The Straight Way Lost: Making a “Real Person” in an RPG

Melina Sedó is the main author in the 5e adventure and sourcebook The Straight Way Lost. The Kickstarter is running now, has hundreds of backers and hit the funding goal.

Geek Native, ahem, likes to lure RPG designers in with thought pieces while they have a Kickstarter planned.

Melina was invited to discuss making characters feel real in a fantasy setting. I asked about that as The Straight Way Lost is a fantastical version of Renaissance Italy.

As it happens, I think Melina over-delivered and revealed the (potential) of brand new news of The Straight Way Lost content at the end of the piece.

There’s also loads of great art from the book to share in the article, which is a look at characters through the lens of The Straight Way Lost.

Character creation and development in “The Straight Way Lost”

You all know this. Any roleplaying game relies on two main features: The actions in the game and the interaction of the characters. 

And by interaction, I do not mean conversations like: “Hey, watch out for the tentacles.” “ARGH!”

What I am talking about are the moments that turn a roleplaying character into a person. Someone with concrete character traits, with hopes and fears, loves and hates, someone who could be your best friend – or your worst enemy. We want the adventurers to be more than cardboard cutouts, don’t we?

As a gamemaster, I have run a few very long-running campaigns in which not only the player characters, but also many of the important NPCs had ample time to develop over the years. Moreover: I wrote elaborate background stories for every NPC and spent many hours of playing scenes from the PCs’ past in solo-sessions, so that they felt like real people from the very first moment of the story. Many of them still live on in my imagination, like distant friends whom I sometimes sorely miss. 

And this is how I would like you to experience The Straight Way Lost. 

Although we’ve written an exciting adventure with lots of suspense, danger and possibilities for triumph, it will be the adventurers and the players themselves suffering, rejoicing, experiencing the journey through city and wilderness, through Heaven and Hell. Not everyone might want to spend heaps of extra time to play the background stories of every PC, but you want them to feel “real” from the very beginning. 

This is why we offer a couple of features that will help create vivid starting characters, and mechanisms that reflect the changes they undergo during the adventure. Some of them are essential for the adventure, others are optional and meant as a help to get things going. Let me discuss them briefly.

The Dark Secret and Good Deed

Our adventure is based on the assumption that every living being has two sides. No one is only bad or only good, but will instead display different traits, depending on external influences and on which internal feature has the upper hand in a given moment.

This is why every character must be given one personal Dark Secret as well as a past Good Deed. With this you basically choose a moral flaw – a sin – and a virtue. These are grounded in a late medieval, Christian worldview and help the players get into the proper mindset for an adventure that was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Sins and Virtues play a central role when voyaging through the netherworlds.

The Happy Memory

We ask the player to describe a moment in their character’s life in which he or she experienced complete happiness, an instant in which they felt in perfect harmony with the world and were absolutely content. This memory grounds the character and can lend them strength in moments of deepest despair. 

Hooks for Character Motivation

Our adventure is not the typical story in which the adventurers are thrown into a dangerous situation and just have to act. The setting rather relies on characters with intrinsic motivations and bonds within the community to make them want to understand the world around them, in particular when it comes to the fate of the city they call their home. It therefore always helps if the characters have some palpable and personal stake in the goals of the adventure other than curiosity or the hope of reward. 

We therefore provide a table with some ideas for the various ways the player characters could be motivated by external factors. One example is “Family Duty”, meaning as a good son or daughter you are mindful of advancing the interests of your family, perhaps by staying informed about the goings-on among the mighty. Which in turn means you have a vested interest in being part of whatever action is on offer.

Motivational Drives

These traits are intended as an antidote to instances when a player gets in his own way by thinking “my character wouldn’t do that” when faced with great danger. Motivational Drives are intended as optional. For some groups, they might be helpful, for others they might not be necessary.

We provide a table with eight options such as Truth Seeker (you must know!), Fear Itself (you couldn’t stand turning out a coward) or Pig-Headed (you find it difficult to back down, ever). 

Dismay

We all know that most roleplayers have vicariously experienced hundreds of terrifying situations and very often, another terror is just shrugged off instead of really acknowledged. This trait therefore measures how much the adventurers are affected by the horrors that they encounter. 

Experiencing terrifying situations, inflicting harm on another being or watching someone else suffer may cause psychological trauma. The results of such traumata are ultimately depression and other severe mental impediments. You might hide your feelings in front of others, but they will affect you nevertheless. You might smile or be heroic or even seem cold, but inner turmoil will plague you ever stronger the more Dismay you accrue. This trait will play a central role when voyaging through the Inferno. But do not fear: there will be ways to rid yourself of Dismay points you have accumulated, so affected characters are not disabled forever. 

And finally, we also want to ensure a smooth process of group building.

Commonalities for Group Cohesion

Since the Straight Way Lost will probably be the first adventure of this particular adventuring party, and their first interaction really, it can be useful to make sure that there is some extra glue between the characters to help them act as a group rather than as randomly assembled individuals with only the task before them to hold them together. While players should create characters who want to adventure and cooperate as a group, sometimes the players need help. We therefore provide a simple method of determining features that an adventurer might have in common with one or more other other party members, such as Business (you have the same employer), Powerful Patron (you want to please the same person) or Family (you have some kind of family connection, close or remote). 

By the way: We do have an introductory starting adventure up our sleeves as an extra stretch goal not yet displayed on the Kickstarter page. This would help even more to prepare the adventurers for their epic journey. 

Quick Links

• Kickstarter: The Straight Way Lost.