Creating a character for Port Alice requires six basic steps.
1. Choose a Concept: What's your character going to be like? Noble knight, bookish scholar, apprentice spellcaster, squid-faced fish salesman?
2. Choose Character Type: The Character Type determines the general power level and nature of your character, and sets some basic ground rules for the power level of your character when compared to other characters. The higher up on the scale you are, the more powerful your character is. Human-level mortal types also get to start their careers with 20 Drama Points to everyone else's 10 - and they'll need them, especially if they're playing in the same field.
These are the character types available to play:
| Type | Attribute Points | Quality Points | Drawback Points | Skill Points | Drama Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mortal: Kid | 10 | 10 | Up to 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Mortal: Teenager | 15 | 10 | Up to 10 | 15 | 20 |
| Mortal: Adult | 15 | 10 | Up to 10 | 20 | 20 |
| Mortal: Badass Normal | 20 | 10 | Up to 10 | 25 | 20 |
| Champion/Monster: Fledgeling | 20 | 20 | Up to 10 | 20 | 10 |
| Champion/Monster: Journeyman | 22 | 20 | Up to 10 | 25 | 10 |
| Champion/Monster: Master | 25 | 20 | Up to 10 | 30 | 10 |
This determines how many points you get to work with in the next few steps.
3. Attributes: What are your character's natural abilities, both mental and physical? Attributes cost one point per level to level five, and three points per level after that. At least one point must be put into each Attribute. The human base maximum is six, and a human-average score would be a two.
4. Qualities and Drawbacks: What innate advantages or penalties affect your character? Do they have personality traits that make life harder for them, or talents that make life easier? Benefits - mundane or supernatural - are paid for with Quality Points; you can earn more Quality Points by taking Drawbacks, up to your Drawback Points limit.
5. Skills: What does your character know? The system uses a variety of main skills and the ubiquitous Wildcards - chances are if you can't logically fit an area of expertise into one of the main categories, or if you want to reflect more specialized knowledge than a main category would imply, it requires a Wildcard.
6. Finishing Touches: This is where you decide the character's name, appearance and other characteristics. Distinctive habits or mannerisms, hairstyle, scars, tattoos, piercings, fashion, music/video tastes, and other traits that might make the character recognizable.
Note that this wiki is cadged together from official, unofficial, and homebrew sources for personal use. Your mileage may vary. Originally done up to give a basic adventure structure to an otherwise freeform game experience, LACUC (try saying that in public) is based on a variety of sources, but most specifically the style of Cinematic Unisystem used in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG game set.