#38 NPC Communities: Langeness Pt. 2

 The second post in this series is about concretizing a NPC community concept.

Environmental Storytelling

By placing certain actors in certain places, having certain looks and being surrounded by certain objects, we can tell something about the place and the people living there. This telling becomes even more evident when things are moving: People work, birds fly, plants move in the wind and a mill might be driven by water. This all certainly is worldbuilding and might even be storytelling, if the used actors/places/objects/.. are part of a story. The following video shows how the environment in Cyberpunk 2077 heavily influences its storytelling by mood-setting, contextualization etc.

Cyberpunk 2077 Environment Breakdown with 3D Artist

I decided to not share one of the countless articles on the craft of environmental storytelling itself here, since on the one hand it is a pretty well-discussed topic in narrative and level game design, and on the other hand I simply didn't have a concrete ressource to recommend. 

A Witcher 3 Community: Langeness

First step for community creation and environment art with the radish modding tools (besides basic project setup) is defining a new layer. A layer is like a container for anything that can be placed into the gameworld, including e.g. regular assets like tables and such, but also waypoints, areas and actionpoints (a point that defines the execution of a certain NPC behaviour without yet saying who does it).

A layer definition might look like this (written in YAML):

You can see that a layer "nekkerlayer" in skellige is being defined. It has six actionpoints, each with positional data (x, y, z, rotation) and an action (e.g. "nekker/nekker_angry_jt") assigned. Next come two areas, which consist of a height parameter and an arbitrary number of corner points. Under "statics" various assets are listed; here a blood decal referenced from the engine's asset depot is used.

Such layers can be defined via a game mod and their definition can be dumped directly into the right format.

Not all work, however, has a nice GUI-tool. The community definition itself, meaning the definition of NPCs and assignments of NPCs to actionpoints, possibly also for different phases, times and dynamic world conditions is all written manually.

In the screenshot above you can see how both shown communities (bear- and nekker_community) have actors defined based on existing templates and phases. Phases are used to define different community states that change via quests, e.g. when the community is happily living in one phase, and after the player triggered a local assault a phase were the community is devastated.

In a phase, for one actor (who might be used multiple times) it is defined how they spawn and behave. They might wander around in wanderareas (bear), guard an area and follow an intruding player up to a certain distance (bear), spawn in packs (there are always 2 bears spawning, with a respawn time intervall of 20 seconds). They might also have a pursuit area defining how far they follow the player and show different behaviours (be at different actionpoints) at different times.

After defining layer and community in a file, the radish encoder from the modding tools and the official mod kit translate these definitions into game data and bundle them into mod/dlc extensions, which can be easily plugged into the game.

This makes the main task understanding the concepts behind the many options for layer and community definitions, of which I showed only a fraction here. I'm quite grateful to be able to work on such a high level at all, considering the fact that the official mod kit at release had a much more narrow scope and was much more technical.

Conclusion

Next time, I'll either be done with this trial and present the final post in this series or - and considering the problems I'm having right now with the remaining tasks this might very well be the case - another project will find its way onto the blog.

Hope you're doing well and are taking your time to do nothing!

#37 NPC Community: Langeness Pt. 1

 In this post we're gonna take a look at NPC communities: How NPC are integrated into the gameworld, doing actions, reacting to events and being integrated in quests or small dialogs.

Quest Design in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

A neat article including this topic is one written by now Lead Acting Quest Designer Phillip Weber. It covers the technical process of creating quests and communities, explaining how in tools like REDkit or radish modding tools NPCs can have time-bound actionpoints in the world where they repeatedly exercise a certain "job", how they might have different phases in which they show different behaviour, and how they might react to dynamic events like rain. Here is the link:

Making Games Classics: Quest Design in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

A more abstract but interesting lesson is that quest designers, while obviously focused on getting quests done with the help of other developers, may also do related tasks like setting up a small scene which doesn't need much cinematography or creating a NPC community which simply enriches the environment the quest plays in.

