In honor of April Fool's Day, I thought I'd ask a little about creating characters: what's the most objectively "ridiculous" character you ever created who was nevertheless quite serious within the context of the adventure or campaign in which he appeared? I'm not interested in hearing about characters created specifically to be jokes but rather characters who, when viewed outside the context in which they appeared, look to be purely absurd when they in fact are not.
For example, long ago, I had a recurring NPC in my Gamma World campaign of old who was a mutant chicken called simply The Colonel. He was a military genius and a member of the Ranks of the Fit cryptic alliance, so he terrorized the PCs and indeed the whole area out of which they were operating for some time. But he looked and acted like Foghorn Leghorn from old Warner Brothers cartoons, right down to his Central Virginia accent. The Colonel was a perfectly serious Gamma World character and a dangerous foe of the PCs. To an outsider, though, he'd probably have appeared to be solely a joke. He was humorous in origin, obviously, but I didn't create him just as a gag -- quite the contrary in fact.
So, has anyone else created characters like this? Characters who possess ridiculous elements but aren't themselves ridiculous?
Not sure if this counts, but I did have a Gully Dwarf character once, with abysmal stats, unable to count above 2, generally all round poor. He was a proper character and all, not played for laughs, but he was hopeless. He would go scouting and come back, reporting he'd seen only two monsters, when of course there were many more.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can remember, my characters (PC or NPC) are usually played straight.
It's not my own characters, but players in my current campaign have created a psionic, hyper-intelligent cat and a flying monkey (as in Wizard of Oz). Both characters are completely serious in the context of the pulp-era dimension-hopping campaign (thanks to lots of adventures in the lands of Faerie).
ReplyDeleteRetoad the Retard - a BECMI magic user with all 3 stats, a mute, and knows only the spell ventriloquism and can only make badly sounding cat meows with it. Me and my DM (in those days) ran him through the Basic adventure in the book and he survived! In fact he survived for a few quickie adventures. We begun to joke about how maybe he'll make it to name level and invented his theme song "If he can't do it, you sure can! He's Retoad... the retard!!". Than he died.
ReplyDeleteWe would later make Retoad II, III, and IV; but all died right away. There could be only one Retoad.
Lathargic the Lazy, the self proclaimed petty god of lazy napping.
ReplyDeleteA recurring NPC who told all he was a real god, the god of laziness. For food and shelter he would share his dogma to all (Why walk when you can be carried, why be carried when you could sleep). Was he a charlatan or a god?
Azmar! A minotaur gladiator champion who talked about himself in 3rd person, "I am Azmar!" He would spend his time flexing his muscles in the arena while the PCs fought the arena monsters and come in at the last moment for the final kill and all the glory. One PC decided his halfling saw Azmar as a real action hero, and would play his PC always starstruck whenever he met up with him, even when he was a level 17 paladin in charge of the South Amn.
Zvarks the merchant kobold (NPC). A kobold who drove around in a wagon selling gear, especially his flying rock - a rock tied on a string. He would "wake up the rock" and begin to spin the string. A flying rock (and the string was *only* there to keep the awaken rock from flying away)!
Captain Jerkoff and the crew of the Rentaprise, like Commander Spook (wind gensai), Dr.Bones (a lich), LT.Woof (werewolf), and the All-star Bard Band (Five 20th lvl bards who played the "fight song , da da da daa da daaa da... you know the one! They never fought, just played the fight song for the crew). Again recurring NPCs who the players would get a ride on their ship.
After debating bell curves vs. linear progressions, we decided to play a game with characters created by rolling 1d20 instead of 3d6. Amazingly I managed to roll both a natural 20 and a natural 1, in Strength and Constitution respectively. Trying to find an explanation for these wildly opposed stats I came up with: Gramps the Destroyer! Clinging to the memories of his halcyon youth when he was your typical muscle-bound oiled-up loin clothe wearing barbarian warrior, Gramps manged to maintain his muscle tone and insisted on continuing to go on crazy adventures. However, his bones were brittle and combat would end very quickly for him one way or another. "Behold, the awesome power of... ow, my hip!"
