Characters

How to submit your character idea When you are ready, you'll need to send your character idea to the GMs via the internet character submission form - Log in. You won't be able to play until the GMs have approved your character, so submit it sooner rather than later!

Preferred characters

At the moment the composition of the game is fairly well balanced. New characters can come from any race, country or hierarchy. We don't have any clanks yet, so it may be worth considering being one of these powerful steam powered constructs.

Who is in the game already? count Country Hierarchy Branch 1 Florin University Physics and Steam 1 Florin University Biology and Life science 1 Florin University Schooling (all others) 1 Florin Military Army 2 Florin Military Airwing 3 Florin Noble Old Money 2 Guilder University Biology and Life science 3 Guilder Military Army 1 Guilder Military Airwing 1 Guilder Noble Old Money 2 Guilder Noble New Money

If the player does provide enough information to make a playable character, it will be done by the GMs. Written comments overrule verbal comments (the GMs have poor memories). Players should try to change their backstory as little as possible, and only with GM permission, once they have entered play.

Power levels

The characters are people with world class abilities. They are some of the best in the world, and test the limits of human ability. They can to do some very impressive things, up to 3 or 4 times better than normal everyday human ability. They are not however, superhuman. Anyone can be killed by being shot through the head or stabbed through the heart (or gear train, or furnace, or whatever). Even the most heavily armoured clank will go down under a few seconds of concentrated fire from a group armed with assault muskets. Tougher things do exist (Armoured Zeppelins, War Tanks, Dinosaurs, etc) but these are not available as player characters.

Characters have four core aspects: Power, Finesse, Mental and Style. You distribute 100% between these four within racial maximums. These act as core attributes and caps your skills in those areas. Having no skills at maximum for an area is probably unbalanced, under-utilised or otherwise sub-optimal. As a rough guide each 10% should have about 2-8 XP spend there (ie 5% power means spending about 1-4Xp in power, 40% finesse means spending 8-32XP in finesse),

Character Injury

There are three basic levels of injury: Wounded, Maimed, and Dead.

• Wounded:- Wounded characters have lost health points. These health points can only be recovered between games. Characters receiving medical attention recover faster than those who do not. Wounds which have not been tended by a character with First Aid skill may get worse at the whim of the GMs. A character with 0 (zero) Health points falls unconscious. At negative health points they are unconsious and dying (-1 dies in under a day, -2 dies in under an hour, -3 dies in under a minute). Doctors or people with First Aid can return an unconsious person to consciousness, but this does not restore any hit points, making further injury life-threatening.
• Maimed:- Maimed characters have been permanantly injured. They may have lost an arm, a leg, an eye, etc. They gain the relevant flaw (lost arm, lame, lost eye, etc), but they get full XP for this flaw. Maiming occurs at GM whim, or if a character specifies that they are maiming a character, and it is within their power to do so. Maiming can't normally be done in combat, unless it is the final blow.
• Dead:- Characters may die. Players who take new character get half the XP of their previous character. GMs may increase this to reflect good roleplaying. The default is that characters can only be killed by GMs if they make a "Terminal Mistake". PCs can kill other PCs, but it is polite to offer them an Off Screen Death.