I've already been plugging away at Haven's new character generation system for over two hours, but I get a nice three day weekend, owing to Thanksgiving Day (yes, Canada has Thanksgiving in October) on Monday. After that, I'm starting into a four-day run of night shifts.

All of my night shifts are from 9 PM to 2 AM, so theoretically it's not much of a night shift, just a "really late evening shift". It probably won't be much different than my Days Without Paycheques in the Time Ago. Except I get paid.

Back to the subject you're actually interested in... so far, my plan for Haven is going to be realised as it was originally.

Creating a character is following a process. The first step of this process is choosing whether you want to randomly generate a character background, or whether you want to choose every step from birth to adulthood. The random generation is simple: it simply chooses a chain of events which positively and negatively modify your attributes. The choice version is the same, but you choose between certain "paths" to follow and it randomly feeds you events along that path. This stage is called the lifepath.

The very first step in the lifepath is your gender. You can choose to randomly pick one in the choice-based lifepath, but cannot pick your gender in the fate-based lifepath.

Most of the paths you can follow have some sort of minor net negative impact on your attribute points and some sort of moderate net positive impact on your skills.

For the game, an age of 15 is considered "young adult", 30 is considered "middle aged", 45 is considered "old", and 60 is considered "venerable" (compare to the modern 20 for young adult, 40 for middle aged, 60 for old, and 80 for venerable). Thus, following a long lifepath can get you some impressive skills, but will leave you physically weak.

In the beginning stages, I'm not planning on having the full lifepath system fleshed out. Most of the paths will be the same as one another -- a simple "gain one skill point and lose one attribute point". I'll undoubtedly require several character wipes as the lifepath system is fleshed out, unfortunately, violating one of my original design goals ("Haven will never have a global savefile erasure"). Oh well, I say.

The lifepath you follow also influences your ethos. There are 5 ethos ranging from good to evil, and 5 behaviours ranging from strict to anarchic. Law and Chaos fit into ethics (how you function in a society) while Good and Evil fit into your morals (your balance of selfishness and altruism). (In Haven, behaviour is a synonym for ethics, and ethos is a synonym for morals.)

If you don't like the ethos produced by your lifepath, you can simply choose a different one -- for instance, if you followed an "anarchic evil" lifepath, you could still pick "lawful benevolence", and this would undoubtedly mean some sort of massive personal realisation just before you started play.

Once you've finished with your lifepath and ethos, you move into the creation phase. This gives you a pool of 100 points to be divided amongst the five categories of your character: Attributes, Techniques, Skills, Assets, and Equipment.

Attributes are built based on a purely random roll -- the system throws d20 exactly 10 times, and each of these rolls are placed directly into each attribute automatically (no more rerolls). 35 is added to each attribute, the results from your lifepath are subtracted, and then you are allowed to have at it. Initial values for attributes are shown in the standard "off white" colour that the game uses. An augmented attribute shows up in green, while a decremented attribute shows up in red. You gain 1 attribute point by decreasing any attribute 2 points below the normally rolled level, but require 1 attribute point to increase a skill one point ranging from 0 to 54, 2 attribute points to increase an attribute one point ranging from 55 to 72, and 3 attribute points to increase an attribute by one point at any higher level.

Techniques are like Haven's old advantages, except more extensive. If you've ever played Final Fantasy IX, it's probably the closest analogue. Certain techniques are always active -- these are the techniques that closest resemble the original advantages from Haven, and are called permanent techniques. Other techniques require ability points in order to "activate" them -- these are called passive techniques and are most similar to FF9. Finally, some techniques require ability points, and not only need those points in order to be ready to use, but also temporarily consume those points as soon as the technique is triggered -- these are active techniques, and a unique concept of my own design. You can buy techniques or ability points for a fixed number of character points. You can also continue to return to the point allocation menus as the game progresses in order to improve your techniques. The system is complicated and difficult to understand, but I'm convinced it'll be easy to grasp once it's put in front of you.

Skill selection is a bit different now -- no skill tags. You can spend 2 points to increase 1 point in a Main Skill, 1 point to increase 1 point in a Subskill, or 1 point to increase 2 points in an Underskill. For instance, I can spend 10 points to become an good wielder of the longsword, or I can spend 10 points to become a fairly good all-around slashing swordsman, or I can spend 10 points to have a broad, unfocused aptitude for swords in general.

Assets are pools of raw resources. Every character actually starts in debt in this game, and adding points to assets allows you to offset this debt and possibly come out ahead. You'll notice assets in the form of property, materials, invested funds, inherited goods, and capital (but bear in mind that points put into capital are very unfavourable compared to points that are put into non-liquid assets), and liabilities in the form of debts, borrowed money, and family debts.

Equipment enters you straight into the equipment system where you can pick from a list of specific goods and commodities. The total cost of the equipment you buy determines the number of points needed to gain that equipment. Like in the original Haven seed prototype, this probably won't be finished in a hurry, even though I continually dabble with the object type and materials lists.

Once all of this generation is done, your character is all ready. What little random production is needed is done now, and then your character is saved and dropped into the (still empty) game world.