# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 26 - On Mighty Thews :: Amenemhat, Cruel Elementalist tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/rpg/on-mighty-thews > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] You just can't seem to escape fantasy in the tabletop RPG space. It's one of the longest established, most ridiculously entrenched genres of play – but even within that scope there's room for variation. One of those styles is less the high fantasy pseudo-Tolkien-ism of D&D and more sword-and-sandals high/low fantasy of [Howard's **Conan** saga](https://conan.com)^[God, I want [that Thulsa Doom bottle opener](https://conan.com/product/thulsa-doom-bottle-opener/).] or [Moorcock's **Elric**](https://www.reddit.com/r/michaelmoorcock/comments/i0szqx/elric_reading_guide_the_books/). Big characters, big passions, worlds which can surprise you, all the action you can eat. Good stuff across the board. ![[On Mighty Thews (cover).jpg]] That's what **[[On Mighty Thews]]** brings you. Extremely lightweight mechanics? Check. A world that that is essentially undefined before the players start to add things to it themselves, literally, at the end of character generation? Check. An extremely flexible architecture that allows for any number of over-the-top action sequences? Check. If you're looking for a game to play **Conan**, ignore the recent TTRPG versions^[Which you can't seem to buy anywhere, anyway, due to Modiphius losing the license. [Check eBay](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2332490.m570.l1313&_nkw=conan+rpg&_sacat=0) if you must.] – get OMT. This is the game. Before you ask, no, we are not going to create Conan as our example character. I promise. Not going to do it. Wouldn't be prudent. ## Chargen This is going to go very, very quickly. Hold onto your butt. ### Concept We need to start with some vague idea of who it is that we are creating. At this point, you all know that I generally tend to prefer playing some sort of sorcerer/mage with a leaning toward the darker arts. If you're going to drop me into Sword-and-Sandals, I'm going to go hard. I'm going to play a sorcerer-explorer from the grim, stony wastelands of the South. He's wiry, sun-dried, and wears surprisingly little most of the time. His magic depends on twisting and perverting the spirits of the land to serve his will. This is not a morally fraught choice but rather a reflection of the fact that nature is often at odds with human life. I suppose we need a name, too: **Amenemhat** ### Attributes The train is picking up speed. We have a D4, a D8, and a D12. We have three fixed attributes, *Warrior*, *Sorcerer*, and *Explorer*. They are associated with pretty much exactly what you think they should be. Warriors hurt people, they know about war, they know about weapons and armor, and the know-how to hang out with military types. Sorcerers know how to read, know how to translate ancient languages, are resistant to magic, and know how to associate with magical beings. Explorers do all the physical stuff that's not fighting, running, dodging, disabling traps, and making roughly useful tools with nothing but a piece of flint in a cave; they're also good for dealing with foreigners and people from outside your normal circles. | Attribute | D | | ---- | ---: | | Warrior | d8 | | Sorcerer | d12 | | Explorer | d4 | Amen is a sorcerer first and foremost, studied in the forms of elementals and spirits of the air. But his upbringing required that he be able to engage in the blood sports of his city to near equal degree, which he did with some distaste. While he certainly has the resources to take care of himself on his travels, his preference is not for sleeping rough in the grass but rather a taste for the best bed in the inn. ### Abilities One of my *favorite* game design tropes: free-form traits which represent broad areas of expertise, pieces of equipment, or a kind of magical power. Not specific spells; we don't do that here, but types and areas or cults. Things that themselves could be hooks for stories. Whatever we pick, one of them gets a D10 and the other a D6. | Ability | D | | ---- | ---: | | Cult of the Falling Sky | d10 | | Bloodsport | d6 | Both of these things seem broad enough to allow a fair spread of manifestation. But just as importantly they leave the door open to introducing elements of lore later in the game to actually define what they are. Do I actually know what the tenets of the *Cult of the Falling Sky* are right now? Not even a little. It probably has something to do with the prophecy involving a meteor, though. I'll bet that's true. Do I know what the rules of the southern bloodsport are? Nope. Not the foggiest. We'll figure it out as we go. OMT really takes to heart the idea that you see showing up in a lot of games more modern: play to find out. What are the truths? Play to find out. ### D20 Trait Finally, we get the big boy. The only one to get the golf ball. It's a single word that defines how the character acts most of the time, how they react to the world, how they think about other people, and how they think about their place in the world. You can play into it or you can play against it, but it helps to find something strongly representative not only in the character but in the world. I'm going with an old favorite: *Cruel*. You get rewarded for every scene in which you manifest your D20 Trait and if you act specifically against it, you are especially powerful. This is one of those mechanics which have a lot more carry-on effect than you would expect in terms of how your character gets seen. Conan, for example, very well could have the D20 Trait *Mercenary*, meaning that when he's out reaving, wenching, looking to have a good time by making money selling his sword – he gets rewarded. He's playing to type. But in a scene where a beautiful girl bats her big eyes in his direction and he decides to do what she asks without asking for compensation? He can do some mighty things. (He can also get into some mighty trouble, but that just goes with the job.) And that's it – that's the entirety of character creation. ### The Map I can't really leave without talking about what happens before the first scene. The GM should be talking to the players as they make their characters, asking questions about their traits, generating a little back story, getting some ideas for directions things could go and the obvious elements that the players are signaling they're interested in through their selection of traits. But then – we break out the map. We have to establish the "poles," the locations from which ideas emanate, as it were. Every player picks a place on the map, the empty map, mind you, and writes their D20 Trait next to it. In our example, somewhere on the map we would have a point labeled *Cruel*. Things closer to that point evidence the trait more than things further away. Maybe the weather is particularly