RULEBOOK

Character Appearance

Appearance is information. Everything a stranger sees in the first five seconds — the way you stand, the state of your boots, the scar you forgot to hide — tells a story about you. The question is whether it’s the story you meant to tell.

Why Appearance Is Worth Thinking About

Hair color and height are a fine start. They’re not enough.

By the time you reach this page, you know what your character can do (gifts, skills), where they came from (background), and who they are on the inside (defining moments, mindset, motivations). Appearance is where all of that becomes visible — or deliberately invisible. A lifetime of choices, labor, and damage leaves marks. A lifetime of fears and secrets shapes what someone tries to hide.

The goal here is not to produce a portrait. It’s to find two or three details that feel true to this specific person — details that other players will notice, remember, and eventually ask about. Those details do more for a character’s presence at the table than any description of eye color ever will.

None of this affects rolls or action points. It gives your GM texture to work with and gives your character a surface that other people can read — or misread.

Build and Bearing

Your gifts and skills live in your body. Someone who has spent years hauling cargo looks different from someone who has spent years bent over books. That difference shows — in the hands, in the posture, in how much space a person takes up without thinking about it.

But bearing is a choice. Not everyone carries themselves honestly.

What to ask about your character:

  • Does your character’s body reflect their capabilities — or do they go out of their way to obscure them?
  • A soldier with Body 5 might carry that in every step. Or they might have learned, after one too many bar fights they didn’t want, to move quietly and keep the shoulders down.
  • A scholar with Wits 5 and Body 1 might have ink-stained fingers, a slight forward lean from years of reading, hands that move when they think.
  • A hunter with Appeal 4 who’s spent more time in the forest than in company might move beautifully and have absolutely no idea that anyone finds this interesting.

The gap between what a body can do and what its owner lets it show is itself a character detail. A physically powerful person who makes themselves seem small has a reason for that. So does a slight person who takes up exactly as much space as they’re entitled to.

Face and Features

The face is the hardest thing to control. You can choose your clothes. You cannot choose whether your jaw tightens when someone in authority enters the room.

A face carries history. Not in some mystical sense — in the practical sense that laughing for twenty years leaves different marks than twenty years of being careful. The expressions a person reaches for most often become the ones that live there permanently.

Some faces worth considering:

  • A herbalist who has heard enough confessions to stop being surprised by people — a face that listens without reacting, which makes people trust her with things they shouldn’t.
  • A former soldier whose neutral expression is actually quite good, but whose eyes still go to exits first every time he enters a room. He doesn’t notice he does this.
  • A merchant who smiles with professional warmth and whose eyes never quite join in. Customers notice this eventually. He has never understood why they seem vaguely unsettled after a pleasant transaction.
  • A street urchin who learned to keep her face blank very young, and who now has laugh lines she didn’t expect, from people she didn’t expect to find funny.

Think about the expression your character wears when they think no one is watching. That’s usually more interesting than the one they put on.

Clothing and Presentation

Clothing is the easiest thing to lie about.

A background shapes what someone defaults to: the worn-in boots of someone who has walked a lot of miles, the particular way a sailor knots things out of habit, the instinct a noble has for fabric quality even when they can’t afford it anymore. But backgrounds also explain deliberate departures from the expected. The criminal who dresses like a clerk. The deserter who left his uniform in a ditch three counties back. The prostitute who, off the clock, favors plain clothes that make her invisible, because invisibility is what she never gets to have at work.

What to ask about your character:

  • Does their clothing match their background — or is the mismatch itself the story?
  • What do they keep in perfect condition, and what are they indifferent to? A soldier who polishes his boots out of habit but hasn’t repaired his coat in a year is a different person from one who keeps the coat immaculate and treats the boots as tools.
  • Is there anything they always wear, regardless of circumstance? Not for warmth or protection — because it would feel wrong to take it off.

Fashion from a distant shore, a coat that’s clearly too expensive for the rest of the outfit, the absence of something that ought to be there — all of this tells a story before your character opens their mouth. The question is whether you control the story or let it tell itself.

The Gap Between Truth and Presentation

This is the section worth spending the most time on.

