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I'm stuck in a rut for character creation, and am looking for interesting characters with cool backgrounds. I've built a Musket Master, multiple clerics, a trox barbarian, a tiefling wizard, and a half-orc qinggong monk. I want to keep going but nothing really is tripping my trigger.
So who has cool characters that haven't seen the light of day but should make it into a party? Lay 'em down.
Hm. Well, I recently made this guy for one of Rednal's games, but it didn't get in.
I still want to use it some day, but perhaps it will spark some small inspiration?
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I'll start it out.
Sammana Thorden (Friend of Bones in dwarven I believe)
Female Changeling who after being dragged out of town into the nearby swamp as a child by a knight of Iomeade, was raised by the undead in a temple of Gogunta (boggard goddess of the swamp). Became a cleric of Gogunta (Undead Lord Archetype) who communes with and raises the dead as her friends and even keeps one with her as a companion, but due to her mistreatment as a child stays away from civilization and makes money as a boatwoman using her undead friends to help ferry and guide people through the swamp.
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I'll start it out.
Ouch.
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I'll start it out.Ouch.
ahaha aha! I can't stop laughing!
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My Paladin lost 4 points of INT to a Deck of Many Things, I said, "My brain hurts!" then changed his name to Mr. R.H. Gumby, Paladin and hilarity ensured for the rest of the campaign. I know it's not quite what you're asking about but I've found that when you're uninspired, finding a real world character to base a PC on is often all you need to do and the character often builds themselves from that point. Wasn't sure I was gonna play a 8 Int Paladin but thanks to Python he became the star of the campaign.
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There are a hundred great character ideas on the forums, and yet Set's Mordecai always seemed very haunting to me.
And then despite such a Gothic Horror backstory, or maybe because of it, the character totally turned into a comedy of errors in game, which made me love him even more.
I kind of want to revisit Thrain, my NG Dwarf Barbarian (name ripped from Tolkien, I know) since the campaign she was in got shelved.
To be honest, she started off as a deliberate of one of the characters from my fiction, but ended up taking on a life of her own so that Thrain is similar to Hrūt in personality but is not the same.
Basically I really hate the unintelligent "rawr i hit head" brute stereotype of a barbarian so Thrain was written to be bitter about said stereotype and defy it proudly, while still being quite brusque in her dealings with others.
That latter bit has something to do with the fact that I optimized her to have +12 to intimidate at level 4 because I realized I could.
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"My brain hurts!"
It'll have to come out. All the bits of it.
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I have no idea what class I'd go with, but I'm toying with the idea of a retail clerk oriented self-insert with serial numbers filed off, someone with decent Perception(for seeing shoplifters)/Sense Motive (for picking up on fast-change and other scammer)/Stealth (For getting to break during busy times at work)/Profession: Merchant/Knowledge(Local)/And some other things I haven't given a solid thought on. Probably using a broom as a melee weapon to start.
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The number of characters I've got lined up... Here are a couple that I think are especially good. Some have been done, some haven't:
Partially because this is a horrible race/class combo and partially because I want a rage prophet.
Munchy was once a great hero in his local goblin tribe. So great that he started getting arrogant. And so Lamashtu punished him in the most horrible way possible for a goblin: She made him deaf. Now he can only communicate by reading things. It makes him very angry.
Combat-wise, he can bite and hold onto things and also cast spells at them, thanks to the Deaf Oracle Curse.
My Harrowed Medium (You can just ignore the playtest report and look at the character fluff)
Paladin who supports slavery. They find hopeless people and give them a decent sum of money, then turn them over to a kind master who's fairly certain to treat them well and give them training. Or otherwise give them food, shelter, education and money via slavery. Probably even just short term slavery. Character sprang up mostly because it seems like a counterintuitive combo, and to illustrate to my gaming group that slavery is technically only lawful, and when done in some ways it can even be good. It's just most of the time it tends not to be.
The rogue who *really* wants to be a wizard, and pretends that they actually are to everyone. They put on a big show, and do really flashy things with magic all the time. But they can't actually do magic, they just spam use magic device, take advantage of the Bookish Rogue feat and Quicken and Empower Spell-like ability feats. Eldritch Raider archetype helps a lot with this. They're sort of bitter about the fact that they're not actually magical and they're just faking it if anyone finds out.
