Tags: character
As you make a character in Heart Rush, remember that at the center of every Heart Rush character is their heart. It is the foundation on which you build your life, your soul; it is the chassis and essence of your decisions and their consequences; and it is what drives you forward. You are building an entire, fictional person. Make them awesome.
With this in mind, build a character that has a vision towards what they want to achieve. You should have a dream of what you want to do in the world, one that is complex and difficult and worthy of the caliber of legend you wish to become. Remember—you determine the direction the story takes. There’s no goal to this game besides the one you set out. So speak with you GM about the world in which the game takes place, and figure out how you want to be remembered. It’s your story, and the stakes are low, so it’s okay to set your sights high.
Once you have come up with something, write this dream down somewhere. You may want to edit or add to it later.
These are the core-most stats of your character. They represent the raw capabilities and limits of your mind and body.
When the game begins, you will start with some experience (XP). During the game and between sessions, you may spend XP to gain new skills, abilities, hitpoints, and more. See the Experience Options section to learn more. After making your character, you may begin spending your XP.
Players have four important stats—might, agility, cunning, and presence. These traits define your physical and mental abilities, and are used to determine the outcomes of nearly any difficult task you attempt to do.
Might is your strength, endurance, and fortitude. High might allows you to push through locked doors, lift heavy gates, resist poison, and run for miles without rest.
Cunning is your intellect, wisdom, and senses. High cunning allows you to recall information you’ve learned, notice the nearly imperceptible, and discern fact from fiction.
Agility is your physical dexterity, speed, and reflexes. High agility allows you to dodge falling rocks, respond to threats faster, and perform a summersault on a tightrope.
Presence is your charm, charisma, and social influence. High presence allows you to persuade guards to let you past, lie to them about why you did it, and then intimidate them into not telling anyone about it.
Your prowess in each of these abilities is represented by a die. Whenever you attempt a task that requires one of these abilities, you will roll the ability’s corresponding die and add it to the result.
The first step in creating your character is determining which dice you will use for which stat. Typical humanoids use d6s and d4s for each ability, reflecting a general mediocrity at most things. Likewise, you start with d4s and d6s. You may distribute two d4s and two d6s among your four abilities.
Hitpoints (HP) represents your health and stamina. Humans start with 40 hitpoints. Larger creatures have more, smaller creatures generally have less. As your hitpoints fall, bad things happen, and falling to 0 can result in more long lasting effects, as described in the Combat section. You can gain more hitpoints by expending XP.
Besides your core ability stats and hitpoints, you also have a heart die, sometimes shortened to just “heart”. This represents your vigor, health, stamina, and overall wellbeing. Your heart die will usually correspond to your hitpoints. With more hitpoints, you have more heart. Small creatures, like rats, generally have a low heart die, such as a d4, whereas large and powerful creatures, like dragons, typically have larger heart dice, such as a d20. Humans, and any other race you may start the game as, use a d8.
Your heart is important for determining your successes and fails. Nearly every dice roll in this game will require your heart die.
Throughout gameplay, your heart die will increase or decrease in size. This means that you should switch your your heart die with one that is “bigger” or “smaller”. For example, increasing in size from a d6 would mean you would replace it with a d8. Decreasing from a d20 would mean replacing it with a d12.
Losing hitpoints is one such way that your heart die will decrease. In the following chart, find the row corresponding to your maximum hitpoints. Whenever your current hitpoints reaches or falls below one of the numbers in the row, your heart die is set equal to the size corresponding to that column. For example, if you have a maximum of 40 hitpoints, and you take 13 damage, falling to 27 hitpoints, your heart die would decrease in size from a d8 to a d6. It would then remain as a d6 until you reached 13 hitpoints, at which point you would replace your d6 with a d4. You can never have a heart die smaller than a d4.
Nothing can cause your heart die to fall beneath a d4, though there are consequences for reaching 0 hitpoints. Your heart die also cannot increase in size beyond your regular maximum, so until you increase your maximum hitpoints to 100 or more, your heart die cannot grow larger than 1d8.
As you spend XP on hitpoints, your heart die will increase. When you have 100 hitpoints, your maximum heart die becomes a d10 instead of a d8, and when you reach 200 hitpoints, you get a d12.
Everyone comes from a different background and has a different upbringing. When you create a character, choose a race from Appendix A: Race & Heritage. You gain the aspects and abilities that come from choosing that race.
Many races have multiple heritages within that race. In that case, you gain the aspects and abilities of the race, as well as a chose heritage within that race.
Talents are specialized abilities that you know and can utilize. These act as a way of specializing your play style and differentiating you from anyone else in the world. You do not start with any talents, but they can be purchased with XP, which you will start the game with, and accumulate over play.
Heart Rush is not about ordinary people—it is about people are destined to be remembered, and you are no exception. Over time, you will become either a hero or a villain, until you eventually retire your character, or else fall to the forces working against you.
When you first create your character, you gain three destiny points (DP). These destiny points can be spent to twist fate in your favor, and to make shine the differences between you and the common rabble. However, they can only be gained by acting out the flaws in your character as well. As your strengths grow, so will your weaknesses. In this way, your successes will become more and more epic, while your failures more and more crushing. This collection of skills, traits, background, habits, and flaws are known as aspects.
Your aspects describe the features and traits from your personality, background, and experiences that make you distinct. Aspects will affect everything you do, and will aid you or hinder you every session. As you play your character, you will gather more aspects, and the relative impact your aspects have will grow. Each aspect has two parts: its description, and its rank.