A Witcher 3 Community: Langeness

In the last post I mastered stage six of the learning course dubbed "trial of radishes". Stage seven is about advanced communities: They should have special guarding or walk behaviours, or dynamic assignment of actions and such things.

From the task description it become evident that it would be sensible to design three communities, each fulfilling multiple criteria. First I thought of a place for them. The Witcher 3 is already quite filled with content, but my long roamings in Skellige reminded of the northern isles there, which are uninhabited and probably unknown to many.

Visiting this place, I decided to name it "Langeness", referencing a "Hallig" (a kind of small isle) in the North Sea to which I lived close for many years. Unfortunately the place wasn't as empty as memory told me: There were a lot of harpies which would later disturb my communities much too often. On the land I found three fitting places:

The majority of the communities NPCs were intended to be in the areas I, II and III, with

• I being a skellige pirate/warrior camp
• II being a couple of bears
• III being a couple os small monsters (ghouls or nekkers)

To make all this more interesting I decided to include some environmental storytelling. On the peaks at 1a-d I intended to place guards looking to the sea, but it turned out terrain probably wasn't plain enough, so I had to reduce this to guards at 2 only. At 3 some times one to two skelligers should show up, mocking a helpless fellow at 4, trapped by the bears. The bears are angry because at III some skelligers had killed one of them (although some skelligers themselves were killed), causing nekkers to appear.

The next post will dive into how I set up communities technically and which ideas guided me when faced with options.

Conclusion

I enjoyed writing this little impression of work that might very will be part of quest design. After all, quests often work with characters and these characters need a place in the world. A community.

Hope you're doing well - until next time!

#25 Group Psychology

 This time we will take a quick dive into the dynamics and regulations that may emerge in groups. I will try applying the won knowledge in a quest design thought experiment.

Group Psychology

In post #12 I mentioned dynamics between characters, which "are concerned with the processes happening in and between characters". I linked the concept of dynamics to systems theory and cybernetics, which deliver approaches to understand systemic and processual units.

If we understand characters as systems with internal ressources, loops, processes, sub-systems and input/output possibilities, then we come closer to understanding the principles of character design. And if we go further and describe a meeting or a group of people as a meeting/group of systems, then we can look at those temporal system-collections too through lenses of reciprocal influence, information exchange, shared informations, regulation of common beliefs/actions and so on.

The term dynamics describes all happenings in a meeting caused by that meeting. If a group decides to not go to school even if secretly not everyone is content with that, then both events are a dynamic that has emerged from the meeting.

A regulation describes standardized processes in a system. In a group this might be a certain manner of greeting or a time slot in which they usually meet.

How and why do groups form? I'd say the answers are the same: Because and via of interpersonal attraction, or commonalities. I think the main regulation of a group then is mainly decided by exactly those premises it built on and consequently all dynamics will be influenced by this. Opinions, reactions and attitudes negotiated in a group will be influenced by this base line.

Examples for typical regulations/structures in a group over time include:

• group membership status:
• full member
  
• "black sheeps", which eventually might become
• outcasts
• adjacent/marginal members
• new members
  

• roles, such as "leader" and
• functional/task roles: defined in relation to the tasks the team is expected to perform, e.g. "coordinator", "recorder", "critic", or "technician"
  
• relationship/socioemotional roles: maintaining the interpersonal and emotional needs of the groups' members, e.g. "encourager", "harmonizer", or "compromiser"
• individual roles
  

•  norms, the informal rules that groups adopt to regulate members' behaviour
• prescriptive: the socially appropriate way to respond in a social situation
• proscriptive: actions that group members should not do
• descriptive: describe what people usually do
• injunctive: describe behaviours that people ought to do

•  intermember relations, e.g. 
• friendships
• relationships
• power relations, see for example the 'rank dynamic position model' by Raoul Schindler with G (the outward fix point of the group), Alpha (leader, who leads the interaction with G), Beta (the expert, advises Alpha), Gamma (identifies with Alphas view on G, assists and works), Omega (opposes Alpha, antipole that expresses group deficits)
  

I'll admit that this knowledge is mostly (but not entirely) drawn from a wikipedia page. It won't bother us here, if it helps us designing quests.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• Wikipedia: Group dynamics Link

• German Wikipedia: Gruppendynamik Link

  Here I got the informations on Raoul Schindler's model, of which I learned in university class on organisational theory.

