Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Mon, 27/11/2006 - 12:37.

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After a hiatus of 2 years I've finally gone back to Yesterday's Tomorrow, my game of a nuclear-powered, dystopian alternate now inspired by 1984, Brave New World, Children of Men et al. Although much of the setting has remained the same, I've ended up junking most (or all?) of the rules, to be replaced with my new ideas.

Character creation used to be a case of picking a number of adjectives to describe your personality, mind and physique (so academic, weak and unhinged), each of which had a stat bonus or penalty associated with it. The idea was to end up with not only a series of attributes, but also a ready-made description.

So I junked that, or rather refined it, and replaced it with a personality test of sorts. So you'd answer the questions for your character, picking from a choice of 4 possible answers. Then you'd tot up the total numbers of A, B, C and D and each would correspond to a stat. So if you answered 5 As, you might have an Intellect of 5, or whatever.

This week I've refined this even further, trying to mould it into the dystopian setting more tightly. Now I want character creation to be an in game concept, for the character creation itself to take place in play. This will take the form of an interrogation, with the characters pulled into a police station for questioning. The players will answer the interrogator's questions in character and his answers will inform character creation. This meshes with the idea I've wanted all along to have the YT character sheet as an in game artefact, a file kept on the character by the authorities.