a character creation chapter for people who have never done this before and are, frankly, a little scared of the book
Revision 9 — iterates on v8. Removed all references to the Green Room / the Wellspring hub from the chapter — that's GM-side taxonomy scaffolding, not something for players to read. The seven Signs themselves (Beast Critter, Catburgler, Witch, Psychic, Creator, Radical Lover, Mom) and everything about them is unchanged from v8. The closing function count now reflects only the seven visible Signs (199, not 227), and the appendix no longer lists the hub.
Somewhere in a spreadsheet, very seriously, there is a document that calls the seven things in this chapter Valor, Freedom, Invention, Curiosity, Guile, Fellowship, and Compassion. Like a Care Bear jury summons. Whoever built that spreadsheet did genuinely excellent, checkable work, and we are about to ruin their evening by putting lipstick on all of it. You're welcome, and also sorry.
Here they are for the rest of us:
| # | Sign | The want, roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 🐾 | THE BEAST CRITTER | To meet the danger head-on, and not entirely as yourself anymore |
| 🐈⬛ | THE CATBURGLER (a person, technically — you just didn't see her leave) | To never, ever be cornered — by a wall, a lock, a guard, a rooftop, or the concept of consequences |
| 🔮 | THE WITCH | To remake the world into a shape it was too lazy to arrive in on its own |
| 🎱 | THE PSYCHIC | To know — and to say "I felt something" about it, ominously, well in advance |
| 📱 | THE CREATOR | To win the contest before the follower even knows there's a contest on — or that they're the prize |
| ❤️🔥 | THE RADICAL LOVER | To love people so completely, and so many of them, that it becomes a threat to anyone trying to control them |
| 🤱 | MOM (not your mom specifically. Not anyone's mom, really. Just — Mom. The concept. We're not taking questions.) | To have the harm undone and the vulnerable person fed, warm, and accounted for |
Pick one of the seven. That's your character's spine. Everything else — your class, your weapon, your stat block, your tragic backstory involving a well — gets built on top of it later. This chapter is about the spine.
- Pick a Sign. One of the seven. Whichever one made you say "oh no, that's me" before you'd finished reading it.
- Pick a second one. Either the Sign next door (your wing, and we've written up what all seven wings feel like below) or a Sign from clean across the wheel (which is where the actually interesting characters live — also below).
- Now go pick your class, your stats, your weird little hat. You already know who you are. The rest of the book is just paperwork.
You are allowed to be uncertain about step 1 and step 2 forever. Characters drift across these lines constantly during actual play, and the drifting is not a mistake — it's usually the best part of the campaign. More on that later too.
Seven signs, arranged in a ring, because six would make everyone into a fighter-or- thinker binary and eight would let everybody hide behind their exact opposite. Seven means every Sign has two near-neighbours it blends into and nobody it's a perfect mirror of.
1 BEAST CRITTER
7 MOM 2 CATBURGLER
6 RADICAL LOVER 3 THE WITCH
5 CREATOR 4 THE PSYCHIC
Reading it end to end, it loops. Mom sits right next to the Beast Critter, same as the Beast Critter sits next to the Catburgler. It's a wheel, not a ladder. Nothing on it outranks anything else — not even the radical one. Especially not the radical one.
The want: to meet the danger itself. Not around it, not away from it — at it, and not entirely as yourself anymore.
This is your barbarian, your berserker, your character with at least one incident on record involving teeth that nobody in the party likes to bring up. The Beast Critter doesn't need the fight to be fair, doesn't need it to be smart, doesn't really even need it to be won — it needs the thing in front of it to stop being a problem, by whatever means the nearest working set of claws, horns, or jaws provides. Something under the skin has been waiting for a reason. The reason just walked in.
Inside the Beast Critter you'll find:
- The Snarl (10) — the actual fighting. The warning growl and the bite that follows it in the same breath. Nobody has ever accused a Beast Critter of overthinking a fight.
- The Den (11) — putting your whole body between the den and whatever's hunting it. Nobody assigned this job. You're the one with claws; it's yours now. The edge toward Mom next door.
