In my previous post on pickup games I pointed out that, while Houses of the Blooded (HotB) is easy to GM with little to no preparation, character creation takes some time. Our experiments with this game have consisted of a series of one-shots. For most of these, the players have created new characters in each.
In other words, I’ve had a good chance to watch players make HotB characters. What I’ve noticed, throughout all those observations, is that much of the time seems to be spent finding suitable Aspects.The problem is largely caused by the fact that the pre-defined aspects are strewn throughout the HotB book. Some are in the ‘Aspects’ chapter, some aren’t. Some are in the main text, others are in sidebars.
The index at the back of the book is better than most RPG books, and you can find there a list of aspects. Unfortunately, as I was compiling my own database, I found that there are some missing from the list, and there are some in the index that don’t exist in the book. There are also aspects on that list that are the author’s examples of “bad” aspects, and others that are intended to be detrimental to the character.
In my effort to speed up our games, I decided to make a tool to simplify the process. My HotB Aspect Library allows searching of the aspect list by either name, or by a set of tags that I defined for each aspect. Thus, you could easily search for all combat-related aspects.
Knowing gamers’ love of randomness, I also added a button to randomly pick one of the search results. Please give the library a try, and let me know what you think in the comments!