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 Tell me about your character(s), traditional games board. Talk about their backstory, personality, mechanics, or maybe some interesting things that happened to them in game. If you've got an image of your character - custom drawn or just ripped from somewhere - you should post that too. We'll see where this thread goes. (This space reserved for additional content/resources.) mellonbread fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 18:30
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I'll seed the thread with a few of my old characters I still have art for. Edmund Skinner, Cleric of Abadar  My first Pathfinder character, made for PFS. Purely from the corebook, without any splats. Law and Travel domains, letting him waddle around the battlefield at high speed and enforce statistically average rolls on people. His feats and ability scores were kind of unfocused and poorly optimized, but still fun. PFS doesn't demand a backstory, since it's mostly about overcoming mechanical challenges. People still brought a lot of personality to their characters though, even the really min/maxed ones. I don't miss the game system, but I do miss the group. For a collection of randoms drawn from the store's playerbase, it was a consistently good group. Typhon the Red, Cleric of Storms  My first 5E character, made for an Elemental Evil campaign that fell apart when the couple whose house we played at got divorced. Tempest Domain, and overall more smartly built than Skinner. 5E characters are more same-y than Pathfinder characters due to the narrow range of good options, but the Cleric domains are fun once you start getting into the bullshit special abilities, like pushing people without a saving throw whenever you deal lightning damage. Not much backstory on this guy either - he was a pirate who joined the party to kill people and steal things. DOJ Office of the Inspector General Special Agent Archimedes Brabrand - Delta Green Agent GERARD  Another big fat guy. I wanted to start with characters I had art for, and fat people are fun to draw. I normally to run Delta Green rather than play it, but this guy was a joy to play. A Federal Agent who polices other Federal Agents, which in Delta Green gives you the keys to the kingdom. "Lawyer with a gun" and "corrupt cop" are two of the most fun portfolios in RPGs. You can open doors for the rest of the group, commit all kinds of crimes and get away with them. This guy had a little more personality than the other jokers above. He destroyed every relationship he ever had, due to his need to feel in control of every situation, combined with his inability to control his own destructive impulses. That's his pregnant and very annoyed secretary on the right. Esme Parkreiner, Archmilitant  A Rogue Trader character. Drawing someone smoking is a cheap trick to add visual interest to a pose you aren't excited about. Esme is the "test character" I try to build when learning a new system - an uncomplicated shootwoman who I first built almost a decade ago when I was learning Eclipse Phase. This iteration of Esme was basically a caveman on a nameless feral world, whose tribe was enslaved and violently "uplifted" by Imperial missionaries. Archmilitants don't get a whole lot of customization options under the core rules, the main decision you get as a player is what weapons and gear to equip yourself with. The system in general is a little broken, since it was one of the early FFG 40K RPGs. But with a good group who knows how to work around the flaws, and a GM who creates interesting challenges for players who command an army and a fleet of ships, the game really comes alive.
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Jan 4, 2021 18:31
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I had a paladin, Reyus Dvorak, who rode a giant crab as his holy mount. By the time he was a retired character he had a Holy Avenger and a Sunblade and also a Gryphonne (instead of a gryphon) because one of the local DMs thought a giant crab mount was dumb. He also stopped being a paladin and got a custom prestige class after he gambled away one of the Holy Avenger weapons with a demon prince.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:02
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Karolith Quickdraw My first memorable DND character. This was in the kind of 2nd edition campaign you could only have when you're all in school and hand out daily. We played a couple times a week and he was a bog standard Elven Ranger with a longbow and a sword. Eventually the party got a deck of many things, and feature creeped our way into 3-wishes. I wished for a badass castle, and the DM gotcha'd me with this keep called Hellgate which was basically at the mouth of this big portal to hell so monsters came out constantly. Well, we formed an army, took the keep and then killed the monsters with our army forever. I don't know if it was RAW or we just made it up but we credited our characters with a portion of XP for any kills done under men under their leadership. When I shelved Karolith he was a 413th level Ranger and I think he took like 2 levels of Rogue for some reason. I would occasionally bring him out of retirement when someone would invent an unkillable god monster with bigger numbers just so Karolith could clown on the thing and send the writer back to the drawing board. I also gave future characters a little ring they could call upon Karolith to aid them if they ever got in dire circumstances. Tons of fun, and it all started in a little tavern during a strange fog where Karolith met a handful of other adventurers.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:03
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I don't have many stories from my IRL group, since I was always the GM and thus didn't get to play many characters. Fortunately, I have been a player in a long-running World Wide Wrestling game. World Wide Wrestling is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about Wrestling, and it's a lot of fun. The 2nd edition is about to be printed so looking forward to that as well. All of the characters below have been part of the same campaign: I like to change around and try new things, hence why I didn't stick with just a single character. Redcoat Redcoat (AKA Jack McNulty) was a british wrestler that had been given a lovely "British Invader" gimmick which quite frankly he hated. He arrived to the ring with Rule Brittania and even had a manager, a Major that ordered him around. The gimmick was meant to feed into a "Canadian invasion" angle, but it never went anywhere. His first match was against another PC and it was just a complete failure, with neither wrestler looking good, but Jack was a bit of an rear end in a top hat and blamed the other wrestler for all the problems with the match. Redcoat had just one ally within the roster, a wrestler called Amadeus that had a german aristocrat gimmick, but found out that he was actually talking behind his back. Pissed off at everything and everyone, Jack deliberately injured Amadeus in the ring and was soon fired from the promotion. Mourn  Mourn was the character I played the most, and she is still in the promotion to this day. As you can see above, her thing is a death theme, although the mask itself has different motifs. Her backstory is that she was an indie wrestling darling with a very dedicated (and scary) following, She immediately made a splash when she was acquired after Redcoat left the promotion, which ruffled a few feathers. The second season of the game really showcased her as a headliner, however: she started a dedicated tag-team match, the Instruments of Pain and took part in the Tag Team tournament, which spanned the entire season, eventually winning it. However, it was a bumpy ride and a mixture of a personal rivalry with another PC wrestler/manager, her getting divorced and having to find a new place to live as well as management not telling her if she was going to get the tag team title or not, meant she was pretty stressed at the best of time. The finale of season 2 was centred around her mask: the lore had been built up that her mask was actually mind-controlling her, so the final episode was centred around her getting free of the mask and then destroying it for good. In the last season of the game (season 3), she has now been put in maintenance mode, as she isn't my main character anymore and she's happy to defend her tag team title. Keith "The Beast" My current character, he's basically a comedy gimmick: he's tall and very thin and without significant muscle mass, and his gimmick is that his ego is much bigger than his actual physical prowess. I mostly decided to play him due to the fact that comedy matches were some of the most fun matches I ever played with Mourn.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:26
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Elendil004 posted:Karolith Quickdraw mellonbread fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jan 4, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 19:27
