CHARACTER CREATION
Arm yourself for adventure in the Five Realms!
This chapter covers step-by-step character creation. Grab a pencil and download the Mythmaker character sheet to start.
This chapter covers step-by-step character creation. Grab a pencil and download the Mythmaker character sheet to start.
You create your own Mythmaker character in 6 steps, noting your choices on your character sheet, which can be found here:
The first and most important step is to think about what kind of character you want to play in your game. Mythmaker campaigns are about swashbuckling adventures in a doomed world with many commoners just trying to get by. Think about what your character wants to achieve in the world. Where do they come from? How do they look? What is their personality like? Would you enjoy a night at a bar with them? How about finishing a school project? Are they clever and mischievous? Strong but dumb? And so on.
Work with your GM to make your character fit into the world they've made.
Your character's ancestry determines which people they call their own, whether it's the diverse and ambitious humans, otherworldly elves, greedy dwarves, or any other people who inhabit the Five Realms. Your ancestry provides you with your base game statistics, such as your size, speed, available languages, and attribute boosts (and sometimes even flaws!).
If your ancestry grants you attribute boosts and flaws that don't quite fit the vision of your character, you can instead choose to gain just two free attribute boosts. These can be allocated to two different attributes of your choice.
Your ancestry also grants you your selection of heritages—cultural and hereditary benefits associated with your people. You can pick heritages in any combination you like to fit your vision of your character.
Your character's class is the most important choice you make. A class indicates which skills and training they have and will improve upon as an adventurer. All classes can be found in the menu, which also has subpages, called chapters, that describe how to play that class in detail. All classes have up to 10 levels you can obtain, which provide you different features at each level.
Your class provides you with bonus health, recoveries, and skill training, as well as an attribute boost that indicates your class's key attribute. You also gain your first class features at 1st level.
At first level, you will also have to choose
Steel, spirit, shadow—your strength has a shape.
Your character channels their power through a distinct philosophy of conflict. These philosophies are called virtues, and are gained based on your class. These specialization define how your character fights, whether through disciplined weaponwork or world-shaping magic.
Your available specializations are determined by your class choice, earned through training and revelation. They fall into two broad types:
Martial Disciplines: Focused on force, weaponry, and precision. Whether you pick frontline style warrior abilities, or scheming styles that use Stamina to fuel their techniques.
Mystic Circles: Rooted in arcane, divine, or primordial power. These techniques reshape the world using Mana.
Every class draws power from a core resource, such as Stamina or Mana. Your class determines which resource you use and how you gain it.
You spend your core resource to fuel techniques from your specialization. Most classes also gain bonus benefits when they accumulate large amounts of their resource—so you’ll often find yourself choosing between sudden bursts of power and steady pressure over time.
Each specialization grants you a signature attack—a basic, reliable ability that costs no resources to use. These attacks form the foundation of your combat style.
For martial disciplines, they often build on the Strike basic ability in some way. Signature attacks from mystic circles call on your magic potency for their damage.
You can have any number of signature attacks at the same time, and whenever a feature lets you use a signature attack, you can choose freely among any of them. If a feature dictates you must make a melee, ranged or other signature attack, and you don't have that weapon type on hand, your Strike uses the damage scaling for improvised weapons.
In Mythmaker, your gear isn’t just inventory—it defines your combat style.
A kit represents not only the weapons and armor you use, but the training and stance that shape how you fight. Each specialization offers you one or several kits of your choice. Unless you have a class feature that says otherwise, you can only benefit from one kit at a time.
Your arms and armor are described in broad categories, leaving you free to decide what your equipment looks like—a serrated dueling knife, a hand-carved war club, or a skyforged glaive—so long as it fits your equipment's category.
You can change your kit whenever you take a rest. New training, found equipment, a change in mindset—whatever the reason, you’re free to adapt your fighting style to match your strategy or story.
When you've chosen your class, it's time to finalize your attributes. Each attribute starts at a base of 0, and after factoring in all attribute boosts (and flaws), you get your final array. During this step, you can raise an additional two different attributes by 1. You can't change a single attribute multiple times during one step. For example, if an ancestry gives you an attribute flaw, you can't raise that attribute with a free boost from your ancestry.
Your ancestry provides you with your max starting health. Add your class's health bonus to it. Whenever you gain a level after first, your max health increases again by the amount determined by your class health bonus.
Your recovery rate is a third of your max health.
Your recovery rate is a third of your max health.
This characteristic determines how fast your character can move and is expressed in meters. Your ancestry determines your speed, but it may be altered by your equipment, ancestry, heritages, or features from your class.
Determine the languages you know from your character's ancestry. Typically they know one or two languages plus a number of languages from a list determined by your ancestry equal to your Reason score. You don't suddenly forget languages if you have a negative Reason score. If your Reason score is 0 or lower, you simply don't learn any new languages.