- The Bite (8) — not murder, grip — the kind that locks and does not reconsider. The edge toward the Catburgler, and half of a genuinely great joke we'll get to.
The want: to never be stopped. By a wall, a lock, a guard, a rooftop, a vault door, or the concept of consequences.
Commitment-phobic in the genuinely useful sense. The Catburgler is your rogue, your rooftop specialist, your character who has never once used the front door on principle and considers a locked room a personal insult. Extremely difficult to corner, extremely difficult to keep in one place, and always, infuriatingly, already out the window before anyone noticed the window was open. Not an animal. Just moves like one when it matters.
- The Fire Escape (12) — movement, terrain, travel — the general skill of finding the route nobody else clocked. There is always a route.
- The Slip (3) — getting out of a hold once someone's already got you — cuffs, a grip, a door closing. Only three of these exist in the whole taxonomy — published games print roughly four times as many ways to grab someone as to get away from them, and that's not an oversight, it's a finding.
- The Nine Lives (6) — surviving the unsurvivable: the collapsing vault, the gas vent, the guard dog that should have caught you. Doesn't dodge the trap so much as simply outlast it. Edge toward the Witch next door.
The want: to have the world be a different shape. Things built, bodies changed, ground rewritten, an element let entirely off its leash.
Your wizard, your artificer, your hedge-witch, anybody whose answer to a problem is "what if the rules of reality were simply different, actually." Big renovation energy. Big coven-of-one energy. The Witch didn't like how the world was doing that, so she fixed it, and she is not sorry.
- The Craft (11) — the actual making: objects, structures, constructs, illusions that hold up under poking. Witchcraft in the most literal, blue-collar sense — this is a trade.
- The Hex (14) — fire, lightning, force, the elements let off the leash entirely. This is where the fireball lives — filed here, with the spellcasters, not with the punchers, because standing in a burning circle is a decision about the shape of the ground, not a decision about how good you are at hitting things. It's the single change that made witches read as people instead of walking spell lists. Edge toward the Catburgler.
- The Glamour (9) — becoming something else, shape and all. Neither rulebook lets you turn into a bear without studying the bear first, which means this edge — toward the Psychic next door — was already written into the source material. We just noticed.
The want: to know. What's there. What it is. What it did. What it's going to do next. And to say "I felt something" about all of it, ominously, well in advance.
Your seer, your medium, your fortune-teller who is suspiciously right more often than chance should really allow. Your character who gets a bad feeling about the third door specifically, every single time, and is later vindicated, specifically, about the third door. The Psychic cannot leave a closed door closed in her own head — she's already seen what's behind it, or thinks she has, or is bluffing well enough that the difference stops mattering.
- The Third Eye (14) — raw perception. Seeing, hearing, sensing the thing nobody else clocked — reading auras, reading rooms, reading the exact half-second before somebody decides to lie to you.
- The Tarot Reading (7) — the actual studying: history, ritual, the beast you couldn't turn into without reading up on it first. Even a psychic has to learn the deck before she can read it. Edge toward the Witch.
- The Cold Read (8) — seeing through what someone else built to be unseen, and knowing exactly which detail to say out loud so they believe you saw it in the stars. Edge toward the Creator, and the cleanest opposed pair on the whole wheel: everything on this side exists to out something on the other side.
The want: the contest, won before the follower even knows there's a contest on — or that they're the prize.
Your grifter with a ring light, your cult leader with a link in bio, anybody whose weapon of choice is a camera angle and a caption that says "not sponsored" while being, extremely, sponsored. The Creator is elastic about method, not about cruelty — the poisoner, the ambusher, and the brand ambassador all live here because of how they operate, not because they're the designated villains. Nobody picks the evil box for their first character, and this isn't one, even though it has, on at least one occasion, ruined a wedding.
- The Sponsored Post (14) — the unfair advantage itself. Poison, ambush, hexing, the setup nobody sees coming until it's already worked — presented the whole time as completely organic content.
