Designing Hogwarts Characters: My Process (and how to use it to make your own)

The possibility seems remote, but imagine, Dear Reader, that find yourself playing a game of Night-Haunted Hogwarts. Further imagine that none of the 24 clan options suits your purposes - perhaps you have a favorite character that I failed to include (cutting it down to a d6 roll's worth for each house left many on the table), you don't like my interpretation of one of the existing ones, or you really want to play something off the beaten path like a foreign wizard, goblin, centaur, or elf. What to do? 

In this post I'll walk through my process and see if we can distill that into some general principles that we can use as a guide for making your own material in this setting.

As I've discovered, writing tie-in material for an established setting you have to fill in a lot of blanks left by the text. A roleplaying game needs different things than a series of boarding school mystery novels does, for example. At the same time, your work needs to feel like it belongs or you lose the benefits of using the established setting in the first place. Writing tie-in material, therefore, is mostly a process of extrapolation - you're trying to surprise your audience with a sense of familiarity. In practice this mostly consists of looking at specific examples from the text and expanding outward to make a generalized type. These can be direct (Neville Longbottom killed one specific snake one time --> his descendants are famous dragonslayers and serpent-hunters) or indirect (a mirror in the Leaky Cauldron gives Harry sarcastic advice on his appearance --> mundane objects in Harry Potter world can have funny personalities that relate in some way to what they do --> the Crabbe's magical caltrops chortle to themselves whenever they think they're about to stick someone). Sometimes they are made from the thinnest of thin strands (house-elf could be said to imply other kinds of elf: by looking at house-elves what can we interpret as qualities of "elfishness" in Harry Potter and how can we apply them to different contexts).

So that's the general idea. How did I apply that to writing character types? Let's walk through the process. As an extended example I'll take a minor character and demonstrate how we can spin passing references into something that more or less passes muster in our neo-medieval fantasy version of Harry Potter. For the purposes of this exercise, let's pretend that I really like Lavender Brown. Maybe I want to play a traditionally feminine character, or maybe I just think that Rowling did her dirty. Either way, she's present in the text but there isn't a lot of solid information about her, so we'll have to do a lot of extrapolating.

House

When it comes to characters, I first assigned what House they belonged to. I wanted to give people the option of generating a character randomly generating a character if they didn't come to the table with an idea in mind, and the game only uses d6s, which meant six recognizable characters per House. You can see that I had to stretch to fill out gaps already, either bringing characters up from the minor leagues (Bones, Chang, Rookwood) to fill out the roster or doing some creative interpretation of who belonged where (Lupin, Moody). 

That symmetry isn't a consideration for new characters, so just go with what feels right. Lavender Brown is a Gryffindor in the books, so let's put her in there.

Note: For characters outside of the House system (foreign wizards & non-humans), either assign them to a house as a functional equivalent (Durmstrang = Slytherin, Beauxbatons = Ravenclaw) and change the names, or write a new one. Mechanically a House or House-equivalent consists of three elements: a stat increase, a broadly written Inspired Action, and a broadly written Flaw. For non-humans I would probably collapse House and Clan into a single thing, but you certainly could apply the type --> subtype if you felt like you had the creative juice for it. Bane and Firenze are fairly different kinds of centaur, and I could see a Goblin, Gringotts vs Goblin, Mountain.

Clan

A clan entry contains the following components:

1. Name, Motto, and Sigil
2. Staring Skills
3. Background
4. Inspired Action
5. Flaw
6. Starting Equipment

Brainstorm

Rather than going in order, I start with whatever's easiest and work outwards from there. Before we can start writing our entry for Clan Brown, let's take a look at what the existing material we have to work with. Crack open your books (or much more likely, visit the exhaustively detailed and footnoted Harry Potter wiki):

• Is friends with Parvati Patil
• Has a pet rabbit
• Likes horoscopes and divination
• Flirty
• Tacky jewelry
• Did well in Care of Magical Creatures once presented with a competent teacher
• Participated in extra-curricular Defense Against the Dark Arts classes w/ H. Potter
• Mauled to death by a werewolf

Uncharitably, Lavender Brown is a stupid bitch who exists to make Hermione look good by comparison, another of the many mean-spirited caricatures that populate the book series. Luckily, we aren't bound by that interpretation and are free to extrapolate these traits in a more positive light. Lavender's skill set is one of her few notable traits, so let's start there.

Skills

Behind the scenes, Clans in Night-Haunted Hogwarts have 7 "skill points" to distribute. 

