Exchange of Realities

“I shall live forever!” you say, reaching to the heavens or grasping at a new source of power. You’ve found the Fountain of Youth, learned how to tie your life force to an object, gotten a wish and decided you want to be impossible to kill, and everything is absolutely perfect.

Yeah. Right. Come back to my successor’s successor in a couple hundred years and say that again.

It’s logical to want to live forever. Nobody wants to not exist, and certainly nobody wants to stop having an impact on the world. But there are certain logistics to contend with, and those are where the issue’s going to sink its jagged teeth right into you.

First off—I don’t have personal experience with this, but I’ve been told by people who’ve been there—immortality is dead boring. After a while, you’ve been there, done that, invented a couple variations, tried it backwards to see if it works any better, and you’re running out of ideas. And that’s if you get to keep your operating speed. In a lot of cases, perception shifts to match lifespan, so it feels the same length—and that means that people who are living at normal rates are just zipping past you. Not fun, particularly not if you’re one of those people who does the attachment thing.

Second, if you’re an adrenaline junkie, it’s going to screw you up to no end. It’s all very well in the beginning, sure—imagine the things you can try because you know you can’t fail! But if you can’t die, these risky things can’t kill you. (Yeah, I know, being Captain Obvious here. Let me finish.) And if they can’t kill you, then where’s the risk? Sure, you can go jump off the highest mountain in the world just to say you did, but you’re not going to get the same I’m-gonna-die rush out of it. Moreover, if you’ve got a regenerative immortality rather than an invulnerability immortality, that means you’re still pasting yourself on the rock face, you’re just not dying from it. That has got to hurt.

Third, what happens if you lose anyway? Just because you’re immortal doesn’t mean you can’t be defeated, just that you won’t die. The best-case scenario is that they don’t learn you secret, and you make a hobby of engineering “She can’t possibly have survived that!” scenarios by which you can make your escape. Should keep you entertained a few years, at least. The worst is that they figure it out, and they manage to capture you and put you in something you won’t escape from. You know what’s worse than a lifetime trying to keep yourself amused in a world that isn’t adapted to your lifespan? A lifetime trying to keep yourself amused when you’re stuck in an itty bitty cell or an Evil-Sealing Can.

And that presupposes you can even get the variety of immortality you want. For some reason, the semantics on immortality are one of the most quibbled-over parts of the Laws of Dramatics the multiverse has ever known. Ask for eternal life for someone, they end up as a grasshopper, or spend the ages asleep, or if they’re lucky just have an eternity of arthritis, cataracts and constipation ahead of them. Or you get one of those people that thinks “immortal” just means “won’t die of old age”, and you don’t figure out that’s their definition until you’ve got a sword through your ribs and it’s all going black. If you must go for immortality, read the small print, get someone else to double-check it, and run it by your five-year-old just to be sure.

If you want to live forever, think it over first. It’s a lot easier to arrange than it is to undo.

The Generic Villain tells it like it is; feel free to leave a question!

This week, I talked about the older characters most likely to have shaped a character’s growth, and how they interact with the character and each other. As an example, I’m going to use one of my old characters and the process of extrapolating the adults with whom she had been closest.

Tuyet herself was an interesting case; she had three such adult-figures, two of whom could be argued to be just as much adult with distance as parent. What we’d known in the beginning was that she was of a line known for its participation in dirty politics and spywork (a set of activities members of the family generally referred to as “The Game”), that because of circumstances relating to that fact her father was usually somewhere else entirely, that she had had a very strong connection to her aunt before said aunt’s untimely death (or rather, feigned untimely death, not that I knew that for a while), and that it was only after such that she had gone into the Game herself.

Which first gave us the aunt in question. Gisel was one of the two who was something of a blend of parent and adult with distance; she served as primary role model and partial guardian for both Tuyet and her younger sister Chumani. When I’d created her, I’d mainly known that she’d be more open to new friends than Tuyet’s mother would, and left it at that; my GM added to this an event she’d regretted that had driven her out of the Game and given her an enmity towards their head of household that Tuyet’s mother had not mirrored, and explained Gisel’s closeness with her two nieces as being in part a result of her own infertility and surfeit of maternal instinct.

The parents themselves were brought in much later in the game, and were more of a collaborative effort between the two of us. Tuyet’s father, Pasel, was an adult with distance under just about any definition; he appeared ever so often when he was permitted to come visit the family, and there was always something rather melancholy about his time with them. One of his primary character points we extrapolated from a couple of Tuyet’s characterization points; despite not having a natural knack for it, she was highly skilled in performance art and oratory. Between that and her flair for the dramatic, I concluded that she’d clearly been guided to that hobby by one of her parents, and her usually-absent father seemed like the best choice.

Her mother, Runa, on the other hand, was a more significant influence, having been there the whole time. Since Gisel did so much of the childcare, Runa might be thought of as an adult with distance—but on the other hand, it was her household, and while she wasn’t the most close of parents she was active in raising her daughters. In and of herself, Runa was a dyed-in-the-wool Gamesmistress, seemingly emotionless and utterly loyal to the head of her household; while I never had it confirmed, I got the impression that the only reason why Gisel was given as much latitude as she was in raising Tuyet and Chumani was that Runa was determined not to show any sort of attachment to the girls so as to avoid their being used to influence her the way her husband was, as otherwise the parent/adult with distance rivalry would likely have gone past the point of tolerance. (Certainly, it was later confirmed in-game that avoiding fostering or showing dependence had been very important to how Runa dealt with her daughters.) The distance also explained a thing or two about Tuyet’s otherwise incongruous interest in her impact on people whom she saw as admirable; can we say parent issues?

In the end, this extrapolation gave us three characters and a complicated set of relationships that I still haven’t finished learning the details of.

After all of yesterday’s reasons why parents and adults with distance are often portrayed as rivals, you’d expect them to be like oil and water, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way; in fact, there are plenty of ways in which the parent and the adult with distance can be allies, even if you don’t take into account preexisting connections and teamwork.

One is in dealing with family squabbles. If he isn’t actively taking the character’s side, the adult with distance might still be able to help defuse tensions through his neutrality, pointing out the rightness in the parents’ argument that the child might not be able to see or, conversely, stepping in on behalf of the child because the parent’s missing an important point. (This goes double if the adult with distance is in collusion with the nonconfrontational parent; each one’s translating for one of the people arguing, and it’s that much likelier that important points will be brought up and straightened out).

Another is in getting information across. Sometimes, there are lessons a parent just isn’t the right person to teach; perhaps it comes across as “do as I say or not as I do”; maybe there’s an experience that one has had that the other hasn’t. Whatever the reason, it’s something where the adult with distance is likelier to be able to get the necessary point across, and the parent has but to ask. Conversely, if the adult with distance is being treated as the primary fount of wisdom by a child who really doesn’t respect the parent, he might be able to convince the kid to “go ask your mother” when the parent herself wouldn’t be able to get the child to listen.

What about role modeling? A lot of societies have different expectations for how different portions of the population behave—take gender roles, for instance—and children are supposed to learn how to fit these roles from their parents. But there’s usually more than one way to fit a given role, and if the parent and the adult with distance are two different versions of the same group, they can model different types of behavior appropriate to that group, both demonstrating acceptable behaviors and showing that there is no “One size fits all”. Or the adult with distance might be from a different group, and model for the child what she should see from that group.

If you’re dealing with a culture that does gift-giving occasions, there’s a lot of collaboration that can go on at that time of the year. Each of them can hint for what the other wants or run interference while the other’s doing their present-arranging.

And of course, there’s the matter of resources in general; what one family cannot provide on their own, a family plus another person might have a better chance of being able to. That alone can almost be worth the other complications.

There you have it—the adult with distance can be just as much the parent’s ally as the parent’s rival.

As always, more characterization articles are available.

Yesterday, I introduced the adult with distance, a character who often mirrors and complements the parent’s role in a character’s relationships. But the world’s more complex than just connections to a specific character, so I’m going to look at a different issue; how the parent and the adult with distance interact.

“Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy: the mother.”

–Unattributed, found in a cryptogram puzzle.

In many stories, the parent and the adult with distance are set up as rivals. Part of this is a fact about the differences presented in the last article; the adult with distance can portray himself to the character as more likable than the parent because he isn’t held responsible if she doesn’t “grow up the right way”, and his separation may allow him to see her growing up in a way that the parents might not. But most of it is the similarities between the parental role and the adult with distance role; both can serve as teacher, trusted ally, and role model, and if one gets to fit one of these roles more than the other, it’s not unlikely that jealousy will come into play.

The apparent rivalry between the parent and the adult with distance is further magnified through the adult with distance’s trusted outsider role. When a child gets in a fight, runs into something too big for her, or is otherwise emotionally shaken, the logical person to go to is the parent, right? But there are times when the child just can’t get away with that. Fighting with a parent, peer pressure against using the parent as a confidante, parental nonacceptance of the emotion or situation in question (whether real or imagined), or any of a number of other things can make running to Mom or Dad not an option, but when an authority’s needed, where else is the kid to go but to the adult with distance? Unfortunately, the parent isn’t necessarily going to see it that way. “Where did I go wrong?” “What is it that [adult with distance] is doing better?” After all, being a source of comfort and guidance is the parent’s job. It’s particularly difficult for the parent when the child’s reasons for going to the adult with distance instead are perceived only—one who really was on the child’s side, or who isn’t going to be judgmental about the situation in question—since it’s seen as an unacceptable failure in the parental role. But people don’t like seeing themselves as failures, so scapegoating one of the other two members of the triangle is a ‘logical’ solution, and since adults have more agency than children, the adult with distance is the logical target.

Further complicating the conflict, the adult with distance is a natural ally of the child, particularly during intrafamily squabbles. Neutral to begin with, he’s as often as not approached by the child first, so his bias on the conflict is likely to skew more towards her viewpoint. And that’s before you factor in attempts to come across as more on her side for purposes of comfort, let alone whatever biases he might have from picking up on already present tensions from the parent. (Vicious cycle? You bet!) As if the parent’s position isn’t difficult enough, the adult with distance might actually get involved on the child’s behalf, potentially undercutting the parent’s authority.

It isn’t a one-way issue, either; the adult with distance is just as likely to have issues with the parent. There he is, getting the child’s-eye view of the situation (if filtered through his own experiences, which can be more biasing or less biasing—or both at the same time) and probably experiencing a certain amount of indignation on the child’s behalf. He might have issues with the parent’s style or approaches to child-rearing. If he himself is taking on the child due to not having offspring of his own, he might resent the parents for the fact that they do, particularly if they seem grudging about ’sharing’.

And that isn’t even taking into account non-kid-centered tensions between the parent and the adult with distance—relations with a young character may be life-changing, but that doesn’t mean characters should be centered around them.

But just because the rivalry’s popular doesn’t mean it’s the only way the dynamic between the parent and the adult with distance can play out. Tomorrow, I’ll look at some less confrontational relations between the two.

As always, there are more tips on characterization available.

Yesterday, I started talking about parents and their potential impacts on characters and their development. Today I’m going to stay in that vein but take a slightly different tone, as I move on to the next step outward in a developmental relationship: the adult with distance.

At heart, the adult with distance is more of a guide than an aggressive shaper, often doubling as the “family the character chooses”. Since he doesn’t have to live with her, and since their relationship is often as much a matter of choice as circumstance, the adult with distance is usually less likely to have an adversarial relationship with the character (though this might not necessarily apply if the character is foisted off on the adult with distance by the parents). While most people expect the adult with distance to be a mentor, first employer, neighbor or friend’s parent (or similar nonrelative), it’s also a popular role for noncustodial parents and nonresidential grandparents, and occasionally populated by supernatural guardians. This is, in fact, one of the few uneven-power relationships that is realistically more often than not positive.

The greatest advantage the adult with distance has in his relationship with the character is that he has the authority of an adult without the stringent requirements of a parent. In part, this allows him to be a bit less of an authority and a bit more of an ally than the parent; after all, if the character doesn’t turn out the way everyone wants her to, isn’t that ultimately the parent’s fault? This doesn’t mean that the adult with distance isn’t trying to get the character to grow up in a certain way (how ‘right’ the way is often depends on the adult with distance’s own morals and attitudes), just that the adult with distance is “permitted” to try to use honey rather than vinegar in situations where the parent wouldn’t be. Similarly, the distance between them brings out the ability to tolerate each other’s habits more easily due to decreased overexposure, and, possibly more importantly for the character, for the adult with distance to notice more easily than the parent when the character is growing/has grown up.

If there’s an adult with distance present in a mentorly role, the character is at least as likely to mirror portions of his skills, interests and profession as she is her parents; after all, he is the one teaching her. Note that this is less likely to happen with a teacher, let alone with a helpful neighbor; possible, but not a guarantee. This goes double when the character is being pushed towards a given future by her parents, or when she’s caught between them and doesn’t want to seem like she’s taking sides; often, the mentor will have or know of a third option. (Of course, then there’s the possibility that the fact that the mentor has a third option will up the tension and inspire the character to find a fourth; stranger things have happened!)

One of the most common roles of an adult with distance is in providing a safe space and coping strategies when dealing with conflict within a household. Part of this, again, is a function of the distance and the ability to present himself as an ally to the character. When the character is feeling overwhelmed by the intrahousehold conflicts, or just trying to get away from the dustups between other members of the family, having a place to hide can be very important to her, and further strengthen her relationship with the adult with distance.

But the world isn’t just the connection to the character; tomorrow, I’m going to look at one of the oldest rivalries in the book: the one between the parent and the adult with distance. Stay tuned!

Check out the secondary character page for more characterization ideas.

Yesterday, I started riffing on the importance of knowing how characters were shaped through their interactions with other people. Today I’m going to start with the obvious movers and shapers: the parents.

Now, before I get into the details, a point of definition: for the purpose of this article, I am defining the parent as the person(s) most responsible for the raising of the character. For purposes of this article, blood has next to nothing to do with it; personality traits may be heritable, but what we’re discussing is the shaping of the character that comes from having been an authority at the character’s most impressionable age, having dealt with being under the same roof as her for significantly prolonged periods of time, and in general being an influence on her development. As a result, there are four areas in which the parent is likely to have a strong influence on the character: communication style, skills and interests, the understanding of gender, societal and family roles, and last but not least, the character’s view of authority.

View of authority is, in itself, one of the most affected traits. The character is likely to associate parental behavior with a generalized image of how Those In Charge behave, and, conversely, her parents’ expectations of their reactions with how she’s supposed to behave towards those in Charge. If parent and child got along, the character is likelier to respond well to a style of authority similar to the parent’s. If they didn’t, it’s likelier that the character will be resistant to the style, anywhere from obedient but resentful to out and out rebellious. And when parents have different styles, the character’s likely to have learned a thing or two about how to deal with those styles and play them against each other. Then we have the ones who were pushed so hard into cooperating with a style that just seeing bits of it is enough to ensure utter cooperation; it’s not always a happy picture, but it’s plausible.

Skills and interests are also pretty easy to figure out in terms of the parents. It’s common for writers to create kids who are either near-copies of their parents in terms of skills and interests, or practical opposites, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I do think that a character is likelier to have opinions on the skills, interests and professions of her parents than on other skills and professions, particularly if the parents encouraged her to follow those (after all, she’s probably got a pretty good idea what the advantages and downsides of cultivating them are, and has likely observed or tried most of them at least once). If there are two parents, there’s going to be pulling between what each of them wants to see; the character might go one way, might go the other, is perfectly likely to get sick of it and take a third option, or just might end up deciding on something else entirely. But there’s going to be an influence, however it works out.

Then we have communication style, particularly confrontation style. This one’s parent-influenced on a very strong but often subconscious level; people have been known not to figure out how they’d had their styles shaped until long past adulthood. See, parents and their offspring are in part defined by having had to live with each other for quite a while. When two people spend a long time under the same roof, they’re almost definitely having to communicate, and it’s pretty much a guarantee that there are going to be conflicts—between parent and child for one, or between parent and someone else where the child can see. And the child will be watching. They might learn what they should do from what another parent does or doesn’t do (or from what an older sibling does; you ever wonder why the stereotype is that the older sibling is likelier to get in fights with the parent exists?). Or they might just generalize what they see—interpreting a parent’s action as having a particular significance, then adapting that to their own relations.

Speaking of which—gender and societal roles. Now there’s a can of worms if there ever was one. Most of what we see, and the reason why so many people are so obsessed with preventing anything that would result in not having a mother and a father in every household, is each parent modeling to the child the role of said parent’s gender; even in circumstances where that isn’t the case, there might be differential treatment according to gender. Similarly, in watching interactions both within the family and between the family and outsiders (most effectively the parents, as the parents are The Ones With the Power), the character will probably be picking up a thing or two about how she, eventually, is supposed to interact with those people—being polite to this group, laughing at this one behind their backs, pretending this one doesn’t exist, actively being afraid of this one. (You’ve got to be carefully taught, after all!)

So even if the parent isn’t still around, it’s good to know who the parent was, as that’s going to determine a lot about the offspring. I’m sure I missed a few impacts; anyone want to fill me in?

Looking for more characterization tips? The archives are full of them.

Way back in February, I ranted against characters who have no roots to speak of: the ones who didn’t seem in any way to have been shaped by other people. I’d originally been going to start on this series then, but I got a little distracted explaining why characters with no current connections are not more likely to establish new ones than characters who already have a few. So, back to characters being shaped through their connections.

First off, why? I’ve always seen the question more as “why not?” After all, people don’t live in a vacuum; anyone who has language has to at some point have interacted with someone, probably several someones. If they were housed and raised for most of their childhoods—or any portion of childhood that they can remember—they have parent-figures or some facsimile, and the parent-figures will almost definitely have had an impact. If they have culture, they have to have gotten it from someone; if they reject culture, there’s probably a reason why that’s more than just “It sounded like a good idea at the time.” In sum, this person has been exposed to people, and those people have rubbed off on her. Why wouldn’t she show signs of that?

Second, by whom? Again, this is a question that begs its opposite: “By whom wouldn’t they?” Sure, most people look at the idea of characters shaping other characters and see tutelage or emulation, the whole “I wanna be her when I grow up!” or “This is what my mother/father/guardian taught me.” But it’s just as likely to be created by dislike—someone seeing a behavior and choosing to do the exact opposite, or trying to act in a way that eradicates the behavior, or just trying to get away from it, for instance. It doesn’t need to be this extreme, but there are going to be those sorts of factors. Parents, or parental equivalents? Definitely. Rest of the family. Of course. Friends. Absolutely. Mentors? You bet. Antagonists? Yep. Intriguing drifters with potentially interesting talents? Sure.

Third, when? A lot of the character’s shaping is going to have happened before she so much as sets foot onstage, but that doesn’t mean all of it. Development is an ongoing process, after all—some characters have an arc they’re supposed to follow, some characters find their changes in who they interact with, but either way there’s almost guaranteed to be change. Conflicts cause people to bend or to stiffen, new information brings out new aspects of the personality—you can’t expect them to walk around in a little 5′x5′ glass box, now, can you?

As in all things, there is the potential for overkill. Shinali pointed out to me today, when I was brainstorming, that sometimes a character will be created entirely by relationships, and that that isn’t any better than a character who doesn’t have any. And that’s true. How many characters have we seen who were designed solely as love interests or rescue objects (or both at once), and turned out little better than cardboard cutouts, or didn’t seem like they existed when they weren’t onscreen? I’m sure you’ve seen the type.

That leaves us with the question: what kinds of effects are these other characters going to have, and how is it likely to affect the focus character. And that, my friends, is what this week is for.

Character not ready to build from? Check out the other characterization tips to give yourself a framework.

The Dark Powers have me on Demographic Watch this week. It’s good to do that—settle in, rejuvenate that mindset of treating people as statistics. But some of what I’ve been learning strikes me as worth talking about a little more closely.

Namely, I’ve noticed that a lot of newcomers, when trying to establish themselves as Big Bad Evil Guys, tend to try to do it through some sort of bias. Usually it’s sexism or racism, though I’ve seen people try it with ageism, classism—heck, some people even miss the point and try to make their token ism feminism. (This invariably fails further, mainly because they get it conflated with misandrist-type sexism. Use a dictionary, people!) Point is, it’s being seen as a short cut, same as unprovoked puppy kicking or gratuitous child abuse. People think that if they just do that, and do that in a sufficiently over the top manner, they don’t have to worry about any of the other qualifiers for being villainous, and they’ll still make it as lasting antagonists.

No. Just no.

Now, granted, singleminded devotion to a single quality does seem to be a hallmark of the evildoer, as we start not worrying about little things like social consequences or how many lives are going to be lost in pursuit of our goal. In that sense, yeah, taking one aspect of the mindset and running it into the ground may not be such a bad idea. But it’s not just what you do that counts if you want to make a proper impact, it’s how you do it.

One of the issues is simple Fourth Wall narrative causality. See, clear and blatant prejudice in the absence of any other quality, the kind that causes you to oppress whoever you’ve chosen to set yourself up against for no apparent reason—that makes of you the mythical creature known as the straw-bigot. And when it comes to narrative causality and ill fortune, the straw-bigot is one of the likeliest to call down every sort of unfortunate circumstance that might be feasible on his own head. One might even think that the world was attempting to make some sort of example of him, tearing him apart to teach a moral lesson. Short version: we already have most of the bad luck anyway. Do you really want to invite more of it?

For another thing, there’s the empathy quotient. You know, that thing where the people with the cohesive reasons for being that even the do-gooders can understand and maybe sympathize with have longer lifespans and an overall greater shot at being merely set back rather than completely ruined in the inevitable conflict with the forces of Good? Yes, that. Like puppy-kicking and gratuitous child abuse, blatant and sourceless prejudice is very bad for the empathy quotient.

And last—we know posers when we see them. You walk in talking about how yeah, you’re going to take out everybody fitting Criteria X, Y and Z in your territory, we’re going to take it with even more salt than we do the people who show up at morning meetings and ask “Speaking of babies, who wants breakfast?” The best reception you’re likely to get from a professional Hand of Darkness is a minute or two of mocking laughter. Possibly not even respectful enough to be evil mocking laughter. Do you really want that?

Now, I’m not saying not to exhibit these sorts of behaviors at all. Why let a perfectly good vice lie fallow? But if you’re going to have it, just make it part of your schtick rather than all of it. Consider, for instance, a cold-blooded version of the same style; you’re not an angry person out to get whoever it is you’ve got it in for, just particularly apathetic as to the impact that your plans will have on them, and those plans happen to involve a lot of collateral damage—or maybe it’s just that you tend to generalize traits onto them for the behavior of one individual, or treat members of that group whose traits contradict the facts you know as exceptions to the rule. Or give yourself a really strong reason; attempted genocide against a group for no apparent reason beyond “They make easy targets” is straw-thinking, but if your beef is that they seem to be in control of just about every power you can think of, that they (or entities looking extremely like them) killed your family and kicked your dog, or that there’s some very valid reason why they’re trouble and you have scads of evidence for it, you might be able to avoid a lot of the narrative backlash.

In short: bias in evil is often used as a crutch. Don’t depend on it when trying to establish yourself as one of us; pushing it too hard isn’t going to get you anywhere except a quick karmic retribution, and the professionals will see right through you and mock you.

More Generic Villainy awaits!  Read articles, leave a question, involve yourself!

I’d originally been going to talk about relationship mapping and how it applied to my game, as I have an exceedingly large cast of characters and spend a lot of time having to deal with them and keep them straight. But then I sat down and sketched out a partial relationship map, just detailing existing connections between characters and not including any of the canonical characters, and I got, well, this. (Linked due to size; the thing’s enormous.)

Loose Threads Relationship Mapping

Yeah. ‘What a tangled web we weave’ is a bit of an understatement—but I do manage to keep that entire collection relatively straight.

How? One of my most successful strategies has been the use of color and type modification to differentiate between them. It’s been a trick I’ve used ever since the very beginning, when one of my players asked me to color the text of the two NPCs I was using and set it as bold so the color would be more clear. As the game went on, I started differentiating the characters further. Ones that were about on a level power-wise with the characters were bold. Standard mortals were plaintext. (Those midway between them tended to be underlined.) The inherently supernatural—or the particularly powerful—were italicized. Gods more powerful than the characters rated bold-italics. Occasionally I’d switch fonts, but only on special occasions. Then within those categories, I tended to color by further things—subtype, dominant element, color often found in the location, astrological sign, primary association, whatever seemed appropriate.

It helped that many of them were strong personalities whose initial introductions I greatly enjoyed, and who came well-remembered by the PCs as well. Sometimes it was an entire attitude, as Luath’s snarky sister demonstrated during the offscreen incident in which she was introduced. At other times it was just one line I could guide to, as when minor character Rian responded to a fellow in wasp-demon form who introduced himself as Tooth with “Shouldn’t that be Mandible?” Essentially, if I managed to make myself and others laugh—or have strong reactions of any sort—I could keep the character in mind.

And of course, there’s the wiki; I started it about two years in, and while I haven’t been as good at updating it as I could have been, it’s helped me to keep many of the bigger names on the right track.

I also made a point of giving just about everyone a narrative anchor of some sort; the web of relations I pictured earlier partially approximates it. Some characters were innately easier to bring to mind—Ruby and Lirit due to their presence throughout the series, Kestrel and Kiara due to their early introductions, Jalil due to being both the first arc’s primary antagonist and quite possibly the most entertaining character I have ever played. A lot of my characters are anchored either to them or to the PCs. Some even have multiple layers of connection—Solada, for instance, was created through her anchor to Lirit, but quickly acquired a lateral anchor to Farren (it’s not quite clear which of them is anchored off of whom at this point, though, as Farren is quite memorable to me in her own right) and further anchors off of Kiara, Nandin and Shadow. As a result, I’m being reminded of my more minor characters regularly, which helps to keep tabs on them.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my discussions on keeping track of large casts and on use of narrative anchors was that inter-character connections can get a lot more difficult to keep track of when there are large numbers involved. This is particularly a problem, I think, for the visually oriented; it’s easy for the eyes to just slip over long lists of names, and a few to get lost in the process. Being able to reinforce the lists with a more tangible display of the links between characters, something that allows you to see how they all fit together, provides an added advantage.

What sorts of things can you map? The question is more what kinds of things you’d want to map; you probably could map just about anything—and you can map a lot at once, if you’re willing to play a bit with a key. A simple character map might trace relationships between characters in terms of like/hate/neutral, show the relative ranks of a different group, or just trace narrative anchors. A more complicated one might combine the two, or add in other kinds of relations (family vs. acquaintances vs. introduced through a third party), or maybe start tracking how long people have known each other or the unevenness of certain connections.

Of course, the biggest catch to this is coming up with a key. If you’re only mapping anchors, all you’ll really need are lines, but if you’re looking at less binary concepts, you’re going to need a way to tell apart different kinds of connections. With rank, this can be done by arrow-points, or by the relative placement of the names. But if you’ve got how people relate, or how their relationships came about, there’s a lot more gradation—the latter topic seems to work better with colors, the former with different varieties of line or with symbols on the line.

So how might we do this? Let’s start with a simple group: Alice, Bob, Carl and Dara, as satellites around main character Mae. This diagram shows their general relative ranks (Dara is Alice, Bob and Mae’s boss), and who’s got narrative anchors to whom (everyone’s anchored to Mae, since she’s the main character; Carl, not being part of the workplace, is anchored to Alice as well).

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Now, let’s look at how these people relate to each other. Alice is married to Carl (hence the X in their line), and they both love each other dearly. Mae and Alice are close friends. Mae and Carl can tolerate each other’s company when they pass in the hallway. Dara approves Mae as an employee, but Mae mildly dislikes Dara. Bob has an unrequited crush on Dara and is pretty good friends with Mae. Alice and Dara can’t stand each other. Note the colors being explained in the diagram, as this is starting to get complicated enough to require a key, with hue corresponding to emotion and shade corresponding to intensity; note also that I kept our narrative anchor lines, using a different thickness to get the relationships across, and that when feelings are uneven, you read the half of the line closest to each character for that character’s feelings. (Note also that I had a little trouble with Alice and Carl, over there; I don’t consider love and friendship to automatically correspond, so I was trying to fit two colors into one line.)

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Once you know the code, and when you’re dealing with a lot of people, these sorts of diagrams can speed up keeping track of who’s who and how they relate. What do you think?