THE ACHING HEART - Character creation in Victories and Miseries

This is a system where change is the core verb. Where the marks on your character sheet are bruises, kisses, lies you swallowed, and truths you failed to speak.

It is not about power-building. It is not about stat optimization. It is not about narrative arcs delivered from on high.

It is about desire as form guiding play. It is about what your character becomes and what you are willing to let go of to become it. Being vulnerable, choosing what to reveal and what not to.

You do need to be careful, though: This is not “balanced.” This is not safe. This is not “play to win.” None of those.  

You will need to reference my other system post constantly. My bad. Sorry not sorry.

Also, here's a non blog play-aid for it.

A god and its followers are one. Valin Mattheis

You Are Made of Meaning

You make characters like you make a promise—half-open, trembling at the edge of meaning, filled out in practice and pain and maybe pleasure. If you’ve read my post for the RPG Blog Carnival, you already know: this is a system about oaths, transformation, and entanglement. Much of that comes from the individual races. Change is made central independently of race, though.

A character can be made from a backstory and some underlined phrases. From the answers to race-specific questions. From a scrap of poetry. From an image that makes your skin feel strange. From a kiss that haunts you. From play. From Schrödinger’s rule.

In this system, character creation is not about completeness. It is about direction. Nothing has to be final. Everything can change. Everything will change.

You may begin blank. You may begin radiant. But the real sheet emerges in motion.

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Characters in This System

Characters in Victories and Miseries are like anything else here: built from words that matter.

You can reach a character by:

• Answering the character creation questions for your race or concept.

• Writing a backstory and underlining what feels true or important.

• Starting from a picture and playing with I CAN statements and Schrödinger’s Rule nearby.

Character creation is poetic and yours. Ungoverned. Not breakable—because the dice won’t go up, and the fiction always responds. The sheet will change, grow, fray, ache. Just like your character. Just like you. It is precarious. You can make something traditionally overpowered. But it will change, and abusers reveal themselves. 

FIRST!, Scrödingers rule:

SCHRÖDINGER’S RULES

You don’t need to finish your sheet. You don’t need to know everything.
You just need to be real enough to begin. What counts then? Read the ending of the post.

This system honors uncertainty.
Sometimes, the truth isn’t written until your voice cracks as you say it. Three rules make that true.

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RULE 1

If something is blank, it can be filled in at any time. Are there blank spots on your sheet. fill 'em.
Not randomly—but at a moment of recognition.
Say “Oh.” Say “Of course.” Say “That’s what it is.”
Say it because something just hit you. Remember, when you feel a strong emotion and it has to come out at the table - something changes. It's already built in.
Steal your watch and hand it back to yourself at double price

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RULE 2

If something doesn’t fit after the first session or two or whatever, you may change it.
You may even delete something that feels truly wrong—just tell the table.
Effort gone towards it are released.

But try this first:
Play toward it. Press on it. Let the world deform it. See if effort trickles to it.
Change through friction, not escape.

Still—I am not your mother.

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RULE 3

You can always, if you know and realize that you can do something fitting what exists on your sheet, say I CAN - and write it on the sheet. 

These I CAN statements should not indicate evolution, change or be some monumental reveal. They are realizations of what you already can do. A trait you already have. 

Others can realize that you have been playing in a certain way, that your character is a certain way. Something already true that just needs to be scrivened on your sheet. They can ask CAN YOU?. Another player if present must echo with a YOU CAN, and you too must feel it true and say I CAN.
Then you CAN.

These rules are not optional fluff.
They are how characters become through exploratory play. Find out what hides in the blanks of the sheet. Make it a litany of tender scribbles.
They are what makes the sheet alive, and yours.

The anatomy of a character

TRAITS:
An inner, sensed, historical state and an outer, sensible state and how they relate.

There is a tension in this. Either can be played towards. Traits can grind up against one another. We don't always make sense in reality, neither does your character. They can be poetic and stark, powerful in play, or tender and real. Your choice. 

If you don't have both, don't sweat it, just write one part of the exterior-interior dyad.

Do not sweat it if the interior is a little exterior, or vice versa. It is real. 

"My sorrowful eyes, haunted by a past of too many failures to protect others."
"A blue-colored beard to catch eyes, my way of saying how exotic and poisonous i see myself"
"A twitch in my limb, a guards hypervigilance massaged into my very brain."
"Tattooed arms coiled like rust-touched steel, A wiry strength the product of painful occult experimentation."