Another Quest Jam

Martin, the player avatar, is weak, needs help remembering what is, and is lost in terms of navigation. He manages to get up and the player finds a way out of the unfriendly place he initially was in. He meets Henry, who offers him help in all his problems. The player can choose some minor dialogue options, but none will prevent weak Martin from accepting the help in exchange for collecting certain items. Henry follows Martin with every step, an unhealthy relationship is starting.

They meet Maria, who is a free spirit, naive and optimistic. He is lost in the space they're all in too and thus joins the now forming group, whose base line is about fixing things. In the group currently Henry is the leader, with Martin being a central and possibly powerful figure who is of lower rank right know. Maria is the antipole, who is sceptical of Henry and bonded with Martin on a very human level of positivity towards life.

They travel together for a while and slowly the authority of Henry crackles, which he himself notices. Henry begins to silently retreat (for such is his nature), being replaced by Maria in his stead. Martin still doesn't manage to be present in his fullness and commit to the leading skills he has. The group gets distracted onto side paths, lost from its goal and the now antipole Henry critizes his opponent Maria while alone with Martin.

They meet a third character, Kristoph, who has a strong rhetoric voice and hard values, he immediately attacks Henry whom he sees as a threat to healthiness and overwrites the presence of Maria. The scene escalates, the "badness" of Henry is openly discussed. Martin acts as a harmonizer and calms the group down. Henry makes concessions and withdraws from any participation apart from standard assisting. Kristoph degrades Maria to mere assistant too and makes Martin an advisor, seeing him and himself as "the true leaders" (overseeing that he himself has final control).

The group has re-stabilized and focused on its goal of getting out of that place, but its leadership is enforced. In the final phase, Martin realizes who he is and gains the advantage of being authentic, which brings an irresistable atmosphere to him. By simple actions Kristophs so strong leaderships is crumbling, and Kristoph himself realizes the glory in Martin, who eventually leads them out of the calamities, fulfilling the groups quest.

What means might be used to communicate all that?

• spatial arrangement of characters when they are all together
• where the group is going, what they are doing
• what characters say, how they act
• who is determining norms, actions, beliefs
• who is (if silently) opposing
• what objects are collected form/distributed to whom

This being a jam, I won't elaborate further. But it gave me at least me some interesting ideas for some current and future projects. Also, I'd like to analyse group dynamics in the lord of the rings *thinking emoji*

Ideas for Feedback

• Do you know a good book/reading on the subject?

• What other means might there be to communicate group dynamics and regulations?

Conclusion

Another post, another conclusion. This writing was quite pragmatic, but it highlighted one of the fascinating aspects of life for me. I'm looking forward to seriously apply this knowledge in a project.

I hope you're having a good time. Until the next post!

#21 Character Families & The Witcher 3

In general - a lot of [..] is actually about Geralt - in spite of being an itinerate monster slayer and dealing with a lot of nastiness and sleeping around with sorceresses and making questionable moral decisions - is about Geralt trying to figure out how to re-establish himself within a nuclear family.

Today we'll have a post on families, parents and why they're important for character and quest design. I'll demonstrate this on my current quest design project. (Star Wars I-VI spoilers incoming)

Family Matters

Why do so many stories have family conflicts at their heart? This one of the questions I'll try to answer here - but I'm no professional psychologist or sociologist, so rather expect some intuitive thoughts.

Star Wars is famous for its father-son conflict. Source

To make a start, let's look at the first paragraph of the wiki-page on families.

"In human society, family is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship)."

Already at this point I feel the need to intervene. To me this doesn't put enough emphasis on the "other relationships", which might include other people not necessarily romantically attached or an animal. More generally I would point out, that you may declare any other being part of your family, if you regard the other as an important part of your life. In turn you may also see someone biologically related to you as not part of your family.

