Note: This article was originally posted on the Calenmir's RPGs blog on January 31, 2025. Rebuilding its internal links and the links to other articles is a work in progress; thank you for your patience.

This is the second entry in a seven-part series which demonstrates custom character creation in Apocalypse Keys, an Evil Hat horror-superhero game by Rae Nedjadi where you play as superpowered monsters fighting to stop the apocalypse. However, because you’re an Omen-class monster, if you give your darker impulses free rein, you could become one of the very Harbingers of the Apocalypse that you oppose. Therefore, Omens must walk a fine line between unleashing their monstrous natures and clinging to their humanity with the help of their fellow Omens.

Omens have the power to freely reshape the world, with potentially cataclysmic consequences. One way this is expressed mechanically is via Apocalypse Key’s flexible character creation system. The downside of this system is that new players can easily get overwhelmed by all the options they’re presented with. Therefore, many decide to play as one of the four premade Omens rather than come up with their own.

This series is intended to demystify the process of original character creation in Apocalypse Keys. Each entry will focus on a different playbook, using a figure from pop culture to illustrate the step-by-step process for transforming a concept into a fleshed-out Omen.

We started with Batman to illustrate The Shade. Next up: The Found, featuring Anya Forger from Spy X Family.

Part 1: Batman | Part 3: Avatar Aang | Part 4: The Doctor | Part 5: Kirby | Part 6: Optimus Prime | Part 7: All Might

Want to try Apocalypse Keys yourself? My one-shot module “Sweet Dreams” is now available on Itch, DriveThruRPG, and in the site shop!

A Note About Safety

Safety is especially important for horror games such as Apocalypse Keys, and child endangerment is commonly an issue for Keepers and players. If you want to play as Anya, make sure to have a conversation about whether the canonical Anya Forger, who is at most six years old, is a good fit for your campaign. If not, consider using this guide as inspiration for a version of Anya who has reached adulthood.

In addition, the build in question will include options for mind reading and mind manipulation, so make sure to establish your table’s boundaries prior to play.

Table of Contents

• How to Build Anya Forger in Apocalypse Keys

• Table of Contents

• Why Anya Qualifies As an Omen-Class Monster

  • 1) Apocalypse Keys Explicitly Allows Gameplay Elements to be Reflavored

  • 2) War Is a Kind of Apocalypse

• How to Build Anya Forger

  • Playbook: The Found

  • Character Prompts

  • Selecting Moves

• Advances

  • Ruin Advances

  • Playbook Advances

• Congratulations, You’ve Built Anya Forger!

• Glossary

Why Anya Qualifies As an Omen-Class Monster

Feel free to skip to How to Build Anya Forger if you’re not interested in my explanation of why Anya Forger qualifies as an Omen-class monster. However, I rest my case on two arguments:

1. Apocalypse Keys Explicitly Allows Gameplay Elements to be Reflavored
2. War is a Kind of Apocalypse

1) Apocalypse Keys Explicitly Allows Gameplay Elements to Be Reflavored

Recontextualizing the flavor moves and powers is explicitly allowed by the rules of Apocalypse Keys. Players are allowed and even encouraged to reshape narrative-level elements to better fit their character concepts as long as the core mechanics stay the same. For example, here’s an excerpt from the section on choosing playbooks:

Playbooks focus on specific monstrous themes and unique emotional arcs rather than specific archetypes. You are encouraged to interpret your powers and origin, while exploring the themes of the playbook.

In addition, during character creation, players “…can tweak the prompts as you like—each prompt is a starting point.” Note that Powers of Darkness – superpowers Omens can use at-will and in combination with playbook moves – are a type of prompt.

Your Powers of Darkness: How you manifest your will, confront the apocalypse, and fight back the Harbingers. How you choose to interpret your supernatural powers, and their possible limitations, is completely up to you. The Shade’s machines powered by soul magic may be automatons or small steampunk inspired devices. The Last’s time distortion may be used in a purely defensive fashion or may be in the form of a mysterious voice from the future.

