All right, Innmates, I’m back and ready to get the evolution of our characters underway. Did everyone show up with their dice, character sheets, and all that good stuff?

 

Yeah?

 

Good… Got those rough-shod ideas regarding your characters at the ready, too, I hope… we may be using them sooner than you think.

 

Okay, if you’ll remember from the last installment, I’ve decided that I’m going to whip up a level 7 character for a 3.5e style campaign - a mith’ganni assassin named Nyx Shyndyn…

 

Oooooh! Assassin!

 

 Oooooh! Level Seven!

 

… I know, right? An elven assassin with seven character levels sounds like it should be a super-cool character, doesn’t it? Pretty decent set of feats and skills and abilities, yeah? Could even be a fairly challenging if not deadly opponent if he was made an NPC and plopped down in a campaign and sent after the one or more of the PCs…

 

Woooo! Let’s play!!!

 

…Not yet… I need you to set aside the whole level 7 thing for a while, first. You can’t get to 7th level, after all, without looking at levels 1 thru 6, and to build a good, rich, playable character, you’re going to want to look really closely at each one.

 

Take Nyx… He’s an assassin at his 7th character level but, since assassin isn’t a “base class” in the ruleset we’re using… and since, realistically, no one is “born an assassin”… we’ve got to pick an available class that will get us to where we’re trying to go, and make it believable and true to the character to boot…

 

Hey! Drop the dice, skippy! We ain’t there yet!

 

…If your goal is for the character to take on a “prestige” or “advanced” class at some point during his/her evolution, I want you to take a look at the prerequisites for that class even before you roll your base stats. It’s always a good idea to have a firm grasp on what you need to have before you go charging dice-long into trying to get there. So, that in mind, to be an assassin at 7th level, Nyx will need to meet the following requirements:

 

 

Not too challenging, really… those skill requirements should be fairly easy to reach by level 7 and you can just pick your alignment, right?

 

Sure… you can just pick your alignment where the finished character is concerned, I guess, but, to get some depth in there, you really need to consider how that alignment is going to apply to your character. Take Nyx for example, I knew, starting out that he was going to be either Lawful or Neutral Evil but, at the same time, I don’t imagine that, in his early days, he was inclined much to evil. He was a hunter/warrior (we’ll use the ranger character class to represent this) in a small, nomadic clan of plains-dwellers that typically went out of their way to avoid humans (and to a lesser extent, other races, as well). They’re a dying race, content to keep to themselves and keep their clans going for as long as their gods see fit to make possible, and the most “evil” they may commit in their day to day lives is moving their herds of horses through the range of another mith’ganni clan… Nope… Highly doubtful that Nyx was evil to begin with… in fact, I’d say the “average” mith’ganni tended towards true Neutral… we’ll figure out how to slip evil in there later.

 

Okay… now pick up those dice! Our first step on the path to our assassin is a true neutral, first level, mith’ganni ranger… Stat generation is 4d6 drop the lowest and, since I’m feeling generous and chatty, rerolls on anything lower than 10, okay?

 

Go!

 

Nice! Fairly good set of rolls there… a pair of 13’s, a 12, a 17, an 18, and a 16! Impressive! (Aren’t you glad you go to reroll that 6 and 9?) Let’s allocate those to our base stats… don’t forget to take into consideration your chosen race’s modifiers when doing this, of course. It’s really tempting to throw that 18 into something like strength or dexterity in an attempt to make the guy a devastating melee combatant or a deadly threat at range buuuuut the mith’ganni have a -4 CHA adjustment and, when you get to be an assassin, you’re going to need a decent charisma score in order to pull of some of the more complicated jobs, aren’t you? There’s also a -2 INT modifier to look at on the downside and, where pluses are a factor, we’ve got +2’s working on DEX and CON.

 

Yep… we’ll be able to work with these… that 18 isn’t going into STR or DEX, though, we’re sacrificing that to Charisma right now! Here’s how Nyx’s stats were allocated (and why I chose to allocate them that way):

 

 

So, our mith’ganni “assassin” starts as a ranger with the following base stats: Str: 13, Dex:19, Con: 14, Int:14, Wis: 13, and Cha:14… respectable… *nod* Now, away go the dice… Time to throw in a little detail work and, since I tend to overlook language selection if I don’t do it way early in the creation process I like to get that out of the way once the stats are set…

 

Why bother with languages, especially when everyone I game with speaks the same language as I do, anyway, you ask?

 

Flavor, my friend. Depth of character. And hey, there’s been more than one GM in history who let a whole party get their shiny butts get handed to ‘em because of a language barrier, hasn’t there?

 

…So let’s look at languages, shall we? By default, Nyx gets Common and Elven (Mith’ganni Dialect) as granted languages. That +2 mod from INT gives him the potential to speak/comprehend two more, though, doesn’t it? Hmmmm… what to choose? Draconic? Nah… doubtful that Nyx has encountered a dragon, let alone knows how to converse in it’s language… Let’s see… he’s spent his life, so far, wandering the steppes with his people… Gnolls aren’t uncommon in grasslands and such, right? And, maybe, just maybe, his clan had regular dealings with some of their forest-dwelling cousins? Gnoll and Sylvan, then… entirely more plausible for a ranger than Draconic and Abyssal, yes?

