Character Creation

Character Creation

High Concept

Each character should have a “High Concept,” a short phrase that describes what the character is “all about.” For example, “Cheerful Morgue Attendant,” “Wizard Private Eye,” and “Hairdresser Turned Archer” would all be good.

High Concepts have no game effect, but they’re useful shorthand for staff to keep track of what makes your character distinctive. Players are encouraged to change their High Concept at any time it seems appropriate, and to note that in their PEL and in the character database so that staff take notice your character has undergone a significant life change.

Trouble

Crossover characters should also have a “Trouble,” a short phrase that describes what the character’s most important struggle currently is. A Trouble is not mandatory, but certain skills (called Epic skills) cannot be accessed by a character unless they engage with their trouble in play and try to work toward resolving it. Examples of a Trouble could be anything from “My uncle the mummy lord,” to “Trying to organize this crazy town,” to “I really need to get out more.” Your Trouble can relate to world-shattering occurrences or deeply personal issues. It’s up to you what your character is most involved in, and what sort of goals you enjoy working toward in play.

As with High Concepts, players are encouraged to change their Trouble at any time they feel is character appropriate, and to note it in their PEL and in the character database so staff can take note of the changes. Players are also encouraged to note in their PEL when they feel they have made significant progress toward their current trouble, or resolved it. (Note though that characters are unlikely to get credit toward accessing Epic skills more than once a year.)

Heroic Qualities

Your character will also have three Heroic Qualities that help define them. You may also choose to make one or more of these a Dark heroic quality, if character appropriate, which may have an impact on certain skills.

When using per event skills and certain other abilities, you may be required to use a Heroic (or Dark) Quality in the verbal. This adds flavor to the ability, and other characters may react differently to you depending on which Qualities you show.

Some characters in the game world may also have Wicked qualities. These traits are not heroic; player characters may not start with them, and characters who gain them somehow are unlikely to remain playable as PCs for long.

If you feel that your character has grown or changed such that one of your Heroic Qualities is no longer appropriate, you’re encouraged to change that Quality in the database for a more appropriate one, and tell staff in your PEL what happened to prompt the change. One caveat, though: If you have skills that require you to have (or not have) certain Qualities, changing your Qualities does not mean you get to automatically sell back those skills. If you wish to, you’ll have to go through the normal process to do so, and those skills will fail to work in the interim.

List of Heroic Qualities:

Agility, Ambition, Calm, Charity, Compassion, Courage, Cunning, Daring, Excellence, Faith, Fervor, Flourish, Focus, Glory, Grace, Guile, Humility, Humor, Insight, Kindness, Logic, Luck, Mercy, Might, Mischief, Passion, Piety, Precision, Prowess, Purity, Reason, Serenity, Skill, Speed, Stealth, Swiftness, Valor, Wit.

List of Dark Heroic Qualities:

Anger, Apathy, Arrogance, Bloodlust, Cruelty, Decadence, Deception, Disdain, Envy, Greed, Hatred, Indifference, Infamy, Pride, Rage, Vanity.

List of Wicked Qualities:

Atrocity, Depravity, Loathing, Malevolence, Malice, Mockery, Perversion, Gluttony, Sadism, Tyranny, Wrath.

Vitality

All characters in Crossover begin with two points of Vitality. To increase your Vitality score, you must buy skills that add to your Vitality total.

Armor

Characters in Crossover do not begin with any armor points. To gain armor, they must buy appropriate skills. The maximum armor points a character may have is four, though there are skills that raise this limit.

Endurance

Crossover characters begin each event with 50 endurance. Endurance is spent to power many skills and abilities. There are ways to temporarily increase or refresh your character’s endurance in game, such as eating well, listening to a skilled entertainer, getting orders from a charismatic commander, or accomplishing difficult goals.

If your character has no endurance remaining, you may not use any skills or abilities that require you to spend it.

Character Points

Newly created characters begin with 50 character points to spend on Open Skills, Racial Skills, and skills from their Training and Themes. You can earn more character points by pre-registering for and attending events, sending in a Post-Event Letter after game, and helping out the game (and community) in other ways. The most CP you can earn for your character in a calendar year is 20.

Open Skills

Open skills are a pool of skills that everyone has unrestricted access to. You may spend as many CP as you like on skills in this category.

