# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 02 - Warrior Heroes :: Antonio Vettori, Soldier of the Capalan League tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/wargame/warriorheroes > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024 - Day 01 - Wushu - Aelthorond, High Magus of Nardon|We started walking down the path of fantasy yesterday]] and even though fantasy is not my favorite RPG genre, it seems sensible to push on but perhaps in a slightly more gritty direction. To that end, let's look at **[[Warrior Heroes - Adventures in Talomir|Warrior Heroes: Adventures in Talomir]]**, the latest fantasy line from [[Two-Hour Wargames]], admittedly one of my favorite gaming companies. Not just because they were the most recent to pay me. That's purely peripheral. THW produces games which walk a narrow line between TTRPG and wargame, focusing quite a lot on tactical combat but leaning into a sort of storygame-like set of oracular mechanics to randomly create situations, tactical set ups, and noncombat interactions. We are going to walk through character generation and see what shakes out. It won't be a mage – we just did that yesterday. --- ## Chargen The core mechanic of resolution for or WHAT is typically 2d6 versus the Reputation of the character. Each die that is less than or equal to the Reputation is a hit, rolling over is a pass. That means that for most tests you can have past 2 for a complete success, pass 1 for a partial success, or pass 0 for a failure. We'll start at the top of character generation, go through the list of questions, and see where we end up. ![[Warrior Heroes Adventures in Talomir Defining Figures.png]] ### Is this character a Star or a Grunt? Stars are the central characters of stories, Grunts are the guys who are everyone else. We're going to be running a Star. As a result, we have certain advantages over other kinds of characters. Damage that might normally disable a character, we have the ability to use our Star Power (which starts at 5) to roll a die and cancel some of that damage, which burns that point of SP. Once every Encounter, we can do an Extraordinary Effort and just reroll one of the D6 on the table. Finally, just for being a Star, we can just choose to have ourselves and/or our entire side leave the fight when taking the Will to Fight Test. We can just choose to bugger off. Being a Star is awesome; we'll stick with it. > [!info] It's worth noting that in WHAT you are almost never playing with just one character. > > You create an entire warband/party to go adventuring with, recruit and lose, and pretty much everyone else is a Grunt unless you're using the Crunchy rules which have the mechanics for Co-Stars. ### What is your Race? We'll flip over to the rather extensive Race List and pick something interesting. Each Race has its own Attributes which make them just a little bit different. Black moon incarnates, dwarves, elves, feral vampires, ghouls… And that's just from the first couple of pages. Let's see… You know what? Let's be classical. We will be of the race of Men, which means we don't actually have a Race Attribute, we have a Random Attribute. We'll figure that out shortly. ### What is your Nationality? This is a more complicated question than you might otherwise think because there are more than 30 nations in Talomir, most of them inspired by some historical Earth culture of surprisingly modern vintage. We're talking Renaissance Italy, medieval Germany, all over the map. I just can't seem to get away from a certain type of character concept, so we are going to be from the Capalan League. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that I get a giant metal knight to ride around in. > [!quote] > > The Capalan League is a loose confederation of City-States, each ruled by a powerful Family. Each of the five City-States are considered to be independent with smaller cities owing > direct allegiance to the local ruling Family. All decisions that may affect all of the City-States, such as going to war, must be voted upon. The Capalan League has a long history of being > fragmented and suffers greatly from court intrigue. > > *Knights are Swordsmen. Shooters are Agile and Soldiers have the Duty Attribute.* That last is a bit of notation on the random generation table for this particular nation which we will take as guidance but not as necessarily dictate. We are, after all, a Star. ### What is your Alignment? Yes, this is a game with Alignment. I actually quite like how it's described in the text here. > [!quote] > > The majority of the Characters and Creatures in Warrior Heroes – Adventures in Talomir view the world in absolutes. It’s a world of black or white, good or evil and how they view this is defined by their Alignment. But we are Stars, and that gives us a little more flexibility in our choices. > [!quote] > > Not everyone in Warrior Heroes – Adventures in Talomir views life in black or white. A few can see the advantages and disadvantages of both sides and choose to walk a fine line between them. These neutral folks are considered to have the Twilight (TW) or Neutral Alignment. I've always been the sort to never pass up an opportunity to deal with both sides of the table, so it's no surprise that I'm going with being Twilight rather than Red Sun or Black Moon. ### Are you Male or Female? You can tell this game was written by someone who is not part of the current day RPG mainstream because he actually dares to make it important in a fairly significant way: > [!quote] > > When Interacting with a Male Character of the same Race the Female Character will receive +1 to her People Skill. Nonetheless, this character is going to be male. I know, I know – passing up on the minmax is anathema, but here we are. ### What is your Reputation? Because we are of the Star, we always start at Reputation 5. Rep 3 is where peasants and goblins generally hang out, Rep 4 is where your average soldier in warrior in an army typically is, and Rep 6 and beyond are legendary creatures, demons, and Conan. No, there is no maximum Reputation. But there is always the possibility of rolling *Obviously Dead* in combat. And yes, that is a literal mechanic. ### What is your Class? Don't worry, for a change there isn't a massive list of Classes scratch that. Instead, there is a very tight list of very broad Classes. *Caster, Civilian, Creature, Healer, Knight, Ranger, Shooter, Soldiers, Thief, and Warrior.