Last week, I gave a quick overview of character creation, but today, let’s talk about the first two steps: Facade and True Self. These are the two sides of your character’s identity—their civilian life and their criminal self.
Your Facade is how the people around you see you: your family, coworkers, friends, and other "civilians" who have no idea about your extracurriculars. Maybe it’s even how you’d see yourself if you were just a normal person. For some characters, their Facade is something they could truly want to live up to and cause a lot of struggle and turmoil for. There are three parts to it. First, your Day Job: what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for. Examples include “Dentist who works for a large healthcare chain,” “Journeyman electrician who owns her own business,” or “Unemployed, small-time drug dealer who mostly sells to their friends.” Even something sketchy like selling drugs can be a Day Job if it’s part of your outward life- it just needs to be separate from your more dangerous ambitions.
Second is your Facade Reputation, which is how your loved ones see you. Are you a dedicated family man? A hard worker who can’t catch a break? Maybe your reputation is at least partly honest, like "a loving but stressed out single mother" or it’s a total lie, like a Dexter-style mask of being an upstanding citizen and forensic specialist. Finally, you’ll pick your Facade Traits, which represent specific qualities tied to how the world sees you; but we’ll talk more about that shortly.
After you’ve built your Facade, it’s time to reveal your True Self: the side of you that comes out when the world isn’t watching. Just like the Facade starts with your Day Job, True Self starts with your Night Job, which is what you do, or will do, in the criminal underworld. Maybe “I patch up knife and bullet wounds at my dental office after hours,” “I disable alarms for a ring of thieves,” or “I smuggle people across the border for the cartel.”
Next, you can define your True Self Reputation, but this step is optional, because if you’re new to the criminal world, you might not have one yet. Both your Facade and True Self reputations can evolve in the game, and when it does, it’s a major turning point for your character.
Lastly, traits help tie everything together. These can apply to either your Facade or your True Self, and they add mechanical depth to your roleplay. For example:
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Jerk
You're a jerk. Maybe you're a bit mean, maybe you're brusque, maybe you're rude, but a lot of people think you're obnoxious. If applied to your Facade, it means your friends and family know you’re abrasive and care about you more in spite of it—but you’ll have fewer people close to you. Applied to your True Self, it means your contacts will tolerate you for a while and work harder to stay on your good side, but their patience will eventually run out.
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I'm leaving out the mechanical part of the text because we haven't finalized numbers yet. But, the short version is that your Social Circle will put up with more Lies and Secrets, while your Contacts have a greater reliability- for a while, at least.