Characters

A character in Tarnished Tale is essentially any entity capable of taking action directly in the world. Very broadly, this can be further subdivided into Player Characters (PCs) controlled by individual players or Non-Player Characters (NPCs) controlled by the Facilitator. While the character rules are the most heavily altered by the application of a setting, in general, they'll be the same for any Tarnished Tale system game, and they're going to be mostly the same for both PCs and NPCs.

Please note that character generation is covered separately from this main article owing to its own complexities. This article focuses more on the properties of characters as they would appear on the character sheet.

Biographical Information

Characters almost always have names - sometime that name is "Cow that started third from the left" or "Bandit A", but a name is a name - as well as ages, places of origin, gender identities, height, weight, and so on. These stats are fully independent of other mechanical information and should be recorded by the player more or less at their discretion.

However, a few pieces of biographical information do have relevance to most systems.

Heritage

A Heritage is an optional (but freuqently used) rule for a Tarnished Tale settings intended to give setting developers the ability to define racial or cultural groups with a roughly uniform identity. For example, a High Fantasy setting may have one or more heritages that are all different polities of Elves, or a science fiction setting might give you access to a Martian heritage.

Heritage is a mostly immutable statistic that is set during character creation. For the most part, other than helping you color in your character, it has no immediate gameplay impact. However, in many settings, Heritages define additional Traits that you may (or sometimes must) take during character creation, to give your character a leg up that's appropriate for their people.

Background

A Background is a non-optional statistic that can be thought of as a trait and influences your Aptitudes as well as certain other character properties. For the most part, setting developers should keep backgrounds as open-ended as possible, so that they can apply to a broad range of similar characters. Your character isn't their past, but our pasts have a way of sticking with us and helping to inform our presents, for good or ill.

Occupation

Occupations apply to all characters, though for most PCs, they stop applying almost immediately upon the start of a campaign (if appropriate). Your occupation informs your starting wealth, offers an extra set of skill points to be used for a specific subset of the available skills (your Occupation Skills), and provides other minor benefits such as Connections and an ongoing income - provided you keep up with your occupation once you start adventuring, that is.

Statistics

While the above character attributes were all largely lyrical, there's a large set of character properties that are more numerical in nature.

Aptitudes

Aptitudes are the most core set of statistics in Tarnished Tale, and work together to broadly describe your entire character as a starting point. Many traits are gated behind certain aptitude minimums, and most statistics are derived directly from them.

While your setting developer may rename or add additional aptitudes, this is not intended and should not be encouraged as a practice. The Seven Aptitudes are, briefly:

• Strength, representing raw physical strength;
• Agility, representing finesse and fine motor control;
• Hardiness, representing physical endurance and capacity;
• Analysis, representing the mental capacity for study, inspection, inference, and the general application of "hard" logic;
• Presence, representing the mental capacity for "taking up" social space;
• Intuition, representing the mental capacity for leaps of logic, emotional intelligence, hunches, and the appearance of wisdom, and;
• Willpower, representing the mental capacity for emotional stability, endurance, and tolerance.

Each aptitude has two values: its actual value (called the Aptitude Score), and that value multiplied by 5 (called the Aptitude Check). This is to facilitate the use of aptitudes in checks.

Pools

Directly derived from the aptitudes are Pools. Pools vary in both name and utility but all fundamentally operate the same way, being derived from their "base Aptitude" by some formula, usually a simple division operation. The most common of all these pools is Hit Points. Other settings may add or remove pools associated with the other aptitudes as appropriate, as their most common use is for systems of magic.

Pools differ from most other skills and statistics in that their value is not purely static - only their "origin" value. They are literally pools of points to be spent (the pool itself will explain how the points are spent) that recover slowly over time.

Skills

A character has access to any of a number of Skills. Skills have a variety of properties:

• Whether or not they can be used without training (the investment of points, on purpose, into the skill);
• Advancement Tally, being a count of available opportunities for skill advancement for that specific skill;
• Base score, being the starting score for the skill (which is sometimes an absolute value, or sometimes an expression in the general form of a multiplier and an associated attribute), and;
• Current score, being the character's actual score in the skill.

Skill advancement is the primary means by which characters improve and is therefore the main metric through which landmark advancement is bracketed.

While many base skills are included in this wiki, also consult your setting documentation as some may not be available or others not considered here may be added. Also work with your Facilitator to determine if a skill will actually be useful to you based on the intended gameplay style of the campaign.

Finally, skills could further be subdivided into three main groups:

• Combat Skills - chiefly fighting styles, specific weapon skills, and the Dodge Skill.
• Magic Skills - if available in your campaign, will likely have more specific rules attached to them than other skills, and;
• World Skills, which is more or less any skill that isn't a combat skill or a magic skill.

Other Mechanics

A few other mechanics apply to direct properties that a character possesses. The following is an incomplete list.

Traits

Traits are special properties selected during character creation (or otherwise acquired) that grant a passive ability to the character or otherwise modify some other existing ability of theirs. Often a trait has a requirement to be able to "take" that trait, such as membership in a certain heritage or possession of a certain skill score or aptitude score.

Connections

Connections is a social mechanic intended to let Facilitators occasionally short cut backstory and personality creation for NPCs by allowing certain actions to be resolved as a purely mechanical exercise, and summarize the story of the encounter once the outcome is known. For the most part, connections are yet-to-be met individuals from a character's past who are able to provide a minor favour. The usage of this mechanic is entirely optional, but it can be convenient for investigative campaigns where the party might suddenly have an idea that the Facilitator did not plan in advance for.

Abilities

Abilities are effectively traits that grant some kind of special action to the character. These are also often setting specific, but a few general abilities are presented as part of the ruleset. In the default systems of magic, individual spells are often recorded as abilities. While abilities are not always magical they are intended to be a bit fantastical, and accordingly the activation of an ability almost always has a cost, usually in the form of spending against a pool.