Each player takes on the role of one of the heroes of your story, controlling all their actions. You get to build the character you want to see in the world. Keep in mind that Fate characters are competent, dramatic, and willing to engage with the adventures ahead.

Your PC is made up of several elements:

• Aspects: phrases describing who your hero is
• Race: your character’s race
• Skills: your hero’s areas of relative expertise
• Stunts: remarkable things your hero does
• Stress: your hero’s ability to keep calm and carry on
• Consequences: the wounds, physical and mental, your hero can endure
• Refresh: a measure of your hero’s narrative agency
• Finishing Touches: your hero’s personal details

Aspects are short phrases that describe who your character is or what is important to them. They can relate to your character’s physical or mental qualities, history, beliefs, training, relationships, or even particularly important equipment.

The first thing to know about them is: Aspects are true. In other words, how you define your character is real and true in the story you’re telling. If you write down that your character is an Oracular Master of the Blade, then they are an oracular master of the blade. You’ve told everyone that your character sees the future and is an artist with a sword.

You’ll also use aspects in play to change the story. They give you permission to improve your dice rolls and establish facts about the world. Lastly, aspects can earn you fate points if they create complications for your character—so to make the most versatile aspects, you should aim for ones that are double-edged, working both for you and against you.

To begin, you’ll give your character five aspects: a high concept, a personal goal, a trouble, a relationship, and one free aspect. For more information about aspects, see

Every character belongs to one of the races of Hyrule. Your race offers some suggestions on aspects, as well as swapping one of your skills with skill specific to your race, representing each race’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

While aspects define who your character is, skills show what they can do. Each skill describes a broad activity your character might have learned through study and practice or simply have an innate talent for. A character with Burglary is capable, to some degree, at all manner of crime relating to the fine art of burgling—casing a joint, bypassing security, pick-pocketing, and lock-picking.

Each skill has a rating. The higher the rating, the better the character is at the skill. As a whole, your character’s skills will show you what actions they are built for, which ones they’ll get by on, and which aren’t their forte.

You’ll choose your character’s skill ratings, arranged in a pyramid with the highest-rated skills at Good (+3), as follows:

• Two Good (+3) skills
• Three Fair (+2) skills
• Four Average (+1) skills
• All other skills at Mediocre (+0)

Your refresh is the minimum number of fate points your character begins with at the start of each session. Your character begins with a refresh of 3.

Each session, you start with fate points at least equal to your refresh. Be sure to keep track of the fate points you have left at the end of each session of play—if you have more fate points than your refresh, you’ll start the next session with the fate points you ended this session with.

Billy earned a lot of fate points during today’s session, ending it with 5 fate points. His refresh is 2, so Billy will start the next session with 5 fate points. But Benny ends the same session with just one fate point. His refresh is 3, so he’ll begin the next session with 3 fate points, not just the one he had left over.

While every character has access to all the skills—even if they are Mediocre (+0) at most of them—your character has some unique stunts. Stunts are the cool techniques, tricks, or bits of equipment that make your character unique and interesting. Where skills are about a character’s broad competencies, stunts are about specific areas of excellence; most of them give you a bonus in particular circumstances or let you do something that other characters simply can’t.

Your character begins with three free stunt slots. You don’t have to define them all right away, and may fill them in as you play. You may purchase more stunts by spending 1 refresh each, to a minimum of 1 refresh.

Stress and consequences are how your character withstands the toll of their adventures. Characters have at least three one-point boxes for Health stress and at least two one-point boxes for Stamina stress. They also get several conditions, described in Stress and Conditions.

Your rating in several skills grants you additional stress boxes, as described in Skills.

Give your character a name and description, and discuss their history with the other players. If you haven’t written down a relationship aspect yet, do so now.

Have any choices you just can’t land on? Not sure about what to do for your Other aspect, or how to spend your last Fair skills? You don’t have to decide everything all at once; instead, just leave them unselected for the time being, and write something down once you get a good idea later. If you come up with a good angle for your aspect, feel free to write it an invoke it simultaneously; similarly, if you left one of your skill selections empty and it’s time to roll something you don’t have a bonus in, you can just decide then and there to give that skill one of your remaining slots in the pyramid!