Character Ideas

[Elle]

My current title is "cleric thief" because I am a special agent working for a temple of Callistria, dealing with property crimes and lesser torts. When a situation can be made right again by Robin Hooding it or otherwise levying a fine that the offender doesn't want to pay, it's my job to make that happen. I work in league with an assassin who makes me question my faith a little because she seems more like an organized crime hitwoman than a righter of the scales of justice. I get why the rinkydink town court doesn't provide justice for the kinds of offenses I resolve, given that it's financed by some of the same people who are likely to offend. Petty bribery and influence, nothing more. But the judge usually takes murder or major crimes seriously, and if he already decided a case, should we really be taking a bounty - I mean, donation - from the victim's family to carry out justice? I need to talk to a high priestess, but we're the only ones here. Maybe if I went to find one in a bigger city...

[Reika]

Calliestra isn't about justice, she's about vengeance which isn't quite the same thing. It's quite within her purview to exact revenge for those who didn't get the justice they were looking for.

[Elle]

That is a good point, yes. Our young cleric here probably sees it as justice, but is having a hard time figuring out what counts as neutral vengeance and what's actually evil.

[Zen]

I have been tossing around an idea for a Martial Artist/Druid character... Perhaps having the final part of the Monk training being some kind of survival test in the wilderness where some sort of awareness of nature awakens, leading the character to pursue a new path?

[El Jefe]

Zen, you could also look to the skinwalker race, mix that well with druid/monk. Throw in a Feral Weapon Training feat for whatever natural weapons you go for, and you've got a rather potent "natural" knuckleduster. Unchained monk is an option, but there are probably some better choices with standard monk via archetypes to make things fit.

[Zen]

Hadn't looked here for a while... I'll have to check those out! Probably a while before I'll get a chance to use this idea. (Unless my current character is killed by a dragon... At which point I'll probably need to make something pretty quickly and was thinking of just rolling up her father as a 9th level something-ranger and have him show up at the funeral because he had heard rumors about a half-elf who looked like a former lover of his in Sandpoint. Probably an easy replacement If Kay's combat style ever catches up with her.)

[Mike]

Ha. Didn't even remember there was another thread with the same name... although for some reason I thought this one was campaign-specific. Oh well. I'll combine these.

[Mike]

Snowfoot

Pathfinder. Dhampir Shaman (Life spirit)

I originally created Snowfoot about 8 months ago for a campaign that never got off the ground. Rediscovering him motivated me to create this thread. If we ever get to playing that Winter Witch campaign after Runelords, he could make a really fit there I think. That is, if I haven't come up with 18 other equally interesting possibilities in the intervening three years.

The concept here is a dhampir healer who, ironically, cannot heal himself. He will have limited fighting ability and low hit points, and probably be kinda cowardly in practice. Very emo.

My name is Setsuke, but I have been known only as Snowfoot most of my life.

My father died when an ox kicked him in the head. Four months later, my mother, heavy with child, was bitten by a jiang shi. A filthy, shaggy vampire-witch that dwelt beneath the snow around our mountain village. Kodo, our healer, nursed her back to health, but she wasn’t the same. Or so they tell me. My mother died bringing me into this world, and immediately, Kodo knew that I bore the taint of the grave. Aswanigami, she called me… half-vampire… daywalker… dhampir.

But Kodo was a stubborn old fool. She was intent on saving me from the darkness. She surrounded me with the magicks of life and worked to infuse me with vital energy, to drive out the stain around my soul. She even severed a portion of her patron spirit, a grand, glowing, rainbow-colored eagle that the people called Komada… giver. That new-formed spirit thing became Omichi, my own guardian spirit. But where Komada had been master of the air, filling the sky when Kodo worked her magic, my Omichi was small and tentative and timid, a snow rabbit like the ones that lived all around us. But timid or not, Omichi has not left my side in the century since that day.

That was a surprise, by the way—realizing that I did not age. Kodo did not succeed in “curing” me, but thanks to her efforts, I can walk boldly in the daylight like a normal human. Not that anyone would ever mistake me for a normal human. Kodo raised me as her own, but she was old. She died when I was 14. After that, I lived with her grandson Kenzo and together we studied to be healers. Or rather, Kenzo studied, and I just followed along, putting in as little effort as possible. Kenzo became one of the greatest leaders of our village, and it is thanks to him, I suppose, that they didn’t drive me away sooner than they did. But Kenzo was mortal as well, and he eventually died. That left me nearly 100 years old and still looking and acting like a spoiled petulant teenager. I withdrew from the world to be with my spirits, living off the kindness of the village. But eventually, they came to see me as a freeloader (which I was) and worse than that, a token of bad fortune (which I might have been). Not long after that, it became clear that staying there was no longer in my best interest.

