Nuts and Bolts
I'd like to say that Talen was an original idea from me, but that would be more than a little wrong. The character concept was borrowed from a David Eddings series, right down to the first name: Talen.
Talen was a really ambitious character to make and to kind of introduce.
I had previously played other 7th Sea games and most of my characters tended to use their brawn over their brains�
Not so with Talen.
I wanted to be different and add a little diversity to the group.
The group, at the time, already possessed two maturing swordsmen, and what could only be called an Avalon force of nature, along with a couple more fledgling swordsmen and other sturdy characters�
Making another swordsman, or another character with solid traits and a huge amount of martial skills wouldn't be of much help�
So I took the ideas from my previous characters and turned them inside out.
So Talen started fragile in traits.
A couple of civil skills became a pair of martial skills.
Profuse amounts of points in martial skills and martial advanced knacks became the same amount in civil skills and civil advanced knacks.
A huge believer in virtue arcana, I picked something that would help the entirety of the group in moments of trial, and really promote the character's sense of self.
And the one thing that Talen would be extraordinary in, his innate intelligence�
I maxed out the one trait that I could, which became the reasoning behind his nationality�
His age was an initial point of contention, I wanted the character young to secure a little protectiveness from the group, probably because I had never made a character this fragile before�
Russell rejected the initial preteen age and we came to a compromise, something that I ended up being glad for now.
