Like your character’s appearance, you are welcome and wholly encouraged to decide your character’s personality from the ground up. In fact, many people may find it more enjoyable to discover their character’s personality as they play, rather than deciding anything beyond broad strokes at the outset of a campaign. However, if you’re interested in making a more concrete start to your character’s personality, or if you’re just looking for inspiration, the tables in this section can help.

Though these tables will present very straightforward ideas and elements, keep in mind that no aspect of any character is one-dimensional. People are nuanced, and it’s perfectly normal and natural for context or perspective to change how your character behaves, whether that change is short-term or a complete alteration of their core personality. One of your character’s traits may even be that they adopt completely different personalities based on who they’re working with!

Manner of Speech

Whether your character speaks vocally, exclusively through writing, or through sign language, consider one of the following cornerstones of your character’s manner of speech and try to incorporate it into your role-play.

d20	Manner of Speech	d20	Manner of Speech
1	Stutters	11	Compulsive rhyming
2	Compulsive alliteration	12	Frequent uptalk
3	Excessive verbosity	13	Unusually rapid or slow
4	Laconic	14	Has a thick accent
5	Unusually flat or bubbly tone	15	Frequent talks to self
6	Drawls	16	Very urbane
7	Stentorian	17	Uses vocal fry
8	Whispers or mutters	18	Trails off often
9	Has a lilt	19	Uses many filler words
10	Halting	20	Strikingly eloquent

Odd Habits

Even the most “normal” among us has an odd habit or two. Sometimes people will only eat food in a certain way, or have a peculiar routine for cleaning their house that feels wrong to change. The table below has a short list of possible odd habits for your character.

d20	Habit	d20	Habit
1	Compulsive weapon reloading	11	Preoccupied with wildlife
2	Fidgets	12	Distractingly expressive eyebrows
3	Polishes Ghost excessively	13	Frequent anecdotes
4	Frequent quotation	14	Peculiar hobby
5	Humming/singing	15	Needlessly argumentative
6	Speaks in third person	16	Frequent finger-snapping
7	Unusually tidy or messy	17	Compulsive exercise
8	Trench artist	18	Special handshake
9	Nail biting/picking	19	Coin/pen/knife tricks
10	Lip chewing	20	Tinkering

Values

Your character’s values are the beliefs, people, and things your character considers important aspects of their life, and are what your character would risk their safety—or even the safety of others—to defend or uphold. Some characters have no values, some have only a few, and some have so many there is no way they can possibly uphold all of them, putting themselves in the precarious position of often having to choose one over another.

Another way to think of values is to consider what motivates your character. The three most common character motivations are money, interpersonal relationships (friendship, family, love, etc.), and power. Typically, your character’s values will fall into one of those very broad categories, but don’t just stop there when choosing what your character cares about. A good practice is to incorporate some nuance into their values, or even a contradiction of values, which sets you up for more interesting and dynamic role-play opportunities in the future.

d20	Value	d20	Value
1	Self-preservation	11	Technological advancement
2	Defense of the Traveler	12	Scientific knowledge
3	Personal integrity	13	Cultural preservation
4	Protecting the vulnerable	14	Martial prowess
5	Honor/social status	15	Aesthetic beauty
6	Social cohesion	16	Risen superiority
7	Fireteam camaraderie	17	Material acquisition
8	Humanity’s survival, at any cost	18	Inner peace
9	Individual liberty	19	Orderliness
10	Self-discipline	20	Flourishing complexity

Vices

Whether virtuous or vicious in general, everyone has some habit, taste, or preference that qualifies as a vice. Your character’s vices could be fairly harmless indulgences or genuinely detrimental behaviors, but whatever they are, the key quality of a vice is your character’s weakness to it or around it. 

At your Architect’s discretion, when you pick a vice for your character, and your character is exposed to that vice, they must succeed on a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw or they become Charmed by the vice. If the vice is something being offered by another creature, the character is Charmed by that creature instead. Your character can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of their turns, ending the effect on itself on a success. If your character succeeds on their saving throw, or if the effect ends on them, they become immune to being Charmed by their vice for the next 24 hours.

d20	Vice	d20	Vice
1	Gilded/glowing/gaudy armor	11	Collection completion
2	Wormspore	12	Vex tech
3	Trashy Hunter romance novels	13	Hive studies
4	Angry VanNet posting	14	Heavy ammo hoarding
5	Romanticizing the Darkness	15	Sparrow racing
6	Loot obsessed	16	Esoteric Warlock writings
7	Ahamkara conspiracy theorist	17	Sartorial struggle
8	Power tripper	18	Celebrity gossip
9	Compulsive notification checking	19	Nihilistic pessimism
10	Bad musical taste	20	Paracausal pranks

Fears

No matter how strong, agile, or smart your character is, chances are there is at least one thing they fear deeply. Much like when presented with a vice, characters don’t act like themselves when they’re around their fears. The strong can crumble, the quick can stumble, and the intelligent can suddenly find themselves at a complete loss, unsure what to do.

Consider carefully how your character responds to their fear. Do they become aggressive, or frightful? Everyone reacts differently to their fear, and irrational fears often provoke irrational actions. 

At your Architect’s discretion, if you pick a fear for your character, whenever your character is presented with their fear they must make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw, becoming Frightened on a failed save. Your character can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of their turns, ending the effect on yourself on a success. If your character succeeds on their saving throw, or if the effect ends on them, they become immune to being Frightened by their fear for the next 24 hours.

d20	Fear	d20	Fear
1	Losing your Power	11	Accidentally harming Ghostless
2	NLS jumps	12	Gear failure
3	Transmat malfunction	13	Triskaidekaphobia
4	Ghost abandonment	14	Fireteam death
5	Specific alien species	15	Ghost switching
6	Other Guardians	16	Ridicule
7	Past life identity	17	Patrol beacons
8	Temporal excision	18	Immortal boredom
9	The Nine	19	Triangular shapes
10	Radiolarian contamination	20	Entropy

Charmed And Frightened Duration. The duration of the Charmed and Frightened effects described in Vices and Fears, respectively, is left undetermined because what constitutes a reasonable duration for those effects can vary greatly depending on the vice or fear you pick, and the situational context. Work with your Architect to determine a reasonable duration for the effect if your character fails their saving throw.