THAT DESERVING OF A NAME: 

Objects. People. Places. Dreams. Hungers. These are your character’s pressure points. The fragile, dangerous, sacred elements of their world.

These things do not exist to “enrich the story.” They are the world—its edges, its echoes, its vulnerabilities. They can be stolen, shattered, exalted. They do not die quietly (use the rules for impact, harm/change them only irrevocably when the player character is present. The player should have hints and chances to stop and act on them being threatened. 

They deserve a name because the world agrees they matter. Because someone might weep to hold them, or break something trying to take them.

If it worries the world player how to manage powerful name-deserving parts of the world:
If something is powerful and commonplace, others already wield things like it.
If something is powerful and rare, others will come for it. It is coveted
If it is a relation without much power, threatening it is easy - the player character likely has to respond.
If it is a relation with much power, that relation can be caught in intrigue, coveted, the subject to jealousy.

Example things deserving of a name:

A sword forged from your brother’s ribs. Why so?
A stolen kiss, still burning on someone else, a lovers, mouth. Who are they.
A village where your name still means something. Which village?
A book that hums when held by the guilty. How did you get that?
A debt, a pet, that walks. What is its demonic form?

EXPERTISE AND SKILL

Expertises have names. And names change everything: A “Sister,” a “Mendicant,” and a “Speaker of Healing Words” might all help you stand with the action "clean and stitch the wound closed with herbs and string" —but they do not do it the same way, and the results may differ. A Sister's care is potent for her kin, a mendicant works thread and herb like spell, and a speaker of healing words may recite hymns all the while, pulling the string out of the miraculously closed gash after the end of their prayer.

Expertises flavor every act they touch. They carry memory, culture, shame, reverence. The fiction changes around them. If you have one, it speaks through every action within its reach. They define knowledge, shape the content of relations, speaks to status.

But you do not need one to begin - remember. You may be blank. You may be silent. You may be a thing still learning its name. Apply Schrödingers rules. Let the world call you something. Or wait until you say, I CAN, yourself. 

Each expertise has a list of actions - skills. Skills are not abstract. They are explicit, grounded, and used in action. They are likely to be incomplete in the first sessions. Remember that YOU CAN do what you already can do, it is just not on your sheet yet.

A skill must name: A sphere of intent, and a direct method.

Skills come in three types:

ACTIONS

Used to change, support, create, or assist. 

“Helping birth directly.”

“Supporting another with kind words.”

"Admonishing by philosophic tirade.

SAVES

Used to endure, resist, or redirect.

“Avoiding guilt by turning away the eye.”

“Bearing pain by screaming bloody murder.”

ATTACKS

Used to harm, control, destroy, or dominate. 

“Fast attacks with bladed weapons.”

“Crushing bones with a two-handed mace.”

“Upheaving earth with a two-handed mace.”

When they don't make sense, ask Why!?

Summoner. Lover. Keeper. Antonio Reinhard

FEATS HEROIC

These are crystallized moments—poetic truths your character can always invoke, and also a truth that is always in effect.

They are not powers.
They are declarations.

This happened. This changed me. It is still happening.
This is how I am in the world.
This is a very definite moment of being.

A feat heroic is always tied to something else on your sheet:
A Trait, an Expertise, a Skill, a Named Thing, even an Instinct. Any other thing that makes sense, really. I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER.

When that thing changes, the feat refreshes.
The blade is heated again. The truth is made strange once more.

You may use a feat heroic whenever it fits the fiction.
You may use it in addition to anything else on your sheet.
it's effect, interpreted as you wish, comes in effect in addition to the effects of the roll. It must be acknowledged.

You may write one even if:

• You don’t yet know what it’s tied to.

• You don’t yet know the active or passive effect.

Don’t sweat it.
You’ll find it in play.

The activated part of a feat heroic refreshes—becomes sharp again—when what it’s tied to changes.
You’ll know when. Something inside will ring.

Tie
Skill: Repair at the forge
Crystalization
“My hand strikes the anvil, and the sword bends and screams. Unwieldy, now more deadly.”
Truth:
When I smith, things writhe and change into deadlier forms.

Tie:
Trait – My many scars - A painful reminder of many a road i have travelled
Crystallization
“My bloodied feet kiss the river red."
Truth:
It is most easy to find traces of my passing.

Tie:
Instinct – Always display subservience when in need.
Crystallization:
“I fall to the ground. Flowers bend their heads. The flagging pole lies asleep. Pity spreads as I crumble. All near feel it in earnest”
Truth:
I may always choose to be emotionally affected and demand to hear how from another.

