Your favorite character

[Blackhawk748]

What it says on the tin, what is your favorite character that you have ever played and why. Its ok if you dont have a "favorite" you can just mention one you liked a lot.

Id have to say that one of my favorites was an Axe and Board Fighter named Armon Fellhammer. I took him through Barrow of the Forgotten King, The Sinister Spire, and Fortress of the Yuan Ti. I didnt know about Shield Ward at the time, so he took the Shock Trooper line (no Dungeoncrasher) the Shield Slam line, and Imp Trip (yes he wasnt really OP) I had a lot of fun charging, tripping and stunning people, then wailing on them with my axe (it was a Dwarven Waraxe......and i was human, ya i know) Eventually i took 2 levels of Barbarian, no ACFs, and Extra Rage, and the beatsticking continued.

So, lets hear some of your stories.

[Crake]

What it says on the tin, what is your favorite character that you have ever played and why. Its ok if you dont have a "favorite" you can just mention one you liked a lot.

Id have to say that one of my favorites was an Axe and Board Fighter named Armon Fellhammer. I took him through Barrow of the Forgotten King, The Sinister Spire, and Fortress of the Yuan Ti. I didnt know about Shield Ward at the time, so he took the Shock Trooper line (no Dungeoncrasher) the Shield Slam line, and Imp Trip (yes he wasnt really OP) I had a lot of fun charging, tripping and stunning people, then wailing on them with my axe (it was a Dwarven Waraxe......and i was human, ya i know) Eventually i took 2 levels of Barbarian, no ACFs, and Extra Rage, and the beatsticking continued.

So, lets hear some of your stories.

Since I primarily DM, and haven't ever really had a chance to play a fulfilled character, I'm gonna bring up one of my NPCs from the first game I DMed. It was an e6 game, and I had planned from the start that the first person to die would get a "free pass" in the come back to life department, but with a string attached. Who it was would determine what string was attached, and it just so happened that the party boy beguiler who slept around was the first to die, so naturally, a succubus. I was initially intending for her to be a bit of a prankster and just sit behind the scenes, pulling strings and messing with the players, but shortly upon his return, the beguiler was somewhat alienated by his party, and pushed into the arms of the succubus, and so their relationship became quite intimate (beyond the obvious haha). Over the course of the game, she slowly transformed the beguiler into an incubus as a "reward", and by the end of it, the player and the NPC were lord and lady of the underworld (custom planar setting). Along the way, they got married (the player and I even wrote vows for it haha), and their anniversary became the campaign setting's valentine's day, and the player, when going back 1000 years into the past, met his succubus wife before she became a succubus, and so perfectly pushed her down the path that would lead her to become a succubus, completely without my need to interfere.

One of the most serendipidous NPCs I've ever run, and I still use her in my current game as a demon lord messing with the material plane for her own enjoyment.

[Blackhawk748]

Since I primarily DM, and haven't ever really had a chance to play a fulfilled character, I'm gonna bring up one of my NPCs from the first game I DMed. It was an e6 game, and I had planned from the start that the first person to die would get a "free pass" in the come back to life department, but with a string attached. Who it was would determine what string was attached, and it just so happened that the party boy beguiler who slept around was the first to die, so naturally, a succubus. I was initially intending for her to be a bit of a prankster and just sit behind the scenes, pulling strings and messing with the players, but shortly upon his return, the beguiler was somewhat alienated by his party, and pushed into the arms of the succubus, and so their relationship became quite intimate (beyond the obvious haha). Over the course of the game, she slowly transformed the beguiler into an incubus as a "reward", and by the end of it, the player and the NPC were lord and lady of the underworld (custom planar setting). Along the way, they got married (the player and I even wrote vows for it haha), and their anniversary became the campaign setting's valentine's day, and the player, when going back 1000 years into the past, met his succubus wife before she became a succubus, and so perfectly pushed her down the path that would lead her to become a succubus, completely without my need to interfere.

One of the most serendipidous NPCs I've ever run, and I still use her in my current game as a demon lord messing with the material plane for her own enjoyment.

That..... is just awesome and i wish i could have this happen in my games.

[torrasque666]

My favorite is the first one I saw all the way through a campaign. Poruk the Destroyer, often shortened to Destroyer.

Warforged Fighter 5/Juggernaut/SLT Barb 1 /War Hulk/Hulking Hurler(it eventually got to epic levels)

We had a player who had managed to seduce the captain of a ship, as well with knocking her up. Because Destroyer was frequently providing a literal wall between him and enemies/spurned lovers/the rest of the party, all of his possessions were left to Destroyer upon his death. Including his wife and, as the dm rolled for it, 12 halfling babies.

His goal was to become the largest warforged in existence. He got most of the way there on his own, through an Amulet of Change(all day polymorph to Warforged Charger) and a custom item of Augmented Expansion. He finally managed to make that last leap through stealing a portion of the divinity of Vol(she had ascended to god-like status by then). Mostly he's funny partly due to the DM's laziness. To explain how he was fitting in these tiny dungeons, Destroyer warped time and space around him due to his great mass. He would then frequently throw said dungeons at people to fight with, dealing thousands of d6s a shot. When I wanted to try to play my first cleric, we loaned Destroyer out to the Lord of Blades as a general of his army. Due to my cleric's belief in the Lord of Blades, he would frequently get sort of a video message effect. In these visions, Destroyer's leg could frequently be seen in the background. Only his leg. Maybe a hand on the occasion that he would provide a stage. I didn't like the cleric so I got Destroyer back for the rest of the campaign. Little did the Lord of Blades know, but Destroyer would one day turn on him. He did and became the new Lord of Blades.


Same domains, plus Halfling. It doesn't actually exist to my knowledge.

[AvatarVecna]

So, my very first 3.5 campaign, I played a monk working with a paladin and a druid; the monk and paladin had cohorts, a rogue/monk and a sorcerer, respectively. Sometime around 10th level, when the paladin was just starting to get a little bummed out by his code of conduct, I was looking around for new characters to play; I liked the monk, but I wanted to get my feet wet in the casting side of the pool. In-game, my monk and rogue/monk cohort went on a sabbatical, and were temporarily replaced by my favorite 3.5 character to date: Annastrianna Nailo, a powerful LG wizard/cleric/mystic theurge...specializing in necromancy.