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Adiy Third My PC in my first LANCER game, which we're playing through at the moment in a homebrew Gundam setting, which has inspired me to go Full Anime with my characterisation. (The portrait was mocked up in DAEMON X MACHINA, a very good, very anime mecha action game.) Adiy was found in suspended animation by the other PCs in an abandoned military black site. He's a second-generation Chiral Soldier: a human engineered to be a superior mech pilot, with 'mirrored' biology that leaves them immune to disease but reliant on foods based on similarly-mirrored proteins (basically the setting's Newtype equivalent). The first generation were ostensibly 'normal' pilots with a little more skill and focus, while the second generation were nicknamed 'Human Bullets'; kamikaze soldiers conditioned for maximum aggression and zero self-preservation. Adiy's in his mid-teens and has very little memory of his life outside of his Human Bullet conditioning, thanks to memory degradation from being suspended for way longer than you're supposed to be. He's spent the few months we've been playing the game learning how to think of himself as a person, rather than a disposable weapon, and getting closer to the found family that is Risky Business, the mercenary outfit that thawed him out. He's also become completely obsessed with chanbara and samurai movies, which is probably why he pilots Gundam Yatra: 
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Jan 4, 2021 19:40
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I ran a campaign of Rhapsody of Blood set in 1907 where the Castle was a company town for a firearms company run by an ancestor who ended up seizing the Grail in the last Castle and became obsessed with protecting family through superior firepower. Alida Batori of the Batori Repeating Arms Company is hands down one of my favorite villain characters on account of the fact that the PCs were really loving competent and never really gave her a chance to succeed. I had no idea how to play her as a character, but the fact that they gave her plan absolutely no quarter and loving despised her helped me come up with something better than I could've envisioned. Creek's Run in California was a combination factory and mining town where the company hauled the Black Blood of the Earth from its depths to make guns in the factory. The protagonists were an industralist's daughter who wielded experimental firepower and the help of their butler, Batori's grandkid who inherited the blood-born parasite plaguing the family for each generation and was trained by one of the previous heroes, an aloof crossbow-wielding cartographer and documentarian responsible for keeping track of the Castle, and a square-jawed two-gun Chinese horseback rider who'd grown up a naturalized American citizen whose mother was kidnapped by Batori (and whose grandmother faked her death to train members of the Batori line in hiding). They ended up in town when the populace vanished overnight into the factory and mines. The different zones of the Castle were: The Dormitory, which was permanently midnight, home of constantly-shifting and warping architecture and full of sleeping workers being plagued by silent doctors and nurses smothering the weak and sick in their sleep. The boss of the zone was The Nightmare, a terrified woman whose shadow was made of hateful owls who grew more powerful in the dark. The Nightmare would later be turned into an ally and romanced by the industrialist. The Pub, a perpetually twilight endless bar of bacchanalian delights, gambling and indulgences and music overseen by seductive beings made of smoke whose touch burned away pain and left pleasure. The boss of the zone was The Dream, a giant golden man in the style of a political cartoon overseeing a music hall who used puppets in the perfect likeness of the past heroes to try and convince them that Batori was right and that they should all sleep and join the Dream in the greatness of America. Everyone hated him out of all of the bosses; the industrialist got pissed their grandpa was telling them to do the wrong thing, the cowboy's dad nearly worked himself to death on the railroads and the grandkid didn't like being lied to. Just the sheer unified gently caress THIS GUY IN PARTICULAR was one of my favorite moments as a GM. The Mine, haunted by blind and broken workers swarming the heroes from the darkness and the hissing excavation machines striking at them with precise blows. The boss was The Boiling Man, an enormous steam-powered bipedal mining machine in the form of a skeleton that gnawed through rock with its unyielding metal teeth. The Factory, a hideous deathtrap of labor violations patrolled by clockwork overseers brandishing whips and clubs where the corridors would sometimes lead right into the path of the assembly lines or ore processing rock crushers. The boss was The Gunsmith, a huge centipede made out of men protected by heavy automatic firepower and wielding guns and explosives. But, most importantly, the players just stomp an absolute hole in her plans. They steamroll every boss and tear down all of the supports of the Castle's final lair, the Manor, which is this gaudy pseudo-McMansion old world manor home on the outside and inside is just shambles and filth. And my absolute favorite moment of the campaign is when they met Alida Batori inside of her home where the cleanest room was the lovely kitchen where the cowboy's mom made formal introductions between the villainess and the party. Batori proceeded to, politely, introduce herself, finish the last of many bottles of wine, and ask them to dinner in the kitchen to have a moment of civility before they killed her. It was abundantly to her that obvious she lost and she was going to die at their hands and ironically the entire experience of having her plans ruined had managed to jar her back into some form of lucidity of her actions and behaviors. They were having none of it. What proceeded was a one-sided shouting match where the heroes dressed her down as she just stood there and solemnly took it, ultimately agreeing with their insults and criticisms and making her apologies. Just, nakedly, "I have hosed up royally and you all have every single right to hate me and if you're going to kill me, let's kill me, just don't make the same mistake I did by trying to become Regent". It was great. Dinner was ruined and ignored except for the industrialist and cartographer snacking on dinner rolls as the grandkid and cowboy aired their many grievances. It was just wonderfully refreshing to play the villain who'd just had a moment of horrible clarity and was just like "can I have a dying wish, a last meal? No? Alright, I understand. Let's go kill me. Don't hold back." They ended up beating her viciously and walking away as the saviors of the day in the end but, man, I will not forget how that character just grew organically out of the players having really good dice rolls all the time.
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Jan 4, 2021 20:02
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Gig Halledge A Dragonborn valor bard who used to help entrap people for food for a vampire, his sister being kept a hostage to do the vampire's bidding. But he was eventually was rescued by a vampire hunter (and unknown to him, his sister at around the same time had managed to escape her captivity on her own). He met two brothers, and doesn't remember much from that night, but that he was drinking, and he woke up in a coffin that fell off the back of a cart, in Barovia, where he was found by the rest of the party. Personality wise, he's inspired a lot by Gurney Hallock from Dune (Specifically the Patrick Stewart version). He has a very strong sense of honor. He will crack jokes once in a while, and try to keep the party (and his own) spirit's up in hard times. He's far from the typical "goofball bard" or "horny bard" stereotypes. His favorite spells are Tasha's Hideous laughter (usually using a really bad pun), Vicious Mockery and Sleep (though it seems these spells barely ever work). My favorite moment so far is when we were fighting some cultists (who seemed to be right out of wicker man), and Gig managed to put the leader to sleep. After the battle, our party tied him up and disarmed him, but the cult leader challenged Gig to a duel. He couldn't turn it down and so (as much as the rest of the party objected) he gave him back his sword and they dueled. Gig got a stab in, but the cult leader managed to do a roll around him and stab him, knocking him out and running away. He also discovered that his hero the vampire hunter may have killed some peaceful travelers, and so he will have to deal with his former mentor. Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jan 4, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 20:41
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That's a cool story. I like it when the whole game takes place in one huge complex with lots of themed areas. It's also great when the villain is sort of pathetic at the end of the day. Not something you can get away with every game, but it adds a lot of personality.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:39
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I ran a game of Dungeon World once where our "wizard" was the Charlatan playbook and our Bard just ran with it. He acted as the personal hype man to the "wizard" and made him out to be this insane spell caster that could level mountains and devastate entire armies. He never failed on any roll to make people believe it so the stories just kept getting more and more ridiculous. Sadly the game died and we never got to continue the adventures
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Jan 5, 2021 00:33
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Len posted:I ran a game of Dungeon World once where... I made a character for DW once whose primary move was to light himself on fire as a defense mechanism, which worked out well at least twice. I think he was featured in one of the DW hacks a goon ran a Kickstarter for. Separately in an Eberron campaign, my warforged lit himself on fire to deal with termites in his joints.
