too.