This begs for a differentiation between biological and social family. While many peoples social familiy will be near congruent with their biological family, there are surely a lot of examples where they differ to great degrees. But let's continue with the wiki-paragraph:

"The purpose of families is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Ideally, families would offer predictability, structure, and safety as members mature and participate in the community. In most societies, it is within families that children acquire socialization for life outside the family, and acts as the primary source of attachment, nurturing, and socialization for humans. Additionally, as the basic unit for meeting the basic needs of its members, it provides a sense of boundaries for performing tasks in a safe environment, ideally builds a person into a functional adult, transmits culture, and ensures continuity of humankind with precedents of knowledge."

Reading this it becomes clear why family is important. Family provides the invidual with a big range of spaces, tools, guidances, .. to grow into "a functional adult".

Providing these things works - in my opinion (not taken from wiki) - via several basic, archetypic roles which family members may take up. Examples for such archetypes are "mother", "father", "brother", "sister", "grandfather", "grandmother", "uncle", "aunt" (C.G. Jung sends his regards). I want to emphasize at this point, that in the social family literally everybody might take up such a role and that I furthermore think that it is the social family, which is important.

Anakin was a brother to Obi-Wan, even though they weren't biological brothers. Source (modified)

A very important element of the family as a social entity are its responsibilities, commitments and deliveries. When a human child is born into a family, it needs family members to assume some the above mentioned roles, in particular "mother", "father" and "sibling" (so I believe). It is the families responsibility to provide members who commit to doing this and deliver what is needed. However there also needs to be a balance: There is such a thing as overparenting and parents abandoning themselves.

Besides Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, whom I quoted in the posts beginning on Geralt and family, Dave Filoni also provides a great example for how vital nuclear families are and how grave conflicts in them can be:

"he [Obi-Wan] is a brother to Anakin, but he's not a father figure. That's a failing to Anakin, he doesn't have the family that he needs [..] so he's left completely vulnerable"

Further Reading / Inspiration

• NoClip - Designing the Quests of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Link with Timestamp

  Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, Lead English Writer at CD Projekt RED talking about family and The Witcher

• The self is not singular but a fluid network of identities – Kathleen Wallace | Aeon Essays  Link

  If humans are a constantly actualizing network, then the family does a great deal to lay the foundations and core traits of that network. And if it doesn't - then the whole network becomes fragile.
  

A "Witcher" Quest - Part 10: The Father

Already in previous posts I explained or hinted to the underlying conflicts happening in my Witcher quest. Today I'll show a characterization of Aisker, Alene's father, who is probably the central figure to understanding what is so wrong in the village and why we encounter Alene in the way we do.

Aisker Wudmager. For higher resoution, see this pdf.

Aisker unconsciously hides his main fears and problems under the cover of "protecting Alene" and "advancing the village economy". And while he succeds in his political role, he isn't able to control his child, which divides father and daughter. He thinks he will be happy when he reaches his goals, but even though he mostly reached his goals political-wise, his happiness is far too low in proportion to the successes he seemingly had - and this makes him quite insecure.

Many of the things written down here won't be revealed in the quest, but they are important to inform how the different characters behave in specific situations.

By the way, a small trick that I often use for character names is taking a meaning/theme fitting to the character, finding a word and then translating it into some other language. In this case "Aisker" can be traced to something with fishing (I don't remember exactly what) and "Wudmager" to woodwork. A good extra trait for Aisker might be that he likes his first name, but not his family name.

Ideas for Feedback

• Do you think I adequatly described families?
• Where could the character of Aisker need more depth?

Conclusion

This was a very interesting post to write. It revealed to me some knowledge I hadn't had yet and it also allowed me to grasp the whole thematic in a cohesive way.

While my quest design journey is coming near its half-year anniversary, I'm beginning to think more and more about what I achieved here so far. Post #26 will be an interesting one, for sure - but I try to not be too hasty with my thoughts.