Almost everyone hides something. Not because they are dishonest, but because some things feel too exposed to carry visibly. Trauma, shame, capability, fear, history — all of it gets managed. The managing is not a character flaw. It is a human response to having lived.

Look at your defining moments. Ask: which of these would my character prefer that a stranger not see? That preference shapes the surface you present to the world.

What people hide, and why:

  • Survival: The entertainer who downplays how perceptive she is, because people talk more freely around someone they think isn’t paying attention.
  • Shame: The soldier who left the last battle early — not cowardice, it was complicated, but he knows how it looks, and he wears it as a permanent tension across the shoulders.
  • Strategy: The criminal who presents as utterly unremarkable, who has spent years cultivating a face that no one remembers. The invisibility is the skill.
  • Fresh start: The noble who took off the ring, learned to hold a drink differently, trained herself out of every instinct that says “person with money.” She is almost convincing.
  • Trauma: The farmer whose village burned. He doesn’t flinch at fire. He just goes somewhere else for a moment. The people who travel with him have learned not to comment on it.

Now ask the harder question: what gives them away?

Involuntary tells are the gap between the managed surface and the truth underneath. They are not character flaws to be punished. They are the details that make a character feel like a real person — and they give other players something to notice and respond to.

The kinds of tells that feel true:

  • Hands that reach for a weapon that isn’t there, in a room that has gone quiet in the wrong way.
  • Going still rather than flinching — which is its own kind of tell to someone watching for it.
  • A habit of standing with one side toward the wall. Not paranoia. Just preference.
  • The way a practised liar makes eye contact a half-beat too consistently, because they learned to compensate for looking away.
  • A pause before answering a question that shouldn’t require one.

Your mindset shapes how this plays out. A cautious character suppresses tells carefully and deliberately. An impulsive one may not have noticed they have them. A proud character may refuse to hide what shames them, wearing the history plainly because asking for discretion feels like a different kind of defeat.

Marks and Keepsakes

Some details live on the body. Scars, calluses, marks made by time or choice or accident — these are the physical evidence of a life, and they tell stories with more specificity than almost anything else.

A scar on the hand of a craftsman means something different from the same scar on a former soldier. Both are different from a scar someone has and no memory of how they got it. The detail is not just the mark — it’s what the mark implies.

Details worth considering:

  • The orphan who never had much kept the cheap brass necklace from her first earning. It is not valuable. She would notice immediately if it were gone.
  • The former squire whose signet ring came off years ago. The finger still has the indentation. He notices this occasionally and does not examine the feeling.
  • The sailor with a port tattoo she got at seventeen in a city she has never returned to. She’s not sure she wants to return. She’s not sure she wants to explain it either.
  • The deserter with a regimental brand under a high collar. He wears the collar up regardless of weather. It has become a kind of tell for people who know what to look for, which thankfully is not many.

What to show and what to hide is itself a character choice. Some marks are worn openly, with history. Others are kept out of sight — not with shame, exactly, but with a careful preference for not explaining.

Putting It Together

You do not need a full portrait. You need two or three things.

Pick the details that would hit a stranger in the first five seconds: something about the build or bearing, something about the face, something about the clothing or what’s missing from it. Any two of these is plenty. Three is more than enough.

Then consider including one detail that is not quite right — something that doesn’t fit the surface the character is presenting, or that leaks through despite their best efforts. That tension is what other players will notice. It is what makes a character feel like they have a past rather than a backstory.

Examples of three-detail portraits:

  • A woman in a merchant’s coat that is slightly too well-made for the rest of her appearance. Moves quietly for someone her size. Does not sit with her back to the door.
  • Young, good-looking in the way that has clearly been inconvenient for him, dressed in clothes that are slightly too plain for the face. Laugh lines already, which implies either a happy childhood or a very good performance habit. The hands are wrong for the rest — too calloused for what he claims to do.
  • Weather-burned face, efficient posture, not much to say about it — except the pause before she answers any question about where she’s from. Not long. Just a half-beat. Just enough.

You are not writing a novel. You are giving the other people at the table something to see. Two sentences is enough to make a character real. What matters is that at least one of those sentences leaves room for a question.

See also: Character Identity — defining moments, mindset, and motivations.

Back to Character Creation.