Tie:
Attack – Throw giant spears
Crystallization:
“The stake bolts through. Their form slumps, a piece of dead meat on a stick.”
Truth:
When I throw a weapon and someone is wounded—they are pinned.
When I pin something to the ground, my strikes are true

Feats heroic are also always on truths. Powerful. The closest thing to a different way to manipulate the world there is.
But yours is not the only truth in the room.

When you invoke a feat heroic against another player, you are not declaring a winner.
You are opening a wound and asking: what do you do with this?
You are co-authoring pressure, not closing the scene.

A good collision is two truths, ringing off each other like struck iron. It is tension that remakes the world.
It might look like this:

“The spear carves through their chest, caving it in. Their form slumps, a piece of dead meat on a stick.”

“I reach out, grabbing the hilt, not quite dead—blood and gore seeping from the spear’s end, pushed out by my guttural scream. My ribcage strains against the intruder. ‘It will take more,’ I say, pushing both me and the spear out of the ground.”

This is not contradiction.
This is two characters being seen, being changed, being held in the violence of the moment.

A bad collision is loveless. One-sided. Mechanical. A player trying to win at fiction.
A feat used to erase rather than entangle.
It might feel like:

• “I say my thing, and your character is gone.”

• “You don’t get to react.”

• “This is how it ends for you.”

This is not how this system works. Make legends, make smut. 
There are no hit points. No initiative order.
Only Impact. leverage. Feeling. Mutual weight.

Is there a bag tied to your spear, or is it just a means to an end? Then you are an abuser.

So ask the question, if you must. Ask it honestly:

If another player uses a feat heroic to flatten you—to remove your agency, to end your character without regard—are they an abuser.

Not in the legal sense. Not in the moralizing sense.
But in the structural, intimate, fiction-breaking sense.

Before concluding—assume a moment of heat or impulse, not malice. Someone should inquire "Why?" they did it - there may be a delicious bag of seeds set on the spear.

There may be mental impact, a demand to act a certain way, but there are ways to make that action yours.

Did they break the system of care, of pressure, of mutual trembling this game demands?

This game is not balanced.
But it is built on meaningful, loving domination, not domination for its own sake.

If you use your truths as weapons, be ready to lose them.
If you don’t want to lose them, ask, invite, entangle.

Because the greatest feats are not kills.
They are kisses that burn the world in renewing fire.

Always log the day on my skin at nightfall. Zeen Chiin

INSTINCTS

Are always true statements.

Instincts are truths your body acts on before you think.
They are always true, until they aren’t.
They are how the world knows you. They are how you interject. How you break a situation open.

An instinct is a sentence that starts with ALWAYS or NEVER.
Sometimes it begins with WHILE—a condition, a moment, a pressure.
They may at some point feel tied to something else on the sheet. If tied, they are tied. Remember that YOU CAN.

ALWAYS throw a quick lie when questioned
NEVER strike the first blow
ALWAYS accept a drink if offered
WHILE touched, ALWAYS speak sweetly
ALWAYS answer a question with another question
NEVER cry while someone else is watching

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Instincts can always be invoked for detriment by the GM as a primary consequence of action.
No effort is gained. Take instincts you’re willing to live with—or struggle against.

Players can invoke instincts in three ways:

• To Make Things Worse
  Act impulsively or against your own interests. You gain effort. Others at the table may offer it too. You can accept or decline—but if you take it, the instinct rules.

• For Bonus
  To act with clarity, leverage, or force in a situation that aligns. If the instinct is true, you may act. Nothing stops you.

• To Interrupt
  Before a consequence lands—I can’t help it, I act. The instinct fires. You are now part of what unfolds.

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Instincts are not passive.
They are not “roleplay suggestions.”
They are pre-loaded decisions.
They are vows written in your blood.

If you want to change an instinct:

• Break it during a moment of high tension, emotional cost, or transformation. That would cause Change!

• Let something else on your sheet change first—a Desire, a Trait, a Feat—and allow the instinct to follow that change if it makes sense.

Let them rule you—until they don’t.

I desire to be an echo of the fae's voice. Jodie Muir.

DESIRES

Something is pulling you forward.

Desires are what you want—either what the character wants, or what the player wants through the character.
Desires don't make sense. Mine sure don't.
They can be clean. They can be a mess. They don’t need to resolve like goals do. 
They just need to burn brightly.

To be admired by those who hurt me. To have them grovel at my feet.
To make her forget me, utterly.
To be chosen—without asking. To be taken up and remade.
To stop running, even if it means to fall, and end this ceaseless conflict.
To make my mother regret.

