That was not my intent -- I was aiming more for a sort of juvinile Lovecraft or Poe, with touches of Will Navidson or Dr. Faciller, but now that you mention it I do seem to be playing with very similar thematics, don't I? I might want to rework, either minorly or majorly.

I think I'm going to play a quiet little kid who can read minds and maybe other stuff I don't know yet. I'll read through everything else again and try to stat it out tonight.

is there such a thing as a drawback for the creepy skills? I'd like to make it so my orphan can't turn his power off (I'm taking some point in AoE so it'd just be a floating cloud around him) and I'm wondering if that's something I can get other upsides for. I'm doing it either way, but I wanted to check.

anyway, assuming not, here's my character sheet.

Vincent Everton Winters

image: Vincent is a boy of 10 years, but looks not a day over 8. short for his age at about 4 feet, but rather pudgy, Vincent's rather unassuming form is cut only by his sharp green eyes, framed by straw-blond hair that hangs down to his neck.

personality: Vincent is quiet to a fault, frightened of other people and the things he sees in their heads. while he rarely speaks, Vincent is always watching the people around him, trying to understand them so he can finally fit in. he has a deep need for acceptance but gives off the unnerving vibe of someone who would rather be liked than honest. he tries to use what he hears in his head to understand people and make them like him, but his inability to separate what people think from what they say only winds up disturbing people.

Face 1
Brains 5 (+4 Notice, +2 Outthink, +3 Remember)
Hands 4 (+2 Shop)
Guts 2 (+1 Wind)
Feet 3

Creepy Skills: (7)
Hear Thoughts 4 (Useful: hear thoughts of everyone around him, Area*2, Tough)


Echoes:

a talisman shaped like a closed eye (3)
a single flickering light (2)
a man with a staff and a scowl (2)
a portrait of an unknown girl (1)
three small bronze rings (1)
crying alone in the corner of a large room (1)

lemme know if I did it right

Okay, let's give this a try:

Name: Bartholomew A.K.A. - Bar (no last name, no family after all)
Age: 12
Quote: "Come back, I wasn't done punching you!"
Image: A slightly chubby, taller than average 12 year old, acne that will scar, and fists like Christmas hams.
Personality: Angry to a fault, with no discernible reason to why. He's built like a tank, fights all out, and has no reasoning skills, which suits him just fine.

Stats

Face - 1
Brains - 1
Hands - 5 (Punching +4)
Guts - 5 (Wind +4, Wrestling +4)
Feet - 3

Creepy Skills

Assisted by Shadows 5 (Defends, Tough, Tough, Tough)
Shadows come to Bar's aid when he's getting hit.



No idea what the echoes are.

~SE++

that's 8 points. also what stat is this associated with?

how do competitive rolls work? like, if someone's trying to punch me and I try to block, how is that resolved? the way the guide talks about it implies simultaneous attacks, but nothing about defending.

I thought it could be 8 since the "Defends" part is free, so I just used all 7 points.

Umm, "Guts"? I dunno, I just wanted to make a tank-ish character since I usually play mages or other caster-type classes in RPGs.

~SE++

More things I have forgot to note! The range of your creepy skills, how far it lets you move and the amount it lets you lift is based on your stat + skill pool. So Tevish's force of shadows is 4 + 3 = 7, meaning he can teleport up to 640 yards away and use it to move at a rate of 128mph. Vroom vroom.
As a preface to some comments, I don't know why the book says that the average is 2, since the average of a character is 3. Anyway, I recommend you treat a stat of 2 as poor, and 1 as terrible, it will give some context to a few of my comments.

Tevish: I personally wouldn't go with Awesome ×1. Either take two or nothing. ×1 is only worth it if you really want to hit specific locations. However, with two ranks, you can guarantee a basic success as long as you roll two dice (just set one to be equal to the other.) I'd also make the fourth echo "Arcane text and strange images." so you can use it more often (and so it actually fits, that one is damn lengthy <.<)

raz: Just be aware that if you put a 1 in face, you become incapable of making social rolls (without using relationships or investing in skills). 1's and 5's in stats are outstanding aspects of your character, and should be addressed as such.
You haven't have passive skills, for several reasons. You need to roll to determine the effect of your roll, and I can't have you roll dice all the time. I'm going to suggest that width gives you more amounts information and height gives you more clear information (lower rolls are mostly abstract imagery and higher rolls is more like a transcript.) Secondly, using skills is weird, and people are more likely to spot that you are creepy when you are using it. On that note, you should detail how your skill is weird.

