Characters are the life that makes a tabletop RPG game come alive. Players in the game adopt a fictional persona to control; navigating through fantastic situations the gamemaster sets before them. Within Alchemy, players can build their character's personality and mechanics seamlessly into the platform and reference their information in a way to keep themselves immersed in the experience of the story.

In This Article

Within Alchemy, characters lie in the center of the player's game. They are the representation of who the player is and what they can do within the greater context of the story itself. When a player joins a game for the first time, or when they navigate to the 'Characters' tab within their library and create a character, they will be presented with the character creation modal for the system used in the game.

When loading into a game for the first time as a player, players will be presented with the character creation modal.

This modal will enable players to fill out basic information for their new character in one of three tabs:

Once basic information is filled out, players can select the confirmation button to see the traditional player view. From here, players can either begin playing or add additional character details to their character sheet.

When players are looking to edit or add additional character details, they are able to select their character's portrait in the player bar to bring up their character's information. By selecting the lock slider in the top left of the modal, they can unlock the ability to further edit these details.

Upon unlocking a character, several additional tabs may appear beneath the character portrait in the modal. The tabs that appear depend on the system used for the game.

Generally, most games will have fields to edit a character's name, ancestry, class, attributes, and abilities. Some systems may have more areas for character descriptions, personality, or appearances. Other systems may have more ways to adjust modifiers, resources, or other abilities characters have available to them. Ultimately, what you see when editing a character here makes sense within the context of the system assigned to the game; and those rules can be consulted to better understand the importance of each value.

Custom game characters are modular in that they are incredibly customizable to facilitate many systems that are not directly built within Alchemy. Creating these characters looks different than creating a character for a pre-built system; and this section aims to walk players through this unique creation process.

To begin, you will see the following tabs one opening the character to edit:

Trackers are the small editable lines of information flanking a character portrait in the player's main view.

Custom trackers can be added to players to track different values in a game such as their Hit Points (HP) or experience (XP). The Primary Tracker represents the bar showing to the left of the NPC's portrait and the Secondary Tracker represents the bar to the right (when playing as them).

Players can also have additional trackers added to their Tracker Panel by selecting the 'Add Tracker' button at the bottom of the modal. The fields that appear are the same as above with exception to the Tracker Type. This field enables the creator to select whether this tracker will display as a bar (for higher quantities) or as pips (for lower quantities) in the Tracker Panel.

Actions can be created in the player's Actions tab. The actions created within this tab can be accessed and used using the player's Actions Panel in a game.

In the Equipment Tab, a player is able to add any custom items needed to their character. Items added in this way can be referenced on the character sheet and are created in the same way as creating items in a universe.

The description of a character written here can be used as a reference for the character's appearance, backstory, or just about anything else needed by the player. This description can be either publicly viewable by other players or kept private through toggling the Public Description slider. This description can also leverage markdown to split different sections players may need to write in this field.

Player characters can be imported and exported within Alchemy to quickly move their information between universes.

To export a player from Alchemy, click on a player to open their information modal and unlock their character sheet to edit. Next to the edit toggle, select the overflow menu and the subsequent 'Export JSON' option to export code representing the NPC to your local device.

A player's information can be imported into a universe as a premade character by navigating to the premades tab in the universe, clicking the arrow next to the 'Create Premade' button, and selecting the 'Import JSON' selection from the menu. This will prompt you to select the premade from your local device to import into the universe (specifically the selected module). Once the import is complete, the new premade character will appear in the premades list within the tab.

While some fields of information can transfer over, we generally do not recommend importing NPCs created in different systems.