Finally, in the section on character Advancement options such as “Take a New Playbook Move” and “Take a Move from Another Playbook,” it’s stated that players can alter aspects of moves to better conform with their vision of their character. For example, taking a move from the playbook The Fallen does not mean your character is now an ex-god, and any part of the move that would indicate as much can be reworked accordingly.

Take a Move from Another Playbook

You can choose most moves from another playbook, except for each playbook’s starting move. For example, no one else can be as telepathic as the Found, and only the Fallen can so easily create new worshippers.

If a move from another playbook sounds like fun but relates to the central themes of that playbook, you may rewrite the premise or reword triggers to better suit your own character.

If your character does not communicate telepathically, you may take the Found’s You Are Not Alone and change it to only work if you can speak out loud to the character you are helping. Or you may connect to a power of darkness you have instead of telepathy, such as the dimensional phasing of the Last or the cosmic energy of the Surge.

Therefore, it stands to reason there is leeway in what kind of apocalypse Omens seek to prevent and Harbingers attempt to bring about, which brings us to Anya’s mission of securing world peace.

2) War Is a Kind of Apocalypse

In Spy X Family, every member of the Forger family wants to prevent a war between the countries of Ostania and Westalis. Because Anya is a child, she’s motivated primarily by wanting to keep her family together, and doesn’t fully grasp what averting war entails—her internal monologue refers to it as “world peace” despite being a matter between two countries, and she seems to conceptualize it as a state where everyone is happy and gets what they want. Nevertheless, the cost of failure is unforgiving.

Flashbacks to a previous conflict show cities reduced to rubble. Supplies are scarce. At least one character is, in the present time, still motivated by a close brush with starvation. Other characters are forever changed by what they saw, what they did, and the people they lost in the war. For them, their world ended, only to be replaced by a strange new one called “peace.”

It is a fragile peace, haunted by the specter of another war. One narrowly-averted scenario began with the death of Anya’s father and went downhill from there. For exactly this reason, many factions in the setting will go to extreme lengths to prevent a war—it is the villains who wish to instigate and profit from armed conflict.

In this sense, Anya is a very real contributor to the fight against the apocalypse, and with telepathy as strong as her, she very much qualifies as an Omen-class monster. Conversely, there are many factors that could push her to become the setting’s equivalent of a Harbinger: her father is a spy, her mother is an assassin, she constantly involves herself with the clashes of powerful organizations, and she’s haunted by whatever experiments were done to her. Any one of these things could send her down a dark path where she decides that her interests are better served by war than by the effort and sacrifice necessary to maintain the peace.

By this logic, I maintain that Anya’s parents are also Omen-class monsters: Loid is The Shade while Yor is The Summoned. However, I’ll have to let someone else rise to the challenge of making their character sheets, because today we’re focusing on Anya Forger.

How to Build Anya Forger

There are five steps for building a character in Apocalypse Keys:

1. Choose a playbook
2. Fill out character prompts
3. Choose additional playbook moves
4. Introduce your character
5. Create starting Bonds

Because steps 4 and 5 require cooperating with fellow players, those won’t be covered in this guide. There is, however, a section about choosing new abilities for Anya as you unlock them during gameplay.

Note: the full text of playbook, Ruin, and DIVISION moves will not be included due to space constraints.

Playbook: The Found

Many of the Apocalypse Keys playbooks are clearly inspired by characters from the Hellboy franchise (which Rae Nedjadi cited as an influence). This becomes something of a problem when it comes to The Found: while the rest of the playbooks are flexible archetypes, I couldn’t think of any character aside from Abe Sapien who could fit the basic concept of “amnesiac telepath who was found at a mysterious location.”

Any character, that is, except for Anya Forger of Spy X Family.