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munchy scribbleface is the cutest name ever, I love it.
I want to hug your goblin and rogue, and teamkill your paladin. c:
(coming from me, that's a compliment)
Marking for interest.
Ravingdork's Crazy Character Emporium has its own whole thread -- I haven't checked it out in any depth, but it's got longevity, which suggests that it's got to have something good in there.
And I have some character ideas in my profile (open the spoiler) and aliases (2 of 3 statted up in the latter). Meaning that as work permits (very slow), I intend to develop my own UnArcaneElection's Weirdo Collection. (Also need a new computer before I can resume work on this, because a phone just doesn't cut it for that.)
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I have two characters whose stories will probably never be revealed, especially since they are passed over NPCs I made as choices to round out a 3 player party running Hollow's Last Hope and Crown of the Kobold King.
The first is Kid, a Female Halfling Rogue (Flicher Archetype). Not many choose to end up in Falcon's Hollow by choice which makes it a decent place to hide if you don't want to be found and Kid didn't want to be found. Having escaped from Cheliax she hides among the drown trodden people of the town keeping a low profile stealing just enough to survive and only from those few who can afford it. Her life has become one of concealment and deception tricking even those few who know her into thinking she is just a human child. She barely remembers her real name having adopted the name Kid which on some level actually aids in her ruse. She has become close to the children of the town and can point the PCs in the direction they need to go or if convinced even join them in their adventure to save the lost children.
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If you can find it, there is a great article in Dragon Magazine #225 called "I'm Okay, You're One-Dimensional" by David Clark. I always recommended it to both new players and old time players, who haven't read it and who are uninspired when making a new character. Also Jim Holloway did the artwork for the article!
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I don't enjoy building characters for the sake of building characters. I do very much enjoy designing a character to fit a concept or storyline, which is one reason I absolutely approve of the Players Guides for Paizo's APs.
For example...
A few years ago, the campaign was Thralls of Thrune. The PCs would be a band of adventurers who were enslaved by House Thrune, and sent on near-suicidal missions. The promise was eventual freedom. The GM instructed us to come up with a reason for being enslaved to House Thrune in our backstories, and to let that influence our design choices.
I conceived of a priestess of Desna—a faith that's outlawed in Cheliax. Thinking about how this person would have survived long enough to become a problem, and knowing that Desna's faithful are often storytellers and musicians, I decided that she would have been posing as a bard. The deceptive part of that concept made me remember the Hidden Priest archetype from Inner Sea Magic. Thinking even more about a traveling troubadour in Cheliax, I decided to make her Varisian. I thought this choice would help inform how she could travel around spreading Desnan philosophy without drawing too much attention by the Chelish or Asmodean authorities.
With all that in mind, I then designed the game mechanics for Valeria Baladin.
^I do this for most of my character concepts. Problem is: I most easily come up with character concepts that are really hard to build . . . .
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Caina Smabukra (last name is little claw in Orc)
Half-Orc monk
Born in Katheer from a drunken pairing of a keleshite and orc. Mother abandons her with her father. Turns put to be good father until the tribe is killed by other orcs (good orcs vs. bad orcs) and in trying to save her father has her tongue cut out to stop her screaming. Dumped in Katheer as a slave but is kicked out on the street because of race(Racists...they exsist. Even in RPGs). Picked up and raised until adulthood by cleric of Andoletta, a seemingly ageless old crone with a strict but fair attitude(possibly actually Andoletta herself). Finds out her biological mother is still alive and take off into the big world as a mute who cannot tell a lie in search of her.
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There are a hundred great character ideas on the forums, and yet Set's Mordecai always seemed very haunting to me.
And then despite such a Gothic Horror backstory, or maybe because of it, the character totally turned into a comedy of errors in game, which made me love him even more.
Thanks!
I think the 'A Day in the Life' notion of not just writing up a backstory, but coming up with a typical day for the character (grittier and more prosaic and less gothic for Mordecai) was more relevant to where the character was *now.*
Other games have done that too, and I found it useful to get into the feel for the character's present, instead of past.
(For instance, a Council of Thieves character was a foreigner whose father had died in Chelish custody, and was there for revenge, but that backstory was less relevant to the current storyline than her day to day work as a spell-for-hire and the NPCs she interacted with as competitors and customers.)