Accompanying her was a monk who's name has been lost to time on account of "he died after two hours of gameplay, and younger me didn't keep good character records": he was a monk I used to experiment with the BoED Vow of Poverty that had always intrigued me, both mechanically and storywise. Guess how well that turned out? He was replaced with another wizard, this time an illusionist who's name also escapes me (I didn't play Annastrianna for very long; the paladin player threatened to quit after just 3 sessions playing with her). In retrospect, I think the introduction of this character, the logic train that lead to her working with a paladin despite possessing animated undead minions with DM approval (well, allowance, anyway) might have lead to his growing distaste with the paladin moral code.

In any case, I had fun playing Annastrianna: she was more lawful than the paladin, and her short-lived exalted cohort was more good than him, as well. What's more, even after I spent an hour successfully convincing both the paladin player and the DM to allow the character, the paladin spent a lot of time in-game searching for the undead hiding in the forest that Annastrianna swore were just figments of his imagination. You know what made it even better? Two adventures prior, we'd cleared out a bunch of undead from the paladin fortress they'd ransacked, and then followed the heretical cult they were controlled by back to an ancient paladin graveyard where we proceeded to free the trapped souls of the dead paladins from a lich-lord's grasp.

The best part? He'd picked up a phylactery of faithfulness, and the whole time he was searching for Annastrianna's minions, or talking to her, he was getting an almost-constant stream of reminders from the DM that killing LG party members without prevocation, rhyme, or reason would result in him falling.

To this day, I remake Annastrianna in whatever D&D style game I find. Hers was a short-lived adventuring career, but a more memorable one I cannot recall.

[Iron Angel]

Nixerghealghy Rhogulf, "Despoiler of Sons".

http://i.imgur.com/8omkY9O.png

This character was a blast. She was a goblin with a spiked chain and a taste for strapping lads, if you catch my drift. She was part of a tribe of goblins that moved too close to humans, who worshipped Meriadar, and rather than wipe out the goblins, they civilized them. I intimidated an Ogre once. Just the mental image of this little goblin scaring the hell out of an ogre. Priceless. Chaotic good, but had a mean streak a mile wide. Good times. Best friends/drinking buddies with a gnome and a dwarf, on top of all of it.

[Abd al-Azrad]

Annastrianna Nailo, a powerful LG wizard/cleric/mystic theurge...specializing in necromancy.

...

The best part? He'd picked up a phylactery of faithfulness, and the whole time he was searching for Annastrianna's minions, or talking to her, he was getting an almost-constant stream of reminders from the DM that killing LG party members without prevocation, rhyme, or reason would result in him falling...

Reading this frightened me, with how similar your experience was to my own Necromancer in a party with a Paladin. I took a bit of a darker path, however.

1) Possess one of those high-level Magic Item salesmen and sell the Paladin a trinket disguised as a Phylactery of Faithfulness.

2) Possess said "Phylactery of Faithfulness" with a Magic Jar spell, then spend the game whispering lies to the paladin, corrupting him into darker and darker acts.

3) When the Paladin falls, keep buffing him with arcane facsimiles of the spells he was otherwise going to pray for, to make him think he's still got his God watching over him.

Obviously the Paladin's player loved this whole thing, otherwise it wouldn't have worked in the slightest. But it was a delightful game - the Paladin would pray for miracles to a God which had abandoned him long ago, and my Necromancer would somehow make those "miracles" come true. The Paladin would, in turn, transform more and more into a fanatical witch-hunter, slaughtering off my Necromancer's most powerful enemies.

[Manly Man]

One I've mentioned on other threads was a Bard lich I made (played power metal that was most worthy of headbangs) who, while Chaotic Good, wanted to make the world a more awesomely metal place. Unfortunately, after having run out of material over the past thousand years or so, has no idea what to do himself. He then cooks up a plan to draw a party of adventurers along a path of quests that lead up to him, "thwarting" his every plan as he sends them on chase after chase until they finally encounter him. A great and mighty battle ensues- likely atop the rim of an active volcano, during a thunderstorm, with a bunch of undead creatures singing in the background- in which he's defeated. However, the group never finds his phylactery, and so they beat him and just think that's that, when in reality they've managed to give the lich lifetimes' worth of songs to write once he reforms. The adventurers are regarded as heroes for the rest of their days after stopping him and his plans to "destroy the world", and everyone (un)lives happily ever after.

[Sian]

probably a tie between two of my most recent characters

One was a Dwarven Barbarian / Fighter / Battlerager, that had a Charisma of 5, yet had high ranks in Perform (Singing) and no inside voice, and unless the mission explicitly called out for sneaking, he went bellowing in song together with his Intelligent Greataxe (which had a much higher skill check) ... at least once singing so bad, that the party got stuck in a cavein

Second choice was a LN Monk that had a lot of philoshopical debates with the local Paladin, since she came from a country where slavery was expected and accepted and strictly regulated so no violence befell them (as they only bought a minority from slave traders/Pirates, and the rest sold themselves or their children as slaves as a way to get them forward in the world) and in fact was a slave for one of the main military leaders, holding the post as one of his spymasters, while the Paladin was stereotypical Stupid Good, denouncing even the mere hint of slavery while my Monk was very cool and collected about it given strict regulations and lack of abuse

[PaucaTerrorem]

My go-to character, especially for a new gaming group, Father Farnsworth Facesmash. Battle cleric. Primary buffer, secondary melee. He's a stern fellow with a hatred of the undead. Man of few words, but those words carry weight.

[Katana1515]

In terms of 3.5/PF games my all time favorite PC had to be Zabrak Arken'eld. Drow Conjurer lvl10/Diabolist 2. I played as him in a 2 year long 'intrigue in the underdark' PF campaign during my time at uni, and my god was he a glorious b***ard. An egotistical manipulative mastermind he was the undisputed leader of our cadre of magical enforcers, chiefly because he had a habit of causing the downfall of those PC's who got in his way (it was that type of game from the outset not me being a **** honest XD).

By the end of the campaign he was the shadow ruler of our Drow kingdom, the Vizier for the mentally dominated Matriarch, who used a choir of bound imps and loyal servants as a giant spy network throughout our entire region of the underdark. I find that you don't often get to use Planar binding as a PC in most games, but this was a golden opportunity to make all kind of deals with the devil as well, he had a couple of loyal 'familiars' who acted as his messengers/muscle.