harsh around the location we've chosen, maybe the people and cultures are particularly cruel, maybe both… And further away, things are less cruel. On the other side of the map, maybe things are positively friendly. Every player places a pole. Once that's done, every player, including the GM, add a few things to the map they would like to see or are excited about. Maybe you want to see a seven headed waterfall so you sketch in what that might look like about thumb size, label it, and move on. Maybe you want a small village of little people. Maybe you want a smoking volcano. Maybe you've decided the map is not the size of a continent but instead represents a single city (think the more constrained scale of **[[Blades in the Dark]]**, for example); you could be drawing in buildings, factories, streets, parks, houses – whatever works for the scale of your story. Once everybody's got a couple of things the GM will meditate for a moment, figure out where play is to start, and head into the first scene. Everybody else has some things to think about and look forward to, many of which they've created themselves. ## Character Sheet ![[Amenemhat, Cruel Sorcerer.jpg]]^[I wasn't planning on going with any sort of anime influence but – then this image popped out and I really couldn't let that go. Too many good influences. That's pretty electric awesome.] **Name:** Amenemhat *A sorcerer-explorer from the grim, stony wastelands of the South. He's wiry, sun-dried, and wears surprisingly little most of the time. His magic depends on twisting and perverting the spirits of the land to serve his will.* | Attribute | D | | ---- | ---: | | Warrior | d8 | | Sorcerer | d12 | | Explorer | d4 | | Ability | D | | ---- | ---: | | Cult of the Falling Sky | d10 | | Bloodsport | d6 | **D20 Trait:** Cruel ## Exunt That's it. That's character creation. It's simple, straightforward, flexible, and can cover a lot of ground. If you wanted to do a sci-fi version of OMT, you could scratch off the serial numbers and have it doing just about anything you like in minutes or less. That D20 Trait? Any time you've role-played a scene in accordance with what you chose, you get a reroll token. You don't like what you just throw on the table? Burn a token, pick up the dice, and do it again. Once per conflict, just to be clear. The resolution mechanic is surprisingly fiction-first. Figure out the conflict, negotiate what the stakes are for success and failure, then roll the dice associated with the applicable attribute and any abilities if the character has any. Pick the highest outcome. Is it higher than four? They succeed. Is it less than four? They fail. Is it exactly four? Then it's just barely a success with no margin. For every two points you exceeded, you can either make up a fact about the character's success or take a +1 bonus to a future action. Yes, that means that if you take an action to look out and see who's out there and you succeed, you can then end up narrating *exactly* how many of them there are, what they are, or any number of other things, and/or take a +1 or more to dealing with what you've seen on the next action. This is a reminder that OMT is an extremely player-driven narrative game; it is not a game in the classical GM-central-authority style. It's better for it. It's interesting how damage is handled in this game, too. Any given conflict can only injure a character once and it's a very narrative injury. You don't just take three HP, you take a wound, "cuts and gashes," "broken nose," that sort of thing. Take three of those and the next one will take you out of the scene, either knocked out or dead – however your group decides to handle it. It's how that they are *removed* that's really interesting: want that injury to go away? Describe how it hampers you and take a -2 penalty to your roll. Take that -2 for that one conflict and then it goes away. That's brilliant. I love it. To get better, you have to suffer from your injuries. But you don't have to; "I ain't got time to bleed!"  One last thing, the last use of the D20 Trait: if what you're doing goes against it, that big ol' D20 gets added to your die pool. You won't earn the reroll token for that scene but you will definitely be a badass. Are you usually a coward but need to swing out over an endless drop to save the princess? I think you might can do it. Only once per scene, but it's worth it. I don't think there's much I can add here. **On Mighty Thews** is a great game, another one of those which were quite ahead of their time, and it's full of interesting mechanics that won't take you all day to understand. The book is only 51 pages, after all. You want Conan? You can have Conan. You want **Star Wars**? Replace Sorcerer with Force and interpret it as a general understanding of the fact that the force exists and flows between all living things at the bare minimum – and you're good to go. (Enjoy that "rapier-handled lightsaber" attribute!) Want **Indiana Jones**? Want the **Three Musketeers**? Want **ShadowRun**?^[I know that sounds like a very strange thing to drop in right here, but – you could definitely do it. All the tropes fit. I might replace Explorer with Netrunner, but that covers about everything you would ever want to do. Try it out!] It's a treasure trove of some of the best tools for quickly putting together a game in a straightforward setting that gives the players agency to add to it at every turn. Oh yes, I guess that wasn't one last thing. We need to talk about Lore. Anytime something is introduced, you see something, something comes into play, a player can call for a Lore roll and if it's successful they can introduce true, uncontrovertable facts about the subject and how they knew of it. I'm just going to grab the example they give because it's amazing, hilarious, and I'm here for it. > Zarathoon, Master of the Black Tower, is confronted by snake-men in a steamy, distant jungle. His player wins a Lore roll about the stinking swamp with three degrees of success. The player describes Zarathoon calling to his enemies: > > “Back, fiends, this swamp is home to the demon Irriqizz, Lord of Insects (one piece of lore). I have read of him in my books, and I know the chant that draws him near! (another piece of lore)” > > The player spends the last degree of success on a +1 bonus to summoning Irriqizz. This will be a dangerous conflict, using the Sorcerer attribute. Look, if that doesn't get you going right there, I'm not sure what I can do for you. This applies to everybody, not just sorcerers, and anything they stumble upon. The players introduce lore, they create the world as you go, and that makes things – unpredictable. I love this. OMT is one of the best games of all time, in my opinion. Rare, generally unknown, but incredibly fun. Thanks to my training by some of the greatest minds of our age, I can see that the Crimson Terror is on its way and I must depart to prepare! Out!