ReplyDeleteConan the Librarian.
ReplyDeleteHe was a Barbarian, per Unearthed Arcana rules, and was actually a pretty serious character with sub-9 INT, and 18/00 STR. He wielded a two-handed barbed sword which per our rules did d12+1 damage. Basically, he was license to produce untold carnage and game imbalance on unsuspecting NPCs and randomly rolled monsters.
But hell, we were 12 years old, so it was way cool.
A guy I knew was in this lengthy campaign where he was always getting annoyed by this bumbling, senile old wizard. Turned out he was actually the high god of the campaign's pantheon in disguise. What a crock.
ReplyDeleteI ran a space opera campaign where the players were aboard an automated starship. Its security drones were called O.D.I.E.'s (Offensive/Defensive Intruder Eradictaors). They looked and spoke like Daleks: ERADICATE!!!
ReplyDeleteThey were quite loyal, except for the Medical O.D.I.E. that spoke in a heavy accent and acted like a mad scientist.
Kiirsti MacDouglass, a character for Lords of Creation, and one of the few times I've presumed to play cross-gender. She was a Finnish-Scottish-Japanese ninja.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if this one fits well with the whole "in context" or not. A friend of mine started up a 4e campaign in the Forgotten Realms, and I noted how the setting had gone through every single edition of D&D within, what, 50 years of the setting's history?
ReplyDeleteSo I made Argyle the Red, an old, senile wizard who wore a musty, moth-eaten orange robe (it used to be red!). His back-story was that he lived through every edition of D&D. When he cast Fireball, he would throw out some bat guano, and then pick it back up when it didn't disappear with the spell. He constantly prefaced his sentences with "Back in my day...". All the other characters just chalked his rants about how "the physics of the universe keep changing!" up to him being senile.
Our opponent was once a werebear with bouts of mania and depression. He was quite dangerous and nearly wiped the party twice.
ReplyDeleteHe was of course, a bi-polar bear.
I once played Ambush Bug in what was otherwise a very grim and dark CHAMPIONS campaign. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambush_Bug He had extradimensional teleport so he could leave the comic and go read the letters page when things got too hairy (as they often did).
ReplyDelete-The Gneech
Not my character, but I played in a campaign with an annoying Paladin who led a competing party of adventurers named Algore the Glorious. One of my own character's missions (I was a 1/2 orc assassin) was to ruin him, personally and professionally...
ReplyDeleteP-tom said: Conan the Librarian.
ReplyDelete"What is best in life? To shush the noisy, to see them driving home, and to hear the silence of the library."
I created a whole super team of misfits for Marvel Supes. The two stand outs were a guy who had a toaster for a head and "The Stink" which was a giant so huge that only his foot would fit in the PC portrait box. You can imagine what his power was.
ReplyDeleteA heavy engineering robot struck sentient, who was woefully clumsy but, due to the GURPS advantage "perfect balance" was also able to walk a tightrope.
ReplyDeleteShe (the only sentient robot in the setting, she identified female on a coin toss) was merely eccentric until the night the rest of the party went carousing and she tagged along... and suffered Rientsian carousing fallout that made the collected players wince. After that it became increasingly difficult to play her straight.
Not as crazy as a chicken, but an AD&D thief named, Mhee (pronounced, Me). The game centered around a group of cutthroats who were paid to infiltrate the houses of nobles. Due to the characters high charisma (15 whoo!), he was tasked with target distraction. Simply walking up to the house guard and giving his name turned into a Monty Python skit, which ultimately drew a lot of attention due to argument and aggravation. All the while his comrades quietly slipped by.
ReplyDeleteI really hate absurd names, but for this campaign it made for a really effective character, and great roleplay.