- Ghosting (9) — not being seen at all. Stealth, disguise, vanishing from a room you were definitely just in. Edge toward the Psychic.
- The Catfish (10) — the con. Changing what someone believes is true. Edge toward the Radical Lover, paired with a very close cousin next door.
The want: to love people so completely, and so many of them, that it becomes a threat to anyone trying to control them.
Your bard who is sincerely, simultaneously in love with everyone in the room and refuses to rank them. Your cleric of a god who never really believed devotion and desire were two different things. The Radical Lover doesn't act directly on the world — they act on the people in it, all of them, completely, at once, which reads to most people as either the most generous thing they've ever witnessed or deeply, structurally alarming, depending on how used to being loved rationed they are. This is intimacy treated as a political position: showing up, remembering everyone's order, making sure nobody in the party eats dinner alone — not because it's sweet, but because a person loved like that is very, very hard to isolate.
- The Declaration (14) — the actual speaking, and the actual being believed — not because you outrank the room, but because you meant every word and everybody could tell.
- The Walkout (8) — not one threat from one person, but the credible promise that everyone leaves together, all at once, until the terms change. Edge toward the Creator — the con and the collective refusal, side by side: one changes what a person believes is true, the other changes what a whole room believes is possible the second they all stand up at once.
- The Potluck (10) — not leadership. Logistics, fed to you. Getting resources to whoever needs them, no means test, no favour owed back, a plate made for you before you even said you were hungry. Edge toward Mom next door, and about as close as this wheel gets to an actual thesis statement.
(Not your mom specifically. Not anyone's mom, really. Just Mom. The concept. The energy. Moving on.)
The want: to have the harm undone and the vulnerable person covered. Wounds closed, fear talked down, the weak fed, the door held open for whoever's coming through it next.
Your healer, obviously, but also your bodyguard, your character who keeps a running mental tally of who got hurt that nobody actually asked her to keep. Mom's love language is a sandwich you didn't ask for and a lecture you didn't ask for either, delivered at the same time. She has never once let a grown adult leave the house without a coat, including grown adults already wearing coats.
- The Undo Button (8) — actual healing. The hurt is repaired and the body keeps no record of it. This is what she means when she says she'll kiss it better, and, infuriatingly, it works.
- The Check-In Text (7) — "let me know when you're home." Buffing an ally, tending them, keeping them upright rather than making them stronger. Edge toward the Radical Lover — the companion made useful versus the companion kept alive, and the line falls exactly between those two verbs.
- The Safe Word (6) — protection aimed at someone else. Wards, shields cast on a friend, standing between them and the bad thing. Yes, it's a loaded phrase for a mom sign. We know. Sit with it. Edge toward the Beast Critter next door.
Every edge above has a partner directly across a boundary, written as a matched pair on purpose — not two abilities that happen to sit near each other, but one idea, told from both sides. Here they all are, with a worked character for each:
| The seam | One idea, two sides | Somebody who lives here |
|---|---|---|
| The Safe Word ↔ The Den | A ward placed on someone else, and a den defended against whatever's hunting. Harm kept off them, harm kept off you. | The bouncer who will absolutely cry at your wedding, and will absolutely put someone through a table defending the open bar. |
| The Bite ↔ The Slip | The jaw that clamps down and does not reconsider, and the wrist that was never planning to be there when it closed. | The mercenary who will die for you this month — cancellable at will, exactly like a catburgler's loyalty. |
| The Nine Lives ↔ The Hex | The survivor who adapts to anything, and the ground rewritten so they don't have to. | The vanlife witch's getaway driver, who has technically totalled the van twice and is doing great about it. |
| The Glamour ↔ The Tarot Reading | You cannot become the bear without having read up on the bear first. | The witch who reads the forbidden grimoire because "forbidden" was doing the heavy lifting. |
| The Cold Read ↔ Ghosting | The read that outs you before you've said a word, and the vanishing act that dodges it anyway. | The fortune-teller who already knows which question you're too embarrassed to ask, and the creator who goes dark the second the algorithm turns on her. |
| The Catfish ↔ The Walkout | Changing what one person believes is true, and changing what a whole room believes is possible the moment they all stand up together. | The situationship who is absolutely leading a walkout on principle, and also, separately, selling you a suspiciously good deal on skincare. |
| The Potluck ↔ The Check-In Text | Feeding a companion so they're stronger, and checking that they're still standing after. | The radical lover who will absolutely fight your landlord for you, and will also, separately, remember exactly how you take your coffee. |
That's all seven adjacent pairs — meaning every Sign already has a worked "wing" character above, just by reading the seam it sits inside. Pick a Sign, pick the neighbour it's paired with in this table, and you already have a character concept before you've touched a single number.
