04 - Create Your Character

Your character! Your character is the protagonist of your story. They are the vehicle through which you write and experience the story you're telling by playing these wonderful games.

As such, the process of creating your character is very important! In this guide, we'll walk you through the whole process, following along with the Starforged Rulebook's steps!

Generating Your Character Sheet

What's a hero without a character sheet?

Iron Vault has a concept of Character Entities, and includes built-in Character Blocks. With these two building blocks, we can build a full-featured, flexible character sheet!

You can quickly generate a character sheet by running the Create new character command (either through the Ribbon button or through Ctrl+P/Cmd+P). This will prompt you for a character name, but don't worry: you can fill this in later, you might just have to rename the file if that happens.

The first thing you'll notice, of course, is a long column of words and numbers and such on the top of the page:

These are Obsidian Properties, otherwise referred to as the Frontmatter. In essence, this is where the "data" for your character is stored. The first thing you'll probably want to do is get it out of the way, though, so just click on "Properties" to collapse it.

Once you do that, you'll be greeted with a much nicer representation of that data, your character sheet, as rendered by Character Blocks:

This character sheet is fully-editable and interactive, so you never have to manually edit Properties yourself, even if that's what it ends up writing to each time.

Character Creation Steps

There's eleven steps for character creation in Starforged, and we'll be going over each one!

Ready your assets (p. 104) - don't worry, we've got this covered!
Choose two paths (p. 105)
Create your backstory (p. 106)
Write your background vow (p. 107)
Board your starship (p. 108)
Choose your final asset (p. 110)
Set your stats (p. 110)
Set your condition meters (p. 111)
Envision your character (p. 111)
Name your character (p. 111)
Gear up (p. 112)
Next steps

Choose two paths

Assuming you haven't already been playing around with the shiny character sheet, this is your first interaction with it! Let's make it count.

The first step after sorting cards (which we don't have to do) is to pick two Path assets. We can do that one of two ways:

Run the Add asset to character command
Clock on the "Add Asset" button at the bottom of your character sheet

Whichever you choose, you'll be greeted by this popup window:

You can click on each asset category here to expand it. For example, we only care about Paths right now:

Finally, you can expand again in order to see a nicely-rendered asset card for each asset, as well as a button that you can press to add it. You'll be able to edit the asset's fields after you add it:

Go ahead and pick your two Paths. If you change your mind about a choice, simply click the "x" button on the asset card in your character sheet. If you want to reorder them, just drag and drop them by the top part.

Create your backstory

Although you had some opportunity to do this with Truths, this is likely the first time you'll have to make a choice about where to put something and how to organize your vault. Your backstory can go anywhere you want, after all!

Some ideas:

Write it under a ## Backstory section at the bottom of your character sheet.
Use the Session 0 note to start fleshing out a bit of background narrative and make it more story-like.
Create a separate note, maybe in a separate folder like "Lore", where you can add snippets of backstory like this.

Or anything else you can think up! As long as you write it somewhere in the vault, you'll be able to keep track of it and link to it pretty freely! I recommend making sure you put a header (##...) of some sort at the start of your backstory, though, to make it easier to link directly to it.

Want some help? You can Ask the Oracle! You can do this two ways:

Run the Ask the Oracle command directly through the Command Palette/Ribbon button
Use the Iron Vault Sidebar Oracle Browser

Running the Command

As before, you can simply run the command, and you'll be greeted by a filterable oracle picker. Search for "Backstory Prompts" to find the table we're looking for, and select it.

Using the roller

Regardless of which method you pick, you'll be greeted with this popup window:

The roll will have been made immediately, but you can choose to reroll by clicking on the reroll icon, or select either the current roll, or the flipped (opposite) roll.

In my case, I decided to put my backstory details in my "Session 0" journal, so that's what I had open when I called this:

What's this? Well, that's a Oracle Mechanics Block. Iron Vault includes all sorts of mechanics blocks for all sorts of situations having to do with game mechanics, and it renders them all nicely for you! If you're curious, you can go ahead and read more about them here. As you can see, I also wrote some extra color underneath to set the stage for the backstory in a more narrative way.

Write your background vow

Next up: your background vow! We'll be creating our first progress track this time.

I'll start by rolling on the Character Goal Oracle to get an idea of what that might be. Then, I'll use the Create a progress track command to create the vow itself.

Skipping over the Oracle roll, this is what the progress track popup window will look like:

I've already filled in the fields with what makes sense for our particular vow, and when I press create, the following will be inserted into my Session 0 note:

Board your starship

You're likely getting a sense of how to do things by now. Our next step is to set up our Starship. Let's start with an Oracle roll. In this case, I'll go click on the Sidebar's Oracle Tab and search for "starship". Browsing around. I see that this Oracle is actually under "Campaign Launch Oracles":

After rolling that, I can once again Add asset to character (or click on the "Add Asset" button on my character sheet), and pick the Starship from the list, making sure to give it a name!

Choose your final asset

And just like above, we repeat that for our final asset. This time, you can pick anything except a Deed! So go ahead and do that.

Set your stats

You may have noticed that all your stats on your character sheet were actually set to "0". In this step, we'll go ahead and set them to what we want.

The standard spread for stats in Starforged and Ironsworn is 3 2 2 1 1. So we'll allocate those by just... clicking on each stat box and typing them in!

Set your condition meters

Iron Vault will have already set your condition meters to their defaults, but if you want to make any adjustments, you can either click on the +/- buttons next to each value, or type the value you want by clicking on the numbers themselves.

Momentum reset will automatically be tracked for you based on your impacts.

Envision your character

Let's picture in our minds what our character is like! This can really immerse you in your new character, and also give you clues about how they see the world and how the world sees them.

The Starforged Rulebook suggests defining one or two facts about how they look, how they act, and what they wear.

We have some options on where to put this, such as the bottom of the character sheet or in Session 0, but for this basic description, we'll just type these details in the "description" box in the character sheet itself:

Name your character

While we already named our character when we first created them, it's time to give them a callsign and some pronouns. We can, again, just fill these in directly on the character sheet, rolling an oracle for the callsign if we want (while on the Session 0 note):

Gear up

Our last step is to gear up!

The base assumption is that we all have a spacer kit with some basics in it. But we can also add a section to our character sheet with details about some other stuff we might be carrying around. For this, we can go to the bottom of our character sheet and just add another header:

Next steps

That was a lot!

But with all that done: congratulations! You've made your first character using Iron Vault!

Now we can move on to 05 - Build a Starting Sector.