Just to show how James M's blog is influencing my playstyle, in our current ADD1 game, I play a 1rst level wizard living in a remote village who deliberately dons a pointy hat and moons-and-stars blue robes , because he thinks it will impress people. Of course nobody takes him seriously because the party also counts two multi-classed elven mages...
ReplyDeleteAdnd2E Planescape. Played a rogue modron. Big box with a single eye. He was unnamed, my necromancer companion simply called him "Box" and thus the necromancer was named "Box Rider" for his habit of riding atop my character, which seemed to please Box.
ReplyDeleteBox wielded a two-handed sword that he never saw fit to sharpen and which he drug along the ground behind him.
His signature attack was to run into an enemy, knocking them over, then proceed to dance on them, crushing them with his immense weight. Dance of Death, 2d12 for as long as it is maintained.
Box also had a bad habit of crashing through the walls of Tanari bars, which frightened the necromancer immensely, and equally amused the tanari.
In my Star Wars campaigns, one of the players ran a Tusken Shaman who later became a Jedi. The player was unable to come up with a name for his character right away, so one of the others just called him "Bob"- and the name stuck. "Bob" the Tusken Jedi is, on its surface, a rather silly concept, but he has since turned out to be one of the most interesting characters in the campaign, and has truly become (with a few exceptions) a paragon of the Jedi ideal...even if he is still a barbarian at heart.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite is from my current game. Diego Silverclaw, blackbear vampire, right hand of Strahd. Silly, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteNow for the background. We're playing 3E Expedition to Ravenloft at work. New guy joined our group and as a first time player, he started off as a first level human rogue named Diego. He was quite a bit below the rest of the group, you have to learn the ropes, you know. So he got to 4th level, and died. So the Druid of the group used reincarnation...and he came back as a black bear.
With this new body, he became REALLY effective. Especially after he had his claws dipped in silver so that he could effect the werewolves they were fighting at the time. So he decided to take a few levels of barbarian. So he was a 3rd level rogue/3rd level barbarian, named Diego Silverclaw.
Then woe happened, the player got fired. Oops. So what happened to the character? Strahd bit him and he became a vampire. With the varied bonuses from the black bear and the vampire template, he ended up with something like a 27 dex. The rest of the group lives in mortal terror of him.
I love this type of thing because it is sooo unusual and it could only have happened due to the random dice rolls that happen in play.
The most recent Big Bad for my current 3E campaign featured an eighteen-inch tall, thoroughly deranged and genetically degenerate (and evil) gnome called The Infallible Alchemist.
ReplyDeleteHe wore pink and purple silk outfits, overlong capes and tall hats to make himself more imposing. He would respond with any perceived slight against his ability with rage and a long rant.
At first, everyone thought that he was just silly and eccentric. Then, when he summoned a devil out of the depths of the earth, stole hundreds of souls of innocent bystanders, changed one of the party into a guinea pig, and started killing people with sheets of lightning, they took him a bit more seriously.
The Infallible Alchemist's best line, in my opinion: (handing his business card to a PC, consisting only of a black circle on a white background) "Here's my card, share it with your friends."
PC: "But why is it just a circle?"
(one of the players actually saw the next line coming, and spoke it along with him...almost)
IA: "Because it's the perfect number!"
PC: "Umm...a circle isn't a number. You know that, right?"
IA: (snatching the business card away) "Give it back, and get out of my shop!"
Haggis Sneed, AD&D1e novice magic-user and wilderness chef. Voice of Don Adams in Maxwell Smart/Inspector Gadget mode. 'Nuff said.
ReplyDelete2E, Forgotten Realms
ReplyDeleteEl Capitan, a fighting man with true 18/00 strength (I actually rolled it in front of several witnesses!) who specialized in darts, wore a custom made bandolier, a massive sombrero and was obsessively compulsive about maintaining a 5 o'clock shadow. Gamey as hell but he was a hard man extraordinaire.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, my DM would often insert him into some of his other campaigns as the Mysterious Stranger who arrived on the scene to help out a party in dire straights. In one of his unrulier campaigns filled with unrepentant power-gamers he was one of many NPC's the DM used to reign in out-of-control PC's. Dispenser of justice and retribution etc.