The 3 most memorable things about him for me were 1. by the last third of the campaign he was so infamous and had made so many enemies their would be an attempt on his life at least once per session, I learnt to just say 'no' when people came up asking for him by name.

2. his final clash with his 'Also evil opposite' (an extremely fun series of repeating villains our DM threw at us), It was a proper 'Casterfight' in mid air in a giant cavern with summoned monsters being chucked around like no ones business (conjurer specialist vs Summoner). It ended with Zabrak throwing a barrage of Enervations followed up by a Flesh to stone.... at 200+feet up. The broken remains of her head obviously served as a paperweight on his desk after he became the Vizier.

3. As the campaigns apocalyptic main plot came to a head their was a pitched fight with an Elder Evil, or at least with one of its appendages. After toppling the BBEG and its oversized mecha, the poor sod got Plane Shifted into somewhere in the elemental plane of fire. Surviving that only to come back with a vengeance in the final rounds of the battle was a true crowning moment of awesome.

[Pyon]

I had an amazing character my first game of Dungeons and Dragons. I ran a dual wielding ranger, and we rolled for stats. I got perfect stats. So any check that came by, I aced them and became the most famous in my party. She was also extremely famous snakiness and a large amount of crits at the exact right moments. Too bad the campaign ended due to inactivity =/

[Deadasadoor]

Mine is torn between two choices. First, my half-ogre, Obah-blessed(6 arms) swordsage in an ongoing Kung Fu Hustle themed gestalt campaign. Arcane magic doesn't exist in this setting, so fights are almost entirely melee, which the character is obviously pretty great at. The second was an awakened ochre jelly named Hugh Mann, who lived in a dungeon and eventually killed enough adventurers to "level up" into sentience, and was further awakened by his wizard father/owner. Hugh's quest was to learn what it meant to be human, and cruised around the multiverse in his rubber suit that he wore to take a humanoid shape.

[atemu1234]

Byron, paladin Gray guard with a backstory that justifies it.

[Dunsparce]

Eliwood Smith, CN Human Mystic Ranger, Campaign is still going on (It's a 20 level campaign and we're level 11 right now)

Eliwood isn't a wildshaper or SotAO type Mystic Ranger, he's a Mystic Ranger without the cheese, choosing the Archery Style and only casts Ranger spells. And it fits him perfectly. He uses spells like Arrow Mind, Swift Haste, and Arrow Storm constantly, with a dab of Battlefield control like Impeding Stones, Haboob, and Wall of Thorns. He's a crazy guy who worships the made up deity Bowbosa, god of bows and arrows(btw this campaign use the egyptian pantheon), and his favorite food is lizard jerky. His best friend is his Wild Cohort, A Dog(Not riding dog, just dog) named Meatgrinder, and he's very protective of him. Eliwood is an oddball, seemly insane but when a fight breaks out he's quite dangerous. He cares for his companions and willingly travels with them throughout the expansive desert, shooting things and making a lot of money along the way. Has an odd penchant for buying worthless trinkets, like a Paper Golem(A 600 Gold Lesser Golem from Dragon Magazine #341) and enchanting a strip of lizard jerky to be everlasting. He also is very good at riddles and puzzles, having bested a sphinx and once found a way around a death trap to get a minor artifact using situational spells (Summon Nature's Ally II + Easy Climb).

I once asked my DM what he thought about my character, and he has this to say:


"Eliwood appears harmless and relatively derpy, but whatever he cares about is extremely important, and if you mess with it Eliwood is going to kick your ass whether you realize it or not."

[Pearstriker]

My favorite character?
Pierre, the Half Orc Enchanter from a far away land. I was able to speak with the worst French accent I could manage and get away with it :P
When adventuring, he carried a club and tried to seem as brutish as possible so enemies would assume him to be nothing but a big dumb guy with a stick.

Apart from being a lot of fun to role play (I got to play him straight AND when he was pretending to be a moron), he was the character that taught me just how dangerous you can be without knowing a single cantrip of Evocation - tragically, prior to that I didn't see much value in noncombat magic.

Tragically, the DM flaked out before the campaign could end, so he'll forever be on that boat downriver.:smallfrown:

[Yael]

A Snow Elf Warblade who was playing the melee role in a Dark Souls campaign, latter, when I became a DM, he ascended to beyond divinity and serves as the final boss.

[VincentTakeda]

I've been mostly a gm for decades so I really enjoyed having new stuff to choose from on my first foray into pathfinder as a player than the core 4.

In pathfinder, Vincent Takeda, an evolutionist summoner romantically involved with his angel type eidolon. Managed to get through 20 levels of that in a classy way without being squicky. A consummate entertainer, he loves people, loves doing magic tricks for kids. He and his eidolon Zhdurievdrioschka (жидуриевдриошка) ('dree' for short...) each had at least 36 skillpoints in singing. Getting their friends out of tight spots and putting on a show!

Father was a samurai, mother a viking. Father wanted him to follow in his footsteps but he was a bit of a shy antisocial misfit with a fascination for fey instead. He was never good at making friends until he met Dree, who helped him figure out how to get along with others. What used to be his worst fear has become his greatest passion, meeting new people and putting on a show!

My posting avatar is their headshots. He's a dead ringer for Mads Mikkelsen and she's a Gemma Ward most of the time. He took the bestow luck feat tree and wore a Jingasa and Aikido Hakama and white flaming (continual flame) bokken combo a la Kibagami Genjuro and she's a katana wielding female samurai type. She maxxed out Con/Dr/fast healing and took the sacrifice evolution so we could wander from town to town as a giant hit piont battery healing the sick.

All of the verbal components for his spells were russian phrases describing the spell being cast... Like invisibility was a russian phrase meaning 'you can't see me'. The mount spell would have been something like 'now where did I put that horse...' He has a 2x time personal demiplane sanctuary fashioned after both the viking great hall and the waterfall/somei yoshino orchard motifs, which he calls Folkvangr.

So a scandinavian samurai who speaks russian and is in a committed relationship with an outsider who disappears every night as she sings him to sleep. It was fun playing a summoner in pathfinder knowing that they have a reputation for being too powerful or too annoying and I managed to avoid both, in a package that was pleasant, laid back, competent, super versatile, and fun. 'Full caster' that looks like a samurai, sings like a bard, heals like a cleric. Couldnt have built anything like it in 2e.

