#RPGaDay
Day Eight – Favourite Character
Isn’t this one of those things
you’re meant to never ask a roleplayer? I know I’ve certainly done my fair
share of boring other people to death with my beloveds. Indeed, the primary
purpose of this blog was to be able to share detail of various characters
without having to see that glassy-eyed response in my audience…
But the truth is there is
something lovely about the enthusiasm with which a geek speaks of their
favourite characters, so I’m really pleased to see this here.
I love most of my characters, but
those I am most deeply attached to are, probably unsurprisingly, those I have
played the longest – so Kamaya, Plays, ‘Mathilde,’ Kella and Svetlana are I think
my top 5. It is very hard to pick between them.
Kamaya
Kamaya was my character in the
first ShadowRun game I played – a Canadian Japanese-Native American elf adept born
to a human family, she had travelled to Seattle to avenge the death of her
brother (hooked on BTL’s). She joined the game after achieving this and feeling
at a loose end. I intended her to be more of a pacifist, only killing if
necessary and using non-lethal bullets. Of course, these don’t pierce the
armour security guards inevitably wear so I soon gave up on my lofty ideals and
was as much of a killing machine as the louder players and NPC’s (there were
pacifists in the group, but they were quieter so placed less peer pressure on
me).
When the GM got his hands on the Magic in the Shadows supplement, we
adapted the character to be a shaman-adept, with Cheetah as her totem because
she was so fast. Her preferred weapons were some uzi-type gun whose name I
forget and her monofilament whip – she lost this in the Renraku Arcology (which
I would love to revisit because we barely scratched the surface) but on the
next corpse was told she could find another (yay for puppy-dog eyes) with a
target number of 30-something on a D6. I reached 40.
Eventually, Kamaya became so
powerful I felt it was time to retire her. I had a nice little plan to set up a
chain of pubs, clubs and restaurants and set herself up as a fixer with these
as her front. The GM wanted to tie off one plot (we’d seriously pissed off Ares
Corps) so had her best friend (NPC wolf shaman Tark) cranial bombed to death in
front of her. Was a bit upset by that because it meant I couldn’t retire her,
even though we’d agreed it…
Starlight aka Plays in Shadows
My character in the modern-day
Werewolf part of the Awesome Uni WoD Campaign, I have spoken about Plays
before. I really liked her innocence and child-like nature (a theme we will
return to with both Kella and Svetlana) but am not going to add to what I’ve
already written.
‘Mathilde’
I played Assamites in the Vampire
parts of the WoD with Starlight/Plays. One of the other players played Ravnos,
and they looked a lot of fun. So when another friend at uni invited me into her
Vampire game, I jumped at the chance to try them out.
The game was set in Austria or
somewhere in that area, in the early 19th Century. My character
introduced herself as Mathilde, a Toreador passing through. It didn’t take long
for the other players (although not their characters) to twig there was some
masquerade going on: I kept making vaguely feline paw-to-face style motions.
Owen, playing the excellent Russian Malkav Jana, had me pegged as a Gangrel
from the first session I joined. I think he was as amused as I when it finally
tumbled out I was actually a Ravnos.
My character never had a set name
– she was old enough to barely remember the name she’d used when alive and was
known by those other Ravnos on the same path as her (one from the Ravnos book)
as Ursel (something the other players never knew) and chose a new name for
herself every time she changed location. She’d been born in India and had grown
up as part of a group of travellers with a Ravnos vampire living in their
caravan. She’d had her eye on my character, and when I was deemed old enough
she changed me with the agreement of my parents.
I really liked the character.
Most of my characters are healers and basically nice: this character had ‘bully’
as her nature and her weakness (which worked very well with Jana’s nature of ‘egomaniac’:
every time I bullied her it was all about her so we both regained willpower. An
accidental bit of powergaming!) She was where I learnt about being a trickster
and I found that a lot of fun and very liberating.
Her primary focus was chimestry.
She was very fey/wyld orientated – her overall goal was to wipe out all
vampires to free the energies caught up within their bodies. One NPC, a
Lasombre called Maxmilian, ended up blood-bound to her because he wanted
chimestry and she wanted the shadow power whose name momentarily eludes me. His
tentacles were thick and tentically. I always pictured hers as more delicate
and tendrilly – like a bramble or climbing rose.
Kella
I’ve spoken about Kella briefly before. She was my character in an epic homebrew game based on Final Fantasy 10.
Kella started out as a white mage (of sorts) and ended up a summoner. She had a
child-like naivety that was an external façade, a shield to protect her from
the horrors of the world. Inside, she was steel and determination but to be
able to maintain that she needed this other appearance. Svetlana can be a bit
like this.
I think Kella is so dear to me because
she had a younger sister that my GM played exactly like my real world younger
sister without having met her, for her beautiful love story and for the
intensity of the game itself: it left me in tears more than once.
Svetlana
It’s probably obvious that I
rather like Svetlana. She’s my character in the Pathfinder campaign that makes
up a large amount of this blog and she’s lovely. She’s optimistic, confident
and caring – she is, in many ways, the person I would love to be. Kella and
Plays share this with her (although there are times when I would love the lack
of care for others that marks ‘Mathilde’ – the way she does things for her own
entertainment without even considering another may have feelings that could be
hurt. Liberating in small doses, but not something I could deal with doing in
the real world).
I’ve said a lot about Svetlana in
various places on this blog so I’m going to leave you with my GM’s description
of her:
With thanks again to Autocratik. His Day 8 is here.
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