Race, and Racial Skills

Crossover does not have pre-defined skill or characteristic packages for the various races in the game world. Instead, you may spend up to 10 CP on racial skills to help define the fantasy (or non-fantasy) race you wish to play. If you wish to spend more on racial skills, or select more powerful ones, you may take a Theme for your character (see Themes) that reflects a “greater” or more powerful race.

Players are encouraged to be creative when choosing racial skills and defining their character’s race. For example, if you want to play a human with claws or the ability to regenerate, you’re free to do so, and staff will be interested to read the character background that explains how this happened!

The section on “Peoples of Ariath” later in the rulebook has roleplaying and cultural information on some of the races in the game world, with suggestions on how you might assemble skill packages for some of them. These are only guidelines, not rules. If you want to play a fantasy race not mentioned here, feel free to talk to staff about what you’re interested in. Races that are specific to other fictional worlds, don’t fit in Ariath, or that might cause trademark issues might not be possible, but we’ll help you get as close to what you want as we can.

Training

The Training lists contain core groups of critical skills that enable characters to fill certain roles in combat. There are four types of training, each divided into four tiers. The tiers are Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, and Grandmaster. The Trainings are as follows:

Warriors are tough, tenacious melee combatants, skilled in holding a spot on a line or engaging tough foes.

Skirmishers are fast, mobile melee or missile fighters, good at harrying and hit-and-run tactics.

Adepts are specialists in ranged attacks. Depending on their Theme, they might use magic spells, glass globes of volatile poison, or rifles and grenades.

Healers are skilled at keeping their allies on their feet through long battles. Some might use medicine, or prayers, or just an encouraging word. Regardless of their methods, they can heal and protect their allies and cure their ailments, and some can even return the recently slain to life.

Newly created characters start with two tiers worth of training. You can choose to specialize in one area (and be, say, a Journeyman Skirmisher) or take one tier each of two training lists (say, Apprentice Warrior and Apprentice Healer.) Selecting a training tier allows you to spend CP to buy any skills in that tier.

Your character gets access to a third tier of training once you have earned and spent 100 CP, a fourth at 150 CP, and a fifth at 200 CP. You must have the lower tiers in a training before you can access the higher ones; you can’t choose Grandmaster Adept unless you already have Master Adept.

Themes

Where Training mostly defines what your character can do, your character’s Theme describes how you do it. Each theme is a profession or personality type in the game world, and contains a small number of skills that add flavor and options to your Training.

You may buy up to four total Themes. Your first, at tier 1, costs no CP. You may buy a second for 2 CP, a third for 4 CP when you achieve tier 3, and a fourth for 6 CP when you reach tier 4. There are more than twenty themes available, and they can be combined with each other and with training freely.

Combining Training and Themes

The varied selection of training and themes is intended to allow a lot of creativity in character creation, without restricting what your character can do by what feel you want your character to have.

For instance, say you want to play a ranged damage dealer, and begin with Journeyman Adept. If you want to play a fantasy-race character from Ariath, you might choose a theme like Wizard, so you could throw fire spells. Alternately, if you were playing a character from Earth, you could still be an Adept, but choose Soldier as your theme, and fight with a rifle rather than spell packets. You’d have about the same skills and level of power, but the character’s feel would be very different.

You might want to be a support character, and play a Healer. You could be a Physician, and use medicine to heal, a Witch, who heals with potions and herbs, or a Faithful of Death, praying to your deity to stave off mortality. Again, you’d have mostly the same skills, but very different character flavor.

Any theme (or themes) can go with any training, even if they don’t seem like an obvious match at first. A Wizard doesn’t need to be a ranged damage dealer; they might heal with light and shadow, or take up a shield and a flaming sword and wade into melee. A Faithful of Joy might be a healer that spreads happiness and good feelings to anyone they meet, or they might be a skirmisher that uses tricks, flourishes, and fancy maneuvers to confuse their enemies.

Attack Traits and Flavor Traits

Each theme contains a skill (usually at no CP cost) that gives your character access to some Attack Traits, and some Flavor Traits. Your character has to take at least one such skill, or you’ll be unable to use most of your abilities.

Attack Traits are used for offensive effects. Many skills will have an effect call such as “4 damage by [attack trait.]”

Flavor Traits are primarily used for beneficial effects. Most beneficial skills will be of the form “Heal 2 by [flavor trait.]”