They survived the entirety of rise of the runelords. Had to borrow another player's minis for it. Ezren and an alu-demon. Still. Best player experience I've ever had. In retrospect playing their relationship felt a lot like Flynn and Kora in Tron... she loves him because he could bend reality to his will, and he loves her because she is the raw embodiment of the planes themselves... 'biodigital jazz' man. Could have just as easily been a K1/Belldandy thing.

As a gm who likes having the 'infinite toolbox' to build from, I was worried about feeling the limitations of playing one character and one 'schtick' for a long period of time. Once the evolutionist summoner gets to a certain level, he can change the eidolon's evolutions and base form completely each day, so on any given day his companion could be a saucy nymph, a clockwork, groot, or rainbowponythulhu. Which was pretty awesome.

[Buufreak]

I would have to go with my dragonborn barb that I first ran in 4e. Statistically, he was as generic as they could get. But on the board, he was nothing but laughs. His first adventure took him into a town, and he and his companions were expected to find an important bureaucrat, which he couldn't understand the concept of, partially because he was raised to think everyone should defend themselves, but mostly because he didn't understand what taxes were.

His name was Torrin, and he understood close to nothing, but we still make tax and smash jokes about him, 5 years later.

[Andry]

My favorite was a Valenar Barbarian/Ranger/Scout/Revenant Blade by the name of Jalen Swiftwind. The campaign started with him looking for his Ancestor's blade in Xen'drik. With his fellow adventures a warforged wizard named Library and a Valenar Druid named Theira they founded city called Vanguard. A new mixed homeland for elves and warforged. After battling Sulatar, giants (oh so many giants),dragons and more than a few Inspired agents they eventually retired to rule a stable nation with my character as king.

[Amphetryon]

Favorite Character I ever PLAYED for any length was a Warlock/Chameleon, who died due to a disagreement with the DM on how the Shatter SLA interacted with locked doors.

Favorite Character concept I've ever used is either Darfellan Dread Necromancer/Crusader/JPM (some possible houserules necessary for how list casters' mechanics interact with JPM abilities), or Daken (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=9465019&postcount=96).

[prufock]

I have trouble picking favourites, because I get pretty into whichever character I'm playing at the moment. However, I think my favourite was Michal Carter. He was a sort of "everyman" character, a bard/marshal with Perform (oratory) fluffed as motivational speaking. Focused pretty highly on self-buffs and diplomacy, he always preferred the non-violent solution. He just liked people, loved talking, making new friends. He was extremely loyal, and could turn his abilities against anyone who messed with his friends.

He sort of annoyed the more violent members of the party. He wasn't a pacifist, as such, but had the attitude that differences could be worked out through words, reason, and compromise.

He was a lot of fun to play, but it became difficult when assassins killed one of our party. Carter wanted to kill the assassin, but the party stopped him and we took the assassin prisoner instead. The assassin brought us to someone who could raise our friend. Oddly, the entire party, including the one that was killed, started trusting the assassin and treated him like a member of the team. It was a complete reversal of the usual state of affairs, with Carter constantly suspicious and wary, hardly able to sleep with the guy around, while the rest of the party were chummy with him.

I had planned to play out an arc where Michal gradually came to trust the assassin more and more, but unfortunately the campaign ended unceremoniously.

Oh, and his family built and sold carts. Magnificent carts.

[Cyussu]

My favorite character has to be my Kenku Half-Dragon, Mob Barley, in a high-power campaign that is still going on. We're 8th level, started at 1st, with no end of the campaign in sight. So far I've managed to cheat death of alcohol poisoning, sheer stupidity, and eating magical creatures even after taking damage from biting them. Whether I'm sitting 15ft away filling an enemy with arrows, or I'm trying to eat their face, which is literal for the last 2 sessions where we fought a bunch of magical goblins and with our Thri-kreen player alongside ended up eating them, my character tends to be spontaneous and, as the party refers, mentally deficient, yet when it comes about for actual planning for combat he shines rather brightly. Any other given time...Yeah, he's slow on the uptake, doesn't care much for the whole "Working for the Church" deal going on, yet enjoys gathering bits and pieces of his enemies to make into neat little knickknacks like a necklace comprised of kobold fingers and a spearhead and clothing made of tanned blackened orc skin, all of which were killed by him or his allies whilst nearby. Currently working on building an Airship and rather enjoying the whole deal with the deity to pay for every single material component needed due to said deity being the god of crafting, more or less. :D

[Talya]

Originally posted here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?69461-My-favorite-character) in January, 2008.

http://s11.postimg.org/6agts5jlr/nara2.jpg


For two years I've been a player in a live (non-pbp) game. We started at level 4, and are currently level 14. While I've made a lot of other characters, none have felt so real to me. She has more personality and growth potential from a fluff standpoint than anything else I've ever tried.

Forgotten Realms setting
Nara Aesera Nahid
Nara was a harem girl in a Pasha's palace outside the bustling metropolis of Calimport. Her striking, fiery red hair was almost unheard of among those of Calishiite ancestry, but it was correctly surmised that the girl likely had Efreeti or Genaasi blood in her lineage. When Pasha Jhozim el Fadeel saw the young child with the fiery hair, he knew he had to have her for his own harem, and so the purchase was made.

Growing up in a harem provided Nara with ample opportunities to enhance her social skills and performing arts, as well as religious traning from the Sunite Headmistress Cassindra, but what surprised nobody was how magic came to her so naturally. Nobody understood to what extent, though, until the bugbear raiding party fought its way into the harem looking for the Pasha's blood. They received a warm welcome...warmer than they expected by far when flames burst from 17 year old Nara's hands, incinerating the lot of them. Nara received her freedom from the grateful Pasha in exchange for her act.

House rules in creation: DM granted spontaneous casters +1 spell per spell level, with the caveat that the extra spell HAD to come from a forgotten realms based source.

Mobility requirement for PRC was substituted for "Harem Trained" regional feat.

Bardic Weapon Proficiency: Longsword was substituted for Weapon Proficiency: Scimitar due to her Calishiite (Arabic) heritage.

The non-optimal bard multiclass allowed getting into the PrC early (skills and whip proficiency), as well as giving her some divine-like healing ability. The class has a very divine flavor for a sorceror.

Complete Champion and PHBII were not available when we started and the DM hasn't allowed them yet, so some other flavorful additions might have been useful that she doesn't have.

