Post-Mothú 2025 Thoughts 2: Writing Characters

The second of a series of posts after Mothú, 16 Iúil 2025, by Siskey

I submitted my blurb for Mothú on the 4th of May, and it would run on the 12th of July. So naturally I did my writing for the LARP at a steady pace so I wasn't over-burdened and stressed, right? Obviously not. Does that actually work for anyone?

I did some initial writing on the 10th of May at a writers' meet-up at Blas Café in Dublin, where I got my first 3 of 12 characters written. Great! Amazing! 25% done! The character sheets were my usual format, about a page of narrative which sets out who the character is, what they've done in their life so far, and what brings them into the LARP. Down the bottom I had some objectives, and a smattering of skills. At this point these were just random keywords, like the fathach ranger character, a stone person created for a particular purpose, had "Keen Senses" and "Great Strength".

The first three characters I wrote were as follows:

• Sceallach, the Fathach Ranger
• Velkern, the Rival Saoi
• Nieswurz, the Sage

I knew the game would be set in Draíod, the most magical of the Five Realms of Tirneach, where the majority of people live underground in a strange caste-ridden society. It made sense to start with two Draíodach characters, who would be embedded in that society. The fathach and the vartach are inter-linked species in the Five Oaths setting and they are archetypically from Draíod as well. Right away I had a character who would by default be loyal to Saoi Kervall, who was still amorphous in my head, and a character who had cause to hate him for a lifetime of perceived slights. The third character then, I wanted to have someone who would have an outside perspective, and would perhaps bring a bit of light to the proceedings. Nieswurz, meaning hellebore in German, would be a different species adopted by Krieger who had embraced the Krieger way of life, and was also an expert on the Gwyllt. So those were my first three characters, along with a fourth who was just an epithet so far, "the Devotee".

Then life got in the way as it so often does, and the next time I got back to writing was the 1st of July. I had been doing a lot of thinking about the LARP, and I had ambitious ideas. What I had decided I wanted to do was to have a library of books which would contain clues which would be accessible by the characters based on skills that they had. I was inspired by the old Fabled Lands adventure books, where characters visiting a particular entry might be able to go to a different one if they had ticked off a keyword in a list at the start of the book. The first book of the series had keywords starting with A, the second with B, and so on. I wanted the substance of these clues to be tailored to the characters and their experiences, so before I could get started on all of that I needed to get the characters done. Also I wanted to send the characters out a week in advance, so I was running out of time!

So it's the start of July, and I need to get nine characters done by the end of the week. I have been working on a spreadsheet with the titles of all the books I want to have, which I'll get to in Part 3 of this series of posts, and what skills and keywords I want the characters to have. I've ended up with six different skills: Five Realms Lore, Draíod Lore, Magic Lore, Religion Lore, Ritual Lore, and Magic Lore. I've distributed these evenly across 12 characters using a website that does random set generation. Now based on what skills they have, I start to imagine what characters might fit. As it happens, my wife has tested positive for Covid, so all plans are cancelled. Probably for the best, as I've got a lot of writing to do!

An hour a night all week gets me most of the way there. I start with a character with the Magic Lore, Ritual Lore, and Five Realms Lore skills. I decide this first character will be a wizard-at-arms, which is an officer position in a gallóglaigh band. I decide they are a Drakeblooded, giving them the name Ionraic. Ionraic is not a typical Drakeblooded, preferring not to focus overly much on their family and their legacy...although they still use their house name of House Roaring Thunder! As an ex-gallóglach, Ionraic needs a band name, so I pluck "First Flight" out of nowhere, deciding it relates to a myth about how the dragons, who are all dead in the setting, helped the Shaper, the main god of the setting, to create the world. I set up how Ionraic had met Saoi Kervall, how they had a debate about the dragons and the Gwyllt, and Ionraic was pretty much done.

Next was a pair of Torchbearers. I wanted one to be a vartach so the pair would have a link to Draíod, and I thought a good counter-point to them would be a human. Humans in the setting are happy-go-lucky experimenters and regarded by the other species as slightly crazy. When the species were being written for Five Oaths that "humans as space orcs" Tumblr meme was doing the rounds! I nearly made the vartach Torchbearer have the Hook mark, which is basically the working class mark of the vartach, but then I remembered that we already have a Hook Torchbearer among the player characters at Five Oaths so I changed them to a Sunspear. For the human, I had them come from Uasa and be part of a tribe of swamp dwellers, mostly Drakeblooded, that had cast the character out for being too human, playing pranks and questioning tradition. I figured the two characters would complement each other, with one being a bit more serious and focused on the main job of the Torchbearers which is fighting the Gwyllt, while the other had a more holistic view on their role as a cinnire, the priests of the setting. I made sure both characters had Gwyllt Lore and Religion Lore, which required a bit of tweaking with the skills mix I had allocated.

