Character Creation

Ability Scores consist of Attributes, Skills, and Passives. Each can have up to a value of 20. These are fundamental statistics that dictate the potential capabilities of your character. There are five Attributes, thirteen Skills, and six Passives.

  Attributes

Attributes consist of Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Intelligence (INT), Charisma (CHA), and Luck (LUK). Each of these start at 1 unless  otherwise specified.

   Skills

Skills consist of Clerical, Culture, Guile,  Leathercraft, Marksmanship, Martial Combat,  Mechanical, Medicine, Memory, Metallurgy, Mystic, Survival, and Woodcraft. Each start at 1 unless otherwise specified.

  Passives

Passives consist of Character Level, Hit Points (HP), En-Counter, Encumbrance, Recovery Points, Menace, and Movement Speed. HP, Recovery Points, and Movement Speed are bound to the Playable Species. En-Counter points and Menace are  initially set to 0.

Information on Weapons and Items can be found in respective sections of this Wiki.  For Manual Selection, each Level One character may start with the following inventory:

• One Weapon valued at 500 Gold, or less, from the weapons list.  Exceptions and additional weapons should be discussed with the GM for approval.  If a ranged weapon is chosen, one unit of the respective ammunition is also applied to the character's inventory.

• Three General Gear items should be selected and added to the character's inventory from the items list.  

• Light Armor or Medium Armor  may be added to the character's inventory. 

• 100 Gold Coins.

A character’s backstory should answer the following questions:

• What do other player characters see when they meet each other?

• How did the character come to be involved in the adventure or pre-adventure hook?

• Why did the character come here?

• What aspirations does the character hope to achieve?

• Where are they from?

• Who do they know? Do they have any allies or enemies?

It’s also good form not to unnecessarily   divulge all of this information right away. Just as in real life situations, characters probably wouldn’t express their entire lives’ experiences, their hopes and dreams, their fears, and who they know all in the first meeting.

OK, maybe we do know someone who does that—but again, it’s good form to avoid that.

Born Again is the fastest way of getting started by putting almost the entire character creation process in the hands of fate… By dice (our favorite thing).

This is the easiest choice for new GMs, new players, or tables that just want to add some chaos to the mix. The benefit of Born Again is that the character is provided with a set Inventory based on the Species result. The  process for a level one character is as follows:

Each player rolls 1d8 to determine their Species and creates a name after learning the outcome. GMs adding new species not detailed in this handbook will need to determine which dice to roll and what the rolled results represent from the table of Species available to the players. If a Player rolls a value not associated with a Species, have them re-roll the dice until they roll a species with a respective value of the dice roll.  Since a d8 die is not advertised as a typical die associated with SURGE!, alternate methods may be chosen such as ripping up small pieces of paper having written numbers 1-7 on them to be chosen at random by each player - returning the number to the pool once chosen to give each player a fair chance at playing any of the 7 supported species.

To use this method as written below, Players roll 1d8, use the result to select a Playable Species from the options below, and then follow the prompt to roll against respective species tables found in that section to determine their chosen trait. 

GMs with new players may want to read the following aloud, for some added theatrics: