CS Guide: Aspects

Aspects are the key to your character's personality and what sets them apart from other characters. They allow you to expand on your character's merits, flaws, habits and quirks, traits that help make them truly unique and likable. These Aspects can be rooted in your character's history, upbringing or background to shed light onto what makes them behave in various situations or scenarios.

Example of Pre-Written Aspect

“Lone Wolf”

Luke Solowalker doesn't like to work in groups or teams and feels most comfortable on his own. Luke Solowalker sticks to himself, sets his own pace, and doesn't share feelings or emotions with others. While the Lone Wolf can get things done quietly and efficiently, he tends to be emotionally cut off and has problems relating to his comrades.

Though simple, this Aspect does a great job of separating your character from the rest of the pack (pun not intended). It then goes on to point out the flaw/merits of the aspect, creating a realistic character you can either relate or empathize with.

How To Write a Proper Custom Aspect

As you can see from the pre-written aspect, writing a custom aspect can be broken up into two parts.

First, you need something to base your aspect on. Finding a cause and effect is one of the easiest ways to create a unique Aspect for your character. The things that happen over the course of our lives are what shape us into being the people we are today. If you were bitten by a wild dog in your childhood, you will (possibly) have a fear of wild dogs in your adult life. Cause and Effect.

Custom Aspect for Wesley

Love Lost

Wesley believed fully that there was no greater power in the Galaxy than True Love. After the death of his beloved Buttercup, he exists now only as saber-for-hire. His views on love have become pragmatic and pessimistic, and he has become detached from humanity as a whole. He has a hard time relating to others, but is very effective in taking on challenges others would shy away from.

Here we see the basic cause and effect: The cause, in this case, is that Wesley lost someone he deeply cared for. The effect is his loss of faith in love. The event in his history causes him to turn to a mirthless life of being a mercenary, and as a result, he is willing to take big risks and jobs that others wouldn't. From this cause and effect, we also see a merit/flaw form: Wesley would be able to pull off stunts that others would not be willing to try, allowing him to succeed where others could fail. The flaw or drawback to that being, obviously, that he puts himself into more danger than someone who would be more cautious, and could have a higher chance of being injured or fatal wounded on a job.

While borderline cliche, this automatically gives something personal to an otherwise simple archetype of: "He's a mercenary, and will take what ever job he can, only caring about money." It allows you to write the character as taking risks, and pulling off stunts that others would hesitate to perform. The possibilities are endless, but ultimately, using the elements of your characters history, back-story, and culture with a cause and effect is a surefire way of having your custom aspect approved!

CS-STAFF NOTE: all titles for Custom Aspects should contain capital letters for each word of the phrase. try and keep your titles to a short phrase rather than a full sentence. less is more in this type of naming.

Example:

Always Capitalizes His Aspects

Wally always capitalizes the first letter of his cleverly named custom aspects. While doing this maintains uniformity in the formatting of the brotherhoods character sheets, it can cause grammar-Nazi's to twitch with the compulsive urge to correct aforementioned grammar.

Cause and effect, merit and drawback.

CS-STAFF NOTE: all custom aspects must be approved by the Voice Staff.