I decide I want to have one character from all the Realms, so I start to think about someone who could be from Baol. The highlanders are obviously the most interesting part of that Realm, with apologies to the lowlanders, but I want someone who Saoi Kervall might have been drawn to. Kervall is taking shape in my head as a self-professed iconoclast, someone who leveraged the position granted by the weird birthmark on his face up to the hilt but also claims to rail against tradition. Morag Oc Aonghusa, then, would be a forward-thinking highlander, in self-exile because they want to get things done for their Clann and raise their family's fortunes and they can't do it in the highlands of Baol because there are no opportunities there. Since the game would be set a while before the current Five Oaths game, I put in a cheeky reference to a grandchild called Tiernan, as the current Réig of Tirneach is called Tiernan Mac Aonghusa.

Now I'm over halfway done and starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of the remaining characters, four have the Draíod Lore skill, so I start to think about how they fit in to the society because it makes sense that they are from Draíod and know things that outsiders wouldn't. I also start to allocate roles out in my head, looking at the survey results that Mothú organised to see what people want to play or not to play. I think about the vartach marks as well and what I don't already have covered. There are five marks, three of them have a positive connotation while two really don't. While in the regular field LARP, many of the characters dismiss the vartach marks as a purely social construct, including my own character, with three Sunspears marks already present in this game I thought they would be mattering a whole heap of a lot more. I decided not to include a Linebreaker mark, as they are generally exiled immediately when the mark develops. I thought about where I could fit a Hook, but this gathering felt like it would be too rarified for a Hook. A Broken Chain, however, who often form the underclass of vartach society, could be helpful. I wrote Kruiv the Broken Chain as someone who did dirty jobs for Saoi Kervall.

A note on vartach names. The Five Oaths setting uses Irish names for places and peoples very heavily, and of course Irish does not have a k or a v, as a c is always a hard c in Irish and the séimhiú mutation on b and m creates a v or w sound depending on the word. When I was writing things for Five Oaths, I decided that the vartach would use v or k much more regularly in their names. So in this LARP I had Velkern, Kruiv, Kívar, Kervall and Uavan.

I wanted to include a Clashing Blades as well, and decided they could be the former watch officer of Misneach, now concerned with managing a (covert) army tasked with the defence of the capitol city of Draíod. The next character was another from Draíod, and by now I was thinking about how to include an idea about stolen memories and how it would affect people. I came up with the name first, deciding to carry on my personal in-joke that Broc is the most common name in the Five Realms, I named them Broc Liath, meaning Grey Badger. This lended itself to the character being a wildling, and the skills to being a cinnire, so they became the former cinnire-at-arms of Misneach, who had subsequently become the leader of a town destroyed by the Deathspine Gwyllt, with holes in their memories that were attributed to that monster. A fun nod for me was that this character was a member of the Order of Counsellors, a wildling, and a cinnire-at-arms, much like a friend's character in Five Oaths, but from Draíod instead of Siabhal so there was a much different spin on their outlook in life. Now I went back through the different characters that were attached to Misneach, seeding events that tied them together. A bandit chieftain called Little Sullivan who got what she deserved, an incident somewhere called Tuorunda involving an elemental spirit and Firetouched who had been turned to stone. Things they could reminisce about.

Or maybe not! The next character was another who had been wracked by lost memories, whose entire career as a gallóglach, or at least all the exciting bits, had been stolen. For the character brief, this was an upsetting and isolating thing, but they had success in their life and had become a Rider in their home Realm of Siabhal, so had decided to move on with all their intrinsic Siabhlach confidence.

So where does that leave me?

• Ionraic of House Roaring Thunder, the Battlefield Scholar
• Morag Oc Aonghusa, the Highland Rambler
• Uavan the Fleet, a Torchbearer
• Corrán Rainwise, a Torchbearer
• Kruiv, the Broken Chain
• Builean, the Last Line of Defence
• Broc Liath, the Lost Leader
• Neasa Ní Shiún, the Destined Scion

Finally I write the final character who was among the first batch of four character concepts I had, Kívar, who would be Kervall's apprentice. This character was hopelessly naive, almost every opinion they have about other characters starts with "Saoi Kervall says". Oh yes and around this point I decide to go back and give each character a full page of their opinions about the other characters in the LARP.

As usual, I have written way too much. In total the character sheet document is 29 pages long and 14,474 words. Some character sheets have stretched into three pages, but only barely. I intend to check in with the players of that game to see if this was too much, as I imagine it probably was, and what I could do differently in future to make it easier to digest or to give them more agency as characters. Also as usual, although at the outset I was despairing at how I could ever write twelve characters for this LARP, by the end they were all living characters in my mind and characters that I would like to play myself. The way I get to that feeling is apparently by writing 1200 words per character! And now that I've written another 2000 words on how I wrote too many words for these characters, in the next post I will write about the process of putting together the game itself and the activity I wanted these characters to engage with, which was reading loads of books and assembling clues, and how I think that went.