Scouts and Explorers: Create a fantasy character

 Create a character in this introduction to online adventures.

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a table top role playing fantasy game. At its core D&D is all about storytelling – you and your friends tell a story together, guiding your heroes through quests and adventures, working together to solve problems and exploring the world you’ve created. You get to create your own characters to play too and, unlike other table top games, what you do is totally up to you!

Find out more on the official D&D website.

 

Create your character

1.      Start sketching an outline of your character. At first, you should think about what you look like – are you tall or small? What do your arms and legs look like? You’ll be adding more details as you go so you only need to draw a basic outline to start.

There’s no limit to what you can imagine in D&D. You could create and play a character completely different to you, from height to gender, hair colour to how you speak. You don’t even have to be a human!

 

2.      Next it’s time to think about what the characters are like – are they a warrior? Do you want them to do magic? Are they a bit of a trickster or do they love the natural world? You should think about how your character might dress and add some more details to your drawing.

3.      Now, you should decide some things that they’re good at – are they strong, wise, or charismatic? You can add as many details as you want here, maybe they’re a whizz at languages or love to paint. You should add some words or images to the left hand side of the page to represent your ideas.

4.      Think of some things that they’re not so good at as well – maybe they’re not very intelligent or they’re slow and not very agile. Maybe they’re clumsy or have bad table manners. This time, you should add some words or images to the right hand side of the page to represent these ideas.

5.      You should spend a couple of minutes thinking about what motivates your character. What things do they care about and why are they joining your adventure? Maybe you’re just hunting for treasure, or wanting to spend some time with your friends.

6.      Finally you should give your character a name, you could add it to the top of your drawing.

 

Bring your character to life

1.      Once you’ve finished creating your character it’s time for them to introduce themselves and start your adventure!

2.      Start by setting the scene – maybe you’re meeting in a hut, a forest, a town square or somewhere out in the wild!

3.      In D&D you play a character, and you can either talk in third person and describe what your character is doing, or speak in first person and pretend to be your character.

4.    Create a video to introduce your character (as your character). You should hold your drawing up to the camera so your leader can see it. Remember to share things like their strengths and weaknesses, motivation and any quirky facts that makes their character stand out, as well as physical characteristics.

When speaking in character, you could speak differently (you could change your accent, volume, or speed) to your normal voice to make your character stand out.

 

This activity counts towards:

Scouts Entertainer Activity Badge

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