Here’s a handy worldbuilding tip. It’s far from original, but that’s because it works.

Take the themes and factions of your setting, and let a character represent them.

It’s an effective approach. Let’s say you wanted to tell a story about how hard work overcomes adversity. Well, you can’t. Hard work and adversity are both abstract concepts. It’s not like they can fight or anything.

But! You can tell a story where one person embodies hard work and another symbolises adversity. Then you’re free to do anything.

Your Hard Work character can straight-up kill the Adversity character if you want.

It’s useful in storytelling because it lets you explore the different factions through what the characters say and do. How they react and what plans they make shows you how that philosophy lives or dies.

They say you can’t kill an idea. They’re wrong. You can attach an idea to a character and then lay them low.

We’ll come back to that later. For now, let’s talk about who and what the major characters are.

The Nameless Executor

As before, you play as a nameless, faceless character. You’re an Executor – a rank in the protoss forces, roughly equivalent to a general or admiral. You command large numbers of protoss warriors.

Does the Executor symbolise anything? Not by yourself, you don’t. You’re loyal to other factions – a loyalty that evolves over the story.

Let’s skip over this and get to characters with speaking roles.

The Templar: Fenix

Protoss are a proud warrior culture. They cherish the virtues of strength, discipline, loyalty and victory.

They don’t always live up to these ideals, but they value them.

Fenix represents this side of the protoss. He’s eager to fight, but he’s no thug or barbarian. Think of a samurai, who sees fighting for a cause to be a noble pursuit and a way to test his strength.

He fights to the death, but that doesn’t stop him – he comes back with a shiny, robotic body.

The Judicator: Aldaris

The protoss empire is ancient. That’s a great strength, for they’ve spent that time perfecting their technologies, sharpening their minds and building a stable society.

It’s also their weakness. Stability is fragile – everything seems fine until, suddenly, it’s not. The ruling body of the protoss – the Conclave – are conservative, hesitant and fearful of anything new. When faced with the threat of the zerg, they did more of what they always did, rather than seeking out new strategies.

This is a similar theme to the terran campaign. The Terran Confederation was corrupt as opposed to stagnant, but both forms of government were slow to adapt. The difference here was we saw the Confederacy slowly unravel. With the protoss, the campaign kicks off after the loss of their beloved and sacred homeworld.

Aldaris believes they can beat the zerg by fighting harder and adhering to the old traditions even more tightly.

The Dark Prelate: Zeratul

I’ve mentioned before that psionics in Starcraft come in two main flavours: light and dark. It’s not like the Force in Star Wars, where you access the Dark Side through your emotions or whatever. It’s more nuanced than that.

Most protoss use light psionics. It’s what unifies them, carrying their shared telepathic bond. It seems associated with creation.

The zerg use dark psionics, challenging the psionic potential of the entropic void between universes. It also unifies the zerg, but it’s not like a coming-together of minds – it’s the mind of the cerebrates overriding the zerg creatures’.

There’s a heretical offshoot of protoss society that practice dark psionics. Although they can use their powers to override another mind, that’s not how they usually use it. The Conclave preaches the collective psionic link that light psionics brings them. The Dark Templar value individuality, drawing power from the void to strengthen themselves.

This isn’t Good vs Evil. It’s Collectivist vs Individualist – two philosophies, each with merits and weaknesses, told through a semi-magical force of nature.

Zeratul - one of the Dark Templar’s leaders - embodies many protoss virtues, such as discipline, martial strength and service. Despite being branded as a heretic by the Conclave, he sees the zerg threat for what it is, offering his abilities to the war effort.

Remember – during the zerg campaign, it was Zeratul who did the impossible by assassinating a cerebrate, striking the first (and only) significant blow to their forces.

It was also him who accidentally leaked Aiur’s location to the Overmind, leading to the greatest defeat in protoss history.

Is the power of the void the only weapon they have against the zerg? Even if it is, is it worth the risk and cost of using it?

The Balanced Soul: Tassadar

Tassadar showed up in the Terran campaign, although he had no speaking lines.

He was the one leading the fleet that sterilised world after world. It was also him that decided to spare the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis. Rather than kill billions of terrans by glassing the planet from orbit, he disobeyed orders and tried to save them, fighting the zerg on the ground.

It didn’t work. He disobeyed orders and it didn’t work. There’s no coming back from that.

Tassadar served the Conclave for a long time. Recently, though, he’s been exploring Zeratul’s philosophies and the powers of the void. He has one foot in the light and one in the dark.

If you think that’s going to come into play at the story’s climax, congratulations – you’re genre savvy enough to spot the obvious.

We’ll talk about how that plays out next time.