It might be more suitable for the"cheating stats" thread, but one of my favorite characters of all time was a magic user I dubbed "Gek, the Incompetent". The only one of his stats higher than 10 was his 14 Intelligence. He was 4th level before ANYTHING failed a save against one of his spells. I expected him to promptly die, but nothing could kill that guy.
ReplyDeleteGek's first encounter was a giant spider. It chewed its way through the entire party before reaching Gek (who was wisely cowering behind the others). He then proceeded to club the AC: 3 arachnid to death with his staff, rolling three consecutive Nat 20s.
Monkey with a plasma cannon. Just... a monkey with a plasma cannon.
ReplyDeleteOne of the NPCs that my players confronted once was a very muscular bald man, extremely deadly with his magic composite long bow, but he didn't have legs at all. As a compensation, he had a belt of flying, which allowed him to move and the funny thing of this is that he was able to fly over his companions and shoot at the players in a corridor while the other NPCs (as deadly as him) were slashing at the PCs in melee!
ReplyDeleteIn this group (named the Chaos Team, a well earned nickname for this party whose goal was to rival with the PCs party during a deadly competition) there was also a very muscular "giant dwarf" (he was 6 feet tall) completely naked except for his loincloth and, as a weapon, he was wielding a deadly club made with the femur of a former demon prince (so it was an evil relic).
And another member of the Chaos Team (they were six at all) was a high level chaotic evil halfling assassin with a wand of wonder and a compulsive urge to use it as often as possible...
We laughed so much during this game...
Hey folks,
ReplyDeleteTwo come to mind. 1) a Dark Cleric had a Troll warrior as a companion. For some odd reason, someone nicknamed him "Fluffy." So he was forever Fluff the War Troll, upon which players would reply, "Awwwwww... "
2) I had lots of fun playing an R2 unit in a Star Wars game. Pretty silly concept but played seriously. He kept wanting everyone to add cybernetics to be more like him.
Ciao,
Andrew
My campaign has a very strong Law/Balance/Chaos theme from Moorcock. Many of the adventures stem from the fact that a bored Chaos Lord, Balo the Jester, has taken an interest in the PC's who are 'always toddling about the wilderness sticking their noses in to the business of others..." He also takes delight in complicating the plots of one of his rivals, Dartilla, normally by inserting the PC's in harms way in direct opposition to her agents.
ReplyDeleteBalo's tool in Quindia, Pincoch the Leo, is a capering Champion of Chaos who dresses in the classic garb of a court jester, including bells on his hat. He acts as a patron or foil, helping or hindering in equal measure. An ever present prop is a hand puppet that he holds one sided conversations with - seeking advice, information, or insults. Recently the appearance of the puppet has changed to a caricature of one of the PC's who more actively seeks a path toward becoming a Chaos Champion himself.
My players are delighted and wary every time they hear the jingling bells and tittering babble that normally precedes the appearance of the Chaos Champion...
Quindia is actually full of ridiculous things... Captain Ron (as brought to life by Kurt Russel in the movie) with a gnome mate called 'Swab' in coke-bottle glasses is frequently encountered when the PC's are in a port city...
ReplyDeleteMeelfus Zeeblirock is the master of the Tower of Sometimes which changes location. It is actually mounted on the back of a giant tortoise which may be commanded to carry the tower to it's new destination. When in motion, powerful illusions hide the procession and when arriving at it's new location, the monster becomes semi-ethereal and sinks, rather than burrows into the ground (thus leaving no trace of the pit when it moves on again).
Dr Who (the Tom Baker version) met the characters briefly as well, though this was on a jaunt through the planes, not on Quindia.
Melf the Mushroom Mage, a myconoid magic-user with a wand of fireballs, joined the PCs for one adventure in the underdark.