Though the orphanage Loid Forger adopted her from is more mundane than some of the locations suggested by the starting prompts, it fills the needed purpose of having Anya enter the story at a place divorced from her origin. Furthermore, Loid and his informant are unable to dig up meaningful information regarding her life prior to the orphanage. Meanwhile, Anya has strong psychic abilities derived from experimentation, and doesn’t seem to have memories from before her time as a test subject. All of this is well within the scope of the playbook for The Found, and also makes Anya a better fit for this playbook than for any of the other Apocalypse Keys playbooks.

Beyond determining the character’s archetype, playbooks in Apocalypse Keys have three important mechanical aspects: they determine what playbook moves players have access to (including a unique starting move), they define triggers for gaining Darkness Tokens, and they include a list of Conditions that can affect the character. Playbook moves will be covered in a later section, so first, let’s consider Darkness Tokens.

Darkness Tokens are a resource that lets you manipulate dice probability. Before you make a roll, you can declare you will add Darkness Tokens to your result, increasing your odds of success. Characters gain Darkness Tokens based on their roleplaying; The Found in particular gains Darkness Tokens when they:

• Feel frustrated or scared
• React with uncertainty or cowardice
• Ask someone to listen to their wisdom
• Ask someone to open their emotions to them
• Embody a Condition that affects them

As for Conditions, they are Apocalypse Key’s alternative to a hit point system, reflecting the emotional states characters can enter when they are under various forms of stress. The Found may be affected by the Conditions:

• Unreachable
• Defensive
• Introspective
• Obsessed

All these actions and emotions are in-character for Anya, particularly when she’s contending with a crisis, which further affirms that this playbook is a good fit for her.

Character Prompts

Anya already has a name, look, and origin, so we don’t need to create new answers to these prompts. We’ll replace “DIVISION” in “What Has Replaced Most of Your Memories from Before DIVISION?” with “Becoming a Forger,” and the answer to that is “a deep fear of abandonment.”

“Your Powers of Darkness” represents the powers Anya can use as she pleases; the two that best represent the scope of her ability to read the minds of people and animals are “Telepathy and Mind Blasts” and “Creature Affinity.”

 “What Does the Darkness Demand of You?” typically represents the circumstances or inner darkness that pulls Omens toward becoming Harbingers. In Anya’s case, we can afford some leeway: “to meet my cruel maker” can represent her fear of being returned to the lab, which often drives her more questionable decisions. For the second choice, “to hurt those who care for me” reflects how the Forgers’ secrets introduce uncertainty and fragility into their found family.

Selecting Moves

The Found comes with the starting move You Can’t Hide Your Heart from Me, which lets them delve deeper into the thoughts and emotions of the people around them. However, disastrous successes and failures have negative effects for The Found and for the person they’re targeting, respectively.

The playbook justifies negative effects in the form of The Found’s mind bleeding into that of the person they’re reading; however, to better reflect the nature of Anya’s powers in Spy X Family canon, this can be reflavored. In the case of a disastrous success, Anya is distracted or overwhelmed by the mind she attempts to read, which results in negative consequences. In the event of a failure, Anya discovers that her target is in imminent danger and must pay a price to rescue them from their fate.

In addition to the starting move, you can choose one playbook move and either one DIVISION move or one Ruin move from The Found’s playbook. Note that DIVISION is the shadowy organization Omens work for, and DIVISION moves typically represent tapping into their resources. Meanwhile, Ruin moves provide Omens with power at the cost of bringing them closer to becoming a Harbinger.

I recommend choosing the playbook move You Are Not Alone and the DIVISION move The Peacemaker.

Playbook Move: You Are Not Alone

This move lets Anya reach out to her fellow Omens when they’re in distress, reflecting her tendency to comfort people she cares about.

DIVISION Move: The Peacemaker

Ordinarily, The Peacemaker represents the player’s ability to sustain an alliance between DIVISION and a different faction of the Apocalypse Keys lore. However, Anya Forger is already surrounded by political intrigue among several major factions, including the spy organization WISE, the secret police of Ostania, and the shadowy group of assassins known as the Garden. Furthermore, keeping her family together requires Anya to work alongside and counter to these organizations without them realizing she knows their secrets.