I ended up playing her for about 5 years, and the DM is about to restart the campaign after spending 4 years dormant, but we're converting it to Pathfinder. She's gone from Sorcerer to Oracle (with a custom curse and the Heartwarder PrC ported and edited to be worthwhile in Pathfinder.)

Nara also had a character sheet ID of 1001 on The Tangled Web. Due to an error on their servers, she was deleted, but I've managed to hold on to that ID anyway. With her "Arabian Nights" theme, I always found getting that ID for her rather auspicious.

[commander panda]

My favourite character so far has been (read this with a sexy spanish accent:) Julio Del Veron! (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=698880) He was a swashbuckling diplomancer/skillmonky who wooed all of the ladies (Seriously. All of them. He once turned into a women to seduce the first mate of a lesbian pirate ship.) He was kind of a fusion of Westly, Inigo, Jack Sparrow, and Tyrion Lannister.
Whenever I talked for him I was required to speak in a comically sexy spanish accent, and he had a tendency to either end encounters before they started by insulting opponents up the attitude scale with extreme diplomacy checks, or otherwise mass steredown/imperious command them all into submission than have his minions team mates gandbeat them (if he didn't do it himself.)
If the game hadn't ended when it did, he would have gotten a 3.0E feat that lets him force people to fall madly in love with him whenever he moved them to helpful (failing that check required a roll of 1, btw.)
He was also frequently a better fighter than the fighter, since he got CHA to most of his combat rolls.

Also worth noting is that Julio has been my annoying nickname since middleschool, and re-appropriating it for my character made alot of my friends stop calling me that.

Unfortunately, the homebrew class (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?227772-3-5-Base-Class-The-Scoundrel) i used has a broken table now, and the creator seems to have disappeared from the forums, so i can't use it anymore. I'm considering reposting it myself with big disclaimers just to make it usable.

[Ruethgar]

She was originally just supposed to be a back up in case the players frustrated me to no end for a TPK of epic proportions. Technically she was a troll, but she had so many templates enchanted onto her that you could hardly call her a troll anymore. Her first incarnation literally had all of the templates I could find mashed into one creature, but I remade her to be a little more streamlined as follows. Arcane Dragon, Spellstiched, Dragonbred(Draconic, Half Red Dragon, and Dragon-Blooded), Fiendish(and Half Fiend), Legendary, Tauric(Nightwalker, Hellfire Wyrm), Chimera(Double Pyroclastic Dragon, Basilisk), Vampiric, Were-Raptor, Troll. The Tauric and Chimera templates were replaced with 3rd party amalgam templates that had similar effects but more flexibility in application but for a better mental image I left the original names. Her name, Gnarlack Isam Duadean the Dragon Queen

She is essentially a dragon with 6 legs, the body of a hellfire wyrm, with two pyroclastic dragon heads flanking a female night walker torso with red dragon style horns arching back on its skull and golden glowing eyes with lava-looking scars reaching outward from her eyes. I did give her an alternate form to move among the populous more easily, but it is far from a disguise. In her fiendish alternate form, Gnarlack takes the appearance of a Drow with ebony skin, eyes of molten gold and deep, blood red hair. Horns jut out and back on the side of her skull similar to a red dragon. She retains two claws but not her other natural weapons, her beauty increases greatly in this form, but she is still regarded with equal scorn as the Drow receive if not more if her horns are seen. She can still use her breath weapon.

I really liked this character because of where I took her out of game in a series of stories that were sparked from her destruction by my brother(so much for TPK). At that time she was practically immune to magic, but my brother managed to buff his strength enough and I rolled a natural 1 he a 20 to push Gnarlack through a portal to his own plane and then destroying the plane and everything in it. In the story narrative she went to the void since matter cannot be destroyed, she was essentially just locked between spaces and had ceased to be able to exist on the material plane. She then traveled around to various cosmoses, there was one where she was written into the Warcraft setting, several where she was in various movie settings. Her character eventually developed as a super druid, defender of the forest and master necromancer. In many of the worlds she went to she took the side of nature, most often against humanity. In Azeroth she had a clutch of children only one of which I statted, Ruethgar the Arcane. In the Heroes of Might and Magic world she had a fiery tempered daughter, Azca'Vyna the Scourge of Nine Hells. But eventually she settled down back in the void where she slept and formed a world around her with all manner of creatures(yay new races). Her fiery breath became the sun, her blood the oceans, her bones the mountains and her flesh the forest and all of it's creatures. She eventually became a rival to both Tiamat and Bahamut when she started experimenting with cross breeds by stealing Dragonspawn and Dragonborn to make her own Dragons (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Grey_Dragon,_Gnarlackian_(3.5e_Race)) and Dragonborn of Gnarlack. The two dragon gods made a united attack against Gnarlack and she was felled defending her children to her last breath as they scattered across the planes.

Dragonborn of Gnarlack are the same as those of Bahamut, but their breath weapon is Hellfire only and they do not fall from grace unless they actively go against the natural world. This is defined mostly as destroying terrain, killing fey and creating unnatural buildings. A tree woodshaped into a house or a cave stoneshaped into a den would be fine, but a tower built with mined resources or cabin that killed trees in its creation would violate the sanctity of the dragonborn pact.

[razorback]

Mine was a MERP Sinda ranger. Game was really a blast.
He was a dual hand axe wielder with a couple of spares, would melee and could throw. Was outshined in combat by the dwarven fighter and couldn't compare to the Noldor wizard in power, but was a fun concept that went away from either bow and/or long sword wielding elf. Pissed off Ents whenever they ran across them, confused dwarves and other elves, with a smart mouth that always pissed off the NPC's. I still have his character sheet saved somewhere.

[kellbyb]

Unfortunately, the homebrew class (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?227772-3-5-Base-Class-The-Scoundrel) i used has a broken table now, and the creator seems to have disappeared from the forums, so i can't use it anymore. I'm considering reposting it myself with big disclaimers just to make it usable.

That table seems perfectly usable to me, even with the slightly broken formatting. What's the trouble?

[commander panda]

That table seems perfectly usable to me, even with the slightly broken formatting. What's the trouble?

its just sort of a pain in the ass to use. if i'm going to play this class in a live game, i dont want me or my DM to have to count the bars on the table every time we reference it. that is assuming they don't refuse the class to begin with because the table is inconvenient.

that said, Ruethgar just kindly fixed the formatting and sent it to me, so this isn't really a problem anymore :smalltongue:.