S_E: First of all, I'm going to tell you that I don't think playing a "fighter" is going to be.... kind of as fun, given the disposition of the characters. Violence will probably make a tenfold more problems than it can actually solve. Secondly, your point distribution is a trainwreck. Your character is incapable of making both social and mental rolls, which includes being oblivious to his surroundings, having terrible memory and not even knowing how to insult someone. On the other hand, his dexterity and endurance are at the peak of their potential, and both his punching and wrestling skills are outstanding, together with his natural resistances. Despite this, he has never given a second thought towards ever blocking someone or moving out of their way, and he's not at all courageous. He apparently never has to run after someone either. Balance your character out a bit, he's too unrealistic.
As raz said, your creepy skill uses 8 dice (7 + Tough ×3), and isn't allocated anywhere. Do note that your tough will also only apply to that specific area. I would really recommend you put something Useful in there, it will probably make the game more fun.
Echoes are kind of faint sensations and memories that will eventually tie you in to Candlewick Vale. Just write down something pretentious. Whenever a fitting situation arises, you may use an Echo to increase your dice pool on a roll. Using it might reveal a relationship to someone or something in Candlewick vale, depending on the rolls. (For example, if you have Black Ruffled Feathers 2 as an Echo, you may add 2 dice to your dice pool (still maximum of 10) when you are e.g. stalking a lady with a black feather coat, or if you are running running in a forest with crows, or if you are trying to persuade a person named Raven. It's pretty flexible. If you succeed, you might come to the realization that you are actually Raven's lost child, or something.)


Combat is done in three rounds, repeating until it's resolved through some fashion (running away, unconscious, agreement, interrupted by alien invasion, etc)

Declare: Everyone openly states what they are going to do, starting with the person with lowest Brains + Out-Think (total, not roll) and going upwards. Smarter people get to choose based on what the dumber ones are obviously doing.
Roll: Roll the dice for your action(s), and choose which set(s) you are using.
Resolve: Actions are resolved from highest Width to lowest. Each time you take damage before your action, you lose a die from your set, possibly ruining your action.

Okay, so, on defending. When you attack someone, the width indicates how much damage you do, and the height indicates where you hit. So if you roll 3×6, you deal 2 (Width -1) damage to the target's Gut (because it has hit location 3-6, and the height is 6. It's the numbers before your stats on the character sheet.) If you want to Defend against an attack, you need to declare a defensive action, and not roll worse. For each die in your defensive set, you can use it to neutralize an attack die against you with equal or lower height and width. So if I want to completely defend against the aforementioned attack, I need to roll 3×6 as well, or better. If your width isn't high enough, then you're just not quick enough to defend. If your height isn't high enough, you can deflect attacks to other locations on your body, up to a number of steps equal to how much you exceed his width. (If you exceed it with 2, you can move the attack to your feet, hands or brains. You can't deflect it to your face, as it is 3 steps away from your gut.)

Edits are being made. Debating between 2d Awesome x2, 3d Awesome x2, or 3-4d and no Awesome ability. The topdown seems solid, now it's just working out numbers. Perhaps you could give guidelines as to about how immediately apparently creepy different values of creepy skills would be? I've been a little leery of the higher values as I'd like room to move in either direction as the game progresses.

Sure. I'm going to talk about Difficulty, which is the Height your roll needs. So if a roll has a Difficulty of 6, you need to roll ?×6 or higher.
There are two facets to being weird. First, it makes people more likely to think you are weird. Secondly, it makes it harder for you to pretend to them that you're not.
First of all, if someone is actively trying to see if you are weird, their difficulty on that roll is 10 - your weirdness pool.
Secondly, if you are trying to look appealing in front of someone who have seen your weirditude, that roll has a Difficulty equal to your weirdness pool. If you can reassure them that everything is fine, then this penalty goes away. For now.