Humor is always part of my campaign and seems normal in Quindia. My players always embrace these strange characters and events...
For some reason, many of the trolls in my campaign wear three-cornered hats and are delightfully witty. I had a recurring 'ally/scoundrel' troll named Rextion-Q that my players still miss.
ReplyDeleteThe Tease, a teenage raver endowed with the ability to copy others' skills and superpowers and armed with a bag of joker-style gag weapons. She rescued her uncle, the mayor (and secretly the Freedom Eagle), and decided it would be fun to humiliate villains in her spare time... plus hopefully get her points with her crush, the local Batman expy.
ReplyDeleteJoke in real life/dead serious within the context of the game describes most of my characters really. Off the top of my head, there's...
ReplyDelete- My half-orc paladin princess (whose claim to the throne is somewhat hampered by the absent King's regents cover-up of his secret "husky and tusky" fetish).
- The wandering monk who believed they had committed the greatest sin imaginable by spilling a glass of wine in what was actually a low key ritual whose main purpose was letting everyone see toddlers in cute outfits bringing things to a priest, leading to a lifetime of searching for new forms of atonement.
- Princeton Whimplethorpe, the scrawny fair-haired promising acting student who spontaneously became a (Shadowrun) troll in his late teens, ruining his career.
-I was once in a campaign where everyone was using a random fantasy name generator which, immediately after I declared I was making an aquatic elf, spit out "Navy" and "Blue." The fact that I was making an aquatic elf for a landlocked campaign is probably worth noting as well.
Elvish, the 12th level Elven Minstrel, King of Rock n' Roll, and hunk-a, hunk-a burnin' love. He was a bard/Elvis impersonator who preferred sequined jumpsuits over armor and always wore a pair of stylish shades. He was my ridiculous, though still quite effective, character during the latter days of D&D 2nd edition.
ReplyDeleteYou can see Elvish's character sheet and illustration here:
http://rpggeek.com/image/940189/personal-character-shrine
For the one session of a Stormbringer game that I ever played in, I created a character who had the lowest possible Size rating. So, a midget. And I wanted him to have a mount to ride, but even the donkeys and ponies available were too big for him. So he bought an animal that was not only smaller than a donkey or pony, but also smarter and cheaper too. A pig. But the GM so couldn't stand the idea of a midget riding a pig around in his oh-so-serious Stormbringer game that he decided there just happened to be a powerful sorcerer around who took a hating to him and killed him -- and his pig too.
ReplyDeleteI played as Sancho, a mutated, bipedal, talking horned-toad wannabe-scholar in a campaign of Metamorphosis Alpha. Whenever he really needed to put thought into something, he put on his "thinking cap", a sombrero discovered in a corner of the ship. What other purpose could it serve?
ReplyDeleteThe 200+ year old character in Ringworld. Because the rest of the players had rolled more in line with the expected curve of characters, the GM felt this guy would dominate. So he was suffering from PTSD from the Man-Kzin wars and couldn't remember most of his past or skills. In a crisis, or at random (I had to remind the GM at regular intervals to let me throw D% so he could check his own random effects table), things would come back to him. Sometimes useful, sometimes not.
ReplyDelete@ Ed Dove:
ReplyDeleteThat's a shame: You're character was perfect for the Stormbringer world, especially if he was aligned with Chaos.
Haven't see Boot Hill mentioned here yet - but Dettlinger was the coward to end all cowards. He fought the Gunfight in the OK Corral's Outhouse and once, when an NPC asked "You a man or a yeller-bellied SOB?" fell to the ground barking and complaining that someone had painted his belly yellow...
ReplyDelete"What is best in life? To shush the noisy, to see them driving home, and to hear the silence of the library."--toddroe
ReplyDeleteThat's brilliant! I read it to my wife and now she wants to run a barbarian librarian.