* That's it. That's the lot. There's no multi-classing but you can change Class once during your lifetime. I'm feeling surprisingly normal tonight so we are going to be a Capalan League Soldier, which means we will have the Duty Attribute in addition to whatever Random Attribute we roll up here in a bit. I'm thinking that we are the leader of a small band of Capalan soldiers from one of the city states out patrolling the roads for banditry and generally trying to keep order. It's a good plan! If we were actually going to play this character, we would also end up rolling up the rest of his warband which would be made up of other CL army members. Maybe we leave that up for another day. ### What are your Skills? Luckily for all of us, there is no long list of Skills in this game. Personally, I hate ridiculously long lists of Skills because they are never properly granular. In this case, there are three skills: *Reputation, People, and Savvy* – used for physical challenges, social challenges, and intellectual challenges respectively. How do we assign the value? One starts at our Reputation, one is -1 that, and the second is -2 that. I envision this character to be smarter than he is physical, even though he's a soldier. He's a commander, a leader of men. So he will have People 5, Savvy 4, and Rep 3. > [!info] > > No, I do not know why Reputation and of the physical challenge stat have the same name. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case in previous editions of the game. Let me go check that. > > You know what? It turns out that I was wrong. In **WH: Armies and Adventurers** there is no Skill system and in **WH: Legends** it's the same as this. I suppose I was remembering a better world. We also don't have any Skill modifiers from our Race because we are baseline humans so there's that. Elves, for example, get an inherent +1 to Savvy. ### Do you have any Attributes? I told you we would be getting to this. We don't have any Attributes from our Race, but we do have both one from our Class (Soldier gives us Duty) and one from a Random Attribute because we're human. It's Random time so we break out the dice – or rather just a single D6, and roll on a table or two. Importantly, know that random chance hates me and that the Attribute tables include both positive and negative possibilities. Luckily, being a Star, if we don't like what we roll we can just ignore it but we don't get to roll again. So on the first die I get a 1 and on the second I get a 5 which gives us… *Clumsy: Counts as -1 to Rep when taking a Physical Challenge.* I'm going to be honest, that sucks for us. We already have a target number of 3 when rolling a Physical Challenge and the last thing we need is for that to go down to 2 when trying to leap from rooftop to rooftop or climb up a cliff. I think we'll be ignoring that one. Our Soldier Attribute is much better. *Duty: Count +1 to Rep for the Will to Fight Test.* Effectively this means that we will be rolling against sixes to stay in the battle or motivate our men when the losses start stacking up. As a Star, this is perhaps less useful than it might seem since we can decide to bail out on any of these tests but it still can come in handy. ### What type of Weapons do you have? We aren't starting with a miniature that we are trying to stat up so we don't have to match something physical. Again, this is not a game with a huge list of melee weapons so we'll pick something sensible: a hefty short sword and an offhand dagger, which is essentially described very basically mechanically: > [!quote] > > **Two One Hand Melee Weapons (2X1) **– This is used when a Character uses a weapon in each hand. Usually a sword and a dagger, but any combination goes. Using two weapons allows the user to count as shielded on the Melee Damage Table. I quite appreciate the fact that we don't need a huge list of one-handed weapons. We know it's a one-handed weapon. It fits in one hand. Go for it. You may well ask what's the point of having a two-handed weapon rather than a one-handed weapon or even punching people if there's no damage listed on the table? The answer is in the mechanism used to resolve melee damage, which reduces the armor of a target hit by a two-handed weapon by one step before resolving. Quite handy, really. ### What kind of Armor do you have? Very simple system here. Effectively you can have one of four types of armor. AC 2, AC 4, AC 6, or AC 8. Unarmored/leather, chainmail and helmet, full plate, or "this is absolutely ridiculous, what are you a Dragon or something?" We are a soldier and well-trained but not intended to be standing truly on the frontline. We'll take some chainmail and call it AC 4. ### Do you use a Shield? Happily, we've already answered this one. We are treated as using a shield in melee but we don't have one to raise against ranged weapons because as insane as we are, we still can't carry arrows out of the air. And that's it! We need a name and then we'll just fill out a character sheet. ## Character Sheet ![[Antonio Vettori, Soldier of the Capalan League.jpg]] **Name:** Antonio Vettori (Star), Male Soldier **Race:** Men **Nationality:** Capalan League **Alignment:** Twilight - **Skills** - *Reputation:* 3 - *People:* 5 - *Savvy:* 4 - **Attributes:** - *Duty: Count +1 to Rep for the Will to Fight Test.* - **Weapons/Armor:** - **Two One Hand Melee Weapons (2X1)** – This is used when a Character uses a weapon in each hand. Usually a sword and a dagger, but any combination goes. Using two weapons allows the user to count as shielded on the Melee Damage Table. - **AC 4** - Chainmail ## Exunt That takes care of it. Again, in a real game we would be generating the rest of the soldiers who were accompanying him/hirelings/hangers on/camp followers/whatever, which would bring a broader selection of choices to the battlefield which we would be assuredly hitting, along with some randomly generated dungeons to plunder. Comments? Questions? Insults? Let me know what you think as we press along.