whit

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but once on twitter I did a big big thread where I just recounted all the TTRPG characters I've ever had over the close to 30 years I've been playing them and I am going to DO IT AGAIN ON COHOST

microblogvember prompt list

• ORIGINS: every single one of my initial teen D&D characters was a half-elf, a half-drow, or in one case of me being real annoying to a DM, a winged half-drow. I was goth and 13 and no one had a car so none of these went very far. Despite this I have not heard the call of actually playing a drow in Balder's Gate or whatever.

• THE WHITE WOLF ERA. When Vampire: the Masquerade came into my life I had a character whose name I can't remember (Wormwood, maybe?) who was a Malkavian and thus had the mental illness of being sO rAndOm LOL. I played that character literally in a graveyard (on bright sunny summer days.)

The ONE TIME in my life I did shrooms the main result is that I fell asleep for 12 hours and came up with the concept for my next V:tM character, who was a Setite, a bloodline whose thing was CORRUPTION, and thus my like 17 year old ass came up with the GROUNDBREAKING idea: "what if he corrupted people..... through..... THE MEDIA...." folks I know. it's rare to see someone so twisted so young. Anyway his name was Andres and he was like a TV exec and he had his heart stored in a jar somewhere. I only got to play him like once.

• AND THEN I DIDN'T PLAY ANY TTRPGs FOR A SOLID 15 YEARS!!! until my coworker Sean was like, hey, I'm gonna do a Fate game set in the Restoration period with like demons and magic and shit, you in? and I said FINALLY! BACK TO PLAYING PRETEND!

Thus we had Johannes, who was a spy and it was not always clear if the voices he heard were demons or not, except for the one time he did summon Stolas. He once pulled off a SICK move of like jumping from carriage to carriage in a high speed 17th century chase. I couldn't make several sessions so I think Johannes just ended up like, getting sucked into hell for a while? Listen Stolas said he needed payment. And how could you not give it to this little guy?

• Then we had the Monster of the Week game where I played The Mundane archetype, in the form of Jesse, who was 100% based on Harry Styles, and his main role was to be constantly falling over, getting kidnapped, and getting his clothes stolen. The first session STARTED with him naked and chained to an altar. Thank you Sean for knowing how to meet your players exactly where they want to be.

• And then there was Sean's tragically short lived Call of Cthulhu game where I played Walter B. Gibson, the creator of the pulp novel series The Shadow. Yeah I just played the actual guy. Harry Houdini was my ex-boyfriend. Pulled an amazing move in one of the sessions where I convinced Sean I could save Harry Houdini based on me recounting a story that was in Penn & Teller's How To Play With Your Food. Truly sad that most vicious murderer of TTRPG games played by adults -- scheduling difficulties -- cut that game off.

• When I finally returned to D&D after like 20 years, when my friends got all rowdy for D&D after The Adventure Zone came out, I went, well, I was always making elfy rogues and bards growing up, it's time to play a HUMAN FIGHTER, and that's how we got Viv, who was a lumberjack lady working for her wife and kids back home in the cool setting my friend Cathy made that was based on a Lord Huron album. All of us died multiple times and were resurrected by a dark sun. There was a character named Spaghetti Dan. Anyway Viv ended up being the Mom Friend of the party with a canonical fanny pack full of snacks to keep other party members on task. I kept forgetting details I said about her wife back home and eventually named said wife Maa'ris for the Frasier joke.

• And we come to Sereno, sweet Sereno, my boy, the OC of my life, I have been playing him in our Dragon Age-based Pathfinder game nearly weekly for nearly 5 years. Sereno would take a post all for himself to truly explain, but in short he is a very tall affable mortician/necromancer with a completely happy untraumatic background with a normal family on a farm, who over the years has become an increasingly powerful mage full of fucked up spells who has done the most murders in our very much NOT murder hobo party, all in YOU STAY AWAY FROM MY WIFE situations protecting his boyfriend. One time we found out guns existed in our setting when he got shot with a gun. He did blood magic exactly once to save the life of a party member who had decided he was evil and couldn't be trusted and IMMEDIATELY had a demon on his ass. He's got a margay familiar. I am looking at framed art of him on my wall right now. Sereno my boy I love you.

• Now over in the 7th Sea game @pts had JUST started to get going when the pandemic hit, I had Andreiy, whose character summary is basically ACADEMICS HATE HIM: one weird trick to get your fellow tenured faculty to yell at you a lot -- study monsters instead of just hunting them. The most important aspect of Andreiy is that he has a pet crow, Svolota, who just, like, does not respect him at ALL. Absolute fucker of a bird. Perhaps I will return to you one day, Andreiy, and do a bad Russian accent.

• In my latest Monster of the Week game I went against my instinct to do The Mundane again and decided on The Chosen One and that's how we get Jamie Collins, who is just based on one of the guys who worked at the Babbage's in the mall when I was growing up, since that game is based around evil shit happening in a mall. He's just the chosen one and he works in a mall. he wasn't even supposed to be here today, man. Poor Jamie got Rose Bride'd by a spooky drowned lady, sword all pulled out of his chest and everything. The dice have made it so he can only successfully put or pull his chosen one sword out of his chest when he is helped by or having gay thoughts about his coworker, Paul. And since it's 2006, he's kind of an indie rock hipster douchebag. His hair looks AWFUL. I can't wait to get back to that game and ruin his life some more. Some characters you want to protected at all costs, and some you want to put in the goddamn pear wiggler.

• Another game that sadly perished because of scheduling was my friend Lou's xianxia-themed D&D game, where I had Song Tianyi, a sweet boy who got so sick once he lost all of his magic powers. All he's left with is his rustic hospitality, extremely sick ruan skills, and a pair of DSLs. He was a real sweaterboy and I miss him, but I do now use his name whenever I need a name for a character in a video game.

• And then there is GREG.
  
  When @likelyvery decided to start a Yakuza games-themed game, I was still playing the above xianxia game, and I thought, well, it feels weird for my honky ass to be roleplaying multiple Asian people, so I went, "what if there was a guy who was basically my brother but instead of, after going to do the JET program and meeting a lovely lady and marrying her and having two children, he instead joined the yakuza" like what if tho. And I just imagined a Yakuza character intro that was like BUM BUM... Greg. Greg had a fat senior cat named Bocchan, had an eyepatch due to a yakuza-related altercation but is missing part of his pinky due to a kitchen accident, and dresses in reasonably sedate suits but wears shoes like Hannibal Chau. He spent a while isekai'd. His stats were just ridiculous OP thanks to good dice roles. One time we had a Food Wars-ass cooking battle and I got an inspiration point by making the dish I came up for him to make in real life (a salmon burger with chimichurri aoili and pickled shredded daikon and radish.) The Yakuza game became movie club, and that's fine, because Greg... greg is forever.

• And the most recently I decided to premiere a surprise second character in the above mentioned Dragon Age Pathfinder game who was my main character's own shitty uncle who had previously been an NPC. Uncle Jackie, a huge dirtbag of a bard (actual class: rogue/gunslinger, since he ended up with one of the guns that we found out existed via his nephew getting shot by one), a wretched slut in his 50s, stage persona like Orville Peck but actual persona like a Bruce Campbell character. Absolute shithead, so much fun to play. Once rolled like a 34 to seduce the bad guy in a classic TTRPG move. Made his premiere in the game bullying a child. Perhaps he will return someday, that piece of shit.

• And that's all my characters!!! FOR NOW. Just last night I was kind of stoned and thinking 'I should find a way to have a character who is a catboy.' Roleplaying games!!! They're fun!!!!!