Chapter Two: Characters
or, this is going to take a while
Chapter Two begins how these things really should always begin: with an explanation of what everything you're about to read means. There are of course races, which they kindly tell us we'll learn more about in the campaign setting section and which do not seem to entail any duck-related creatures, Professions, which we'll read about in the “How to create a character” section and Basic Attributes. What we're seeing is a D&D gold standard STR/CON/DEX/INT/KAR and PSY (Psyche), the last of which also suggests that Magiker (Magis) are dual-attribute dependent from the get-go, but we'll find out later how true that may be. In there, they've also shoved Storlek (STO), or, Size. Also, SMI (Smidighet, agility) seems to not only account for your initiative, speed, reflexes and such, but also your perception and your to-hit score, which leads us once again to guess that while now casters need two attributes, beatsticks need three, which doesn't really surprise anyone at this point. Note: though it's really quite obvious what words the abbreviations come from, it's not excplicitly stated. Minor gripe.
Then we go for Skills, of which there are two types, Primary Skills and Secondary Skills, the first of which is a number between 1 and 20 and apparently corresponds to roughly skills that everyone knows – everyone's granted a single point in things like Jump and Spot and those numbers are modified by your Basic Attributes and can never exceed them, and then you have your Secondary Skills, which you can somehow purchase (we'll soon find out how) and which you don't know from start and which CAN exceed your Basic Attribtute score. Eventually, we have Professional Skills, familiar to us later on as class skills, in which you are given a single poäng the moment you choose your Profession. Skills are rolled with 1T20(tärning, die), roll under your skill score to succeed.
It seems simple now that I'm writing it down, but here's something you may not have noticed: RPGs are a fucking thesaurus for the words “ability” and “trait.” Reading this shit in Swedish made me realise that there are like fifty fucking variants of the words in D&D alone, which we never really pay any attention to, since we've been playing these games either in our native languages or since we were the size of a fire extinguisher.
This man's got a serious grundegenskapsvärden in STY, and you shouldn't call him a thesaurus
Then we have magic, which, for now, seems fairly simple. You have three schools, Animism, which deals with druid shit, Elemental Magic, which abides to the four-element logic, and Mentalism, which from the start is said to include, for example, both flight and invisibility, so we already know that everyone's going to play a Mentalist. Now, you have skill points in your school, and after using INT to learn spells, the School Skill determines the difficulty of the spells you can cast – ranging from 1 to 20. So, jack up that PSY score, my friends.
Here we have an empty character sheet, but strangely and atypically for this book, no suggestion on how to recreate it. I was assuming they'd say you can buy additional sheets from the same store you bought the book from or that the most rolig way is to draw it up with all your friends using crayons.
How to make a character
Bet you can't play as any of these guys
When given an example on chargen, in cursive, they tell of little Peter, who wants to make a powerful barbarian, a little like Conan the Barbarian. Copyright infrigement you say? Nope, Target is just demonstrating how they bought Bob Howard's literary IP. That's right, somebody paid money for that shit.
Now, the character creation has at least 11 steps, of which 9 include the possibility to pay Backround Points to get more than average qualities. BP is apparently kinda the starting level, and it's “nominally” 125. Race, extra power and stuff costs BP, and you can trade some of your perks for BP again, creating this strange starting power shop effect, which we actually recognise from D&D, down to the point where you can buy super power for your Mage with age and race.
Next,
Race
We begin with a continuation to Lilla Peter's story, where he's struggling to choose a race for his Barbarian. Yes fucking really. Who the fuck is editing this thi- oh.
There's a table with the basic atteribute pluses and minuses for the player races and attached are the BP costs. Around it are brief summaries of the races – the rest is explained in the campaign setting section.
What we immediately notice is a very 90's amount of fucking elves. Out of the 12 races presented, 4 are goddamn elves, and all of them are fucking better than you, they're the Dimalv (they mean Mist elves, but I like to call them dim elves), Halvalv (half-elves, or the sound Kaelik makes when he gets a rage stroke), Ljusalv (Bright elves, let's bet money they're a right bunch of assholes) and the Stadsalv (City elf, who exist only to make us wonder, are there no elves in the fucking forest?) The most costly of these is the “ancient” or “first elf,” the dimalv, who are the progenitor elf, who are 65 BP out of 125, which nets you a +5 to PSY and +3 to INT and plus 1 or 2 to everything else. It's hard to say how badass that is, but I know we were told Basic Attributes “normally” range from 1 to 20. PSY and INT are the easiest and the cheapest to increase throughout this process, as we'll soon learn.
Then there's the standard package of Dvärg, Goblin (who are described as “comical” from the start, so I probably hate all goblin players with the same seething vitriol as I have for the shit-eating nimrods who play kents), Människa, Troll, Orch and eventually, Högländare, who are now a different race, because they are from Sweden. Surprisingly, they're not any smarter than “humans.”
Even Lilla Peter wants to play a Highlander
The more exotic choices are Drakonit and Wongos. Drakonit are big, smart crocodile people, who are not at all barbarians, and from the summary, not at all interesting. We'll see later on. Wongoses are the Loser of the Day. They are ugly little people, a sort of a mix between halfling and parody Jew. We await anxiously on how terribly they'll be described later on, but for now, they also get the “comical” tag.
Little people are rolig as balls!