[BWR]

VtM: Nigel Smythe was a lowly bureaucrat working and living in Brussles. He was ghouled by a powerful Ventrue and used basically as a slave. A Lasombra independant Embraced him and used him as a spy. So with no training and no support Nigel was expected to hide his vampiric nature from the others who believed he was a ghoul, the powerful vampire NPCs, learn how to develop and use his powers on his own and survive encounters with local werewolves and mages. He not only managed this in game, he managed it because I was quick thinking and convincing enough to fool my fellow players for a year or more, despite encounters with sunlight, Rötschreck in the face of fire, outrunning a Celeritied Brujah, Mages pretty much telling the PCs outright he was a vampire and being discovered with an unconscious person in his arms, who was bleeding from two small holes in her neck. Oh and two PCs ordered him to get them blood: two new pawns. He later, due to ridiculously lucky dice rolls, soloed a warrior caste Mokole. During the day. With silver bullets, not gold.
Poor Nigel, all he wanted was to be Sir Humphrey Appleby when he got older. He never sought out the seas of excrement that came his way, he tried to run at the first sign of danger, he tried to avoid playing Kindred politics, he just wanted a quiet (un)life.

I suppose Hida Akira should be on this list. his exploits are too many to list, but suffice to say he was a character in a very alt.u. Rokugan/Japan setting. You could probably fill a few books with his exploits by now. Retired and proud patriarch of hordes of children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren and recently gt.gt.grandchildren. His most common appearance nowadays is either as master sensei at the imperial warrior dojo, and allowing the newly-minted adults of his family to pull cards from a Deck of Many Things. His greatgrandchildren have taken over as PCs now, with most of the older generation in comfortable positions and not needing to do much.

[Bonzai]

My current Campaign is pretty fun.

Corporal Kaius Lucious Ventrillous:LN Human Focused Necromancer 5/Pale Master 10/Lore master- (Currently Level 4 through).

The Campaign takes place in Eberron. This is our first time doing an Eberron campaign, and the DM is taking us through the pre-made official mods. Kaius was born in Atur (Karnath) during the last few decades of the Great War. He was tested at an early age, and was found to have an aptitude for magic. He was of low birth with no money or influence to speak of, and was unable to attend the Atur academy. However the war effort demanded that all with potential magic ability be trained and put into military service, so he was trained by a wizard from the Academy in the basics and then sent to serve out his two year mandatory service at Fort Bone. Just two weeks after his posting, the war ended. During his term of service, he saw no action. He remained at the fort the entire time, and was tasked with maintaining the undead soldiers and skeletal mounts stationed there.

Kaius was brought up constantly hearing war propaganda, and his child hood dream was to serve Karnath and fight it's enemies. When he was selected for Mage training, he felt honored and privileged to get his chance to serve. He was excited to be one of Karnath's new breed of Necromatic Soldiers, and dreamed of leading legions of undead into glorious battle. Thus the reality of his posting came as a bitter disappointment. He loves his country, and performed his duties with distinction (eventually being promoted to Corporal), but he was forced to accept that his posting was a dead end during this time of peace. While at Ft. Bone, he saw many adventurers come and go, and decided that the life of an adventurer offered far more opportunities than military service. So once his two year term was up, he did not re-enlist. This was a difficult decision for him, and he left disappointed that he never saw any action, nor had the opportunity to earn his Sgt. stripes. He was not alone however, as he was joined by a fellow soldier Specialist Grimalt.

Together the two former soldiers left Karnath to see the world, along with Kaius's skeletal minion (Private Jenkins). Their first stop on their journey was the city of Sharn. There they looked for work and picked up the 4th member of their band, a Dire wereboar Elf Barbarian. They took on odd jobs, with great success. Kaius, being the leader has named their adventuring band the Ventrillian Irregulars, and has supplied them with uniforms and a banner. He continues to try improve their wealth and reputation, envisioning growing into an order like the Emerald Claw, his child hood heroes.


What's so funny about this character is that he totally throws the campaigns intended perspective on it's head. The Emerald Claw in these adventures were meant to be re-occurring villains and thorns in our side. Instead he idolizes them and aspires to be just like them (the idealized Karnath propaganda version anyways), and went out of his way to be friendly and on good terms with them. We had a mission to recover a missing spy, and an Evil Karnathi sword. He reveres the blade as a sacred and honored relic of his country. Totally not the angle that the writers were intending, and it's hilarious.

[Zakerst]

Hmm, it's hard to pick one but if I had to Strom Feurhertz: A gestalt Goliath Barb/feat rogue with monkey grip and huge intelligent falchion with detect object and some other stuff (I think it ended up with shocking burst and maybe something else), he's use "her" to find strong boxes and the like and use a crowbar and his strength to get out what he wanted, that or straight up sunder it. This game also allowed for the explosives skill and craft chemical skill from D20 modern, so occasionally he'd set up impromptu traps with remote detonating C4, or blast through a wall unexpectedly. He was a kind of clever but unpredictable sort of person, mostly interested in looting things because he could and it was fun. In fights sometimes his sword would try and dominate him while he was raging so he'd be like a clear thinking rage monster (think professor hulk). He was a hoot to play.

[RFLS]

My favorite is, far and away, Rita Hemsworth (3.5). I've never managed to get her into a game that lasted more than a session or two, but I've put a lot of thought into the character. She was an orphan, living on the streets for almost a year before a local gang adopted her. She demonstrated prodigious skill with tinkering and magic in tandem, building strange devices for the gang that helped them in their thieving. Over time, she grew more and more disenchanted with them, until she finally left.

She faked her death and ran, living on stolen money until it ran out, and then making money by selling her skills as a tinker. One day, she tried to sell something to a man, who, instead of buying it, looked it over closely and then offered her a job. She moved into his shop and began to truly learn her trade. Her pride and joy was a suit of armor that towered over her. It was powered by servos and magic alike, and came to be an almost unstoppable juggernaut.

Rita showed great interest in the art of swordplay, to the point of finding and paying a tutor to show her the art of the sword. Over time, she grew to be almost as proficient with the blade as she was with the creation of devices. She managed to combine the two - sending lightning crackling down the length of her sword to scorch her enemies.

Her life was ideal - until one of her old gang members wandered into the shop and recognized her. That night, the gang came to pay her a "visit," one with lethal intentions. She managed to get to her armor before they found her, but not before they found her mentor. He was dead before he managed to get out of bed. The ensuing fight was brutal and short. In less than half a minute, a dozen gang members were dead or dying on the floor of the shop.