Therefore, this move will represent Anya’s efforts to balance her interests against the factions her family members belong to or are at odds with, which requires the following changes:

• Rather than promising the faction a favor, in order to influence the faction, Anya must decide how much risk of exposing her powers she’ll accept on a scale from 1 to 3.
• On a disastrous success, the faction does not necessarily know Anya is an Omen, let alone want her to awaken as a Harbinger; they may simply be working at cross-purposes with her. In addition, any negative effects are incurred by Anya and her family instead of by DIVISION.

Advances

Congratulations! You now have everything you need to unleash Anya Forger upon your party. But in Apocalypse Keys, you can continue to unlock abilities via roleplaying.

During and after each session, you’ll have chances to accumulate Ruin (which brings you closer to becoming a world-ending Harbinger) and gain XP (which lets you grow as an Omen-class monster). When you get enough Ruin or XP, you unlock a corresponding Advance. The following sections outlines what these Advances are and which options make the most sense for Anya Forger.

Ruin Advances

Ruin Advances represent an irrevocable step toward becoming a Harbinger of the Apocalypse, including unlocking a cutscene of your character as a future Harbinger. The available Ruin Advances include:

• Take a new Ruin move (2X): Take a Ruin move from your playbook, gaining powers that give you more Ruin whenever you use them
• Take a Ruin move from another playbook (2X): Take a Ruin move from a different playbook, gaining powers that give you more Ruin when you use them
• Permanently mark a Condition (2X): Become permanently emotionally compromised, affecting how readily how gain Darkness Tokens and hit your Breaking Point
• Gain a new Ruin Condition (2X): Become more emotionally volatile, giving you more opportunities to accrue Darkness Tokens
• Retire Your Character and Become a Harbinger of the Apocalypse: You lose control of your character, who is now a Harbinger who seeks to end the world

I’ll go over each of these Ruin Advances in more detail, including which Ruin Advances are the best fit for Anya’s potential corruption arc.

Take a New Ruin Move

There are two checkboxes for the option to take a new Ruin move, which means you can take a total of two Ruin moves from the playbook The Found. Notably, the available Ruin moves for the Found are not an exact match for the powers Anya exhibits. Therefore, the first one we choose will reflect powers she might develop as a result of falling further into darkness: Where Do You End, Where Do I Begin? The second, Crowned by Dream, Exalted by Nightmare, will require reflavoring.

Ruin Move 1: Where Do You End, Where Do I Begin?

This move allows The Found to alter the emotions and desires of another character. While Anya does dabble in manipulation based on her knowledge of people’s emotions, this would represent her gaining the ability to directly control those emotions.

Note that in addition to the usual cost of gaining Ruin, Anya will also feel what the chosen character is feeling until she chooses to release her hold on them.

Ruin Move 2: Crowned by Dream, Exalted by Nightmare

This move normally represents the ability to forge dreams into weapons, which is not a power Anya exhibits. However, she is being trained in self-defense by Yor Forger (a master assassin), and is frequently privy to the tactics and tools of Loid Forger (a master spy). Therefore, we’ll be renaming this move to The Forger Family Business and making the following changes:

• This move represents Anya weaponizing the knowledge, training, and resources of her family members or their respective professional networks.
• Rather than creating a physical weapon, she uses an existing one or is able to effectively weaponize an ordinary object in her environment.
• Rather than creating an emotional weapon, she wields telepathy, deception, and manipulation to devastating effect.
• Rather than creating a weapon of darkness out of dreams, she is able to locate or create such a weapon on short notice (or had one prepared ahead of time).
• Rather than creating a weapon out of nightmares, Anya is able to persuade, manipulate, or force a dangerous Harbinger to follow her lead… for a time.

 

Ruin Moves from Other Playbooks

There are a lot more options when choosing from six playbooks rather than one, but most of them are tied closely either to the lore of Apocalypse Keys or to the individual powers of that playbook. Even so, I was able to find four Ruin Moves that would fit Anya’s character with little to no reflavoring. Therefore, I’ll give honorable mentions to The Last’s Tragedy Will Not Claim Another and The Fallen’s Tremble Before Me, but the two I think are the best for Anya are The Prodigal Child Will Return from The Summoned and You Can’t Escape the Truth from The Shade.