 

See? Quick and painless… it’s all done, languages are out of the way and some modicum of thought regarding the character’s background helped you make the choices. Envisioning Nyx (in lighter days) chatting it up with a pack of Gnolls or a band of wood elves? Yeah… me too… Don’t get too distracted, though… keep those thinking caps on because we’re looking at our skills next…

 

At level 1, Nyx has 32 skill points to spend… sometime between his first level of ranger and his first level of assassin, he needs to come up with the 8 ranks in Hide and Move Silently and 4 ranks in Disguise, right? So let’s knock that down first. Hide and Move Silently are both “class skills” for rangers (gotta be able to hide from enemies and hunt your food, don’t ya? Maybe the hide skill is even applicable to being able to set up the clan’s camp without it being easily detectable, right?) anyway, class skill means you can beef out up to four ranks each on these, right now. Disguise, on the other hand, is not a class skill for rangers and, unless I want to spend 2 points for a single rank in the skill, I’m probably better off not trying to add anything to that just now.. Besides, who would Nyx need to disguise himself <i>from</i> at this early stage… he only knows his own people and has passing contact with only a few others outside of that… *shrug*… Disguise comes later then… let’s look at what else we can do with the 24 points we’ve got remaining for this first level.

 

Since the mith’ganni are a “horsing folk” it makes sense to throw some points at Handle Animal and Ride, doesn’t it? Besides, the mith’ganni get a racial adjustment of +2 to both of these skills, why not take advantage of the extra bonus? This early on, though, I’ll be conservative and buy 2 ranks of each and maybe add more if I still have anything left… I want to consider the other skills that “young Nyx” might have learned, though. Listen, Spot, and Search all come to mind as things a tribal hunter/warrior would make use of on a day-to day basis…Survival and Use Rope are good and appropriate “class skills,” too, for a hunter… and speaking of Hunter, why not throw a skill point or two at Profession (Hunter)? Hunting and defense of his kinsmen are his roles in the clan, after all… and what ranger wouldn’t have some nature knowledge? He’d need to know how to read the earth, pick the stuff that’s good to eat over the stuff that’s poisionous, understand the migratory patterns of animals, identify the healing properties of certain herbs, perhaps… Hey… Healing! There’s another one!… what else? I’ve got 5 points left… Climb and Jump! Rangers climb and jump, right?

 

Cool! All done. After all is said and done, and due consideration given to the life Nyx has lead thus far, the 32 skill points have been spent and here’s what we’ve ended up with:

 

 

32 points went pretty quickly, I guess… but if those skills were slid in front of me with nothing else, it’d be pretty easy to determine that they belong to a ranger, huh? Plus… we’ve already cut the Move Silently and Hide pre-reqs for our assassin class in half. Now we can go on to Feats and Abilities, I suppose….

 

A lot of your characters starting feats and abilities are going to be determined by your race and/or class selections, of course… Nyx is an elf and a ranger at first level so, by “default” he’s granted the following: Simple and Martial weapons proficiencies, Armor Proficiency (light), Shield proficiency, and Track… gets to select a first “Favored Enemy”, and, finally, after all of that, gets one more Feat to select from a huge list of possibilities…

 

So, Favored Enemy first? Okay… easy enough… Nyx picks Humans. In the world he lives in Humans are engaged in the wholesale subjugation or destruction of “inferior races”… Aside from some inter-clan skirmishes and perhaps the occasional run-in with a cantankerous gnoll, the mith’ganni had no enemies until the humans started their genocidal tear.

 

That leaves us with one more feat to select… what say we pick “Stealthy”? Them breeders ain’t exactly sharp eared as an elf but it don’t hurt to be a bit sneaky when you’re planning a preemptive strike, right? Plus, it oughta help our future career in assassination. ;)

 

And, that’s it, Innmates! Level 1 is done and out of the way! If, as is the goal of this whole exercises, you have considered your character’s history and background as you’ve made your selections and allocations, you should already have polished off some of those rough-ideas you started with and, on the fly, be able to explain where your character’s skills came from and how they relate to who and what he or she is… and BONUS: while you’ve been contemplating that you’ve likely planted the seeds of evolution and have at least an inkling of how the character is going to grow, huh?

 

So, with level 1 laid as our foundation, we know that Nyx Shyndyn was pretty much your quintessential ranger early on. Mix all of the stats and skills in with the campaign world and race info, and you’ve got plenty of fodder for pulling a pretty detailed and, perhaps more importantly, believable backstory out of the soup already… You should be able to tell tales about the exploits of your character, know his relationship with his own people, and his relationships with people/creatures not of his particular breed and, with that, my friends, you’re ready to keep building on those blocks that you’ve just cemented in as your character’s past!

 

It’s break time for ol’ Uncle Run With Scissors, now… In our next installment we’ll see how Nyx develops through the next few levels and what new story snippets we can add to his background as a result, eh?

 

Go… marvel at your characters… have a coffee or a chai… I need to blink… There will be more later… I promise.