If you like stuff like Harry Potter or the Owl House or any other media about going to a magical school, Kids on Brooms (KOB) is perfect. I’ve played over 50 different tabletop roleplaying games, and of the ones that have hard rules, KOB is one of the least mechanically hefty of them all. When we’re done here you’ll be set for class!
When creating a KOB character, five steps need to happen before you have a functional character:
- Select a Trope from the Playbook and take the appropriate character sheet
- Make Trope selections for your character: grade, strengths, flaws, familiar, first name
- Introduce your character to the rest of the group
- Select the finishing touches for your character: motivations, fears, schoolbag, wand, brooms, familiars, and trope-specific questions
- Answer questions about your character’s relationship with the other characters in the game
Tropes
You know what a trope is. The mean jock, the shy nerd, the preppy cheerleader and it goes on and on. KOB characters are partially defined by the trope that they are. I say partially because even if you pick the Bullheaded Muscle, you could still play them against type. There are 19 different tropes to pick from. Each trope has a name that pretty much fully encompasses what the trope is about. On the off chance, none of the tropes work for you, you and your Gamemaster (GM) can create a custom trope that fits your vision for the character.
Once you’ve chosen or created your trope, you’ve still got some choices to make about your character. We’ll take the Bullheaded Muscle Trope as an example. When choosing that, you’ve also got to decide what age you’ll be (under or upperclassman), what strengths you’ll have (Gross, Guardian, Resilient, Tough), and your flaws (Reckless, Conspicuous, Hotheaded) while the under and upper class. There are also questions to answer, but we’ll talk about those later.
Two of the choices presented give you mechanical benefits. If you were an underclassman (technically 14 or younger, but your GM might have you playing as an adult in college as an underclassman), you would get the Innocence strength, which gives a +1 to Flight and Charm checks. Let’s say our Bullheaded Muscle, who we are going to call Jackson from now on, picks the Gross strength. Jackson can now do a gross trick or spell (be really loud, be really quiet, be really smelly, whatever you think works for Jackson) on command without any additional rolls.
Remember when I said two of the three things I mentioned gave you mechanical benefits? Well, Flaws are the third thing, and those don’t do anything mechanical (unless your GM decides otherwise). They are here to help you flesh out the personality of your character. If I chose hot-headed for Jackson, I’d make him quick to anger. Because there are different flaws, ages, and strengths, you could have two Bullheaed Muscle characters but be completely different, save for the stats.
Stats
Speaking of stats, let’s break those down real quick. Each trope has pre-assigned stats. The Bullheaded Muscle trope has a d20 in Brawn, a d12 in Fight, a D10 in Grit, a d8 in Flight, a d6 in Brains, and a d4 in Charm. When you use any particular stat, you roll the corresponding die to determine how well you do. The higher the die the better you are at it, with a d20 representing superb ability, the d12 being impressive, the d10 being above average, the d8 meaning below average, the d6 meaning bad, and the d4 signifying you’re terrible at it. While most of the stats are pretty self-explanatory, let’s walk through them:
- Brains determine how book-smart you are. If you were researching something, you’d use brains
- Brawn determines the level of brute strength you have. This stat does NOT determine how good you are at fighting but just how strong you are.
- Fight determines how good you are at beating up people and creatures no matter what weapon or type of fighting skills you choose to know.
- Flight determines how fast you are as well as how good you are at evading problems, both literally and figuratively.
- Charm determines how socially adept you are and how well you read others
- Grit determines how hard it is to break you emotionally or physically. If something traumatic happened or you were beaten to a pulp, you’d make a grit check to determine how well you handled it.
Now that you’ve picked your trope and decided your age, strength, and flaws, you’ve still got a few more things to figure out: motivations, fears, schoolbag, wand, broom, and trope-specific questions.
Motivations
Motivations are another thing that don’t give you any mechanical benefits but it does help you flesh out who your character is or will become. Your motivations could be something as mundane as “I want people to think I’m cool” or as complex as “I aim to take down the head of the school for what they did to my family.” Most of the time, you’re only going to be sharing these with your GM, but when appropriate, also share it with your fellow players.
Fears
While fears can be anything, there are some general guidelines to what fears could be based on your age. Underclassmen are usually afraid of things they shouldn’t be (monsters in the dark etc) and don’t fear things they should (death). Upperclassmen can be anything. They could be scared of the same things they were when they were younger or have more “adult” based fears. Faculty members are often afraid of losing things, their lives, their jobs, and their family members.
Fears don’t technically have mechanical effects, they can have mechanical consequences. When you encounter one of your fears, three things can potentially happen:
- You can’t use Adversity Tokens (AT) to help your friends. ATs are what you get when you fail a check. They give +1 to a roll, and you can use as many ATs as you want to try and succeed on a roll.
- You must make Snap Decisions. Snap Decisions are things you haven’t planned out and because of that, you can’t take half the value of the die you would roll. You can still use Adversity Tokens, but your friend can’t use theirs on you.
- Depending on how severe the fear is, you might have to make all your checks with up to a -3 penalty.
School Bag
So, figuring out your school bag doesn’t mean figuring out whether or not you have a silk-lined leather bag or a JanSport. You’re figuring out what is inside it. Is there something you’re never without? Do you keep all your magical materials in them or on a pouch at your hip? Are there potions inside? Maybe a broomstick?
Wands
Wands are used to channel your magical energy. You can also have an item that isn’t a wand to channel your magic, but check with your GM first. Regardless of the form your magical energy channeler takes there’s two things to determine with the wand: its wood and its core. Both of these things will determine the bonus you get when casting magic with it.
If you were looking to boost your Brains magical checks, you’d want either wisteria or hawthorn wood. For Charm, it would be lilac or cherry. There’s twelve different woods to choose from, two for each stat.
When you choose your wand’s core, you have to choose a material that doesn’t give the same bonus your wood does. If you chose wisteria (+1 to Brains) you couldn’t choose parchment, phoenix’s feather, or owl’s feather.
Brooms
Brooms are one of the best parts of any magical setting. When you’re deciding what broom you have, you’re also going to want to think about how you got the broom and why it is special to you. You might have had to save up for it. Or maybe it was the last thing a dying parent gave to you. There are fourteen types of brooms. Each one gives you a mechanical benefit while you’re riding it.
You get to have magical pets in this! A familiar is a magic user's best friend! While they can be any type of animal, try and make them something that reflects a core aspect of your personality and something small enough for you to carry around. Sure, your familiar could be a tiger, but that’s not fitting in your bag or on your shoulder.
Last but not least, your trope-specific questions. Now that you’ve fleshed out your character, you’ve got two questions to answer from your trope. While you can answer those questions immediately when you choose the Trope, waiting until you’ve fleshed out your character can make it easier to answer.
And that’s it! Time for you to enroll.
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V.J. Harris (they/he/something funny) is a professional TTRG designer and full-time game master. Play with V.J. here.