The wing combinations above are the safe, adjacent, easy-to-explain characters. The genuinely interesting ones hold two Signs from opposite-ish sides of the wheel at once — two drives that have no business getting along, worn by the same person anyway.
Take The Creator and Mom. Nowhere near each other on the wheel. Put them in the same person and you get the content creator who only runs grifts against landlords and cops, specifically, and who will still, without fail, make you soup afterward. That's not a compromise between two drives. That's a whole person, and the wheel only shows you where to go looking for one.
You don't need to pick your two Signs from a chart. You need to notice which two are already fighting for the wheel in your head, and let them.
You are allowed to not know your second Sign yet. You are allowed to pick one, play three sessions, and discover you're actually something else entirely. This isn't a character sheet typo — it's the good part.
The Safe Word/Den seam up there isn't just two abilities that happen to sit near each other. It's a character arc, in three words: Safe Word to Den. That's a survivor who spent the whole first act protecting herself finally turning around to protect somebody else. Nobody wrote that on the sheet in session one. It just happened, because the wheel had a road from one to the other the whole time.
Let your character drift across these seams. That's not you failing to commit to a build. That's the wheel working as designed.
Two decisions the taxonomists genuinely fought about, in case it's useful to know the lines were drawn by people, not by physics:
- Executing a helpless enemy — is that a Snarl (a kill's a kill, even an easy one) or a Sponsored Post (you waited until they couldn't fight back, which is rather the entire premise of the Creator)? We filed it under the Beast Critter. Somebody else, reasonably, would file it the other way.
- Growing a weapon out of your own body — The Glamour, or The Snarl? We called it a Glamour. The process is stranger than the punch it enables.
There are a handful more like this sitting in the tin, filed under "agree to disagree." If you land on a character who feels miscategorised, you're probably not wrong — you've just found one of the seams the taxonomists are still arguing about over drinks.
The renaming above is entirely cosmetic. Every count, every boundary, and every function underneath it matches the underlying taxonomy exactly. Cross-reference table:
| Chapter name | Taxonomy id | n |
|---|---|---|
| The Beast Critter | valor | 29 |
| — The Den | bulwark | 11 |
| — The Snarl | force-of-arms | 10 |
| — The Bite | grip | 8 |
| The Catburgler | freedom | 21 |
| — The Slip | escape | 3 |
| — The Fire Escape | passage | 12 |
| — The Nine Lives | wayfaring | 6 |
| The Witch | invention | 34 |
| — The Hex | unleashing | 14 |
| — The Craft | fabrication | 11 |
| — The Glamour | metamorphosis | 9 |
| The Psychic | curiosity | 29 |
| — The Tarot Reading | lore | 7 |
| — The Third Eye | sense | 14 |
| — The Cold Read | scrutiny | 8 |
| The Creator | guile | 33 |
| — Ghosting | unseen | 9 |
| — The Sponsored Post | undermining | 14 |
| — The Catfish | deceit | 10 |
| The Radical Lover | fellowship | 32 |
| — The Walkout | pressure | 8 |
| — The Declaration | the-word | 14 |
| — The Potluck | retinue | 10 |
| Mom | compassion | 21 |
| — The Check-In Text | succour | 7 |
| — The Undo Button | healing | 8 |
| — The Safe Word | sanctuary | 6 |
199 functions, seven Signs. Nothing invented, nothing miscounted — just, finally, a taxonomy you'd want to say out loud at a party.