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Jan 5, 2021 00:41
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My current Blades in the Dark character is Amosen de Clermont (aka Measure), a disgraced former nobleman. He married for convenience and kept to his amateur science and let his wife keep to her hobbies. Her hobbies could be summarized as "dashing crimelord," and when she died while robbing a bank for funsies, the scandal was too salacious for his family to tolerate and his protests of ignorance so unconvincing he found himself on his rear end. He's eked out a pathetic existence helping carve/develop illegal mushroom tunnels, and he's sick of being wet and cold and not having anything nice to smoke or drink, so he's now a reckless smuggler trying to claw himself up to at least some sort of vaguely middle class existence.
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Jan 5, 2021 00:54
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I had a Shadowrun rigger a while ago when I just wanted to be the driver. Sidhe (everyone immediately mispronounced it as "seedy" and he loving was) was a weirdly brilliant elf with little to no self-preservation instincts when it came to disrespecting authority, driving, or bomb making. That all manifested in a Distinctive Style of "Go Big or Go Home". Here you have a weedy little not-quite-two meter tall elf in a flamboyant jumpsuit with a six-inch retractable mowhawk of fiber-optic hair that doubled as a video screen, getting a cybernose installed specifically because he can put a datajack in there and drive his car by jamming a cat5 cord up his nose. Sidhe drove a van that he tinkered with out the wazoo, then he had painted at every opportunity. How do you hide what is essentially a perfectly painted recreation of the TMNT turtle van? You get bored and pay a thousand bucks to have the whole thing resprayed with an intricate van wizard. He also had what was essentially a Geo Metro for when he needed to go incognito and remained convinced that he was invisible in it, despite the aftermarket bubble cockpit and V8 engine he'd installed. Sidhe had a tendency to go big in the bomb department, as well. Two of the four nuclear events we caused were Sidhe deliberately overloading portable nuclear reactors, though I maintain the fucks in the Aries science department on that last blacksite deserved what they got. When you have a shadowrunner present you with the suitcase-sized prototype fission reactor you last saw in your fully functional prototype ED-209/Terminator hybrid, you should just believe him when he says he can set it to blow. I will admit, attaching said overloading reactor to a Doberman drone and setting the AI to "playful keep-away" mode was probably a bit over the top, but Go Big! That campaign was incredible and full of so many moments like that. Parking the van on top of a parking garage to provide artillery support on our run to the top of Ares tower. Accidentally destroying the entirety of the Hanford ecology by creating a radiation dragon. Not doing our homework and only finding out the owner of the security firm was a dragon until after I'd hit him with a car and detonated the car bomb. Rolling a critical glitch on an Ebay search for a personality chip and accidentally installing a murderous AI in an armed drone. Talking said drone out of killing us all as long as I kept it supplied with ammunition. It's the little moments you gotta love.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:09
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bbcisdabomb posted:How do you hide what is essentially a perfectly painted recreation of the TMNT turtle van? You get bored and pay a thousand bucks to have the whole thing resprayed with an intricate van wizard. My character in my current Dark Ages V20 game may in fact be the wizard airbrushed on said van. Moroz is a Tzimisce koldun who very much lives up to his name, as he is constantly surrounded by freezing winds that turn into a maelstrom when he decides to go loud. He typically goes around dressed like a death metal Gandalf, complete with robe, wizard hat, and magic staff. His cloak has been tailored to convert into a big canvas sack, which is important since his main motivation in unlife is twofold: (1) ruin the existence of the Tremere as much as possible as often as possible; (2) liberate any and all mystical tomes/grimoires/artifacts from their owners. Thus he often finds himself in need of a huge water-resistant sack that won't overly hinder his movement. Moroz is not without his hobbies, though. Like any good Tzimisce, he practices Vicissitude to relax, giving himself bioluminescence and making the blood of the peasants of their small castle town have different flavors. Why only have blood flavored blood when you can have orange blood, or saffron blood? Thanks to his partner in  He's currently working on mastering the magic of the Pinsk Marsh, powers of growth and decay. Once he can animate zombies imbued with the resilience of the swamp, he's going to try his hand at making every creative Tzimisce's magnum opus: a vozhd. Then he'll take it and his army of zombies, deep ones, and demons to conquer the Tremere stronghold and take it for his own. I'm excited.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:17
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Quick one from a Cyberpunk 2020 game. Agent CARBONARA, NCPD Vice. People often ask how a police officer is supposed to fit in with a party of Solos, Fixers, and other street toughs. The answer, it turns out, is "by being a corrupt cop".   I drew him shooting the gun, but he was honestly pretty awful at gunfighting. It was my first character, so I stuck to the corebook and maxed Empathy, Cool, Body and Authority rather than dealing with cyberware. His MO was to talk lots of poo poo, and either count on people not calling his bluff, or get behind the Solo until backup arrived. The lifepath generator spat out a mix of cool backstory and unusable nonsense. I think I was supposed to roll before creating the character, but I had fun imagining how he dealt with having seven siblings and parents who somehow didn't remember him, got sent to prison for four months, then immediately rose to the top of the Vice Squad. Oh and the generator retroactively decided he was gay, by giving him exclusively male lovers. JK Rowling, eat your heart out. I'd never played CP2020 and was expecting it to be a lot clunkier, but it's well put together. Character creation is pretty easy due to the book telling you outright which attributes you need for which class, and giving you some guardrails on what you're allowed to spend your class skills points on. We used an online character builder that did most of the work. Picking equipment took longer than the rest of the process combined, and that was without diving into all the cybergear on offer. The system itself was good. A D10 hits the sweet spot, where modifiers matter but there's still an element of random chance. The outsized skill list is a drag, but the core attributes system ensures you won't be totally hosed if you put all your points in flower arranging and the scenario takes gardening. The downside is that if 1 is always a miss, you'll "always miss" twice as often on a D10 as a D20, and we definitely saw that in play. Fun game overall though, hope we get to play again.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:29
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 Holma, Daughter of Gundrid is my PC in an Adventures in Middle-Earth campaign* that's been going strong for over a year now. *Lord of the Rings setting, but 5th Edition D&D. Holma grew up in a small village like many of its kind in the North. The people lived off the land and minded the walls in watch of forces both man and animal which threatened their livelihood. It was tough, but her family made do. It was not until the momentous events of recent times which would see the dragon Smaug expelled from the dwarven homeland and the crowning of King Bard that there seemed to be more to life. And with the lands growing more dangerous and rumors of the Shadow, her kin saw safety and strength in numbers and joined the reclamation of Dale. Quickly appointed a guide for tradesmen, Holma quickly knew the lands of the Anduin Vale and the grand and terrible Mirkwood Forest which dominated Wilderland. One week she would be in a Lake-Town guildhall, the next passing down the Old Forest Road to buy honey from the Beornings in the vales past the sea of trees. Things may be looking up, but Holma knows that there are things beyond the ken of men. Dreams and visions which only she can see, that point to things in Middle-Earth's future that may see her dreams come true...or see all that her people built, lost like so many ashes. She is not exactly the most well-spoken sort (CHA 8, no proficiency in any social skills besides Insight) but she is self-aware in this regard and often leaves the talking to the other party members. Over the course of the campaign she's come into wealth and now operates a vineyard in the kingdom of Dale, and gained the patronage of King Bard and the trust of the Woodmen clans of Mirkwood. For those not in the know, Woodmen are humans who live in said forest, mostly eking out a subsistence level rural existence. Holma's also a Wanderer (pseudo-Ranger cuz Rangers are a culture and not a class in AiME) with the Slayer of Shadows subclass, which makes her the "knows about dark magic and monsters" person in the party. As a result she is more worrisome than other party members and has a tendency to overthink and prepare for contingencies.
