Leonard ‘LED’ O’Donnell is the first character I have ever created for Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. The idea of playing a solo campaign hadn’t crossed my mind yet, and I undertook the creation process mostly out of curiosity for the Life Path method.
He indeed represents my first contact with the rules of Twilight: 2000 in its 4th iteration.
Forging what would eventually become the first player in my cast of characters meant rolling dice, consulting tables, picking careers and pondering alternatives. But it also meant writing a story.
Each step in LED’s creation became the kernel of a bit of narrative as my imagination filled the gaps in between, and around, every career choice and dice roll. The experiences I imagined he accumulated decided his choices as much as the dice rolls informed his story.
It was a curious, fresh, and satisfying, process, and I eventually ended up with a ready-to-play character whose life story was fleshed out in detail.
The idea of playing a solo campaign followed soon after.
It’s been a while since I undertook the creation process that generated LED, but to the best of my recollection I wanted someone with a strong moral compass and a tenacious will, with experience in fighting the war against the Soviet when it was in its cold phase. Less of a brutal, head-on clash, and more akin to a chess game of moves and countermoves. Someone with some juvenile arrogance and later-found humility acquired through mistakes and experience.
Sent to the frontline of the now fully-escalated conflict, he has to navigate himself, and later his squad through war-torn Poland, with a high degree of independence. I thought that could be fertile terrain for doubts and uncertainties, and the necessity of facing them with a father-like spirit.
In the interest of offering some variation to the blog, I opted for presenting LED’s creation process in infographic(ish) form. His story is summed up in black, while his attributes, skills, specialties and everything else directly linked to the game’s mechanics is in blue.
By rank, experience, and my own design, LED is the leader of my band of characters. His moral code reflects the role I had in mind for him as the group navigates the dangers of WWIII in Twilight: 2000.
Despite the level of detail I poured in the creation of this character and the rich background from which it stems, the creation process didn’t finish until I started the campaign, and immerse LED in the fictional world where the game and my own mind intersected.
And if you really think about it, aside from stats and specialties, as long as you play the game, your character’s evolution is never fully finished. Play it long enough, have it act and react, and each new hex traversed will grow your PC into a newer version of itself, more deeply grounded in the game’s world.