The description describes the aspect as a whole, and should be a phrase or a few words to describe your character. It should be a significant personality trait, behavioral quirk, background, belief, ideal, self-proclaimed title, or some sort of reputation. For example, “Bullheaded,” “Record everything,” “Full-time thief,” “Fortune teller,” “Leave no one behind,” “I fear nothing,” “I can see straight into your soul” and “Best shot in town” can all be aspect descriptions. Do not choose generic things, like “good at most thing” or “lucky”, since they will apply to everything, or be to vague to decide if they should apply to a situation. It is up to the GM to decide if an aspect is too generic.
Next, the aspect gets a rank. The rank of an aspect represents how influential that aspect is over who you are, and will determine the modifier to your rolls. The rank will be a number between one and five, though it can later be increased even further.
By spending destiny points up to or equal to an aspect’s rank, you may add the that much to your roll. In order to use this, whatever roll you are making must align with the meaning of your aspect, as approved by the GM.
For example, if you had the aspect “Leave no one behind” at rank two, and you were trying to save a friend stuck in prison, you could spend two DP and add 2 to a dice roll to break open the bars of the cell.
Or, for example, if you had the aspect “Arcane researcher” at rank four, you could spend four DP and add 4 to any roll that was related to or would benefit from your experience as an arcane researcher.
If you have multiple aspects that apply to a roll, use the higher ranking aspect, and add half of whatever bonus you spend on the other one, rounded up. You must also spend DP equal to this additional bonus.
In contrast, if an aspect would complicate a situation, you may choose to do whatever your aspect would imply, and gain destiny points equal to the aspect’s rank. If the aspect implies you’re bad at a certain skill, this could mean choosing to fail on the skill check. If the aspect implies that you make some sort of poor decision, making that poor decision would also count. “Bum leg,” “Scatter brained,” and “Quick to draw my sword” are examples of negative aspects. If you role play a negative aspect such that it has consequences in game, then the GM will award DP. For example, if a bookstore owner accidentally insults you, and you have the aspect “Quick to draw my sword” at rank three, you would gain three DP by drawing your sword and threatening the shop-owner.
Aspects can also be invoked by the GM. In this case, the GM suggests a course of action or failed skill check that aligns with your aspect. If you do not wish to oblige, you must spend destiny points equal to the rank of the aspect to not do it. Otherwise, you must comply. If you comply, you will gain DP equal to the aspect’s rank.
When you create your character, create two aspects. You will gain two more from your race and heritage and you may gain more throughout the game. You can never have more than seven aspects, and all aspects start at rank one when they are created, unless noted otherwise. No aspect can be greater than rank five.
When creating an aspects, it is generally a good idea to have both aspects with both positive and negative sides to them. Without any negative aspects, you have no way of gaining more destiny points, and therefore cannot spend them on aspects.
There are six different stages of combat power you can start at in Heart Rush: Adventurer, Exemplar, Archetype, Luminary, Hero, and Paragon. With each stage, you have access to more combat abilities. When you first start to play, everyone should agree which stage to begin the game at. Adventurers are barely more than commoners with a desire for excitement; luminaries are incredible combatants, likely known throughout their community; and paragons are nigh-immortal; with everything else falling somewhere in between.
Depending on what you choose, you gain different abilities.
You gain all the abilities in the corresponding row, plus all of the abilities that come before it. You also begin the game with an amount of XP corresponding to what stage you start in.
While you will gain XP every session, you progress in stages at the GM’s discretion. In general, you should expect to graduate to the next stage around when you have an amount of total XP corresponding to the respective stage, as outlined in the table above. However, it is ultimately up to the GM. It is suggested that the GM grant the next stage when a suitably impressive combat has been won by the party. Remember that these stages only provide bonuses to combat, so they do not need to be awarded for non-combat accomplishments.
At this stage, you have no special abilities beyond those that you purchase with your XP. #### Exemplar
When you reach the exemplar stage, you will have to choose a class, as listed in the Classes and Subclasses section. Your class will determine what role you have in combat—tanking heavy blows, dealing damage, or supporting your teammates. You are welcome to do whatever you want in combat, but your class will give you an edge in its respective role.
Upon reaching the archetype stage, you will then have to choose a subclass. Each class has two subclasses, which are specializations of your class. You must choose one of them.
When you reach the luminary stage, you unlock more abilities in your subclass.
As with the luminary stage, the hero stage unlocks more abilities from your subclass.
Finally, upon reaching the paragon stage you will gain paragon abilities. Each time you gain a paragon level, as granted by the GM, you may choose a paragon ability from the Paragon Abilities section. You must meet the prerequisite subclass and possible talent requirements to gain the paragon level. You can gain any number of paragon levels.
When you create your character, it can be helpful to think about certain questions. Doing so will help you better grasp who you are playing, and will allow you to play them better and more enjoyably. It’s a good idea to have some answers to the following questions, but you can also feel free to skip this step.
This one is perhaps most important. As important as knowing who you are now, it is also important to know who you will become. What do you want to do with your life? How will you be remembered?
You need to know what matters to your character. Do you have strong beliefs about something? What are those beliefs? With strong beliefs, you are more likely to have reasons to interact with the story, so it is good to have some.
You don’t need a full life story, but it’s a good idea to have some idea of what you were doing before the story begins. What were you doing yesterday? How about last week? Last month? Last year? Five years ago? The answers don’t need to be precise, but with more details, the GM has more material to work with for creating an immersive story.
Last modified: Mon Oct 21 05:04:02 2024