Character Creation, Liveplays, & GenCon

There is just over a week left until we launch! Meanwhile, Gen Con is in full swing. Please keep your questions about Time Without Tide coming, both here and in the Chaosium Discord. Based on everybody’s answers to the latest poll, it’s time to talk about character creation. An honorary mention to second place in the poll, lore and setting details. We promise we'll talk about them soon!

First though, for everybody who wants to see what a game of Time Without Tide looks like in practice, watch David Naylor run an all star cast through a session on the Chaosium YouTube channel. A big thanks to everybody involved.

Also, for anybody attending Gen Con, there are some physical copies of the Quickstart up for grabs. Swing by the Chaosium booth and say hi. 

Let's walk through Delver creation process. Your Delver begins as a blank slate. You add detail to them across a series of steps.

Step 1 - Natural Skills: Of the 6 total skills, three begin with a score of 0 and three begin with a score of 1. You roll a D6 to determine which. As a reminder, the six skills are CULTURE, INDUSTRY, NAVIGATION, SKULDUGGERY, SURVIVAL, and VIOLENCE.

Step 2 - Background: Next, you chose a background. Each background applies a suite of pre-set modifications to your Delver that set them apart from the crowd. Although the exact changes vary, they all balance out in the end. The one thing all backgrounds share is a choice between either +1 to any skill (you decide), or an adaptation.

Here are a few examples of the modifications that backgrounds apply:

Backgrounds affect more than just mechanics. They represent whatever your character did before they became a Delver. This affects how the world sees them, the kind of background knowledge they can expect to draw from, and the sort of life they've lived up until now. It also helps give you a deeper a sense of who they are as a character.

Step 3 - Relay and Registration: Once everybody’s made a Delver, you move onto sorting out your party. As a Delver, you work with a team of other trained specialists. You are unified around your relay, a priceless Decadent artifact that lets you teleport vast distances. Relays, like ships, have names. Most people will know you by your relay’s name. For example, the pre-generated Delvers in the Time Without Tide: Quickstart are the crew of Dowsing Odd.

Here, you talk with your party. You decide who carries your relay. You figure out who's job it is to take care of what. Generally, you'll select your records here, including some basic items and any features you earned during the previous step (by getting a score of 2 in any skill).

Step 4 - Finer Details: Next, it’s time to weave your Delver’s story. The Time Without Tide: Core Rulebook has plenty of background information, fun tables, and story seeds that will help ground you in the setting. You can also come up with your own ideas and collaborate with the rest of the table to interweave your backstories. You don’t have to lock everything in about your Delver immediately. It’s fine to leave things vague and develop them in greater detail as you go. Speaking of which:

The Final Step - Delver Development: Delver Development is the ongoing, final step of character creation. As you play, you earn experience points, which you can spend to improve your Delver. Each point of XP is significant, but it isn't the only way through which your Delver improves. You also earn lunar dust (currency) which you can use to trade for items. Then, there's adaptations. Although adaptations are negative at first, each one has the potential to become positive if you invest some of your hard earned XP into them. 

You spend XP between adventures while your Delver is taking a 3 day safe rest. We'll go into detail about what you can do with your XP when we talk about player options. For now though, here's a very rough guideline. 

Every time you get a point of XP you can:

That's all for today but we'll be back again soon. Given everybody's enthusiasm in our polls about both player options and lore/setting information, we'll aim to discuss those next. If you have a specific question, please send it through to us.

Thanks again to everybody. The countdown continues!