Written and Edited by Sandra Elliot and Shane Wells

Special thanks to D. Scott McQuiston, April Asbury, Jereme Anglin, Guy Seggev, Rich Wermske, and Sean Dennis

The following is the Camarilla's Ordeal of Creation. This ordeal and is designed to help players create and develop more enjoyable, long-term characters.
The award for successfully completing this ordeal is twofold. First, you will receive 50 general prestige. Second, you will receive 3 additional experience points for any primary character with an appropriately detailed background. Use this ordeal as a guideline for what constitutes an appropriately detailed background, though final approval lies with the ST in charge of your character's approval.

Introduction: Character Creation
The way you create a character can profoundly affect how much you and the players with whom you interact enjoy the game. The better equipped you are to design and develop a character, the more likely you will be to enjoy the characters you bring into the game-and the more fun everyone will have in the long run!
When creating a character for live-action roleplay, keep in mind the following:

1. Character Concept: how your character views him/herself and how he/she fits in to the world of darkness. For some characters, this view applies to a current understanding; for others, the character concept is related to the character's behavior and feelings from centuries ago. Either way, the character concept sets the overall theme for how the character is played.

2. Motivation: the goals and drives that keep your character going from night to night and guide his/her actions. A character with no motivation reacts rather than acts. Such characters often bore players because they spend the majority of game time waiting for something to happen to which they can react. Characters with motivation, on the other hand, are always working toward some objective; such characters often actively drive their own plots and help enrich the game for everyone. NOTE: Setting goals is important to continued growth. Try establishing three goals to which you can refer before each game: a short term, easily attainable goal; a more difficult goal that will take several weeks, months, or years to complete; and an unattainable goal for which you constantly strive. Such goals help provide tangible motivation for your character. A character can have many different types of motivations:
   • Long Term Goals: Self-perfection, information acquisition upholding the Camarilla to please his/her sire, etc.
   • Short Term Objectives: Defeating a minor enemy, building a playhouse, gaining control of a street gang, etc.
   • General Attitudes or Quirks: Snobbery, compulsions, weaknesses, etc.
   Think carefully about what kind of motivation your character will have and why. Keep in mind: motivations stem from history! You should be able to point to your character history to explain why your character has particular goals, objectives, or attitudes.

3. Cathartic Events: Powerful, transformative events. The character you create is somehow extraordinary; therefore, he or she has faced extraordinary situations. Such situations affect behaviors and personalities in profound ways and can lead to very specific goals (i.e., destroying an enemy who put you into the hands of a torturer) or more generalized attitudes (i.e., a distaste for authority figures or compassion for children). Cathartic events help illustrate a character's essential attitudes and nature and help you understand how he/she will act and react to certain situations. Below are two examples of cathartic events:
   • Bob always knew he would be a great warrior for Gaia someday. He trained and trained, waiting for his First Change. Everyone knew he'd be a leader. But the time for his First Change came and went. Finally, an Elder of another tribe passed through and confirmed Bob's fears; despite everyone's hopes, Bob would never change. He wasn't Garou. Now, though he does not wish it, he finds himself hating his cousin Allen for being the warrior he will never be. And his feelings show.
   • Sally loved hiking. She wandered the forests of her homeland again and again, loving it all. They were her comfort again her gnawing vampiric nature. They soothed her hunger, somehow. That is, until Bob's cousin Allen found her just before sunset one evening. He didn't kill her, but she can still remember watching the man become a huge, hulking beast...and the claw marks across her chest still ache, even a century later...To this day, even the smell of pine trees makes her tremble. She can feel the Beast inside her struggling harder and harder every night to surface; without the comfort of solitude and silence, she does not know if she can keep it at bay.

4. Research: Historical, cultural, and fantastical. Researching a character's home town, country, time period, ancestral line, etc. adds flavor to the concept by helping develop his/her connections to time, locale, ancestry, people, and historical events. It also allows you to work your character into the existing historical framework, both of the real world and the World of Darkness. Having connections to history and to other characters already in play helps you get started and stay involved. Research is useful for many reasons:
   • History is reflected in the past lives of Shifters and Changelings and the personal histories of Vampire and Wraith characters.
   • Knowing the history through which your character walked makes it possible for you to speak knowledgeably, comfortably, and thus "realistically" about that time.
   • Researching a time or place with which your character is familiar helps you understand and develop his/her views and attitudes. The attitudes of a place and time are reflected in the personalities of the people who moved through them!
   • Researching the source materials produced by White Wolf can provide valuable insight into the workings of the World of Darkness and the groups to which your character belongs. NOTE: Don't assume that the source material reflects the world of the Camarilla LARP. You needn't take the words in every source book to heart! Do keep in mind, however, that the archetypes offered in these sourcebooks provide us with the building blocks that are the basis of our character concepts and chronicles. Feel free to be inspired by works of fiction as well! Horror and fantasy add especially rich touches to character concepts and storylines. Be careful not to let your character concept stray too far from the World of Darkness paradigm, though, as that paradigm helps the overall chronicle maintain internal consistency.