As long as you behave like perfect children, then there's going to be very few people who this is relevant for, if any. However, the moment you appear out of someone's shadow, you can be pretty sure I'm rolling those dice.
Strangers on the street are just going to stay suspicious, but if it happens to someone you have a Relationship with (those things that your Echoes turn into eventually), the relationship is going to be damaged (and thus less efficient) until you patch it up (which now has a Difficulty). And remember, breaking your relationships can give you more weird dice!

that was intentional, especially the 1. the 5 was a little less so and mostly a product of having too many points to distribute and not wanting to make his physical stats any better, but it fits the character.

ok. I was more thinking I would roll the dice whenever you decided I should, but if you'd prefer to not have that then I'm ok with just deciding from my perspective even though Vincent isn't actively trying to use it.

right, and Vincent's creepy all the time.

does it have to be a visible supernatural effect? like I said in the personality thing Vincent can't differentiate between what he hears in their heads and what they say, so he'll react to things no one said out loud. I've also already made his eyes a feature, so if you want something could happen with those.

also the defending mechanics seem heavily biased toward attacking.

Okay, so I'm not really getting how all the stats go then, and I'm a little lost on character creation. Would you mind statting me out appropriately for a different character?

How about one who summons creepy things, like spiders and worms? Maybe talks to them and can send them to do his bidding, however minor that ability would be. Umm, someone younger, maybe in the 6 - 8 range. And an ability to crawl on walls like his insect summons? I dunno, is something like that acceptable?

~SE++

You can play your role concept, I just don't think you've statted it out all that well. When I look at your character, I kind of see a Barbarian with 6 INT, 6 CHA, 18 STR and 18 STA. Which, in D&D, is all well from a powergaming standpoint, but doesn't feel like a realistic character to me. (It's also not that mechanically great in this system.)

If I were to stat a traditional "school bully", it would probably look something like:
Brains 2
Face 2 (Put-Down +3)
Hands 3 (Punching +2, Parrying +1)
Guts 4 (Courage +1, Wind +2)
Feet 4 (Kicking +1, P.E. +2)
Person A is good at placing insults where it hurts, he's athletically fit, has buildt up some good resistances from getting into trouble all the time and knows how to pack some solid physical blows. You can shift things around depending on characteristics a lot (e.g. give him Remember if he never forgets a good grudge, Shop if wants to grow up to be a mechanic, Wrestling if he bullies with his body, Notice if he's always looking out for someone to pick on, Charm if he uses his babyface to get out of trouble, whatever suits your fancy), just treat him like a person, you don't need to be amazing at things to have fun. Besides, you reach diminishing returns on extra dice after some point around 6-7 I believe.
For your ability, I'm basically just telling you that when other people are teleporting through shadows, reading minds and setting things on fire (I'll have Rubik post his character next time he's online), yours would only come into play when you are getting hit. If you added something like "Create shadow puppets", "Manipulate darkness" or "Treat objects in darkness as though they don't exist", it's only 1d for a lot of roleplaying opportunities. Although maybe tevish feels you are threading on his territory, idk.

Creepy thing summoner would probably be something like:
Face - Nasty tongue (Useful: Attract and speak to creepy crawlies.)
Feet - Spider legs (Useful: Walk on any surface.)

If you want to summon hordes of small animals under any circumstance, then that would probably be it's own, so (Useful: Summon creepy crawlies; Useful: Speak to them).

Yeah, let's go with that character. How would I stat him out?

~SE++

According to the character. Being able to summon spiders doesn't really tell me much about him as a person.

Squinty, if it helps I came up with the initial stats for my character by taking those 10 starting points, putting one in each stat to raise them to 2. With the remaining 5, I put 1 point into each stat in which I felt the character was not somehow deficient, and with the leftover an extra one into best qualities.

Skills were way harder. I started knowing I wanted a great double handful of points into Courage since he deals so much with The Dark, which is a very inherently frightening thing. He was the bookworm/brainiac, so I wanted a good sum of outthink as well. After that, I didn't have a whole lot left (he's a little overspecialized). I left off any combat skills since I figured he had no inclination to physical violence. Remember went well with the general bookworm idea. "oooh, I read something about this!" "Did you know this church was first built in 1598....". Charm was a hard pull, but it felt a little more in theme than connive, even if connive seemed more 'intellectual'. For shop, I thought of the character trying to work with something small and delicate (like making a watch, binding a book, painting, or picking a lock), and figured that he ought to be a little more proficient there than his overall lame Hands score would indicate.

