Use the Hero's Journey to Discover Your Character

A simple mental framework for examining who your character might be

Something I do at my long running gaming table is ask my players prompts about the characters they are playing.

Ask the players to describe the movie their character would be the main character of, the hero of. We’re playing games about heroic characters, so it should be easy to imagine some story that their character is the star of. What is the story? What are they like? How do they change over the course of the movie? What is the thing that sets them apart from the rest of the cast?

If your players are not film makers (as mine are not), you might want to give them some structure to answer this prompt. A few questions, the form of the movie narrative, the name of the movie - this might make the question easier to wrap one’s head around and easier to find a satisfying answer.

Use the Hero’s Journey structure to write the plot of your character’s movie. It consists of three acts - the Departure, the Initiation, and the Return.

The Departure

The status quo, the Call to Adventure, the Refusal of the Call, the Meeting with the Mentor, Crossing the First Threshold… all steps in the first act of the story. Something happens to the hero, and they reject it - are they afraid? Are they unwilling to change? Are they unwilling to leave something behind? Whatever the reason, they are hesitant to engage with the new world they’ve walked into.

But then, they are pulled in. The mentor doesn’t have to be a person, but it is often easiest to think of them as such. The mentor shows them that the road can be walked, and more importantly, that it must be. Finally, they cross the threshold - leaving town, getting off-planet, walking through the wardrobe. Whatever it may be, the journey begins.

We don’t have all day at the table to hash these things out - I like to spend about 15-20 minutes on my pre-session prompts, so summarizing this as the departure and not diving in too deeply into each step is valuable. What caused your character to leave home? Why did they not want to, and who or what compelled them?

The Initiation

The initiation is the meat of the story. It includes a series of trials, the acquisition of new tools and powers, the crises that form the climax of the story, loss and tribulation, the elevation to new heights. This series of questions will help elucidate the initiation:

1. What happened that set you back significantly?

2. What did you gain or find, what power was given to you or learned? Magic swords, ancient spells, a new ship with alien technology.

3. What was your main obstacle or enemy? How did they serve as a contrast to your hero? What weakness of yours did they expoit, and how did you overcome them? And what treasure, at the end of that conflict, did you gain?

Three questions, but certainly the most challenging to answer. This forms the crux of your character’s movie, and the meat of what they have to overcome.

The Return

The return is the most ephemeral and least action packed of the three acts, but the one where the most moral, emotional, and intellectual parts of the story occur. The hero must journey home from the dangerous, wide world they just adventured into. After what they have been through, home might seem as foreign and hostile as their journey. There may be new lessons learned here - how to deal with trauma, how to forgive, and what to forget. Bilbo returned home to the Shire only to find that there was no real place for him there anymore.

Remember that this movie isn’t actually your character’s backstory. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be - in my opinion, the exciting things that happen to a character should happen during the campaign, not before it. So what use is all of this exercise?

The point is to understand what kinds of stories your characters might tell. The first act, the departure, might thoroughly inform the way your character acts and feels now, during the early parts of the campaign. Their interests might align with the kinds of stories you’re telling during this exercise. The conflict and the enemy of this movie we are directing could illuminate the kinds of change a person wants their character to go through - or what they are dreading confronting. And the return home will certainly illustrate the kinds of personal growth that the character still needs to go through, and point all of you in the right direction of exploiting their deficiencies over a satisfying narrative arc.

If you use this idea, please comment below about how it goes for you and your table - I will leave a comment soon with my own examples.