5. Internal Consistency: the sense that the character's goals, motivations, and behaviors are meaningfully connected to one another. This doesn't mean that your character should have only one way of doing things. It does mean that your character should make sense overall! For example, a character that is a mortician, a successful businessman, a lawyer, and a world-renowned artist has no central focus and does not seem plausible. Even if the character is a vampire who over hundreds of years has learned all of the abilities necessary for all of those professions, it is still unlikely that he or she would practice them all at once-the attention it would draw would be remarkable. Try to phrase your essential character concept in a single, short phrase: "a young but motivated dancer," "a very vocal conservative businessman", etc. If you can't, your character may not be internally consistent. Your character's background should also reflect internal consistency. Over the course of your character's existence, he or she should accumulate many different types of experiences. However, those experiences are always a part of a continuum-though they may change your character, they are also interpreted and understood in light of what he or she has gone through before. Characters' personalities are built as much by their personal histories as by their in-game activities. It's possible for a character to be a warm and loving person at one point and a raving homicidal maniac at another, but the background must describe the events that led to such a drastic change, and seldom will that sort of change occur because of a single event.

Ultimately, your character history will be reflected in your character sheet. You should always have at least a basic understanding of what your character has done and gone through, if not a complete background, before creating the character sheet. Then, as you assign abilities, traits, etc., try to only take those that make sense in light of your character concept. A character that never made friends in high places, for example, should not have Allies amongst the elite. Nature and Demeanor Archetypes, on the other hand, are essentially part of the character concept. If you have a difficult time beginning your character's story, use these archetypes to help determine the personality of your character. Derangements are also helpful when building a character concept. Though they should not be on every character sheet, they can be particularly interesting to roleplay. Keep in mind, however, that derangements require great care and effort to portray, as they describe deep-rooted personality problems that often lead to strange behavior. Playing an active derangement often causes a player to enter extremely emotional scenes that can ultimately result in the character's demise. Negative traits are much more common and describe more ordinary flaws. A character without negative traits can often lack a certain level of realism, while a character without derangements is, quite simply put, more stable and more likely to survive.

In summary, spend some time with your character concept! In it lies the heart of roleplay, the personality you will portray. It is not necessary to determine every detail of your character's life before entering a game, but it is essential that you understand his/her attitudes, goals, motivations, and drives. The character must also be able to fit into the World of Darkness in which we play as well as the history and place into which you have written his/her story. If you take the time to understand and fully develop your character before you play it, you will enjoy the game more!

The Ordeal
The following are the questions of the ordeal. Each one should be answered with at least a paragraph. If necessary, use the material above to devise your answers, but please do not quote any of it. Instead, read it, understand it, and give the answers in your own words.

1. What is the most important question you ask yourself when you create a character? Why is it important to ask the question?

2. Define Character Motivation. How does understanding a character's motivation help you develop and play the character?

3. How do cathartic and life-changing events add depth to your character's background?

4. Why is it important for your character to be internally consistent? How do you keep the character consistent?

5. Why is it important to spend time examining your character's thoughts and behaviors before bringing it into play?

6. How does historical research benefit character development?

7. How does research in White Wolf books and other fantasy materials benefit character development? How can these materials hinder?

8. How can negative traits, natures, demeanors, and derangements help flesh out a character? Give an example of each.

9. Write a short essay on why a single character would have all of the following:
   Derangement: Depression, Negative Trait: Impatient, Demeanor: Director, Nature: Visionary.

10. Character Creation - Create a character using the appropriate Mind's Eye Theatre books and the appropriate sections of the Camarilla Supplement. You may use a character already in play, but only include material from the original background. Do not include any actual game play. Make the character using membership class 4, and include all of the following:

    A. A thorough Background for the character. This should be between 2 and 10 pages (500 to 2500 words). This background should be typed and should adequately explore the character's life before entering the realm of the supernatural, the events that brought him to that point (embrace, chrysalis, etc) and what has happened since. This section should also flesh out and give reasons for the character's motivations, goals, and attitudes.

    B. A completed Character Sheet. The Traits, Merits, and Flaws of the character should reflect the events, attitudes, etc. from the character's Background. Please present this character sheet in the method outlined in the 4.7 Prime supplement and make sure to include all of the character's Traits. If any explanations are needed for any of these traits, they should be presented here as well.

    C. Research notes. Note any and all resources used in creating the character, such as historical references, web pages, White Wolf books, and any other role-playing games or fictional books from which you may have drawn ideas.

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