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Player Creating a Character

Updated July 2026

Creating a character is a five-stage ceremony — Threshold — that walks you from a blank page to a finished hero: choose your system, sketch who they are, shape their attributes and feats, name them, and cross into the story.

How to create a character

From the Characters screen, tap + Create Character to begin. A stage indicator at the top tracks your progress through all five stages.

1. SUMMON — choose your system

Pick which game system your character belongs to. Open Legend is the only one you can actually select today — Monster of the Week and Shadowdark show as locked "Coming soon" chips, since those systems aren't playable yet.

2. SPARK — who are they?

Write a free-text line answering "who are they?" — a sentence or two of flavour. Below it, pick a drive chip for what pushes your character forward:

Drive	What it's about
Redemption	A wrong you're still paying for
Curiosity	A question that won't leave you alone
Duty	An oath you can't put down
Hunger	More — power, gold, renown. More.
Vengeance	Someone owes, and you collect
Survival	See tomorrow. Whatever it takes.
Legacy	Be remembered when the fire's out
Faith	Something larger is calling you

Pick a chip or write your own with ✎ own. Your who-line and drive combine into your character's concept — the same field the character sheet has always shown. In a hurry? Tap Skip — I know my build, always visible, to jump straight to attributes with no concept set.

3. SHAPE — attributes and feats

This stage has its own four steps:

Family — optionally narrow the suggested spreads to a family of build (Physical, Social, Mental, Extraordinary), or skip straight to browsing all of them.
Spread — pick a suggested 40-point attribute spread as a starting point, or build entirely from scratch:

Spread	Best at	HP
Stalwart Defender	Holding the line and the room	30
Battle Mage	Steel in one hand, storm in the other	22
Shadow	Unseen, unheard, already gone — lowest HP of the set	14
Silver Tongue	Every door opens to the right words	22
Sage	Knows the answer, or where it's buried	18
Mender	Keeps everyone else's legend going	26
Iron Brute	The simplest plan: be the wall	24
Occultist	Bargains with forces best left alone	18

Fine-tune — adjust the spread (or your own from-scratch build) attribute by attribute. You have 40 points to spend across 18 attributes; tap + or − on each. Costs are cumulative — see the table below. Your HP preview updates live as you invest in Fortitude, Presence, and Will.
Feats — spend feat points on Open Legend feats. Search or browse, tap a feat to see its tier ladder, and tap a tier to purchase it (dimmed once it costs more than you have left). This step is Open Legend only. Nothing you spend here saves permanently until you finish the whole ceremony — if you don't want to spend anything, Bank all, continue → carries every feat point forward to spend later from the character sheet.

4. NAME — the inscription

Type your character's name and tap Inscribe for a short naming moment before moving on.

5. CROSS — review and begin

Check everything — name, concept, HP, Guard, Toughness, Resolve, attributes, and any feats you bought. Tap ← Back to return and adjust anything. When you're ready, tap Begin the legend to save your character. A brief materialization moment plays over your new character card, then Continue → takes you to your Characters list.

How attribute points work

Costs are cumulative — each step up costs more than the last:

Score	Total cost
1	1 pt
2	3 pts
3	6 pts
4	10 pts
5	15 pts

You start with a budget of 40. No attribute can go above 5 at creation. All characters build at level 1.

Your starting stats

Everything on the CROSS screen is calculated automatically from your attribute scores:

Stat	Formula
HP	2 × (Fortitude + Presence + Will) + 10
Guard	10 + Agility + Might
Toughness	10 + Fortitude + Will
Resolve	10 + Presence + Will

The die shown next to each score tells you which dice you roll when using that attribute. At score 5 you roll 2d6, not a d12.

You don't have to spend every point — attribute or feat. Unspent points of either kind are banked, not lost, and shown on the CROSS screen. They stay available to spend later, alongside points you earn through play.

HP is driven by Fortitude, Presence, and Will — not Might. Putting points into Might raises your Guard defense and your Might attribute dice, but it won't change your starting HP.

A suggested spread is a starting point, not a lock-in. You can fine-tune every score after picking one, or skip spreads entirely and build from a blank sheet.

Nothing is saved until you tap Begin the legend on CROSS. You can back out at any earlier stage with no character created.

If a feat purchase fails to save (rare — usually because the feat changed between when you picked it and when you saved), your character still saves with everything else intact, and you'll see exactly which purchase didn't go through so you can buy it again from the character sheet.