Character Creation

Genesys is as heavy-weight as D&D. Read the rules and create a character if you want, or create a partial character (this online character sheet could help), or I’ll build one for you based on what you’re interested in playing.

Appearance, personality, background.

The system encourages generating new careers and archetypes (classes), so it’s pretty easy to build one around a character concept.

Include a strength, a flaw, a desire and a fear. These sometimes matter mechanically. Examples start on page 46 of the rule book.

Brawn, Agility, Intellect, Cunning, Willpower and Presence.

You generally start with one at 1, one at 3 and the rest at 2. You can raise these with your starting XP (play around in the online character sheet). They’re extraordinarily difficult to raise after character creation, so the game recommends you spend most of your starting XP on these.

List 8 things things your character is good at (relevant to your career/archetype), and choose 4 out of those 8 to be a little better at. I’ll turn these into your skills (skills are cheaper to advance than non-skills). You can find a generic list in the online character sheet, but feel free to make up new ones. If you want to be really good at a skill or two, let me know that too.

Special notes:

• If you want magic skills, I’d like to use a more specialized system than the built-in one. To keep the learning curve down, let’s say that all the D&D wizard schools and cleric types are skills.
• There’s a skill called “Knowledge.” Instead of taking that, choose a very broad category of knowledge (for example, “science” or “the world we live on”). Each broad category is a skill.

If you want talents (kind of weak feats), you can pick them from the book. There’s no need to start with talents. They’re easy to get later.

You have a suitcase containing whatever your character thought they'd want or need during the last couple hours in Apex. List out what you have, and you can always use a Story Point to add something reasonable.

You were also given a faux leather satchel containing some basic survival equipment:

• A 6×6 inch square of cloth, which unfolds into a tent when shaken out.
• A thin, relatively soft foam mat. It rolls up into a 1“ cylinder, and only expands when unrolled.
• Fifteen self-heating meals in rectangular plastic boxes. Bland and dense.
• A plastic water bottle which opens with a fingerprint sensor.
• A belt whose buckle is a silvery ball which contains a portable force field. It gives you +5 soak, but if anyone rolls two advantages against you on an attack, it is depleted.
• An inaccurate laser pistol designed to only shoot forward or down. Always add one setback die to your pool, or three when shooting at any upward angle. Damage 7, crit 4. Inaccurate 1 (3 when pointed higher than level).