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Jan 6, 2021 01:22
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One of my favorite ways to make a memorable NPC/villain is to start with "what is the worst thing they've ever done" and then work backwards adding details that make them likeable (to the audience, not necessarily the characters in the game world) or fun in spite of that. What's the worst thing your character has ever done, TG?
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Jan 6, 2021 22:50
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mellonbread posted:One of my favorite ways to make a memorable NPC/villain is to start with "what is the worst thing they've ever done" and then work backwards adding details that make them likeable (to the audience, not necessarily the characters in the game world) or fun in spite of that. I think I mentioned the paladin who gambled a holy avenger off to a demon prince, right? It was because we weren't doing anything and I was bored. That one was pretty bad!
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Jan 6, 2021 23:18
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mellonbread posted:One of my favorite ways to make a memorable NPC/villain is to start with "what is the worst thing they've ever done" and then work backwards adding details that make them likeable (to the audience, not necessarily the characters in the game world) or fun in spite of that.
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Jan 6, 2021 23:24
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The only time I played a Queen in Monsterhearts she was the popular and prep cliques. Blood in, no out, total control over everyone by one person. Despite the fact that I was the only player in that game who doesn't watch horror movies, nobody else realized how bad a blood ritual could be until a particularly horrifying scene where Alexis invited some of the hicks at school to the soundproofed study room at the public library and forcibly stole their souls. By the time the game ended, Alexis had almost a thousand people chained to her hivemind and was growing steadily through a campaign of predatory advertising (She'd advertise to fix all sorts of problems - drug addiction, mental illness, even weight loss. And then she'd steal your free will and not let you do anything that might hurt your body's longevity.) until Michael showed up postgame and annihilated her. In her defense, she was two months old and her mother turned out to be a demon made of crystal, so Alexis never really had a good role model. That's. . . about how far mitigating factors go for this particular character.
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Jan 6, 2021 23:38
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You're getting a whole bunch of words, because this boy is my longest running D&D 5e character in about a 3 year campaign now: Then:  Now:  The incident that found the Kobold named Biktik Takrin hailed as a hero, and tore him from his life as a common mason, found him alternating between bouts of screaming, crying and laughing atop a dead Hook Horror, having rescued someone who had in turn been sent to rescue him. This set in motion a chain of events that saw him bestowed with his clan’s most prized item, a ring shaped from a scale of their missing Brass Dragon patron herself, crafted by the patron herself. With this, a vision for the Shamanic Council of Elders and his passage through a portal into and unknown world in pursuit of her, his journey began. Through the months of hardships and adventures, he has fallen in with a party of trusted comrades and has grown on both strength and attitude. While once wise prudence (otherwise known as abject cowardice), was his hallmark, he always had within him the ability to overcome his fears. True courage. Formerly he flew into fits of hysterical fear, driving him into senseless, frenzied action. When the pressure is on, he now squares his jaw in quiet determination, choking down his terror. Additionally, he awakened the Dragonscale ring, putting him in tune with the spirit of the patron, Aladryaxinia (or Lady as he calls her), and through her has been granted a measure of her strength. While once not too concerned with the whole "Good and Evil" thing (it was a little above his pay-grade), Biktik's experiences, and contact with the patron has changed him, some would say for the better. However, this also means that when circumstances press him, he can succumb to terrifying, righteous anger, and he has developed a certain moral inflexibility. After the latest incident involving investigating the murder of a child, and him potentially turning to the Black Sap in order to stop him from being turned against his friends, Biktik's Patron contacted in once more, urging him to allow her to lend him more of her strength. I could write alot more because the party's adventures have been extensive, but you get the cliffs notes. Mechanically, he started off as a Kobold Path of the Berserker Barbarian, and the GM started giving him little bonuses as he did things. Awakening that ring gave him a modified version of Dragonborn breath, for example. Eventually we had to split from that GM due to conflicts over how he and the players approached the game, but the party found another GM willing to take us on. She allowed me to switch him to a dragon flavoured Totem Barbarian. Now after more time, and some interesting UA content and Tasha's, he's changing again to a (spoilered because I know some of my party still lurk here) modified Way of the Ascendant Dragon Monk, with a suite of stat changes and more Brass Dragon flavoring. Kokoro Wish fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 04:27
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I once had a Human Evocation Wizard named Galius Quintiusen Camaruso, he was a Noble from a Magical City that dropped itself into a pocket dimension to wait out the Ancient Evil but ended up staying there, becoming an intricate magocracy. When his ruling House was attacked out of nowhere by the biggest rival he was sent back to the "real world" to find a way to return the City, and bring back help. He ended up being amnesia'd, enslaved, and forced into an arena, that's how he met the rest of the party. He was notable for a few things: 1. Being an absolute UBERMENSCH. We rolled for stats, nothing was less than 13, I put the highest values in INT, CHA, and DEX. I argued for multiclassing into Monk because I kept finding myself being attacked directly, and the DM said "there has to be a good reason," so I picked up a crossbow and the War Caster feat instead. 2. Solving an entire mission to stop a messenger, that had a spell on him that would notify his band if he died, with a Sleep spell. 3. Traumatizing someone I was questioning with a casting of Detect Thoughts. I never used the spell again after this.
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Jan 7, 2021 04:51
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Been playing Rifts, my character is Jean Rambeaux, Glitter Boy Pilot from glorious Quebec. Outed as an illegal psychic and unceremoniously drummed out of the military Jean stole a cutting edge GB, joined up with a dwarf Techno-mage and a Mind-Melter who grew up in a tribe of PSI-Stalkers, and hit out for Lazlo to start a personal war against fascism. Jean speaks with an outrageous accent, smokes constantly, and is still dealing with internalized bigotry and self hatred from being a mutant.
