the suffering never ends
This is the real process
Resources for you!
Character Ideas:
- Character creation masterpost
- Character Alignment Chart
- More character alignment descriptions
- Muslim Character questions
- Characters with magical powers
- Building a new character advice
- How to create a character for an online or tabletop RPG (also a good guide on creating characters in general)
- Royalty/nobility TV Tropes page
- Basic character profile
- OC masterpost
- Random character generators - (1), (2), (3), (4)
- D&D Character Building Tool
Character Design Ideas:
- How clothing affects a character’s personality
- Character Design Inspiration blog
- Concept art, fan art, cool art to be inspired by
- Character design references and inspiration
- Sources for POC character design ideas and models
- Create your own character model using HeroForge
- For horned characters
- Body and hair types guide
- Random outfit generator
Naming Help:
- Amazing site with an endless amount of naming resources
- General advice on avoiding naming appropriation
- Hispanic Surnames
- Gothic Victorian names
- Huge master list for character things in general
- Masterlist of names of all types - including but not limited to ancient/old world names, Celtic, African, Northern European, Southern and Central American Native names, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Polynesian, and more
- Another name masterlist
- How to pick a character name guide
- Yet another names masterlist
Creating Background/backstory:
- Character Sheet/Development Sheet
- Another character development list
- In-depth character personality, motivations and traits sheet
- 320 talents and passions for characters
- On writing likes and dislikes that aren’t frivolous
- Why you should write non-human characters non-conforming to the gender binary
- Stereotypes, tropes, and archetypes
- Random backstory generator
- Assassin and thief character tropes to avoid
Character Interactions and putting your character into your world/story:
- Comparing character height/height references
- Characters who are scientists and writing about them doing science
- Describing what different voices sound like
- Describing skin tones
- Writing friendship interactions that are platonic
- Why having one character knock their friend unconscious to prevent them from doing something is a bad idea
- Advice on shipping OCs with canon characters and what to avoid doing
- Sweet Polly Oliver and Sweet on Polly Oliver situations (think of Disney’s Mulan for an example)
- How to write multiple viewpoints/juggling a main cast of more than 4 to 6 characters
- How to make readers care about your morally gray hero/anti-hero
- On platonic OC and canon character relationships
- How to avoid Godmodding in RPs
- When it’s cheap to kill off a character
- Writing dialogue
- Things you shouldn’t do to canon characters
- Avoiding purple prose in writing and RPs
- Slang resources
- Dialogue tips
- Websites to chart your story/plot/character relationships
BLESS EVERYONE IN THIS POST.
*Gulp* oh boy…
Hm… I always just think “Hey, this could be fun. I’ll add them.” The rest of the steps above are sort of slipped in as I write. Find that sweet spot that makes the character what they are and build from it.
Ah, the process.
Hmmmn!