Rita ran. She didn't know what else to do. Her gang and the police would both be after her for the murder of her friends and mentor, respectively. Now, she serves as a mercenary, doing the best she can to get by in the world.

Mechanically she's almost exclusively an artificer, using a variety of wands and permanent magic items to make her a melee monster. If gestalt is on the table, warblade or one of a few homebrew classes floating around the forums is thrown into the mix. I tend to play her sword n' board, which means I'm taking one of the most broken classes in the game and toning it down to t3.

Someday I'll actually get to play her. *crosses fingers*

[RolkFlameraven]

Nym Evenfell the LE Elven Generalist/Force Missile mage/Argent Savant who believed that [Force] magic was the only "true" magic. Every spell he ever researched or used (save one, but sometimes you just have to teleport) where force spells. I found out there are quite a few more of those then I thought too.

Despite the fact that most of what he did was magic missile with as many damage upping meta magic feats as he could add he was fun as hell to play. Being a paid assassin who did 100's of HP worth of damage with magic missile of all things can't help but put a smile on my face. But what really made the game fun is the fact that he was a follower of the Human magic god Mystra, Corellon could suck it as far as Nym was concerned, and the party cleric was a (I think) a Cloistered Cleric of Shar. Oh, and he was a half Drow, so we spent all are time either trying to one up each other and telling the other one just how much we where looking forward to killing the other the moment the rest of the party left us a lone for more then 30 sec or decided they had enough popcorn for the show. Sadly this showdown never happened as the game fell apart a few years ago.


My other top PC has to be Jargost the human Sorcerer in the Shackled City adventure path... as the front line fighter, at level 1. He stayed the main front line fighter for the whole campaign until it died out at around lvl 14. He was the only PC to not die at lest once, though I think he hit 0 to -9 more then the rest of the party combined.

What made him so much fun, was the fact that he refused to admit to using magic. Everything he did, such as tossing his sword as a boomerang due to the whirling blade spell was "really" his "skill" as the "Greatest Swordsmen in his Village" a title that he bore proudly even after having his own plane of existence. It was a true title, even if self given, but only because no one else in his home village bothered to use a sword before he left. I still hold out hope that his game will be picked up again at some point, but its been seven or so years now so its doubtful.

[Darkweave31]

I liked my shadowcraft mage that was slowly driven insane by his illusions becoming more real. He took over the world, changed the color of the sun more than a few times, and led a rebellion against himself all because he was bored... and crazy, but mostly bored.

[Jeff the Green]

Hmm. I guess there are two categories. The one I'm most proud of is Elidiel. She started out from a desire to play with Racial Emulation and have a nice floating doubled familiar bonus (Elf Wizard 3 + Changling Wizard 5) and from that grew a thoroughly messed up, yet functional and mostly happy character who's more coherent, consistent, and fleshed-out than any others. We haven't actually started the game she'll be in yet, so I dunno how she'll play.

The ones I most enjoy writing for are the other two in my signature. Rook is fun because he's fundamentally trustworthy: you can trust him to do whatever he thinks most benefits him/will be the most fun/will result in him getting fruit. He has strong convictions, but these mostly consist of Thou Shalt Not Pay For What You Can Steal and An It Harm Not Too Many, Do As Thou Wilt.

<The sensation of dancing to "three blind mice" played backwards with a stubbed toe while sniffing acetone and peonies> is utterly insane, which is always fun to write. He's a servant of the Daelkyr and this leads to such things as saying <I swear, you give one heir apparent an extra arm and an eye on his fingertip and suddenly the entire house turns on you. They were darling on him. If the Old Ones weren't still trying to conquer you Luddites I'd return to Xoriat right now and your entire scientomagical engineering tradition would stagnate.> or giving his familiar a spinneret with amber so that it shoots electricity and refusing to even consider putting it somewhere more dignified than the usual position. He's also mechanically fun, with a bunch of toys (magical and nonmagical; he's got a homebrew Factotum/Artificer PrC that gives the ability to make nonmagical gadgets like that spinneret or an ectopic adrenal gland) and some fun spells drawn from all the base class arcane lists.

[IZ42]

LG VoP(Exalted) Human MoMS Hungry Ghost Monk leveled 9 when he finally got knocked off by the BBEG because ridiculous damage. He was extremely fun to play, once kicked a hobgoblin off a dragon only to fall off(and survive) when the Dragon barrel rolled. Gonna be reincarnated and given the celestial-blessed template as a reward for stopping the Red Hand.

[MikeB1917]

Nyx was by far my favorite. A sorcerer who eventually got create demiplane, made it permanent, and timeless, hunted casters and imprisoned them to create magical items in the demiplane. Equipped a army of mercenarys with amazing gear and then proceeded to open the demiplane in the middle of citys and take them over with his armys inside. Became ruler of the world, then left it to rot as he moved on to create a new plane of existence. All in all, a great game, DM was mad cause I destroyed his campaign.

[tadkins]

I only got to play him for one session, but he was my most memorable character. I hope to try him again in the future.

Corlan McCabe, NG Human Swamp Druid. Basically a crazy old hick who lived alone with his snapping turtle animal companion Stumps, in a shack somewhere in the middle of a Lizardfolk-controlled swamp. I basically played him up to be the stereotypical redneck. Gave him points in Profession (Brewer), as he had a thing for creating his own booze, fermenting them in rotting, hollowed out trees. His signature product, "willowswig", ended up knocking out half the party.

I would have loved to play that one more. xD

[Super Evil User]

Two words:

Thomas Therin.

CG Human wizard (Evoker/barred Necro, Ench) 6. Originally a Thayan apprentice, he escaped his ruthless nation after his brother was killed for defying the Red Wizards' evil ways. He swore on his life that he would use his powers and make it so that no-one would be abused by evil magic ever again.

Muddying his tragic past and deep conviction was the fact that he had a negative Charisma modifier and was essentially a smelly, alcoholic college dropout with PTSD. His adventuring companion/only friend is Thrormir Thunderfist, an equally uncharismatic dwarf with a whoring problem.

[paperarmor]

I have two:

Gregory "Fab" the Fabulous. A Chaotic Good camp straight single classed bard focused on inspire courage, obsessed with beauty and able to kick much goblin ass. a skill monkey and party face he knew every language in the phb and a few that aren't.

and Sheldon Dubois a factotum/warbalde/chameleon who became an important part of the hombrew setting created from the Forgotten Realms.