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Jan 7, 2021 11:24
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One of my favorite characters was for an Evangelion-based PBP game here on the Forums about five or six years ago and ran for probably close to two years. Hannah Asagiri was basically the Rei of the game, and honestly by herself I'm not really sure there was all that much to differentiate her from any other Rei-alike that had existed in any other EVA-based game before her. I think what really made her so memorable for me is how the GM (Gnoll) really embraced and capitalized on what was written about her, as well as the exceptional cast which gave her plenty of other interesting folks to bounce off of. Hannah started the game being shipped back to Boston (where she was first created and where the game was set) from Nevada and had already fought a couple Angels and died a few times in the process. In very Rei-like fashion she was kind of a protector on the battlefield, an articulate but social klutz, and was even killed once about halfway through the game. Unlike Rei, Hannah was more outgoing and wanted to be 'normal' like the other pilots (none of whom were actually normal in their own rights) and she did sort of improve on this front as time went on, but she also got really cryptic about things as poo poo started to spiral out of control. Although she had a set of implanted false memories, she knew exactly what she was and had a wider view of the full picture than most (or at least professed to, because I was making up all sorts of crazy EVA poo poo and real kudos for the others for adapting and rolling with it) and this really helped her to clash with Rabah, another pilot. Hannah and Rabah had this really great dynamic where they were both really synergized but also at odds with one another. After the fight where Hannah was killed, that's about the time poo poo started to unravel; Gnoll had these masked soldiers that showed up, which all later turned out to be other Hannah clones. Rabah had a mental breakdown, and the next fight Rabah's player ran the Angel (Rabah briefly was out of the picture). It was a very Rabah-like(?) Angel, I don't quite know how to explain why, but it relied pretty heavily on mental attacks and Hannah spent most of the fight in an illusion of her implanted memories. This was also the only Angel Hannah ever got the killing blow on, I think. When Rabah later returned, she was always escorted around by one of these masked soldiers which she had animated one-sided conversations with, which added all the more to Hannah's own strangeness. Near the very end, all of these soldier-Hannahs were practically zombies. Gnoll managed to cobble together something that made at least as much sense as actual Evangelion from all of the cryptic things Hannah had talked about during the game, and had it so that the person Hannah was cloned from (who was now also dead, I'm sure) was the engineer for the Boston Nerv's MAGI and was probably responsible for a good chunk of whatever the gently caress was going on. All of the EVA souls might have been Hannah ones as well, I'm not sure. In true NGE form there was a lot I'm not sure about despite being responsible for a bunch of it. Hannah also developed a strong attachment to another pilot named Franklin. He was her first really close friend and she was super happy about having someone like that. Perhaps the least EVA-like aspect of the whole campaign was how healthy the relationship these two had was. In the end, poo poo fell apart so badly that the pilot twins Pax & Noah, alongside Franklin and Hannah wound up escaping inland. Hannah also had a Longinus-type spear called the Trumpet of the Jubile, which she threw at the moon before before they made their getaway because that spear needed to be on the moon. In the end, the world wasn't destroyed. Rabah might have kept on fighting, I don't quite recall. But Hannah wound up living with Franklin on a remote farm in Colorado or Wyoming, one fairly similar to the one in her memories. This is where the game ended, and the romantic in me likes to think they lived happily ever after. Perhaps this very un-NGE ending could be corrected in the Rebuild version of the campaign, where she'd suitably liquified, crucified, or turned into the moon or something. Anyhow, this is a lot of words about my Evangelion RPG character. bahamut fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 07:49
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bahamut posted:Anyhow, this is a lot of words about my Evangelion RPG character. Hey yo, holy poo poo, I played Franklin!  Franklin Wilson was basically lovely teen superstar put into an EVA. He had absolutely no idea what was going on at any point in the game, partly because nobody told him anything and partly because he was so self-absorbed. As the game progressed, the veneer began to crack and he started to realize how entirely out of his depth he was, especially compared to the two super-soldier teens and the magic clone girl he had a crush on. Also the base commander died in his arms whilst he was trying to get him out which gave him a nice dose of trauma. Highlights of his relationship with Hannah include taking her to an Italian restaurant, shoving terrible love poetry under her door, swimming in a freezing cold lake with her, and freaking out basically all the time. I'm glad everyone indulged his dumb bullshit because he was basically the comic relief of the group. I imagine he lived out his days with Hannah looking after horses or something.
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Jan 8, 2021 10:57
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Gabin Coinhammer, Dwarf Paladin of Kol Korran. A Paladin who prided himself of being the most miserly dwarf on the face of Eberron and bragged about his family inventing currency thousands of years ago by creating the first coins with their special blacksmithing hammer. He was the head negotiator of the party and often strongarmed NPCs into giving bigger quest rewards and his greatest ambition was to take over the Aurum in order to spread the gospel of FREE TRADE through the continents and turn the Mror Holds into the greatest superpower in the continent by economic means. Never bought more supplies than necessary, always sold gear when replacing it for better ones and often mouthed off the "Golden Laws of Korran" when justifying his actions which were pretty much the Ferengi Rules of Aquisition that I reworded and repurposed, changing Latinum for actual gold.
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Jan 15, 2021 23:29
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mellonbread posted:Esme Parkreiner, Archmilitant There are a couple stumbling blocks to work out. Men of Stone weren't designed to breed true with normal humans. But they're great at solving engineering puzzles, so it shouldn't be too hard. Their children might turn out to be soulless mutants. But hey so are the Sisters of Silence, and they're totally awesome. What could go wrong?
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Jan 22, 2021 01:42
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In my ongoing Scion game, I have the character DIAN-E, an artificial human built by Dian Cecht of the Tuatha de Danann. (The name is an acronym derived backwards from "Silver Digital Attack Strengthener" using Google-grade Irish.) DIAN-E was raised under false pretenses as an ordinary human by her mother, DIAN-A (the prototype for this project of Dian Cecht's, who was not good at battle and has become a Guide under Scion rules). DIAN-B ("Bea" socially) is an antagonist in the game's lineup; DIAN-C is dead, DIAN-D's status is unconfirmed. The entire idea came out of an offhand line in Scion Hero 2E, where it mentions that Dian Cecht enjoys creating Scions through the vessel of prosthetic limbs. While this is of course a reference to when the fellow created the silver arm for Nuada, I interpreted it in a more generous sense - in that he is creating Scions FROM this technology, and that could be quite advanced indeed. This was mostly an opportunity to have a reimagining of the classic literary conflict of, "Oh no, I'm a robot, and my anime dad is yelling at me." However, a conversation with an expert on Irish myth revealed the exciting fact that technically speaking, ancient Irish law would not even be able to classify the actions of a robot - such as murder - as crimes, for a robot would not be anyone's descendant or otherwise involved in a legal group. It would be like if a rock tumbled down a hill and flattened someone. Unfortunate, especially if it started on your land - but legally distinct from murder!