• Basic = 1 point
• Advanced = 2 points
• Expert = 3 points
• A +1 stat boost = 1 point and is only used in exceptional cases where a character is part of one House but really feels like they should've been in another (Hermione for Ravenclaw, Neville for Hufflepuff, etc.)
• +1 Shadow is free (it's a disadvantage as much as it is an advantage) and is used where appropriate

Note that the +1 to Stat may be weighted too low - it's a holdover from a previous iteration of the core mechanic which was much more similar to Troika, where you added Stat + Skill and tried to score higher than your opponent. The skill values were much higher at the time. I may rework the character creation math after playtesting, but for now I think it's good enough to get on with.

"Expert" level is only assigned where that competency is a major part of the character's identity, but I think that applies here. None of the existing Gryffindor clans have any level of Divinations, so that's a new niche, and it seems to have been Lavender's best subject. That leaves us with 4 points to distribute. Let's give the Browns an "Advanced" in Courtesy (2 points) to represent her social butterfly aspect and spend the remaining two points on "Basic" in both Creatures (for her bunny and the unicorn lesson) and Charms (general purpose, softer-feeling magic). So far that gives us:

Clan Brown

Divination (expert) | Courtesy (advanced) | Charms (basic) | Creatures (basic)

Background

Now that we have a picture of what they're good at, let's go back to the creative elements, because that will give us a handle on how to write their special abilities and items. Let's say that the Browns are courtiers and bannermen to the Weasleys (Patil would also work if you imagine the House structure to be less rigid than I do, but I like the idea of turning Lavender's embarrassing pursuit of Ron into a Serious High Fantasy bit of courtly intrigue). They keep extensive gardens and a small menagerie of magical creatures, and while they have a reputation for softness the collection of werewolf pelts worn by the family matriarch are a grim reminder of what enemies can expect when Clan Brown rides to war.

In light of this background I'm revising the Brown starting skills to make room for Herbology. As our resident girly witches and garden wizards they ought to be able to fill the cottagecore witchy aesthetic.

The sigil obviously should be a rabbit. I'm kind of stuck on the motto, but a placeholder should be fine.

Clan Brown

"swift as sight"

Sigil: the rabbit and leaves, lavender on brown

Divination (expert) | Charms (basic) | Courtesy (basic) | Creatures (basic) | Herbology (aesthetic)

Ability & Flaw

For Inspired Actions and flaws I've mostly worked with a few variations: making specific rolls Safe or Deadly, gaining Fatigue (self or others), making someone Miserable (self or others), or incentivizing sub-optimal or antisocial behavior. Where necessary I've reused abilities, both to conserve design space and because I don't want to work too hard. As courtiers of the Weasleys, let's make them a straight up variant clan, altering the creative elements where necessary:

Inspired Action -- Court Gossip

You can spend Inspiration to make any roll Safe if you can explain how it relates to a similar story you overheard or situation that you encountered at court. You must invent a new story each time.

Flaw -- Jealous

When another character succeeds at a task you may choose to become Jealous of them and gain Inspiration. While Jealous you are Miserable until that character suffers some kind of misfortune.

We could have also given the Browns the Patil flaw of being Annoying, or the Chang's Passionate. Either would have suited the character (both in the books and in their new mode as courtiers and ladies-in-waiting).

Starting Equipment

Starting equipment is mostly made by taking things owned by or associated with the character in the source material and turning them into adventure-ready equipment.

1. Crystal ball
2. Werewolf-hide mantle (Armor 1, Heavy)
3. Large rabbit - able to transform into a fetching hat and back again with a soft pop. Unusually clever.
4. floral boutonniere - Ward 1 (ud3)
5. Dress robes embroidered with silver & gold unicorn-hair thread - self-cleaning, self-drying, repels dirt
6. Portrait locket - contains a picture of your fiancée. Roll or choose another clan: your fiancée can give you +1 to a single skill chosen from amongst their clan's starting skills. Requires 1d3 rounds to explain the situation to them and get actionable advice.

Names

To maintain the Dickensian naming conventions of the Potter books I've tried to make sure the sample names for each clan are variations on the same theme that the original seems to use. In the case of Lavender Brown we can go with colors, herbs, or some combination of the two.

1. Grayson
2. Indigo
3. Jasper
4. Hazel
5. Olive
6. Ruby

Many of the possible color names seemed too pretentious (Vermillion, Fuschia) or too American (Ash).