Until then, have a good time!

#12 Character Webs and The Witcher 2

Today I'm going to talk about and use character webs, a method/principle introduced to me by John Truby in his book "The Anatomy of Story". Since I am a bit short on time, this post will be a rather short one.

Character Webs

John Truby begins his chapter on characters with telling the reader that defining the hero's traits and then telling a story with him changing is "all wrong". Instead of focusing on the characters as separate individuals he advocates for looking at "all of them together in an interconnected web". According to him, this approach has several advantages:

• the characters won't seem to be "alone, in a vacuum, unconnected to others"
• the hero won't seem to be the only person that matters
• comparing characters and possibly defining their dynamics when they meet will help in defining them and make them more complex
• secondary characters are rather seen on the same layer as the hero/the main characters
• helps constructing story functions for characters and inscribing archetypes, themes and oppositions

While I do agree with many of Truby's thoughts, I do believe that e.g. character sheets have their value on their own: Not every character needs to be distinguished in as much detail as the main characters, and focusing on a character and his connections for a while will help achieving that. (And, I don't believe that there is such a thing as a "wrong" approach.)

A quick word on character dynamics: The term dynamics was not introduced by the book I'm referencing, but by myself. It is taken from a seminary I had and probably inspired by systems theory (focusing on a delimited system) and/or cybernetics (which is all about a system's inner and outer entanglements), Character dynamics in that sense are concerned with the processes happening in and between characters. For our character web I'd like to highlight especially the latter: What behaviours do characters show when meeting certain other characters? What is the atmosphere like? What do they do to their environment? What is created (music? words? battles?)? What are typical patterns in their meetings? Answering such questions seems to be a very promising approach for making a very coherent story.

But know I'd already like to proceed to my Witcher quest.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• John Truby: The Anatomy of Story
• Wikipedia: Social psychology

 A "Witcher" Quest - Part 3: Character Web

A bit of a problem at this point is that I haven't yet defined any character but Alene in more detail. I will nonetheless do a character web and if it fails I will hopefully lean be able to learn something from it.

Here comes the result (see post #11 for a summary of the story and its characters):

Here you may look at a PDF-variant of this diagram in unlimited resolution!

I started out with a list of characters and turned each of them into a blue sticky note. The notes were then arranged based on the characters more formal relations: Aisker is Alene's father, Alvin lives in the forest and so on. I quickly started to note that I tended to place some notes higher than others and decided to make a rule out of it: After some iteration it became "the lower a note/connection is placed, the more personal it is". I also used clustering and proximity to indicate the closeness of characters (Aisker and his wife) or their distance to something (Aisker and Alvin). I made two enclosing lines to denote the border of the village and the valley, such that e.g. Geralt could be placed more sensibly. The line type also got a meaning: Straight lines indicate a more formalized or stable relationship, while curved lines are rather dynamic and skewed/angular connections indicate a not optimal, somewhat broken relation. The central dashed line represents Geralt's wish for non-involvement: He'd rather like to visit the valley on a formal level of contract, employee, employer and work. The mere connection of burgomaster and Aisker shows, how difficult it might be to uphold this distance, especially if Geralt is confronted in the beginning with Alene and Alvin, rather than the eldorman himself in his official role. Lastly I tried to identify the main characters in this web, denoted in red.

So, this was the positive side: I managed to express a good many things with this diagram. However, there are some caviats:

First of all, it is difficult to take into account every character with the amount of detail I'd wish for. For example, defining the relation of Geralt, Aisker or Alene to each of the other characters would be very desirable, but simply not practical in one diagram: It would result in too much clutter. Here the more focused character sheets might be of help, or a single diagram devoted to the relations of one character. Furthermore, little can be expressed of character dynamics: It is rather a description of the overall dynamics in the story that is delivered. For some important characters thinking about their concrete dynamics might be sensible.