The A-Team: three warriors and my dwarf: they were totally badass, and I had the pleasure to be B.A. Baracus, a black dwarf with a mohawk, wearing a chainmail overall and a big number of necklaces made of ears picked from dead enemies.
ReplyDeleteOh, he was very afraid of ride on a chariot, since there were no planes...
Anthony:
ReplyDeleteMy pig-riding midget was *sorta* aligned with Chaos. He worshipped the previously mentioned Balo and embraced his vision of combining Law and Chaos to create Paradox. The GM didn't like that either.
Hard to decide, as I've always had an attraction to the outre. However the latest one was Squeek, a monkeysquid that was a powerful magician (in Swashbucklers of the 7 Seas). Surprisingly workable and fun character.
ReplyDeleteAlthough my favourite would have to be Fred and Ernie. A rather friendly two-headed Dragonsnail who constantly argued with itself and could only breathe fire by accident (or when made to giggle). A surprisingly likeable (and rather lonely) Chaos monstrosity. [Runequest]
Sometimes the outre characters worked (in context of the overall game); other times they didn't, in which case I soon retired them (usually well before the GM requested that I do so, which is how I got to keep trying strange juxtapositions of characters).
The Mighty Thanatos: an aging, punch drunk gladiator in an all to brief Xena & Hercules game. He carried no weapons and wore only the tiniest of tiny loincloths. He could barely remember how to speak - the only words anyone ever heard him say were "I am the Mighty Thanatos!" in an outrageous Arnie-esque Austrian accent.
ReplyDeleteHe didn't even deign to carry weapons: he would simply pick up some random mook by the ankles and swing him around like a club. He was originally played for laughs but came to be something of a tragic figure when the other characters finally figured out that he really was a simple, gentle soul, who truly could not figure out why people always seemed to want to hurt him. The mini-campaign ended up changing direction altogether when the other players worked out he had been cursed by his father Ares for being a bit of a wimp. In the end, Thanatos died before the curse could be lifted, but not before he found the simple pleasures of finger painting and paddling in puddles.
He was, you might have guessed, rather strongly based on a certain character from the Goonies.
We all must have had a "Conan the Librarian". Ours was in charge of the archives of the local Magic Users guild. Things got ugly when one of our party borrowed something but couldn't get it back on time
ReplyDeleteParty member - "Conan the Librarian, I beg your forgiveness! This tome is 3 days overdue".
DM as Conan, leaps from his chair and in his best "Arnie" voice, "Eat cold steel scum!".
Needless say, the party brawling with their librarian was not the best way to ingratiate ourselves with the local MU guild.
In a Vampire - The Masquerade, I had an NPC human named 'Kowalski' who was a taxi driver. Kowalski was a stereotypical Brooklyner (although the game was set in Washington DC).
ReplyDeleteWhenever the PCs took a cab, regardless of the situation, it was always Kowalski who picked them up. He also spoke in stereotypical catch phrases ('youse guys', 'fuggitaboudit', 'buncha mooks') and complained about the tip ('buncha cheepskates').
Eventually, the PCs started using their vampiric powers... not to dominate Kowalski, but to rob a bank of 1 million dollars in which to tip Kowalski.
His response: "Nice tip... buncha cheapskates."
Clearly the most illogical character I've ever incorporated into a game.
Several years later, I ran a Trek game and had a helmsman based identially off of Kowalski (except I changed his name to 'Sparks').
What was I thinking?
Well, I once had a dwarf based on Yosemite Sam.
ReplyDeleteSomeone made a gay hobbit named Dildo Baggins in an AD&D game I was running. Complete with animated gif.
ReplyDeleteDildo Baggins' nickname should be "Tea".
ReplyDeleteI'm late to this, but here is my most ridiculous character, Yukiko Akizuki, a schoolgirl Yamanba Shinto priestess I played in Feng Shui.
ReplyDeleteFeng Shui is a shit system but that campaign really brought out the imaginative best of all of the players.
As I am going to post in my second A-Z blog post today....
