Gallery of Rogues: Past Characters

Active Characters | Memorable One-Shots


Elegie

...would be played in the movie by: Virginie Ledoyen

Best Moments: Befriending her familiar, a tressym (winged cat) who turned out to be smarter than some of her traveling companions; always telling the truth -- without necessarily telling the whole truth; blessing the cathouse

The Lowdown: Elegie and Forbes were my first characters developed for a long-term campaign. Or at least it was the closest thing to a long-term campaign I'd been involved in. In truth, it was primarily a series of dungeon-crawls and random encounters loosely tied together by our desire to "get stuff".

Elegie was a cleric, a priestess of Bast; and, the system being AD&D 2nd ed, she spent most of her time doing cleric stuff like healing her companions after they'd gotten beat up. She never became as well-developed as I had hoped, in part because the campaign ended after a few months when one of our players moved across the country; but she was a good starter-character and introduction to the world of RPG. And not just to the role-playing aspects, either: When we all decided to buy and paint miniatures representing our characters, I learned how hard it is to find good depictions of female clerics who aren't built like a pair of helium balloons on a stick. Heh.

Forbes Dusktree

...would be played in the movie by: Brendan Fraser

Best Moments: A resurrection that wasn't quite all it was cracked up to be; one heck of a bar fight

The Lowdown: Forbes was a stereotypical big dumb figher with good intentions. He wasn't a bad character, but I found my cleric so much more interesting that it wasn't 'til my gaming group switched from AD&D to GURPS -- several years after this campaign ended -- that I tried playing a fighter again.

Forbes became more interesting late in the game quite by accident: In a fight with a giant, he got beaned by a thrown boulder, died instantly -- the GM rolled maximum damage, and felt terrible about it for days afterward -- and had to be resurrected (in a surprise plot twist thrown in by the contrite GM) by an eccentric old man who lived in the mountain. Yes, the GM felt really bad about killing off my character -- but not so bad that he was willing to bring Forbes back to life without some interesting side-effects: Because the man in the mountain specialized in earth-magics, Forbes's physical form became somewhat clay-like. Normally, this wasn't a problem at all -- but when he got wet, he became a bit... squishy. Upon getting dumped in the moat after a bar fight, he spent some time rearranging his own face....

Aya

...would be played in the movie by: Hilary Swank

Best Moments: Befriending the dire wolves that guarded an enemy keep; keeping the party from being sitting ducks on the water with a well-timed Obscurement spell

The Lowdown: Aya, bless her heart, was an unlucky character in a doomed AD&D campaign. A druid, she was at her most useful when using her healing and animal communication skills. She wasn't too bad in a fight, either, except that the dice hated her with an unholy passion. Casting a spell to slow down the enemy? Oops, you got hit with an arrow before it went off. Charging into battle? Sorry, kiddo, the guy in front of you falls down, lands on you, and knocks you into the pile of paralyzing webbing from which you only just broke free last round. And unfortunately, given the makeup of the party -- which included a berserker and a headstrong dwarf -- we were far more likely to end up fighting everyone and everything we encountered than communicating with them. Add to this my own inexperience as a gamer and my quiet nature, and I spent a lot of time feeling like I wasn't doing very much.

Some combination of extremely poor luck, player flux, and a general diconnect of expectations between the GM and some of the players led us to scrap the campaign in frustration after only about six months. It wasn't a total waste, though: We had some great moments. Perhaps even more importantly for me, this was my first campaign with a large group -- all told, we had ten players, though never more than six or seven at a time -- and I learned as much from watching others' styles of play as I did from playing my own character. In particular, I noted the importance of styling a character to fit the feel of a campaign. Aya was an earnest, ethical character in a campaign where the characters having the most fun often seemed to be the ones who didn't think too much about consequences.

Willow

...would be played in the movie by: a young, pre-sexpot Britney Spears

Best Moments: Using her thieving skills to sample the wares the evening before a town bake-off; single-handedly taking down a huge obsidian-enhanced orc; saving the day, always completely by accident

Quote: [Rummaging through her pack as her cohorts discuss how to defeat a giant tentacled beastie] "I've got string!"

The Lowdown: Willow, a teenaged human AD&D thief, was my first real triumph of roleplaying over stats. This is as it should be, as Willow was also my first character with a stat low enough to get her in serious trouble: a Wisdom of 7. (She compensated with a fair dose of cleverness and a huge dose of cuteness.)

I found that the low stat really freed me up to have fun with the character. After all, she was young, inexperienced, and easily distracted; no one was expecting her to be a strong leader or save the day. The fact that she occasionally saved the day anyway made those moments infinitely sweeter; and I didn't spend my gaming time stressing out about being useful. A good non sequitur could take me a long way.

I first realized what a success Willow was as a character one evening early in the campaign, when our group had an out-of-town guest sitting in with us for the first half of the session. I was in grad school at the time and had some work to finish up, so I agreed to let the guest take over Willow while I worked. He, a seasoned AD&D player, took a look at Willow's stats and equipment and proceeded to play her as a useful, forceful member of the party. When I tagged in a couple hours later, after getting filled in on the party's dire straits, I looked through Willow's equipment list and suggested, in the perkiest, most enthusiastic voice possible, a harebrained scheme involving a ball of string. One of the other players said, "Willow's back!" and the group broke into a round of applause.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering: My red-headed Willow was not named after the Buffy character. I didn't even start watching the show 'til a couple years after this campaign started. My fellow gamers did give me some shit about the name, though -- because it reminded them of the Warwick Davis character.)