 

Ruin Move from The Summoned: The Prodigal Child Will Return

The Summoned is a playbook that invokes a complicated family history, and The Prodigal Child Will Return ordinarily represents them turning to their villainous parent or creator for aid. Anya has great parents in the form of Loid and Yor; however, the same cannot be said of the scientists who experimented on her. Therefore, we will be renaming this move to Our Test Subject Has Returned, because it will represent Anya turning to these scientists for aid. Rather than helping her out of love, however, they will help her in exchange for the chance to gather additional data on her abilities.

 

Ruin Move from The Shade: You Can’t Escape the Truth

This move, which was also featured in the article about building Batman, lets Anya reveal a dark secret to gain the upper hand. In Anya’s case, it is most likely one she learned via telepathy, but doesn’t have to be.

 

Mark Permanent Conditions

Because Apocalypse Keys is a Powered by the Apocalypse system, instead of an HP system combat-focused games like D&D use, players have a list of Conditions. These Conditions are emotional states representing character’s reactions to stressful, dangerous circumstances. When all Conditions are marked, characters hit their Breaking Point, resulting in immediate negative consequences for the character and the people around them.

Taking this Ruin Advance lets players choose a Condition to permanently mark, meaning it can’t be cleared by normal means. Since players get Darkness Tokens by roleplaying marked Conditions, the benefit of a permanently marked Condition is additional resources for dice manipulation.

The Found can mark the following Conditions: Unreachable, Defensive, Introspective, and Obsessed. Anya can often be defensive and frequently becomes obsessed with things that interest her, so the Defensive and Obsessed Conditions are most likely the best choices for her.

Gain Ruin Conditions

Aside from not affecting characters hitting their Breaking Point, Ruin Conditions function identically to permanent Conditions: they can’t be cleared, and players can get Darkness Tokens for embodying them in roleplay. The Ruin Conditions players can gain are:

• Cruel
• Fragile
• Guilty
• Haunted
• Paranoid
• Possessive
• Ruthless
• Reckless

Many of these Conditions are suitable for Anya: she can be cruel to her enemies; she’s fragile when it comes to insults, rejection, or abandonment; her past haunts her; she’s paranoid about abandonment and about being found by the researchers who experimented on her; and she’s often reckless in her attempts to help her parents with their missions. But since this option can only be taken twice, the two Ruin Conditions I think are the best fit are Paranoid and Reckless.

Becoming a Harbinger

Leave this one for last, or retire your character before taking this Advance. Not only does Anya become a Harbinger of the Apocalypse who seeks the end of the world, you lose control of your character and will need to create a new one.

Sequence of Ruin Advances

I recommend the following Ruin progression for Anya:

1. Ruin Move from The Shade: You Can’t Escape the Truth
2. Ruin Condition: Reckless
3. Ruin Move: Crowned by Dream, Exalted by Nightmare
4. Permanent Condition: Defensive
5. Ruin Condition: Paranoid
6. Permanent Condition: Obsessed
7. Ruin Move: Where Do You End, Where Do I Begin?
8. Ruin Move from The Summoned: The Prodigal Child Will Return
9. Retire Your Character and Become a Harbinger of the Apocalypse*

The first Ruin Advance in this sequence is You Can’t Escape the Truth, which overlaps with Anya’s established ability to use people’s secrets against them. Then she becomes increasingly reckless as she inserts herself into her father’s spying missions and her mother’s assassination jobs. In the process, she picks up the tools of their trade, culminating in the acquisition of Crowned by Dream, Exalted by Nightmare (which we reflavored to The Forger Family Business).

