While players are creating their characters, it is crucial for you as the GM to make sure that the characters and their backgrounds somewhat make sense with each other. This is particularly important if the scenario or adventure you are planning on leading the players through is a specific type of location, such as a Void ship, a dungeon, a city, or through the Tav Aeduhn in search of the fir darrig city of Pho-Lhung.
A group of unrelated characters could cripple the party before the game even starts, mostly by a couple of poor choices during character creation. Legends of Kralis offers a significant number of options to the player to be whatever character they wish to be. However, while this grants them a great opportunity, having a lack of party cohesiveness could cause issues.
However, with a bit of tweaking during the group's character creation you can help the players produce characters that are both interesting and are mechanically well suited to work together and with the campaign as a whole.
During this time of creation, you will want to help the party, and each character to avoid becoming better than the other's. However, you also want to make sure that each character is unique enough and capable enough that the character lives up to the what the player imagines.
The first step in creating a well-oiled and cohesive group is defining and determining the campaign goals during the creation process. From a player's point-of-view the goal of creation is to build a unique character with a great background and appropriate game stats. From your perspective as the GM there are several objectives you should consider during the creation process.
These objectives revolve around how each character fits into and with the game, the theme, the campaign and setting and the group.
The most important goal during the creation process is for the player's to fit together. To do so characters should avoid being incompatible with each other, whether through mechanical means or story. This often means combining characters that compliment each other such as stealth and magic or combat and healers. Secondly, the players should work to unite themselves, perhaps with help from you, in their background (see Integrating the Characters), each of the characters should have some tie to each other on a story level.
Mechanically, you will want to ensure that each character has adhered to the rules of creation within the Players Guide. This may be as easy as looking over the dice rolls, the species modifiers to attributes, and assuring that the players have each taken a species ability, their focus ability, and their first ability.
During this process be aware of the types of threats that the players may encounter in their first few sessions, and the possible big bad guy(s) they may face throughout the campaign. You may also want to ensure that they have appropriate skills to ensuring that the character will have the future opportunity to get better abilities.
During the creation process, you should help assure that each character take consider the trappings of the setting and its themes. Many times this is straight-forward and simple: as Legends of Kralis is a Science-Fantasy setting and this grants the players are wide birth of themes as their characters can range from a wild wandering hunters armed with a long-rifle to a vigilante crusader from Dardura Sheva, the Great Sapphire City, or powerful spellcasting engineer stalking around in her personal steam-powered mecha.
It is also important to address the actual theme aspect of the setting. Will the party be facing a horror theme filled with undead, an action theme where they will be chasing down the bad guys, or will they be a part of an investigation theme tracking down criminals.
Within the campaign,it is important to have each character have some type of personal attachment to the going ons within the campaign, something important enough that the players or the group won't simply walk away. The most immediate connection that players can have is connected to the main plot or scenario within the campaign. This is often easily done through the character's background or through hooks and tidbits that players write into their background.
For example, the campaign you are running is to stop a powerful undead being who is planning to open up a portal to one of the planes of Nheter Khet to conquer the region. Wanting to stop the undead thing and save their region from this dark doom is the most immediate connection to the campaign plot that the players could have. But it is not the only one.
If the PCs have generated a background, you can use this to hook the player into the campaign. Should some of the PCs not have written specific backgrounds, be careful in utilizing or creating backgrounds that might effect the PC in a way that the player may not like. Be sure to work with the players if you plan to create a background hook around them.
Continuing with stopping the undead being, perhaps one of the PCs relatives has become ill with a sickness directly related to the creeping devastation of the undead being's growing power as it manifests itself within the land, perhaps infesting water sources or even food. The PCs goals of finding a cure are linked with stopping the undead being.
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