When a skill calls for an attack trait, you can choose any attack trait you have learned, any time you use that skill. Similarly, you can freely select any flavor trait you know any time a skill calls for one.

For example, Faithful of the Sun gives access to this skill:

Corona’s Influence 0 CP

You gain “Fire” and “Presence” as attack traits, and “Light” and "Glory" as flavor traits.

If you choose Faithful of the Sun, you get Corona’s Influence for free. If you were using a damage attack, you could choose to do “4 damage by Fire.” If it turns out that fire doesn’t work well on what you’re fighting, you could choose to have your next attack be “4 damage by Presence.” If you were healing someone, you could do “Heal 2 by Light” or “Heal 2 by Glory,” whatever you felt most appropriate to your character and the situation. If you want to keep things simple, you can do Fire and Light all the time, but you always have the others as options if you want them.

Some skills allow you to substitute Flavor traits for Attack traits. This would result in an attack like “4 Damage by Glory.” This is a rare ability that you can only do if you have a skill that specifically allows it. Attacks with Flavor traits are less likely to be stopped by an enemy’s defensive skills, and are best saved for hard fights or tough opponents.

A note on the “Weapon” trait:

When a character in Accelerant game uses an attack and calls simply, “4 damage,” without a trait in the verbal, they are using the trait “by Weapon.” Weapon isn’t said aloud in verbals, it’s just understood that any verbal without a trait is “by Weapon.”

In Crossover, you do not get “by Weapon” as a default. If the skills in your theme do not give you the “Weapon” trait for the attack you are using, you must use one of the traits you do have. Several themes give Weapon as a trait, and it’s available for some attack types in Open Skills as well.

Epic Skills

Some skills in the Training and Theme lists are marked as Epic skills. These skills are purchased with Epic Points rather than CP. A player may earn a single Epic Point when staff agrees that they have made significant progress on their Trouble. (See Trouble, above.) Players should expect to earn Epic Points at a rate of about one per year.

A character’s first Epic Skill costs one EP, their second Epic Skill costs two, and third costs three. Should the campaign go on for long enough, players may find that there are other uses for Epic Points, but three Epic skills is the maximum a character may have.

Frequency of Skill Use

In Crossover, some skills may be used a certain number of times Per Battle, or a certain number of times Per Event.

"Once per event" skills may only be used once at any given event you attend. Some skills or abilities may allow you to regain uses of per event skills during the course of the game. A "Refresh Per Event skill" allows you to choose one such skill and gain another use of it, while a "Refresh (Skill Name)" allows you to regain one use of the specified skill.

"Once per battle" skills may all be refreshed by resting for five minutes in a "Safe Place." Safe places include the Hearth at Covenant (the tavern space,) all player dwellings, and any other location marked with a clarification indicating that it is a safe place. Despite the name, you do not need to be in combat to use "per battle" skills, and you may refresh them without limit in safe place, so long as you continue to pay any associated Endurance costs for each use. (Note that Grant effects always cost Endurance, and no ability will allow you to remove this cost.)

Between Event Skills

Certain skills can only be used between events. These usually represent long term projects, like planning an expedition or spending research time in a library. These skills are assumed to take up most or all of your character’s free time between games.

You may only use one between event skill after each event, even if you have learned more than one. You may also only use a between events skill after an event you actually attend.

The Folk, and the Wicked

When people in Ariath speak of “Folk,” they effectively mean “the people of the world.” They mean it the way people on Earth speak of “Humanity,” but on Ariath, there are many more people than just humans. Nearly any beings or races of beings with the capacity to think and speak are Folk. Only Folk have the ability to belong to or partake in Communities.

The exceptions to this rule are beings that have chosen to forsake their Folk nature. The natives of Ariath would say “he is Folk no longer” the same way someone from Earth might say “she is inhuman.” A rampaging dragon, predatory siren, or serial murderer would be Wicked; they have enough intelligence and moral sense to know that what they are doing is wrong, but they choose to do it anyway. A slime, mindless undead, or simple construct could not be Wicked whatever they did, nor could they be Folk, because they don’t have the minds to understand the ramifications of their actions.

All characters in Crossover start with the “Folk” trait. Characters with any Wicked Qualities are in danger of losing the Folk trait, and becoming entirely Wicked. Wicked characters cannot be played as PCs.