This, however, is not great for her emotional state, as she becomes increasingly defensive, paranoid, and obsessed. Therefore, she pushes the limits of her telepathy and morality, unlocking the ability to control other people’s emotions in the form of the Ruin move Where Do You End, Where Do I Begin? Then, either out of desperation or out of a desire for more power, she turns to the scientists who once experimented on her (Ruin Move from The Summoned: The Prodigal Child Will Return). From there, Anya gives in to her inner darkness, becoming a Harbinger of the Apocalypse.*

*Unless you retire the character before taking the final Advance, which is always an option!

Playbook Advances

In Apocalypse Keys, players can earn experience points (XP) through gameplay and by answering end-of-session questions about their impulses, emotions, and actions. Getting XP allows players to unlock additional abilities via Advances. The available Advances include:

• Take a new move from your playbook (2X): choose another move from your playbook, giving you a new way to solve problems.
• Take a new DIVISION move (2X): choose a move from the list of DIVISION moves, giving you additional resources to call on.
• Take a move from another playbook (2X): gain a move from a different playbook, giving you powers outside your initial archetype.
• Describe a new way to gain Darkness Tokens: add a new trigger for gaining Darkness Tokens, a resource that lets you increase the probability of success.
• Take a new power of darkness from your playbook: Get a new power of darkness from your playbook, increasing your capabilities.
• Change your playbook: Switch to a different playbook.

These Advances represent Anya’s character growth, as well as her ability to learn new skills and access new resources. Below, I’ll discuss which Advances to take and the most logical order to take them in.

Take a New Move from Your Playbook

The Found’s moves tend to explore not just their telepathic powers, but also contrasting themes of relationships and independence. For these two Advances, we’ll be focusing on the latter with the moves The Truth Above All Else and It Was Just Me for a Long Time.

 

Playbook move 1: The Truth Above All Else

As some readers may remember from the blog about Batman, The Truth Above All Else allows players to improve their odds of success when two conditions are met:

1. They investigate the Mystery by themselves
2. They invite danger

In other words, this is a great move to represent Anya’s tendency to run headfirst into trouble to help out her family, yet miraculously come out unscathed.

 

Playbook move 2: It Was Just Me for a Long Time

As much as Anya values her family, she also frequently spends time by herself, including in introspection and in pursuit of her interests. This move rewards time spent alone, granting a resource (Bonds) that most commonly comes from deepening relationships with other people.

 

Take a new DIVISION move

In Apocalypse Keys, all Omens work for DIVISION. Therefore, DIVISION moves are intended to flesh out the structure and resources of this shadowy organization. While this may still be the case in your campaign, these moves can also be used to represent the factions surrounding Anya, such as the spy organization WISE. Alternately, it might represent newfound allies such as Bond, the dog who can see the future. Therefore, the two DIVISION moves we’ll be taking for Anya are Psychic Invokers and Subcontractor.

 

DIVISION move 1: Psychic Invokers

Ordinarily, the move Psychic Invokers represents interactions with DIVISION’s on-staff psychics to gain insight into the future. However, we will be reworking this move to better represent Anya’s relationship with her dog Bond:

 

• This move represents Anya reading Bond’s mind to see one of his visions of the future, with psychic vulnerability determining the clarity of the vision.
• Rather than a disastrous success representing Anya’s inner Harbinger hijacking the connection, it instead represents a particularly ominous vision.
• On a failure, rather than the connection being hijacked, the vision is misleading, distracting, or otherwise unhelpful (e.g. Anya realizes Loid is making Hamburg steak for dinner and therefore forgets to study for an important test). The Keeper may also choose to introduce additional consequences when appropriate.

 

DIVISION move 2: Subcontractor

Anyone who read my guide to building Batman in Apocalypse Keys might remember this move, which lets you call in an ally. The move normally represents a DIVISION subcontractor, but we’ll be reflavoring this one to Friend of the Family, representing the often colorful cast of characters that Anya and her family turn to in their times of need.

 

Take a Move from Another Playbook

When looking for moves from other playbooks, it can be helpful to prioritize playbooks with complementary themes. Other times, a seemingly unrelated playbook can have just the right move. In Anya’s case, there’s one of each.