ReplyDeleteI ran a Drow in a friend's campaign, named Cevek (which I pronounced as suh-VEEK). He wasn't very good with common, so he pronounced everything phonetically. He ended up sounding like an escapee from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He annoyed the rest of the party to the point where they just started calling him Honda (figure it out ;).
Thadeus, a Malkavian Vampire played in a WoD game. A Vampire who thought he was a Civil War sniper who was an anachronist to the point that modern technology would fail when he got near or he might frenzy b/c it clashed with his derangement.
ReplyDeleteEnded up using the character for an entire school year. By the end he had the insane ghost of Abraham Lincoln as his spirit mentor and it was proved that he was turned into a vampire during the civil war.
Sir Francis the Pink, a flamboyant swashbuckling NPC pirate inspired by Zorro: The Gay Blade, the Erol Otus PC in the Rogues Gallery, and the original logo of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (winking, with a pimp hat and a dagger in his teeth).
ReplyDeleteWhen the party first saw him in a tavern, Francis was minding his own business, but one PC--Thorkon, a half-orc warrior--challenged the pirate to a duel, motivated by simple homophobia. Thorkon was a battle-axe wielding brute with 18/something strength, but Francis swiftly cut the half-orc into ribbons with a two-fisted cutlass and dirk routine, fueled by his 18 dexterity. The party's cleric managed to save Thorkon's life, but the half-orc's dignity suffered irreparable damage.
Of course, I couldn't resist bringing Francis back into the campaign. On a subsequent seagoing adventure, the party's vessel encountered the pirate's fleet of seven pink-sailed ships. The PCs carried the day, sinking six vessels and forcing Francis to flee in his flagship.
However, that night, Francis returned to mount a devastating counterattack: his flagship rammed the party's anchored ship, boarded it, and perpetrated a TPK. The party's watchmen didn't see it coming, because the pirate flagship was sailing without light under Silence spells, piloted by the captain's half-elf fighter/mage lover, who then cast Haste upon Sir Francis and the rest of the flagship's best fighters. The battle claimed the half-elf's life, making it a Pyrrhic victory for Sir Francis.
I don't generally delight in TPKs, but this was my finest strategic moment as a DM: taking the remnants of a force the PCs had just defeated and then besting them with it.
My players have never forgiven me. Twenty years later, they still yearn for a chance to kill the legendary pirate.
I've also used joke names occasionally for otherwise serious NPCs:
A double-classed monk/mage named Hu Wen Hao.
A belligerent Celtic pubcrawler named Hamish McHaggis.
Brian, your gay zorro reminds me that once I played a single adventure of that Gygax spin off (was it Fantastic Journeys? I can't even remember the name) in which my character was a eunuch monk. He was absolutely deadly, and flamboyantly neutered.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid all my characters wind up ridiculous. It must be some sort of radiation.
ReplyDeleteOrble Littlefang (e.g. Horrible Little Thing): Half-Orc foundling raised by clerics. Wise, ugly, strong, terrible temper.. used a table leg as his weapon of choice.
Set marKesh: 374th in the line of the marKesh family. Also, a necromancer. With the shtick that all of his undead were the previous 374 generations of marKesh family members...
There are quite a few others, I'm afraid. I once played a food processor in a Star Wars game. That might be the low point.
I'm intrigued, Faustus. What did "flamboyantly neutered" look like?
ReplyDeleteJared, I love the necromancer who animates his ancestors. I'm going to steal that one.
I like the food processor, Jared. Did it have any attacks?
ReplyDeleteBrian, my "flamboyantly neutered" character was straight out of Arabian Nights central casting - fat, eye make up, a lot of gauzy layers of shirt, and pantaloons. He used the poncy manner to hide the fact that he was absolutely deadly in close combat (unless you had no arms - he was a wrestler).
He was, of course, a harem guard before taking up his adventuring life. So a hit with the ladies, too (not that it was any use to him...)