Core Aspects:

Start with your character’s core ideas — two central aspects for your character: their high concept and trouble.  These are often inter-connected.

• Your high concept is a phrase that sums up what your character is about.
• Your trouble is the answer to a simple question: what complicates your character’s existence?

You can find more information about the Core Aspects here.

The central character attributes in Fate are called aspects. Aspects cover a wide range of elements and define what makes your character unique—basically, they describe the core of your character’s identity. (By contrast, skills and stunts could be said to paint a similar picture of what your character can do, rather than who they are.)   (Paragraph borrowed from faterpg.com/dl/df/aspects.html)

Every character has a few aspects beyond their Core Aspects, and you’ll be coming up with those in the next steps.

Character Name and The Phase Trio:

It’s sometimes helpful to have a name before starting the phase trio, because you’ll be collaborating with the other players during this part.  Sometimes it’ll be easier to come up with a name later. It’s not necessary to have a name figured out before you start, and may come more easily in the process of writing your character’s adventure prequel, but it will make it easier for the other players to write their parts of the adventure prequel if they know what to call your character.

The first phase is about your character’s recent background: something you did that’s interesting and adventurous. The second and third are about how the other player characters got involved in that adventure, and how you got involved in theirs.  This is an opportunity to develop some backstory for your characters.  Each phase will ask you to write down two things:

• First, write a summary of what happened.   If you’re drawing a blank, you can start with: “Everything was business as usual, until…”
• Second, come up with a character aspect that reflects some part of that phase, either causing it or developing from it.  You don’t have to keep this aspect in the game, but it should reflect something about your character at the time, to help the other players contribute their parts to your story.

Then, each player will give pass these along to another player, who will write down two things:

• A summary of how their character was involved, perhaps complicating or causing the incident.  This is something that should be negotiated with the first player, and should be something that both parties agree on.
• An aspect of their own character that affected or reflected some part of the incident, either causing it or developing from it.  Again, this aspect doesn’t have to be kept in the game.

Finally, the incident will be passed along to a third player, who will write down two things:

• A summary of how their character was involved, perhaps solving the incident.  Again, this should be negotiated with the other two players involved in the incident, and should be agreed upon by all parties.
• An aspect of their own character that affected or reflected some part of the incident.  Again, this aspect doesn’t have to be kept.

Bring it all together:

Review all the pieces you developed in the Phase Trio and decide which of the new aspects you will keep for your character in the game.  If you’re changing any of them, write down how and why they changed.

If you haven’t already read the page on aspects in general, read it now to get an idea of what makes for effective and interesting aspects.

Next Steps

At this point, everyone will hopefully have a high concept, a trouble aspect, a name, three secondary aspects, and connections with at least two other characters.

From here, we’ll move on to determine skill allocations.