One element that seems to have arisen from trying to get a PBM version of my campaign running on RPGCrossing, is that people struggle with the very basics of "conceptualizing" a character that lives in the same world as they currently do .. despite the questionnaire which is designed to actually take them through the process.

I have actually done this for a couple of the NPCs that you will meet early in the game - or if you are really up for a challenge are available as PCs. I have also done this for another game that I was/am thinking of running at some point when I can line all my thoughts up on how to do it.

This currently conceptual game uses the Immortals-City of Bones film and the universe as its setting, but given that none of my potential players would be familiar with this setting, I needed a way of introducing them to it. My solution was to allow them to pick from one of 8 partially pre-generated characters. The premise behind these characters were they were Shadow Hunters that had been secretly hidden by a group within the Conclave to preserve them against the demonic forces working within the Conclave. These children would have been hidden around the world, so as not to be your average "White European" character, and even the one that did fit that bill hailed from Southern Poland. The others were scattered around the world, India, China, Malaysia, Australia, North East Africa, and South America.

Given I already had an oriental NPC, I didn't want to use that as an example of how to conceptualize a character, so I'm going to use the "South American" character as my example, at least in terms of where they come from. After that everything is strictly related to the AiRP setting as laid out in the introduction, so a character born between 1st October 1991 and 31st March 1995 making them between 18 and 21 years old for a campaign starting in May 2013. It is probably worth noting at this point, that when I came up with the idea for the campaign it was early 2013 so this would have been "real time" if I'd run it at that point.

Now when I created  this conceptual character originally I knew very little about the southern tip of south America, I just wanted somewhere where a character could be hidden, somewhere out of the way. My first step was to pull up Google Maps, and scroll round to the southern tip of South America, and look what possible towns and cities I had to play with. This also allowed me to use Wikapedia to add some detail using its regional/county/state entries and from that it's city statistics. for various reasons I also wanted the character to come from Chile rather than Argentina. After a certain amount of research I settled on Punta Arenas, Chile, which is pretty much the most southern city in South America, well Chile at least.

So that was then, and this is now. All we're sticking with is that the character comes from Punta Arenas, in Chile. All the relevant research indicates that this is a very strongly Catholic region of the world, so we're going to have to take that into account. Whilst thinking about all this, i.e what to do in terms of the character  as I didn't want to go into specific areas and deal with things I know about "In game" that are on the questionnaire, I initially couldn't decide what to do - I knew what I didn't want and what wasn't going to fit, so not a shapeshifter, most likely not a magic user, definitely nothing to do with martial arts, and definitely not anything relate to Mogwai.

If I went with a female character, then I'd have to either make her strongly adherent to a Catholic upbringing or rebel against it, and I have enough "rebel" type characters and NPCs already. My next thought was if I were going to generate a male character, then what sort, socially gregarious perhaps. It was at this point that I thought of "The Fonz" from "Happy Days" - go look it up if you're not familiar. This proved to be my "ker ching" moment, the "hook" for the character.

Going with the gregarious "Fonz" type character, this would mean he would always have a group of friends around him, certainly a group of girls, 2 or 3 maybe, well lets go with 3. If we add 2 of 3 guys as well then we're going to need a few more girls to round out the group, so lets say 7 girls total, and 3 guys. However, I don't want to have all the girls the same, so I'm going to have one staunchly adhere to Catholic principles, and I'm going to have our character staunchly defend her rights to do this, so that none of the other  tease her or are spiteful to her as a result. I'm also going to say that 3 of the girls plus our 4th are staunchly attached to him, to the point he's sleeping with 3 of them. This is also going to mean he's in the older age range we're allowed.

We can also resolve a couple of other things relatively easily at this point. There are lots of RPGs out there that have height/weight generation tables, but we don't actually need them, at least for height. 5ft plus 3d6 gives us a height range of 5'3" to 6'6" with an average of 5'11". Using a simple online dice roller gives 11, so he's 5'11. We'll actually no.. I want him to stand out a bit more, so I'm going to make him 6'3". Also for want of being different I'm going to make him a "Red Head" (which of course occurs in canon - three of the elder Amberites are red heads). Weight is a little more difficult, but just requires finding a height/mass lookup table online.Using this one https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/height-weight-chart/, I'm just going to pick mid point in the "healthy" weight band, so 183lbs(83Kg). Given he's a red head, and red hair is genetically recessive, I'm also going to give him blue eyes, which again are recessive.

I mentioned above that I didn't want to deal with certain things in relation to the questionnaire, and whilst thinking on this, and on the Fonz, whose "hall mark" was his leather jacket, it occurred to me that the selection from the list of options could easily be an item/pet, and in his case, some sort of "smart" jacket. It'd be really cool if it could change to match different fashion styles, and change to accommodate massively changing weather conditions. Beyond that maybe some form of armour protection..

You'll note that I've ignored, and am for the time being ignoring education, mainly because this requires me to go research the education system in Chile. I've also not exactly decide on what sort of career I want for him. Given where he is in the world there a lots of nature reserves, lots of sea, and a lot of volcanoes, given we're just off the "Ring of Fire" and not far from "Tierra Del Fuego". There is also a lot of "tourism" related jobs looking after both tourists and research scientists involved with all aspects of the above. Time to go re-read Wikipedia....

