This unofficial tool helps build Non-Player Characters (NPCs) for Burning Wheel. Use the fields to enter your character's stats, traits, skills, and Beliefs. The calculations for Health, Steel, Reflexes, Hesitation, and Wounds are done for you!
I recommend starting with a core concept for your character. Who are they? What do they do? Use their Stock and Lifepaths to guide their stats, skills, and Beliefs. A grizzled veteran soldier will have different attributes and Beliefs than a sheltered noble. Build a clear idea and use it to set their attributes and BITs.
The guidelines below are sourced from the books or inspired by them. The sections on BITs, Skills, and Combat are my thoughts, driven by my personal beliefs on how to make NPCs usable at the table. Your mileage may vary, and that's why this tool gives you room to enter custom text and use these characters how you see fit.
Name is the character's name. This is a required field. Stock determines the available Circles for the character. Selecting "Other" allows you to define a custom form and Circles for a non-standard character. Lifepaths are a summary of the character's history and career. This is a free-text field; enter the lifepaths that justify the character's skills and abilities. General Tags are used to find your character when searching in the Community Characters list. Add tags that apply to make your character easy to find (e.g., criminal, sailor, guard).
Asterisks indicate that a section is required to add a character to the Community Characters list. Nothing is required to create a PDF except a character name.
Note sections are provided for Key and Evocative Traits and Skills. Use them to clarify how a Trait works or to define a unique property of a Skill. These are not required fields but allow you to be inventive.
If you select the "Other" stock, a "Form" field will appear. Use this field to describe the character's unique culture, physical appearance and nature, since they don't fit a standard mold. This will ideally give you and the other players a strong sense of what this person is and how they act.
G/W checkboxes indicate Grey or White shading. I recommend this rubric for shading:
The following attributes are automatically calculated based on your character's stats and shades:
Health is the average of Will and Forte, modified by your answers to the Health Questions. Steel is a measure of courage and resolve. It's calculated based on Will, Power, and Forte, and your answers to the Steel Questions. Hesitation is the character's default social obstacle. It is derived from Will. Reflexes determines how many actions a character takes in combat. It's an average of Perception, Agility, and Speed. Wounds are calculated automatically based on Power and Forte stats. If you manually edit them, you'll be overriding the automatic calculation. Trait Modifiers can be used to increase or decrease Calculated Attributes without changing the base attributes.
Use this section to add an Emotional Attribute and its exponent.
Key Traits & Skills are central to the character's concept. These are the things they are known for. Evocative Traits & Skills add flavor and color to the character, but are not as central as their Key counterparts. They help make the character feel real and lived-in. Try to be concise. An NPC with 20 skills is difficult to run at the table. Focus on what's important for the character's role in the story.
Beliefs are the core of a character's motivations. A good Belief is actionable, challenging, and reveals something about the character's personality. Every NPC should have at least one Belief that connects them to the Player Characters or the current situation. Adding more Beliefs is usually not necessary until a character recurs or becomes important to the game. Instincts are either the most or least crucial step to making an NPC feel alive and consistent. Colorful instincts such as "I always pause for a long time after starting a conversation," can really come to define a character. But an Instinct that never gets triggered is worse than useless, as it will be just another thing to remember at the table. So try to choose a colorful Instinct to start and add more as you flesh the character out.
Weapons and armor are often the least important thing about an NPC and can take a lot of time to reference. Because of this, I recommend only adding them if they both make sense for the character to possess and they're necessary to the character's role in the game.
NPCs are subject to GM modifications. Nothing here has to be done this way. You can change root stats at will, and subtract or add to calculated Stats with Trait Modifiers. You can invent Traits, weapons, and armor. What matters is that you and your table enjoy the characters that appear in your game.