I have wandered from town to town, nation to nation, eking out a living where I can, usually by theft. But my powers are growing. Things are changing. I still do whatever I have to, but more often now, I can peddle my healing skills to others for a little profit. I managed to stow away on a ship, and my healing power saved me from being thrown overboard when they found me. The captain’s favorite mistress was gravely ill, and I promised I could heal her, if only they didn’t kill me. It turns out I wasn’t lying. I was as surprised as anyone.

And that’s how I was brought to this place. Or at least, that’s how I was brought to this town. Stealing from a temple is what got me to this particular cell, I suppose. But I don’t plan to be here long.

[Mike]

Cricket

Pathfinder. Human Gunslinger (Pirate)

I've got stats on Cricket, but no formally written history. Like Snowfoot above, Cricket is originally from Tian Xia. She is a Gunslinger, but has been a pirate by trade. She was inspired by tales of foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, quick-tempered deadeye Calamity Jane. In personality, I would model her after Jayne Cobb. She's a selfish hedonist, like to such an extreme that she has at least a couple kids that she's had and almost immediately abandoned over the years. Now she has something that she actually cares about (not a person, but I don't know what this will be yet... I'll let the campaign define it). Her life is changing, and Cricket's not sure she's pleased about that.

[Mike]

Whoa. Okay, Cricket has changed significantly.

Like a lot of you, I love taking standard character classes and seeing how I can subvert them (see Order of the Stick: intelligent fighter as team leader; ranger with no wisdom; dim-witted bard). So in that spirit, I've decided I want a Warpriest, but a Warpriest of some deity you wouldn't think of as having militant holy defenders of the faith. Enter Sun Wukong. He's a monkey god of mischief, trickery, freedom, and hedonism. He is Chaotic Neutral and wanders the earth in the form of a drunken martial artist, picking fights, wooing women, and drowning himself in alcohol as the mood strikes him.

So Cricket becomes a Warpriest of Sun Wukong. Much of her history above remains the same: hedonist, ex-pirate, etc. Except now she's Chaotic Good, and her worship involves the freedom and pursuit of happiness aspects of Sun Wukong. And as a Warpriest, it is her roll to smash that which seeks to harsh our vibe. She adventures to have fun and to spread the liturgy of pleasure-seeking, and it is her mission to take up arms against people and laws and systems and customs which seek to limit the pure enjoyment of life. Anti-slavery. Anti-"morality"-laws. To her, property is a rather fluid concept. Stealing from those who have plenty is not a sin. Cricket would never use the term "warpriest", but the abilities are the same.

[Elle]

I needed to come up with more details about a Mom for my NPC, and was simultaneously bothered by the basic fact that we all play a game for multiple years, leveling 1-10, while the in-game time passed is only a few months. Nothing you can do about that, right? Except what if you assumed that the character you started with at a low level was already extremely powerful in terms of unexplored potential? So it's not really that she's training to become a more skillful fighter, or that her encounters make her a better healer than she was before. Rather, she simply hasn't yet let out in public all the awesome multi-level potential she already has inside. Her first efforts to unleash these powers will be halting and tentative, and gradually she'll become more assured and intentional about her abilities, until the point when it makes sense to start talking about learning new things. Perhaps that happens for one character at level 9 - so the way you conceptualize the character is that she was always walking around as a [dormant] level 9 until suddenly she had to start taking action. After exercising her abilities, at some point she not only learned to use them well (leveling up), but started gaining some brand new ones or enhanced ones too.

This way of thinking about development might work for many classes of character, but the one it makes most sense with for me is a Witch, as Pathfinder describes them. The Witches don't always know where their powers come from and it's not necessarily a happy thing. So they might never have let them loose in a deliberate way before, or not in public, or not in the service of some specific project as one gets in a campaign.