Desires are hints for pressure.
They are magnets for trouble.
They are signals to everyone else: this is where I want to be seen.

They show your desire to the GM or the table.
They are a gift: push me here. Dangle it in front of me. Make it a painful decision. Make it worth it.
Let them build the delicious heat. Trust them.

They can blur with your real desires. That’s allowed.
This system doesn’t demand separation—it rewards sincerity.

Let your desire make you tremble.

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Desires don’t sit quietly on your sheet.
When a desire gets close to becoming true, you must choose:

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Refute it

To resist it.
It is no longer true for you. It no longer fits.
You shy away, and may not get it anymore. It is no longer your fate. It cannot be your fate. 
Write I WILL NEVER (or another fitting refute) in front of the desire.

You suddenly realize becoming a vampire is horrific, and reject the advances of the creature violently.

You can die from the vampires blade. Be made its thrall. But you can no longer be made a vampire. That impact shies away from you. 

When your un-desire changes, you can once again be afllicted by that fate, or reach the desire - it may be a goal now - but it is no longer your desire.

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Fulfill it

And see what it does to you.

When you invoke it, the world makes it true.
You fulfill it. You call on it and say: It not only can happen—now it does happen.
Another player may invoke the desire too if fiction allows it, and they are the cause. The world-player may invoke it if the world is the cause. 
It will be true then unless you right-then-and-there choose to refute it. It is in their or your hands.

“I bare my neck to the fangs, for a while gasping, resisting, but then not quite—as I let the red slumber and a new crimson life wash over me. What happens to me? Tell me more.”

It will be a consequence then. Either now or soon. Your choice. The World-player, all around the table should help make it memorable. Now the interesting question is no longer if it happens, but HOW. 

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You gain effort when a desire is fulfilled in a meaningful way—or when it is beautifully, terribly denied.

Painful, aching secrets. Anna Verhoog

A [DARK] SECRET

A secret is something that happened—and if it were known, it would change everything.
It can be dark. It can just be hidden. You should only have one AS MANY AS YOU LIKE.
But it must be concrete. Something that was done. Something that left a mark.
Even if no one else saw it.

DARK secrets

I once betrayed the one I love most, and they still don’t know the severity of what I did.
I held open the door during the massacre. Just for a moment. It was enough.
I burned the letter that would have freed him.
I drank from the sacred bowl and lied about the taste.
I whispered her true name to the wrong ear, and now I pretend I’ve forgotten it.

JUST secrets 

I met the Queen of Willows once, in the guise of a wandering herbalist. I gave her water. I never told anyone.

I was the one who found the missing child, but I let someone else take the credit because I liked the way they looked at me.

I crafted the bell above the town gate. The one that rings when someone dies. No one knows it was my hands that tuned its voice.

A SECRET:

• Is powerful in proportion to the consequences of its revelation when evoked.

• Is event-based—it is a concrete thing that happened, not just a mood or tendency.

• May remain blank, even if you know it.

• May remain written but unrevealed, just your secret, for as long as it fits.

• May change, until it is spoken. Rewrite it for delicious potential

Once revealed, something shifts: It causes Change!

The GM will ask the important Hows:

Who heard it?
Who believed it?
What changed because of it?

You might not know the answers yet. That’s fine.
But you must know what happened.

Until then, the secret is a loaded chamber. A kiss-shaped bullet to the world.

Once spoken, it is the shot. Out there. Cats out of the bag. Genie is out of the bottle. The secret is writ in stone.

A point of finesse:
A secret that says only something about you, and not about another, leaves room. 
"I met the Queen of Willows once, in the guise of a wandering herbalist. I gave her water. I never told anyone." 
still lets the queen of Willows be who she is.
It lets the world-player interpret what it means.
This is generous. It’s the art of play.

Be a lover first.
Don’t stain others—just offer color to the world with your bullet-kisses.

A GOAL: 

A goal is what your character is actively doing next.
It’s a direction. A concrete step. A move toward pressure.
It can be foolish. It can be doomed. It must be real.

A goal is not your purpose in life.
It is your next intent, paired with your first step.

Goals:

• Can be short or long, but must be active.

• Can change at any time, but always change in play.

• Can be offered—you may ask the table: Can someone help me make this matter?
  
  

When you achieve a goal, replace it.
When you abandon one, admit it. Burn it.
If it turns to ash in your hands—good. That’s pressure, too.