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Jan 22, 2021 02:58
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Zeski Blacktalon was a character I had a lot of fun with in a Ravnica campaign. She was a Goblin Bard who worked as a sort of 1940s nightclub singer sponsored by the Azorius Senate, though that was just her public cover and, unbeknownst to the rest of the party, was actually an agent of House Dimir. Her backstory was pretty basic: A poor street-goblin taken in by a Dimir agent who trained her in the arts of refinery, subterfuge and courtly manners; and then helped her to infiltrate the Azorius Senate under the guise of a lost heir of the only surviving Goblin noble family. What made Zeski especially fun to play was the fact that the DM was super onboard both with me doing secret subterfuge poo poo behind the scenes and in letting me bend the narrative of the game provided it didn't affect things mechanically. What this led to was a lot of note-passing between me and the GM as Zeski pulled a bunch of string to help the party behind the scenes, and her casually pulling off weird, Looney Tunes-style antics. A few examples: -While I usually gave Zeski a really bougie, old-money New England accent, I established early on with the GM that this was just an affectation and her real accent (Which came out when she was angry or flustered) was a super-thick Cockney drawl. This ended up becoming the in-game "Goblin accent" and the GM put on an imitation whenever he was voicing a Goblin NPC. -She frequently pulled off elaborate costume changes in the split second the other characters looked away from her -During an arc where the party was kicked out of their respective guilds after being framed, she got a job as a waitress offscreen and over the course of only a few hours solely so she could meet up with the rest of the party while they were drowning their sorrows and spur them on to action. -Later in that same arc, while Zeski was separated from the rest of the party doing spy poo poo, the other characters ran afoul of a bunch of Rakdos Lampooners and got into a fight. Zeski ended up arriving in the second or third round of combat, chastised the rest of the party for getting involved in "Clown business" while she was gone, provoked one of the lampooners to do their schtick on her only to cut him off in the middle of his insult with a casual "Yeah, gently caress you, clown" and then cast entangle. -During a climactic fight near the end of the campaign she turned the entire battle into a musical number, complete with inexplicable stage hands and light effects that no one could entirely explain. All in all a lot of fun to play!
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Jan 26, 2021 19:33
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Omar Hakimi is a former agent of Imperial Intelligence in a sci-fantasy near future Empire without an Emperor, because the last time the magic Emperor-choosing crown picked someone it got tricked by a fascist, caused a world war, and became so traumatized it hasn't selected someone in over a century. He was a poor kid from the lower parts of the great Arcology they built over a magical infinite water fountain in the desert as part of a plan to combat climate change, his father being one of the construction workers hired to help with the finishing parts of the construction. His father was also one of the casualties, dying in a workplace accident and leaving his mom to raise him alone. He ran with the 'guilds of thieves' as a young man along with his best friend, an immigrant girl named Loara, but got out of that life when his skill at martial arts got him a scholarship at a good school higher in the arcology. Before he broke his knee and ruined his professional prospects as a fighter, retrained in polisci, and became an intel analyst. Then was sent back down into the 'Hive' as a field agent after a few years, to pretend he was coming back down to rejoin organized crime so he could report back to Imperial Intelligence about potential cult activity or subversives. He ended up discovering his old best friend was a cultist because the cult of the Builder, a powerful sorcerer who wanted to make everyone into cyborgs that could no longer feel pain, had saved her from cancer while he'd been gone. He slowly discovered who he really was under all the lies he told, fell in love with Loara, kind of went rogue (a little), and tried desperately to tell Intelligence they needed to help the people down-hive if they wanted to stop people joining cults and poo poo, all against the backdrop of a media mogul slowly rising to become a candidate for being named Emperor, crown or no, on a platform of demagoguery and bullshit about the Eastern nations. While he was giving a briefing to the Intel Subcommittee of the Imperial Senate on these matters, they were attacked by another powerful sorcerer, the Destroyer, who wanted to drive the world away from war by making it too terrible to wage (his great dream was the dream of Mutually Assured Destruction because he's a psycho). Omar managed to survive, and took up the sacred Imperial Sword because it was the closest thing at hand and stabbed the guy with it, driving him away and probably saving the arcology despite just being a mortal man stabbing a demigod. And then the magic crown picked him for his valor and to spite the media mogul because it was scared that by NOT picking it was going to cause fascism again and thus it wanted the guy who'd been there arguing against that bullshit. Now his story is a political sim rather than an espionage game, about a very confused 26 year old ex-spy trying to figure out what being a chosen Emperor even means after a long interregnum, despite being pro-democracy himself. And, you know, being married to an ex-cultist. It's pretty neat.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:20
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Night10194 posted:Omar Hakimi is ... a very confused 26 year old ex-spy trying to figure out what being a chosen Emperor even means after a long interregnum, despite being pro-democracy himself. And, you know, being married to an ex-cultist. It's pretty neat. My D&D crew just started a new campaign, and my character is really starting off strong. He started out life as a normal squirrel, but was chosen to be a very strange wizard/druid's familiar/companion. That wizard soon started experimenting with graft magic, using his familiar as a barely-willing participant in said experiments to give him all manner of new appendages and other "enhancements". The last enhancement was an incredibly enhanced Awaken spell, painlessly breaking the familiar bond and making him acutely aware of just how hosed up he is. The wizard then left everything of his to his old familiar and vanished from the material plane, to find something "more interesting" to experiment further on/with. He started reading all of the books in the wizard's library, picking up some basic knowledge of anatomy & medicine along with some introductory magic and the rituals necessary to be a binder. All that magically-granted intellect made him a quick reader and a faster learner. He is now known as Dr. Pteromys Drey: 
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Jan 27, 2021 00:28
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My very first DnD campaign ever has managed to go along for about a month or two now online, so I've enjoyed developing my very first RPG character ever. No images or art, because none of us are artists, but my warforged Artificer Mac OS Guyver has been a joy to play. A former grenadier from a battalion of warforged from that had suffered the loss of their familiar company mascot, Ziggy, during the latest war, Mac hit the end of his service life and decided to live as long as he can to see just what a warforged could become. ( I had read that Warforged are considered "old" when they hit thirty, so there we started). With a daring, adventure addicted attitude, Mac spends most of his time deep in the tombs, caves and ruins around the mountains of Icewind Dale, indulging his boredom and curiosity concerning the meat- cultures surrounding him. Ignorant of cold, poisons and other trifling irritations, Mac doesn't feel compelled to take much of his companions concerns seriously, and plays at senility for the fun of it. With the lowest charisma score in the party, he managed to abuse his knowledge of local religions to bluff his way into a convent to free his companions of cursed items. When pressed for bribes by town guards, he flashes his eyes, grinds his oral gears in a fashion similar to a fax machine; then from his mouth falls a lifelike drawing of the hopeful bribees with Mac's signature emblazoned across the image, in binary of course. When asked if he's concerned of his advanced age, he remarks that he's been warned of something called "ramp-antsy". Surely, many warforged become obsessed with repetitive tasks with time, but who would spend the time to make ramps for ants? Would they even care? In the clamor of combat, Mac drops his charade; mostly because he knows he can only irritate his traveling companions so much before it stops being fun. Recalling skills he's not bothered to appraise anyone else about, Mac has repurposed the traditional tools of the archeology trade with stupendously violent effect. The last thing several gnolls, a troll, a water weird, bandits and other sundry scallawags have seen in the past month is a crowbar with the word "Problem Solver" etched across its length catapulted towards their forehead. If they're unlucky enough to live, they get to experience the superior negotiating skill of a shovel with "Always Be Closing" printed across the blade flying forthwith. After crafting a magic cannon in the image of his favorite cat, Butterscotch, he's yet to find himself on the wrong end of an encounter. The cat bit comes from our DM not finding a cannon icon for the forge program we're playing through and using a housecat image as a placeholder. For the most part I'm trying to play him as a robotic Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China; sometimes annoying, sometimes indulgent, a little stupid, but determined and diligent when it counts. I picked all his proficiencies and skills as on-character as possible: history, arcana, languages, and spells like Jump and Catapult. About half of our party of 6 people have never played DnD before and the rest aren't particular sticklers for minutia when a fun idea comes up, so it's been a good experience. In our most recent session, we needed to apprehend someone we believed to be an infamous murderer, performing ritual killings for a local ice diety. We knew he was acting as a bodyguard for a merchant caravan, and couldn't lose him in the town, so we tried to intercept him en route by claiming to be from the Imperial Revenue Squad, come to collect him to sort out a billing error in his favor. This didn't work, so I attempted to melt the ice bridge out from under them at the next crossing with Butterscotch in flamethrower mode. The DM allowed us to attempt this just to have the caravan move north a few feet, because a cat sized flamethrower wasn't going to catch them by surprise, magical or not. So we ended up in combat, slaying bugbears while demanding they pay their taxes, losing half the party to a wild magic sorcerer exploding immediately, but working through the crew and knocking out our target. Good times so far.
