The Winter's Oasis Wiki

Romps and Reconstruction in Loka: Steam, Magic, and Mysteries in the Frozen Wasteland.

Stats

Any stat distribution is acceptable. Players should be advised if there appears to be a mismatch between stats and qualities, but there’s no requirement as to this. A ‘maximum skew’ distribution (5–4−1–1−1) is acceptable, but could be an ‘early sign’ of powergaming.

Qualities

Qualities should aim to be make the character reasonably distinctive. To this end, they should be sufficiently specific to not be highly duplicative of other characters, and ideally be described in a fairly colorful and individual manner. 2–3 80-character lines is optimal length. Extremely complex qualities requiring more detail and explanation should summarize, and move the remainder to the character’s background.

A useful rule-of-thumb for specificity is that a quality should be significantly narrower in scope than any single stat. Another consideration is how ‘heavily subscribed’ similar concepts already are. Common tropes (melee combat, outdoor survival, engineering, etc) should have some sort of specialty or area of particular expertise. Where a quality becomes progressively more common in play, earlier examples will be consider ‘grandfathered in’, but the characters should be encouraged and facilitated in rescoping and ‘sharpening’ such qualities, especially when adding new qualities or making other character revisions.

Highly unusual background features, or any capability beyond that of the average Lokan, should be ‘covered’ by a suitable quality. This includes species abilities, professional skills, especially up-to-date equipment, high levels of resource, and anything Svargan of any significance at all. A single quality often touches on more than one of these (ownership of a modern rifle and skill in using it, for example).

Background

Should cover: geographical origin (tribe or city), context for/additional details of qualities, any other unusual background events or features, and current activities (job, goals, etc).

Desc

Should be at least a paragraph of reasonable length, cover basic appearance, including a reasonable indication of species and markings for Pasu, and setting-appropriate clothing. Baseline appearance should typically be Victorian cityfolk, Old West rural pioneers, Amerind/other tribal clothing, or some combination thereof. No t-shirts, sneakers, baseball caps, etc, please.

Species

Should be a real world tetrapod (reptile, mammal, amphibian, bird) species, extant as of the start of the 21st century. Explicit hybrids are only possible if the real-world species are capable of this. Characters with other ‘mixed heritage’ should have (at most) ‘hints’ of this, and not claim this as a ‘species’. (Nor would they typically acknowledge this, or even be aware of it, ICly.)

Characters may vary considerably with regard to degree of ‘morphicness’, or extent to which their bodyplan and features converge to that of humans. The only case this would affect their notional species would be those who identify as human, but retain some non-human ancestral traits.