It all earns you effort.

FASCINATION, CRAVING, QUIVERING

This is the smutty part. The secret part. The trembling part.
It’s what draws your character in, sometimes against their will.
It can be sexual or asexual, dominating, submissive, transformative, explicit or not - whatever makes your heart race and your mind cloudy. But make it vulnerable.
It’s how the world gets under your skin. Thats you, the player.

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FASCINATION

What you want.
Not in general—now. This setting. This game. This you.
What the other characters have that you think might un-and-remake you.

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CRAVING

How you want it.
The texture of it. The aesthetic. The situation. The touch.
What makes your heart race in ways you did not or specifically do ask for.

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QUIVERING

How your body betrays you.
When something approaches your fascination—what happens?
How do you shift, tremble, harden, soften, pull back, lean in? Is there shame or surrender?

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These aren’t just tags.
They are flags for fiction. Invitations for tension.
They don’t need to be acted on—but they can be noticed by others. Played with. Tested. Resisted. Fulfilled.

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Example smut - tried to hit a more asexual note, a submissive note, and a dominating note.

FASCINATION: I want to be admired from afar. To be celebrated solely by the gaze—a tenderness that needs no touch. Not for passion, but for reverence.
CRAVING: Devoured by a look that truly sees me as I want to be seen.
QUIVERING: My posture shifts—statuelike, feeling the weight of their gaze as it fills me with quiet pride.

FASCINATION: Being felt and grasped. Held and rocked and fucked and fiercely molded.
CRAVING: Big hands running up and down my body, outside and in.
QUIVERING: I lean in, closer to what may grasp me

FASCINATION: I want to be obeyed—completely, even when it hurts. Especially then.
CRAVING: A willing mouth pressed to my hand, waiting for instruction.
QUIVERING: My spine lengthens. I speak slower. Every word wants to become a command.

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When someone touches your craving meaningfully, they gain effort.
If they fulfill a fascination so intensely that your craving changes, or you gain a new craving tied to that someone, you gain effort.

You may always describe your quivering when someone does something. It's a hint for knowledge they may seek. You can reveal your hand, or tease them.
You don’t need permission. That’s how you show your body knows.

They may seek, inquire and-or follow through. Or they may pull back. say no. Directly or indirectly. With a why, of course. "I don't feel like it" is a why, too.

That’s precarious play. There are no easy ways out for them or you. It's all entangled. 

Dramatic / Smutty Bonds

Stolen from myself because it damn well works.

Once everyone has an idea who each character is, they should say to another player.

    "I travel with you because [reason], because I have seen you [do something]."

The responder may accept or reject what they’ve seen, as in I See, but they may not reject the reason itself.

For a dramatic game, each player should say

"I want to feel [feeling] when near you, but you cannot give me that because [reason]"

For a smutty game, each player should say

"I want to feel [Fascination] when near you, but you cannot give me that because [reason]"

 The responder may accept or reject what they’ve seen, as in I See, but they may not reject the feeling or fascination itself. 

They should then reverse the question, so they are now both bonded.

Repeat until everyone has reasons to travel/fuck/dramatize with one another. 

Do you want legend? Nanaco Yashiro

What to do with this then?

What you will need to have written down varies on the type of play you want as a table. Talk about that as adults.

For an "outgoing game" exploring the world, I would recommend that the characters have atleast 1 expertise, and goals or secrets.

For an "inwards" going game, exploring your interiorities, I would recommend that the players have made dramatic bonds, and that both bonds and that deserving of a name are tied between players. Draw lines, become conspiracy theorists.

For a "smutty" game, that each player have their fascinations, cravings and quiverings down on paper (not necessarily to share and also smutty bonds. Discuss if you want soft teasing, or absolutely crazy fetishistic fuckery. Your choice. Players should draw lines between the known bonds. Now it is an investigation of one anothers cravings.

For a decidly non-smutty game. Cut the smut out. The game doesn't suffer. It is just more cool. Less warm.

For an "Epic" game, "things deserving of a name" should entangle the players with outside forces. Feats heroic should be present. Expertises should be rad. All should be able to be spray-painted on a wall. Scream it to the sound of metal. A kidnapped lover, screaming from the highest tower. A blade stolen from a sorcerer king. A deal brokered with the queen of the forest to be repaid before the wild hunt starts, and the first of three horns have just been blown. 

My prepwork - how i run this system - is always improvisational. I do have a method that i call PULP. but it will have to wait, the fae are calling.

Or do you want smut? Nanaco Yashiro