For Echoes, I fully admit just went ahead and pulled snippets after the fashion of what I felt were touchstones for the overall feel of his character and abilities.

(I've also edited his character write-up for what will probably, hopefully, be the last time. Force of Shadows is now 2d Awesome x2, for a total of 5d taken in creepy skills. It's still pretty creepy, but I'm more comfortable there than at 6 and I felt Awesome x2 was more fitting than running 3 or 4 natural dice. I thought about redesigning a new character from the ground up, but I'm not sure I need to.)

((Subject to change, as needed))

Orphan's Name: Rebecca Pyre
Age: 12-14
Quote: "You know what they say about playing with fire?"
Image: Rebecca is a bit tall for her age, but not overwhelmingly so. She’s pretty fit as a result of all the sports and games she tends to play, but she’d hardly consider herself a dedicated athlete despite showing quite a bit of promise at almost every physical activity she’s tried. She’s kind of pretty in a tomboyish sort of way, but she doesn’t really care too much about that kind of thing. She prefers trousers to dresses—she dresses as boyishly as she can get away with—but regardless of what she wears, it seems like she always manages to get soot all over herself and her clothing. Her eyes are a deep shade of amber and her shoulder-length hair is a fiery red. Occasionally, when a gust of wind moves her hair, it almost seems to spark like a fire, but it’s probably just your imagination.
Personality: Rebecca tries to get along with people the best she can. She quickly learned, however, that not everyone else necessarily wants to get along with her. Some of the boys found it humiliating losing to a girl all the time. When they tried to pick on her, they found out being beaten up by one was even more embarrassing. Sometimes they wouldn’t let up. Sometimes their favorite toys would be replaced by a pile of ashes. Funny how things work out. While she’s not a moron or anything, Rebecca was never exactly top of her class. She could never really get into books because she’d almost always rather do something than read about doing something. More than anything, though, Rebecca doesn’t like being suddenly touched. Even an unexpected handshake or a high-five might be met with her suddenly jumping back a few feet. She always chocks it up to nervousness, but that excuse seems kind of flimsy considering how confident she normally is.

Stats and Skills
Face 2 (Charm +2)
Brains 2 (Notice +1)
Hands 3 (Punching +1)
Guts 3 (Wind +1, Wrestling +1)
Feet 5 (Dodging +3, Kicking +1, P.E +2, Fiery Form +4)

Creepy Skill: (7)
A game of tag between children. A boy jumps out from behind a tree and grabs Rebecca by her wrist. "You're it!" Her eyes look panicked. Within moments, her arm seems to dissipate and the boy’s grip becomes an empty fist. Her eyes and hair glow a terrifying fiery color as her entire body loses its physical form, replaced instead by a flaming silhouette of its former self. This lasts only for a moment, however, as the fire quickly runs up along the boy’s arm, burning every small white hair on his body, much to the boy’s horror. To Rebecca, who has become one with the fire, the feeling of speed consumes most of her better judgment, but she retains herself just enough that she manages to avoid letting the fire hurt the boy or reach his face before redirecting herself to the grass and leaving a bizarrely linear trail of ashes deeper into the forest. There, she manages to compose herself just long enough to regain her human form. She covers her face with her hands for a few seconds, looks tentatively back, and then runs away as fast as she can, never to return.
Rebecca can turn all of or part of herself into fire which she can fully control. If her entire body is fire and it ends up being put out, she reforms unconscious in that general area.
Fiery Form +4 ([Attack, Defense, Useful], Burn)

Echoes:
Condensation on a wine glass - 1
Violence - 3
A man with a shaved head - 1
The feeling of being pursued - 3
A stray cat - 2

Character Sheet

Umm, as a person, he's quiet around those he knows, and nearly silent around strangers unless he needs to say something. He doesn't get frightened easy, and enjoys reading quite a bit. He can take a punch okay since he's used to being picked on, but can't toss a decent punch to save his life. His creepy summons would take care of his fighting for him. And his echos would be stuff like seeing someone being bullied, a bottle being thrown through the air, drunks staggering out a door, etc.

~SE++