But in the end I was suprised by the ways of characterization that emerged whilst using this "method". For example it came to me, that Nohman could be seen as a surrogate brother for Aisker, which would result in a much more interesting connection than "seeking the river". And I am altogether content with this overview, which would surely help to introduce the setting to someone who is new to the project.

Ideas for Feedback

• How else could characters be described besides character sheets and webs?
• Which character/reation in the above diagram should be explained more deeply?

Conclusion

This short method really helped me to take a more holistic view on the characters, their environment and their connections. It also provides, as Truby mentions himself, the possibility of setting several themes, archetypes and conflicts into relation by inscribing them into characters, which would lead to a very natural source of inspiration for a story (at least, that is how it seems to me).

Concerning my Witcher quest, I'd like to turn my eye towards more gameplay-adjacent matters. The story space/level needs a post and when I lay out the so far existing story (as described in post #10) in that space, then there'll probably be a lot of re-adjustments to be done. And maybe I will get some inspiration to fill the remaining gaps in the story.

I am looking forward to this and hope you have a good time!

#11 Character Templates and The Witcher 2

Today I want to talk about characters, both in theory and in practice. I present a short approach to character design and am then going to use it in my Witcher quest. Let's get into it!

Characters

It is probably hard to find a book about narrativity (be it in video games or any other medium) that doesn't contain a chapter on characters. Funnily I enough, in none of the six books on storytelling/game writing/quests/narratives I possess it is made clear why we need characters in stories. Moreover, even though this is less surprising, none one of them seriously explored a more experimental use of the term "character" (a.g. the city as a character).

The first finding is probably related to the fact that characters are just such an important part of storytelling in our societies that there is not felt any need of explaining the reasons. I do not think the reason to be very complex: It is probably because seeing ourselves or someone like us in stories is part of what makes them meaningful, relevant to us. However, and here we come to the second note, we seem to not necessarily need humans in order to have a narrative character.There are a lot of examples of aliens, animals, computers or toys being used as characters in a story. But I'd like to take this even further: What about cities, mountains, fate, wind, "the land", "the streets" or Uncle Sam? In school, such things were called personifications or anthromorphizations, whenever human-like properties of a non-human thing were emphasized and/or added. Going in this directions is the chapter "The Tales Cities Tell" by Dr. Konstantinos Dimopoulos in Chris Batemans Game Writing. Instead of diving into this topic further, I will content myself here with stating, that a character can be anything: It only needs proper highlighting of its (possibly made up) human-like attributes in the story.

Character Design

So, we now let us think about human-like attributes. This is the main focus in all the literature on characters (at least that is, how it seems to me), so I won't be able to catch all of them in one post. Consequently, for pragmatic reasons, I'll just present the approach chosen in  the book "The Game Narrative Toolbox" by Tobias Heussner et al., more precisely, chapter 5 "Characters".

After talking about player-characters (or avatars) and department coordination on characters (which both need an extra post to meet them), they start with introducing 

• internal conflicts, 
• merits and flaws,
• psychological types and
  
• temperament theory
  

as four major inspirations for creating a character. They furthermore advocate for creating diverse characters and use the spaces they exist in to tell more about them. At last, a holistic approach is prefered where traits, conflicts, diversifications etc. intertwine and are woven together. To have an overview over all the informations making up a character, character templates are encouraged as a starting point. Here I have distilled from their templates and lists some groups of attributes for such a template:

Outside: Materialistic Description:

Name, Title, Age, Ethnicity/Race, Sex, Complexion, Height, Weight, Eyes, Hair, Biography, Family, World they live in, Profession

Outside: Demeanor/Attitude:

Environment (home, work, ..), Motto, Way of talking, How they dress, Means to reach goals, Relations, Culture, Behaviour towards Strangers

Inside: Knowledge/Image of World and Self

Goals / Desires, Interests, Abilities, Gender, Spiritual beliefs, Philosophical, Political Learnings (...), Experiences/Memories (Childhood, Teenager, at Work etc.)