The Summoned deals heavily in themes of relationships and togetherness, and has the excellent move We’re Family Now. Meanwhile, The Fallen, a playbook that revolves around gaining worshipers and becoming a god, has the nevertheless fitting move Honeyed Tongue and Clouded Minds.

 

From The Summoned: We’re Family Now

This move rewards relationships with Anya. Bonds are a resource that represent relationships between people and can be used to manipulate probability to increase success (among other uses). Players who spend Bonds with Anya can choose between getting an increased bonus or granting Anya an additional Bond with them.

 

From The Fallen: Honeyed Tongue and Clouded Minds

To keep her secrets and those of her family, Anya often has to lie. This move provides benefits for such deceptions even when they would normally result in failure. There’s only one alteration necessary for this move: replace the option “They are tempted to worship me” with “They overestimate me in some way.”

 

Describe a New Way to Get Darkness Tokens

This Advance lets players create a new trigger for gaining Darkness Tokens. Keep in mind that while Darkness Tokens are a valuable resource, they typically tie back to What the Darkness Demands of You and often represent the character’s worst impulses. Since this is Anya Forger we’re talking about, I recommend gaining Darkness token “when I prioritize my personal amusement over my responsibilities.”

Take a New Power of Darkness

Anya already has the powers “Telepathy and Mind Blasts” and “Creature Affinity.” Of the remaining Powers of Darkness, the one most thematically consistent with her psychic powers is “Telekinesis.” Alternately, “Ancient Weapons of Magic” could be reflavored to reflect weapons Anya has borrowed or stolen from her mother, Yor Forger.

Change Your Playbook

This Advance is not one to be taken lightly, because changing your playbook fundamentally changes how your character operates. Each playbook has its own starting move, and switching playbooks means losing access to your current starting move—in this case, The Found’s You Can’t Hide Your Heart from Me. In addition, any powers or moves no longer make sense for the character vanish (with the exception of Ruin Advances, which are switched out for other powers since the Ruin track can never reset).

I’ll be blunt: the canonical Anya Forger doesn’t fit the other playbooks particularly well. Exacerbating the issue, The Found is the only playbook that includes telepathy as a Power of Darkness. Therefore, any attempt to switch playbooks must include divergences from the Anya Forger portrayed in the anime. If you want to stick to the canonical version of Anya, it might be worth retiring the character before taking the final Advance.

That said, the easiest playbook to switch to would be The Last. This playbook represents being the last of one’s kind, with themes of surviving tragedy and forming connections with new people who are different from you. The switch could be justified by the discovery that there used to be other psychics like Anya, but for whatever reason, she’s the last surviving psychic. This could allow her to keep the psychic powers integral to her character while exploring new moves and powers reflective of such a legacy.

Sequence of XP Advances

As you gain XP, I recommend taking Advances in the following order:

1. Move from The Summoned: We’re Family Now
2. Playbook Move: The Truth Above All Else
3. New Way to Get Darkness Tokens: Prioritize Personal Amusement
4. DIVISION Move: Psychic Invokers
5. Playbook move: It Was Just Me for a Long Time
6. DIVISION Move: Subcontractor
7. Move from the Summoned: Honeyed Tongue and Clouded Minds
8. New Power of Darkness: Telekinesis
9. Change Your Playbook: The Last

In Spy X Family, Anya immediately bonds with her father Loid and quickly warms up to her mother Yor, both of whom reciprocate in their own ways as they form a not-so-fake family. Therefore, it’s a high priority to grab We’re Family Now from The Summoned playbook. Next up is Anya’s tendency to run into danger to help her family in the form of the move The Truth Above All Else. However, her drive begins to conflict with her desire to be entertained, unlocking a new way for her to get Darkness Tokens.

