TITLE: The Ultimate Fantasy Character Creator
AUTHOR: Jeff Stormer
PUBLISHER: Adams Media
RELEASE DATE: January 14, 2025
PRICE: Paperback – $16.99 (USD); Ebook – $12.99 (USD)

Creating fictional characters is fun. It’s also difficult, no matter what level you’re at as a creator. No matter how much planning you set out to do, there will always be little unaccounted for things. The more fleshed out a character is, the more readily you can put them into Situations, and the better you can convey them to viewers/readers/listeners/etc.

In The Ultimate Fantasy Character Creator, author Jeff Stormer takes one of the most tried-and-true methods of character development—having someone else ask you random questions—and turns them into a huge, organized workbook. The book starts with naming conventions, walks you through a fictional biography, and then presents a variety of situations to place your characters in.

The Structure

The Ultimate Fantasy Character Creator is divided into ten chapters, each containing several guided exercises. Chapter 1 helps you build a timeline of your character’s life, starting from childhood and going all the way through a hypothetical funeral. Further chapters focus on present-day life, culture and aesthetic, likes and dislikes, relationships (both positive and negative), and common scenarios your character may find themselves in.

Not every exercise will fit every character, and Stormer encourages readers to pick and choose what works rather than muscling through every single unit. For example, not every character will have pets or animal companions, and some character will simply be too serious to bother spending time figuring out what jokes they would tell in which situations.

The concluding chapter brings all these disparate pieces together, encouraging you to “debrief” on what works and what doesn’t. Did an exercise reveal something that works against your character’s intended role in their story? This is the time to address and potentially rework that. The book ends with a sample character built using these exercises.

Why It Works

Ultimately, the things that Stormer presents in this book are not revolutionary ideas. “Warm-up” questions are commonplace in gaming groups, encouraging players to ponder everything from favorite foods to childhood memories to what they have in their pockets right now. Building a playlist for your character is pretty much a standard practice in this day and age. But just because these techniques are known and used doesn’t keep this book from being something really special.

The questions Stormer asks don’t just supply you with tidbits of character business. Every exercise has a secondary purpose. For example, defining details of your character’s go-to outfit will reveal details about their culture, their upbringing, and how they carry themselves. Filling in the blanks in a hypothetical travelogue will give you ideas about how your character comports themselves in unknown places.

Finally, and most importantly, Stormer comes back to the fact that the character he’s helping you build is fictional: they are there to serve a purpose, and the end result must fit that. This isn’t just a reminder dropped on the reader at the end of the book (although the debrief does serve that purpose). Sections on how to incorporate inspiration from the media you love, as well as regular touchstones concerning your character’s role and genre, serve as constant reminders. Better still, answers you come up with that don’t necessarily fit your character’s role and genre aren’t treated as mistakes. Perhaps your character defies the tropes of their fictional role, or perhaps they’ve expanded beyond their original intent. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—Stormer reminds us that it’s up to us what the character is here for.

Final Score (5 out of 5 stars)

In The Ultimate Fantasy Character Creator, Jeff Stormer refines a tried-and-true method into something with true depth. This handbook juggles both Doylist and Watsonian character inspiration, balancing the creativity of in-universe character development with the reality of the form and function of your fiction. A blend of multiple choice and open-ended exercises give enough freedom to spread your creative wings without leaving you in the lurch for more technical questions.

You do not have to be a writer to benefit from this book. If you have any sort of fictional little guy you put in situations, you can (and will) have fun with this. And if you are a maker of fiction, it belongs on your shelf, alongside a notebook – because while this book has plenty of room to write, you’ll almost certainly want to use these exercises again and again.

Featured Image: Adams Media