Cydrian

...would be played in the movie by: Clea DuVall

Best Moment: A bar brawl that became legend

The Lowdown: Cydrian, my first GURPS character as well as my first character with a significant back-story, was a young fighter out to prove herself. After a plague took the lives of her mother and brother, she disguised herself as a boy, took her brother's name (her own given name was Fiona -- and no, I hadn't read the Amber Chronicles yet; I generated both names by drawing Scrabble tiles randomly from a bag), and presented herself to the Fighter's Guild in his stead for training. That plan worked really well until she hit puberty at fourteen and could no longer keep her true identity a secret. So she set out into the wide world to make a name and a living for herself.

Cydrian actually appeared in two games, a short game (perhaps a half-dozen sessions) our group played to decide whether we wanted to try a GURPS campaign with a new GM, followed by a longer campaign with a different set of characters. (Only two of us chose to carry our characters from the short game over into the campaign.) At the beginning of the short game, Cydrian had had an incredible bit of luck -- whether good or bad was a matter of opinion -- in a fight, accidentally breaking the arm of a guy she was trying to keep from fleeing. The story of the incident took on a life of its own: everywhere the party went, they'd hear a new version of the story, with Cydrian's age dropping and the amount of damage she'd done increasing with each new rendition. The garden-variety village ruffians tended to leave our party alone when they learned Cyd's identity.

The party eventually were hired to accompany a group of settlers to a recently discovered island, where once again a slight disconnect between player and GM expectations bit us in the butt: our party was comprised largely of fighter-types, but most of the beings we encountered were peaceful creatures who just wanted the settlers to leave them alone. We eventually scrapped the campaign in favor of a scenario that would appeal both to the GM, who liked to put a lot of religion in her games and gameworlds, and the players, who were perhaps less religiously inclined on the whole and more inclined to shake a stick at anything that moved.

Kenata the Staff

...would be played in the movie by: Pernilla August

The Lowdown: Our next GURPS campaign turned out to be a high-concept affair designed to combat one of the group's main problems: namely, the near-constant interruptions to ask, "What does my character know?"

In this campaign, we all portrayed ourselves, magically transported into the bodies of heroes in the game-world as a result of a spell gone wrong. That way, what our characters knew would be identical to what we knew. We wrote up approximations of our own mental stats and skills in GURPS terms, and the GM generated physical stats and skills for the bodies we inhabited. Those physical skills were discovered in gameplay: occasionally, something would just trigger a combat reflex, and one of us would figure out he was actually an excellent marksman, for example. Of course, the deal was, the skill could only be used if it was reflexive -- if you thought about it too hard, you wouldn't be able to do it anymore -- and so we'd have to come up with ways of distracting our minds so the bodies could take over. (This led to such amusing situations as attempting to do matrix multiplications in our heads during combat. Did I mention that my gaming group was comprised largely of engineering grad students?)

Kenata was a priestess. She was also, of course, me, so in some sense there's not much to say about her as a character. My big roleplaying challenge was to figure out how to interact with NPCs who thought I was Kenata, given that (1) I knew very little about her history, and (2) I didn't necessarily want them to know that I wasn't really who they thought I was. Interacting with the other priests in Kenata's order was pretty easy, given that they mostly already knew that something strange was up; and on top of that, they were, by and large, a trustworthy group. Roleplaying being cagey around those I didn't necessarily trust with our secret was trickier, given that I'm naturally a pretty forthright person.

It turned out to be a fun campaign for the group -- it certainly overcame the problems we'd been having -- but by the end, I was really ready to explore new characters who would have more of a capacity to surprise me.

Dr. Richard Lazarus

...would be played in the movie by: Alan Rickman

Inspired By: Watching Galaxy Quest and Dogma within a few days of each other; my own tendency to turn every topic into a ten-minute academic lecture

The Lowdown: Dr. Lazarus was a Miskatonic University professor and watcher-with-a-past in Rick Jones's far-too-short-lived Tales Of The Slayer game set in 1920's Arkham. Dry, pedantic, and utterly unable to offer anything beyond a cup of tea to his emotionally vulnerable new Slayer, Lazarus was a hoot to play, and probably my most successful experiment in long-term crossgender play. He was quite a departure from my usual trend of playing young, inexperienced characters -- but, true to my even-more-usual trend of playing the oddball, that was because he was surrounded by college students.

True to his name, I have since resurrected him for a Cthulhu one-shot and hope that I can find him a home in another long-term game. He still has a lot of stories left to tell.

Princess Florimel

...would be played in the movie by: Nicole Kidman

Inspired By: My mother, strangely enough

The Lowdown: Florimel, Princess of Amber, was developed for the (now-defunct) adult Amber game A Grand Affair. Unfortunately, a much faster posting rate than expected kept me from staying in the game very long. Florimel was designed to be elegant but uptight, obsessed with keeping up appearances but harboring secret fantasies deep in "but WHAT would the neighbors think?!" territory.

And she would of course steadfastly deny that her feelings for her queen were anything other than proper love for one's monarch....

Henry Gibson "Gibbs" O'Neil

...would be played in the movie by: Brad Pitt

Inspired By: The Crocodile Hunter; Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson) in Shanghai Knights

The Lowdown: Gibbs is a nineteenth-century adventurer/writer who fancies himself a scientist but who nevertheless is more likely to deploy scientific gadgets pointy-end-first into the haunches of charging wild animals than to use them for their intended purpose. But that's OK -- the charging wild animal stories sell more books than weather surveys, anyway. He and his partner Gabriel, the brains behind most of his scientific expedition, joined the British team to compete in The Lunar Ellipse, a race to Mars and back.

At takeoff, he promptly distinguished himself by becoming instantly, violently space-sick. He has not yet decided whether that part will go into the book. Game on indefinite hiatus.



Last modified: 22 February 2005