Table of Contents

Character Creation

In Brainwave you play a psychic resident of Museford attending the Cranium Conference. Brainwave is a game of duality between the fantastical and mundane, so character creation encourages you to think about both aspects of your character's life.

When you're ready please fill out this google form to send the following information to the GMs.

When you submit your character, you'll need to include the following, the details of which can be found below:

The Basics

Basic information about your character. We need your character's:

You will also write two bios for your character: private and public.

The private bio is between you and the GMs. Use this to tell us your overall concept for the character, who they are (in Breadspace and Headspace), how they spend their time, their goals, and any juicy secrets that you don't want the playerbase to know about.

The public bio is a short description of things that anyone at the Cranium Conference could know about your character if they cared to learn. This could include a physical description, their interests at the conference, or rumours about them. It should be no more than 150 words. These will be published along with the list of player characters before the first session.

Breadspace

In Brainwave the fantastical is often an escape from the mundane, but, as much as you might want to transcend your physical form and fight nightmares in Headspace forever, the mundane world is still there. Give us a Mundane Problem your character is facing, which will get worse during the game if they don't find a way to address it. Crucially, mundane problems – for psychics – must be addressed by mundane means, since they're not receptive to psychic projection. A good mundane issue could be a difficult relationship, mental health issues, career difficulties, or a looming court case.

You'll also give us a description of your home environment. This could be where you live, who lives there, and any other important details. We'll use this when writing your Turnsheets.

Finally, select 2 Proficiencies. These represent your mundane capabilities, and are usually of the form “I can [blank]”. We have examples, but you can come up with whatever fits your character.

Headspace

This section pertains to your character when they are projecting into Headspaces.

First you will describe your avatar. This is how you appear in Headspace. This should be humanoid, but feel free to take the description wherever you like beyond that: Headspace is a place of fantasy.

Then you will put points into Powers. Headspace is a place where there are less practical concerns, and effects are achieved by application of will, but different people are better at getting different kinds of results, and Powers reflects that. There are 4 Powers (Fight, Feel, Fleet and Fabricate), each levelled from 0 to 3.

At base you start at level 0 in all of them (you can still attempt things utilising them, but you will have no particular aptitude beyond any other psychic) – distribute 3 further points as you wish between the Powers, but with no more than 2 points in any Power.

Quirks

Powers and Proficiencies tell us what your character is good at. Quirks are more unique personal circumstances that set your character apart, and will often have a big impact on the plot and tone of their game.

In Brainwave, Quirks are divided into Headspace and Breadspace Quirks. You must pick at least 1 Quirk from each list, and no more than 5 total. Each Quirk is rated either +, -, or +- (with +- Quirks counting as only 1 Quirk against your total). The total number of + and - across all your Quirks must be equal to 0. There is no restriction across the Head/Bread divide, so long as you have at least one Quirk in each. For example, a character could have a +- and + Quirk in Breadspace and a - Quirk in Headspace.

Tell us which Quirks you are taking from the Quirk list.

In addition there are Playstyle Quirks which do not count against your Quirk limit. These are OC Quirks that help us make the game as fun as possible for you as a player. You are welcome to add, remove, or change any of your Playstyle Quirks at any time, simply by getting in contact with a GM.