What is a character?

What do you do in this game?

Characters in Epochrypha are assumed to be adventurers

You play someone with a trade and a place in the world, who has ended up doing something that requires leaving both behind for a while.

That framing does most of the work, because five decisions about how Zsenai functions shape every session:

You are not a class, you are a person with a job. Carpenter, alchemist, tomb-robber. Your trade is what you’re good at, what you’re owed for, and what you go back to. Adventure is the interruption, not the career.

Wealth is standing, not coin. What you’re usually chasing is obligation — a patron, an introduction, access to something your name alone wouldn’t open. You can spend your standing to reach past your station, and everyone will see that you did. Getting rich is less interesting here than getting known.

Power is a bargain. Those who work magic do it by binding a spirit, which then rides them and wants things. It is not studied and it is not granted. Nobody with power in Zsenai got it for free, and everyone with it is carrying something.

Distance is expensive. Travel is on foot, on horseback, or by sail. Going somewhere is a decision with a cost, not a transition between scenes — which makes the question of where you’re going one of the real choices of a campaign.

Fighting is a last resort. Armor tops out at mail and scale, and there are no hit points to burn through. A fight you can’t avoid is a fight that will probably mark someone permanently. Characters who treat violence as a first option tend to have short careers.

Your character will change

Most games ask you to decide who your character is before you have ever played them, then hand you a sheet that mostly stays as you wrote it. Epochrypha assumes you’ll get some of that wrong, and builds the correction into the rules instead of leaving it to your imagination.

Three things push back on the sheet as you play:

Attributes rise from use. You get better at what you actually did under pressure, not at what you planned to be good at. A character who kept talking their way out of fights becomes someone who talks their way out of fights.
Injuries persist. Combat is meant to leave a mark, and a bad fight can follow your character for the rest of the campaign. The sheet will say so.
Bargains leave traces. A spirit that has ridden you does not leave you as it found you.

The sheet remembers what happened to you. That’s the idea the whole system is built around, and it has one practical consequence right now:

Don’t over-plan the build. You’re choosing a starting position, not locking in a character. Pick something you’d find interesting to play badly at first — play will do more to shape them than this page will.

What you need to know about the world

Zsenai is an original setting. It is deliberately not Rome, whatever its iron-and-bronze technology might invite you to assume.

Three things are worth knowing before you build someone who lives there:

Magic — what a spirit pact is, what it costs, and why anyone accepts it.
Nations — where people live, who they answer to, and who they don’t.
Technology — what exists and what doesn’t, and what that means for travel, trade, and violence.

Make characters together

Build your characters in the same room, or on the same call, as everyone else — including the GM.

This isn’t politeness. Three things in this system go badly when characters are built in isolation:

Your attack modes decide what you can survive. There are three, and none of them derives from another. A party that all chose the same one will meet something it has no answer to.

Standing can be pooled, but only if someone has some. Reaching past your station is often a group effort — one person makes the case and the others lend their names to it. A party where nobody invested in standing simply cannot reach certain things, and won’t find that out until it matters.

Characters who don’t trust each other die. Loners and troublemakers work well in fiction and badly at a table, and in a game this lethal, a party that hesitates before covering someone will lose them.

Your characters don’t have to like each other. They do have to have a reason to be in the same place, going the same way.

Group size: three to five players and a GM works best. Two is playable and thin. One is grim — a lone character in Zsenai has no one to pool standing with, no cover for the attack mode they didn’t take, and nobody to drag them out of a fight that turned.

Give your character a purpose

Not a backstory — a want. Something they’d leave home for.

The reason is mechanical as much as dramatic: attributes rise from what you actually do. A character with no direction does nothing in particular, and therefore becomes nothing in particular. The system rewards characters who are reaching for something, because reaching is what generates the rolls that change the sheet.

A background matters too, but mostly as the answer to what did you leave, and why.