Creating a Character
This will focus on the pages here at the World of Raios website which help you understand your choices and decide who you would like to play. This guide is not intended to be a tutorial for new players on general TTRPG character creation or play - though that beginner-friendly content is coming in future, both for players and for GMs!
Note that if you haven't yet clicked through Start with this walk through, it really would be best to do so now, to get an introduction to the nations and cultures of Raios and to the most important features of the site, like tooltips and maps.
The recommended starting location for play, during our initial release, is the northern continent of Aorlan, and specifically its Kingdom of Arnheim. Aorlan will feel familiar and comfortable to fantasy gamers, with a couple different cultures of humans living in several kingdoms, as well as elves and dwarves and halflings in their own ancient homes. The most fun and interactive way to explore the starting area for your character is to spend some time exploring the interactive map of Aorlan. The star on the map pin for Arnheim makes it easy to find. You can click on any map pin, and details about that location will be displayed to left of map. The pins shown on this map by default are the nations of Aorlan plus a few fun adventuring locations. Once you have checked those out, click the gear in the upper right of the map and start turning other kinds of locations on and exploring those. There are many forests, mountain ranges and rivers to explore on the map and as an adventurer.
Arnheim as your starting location has good coastal access and trading with the rest of the known World of Raios, making it possible for you to play cultures from anywhere in Raios, not just the cultures native to Aorlan. The best way to see your options for which culture you want to play is to explore the Cultures page. Scrolling down will let you see images of each culture, giving you a flavor of them. You can also mouse over their links to get a popup with lots of detail. You can, of course, click through to the pages about each culture. The description of each culture will help you decide: Who are these people? What are they like? What is their culture like? What do they look like? Each culture has a table showing "Character class prevalence" for them, though you can certainly discuss being an unusual class for your culture with your GM.
When you are looking at a culture's page, it will also show you the prevalence of Deity worship for that culture, which of course matters for some character classes more than others. If you're thinking about a deity-focused character, there is a specific page that will let you check out all the deities for all the cultures on just one page: Choosing a deity given your culture. The key to using that page is to mouse over deity names as you're looking at a culture. The tooltip that comes up is actually all of the content of the deity page, except for the pictures. And, of course, you can click through to see the full deity page with pictures.
This is made a little complicated on our site because we are game system agnostic. So far, we have character rules for Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowdark, Pathfinder 1E and Pathfinder 2E. We hope to add many more supported game systems, with community help. Reach out on discord if you'd like to help get your game into the Raios site!
But different games often have very different classes you can play, or the same classes with different names. So we have used descriptive names which we hope will make sense, and then we map the *actual* character classes for different games to those descriptive names. For example:
Pathfinder examples: Magus, Sorceror, Summoner, Witch, Wizard
The easiest place to look at all classes descriptions and their mapping to the game you play is the Classes page. Mousing over the classes on that page will pop up the tooltip about that class - and right at the top you will see D&D examples and Pathfinder examples of their game system classes who can play this kind of character as shown above.
You will use whatever character generation tool you like to use for your particular game. We are not attempting to duplicate those across all the game systems we'd like to support. D&D Beyond, Demiplane, Pathbuilder, Roll20 - these are just a few of the excellent online tools that players of those games use for character creation. Including us! And, of course, many players still enjoy paper and pencil character sheets.
But at the bottom of each culture page you will see the four current rule sets we have (so far!) for making a character of that culture:
We - and others playing in Raios - are there with help, support, answers, LFG. GM supporters can even have a private channel for your game group to trade messages, voice or video. Come say hello! https://discord.gg/4JfhSYDHPy
Note that if you haven't yet clicked through Start with this walk through, it really would be best to do so now, to get an introduction to the nations and cultures of Raios and to the most important features of the site, like tooltips and maps.
Where your character will be adventuring
The recommended starting location for play, during our initial release, is the northern continent of Aorlan, and specifically its Kingdom of Arnheim. Aorlan will feel familiar and comfortable to fantasy gamers, with a couple different cultures of humans living in several kingdoms, as well as elves and dwarves and halflings in their own ancient homes. The most fun and interactive way to explore the starting area for your character is to spend some time exploring the interactive map of Aorlan. The star on the map pin for Arnheim makes it easy to find. You can click on any map pin, and details about that location will be displayed to left of map. The pins shown on this map by default are the nations of Aorlan plus a few fun adventuring locations. Once you have checked those out, click the gear in the upper right of the map and start turning other kinds of locations on and exploring those. There are many forests, mountain ranges and rivers to explore on the map and as an adventurer.
What cultures can you play?
Arnheim as your starting location has good coastal access and trading with the rest of the known World of Raios, making it possible for you to play cultures from anywhere in Raios, not just the cultures native to Aorlan. The best way to see your options for which culture you want to play is to explore the Cultures page. Scrolling down will let you see images of each culture, giving you a flavor of them. You can also mouse over their links to get a popup with lots of detail. You can, of course, click through to the pages about each culture. The description of each culture will help you decide: Who are these people? What are they like? What is their culture like? What do they look like? Each culture has a table showing "Character class prevalence" for them, though you can certainly discuss being an unusual class for your culture with your GM.
When you are looking at a culture's page, it will also show you the prevalence of Deity worship for that culture, which of course matters for some character classes more than others. If you're thinking about a deity-focused character, there is a specific page that will let you check out all the deities for all the cultures on just one page: Choosing a deity given your culture. The key to using that page is to mouse over deity names as you're looking at a culture. The tooltip that comes up is actually all of the content of the deity page, except for the pictures. And, of course, you can click through to see the full deity page with pictures.
What class would you like to play?
This is made a little complicated on our site because we are game system agnostic. So far, we have character rules for Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowdark, Pathfinder 1E and Pathfinder 2E. We hope to add many more supported game systems, with community help. Reach out on discord if you'd like to help get your game into the Raios site!
But different games often have very different classes you can play, or the same classes with different names. So we have used descriptive names which we hope will make sense, and then we map the *actual* character classes for different games to those descriptive names. For example:
Arcane Caster
D&D examples: Sorceror, WizardPathfinder examples: Magus, Sorceror, Summoner, Witch, Wizard
The easiest place to look at all classes descriptions and their mapping to the game you play is the Classes page. Mousing over the classes on that page will pop up the tooltip about that class - and right at the top you will see D&D examples and Pathfinder examples of their game system classes who can play this kind of character as shown above.
You know what culture and class you want to play! Now what?
You will use whatever character generation tool you like to use for your particular game. We are not attempting to duplicate those across all the game systems we'd like to support. D&D Beyond, Demiplane, Pathbuilder, Roll20 - these are just a few of the excellent online tools that players of those games use for character creation. Including us! And, of course, many players still enjoy paper and pencil character sheets.
But at the bottom of each culture page you will see the four current rule sets we have (so far!) for making a character of that culture:
- Generic Character Creation Guidelines, which are descriptive but without any game-specific rules or details
- Pathfinder 1 Character Creation Rules
- Pathfinder 2 Character Creation Rules
- D&D Character Creation Rules
- Shadowdark Character Creation Rules
Our Discord community is always available
We - and others playing in Raios - are there with help, support, answers, LFG. GM supporters can even have a private channel for your game group to trade messages, voice or video. Come say hello! https://discord.gg/4JfhSYDHPy