Guide: Creating a Character

Creating a character can be a big undertaking, or it can be a small auxiliary project. Characters can be pretty much anything, and a character article can be pretty much any length. For some people, the characters are the first and most foundational part of their lore. For other people, they are one of many parts to a narrative, and not always even the largest. Add to this the fact that Age of Sigmar allows you to tell the stories of an astonishing variety of characters, and no one guide or template can prove sufficient to cover them all.

This article will first look briefly at general aspects of formatting a character page on this wiki, then go into more detail with suggestions for writing compelling characters. There are many more guides of various sorts over on the Writing Guides Portal. If you are wondering whether a concept for a character deserves its own page or not, a good soft guide is that if you can write four or five paragraphs on the character and fill out most of the lines in an appropriate infobox, then it can possibly be a good standalone page, perhaps linking to it in your other pages which mention the character.

Formatting
To be properly formatted, your article needs to meet our Article Quality Policy, should be divided into sections as appropriate, and should contain an infobox.

Sections
Every wiki article of any substantial length is broken into headings and sub-headings. These are used to break the article up into manageable, reasonable chunks, and to create the table of contents which appears at the beginning of each page. Headings are created by surrounding a line of text with two equal signs. Sub-headings use three equal signs, and further sub-headings involve more equal signs.

Below is a suggested set of headings for a character page, but of course characters vary so greatly that many of these may not be appropriate for your character, and you may need to add sections. Just follow the general formatting and make it work for your writing and everything will be great.

Infobox
Every article needs to include an infobox, which appears on the side of your article and summarizes the key information while also looking extremely spiffy. Each page should only have one infobox


 * You can find a Generic character infobox at this link.
 * You can find a variety of other infoboxes at this link.

Categories
We like each page to be in at least one, but usually more relevant categories. For a character, you can categorize the page by copying the code below directly to the very bottom of your article. We want you to include at least category for faction, grand order, and "Character", but others may also be appropriate. If appropriate, you can add additional categories as well using the same format.

Links
It is nice to add a few links to spruce up the page and provide references to the things you are talking about. This can be a way to tie multiple articles together, such as if this page mentions a character or army you have already written about, you can throw in a link to point people towards that other story. Also, the Mortal Reals are vast, and it is tough for even lore enthusiasts to know the details of every faction, so feel free to link to the canon wiki or lexicanum wiki on your first mention of each faction, plus each first mention of in-universe terms.

To link to another page within the Age of Sigmar Homebrew Wiki, use the code like this: Thing you are linking, which will create a link where the text and page name are the same. Alternately, you can use something like this: Text to show on the page if the page name and the text don't match up perfectly.

To link to the Age of Sigmar canon wiki, use code like this: Text to show on the page

To link to the Lexicanum wiki, use code like this: Text to show on page using the full url of the page you want to link, then a space, then the text to display on page.

Things to Consider
If you have a concept and are having trouble fleshing it out to your satisfaction, below are some things to think about that might be helpful.