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Feb 8, 2021 00:03
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 I am playing a true disaster of a D&D 5e character right now, Skathi Thrysce, former cleric and now unexpectedly a Celestial warlock and socialist after appealing to the gods to become less terrible at everything she attempted. It's been a lot of fun as this is the longest and probably the most serious (in terms of character arcs and RP) D&D game I've played, so a lot has happened in terms of character development. My concept began as "what if an elf got too cocky about their ridiculously long lifespan and affinity for magic and learning and became extremely lazy and unmotivated to do anything." So at the start of the campaign she'd left home, realised she didn't have any money or connections in Waterdeep and joined the temple of Kelemvor as an apprentice undertaker, learning a little divine magic but ultimately getting very good at doing precisely enough work precisely well enough to never be given any actual responsibility, and treating the whole thing as basically a gap year internship. To make ends meet she also ended up working as an assistant to a highly dubious gnomish barber-surgeon who patched up adventurers and victims of bar fights, did anatomical drawings for doctors and naturalists, did a little bit of copying and clerical work for whoever needed it, and wrote bad poetry. Basically she worked countless small gig jobs to keep herself in a comfortable amount of money which she spent entirely on books, snack foods and ornaments for her quarters at the temple. This was mostly motivated by resentment of her immensely successful parents - her father a wizard who after retiring from his teaching position at a wizard college became a celebrity chef (and basically fantasy Guy Fieri) and her mother a retired paladin now the ruling noble over a stretch of farmland in the cold northern parts of the Sword Coast, a title given as a reward for her defeating an Orc warlord. If father wanted her to be a powerful wizard, and mother was seemingly constantly disappointed she wasn't eager to go out and smite Orcs, she decided to run away to the city and work minimum wage jobs. All this changed after a couple of years when she realised she was bored. It was an easy life, drawing skeletons and doing bookkeeping and working as a funeral director, but it wasn't fulfilling and she started to realise as long as her life was, she was wasting it. So with a little bit of a nudge from her surgeon friend and her parents acting anonymously, she ended up going to a rough tavern at the wrong time, getting into a bar fight and joining a gang of noble phantom thieves (and one distinctly chaotic good paladin) in a plan to steal a massive fortune from the corrupt nobility and put it to good use helping save an orphanage and help the working class by helping the shipbuilders' union. Unfortunately she was still scrawny, even more unfit than ever after a couple of years living with no exercise, minimal sunlight exposure and an unhealthy diet, and got her arse kicked repeatedly in every fight. So she, with some humility, wrote home asking for advice from her parents about how to become an adventurer. This led to her being initiated into a secret order of holy warriors dedicated to Kelemvor (hence the class change from Cleric to Warlock) and suddenly gaining a lot of useful magical abilities. As the campaign has gone on I've played her as starting out as shy, always deferring to authority and unwilling to make decisions to now learning that - in Waterdeep anyway - most "authorities" are self-serving and corrupt and that sometimes you have to trust in your fists as the City Watch won't help you. This causes occasional moments of internal conflict as her mother is still (in her mind anyway) a paragon of what a knight should be (selfless, heroic, genuinely caring for the people she is responsible for ruling etc), but with the party's no-nonsense smite-happy Paladin being a moral compass this has led to some very cool character moments of having to learn "yes there's a difference between someone who is a good leader, who puts their life on the line to protect those who can't protect themselves and someone who believes they have the right to rule because their parents were rich." At the current point in the campaign she has successfully won two duels against a very unpleasant nobleman who made the mistake of insulting her family for not being a suitably highborn house, firstly by using a fear spell to make him run away screaming from a short, unfit elf, and the second time by using Hold Person to immobilise him, steal his sword and then threaten to hurt him badly if he crossed her again. She also has a familiar in the form of a sarcastic talking deer that claims to be an embodiment of the gods of the underworld, which is a great sources of character interaction with the rest of the party and their menagerie of familiars, animal companions and rescued magical creatures including a young dragon.