The character I have in mind is already a mid-level, fairly powerful witch, but for many reasons she has put all that aside and paid no attention to it for years. It doesn't really fit with her religious outlook, she's depressed and uninspired generally, and she doesn't see her witchy powers as useful for solving real-life problems she needed solved. If she wanted to dig into it and experiment, she'd find herself very quickly in possession of many specific "spells" (or hexes), but she simply hasn't done that. In a few months she could pop up to a very high level to match that innate ability, and then maybe at some point it would make more sense in the story that she's learning new things.

[Mike]

I don't worry about the story consistency of Pathfinder advancement. It's designed for epic zero-to-hero stuff, and it doesn't form a realistic narrative as far as progression goes. And I'm okay with that. I just ignore it and move on.

However, I've thought about how you might make it more reasonable if you wanted more "realism" to the story. The Pathfinder Unchained stuff does give you fractional progression so that you gain your various abilities in stages throughout each level instead of just all at once. But that doesn't really make much difference to the realism when a group like ours goes from complete novices to regional superpower in two months. Alternately, you can just run a campaign with really slow progression. For this story arc, that would involve spacing out the events of the six books and then adding in a bunch of filler material in between, side quests and personal development and that sort of thing. So that by the time we get to the final book, four or five years have passed, and we have the in-game experience to match our abilities. Of course, that requires playing a 20 year campaign (IRL) instead of 6 and only leveling up once a year.

Alternately, we could do like most epic movies and just do an occasional montage. Run the campaign exactly as we have been, but then every two or three levels, we get a break in the action, and the team gets 2-4 weeks off in-game before the next crisis takes us back to the main plot. During that "break", we all develop our personal stories if we want. Get whatever shopping done we want. Assume serious training montages, ala Rocky or Empire Strikes Back or Hercules (the Disney version) or whatever else. With a montage system, we'd have our characters going from 1st to 10th level in six or seven months instead of just two and a half. Still fast, but with a little more logic behind it.

It's an interesting thought. I don't think Rise of the Runelords is really designed for that. The books keep dropping clues and leading us from one danger to the next with a sense of urgency. But it's interesting to think about if creating a more plausible progression for a new game was important to someone.

[Kyle]

It's not a player character, but it is a recurring character that will be appearing in my youngest kids' campaign. His name is Tater McWhiskey, and as their first mission with their new characters, they are going to be approached by the local tavern owner and told that Tater McWhiskey is a giant leprechaun (meaning he's the size of normal elf) who has cowed the tavern owner into giving him free food, drink and board for the last several weeks, or else he'll put a leprechaun curse on her- but by giving him the free stuff, he'll give her some of his leprechaun luck. Anyways, the characters are tasked with following Tater when he leaves the tavern to see where in the woods he's stashing his gold hoard. As they sneak around and follow him, it becomes clear that Tater isn't a leprechaun, but just an alcoholic guy in a leprechaun suit (and an ill-fitting one at that) that wonders around and spends whatever money he can con off people on gambling and women. They're eventually going to be tasked with confronting him and demanding backpay for the services and food he got from the tavern owner. It will resolve however it resolves, but Tater will eventually get away (either through cunning or through running really fast) and will periodically show up in future adventures.

And, of course, he's actually a real giant leprechaun.

[Elle]

And I would like to eat him whole at this point one month in to dieting.

[Zen]

It is very interesting the way RotRL takes you from raw potential to superstar in what seems like moments.

[Cazmonster]

[Phoebe]

Would still eat.

[Mike]

Farmboy/Hunter

My son wants to play a 15-year-old farmboy turned hero. He wants to specialize in mounted combat, riding a giant hog into battle while wielding a scythe. Holy shit, that is too good an image to not make it work. He suggested cavalier or fighter specializing in mounted combat. I suggested we flip through the classes with animal companions. He settled on .

It works amazingly well. As we went through powers and abilities, he fell in love with the magic trappings of the class as well and has built a family history of witchcraft and ties to nature. Plus there's an animal companion archetype for Charger so he can have it as a mount. Without my prompting, he suggested that his pig be just big enough for him to ride as a 15-year-old, but then as his character advances, so will the hog, getting bigger and tougher and gaining combat abilities as the tusks come in, etc.

Eli really outdid himself on this one. This is the most originality and personality he's ever put into a character. And for the first time, being interesting is more important to him than just being badass. Granted, this kid is still pretty badass in his own way, but this is the kind of character I'd want to play myself. I'm so happy.

[Zen]

Bravo! That is one hell of a character!