Going into the character creation process, one of my biggest areas of anxiety concerned whether anyone would want to play a wizard. I’ve always disliked the Vancian spell-casting system, as well as the need for spellbooks. In my homebrew world, all Magic Users are spontaneous spellcasters. AJ suggested that I might want to settle on an alternate magic system, such as those in … well, one of those other books …, perhaps something involving spell-points.

As with many things, I decided that I wouldn’t settle on anything unless someone said they wanted to play a wizard. As it turned out, no one did. Ironically, in running NPC wizards, I’ve found myself just making a set list of spells that the characters are likely to use, just as if they had prepared them ahead of time in the “traditional” fashion. It just makes things easier for me.

I also opted for a “least amount of prep work for the DM” approach where religion was concerned. Though I didn’t particularly care for the traditional D&D pantheon, I also didn’t want to put a lot of work into coming up with my own – in my experience, we usually don’t role-play the importance of someone’s religion very much. It would be like spending hours working on a 100-room dungeon to find that the party skips 75 of your rooms altogether. As such, I put the onus on the players – if you think religion is important to your character, then you figure out who your god is.

Other than that, my character creation guidelines were fairly straightforward. Because I find it tiresome to constantly play and replay (or play against) the naif teenager on his/her first adventure, I asked players to start at 3rd level—a good compromise, I thought, between my desire for characters with a little bit of history and my own need as a first-time DM to not have characters who could break anything I would throw at them.

They all had to start in the League city of Tarrish, on the southern coast, and they had to be able to push their characters along my railroad.

Next up: The Characters.