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Feb 8, 2021 15:04
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This week I hit level 20 for the first time in a D&D campaign that's been running for over four years. Micah of Nid started as a joke name to go along with his sword Cordyceps. The original concept for this character was an intelligent magic item who would change hands from person to person, switching hands to a new hero with each level up. But that seemed logistically annoying and maybe the kind of cute idea that sounds more fun on paper, so I chickened out and made a standard fighter with a magic sword. Micah was a simple farmboy who loved legends and sagas. When his plow turned up a masterwork sword wrapped in ancient heraldry, he immediately recognized it as the call to adventure that it was. It brought to mind (read: subtly telepathically implanted) a half-remembered story about a lost set of matching magical armor. If he could recover that armor, he'd be the greatest hero in history! He set out on his quest and fell in with a team of companions with their own stories to tell. Despite the sword's best attempts to steer the party to its own devices, Micah never found the armor. Cordyceps exerted more and more influence on him, granting him questionable powers (Eldritch Knight subclass) and raising the suspicions of his companions. He was too naive and proud to admit anything was wrong with his perfect hero story, and when its welfare was threatened directly the sword would take over his body to defend itself. Eventually this came to a head when he killed several city guards who were attempting to take the sword away. Because the party was supposed to be on good terms with the city's rulers, and because they were supposed to defend it from an apocalypse dragon the very next day, the rest of the party swept that incident under the rug as best they could so that could deal with it later. They didn't have a chance though because Micah was killed in battle and when he was raised Cordyceps had assumed full control. They forced Micah into an anti-magic cell and vowed to search for a cure. That was year one of the campaign. In year two I played a different character while the party searched for components to a ritual that could bring Micah back, while doing other side quests and continuing to save the world from the apocalypse dragon cult. In year three Micah was restored and got over his distaste of magic enough to form a bro-like friendship with Osdra, an NPC goliath wizard who was hired mostly to teleport the party around. In year four...I admit I didn't have the most consistent characterization because we've been playing over video chat and that is not a good element for me. As year five gets underway I'm looking forward to finally defeating that dang cult once and for all. As a group we commissioned many pieces of art for this game, but here's Micah and Osdra in one of my favorites. It's non-canon because he never had that big dumb evil sword when he knew her.  Yawgmoth posted:That sounds incredibly awesome. I love everything about this. wizzardstaff fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 18:10
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Khisra Valton was probably my longest-played and most enjoyed character from the 3/3.5e group that I ran with in high school. She was a half-elf lawyer by trade who had no awareness of the fact that her voice was magically persuasive until she ended up defending a client in a major city where magical detection was employed in every courtroom to avoid shenanigans. When she caused the alarms to go haywire just by emphatically speaking what she believed to be the truth, it became all the town gossip. Luckily, the right ears heard about it, and she was coached into the way of the bardic profession by the local guild, and then sent on her merry way, armed with the knowledge that knowing the law can allow you to skirt right along its edges if need be. Mechanically, all of her Bard abilities and stuff was either oratory or lawyer-themed. Bardsongs were verbal contracts woven with her magical voice. Bardic knowledge was her cross-referencing those esoteric bylaws that no one enforces but somehow related to the truth she was after. Rather than stand in the back and just chant her contractual empowerments of the team, she took to the front lines, armed with (eventually, after multiple years of adventuring) twin rapiers - one of cold iron named Biting Analysis and an adamantine rapier named Scathing Objection. She acted as the party's very stoic and almost ascerbic-at-times face, mediating god knows how many disputes over land and territory, always pushing her luck as hard as she could for more rewards for our party after a job well done, and eventually resulting in the formation of a bard's guild with her name on it dedicated solely to the voice as an instrument. She also got every other party member acquitted of crimes great and small, including our DM basically doing their own version of the NWN2 Courtroom Scene like four years before that game even came out. The only thing she never did that was on her bucket list (so to speak) was talk her way into nobility. So it goes.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:07
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wizzardstaff posted:Micah of Nid started as a joke name to go along with his sword Cordyceps.  wizzardstaff posted:I love everything about this.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:38
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My favorite at the moment is my changeling divine soul sorcerer, Everybody (far right).  They aren’t actually a changeling, but are instead the result of some kind of resurrection accident, they are every member of two armies all brought back as a single person. They’ve been around in their current form for around 3 months and are figuring out how the world works and what their identity is. Kind of a space case, just wants to see people and try to understand them, and just starting to develop a sense that other people have rich inner lives. They’ve been more or less adopted by the barbarian in the party (second from right), who found them when they woke up for the first time. They used to be in disguise full time, but stopped when members of the party started referring to them as their cover identity, so now spends most of their time in the form of a changeling because people seem to understand that best. They seem to shapeshift mostly as a prank, they introduce themselves by saying “we are Everybody,” and when people give them a strange look or express some kind of confusion, they’ll repeat themselves: “we are *Everybody*. We’re you too.” And then change into their conversation partner long enough to freak them out. Despite access to cleric spells, Everybody has been mostly the party DPS. Being basically raised by the barbarian has taught them that most enemies can be dealt with by one person if you hit them hard enough.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:24
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Damon Noptereche The Noptereche lineage dates back thousands of years, once a proud house of Monster Hunters and wizard slayers, it is now in decline. First Son of Horus Noptereche, a relatively wealthy merchant lord in the city of baldor, he grew up knowing the finer things in life. Recieving a brilliant education and excellent physical training, he quickly became interested in the tales of the Noptereche ancestors. Fascinated by the stories of bravery and swordsmanship, he decided at the ripe age of 16 to bring the family back to it's roots. When a strange cult desended upon the outskirts of the city, it was up to him and a few other like minded individuals to investigate. What they found was a necromancer using his foul spellcasting to turn his cultists into abhorrent undead monstrosities. Damon, not knowing how dangerous magic can be, immediately tried to put an end to this foul wizardry. The mission was a complete failure, not only did Damon's brash resolve lead to the death of his three comrades, but he barely escaped with his life, cursed for seemingly the rest of his life with lycanthropy after one of the wizards enforcers, a werewolf by the name of Bragg slashed his chest open.. Stumbling half dead in the snow fields of Baldor he glimpsed a sight he could not comprehend. A light in the dark blizzard. It spoke to him, comforted him and warmed him. This thing that found him later turned out to be his most trusted mentor and colleague. Lorelei, of The Fume, a secret organization devoted to rooting out monsters and dark wizards everywhere. Waking up in a small collage next to these new allies, he could only feel overcome with grief and guilt at what his actions had wrought. After a time, and noticing the full moon was rapidly approaching, he could only reach out to these new companions for help. he couldn't trust the himself anymore, he couldn't go back to his family with this monster inside of him, he had no choice but to put his faith in these strange individuals. A swashbuckling paladin named Jezelle, a master smith and mechanic named Nadia, and a stern, gruff, half petrified man named Petyr. They knew ways of restraining him which would not harm him, and would allow the night to pass without him bringing harm to anyone either. Over time, Damon came to study Lorelei's spellbook, eventually taking up the arcane arts himself, seeing it as a necessary tool to combat evil who would use it against the weak. He also vowed to take revenge on that foul necromancer, Kuzaad gravves, and his henchman Bragg. After writing his own spellbook, and forging his silver longsword, Luna Maxalar, he headed once again into the foul underground recesses to investigate and fight evil once more. This time with a clearer head and a more stoic demeanor, he is as ruthless as he is cunning and will do whatever it takes to ensure the safety of his friends and companions.
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Feb 12, 2021 05:42
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| # ? May 8, 2024 18:03 |
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mellonbread posted:One of my favorite ways to make a memorable NPC/villain is to start with "what is the worst thing they've ever done" and then work backwards adding details that make them likeable (to the audience, not necessarily the characters in the game world) or fun in spite of that. Theres two things that haunt my character to this day. The first is a little more ambiguous, I was trapped by a group of slavers with one of my companions and had to rely on my lycanthropy transformation to kill them all. Damon isn't so much averse to killing evil men, he just hates that he had to rely on a "curse" given to him by another foul creature. The second, is after discovering the government of my home nation was plotting to have me assassinated for meddling in their plans to open a portal to hell, I had to use my trusty throwing knife to assassinate two innocent workers before they could see me. I was so averse to taking the lives of innocents that to avoid doing it again I had a breastplate forged that not only was glamoured but could change my actual appearance for a time.
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Feb 12, 2021 05:53
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