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| Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain |
Today I will be walking you through the process of creating a new character in The One Ring RPG. I've decided to make one of the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and I think I am going to make him a Treasure-hunter. First lets start off with a name, each of the cultures in The One Ring comes with a list of names appropriate to that culture. I think we'll go with Nár Goldflame. Being one of the Dwarves of the Lonely mountain his standard of living is considered Rich, all that dragon-gold enables him a comfortable lifestyle! Bling, bling! More after the break....
Nár's cultural blessing is Redoubtable - he gets to calculate his starting fatigue by adding up the encumbrance ratings of everything he is carrying and then subtracting his Favored Heart attribute from the total. Dwarves are one of the few classes that can carry heavy armor, they are tough and tireless!
Nár's starting skills are as follows; Explore 2, Song 1, Craft 3, Inspire 2, Travel 3, Battle 1, Search 3 and Riddle 2. All of the other ten skills start at zero. Craft is underlined as it is a Favored Skills and would be used with the characters Favored Body attribute. I will have a chance to increase his skills later on in the process, for now I'll mark these down.
There are two choices for weapon skills, I could go with Axes 2 or Mattock 2, I think I'll take the axes as I see him as a axe and shield wielder. His starting weapon skills are: (Axes) 2, Short Sword 1 and Dagger 1. Axes are in parentheses as this applies to all axe types; regular, two-handed or long-hafted.
Now we get to choose two traits from a cultural list. I'm going to take Fire-making as he enjoys traveling and has gotten quite good at building fires under less than perfect conditions. For his other trait I will take Smith-craft, his love of gold has driven him to become a very talented smith.
Now that I've marked all this down it's time to pick a background to help flesh out the character. This will also determine what his basic attribute scores are as well as giving me another favored skill and a list of distinctive traits to pick from. There are six choices for each culture, I go with A Penetrating Gaze - Nár has come to trust his instinct above all else and his heart is not easily swayed. Thieves and liars are unable to meet his gaze as he seems able to lay bare their plots. This background give me a favored skill of Insight which I underline on the character sheet. His basic attributes are Body 6, Heart 4 and Wits 4. I also get to pick two distinctive traits, I choose Gruff and Wilful. Last but not least I need to choose an age for him between 50-100 years old, I want him to be slightly older so I go with 80 years of age.
The next step is to pick his Favored Attributes, I can apply one, two and three points to his Body, Heart and Wits giving me the ability to modify them to my liking. These new scores will only be used with favored skills so I choose three points in Heart giving me a total of seven (This will help not only with my favored skill Insight but also with my Dwarven cultural blessing of Redoubtable). I put two points in Body giving him a total of eight which will help with his favored skill of Craft and the final point in Wits giving him a total of five.
Next we need to spent experience points to increase his base skills. These range from one to five pips, each pip is equal to a success die when testing with the skill. To buy the first rank of any skill is one point, the second rank is two points and so on up to five points for the final rank, which means that buying a skill from zero ranks up to the full five would cost a total of fifteen points. Starting characters only get a total of ten points to spend. I like to have a least a couple of points in Travel, Athletics, Awareness and Battle. I'll start by purchasing two points in Awareness which costs three points. I'll put another two in Insight since Nár's background states he has a penetrating gaze, that's another three points spent leaving me four more points to spend. I'll put one each in Athletics, Healing, Hunting and Courtesy. That's it for experience points!
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| Dwarven Trasure-hunter |
Now we need to generate his Endurance and Hope. Endurance for Dwarves is found by adding Heart plus a cultural modifier of twenty-eight, giving him a total of thirty-two. Hope is found by adding Heart plus a cultural modifier of six, his total is ten Hope. The next step is to prioritize Valor and Wisdom, one gets a score of one, the other is rated at two. If Valor is given a score of two I get to choose a Reward, If I prioritize Wisdom over Valor then I get to choose a Virtue. Looking through the lists I really like Old Hatred, a Virtue. I'll choose this for Nár. This gives him a bonus of +3 endurance damage when fighting against his old foes the Orcs. This fits into the background that I envisioned for the character. This means that his Wisdom is two and his Valor is one.
We are getting close to finishing so lets pick our gear! First of we equip Nár with Summer traveling gear, this has an encumbrance of two but does not count towards his starting total, this is added to his fatigue level for every Travel roll he fails. He also has an Axe, Short Sword and Dagger, these add up to three additional encumbrance. I want him to have armor and a shield as well, a regular sized shield will be three encumbrance with a +2 parry modifier. For armor I'll give him a Coat of Mail, 16 encumbrance with a 4d protection roll. To top it all off I'll give him a Cap of Iron and Leather, 2 encumbrance and +1 protection. This is a pretty heavy load, his total encumbrance is 26 with his starting fatigue score only a 32. This would normally leave him able to take only a few fatigue damage but this is where the Dwarf Redoubtable ability comes in to play, I can subtract his Favored Heart attribute from his encumbrance score giving him a starting encumbrance of only 19! I love Dwarves!
His close combat and ranged damage are equal to his Body, so both are six. His parry is equal to his Wits, so it's a four. That's it as far as the mechanics go. Now we just need to come up with a back story!
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| The Misty Mountains |
Nár was born in 2865 in the Iron Mountains, he is the son of Náli and younger brother to Nárvi. He grew up hearing stories about how his people were driven from their home in Moria from his father and older brother and spent many nights dreaming of reclaiming old Dwarven strongholds. He showed great skill at a young age as a smith and became very talented in his delicate manipulations of gold, earning him the moniker of Goldflame. As he grew older Nár began to travel to back and forth between Laketown and the Iron Hills to ply his trade, he also learned to read people's emotions and gained a great understanding of what drives the hearts of men. He learned to trust his instincts which kept him alive on more than one occasion. He spent the Fell Winter of 2911 in Laketown designing and creating jewelry which gained him a good reputation there. After the fall of Smaug in 2941 Nár swore his fealty to the new King Under the Mountain, King Dáin. He worked tirelessly to help his people become prosperous and is now ready to set out once again on his own quest to reclaim a new Dwarven stronghold. Nár is quiet, he listens more than he speaks. He works hard at his craft and has earned a good living at it and is known in both Erebor and Laketown for his skill in gold-smithing. In his heart he yearns to march across the Wilderland and reclaim the Dwarven strongholds of old.
So I think that it! I really enjoy the character creation process, lots of options to choose from and decisions to make. I might make Nár's brother as well one of these days. I hope you all enjoyed this post. Next up will be a review of The Heart of the Wild which describes Wilderland in greater detail and provides new threats for your fellowship to battle! All art included in this post was done by Jon Hodgson, Art Director at Cubicle7.
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| Nar Goldflame |
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