Creating a Great Heroic (or Other) Persona

by Gary Gygax


Premise:  You have just decided to run a campaign, and you need
details of how best to have your experienced players get solid Heroic
Personas... or you have an established campaign and potential new
participants interested in playing in it. You think that they would be
captivated by roleplaying, but hesitate to involve them. Why? Why else
but because of the time required for them to develop Heroic Personas.
The time is lengthy because this is roleplaying, your campaign is
complex, and the other players' Heroic Personas are well-developed.
Then again, you just might want a persona from which to springboard a
potent FP or HPG or even an EP or MPG.

	How can such dilemmas be solved? By the following method for
creating especially strong, interesting, and detailed HPs either for
immediate use by interested players or as pre-developed Heroic (or
other sorts of) Personas "waiting in the wings" to be picked up by
newcomers and/or for your use as Other Personas. As I said, the
"stand-ins" needn't be idle all the time either, simply doing nothing
until a might-be player comes along. You can employ them as active OPs
in the campaign, giving them minor roles as needed from time to time.
That keeps them current with action, and will add a few bits to these
personas too.

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Most details omitted from this excerpt...
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You now have one or more ready-to-insert HP/OPs for the campaign, and
your efforts in creating these personas should not go to waste. If
these are JM-created personas, don't let them lie dormant until a
player happens along. Use them in play regularly so as to develop
them, but make sure their roles aren't major, and don't strengthen
them much more than as they began, unless you decide that the a
persona is to become one of the campaign's main ones, or even an HPG.
(In such a case the persona is pretty well beyond the bounds of player
use and reserved exclusively to the Journey Master.)

	When prospective participants do show up, find out what sort of a
roles they might enjoy playing, and then give them the appropriate HP
profiles. Be sure the history is on top, so they can read about who
they are. Then include the newcomer and HP in play. There will be
plenty of time to learn the technical details on the profile sheets as
action progresses. If your background story is right, though, the
newcomer will be playing the HP in the proper manner just from the bit
gained by reading. What better and more exciting way to get into the
game?