What historical event is most important to your character?
What role does the Way of Virtue play in your life?
So im having abit of trouble with these questions, im not sure as a new player how to answer them.
As a character goal how high should you shoot? or should you aim for something you can achieve relatively easily?
For Historical event i am complacently confused.
As a Courage priest the way of virtue is everything?
So abit of a vague question but any help would be appreciated
Cheers
I’m 90% confident that you’re getting those specific background questions because your character is in Highguard (please tell me if I’m wrong!). Everyone gets the IC goals question (I think), but the History and Way questions are there because they relate directly to Highguard.
IC Goals
Personally, I’d recommend having a mix of goals - some that are quicker and easier to achieve (short term), some that are a bit more effort (medium term), and then some Ambitious goals (long term). It’s fine for these all to change when you actually hit the field! But having nice clear reasons for why your character has come to Anvil can be a great boon to getting you started, and immediately gives you something to talk about on the field.
History
In Highguard, the purpose of the past is to inspire the present. History is extremely important to the Highborn - it narrates how they came to the current situation and gives insight into the future. But more often than not, they seek for the past to teach a lesson, to influence certain behaviour - hence the role of Archivists.
The Highguard History page gives a brief rundown of the Nation - but there’s more to be found in the tales of the Paragons and Exemplars, as well as in the records of the Historical Thrones. It may be worth finding an event that would inspire or otherwise inform your character - either as a lesson of what not to do, or an instruction of how to be Virtuous.
Way of Virtue
You’re correct in that the Way of Virtue would be “everything” to a dedicated priest, but this question is, to some extent, about its particular significance in your life. What does the Way mean to you? Did you fall into the path of Courage at an early age, and have never looked back since - is the Way to you Courage and not much more? Did you spend years following other Virtues before settling upon Courage? Do you feel the Way should be a major and commanding part of every citizen’s life - should people always consult priests before making decisions?
I reckon with character goals shoot for the moon- say you wanna be Senator or General or greatest duellist or most skilled artisan or richest person in the Empire or whatever- you may never get there but you’ll probably get and create more game by going fully Ambitious.
For “Historical events”, a quick look at the recent history page on the Wiki may be helpful.
Note that if your character is Highguard and 20 years old or more, the territory of Reikos (the easternmost of the Highguard lands) was lost to the Druj within your memory, and recaptured a year or two ago.
Alternitively, if you know what province you’re character is from, a look through the recent Winds of War could prove inspirational.
Shoot as high as you like for character goals. It is often hard to tell how hard a character goal is to achieve before starting play, can you give your examples of ones you considering which you think are easy and ones you think are moonshots? Also some goals can be fun to work towards even if they are never achieved, having something to direct your roleplay at is sometimes the reward rather than the (unachievable) goal. These need to be things with achievable first steps though, so for example “kill all enemies of the Empire IN THE WORLD” is probably impossible but could be fun because you can definitely start by killing some enemies of the Empire and have fun doing that.
If your virtue is the most important thing to your character, there are historical events relating to it which you could pick. The founding of the Way or events surrounding a Paragon or Exemplar which you like the sound of would be good examples.
Thanks for all the replys there’s alot of good info and I deffo feel more confident answering the questions now. For one of my bigger IC goals would it be even feasible to have something along the lines of bridging a devide in nations though the virtue of courage and learning how they interperate the virtue of courage in the imperial orc nation though the eyes of a highguard. So almost like a priestly research mission? What do you think?
The Empire is pretty well unified, a few people have personal prejudices against nations and some of these are more common in some nations than others, but in general I wouldn’t say there are big national divides in need of bridging. The recent Doctrine of the Howling Abyss makes Orcs/Highguard even less of an issue than it might have been before, and the end of the Yaelite schism means Highguard/anyone is less likely than before. Your solution is nice but unfortunately I don’t think the problem exists in the right way.
Oh ok thabksfor clearing that up. Il have to think of something else then unless the researching how each nation interacts with the virtues could still be one of my goals or is it just common knowledge aswell?
Finding out how each nation interprets and follows a single virtue could be an excellent starter goal, and likely take you most of a year in terms of talks, meetings with national priest groups, and so on. If you want to do all 7 virtues, that’s a quest that might outlive your character
Brilliant that’s exactly what I was hoping. Hopefully it wouldn’t seem too weird for a priest of courage to be enquiring about all of the virtues even tho I would be following courage
No, taking an interest in other virtues is absolutely fine. While this is a bit of an OOC reference, there’s a lovely CS Lewis quote: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” So Courage is actually a good virtue to be dedicated to for doing this.
Bear in mind that how a nation follows a virtue will vary a lot between individuals. If you just ask the priests you will get the opinion of the priests, which may turn out to be very different from the warriors and the mages. Even within one of those groups you will get different answers. There probably will be trends worth picking out, so I think it would be an interesting task.
Good point penny il brouden it to all types of players not just priests. Thanks very much I’m alot happier about filling in my character now. Roll on June
On a higher level note, those questions are not there to constrain what you do in the field. They are there so that plot writers who decide to write some plot can do a quick search of players’ answers to find victims they can use as jump off points for plot (You may or may not feel victimised, it is entirely down to luck! ).
So if you answer “I want to be general”, that is great, but for the plot team, that is fairly useless, because there are 250 people from your nation all saying the same thing.
But if you answer “I want to find the long lost tome of the third empress, which I last heard was lost up a mountain”, and a plot writer wants to get an old book into the game, you might get an NPC knocking on your tent flap looking for you.
This means that as your character develops, and you get more ideas, please email updates to your questions to PD, as they will update them in the system, and then maybe you’ll be “lucky” enough to meet some weird NPCs (and one of them might be me! )
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