Arcadia Characters

We will try to guide you here as you decide who your character in Arcadia would be.

You need to decide, together with your group, on the focal point of your campaign. Some direction that ties the characters together or at leasts makes it plausible that their stories will share some common ground and intersect each other.

The default focus of this setting is Border Town as it stands about to be reconnected to the rest of the Kingdom of Man. This is a dynamic point in the setting. You have a town large enough for very mixed types of characters, from Forge thralls to aristocratic army officers, from common soldiers to alien emissaries, and it stands at a point in history where everything hangs in the air before the new order forms after the reconnection.

A simple variant is to use Border Town but at a different point in history. Perhaps at the beginning of the Trogs attacks on the town and its connection infrastructure? There you would have an initially very static rural community that has to adapt or bleed to death as the Trogs increase in numbers, and that finally has to decide whether they should turn to the enemies of the King, the High Ones and the Independency nearby, for help.

A different variant is to move forward in time, to where the agents of the central Administration have taken charge of Border Town. It would probably have been a bloody reassertion of centralized power, with executions and riots, and the current situation would be similar to that in the American south after the Civil War, when federal governors were tasked with maintaining peace and order in spite of the locals’ resentment.

The capital of the Kingdom is like a country in itself, with unnumbered different milieus and vistas, and as many possible characters and stories to play. We will, however, not delve very deep in that direction at the moment, but mention our favorite source of inspiration for this kind of setting: Dan Abnett’s books about the Inquisitors Eisenhorn and Ravenor, published by the Black Library.

The Kingdom of Man is involved in hundreds of wars at any one time, and any of these might make a good setting for a military oriented campaign. Mix and match between environments, jungle, desert, tundra, urban ruins, et cetera, and types of conflict, territorial conquest, rebellion, defense against outside forces (alien or human?), as well as the type of characters you want to focus on, frontline grunts, civilian survivors, Templar supersoldiers, local leaders or anything else.

If your character stems from Border Town itself she has lived through the Trogs siege and the liberation. How does she view the reconnection, what does she expect it will mean for her personal interests?

What is the position of the character’s family? How has that influenced her?

• If she is from the nobility, how does she relate to her family’s standing and the expected power shift about to come? Is she the heir to the family title, or a younger child? Is she the black sheep or the jewel of the family? Has she renounced her name and fortune? Is she the sole survivor of a long and noble line?
• If she comes from the lower class, how does she view her prospects? Has she managed to climb the ladder of society or does she still dream of getting out of the slums? Has she, like many from her class, entered the grunt ranks of the City Guard? Does she work for herself or is she in thrall to a Master?
• If her family are merchants or tradesmen, has she taken up the same trade or moved to some other field? How has the relationship with the family been affected by whether she has broken or continued the possibly very long tradition of family trade? If she left the field, did she first learn the family trade, or is she alienated by her ignorance?

Always a central question and one connected to what her ambitions and dreams might be.

• If she is into running the Town, possibly in the Town Council, does she strive for the greater good or for her own personal gain? Where does she stand on the reconnection, does she see this as the chance to get rid of her competitor or as the thing that might cost her her entire power base? Does she run a faction outside the Town Council? If so, does she side with the central Administration in an attempt to get into the ruling body of the town or does she prepare armed resistance to the centralized government?
• If she is military, does she stalk the surrounding woods getting into furious fights with Trog bands or is she a part of the officer cadre responsible for restoring civilian order to the Town? How did she survive the war psychologically, is she a nightmare-ridden wreck unable to adapt to peacetime or did she spend the war behind a desk? Is she perhaps a fresh recruit in a dead soldier’s uniform, with hopes of a glorious future in the Guard?
• If she has her own business, does she see that as a tool for the common good or does she put her own profit above all else? Does she expect opportunity or competition from the reconnection with the rest of the Kingdom? Is she the captain of her guild or does she have to work within a collective of peers? Is her business small and struggling to make a place for itself or is it large and afraid to loose the position it has?
• If she is a worker, is she loyal to her Master or does she want nothing more that to get away? Does she maneuver for a better position amongst her Master’s retainers or is she her Master’s right hand, attempting to keep enemies off his back? Is she a foreman under her Master or does she work alone or at the bottom of the hierarchy?