Cinco: Concept Lab

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I wanted to have a pseudo-lifepath thing in the appendices for Cinco! to help players conceptualize characters if they’re at a loss with where to get started. Below is what came of that! You’ll recognize a lot of material from my original draft, FIVEY, but I tried to condense everything into providing just enough information to contextualize a character origin without pigeon-holing individual characters. Thanks to Alex from To Distant Lands for providing really helpful feedback on that front! Without further ado…

If you’re playing a character, pick or roll on the table below for your character’s origin; keep in mind, though, that the Game Mother might disallow certain origins just to make the setting more cohesive. If you’re the Game Mother, considering building your setting around the characters your players create; otherwise be upfront with expectations and don’t surprise your players with them! A setting handout helps everyone.

  • Changeling (1–2): A fairy snatched a baby to pay a debt, leaving you. You look like your parents, but you are not theirs.
  • Dwarf (3–4): Not born, but sculpted by your maker with purpose. Will you fulfill their wish, or break the line of tradition?
  • Elf (5–6): You teeter carelessly between dreams and waking life, seeking meaning beyond things which rot and rust.
  • Hellchild (7–8): Your birth was a travesty through no fault of your own. Some tuck their tails and shave their horns. Do you?
  • Hoblin (9–10): Itinerant little people hiding under big folk’s noses. Known to wander in pursuit of a hot meal and a tall tale.
  • Orc (11–12): Descended from warriors made slaves. You may be free, but the world won’t have you. You have nothing to lose.
  • Nymph (13–14): A divinity born out of others’ relationships to nature. What happened with your sisters that you aren’t with them?
  • Scalespawn (15–16): From a dragon’s scale sown in soil, you were grown. You have never met your siblings; you probably ate them.
  • Terran (17–18): Your ancestors sailed across stars to capture a new home. They were conquerors, but here you are outmatched.
  • Watcher (19–20): Deserters of the heavenly hosts, taking on mortal flesh to live knowing they will die and love knowing it won’t last.

You could make your character a woman if you rolled even, or a man if you rolled odd. The tables below are to flesh out your origin and brainstorm what catalyst had pushed your character from stability to precarity—thus calling them to adventure. Upbringings may not be a useful category if your character’s origin is sufficiently strange.

D6 Upbringing Trauma Force
1 Artisans Abandoned Business
2 Farmers Displaced Family
3 Merchants Forsaken Military
4 Nobles Immiserated Nature
5 Scholars Orphaned Religion
6 Thieves Trafficked Society

Your quest should follow from your origin and catalyst. What does your character want and how can they accomplish that? The interest and motive tables for NPCs (p. 16) may help if you’re totally at a loss, but I don’t know. Give it some thought!

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