Inside: Possibly Unknown to Character

Motivation, Emotional States, Personality, Fears, Conflicting Traits, Merits and Flaws, Temperament, Relationships with other NPCs and own Fmily

In the Story

• Function: Protagonist, Major Sidekick, Friend, Villain, Minor Sidekick
• Drive, Conflict, Motivation, Happenings, Growth, Regression, Arc
• To the Player: Meaningful, Engage, Involve, Capture, Attachement, Seeming Alive
  

Seeing that the above cited "major inspirations" named in the book are all more or less to be found in the more hidden areas of a character (inside and unknown to him), I am reminded again of other sources I read on storytelling so far. It always seems to be about an unveiling of informations, and the deeper the origin of these informations, the better. This, I am sure, is something to be explored - unveiled - in further posts. But here, today, my look is now directed towards my current quest design.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• T. Heussner, T.K. Finley, J.B. Hepler, A. Lemay: The Game Narrative Toolbox
• L. Sheldon: Character Development and Storytelling for Games
  

A "Witcher" Quest - Part 2: Character Descriptions

A short recap: Pursuing a contract in a small village, Geralt finds that the people's problem is deeply rooted in their attitude to their environment and a local family of woodworkers.

To be more concrete, my quest design was about an insecure girl called Alene and the rustic village she lives in. The village is torn between holding on to the old way, woodworking, and a recently found focus on the nearby river. This conflict is instantiated in the relation of Alene's uncle Alvin Wudmager (living alone in the woods) to her father, stern burgomaster Aisker Wudmager, who is not comfortable with the forest nearby. Alene feels drawn to the forest and her uncle Alvin and plans to leave the valley with him. Geralt travels into the valley, because he heard of a possible monster plagueing the people: Indeed it turns out that a fisherman's son has gone missing. He soon meets Alene, Alvin, Aisker and the other villagers and has to decide to what degree he wants to get involved in their personal matters.

Here are the main characters of this story:

• Geralt of Rivia, professional monster slayer
• Aisker Wudmager, burgomaster of the village, focused on the river, is not comfortable with the forest
  
• Alvin Wudmager, his brother, forester, living alone in the woods
• Alene Wudmager, Aiskers daughter, insecure, drawn to the forest
• Nohman Kapuner, part of the only traditional fisher family in the village, lost his son by the monster
  
• The Village, a collection of simple people having a long tradition of woodworking, now mostly following the hype surrounding the river
• The Local Lord, a selfish man who doesn't care much for the inhabitants as long as there is peace
• The Forest, young and calm, stretches far and wide through the valley, wondering why the villagers don't care about him no more
• The River, flowing swiftly, curious for the sudden attention

Being a main character doesn't mean to me that the character needs to talk much or be seen a lot. Much rather, main characters have a big presence: Besides being physically present and speaking, they might also be mentioned often, be felt often or do major movements while the story progresses. Side characters, who do not have such a big influence over time, are:

• Aisker's wife (being Alene's mother)
• A friend of Alene
• Nohman Kapuner's son, who got lost
• An old bear in the forest
• The mountains surrounding the valley

I haven't given much thought to these as of yet, so there is definitely some more room for improvement here, tying into the details of the storyline. But I'll proceed to the matter at hand: A characterization of Alene, done with a slightly modified version of the template written down above.

For unlimited resolution, see this beautiful PDF vector graphic.

So, this is it. I noticed that the last six items were rather difficult to answer and I wrote down some redundant answers. There is room for improvement there. But I will leave it at that for now and come to a conclusion.

Ideas for Feedback

• What items could be added/changed/repositioned in my character template?
• Which parts of my characterization of "Alene Wudmager" don't seem refined enough?

Conclusion

Another post finished, another conclusion incoming. When I first encountered character sheets, I immediately thought "How superficial! How shallow!", but then I soon realized how important they are to give an opportunity to  start with, diversify and refine your character. It helps making them more concrete and embedding them into their surroundings. And, last but not least, it is a good format to exchange between departments and to include in a quest documentation.

This is how my post ends today and I'm happy with it - may you be happy too! Have a good time!