The move Psychic Invokers represents Anya meeting and adopting her psychic dog Bond (not to be confused with Bonds, a resource representing relationships in Apocalypse Keys). After his adoption, Anya begins to be slightly less insecure about her position in the family, and her increasing comfort with time alone is reflected in the move It Was Just Me for a Long Time. At the same time, the events leading to his adoption made Anya realize she needs to learn more and improve her skills if she wants to continue helping her parents. This paves the way for Subcontractor and Honeyed Tongue and Clouded Minds, two moves that reflect Anya’s increasing capacity to navigate and manipulate the factions her family is entangled with.

From here we begin to diverge from canon as Anya acquires telekinesis to supplement her telepathy. This leads to the eventual reveal that Anya is The Last of a group of psychics as she switches to a different playbook. Alternately, her character can be retired before the playbook switch.

Congratulations, You've Built Anya Forger!

Thanks for reading to the end of this guide on how to create Anya Forger in Apocalypse Keys. Let me know if you agree with her potential character arcs, as well as how it goes if you get a chance to play her in a game.

While you wait for the next blog in the series, feel free to check out the previous entry, in which I describe how to build Batman using the playbook The Shade.

Jump to the Table of Contents

Glossary

Advance: a new ability unlocked by accumulating 8 XP via gameplay and roleplaying. Playbooks include a total of 9 non-repeatable Advances.

 

Bonds: A resource in Apocalypse Keys that represents relationships among characters, including platonic, familial, and romantic connections. They can be spent to manipulate the outcome of rolls, among other uses.

 

Breaking Point: When a character has all their Conditions marked, representing their inability to handle the stress they are under, they hit their Breaking Point. The Breaking Point consists primarily of narrative consequences specific to each Playbook, and may result in bad outcomes for the character, their allies, or anyone present in the scene.

 

Condition: a Condition represents an emotional state a character enters due to stress or danger. Players can get Darkness Tokens by roleplaying marked Conditions.

 

Darkness Tokens: an in-game resource that players can spend to increase the total of their dice before they roll. Though this increases the odds of success, this also increases the odds of a disastrous success. In addition, having too many Darkness Tokens can trigger the move Torn Between, which typically requires either expending resources or gaining Ruin to resolve.

 

DIVISION: a shadowy organization with vast resources for which the player characters work.

 

Harbinger of the Apocalypse: a powerful entity that seeks to destroy, overwrite, or otherwise end the world as we know it, usually for their own benefit.

 

Keeper: the Keeper of the Doors is a gamemaster who facilitates gameplay for Apocalypse Keys. Their responsibilities include implementing safety tools, narrating the Mystery, and moderating the emergent narrative created by the players.

 

Move: an ability that, when triggered or activated, provides mechanical and narrative structure to gameplay in ways that potentially benefit the player. There are three types of moves: playbook moves, DIVISION moves, and Ruin moves. Playbook moves reflect the core themes of the playbook in question; DIVISION moves represent calling on the organization’s resources, and Ruin moves allow characters to embrace darkness to gain power.

 

Mystery: a investigation-based story arc within Apocalypse Keys, which may be completed over multiple sessions.

 

Omen-Class Monster: the term for player characters, who are powerful entities that struggle to balance their worst impulses against their desire for connection and their efforts to save the world.

 

Playbook: a thematically consistent set of prompts and abilities used to represent a character.

 

Power of Darkness: an ability that Omens always have access to and can also use in conjunction with playbook moves.

 

Ruin: an in-game resource that represents characters giving in to their inner darkness and coming closer to becoming a Harbinger. Gaining 5 Ruin unlocks a Ruin Advance. There are ways to erase Ruin, but Ruin Advances are irreversible.

 

Ruin Advance: a new ability, trait, or development unlocked by accumulating 5 Ruin via gameplay and roleplaying that represent the character slowly becoming a Harbinger. Playbooks include a total of 9 non-repeatable and irreversible Ruin Advances. When a Ruin Advance is taken, players narrate a glimpse of their character as a future Harbinger. Gaining 5 Ruin unlocks a Ruin Advance.

 

XP: Abbreviation of experience points. Players can unlock experience points through certain in-game actions and by answering end-of-session questions. Gaining 8 XP unlocks an Advance.