So after a couple of hours of reading and thinking, I'm going to change things slightly, and move his home town from Punta Arenas(pop 127,000) to Puerto Natales (pop 18,500). This is because it fits better with the "Family" business being a hotel/riding establishment catering to tourist holiday makers since the big draw in this part of Chile is the Torres del Paine National Park. It also crystallizes a few thoughts on what his education career might be. If he's grown up around horses then his likely career choice is going to be a Vet, so he's going to be at University studying Veterinary Medicine, so back to wikipedia..

The most prestigious university is "Universidad de Chile" in Santiago, with the Faculty of Veterinary and Animal Sciences (Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias y Pecuarias- Universidad De Chile) on the "Universidad de Chile, Campus Sur" in La Pinta. I'm assuming that their Veterinary Degrees as certified by the World Centenary Association are 5 years in length. If I make our currently nameless character 21, then he'd be in his 3rd year..

You should also have noted by this point I'm not doing things in the order they are laid out on the questionnaire.. in lots of ways its like doing an exam - read the whole paper through first and then answer the questions you can do easily, before attempting any of the harder ones.. you'll note he neither has a name yet nor have I worked out any family sibling status.

Whilst we're considering the questionnaire lets see what we have left to cover off... Well there's his attributes to rank, and his internet presence to sort out. We also have to decide on his hobbies, how he gained his jacket, whether there are any other important concepts we wish to note, and this Rodian War stuff and it's effects.

I suppose the easiest of this list to pick off is ranking his attributes. We'll just go with (after a couple of re-arrangements - and ignoring that I actually know how they translate) Intellect:2 Fitness:1 Health:3 Competitiveness:4

It's probably worth pointing out here that if you put them in an order which doesn't fit with everything else you write about your character or which comes out in responses to questions you're likely to get when you submit your questionnaire then I'll tell you so you can re-order them to make more sense..

Given he's gregarious he's likely to have a very high social media presence, but we also need to remember it's 2013 not 2021 so  Instagram 3, Twitter 3, Facebook 10, and university email 10.

I'm now going to deliberately complicate things to illustrate a point. I've already alluded to there being a "family" business. This indicates at least one parent and siblings. The complication I'm going to throw in here is to make him the middle child of 5. Why does this cause a complication, well because out-of-character (OOC) we know that our biological father has to be an Amberite - the introduction says so. This means that if all of the other 4 siblings have the same father then something must have occurred that caused our conception by a different father, and it's an event we'll need to come up with a plausible explanation for. It's much easier for the eldest child, only child, or youngest child.

So lets look at resolving our sibling issue. We know as the middle child, fitting the maximum age, that we would have to have been born in October 1991. If we assume minimum reasonable pregnancy rates, of a child every 2 years, then at a minimum our elder siblings would have been born in 1989 and 1987. The problem then becomes, how to explain the difference in fathers, as Chile didn't implement a divorce law until 2004. The defacto solution of course is to assume that the father of the elder siblings died either as the result of an accident of some description or due to a sudden serious illness or medical condition. If we go with this then we need to push the birth dates of the elder siblings back by a couple of years to allow a suitable period of mourning, so 1987 and 1985.

Next up would be resolving our own conception, maybe some sort of short romance, holiday romance may be, and actually that would fit with the peak tourist season being in the Chilean Summer which is October to April. Resolving the 2 younger siblings then becomes relatively easy, some years later, our mother remarries and has 2 further children, lets say she remarries in 1997 and has children in 1998 and 2001.

We've now dealt with most of our outstanding issues, the two that are left being how we got our jacket and the Rodian War and its affects. Dealing with the jacket is easy, we received it "parcel post" on our 12th birthday. The parcel was addressed to us, had no sender or return details, and had a note inside "Happy Birthday.. Sorry I can't be there in person, hopefully next year... It should come in handy if you need protection from the elements". We're making the assumption here that the jacket came from our father, and something happened to him in the Rodian Wars, that meant he couldn't make it to our 13th birthday in 2004.

This leads us onto the last subject we need to resolve. The Rodian War and it's effect. How adventurous do we want to be? Surprisingly, not 1 person to date has opted for the Amber Earth as described in the Rodian War definition, neither has anyone opted for the Mizzurian Earth. I had 1 person in my FtF campaign actually bother an describe a very different world where the Cuban Missile crisis results in a limited nuclear exchange, destroying the New York/Washington/Chesapeake Bay area, New Orleans, and San Francisco/Los Angeles, along with Moscow, Kiev, Gdansk, and a couple of other strategic Russian cities. This resulted in a completely different "Silicon Revolution" where almost all of the known modern players didn't exist. Mizzurian did but it was a very minor 2 bit software house, which had very interesting repercussions. Most people go completely tame.. "Not much happened, and no real or disastrous consequences".

And on that subject I'm going to conclude, as I don't particularly want to re-write the Mizzurian Earth saga again from a more personal perspective given the character comes from Chile...