The Character Sheet

Players, your character sheet contains everything you need to know about your investigator — abilities, personality, significant background elements, and any other personal resources the character might have to use during in the game. Below is an example of a completed investigator character sheet to illustrate all the components.

Looking for an investigator character sheet? There’s a blank sheet in the back of this book. You can also download electronic copies from the base113 Games website. There are even versions of the sheet designed to look like a passport from the 20s and 30s – perfect for those games that see investigators trotting around the globe as they track down mysterious figures or search for strange artifacts.

Character Aspects

Character aspects are phrases that describe some significant detail about a character. They are the reasons why your character matters, why someone is interested in seeing your character in the game. Aspects can cover a wide range of elements, such as personality or descriptive traits, beliefs, relationships, issues and problems, or anything else that helps us invest in the character as a person, rather than just a collection of stats.
As with all aspects, character aspects also have a mechanical impact on play. When an aspect suggests your character would be particularly well-suited to the task at hand, you can spend a fate point to invoke that aspect for a bonus. When the Keeper compels one of your aspects to complicate the situation, you earn a fate point. Character aspects are also useful in determining what sort of resources would logically be available to the character, be they some sort of equipment, access to a location, or people to call upon for help when needed. Character aspects can describe things about a character that are beneficial or detrimental—in fact, the best aspects are often both.

Alex’s character, Samantha, has the aspect Tempted by the Promise of Knowledge on her sheet, which describes her tendency to let curiosity get the better of her and make bad decisions whenever she sees an opportunity to learn something she doesn’t know. This adds an interesting, fun element to the character that gets her into a great deal of trouble, bringing a lot of personality to the game.

It is important that an investigator’s aspects answer some key questions about the character, so aspects for investigators are further broken down into the following different types:

High Concept

The most crucial character aspect, but also often the most straightforward, a character’s High Concept sums up who they are. Most commonly it incorporates their profession or occupation, their ethnicity or social standing, and an important facet of their life to this point. Once investigator might be a Reclusive Author from Maine Whose Family Died in a Fire, another might be a Wealthy Dilettante Turned Famed Female Explorer, and still another could be Brilliant Surgeon Haunted by his Time in the Great War.

Trouble

A character’s Trouble describes something from his or her past or some innate character flaw that has a tendency to make their life more difficult or dramatic. Desperate to Find Anything to Give Life Meaning Again, Price on Her Head for Betraying the Mob, and Only the Bottle Keeps the Nightmares at Bay are just some examples of Troubles for investigators.

Motivation

Investigators differ from everyone else in one key respect – they are not content to simply sit idly by and let others figure out what’s going on. They need to know the truth for themselves, they feel compelled to provide aid or protection to those that need it, or maybe they simply cannot abide living a boring, ordinary life. A character’s Motivation briefly describes why they are the kind of character that would explore the unknown, seek out the truth behind the unexplained, or take action when others would simply turn away.

Sanity

An investigator’s Sanity aspect represents how they see the world around them, what keeps them grounded, or what they view as being important in life. It could be a core belief, an idea describing how they think the world ‘really works’, or even a default attitude they adopt in their daily life.

Of course, investigating strange mysteries, uncovering clues pointing to dark truths, and coming face to face with horrors beyond your worst fears are the kinds of things that tend to leave their mark on a person. As in real life, characters in Our Terrible Fate change over time, so naturally the aspects that describe a character will change as well. Most character aspects change slowly, perhaps one aspect will change each scenario, but a couple of aspects can change more frequently.

Drives

A character’s Drives describe their goals, motives, commitments, or even suspicions – think of them like a short-term Motivation aspect. An investigator typically has two Drives, which will often relate to the issues in the current scenario or the characters involved. As more clues are revealed, issues emerge or change, and characters interact with one another, an investigator’s Drives will also change.

Ties

Everyone has someone in their life that is important to them, be they a family member, close friend, professional colleague, or even a pet. A character’s Ties are aspect that describe their most important relationships. These are the people they lean on when times are tough and the ones they will stop at nothing to protect. Investigators usually have three Ties, each of which briefly describes a relationship with an important person in his or her life. As investigators face the Mythos they may fall back on these relationships for aid or to help them deal with the stress of what they have encountered. Of course, as investigators are changed by their experiences, it is only natural that their relationships with those around them may change as well.

Skills

Skills are what you use during the game to do complicated or interesting actions with the dice. Each character has a number of skills that represent his or her basic capabilities, including things like perceptiveness, physical prowess, professional training, education, and other measures of ability.
At the beginning of the game, the player characters have skills rated in steps from Average (+1) to Great (+4). Higher is better, meaning that the character is more capable or succeeds more often when using that skill.

If for some reason you need to make a roll using a skill your character doesn’t have, you can always roll it at Mediocre (+0). There are a couple exceptions to this, like unusual skills that most people don’t have at all.

An antiquarian by the name of Gaius has the Lore skill at Great (+4), which makes him ideally suited to knowing about obscure myths and legends. He does not have the Stealth skill, however, so when events lead to him finding it necessary to sneak up on someone, he’ll have to roll that at Mediocre (+0). Bad news for him.

Stunts

Stunts are special tricks that your character knows that allow you to get an extra benefit out of a skill or alter some other game rule to work in your favor. Stunts are like special moves in a video game, letting you do something unique or distinctive compared to other characters. Two characters can have the same rating in a skill, but their stunts might give them vastly different benefits.

Samantha has a stunt called Another Round? It gives her a bonus to get information from someone with her Rapport skill, provided that she is drinking with her target in a pub or bar.

Stress

Stress is one of the two options you have to avoid being taken out — physically it represents temporary fatigue, getting winded, superficial injuries, and so on. Stress also represents the shock of seeing the horrors of the world, both natural and otherwise. This could be witnessing a murder, coming across a particularly gruesome crime scene, or encountering a creature that seemingly defies all known laws of physics. You have a number of stress levels you can burn off to help keep you in a fight, and they reset once you’ve had a few moments to rest and catch your breath.

Consequences

Consequences are the other option you have to stay in the fight, but they have a more lasting impact. Every time you take a consequence, it puts a new aspect on your sheet describing your injuries. Relative to stress, it takes longer to recover from a consequence, and it’s stuck on your character sheet in the meantime, which leaves your character vulnerable to complications or others wishing to take advantage of your new weakness.

Refresh

Refresh is the number of fate points you get at the start of every game session to spend for your character. Your total resets to this number unless you had more fate points at the end of the last session.