Player Characters

Player Characters (or PCs) are the characters in the game that can be controlled by players. While Souls are permanent and may live through many characters, player characters in Elyria are born, gain skills, age, and die all in a period of ten to fourteen months, depending on playstyle.

Character Creation
In order to insert a soul into a new character, players must use a Spark of Life. Once a spark of life is used, the character creation process will begin and players will choose to be born into a family, become a ward of the state or take over the life of an NPC.

Souls
Every PC in Elyria has a soul. A soul is the complete set of memories, experiences, and past lives of a character. When transferred from one character to another (when the current character dies and the soul is passed on to an heir or new character), the soul brings with it achievements and accelerated skill development in skills that previous characters have been proficient in, providing a feeling of continuity and progression.

According to Elyrian lore, souls are said to walk through the halls of the Akashic Records. There, the soul may read the deeds of its past lives and learn from its past successes and failures while also attaining an increased affinity for the skills and crafts the soul's past lives had trained in. This translates to a skill ramp in game, where the player is able to quickly reach the level of proficiency attained in previous lives.

Attributes
In Chronicles of Elyria, character attributes are divided up into three different dimensions that change as you age. The three different dimensions are physical, mental, and social. Within each of those three dimensions your character’s attributes are further subdivided into aspects of force, reflex, and endurance. Force relates to how strong your character is along a specific dimension. Reflex defines your character’s ability to change the direction of their force or evade an opposed force. Endurance represents how long you can comfortably maintain or resist a force.

Identity
In Chronicles of Elyria, a character and their identity are two separate things. The character represents the physical body, while the identity represents the intangible parts such as the character's name, reputation, and persona. And, much as in our world, in Chronicles of Elyria a character's identity is never displayed by default. When you approach a character you've never encountered before there's no floating nameplate above their head that identifies who they are, what "class" they are, or any other information. The same is true for you. When you first enter a new town, nobody around you will have the slightest idea who you are. To go beyond that place of mystery you'll need to either introduce yourself to someone, or ask them to introduce themselves. However, if you are a person of note, you may already be known in this new location before you step foot there.

Players can also masquerade as other characters through a variety of different skills related to the Guile skill tree.

Talents
A talent is a rare and powerful thing. Talents are certain abilities or powers which are out of the ordinary and are intended to help drive the story forward, creating heroes and villains. Upon creation of a character, a player may acquire a talent. Note that less than 5% of players will have talents and that talents will not be present in the game upon launch.

Offline Player Characters
Your character maintains their place in the world even when you sign off, and aging happens whether you’re online or not. But this creates a problem. In a game where your character ages and dies, you want to get as much life out of them as you can. To remedy this problem CoE introduces the concept of Offline Player Characters (OPCs). Whenever you sign off, the game takes over and essentially plays your character for you as an NPC. As some players may not like the idea of the game determining the actions of their characters, they will be able to create custom Behaviors for their character to perform while offline.

Note that if your OPC dies, then your Spirit Walking timer will only start when you log into the game.