[b4ndito]

My favorite was a nearly mute Black Blood Cultist that routinely ripped enemies apart. Was singularly handling a planetar Angel at level 10 (sent to return a paladin from his pathway to Blackgaurd) while my allies fuddled like idiots. Unfortunately, before I had him pinned and savaged, he got me with Power Word Stun.

My next character will definitely be another grappler. Loads of fun to play.

[Faily]

After some thought on this, I'd have to say my Pathfinder Paladin, Othariel.

Othariel, as a character in D&D, have gone through different existences in various games, from my very first chat-based RP on old Yahoo chat rooms, to a Ranger on tabletop, a Fighter online again, and now a Paladin in Pathfinder (once again on tabletop). While she has changed from each time, she has always been a Good-aligned elf warrior with the same appearance.

In her current existence, she is an elf born to Alfheim-elven parents who settled down in the Thunder Rift. Her father in his youth, while adventuring, came across a piece of metal that he believed to have come from his ancestor, the elven god Mealiden, since he found it at the end of a rainbow (or so he says), and the rainbow is the symbol of Mealiden. As a smith, he held onto the piece for a long time, and as most elves do, spent many years contemplating how to best utilize the metal. He later on travelled to Thunder Rift with his mate, as many of his kin in Alfheim thought him a bit odd for being so interested in metalwork, and settled down there. When he learned that they were expecting a child, inspiration struck him and he forged an excellent blade, which was ready the day when his daughter Othariel was born. He knew it would be meant for her.


The child was exceptionally blessed (as I rolled insanely good stats), and showed an aptitude for many things, but it was the call of the divine that Othariel heeded and under the tutelage of the elderly guardian of the Thunder Rift elves she learned the ways of fighting with sword and bow, to move unseen in the forests and to protect those who lack the strength to do so themselves. When she first left her home forest to travel the world, she left with the sword her father had forged along with a set of masterwork weapons and armor, as well with riches given to her from her parents to assist her in her years of wandering.

In her time of adventuring, she has countless times faced danger, if not certain death.
She have helped reclaim a sacred silver sword to its proper owner.
Taken down an evil vizier who plotted to overthrow his Rakasta-ruler.
Saved a town from an aboleth plotting to use all the citizens there as his mind-slaves.
Faced a red dragon in honorable duel to prevent it from taking over a kingdom.
Helped save the wife of a king.
Prevented strife in a kingdom by finding the true heir to the crown.
Faced down an evil version of herself at the bottom of the sea to reclaim her father's sword.
Saved a barony from being overrun by undeads coming from the realm of entropy.
Have willingly accepted the loss of her Paladin-abilities for the greater good of saving Alfheim from a Phoenix unleashed from an artifact from her God.
Spent enormous amounts of resources on a high-risk mission to save a party-member from the captivity of her evil grand-uncle.
Avenged the death of her father and countless others in the Thunder Rift by taking down the great red dragon Scorch who for a long time had terrorized the place until he went on a murderous rampage.
Befriended the king of Norwold and his queen, and later aided him in stopping a nasty war... but also earned the ire of the evil entropy god Alphax after a lengthy adventure of space-travel.
Have taken up rulership of the Thunder Rift and is currently working on making it a prosperous and peaceful principality, with her trusty cohort Grund, the Ogre Paladin she redeemed from his evil ways.

And other adventures as well, but those are the ones that come to mind. Weekly game for 2 years or so tend to create a lot of material. :)

As a person, she is nothing if not generous and kind to most people, always willing to help. She is a true friend, never hesitating to sacrifice herself to save those she cares for, and as noted above, didn't even hesitate to strike down a creature summoned from her own god to save innocents even if it cost her her paladin abilities, because she believed that was a fair price to pay in exchange for not burning down the ancient forest-city of the elves. Othariel tends to speak her mind, often being straight-forward and honest, and sometimes the complexity of other cultures are lost on her, such as most humans thoughts on decency (what do you mean a naked body is wrong?), traditions (marriage?), politics (people kill their own family for titles?), and the whole point of lying. To her opponents, she often gives them the chance to yield and when she utilizes stealth she always calls for them to surrender before attacking, but to those truly evil she is merciless.
Strangely enough, one party member have converted from Chaotic Neutral to Lawful Neutral, claiming that Othariel has been a more Lawful-influence than a Good one (though I'm personally confused by that as I tend to see her actions more as Good than Lawful most of the time, as she has a few times "taken the law into her own hands" to do the greater good).

[Mizr]

My favorite character was Alexander Maximilian Cromwell, a Cleric of Bane/Wearer of Purple/Hierophant. He was the main damage dealer in the party (being able to whip out some serious hurt with the use of Divine Metamagic, the class ability in Hierophant that allows you to cast inflict/harm spells at a range, Black Lore of Moil and the Chain Spell feat). He was the Second Son of a prominent Thayan family, and had the complete devotion and loyalty of another PC who was a Shadow Adept, also born of Thay. He infiltrated the party claiming to be a Purple Dragon Knight, and proved to be a competent melee combatant as well (mostly thanks to his Gauntlet of Utterdeath, fitted with spikes to fulfill its role as Bane's favored weapon). Sadly, the campaign ended before his many machinations came to fruition (which included either the corruption or soul entrapment of another PC who was a now-mortal Sune), and he never got to Rebuke/Command an Evil Dragon (and he so wanted a red dragon mount!) Suspicious party members either disappeared or "inexplicably" changed their minds about Alexander and his companion, and he slowly began to corrupt those around him.

[Tragak]

My favorite was a CG Catfolk Rogue named Deshara.

Backstory: the family that he came from ran a traveling theatre troupe dedicated to the draconic deity Hlal, and many of them were spell casters (though not Deshara himself). The troupe was imprisoned after a magistrate took offense to a play they performed, and Deshara instigated a jail-break but was accidentally teleported half-way across the continent when the plan went sideways. The only keepsake that he has left of his family is a Slaad puppet named "Groga": his ventriloquist sister had always used it as a conduit for her Bardic spell casting, and he had been in the process of returning it to her so that she could help with the jail-break.

He spent months working his way back to his original country, training himself to exhaustion for stealth and close-quarters combat so that he doesn't get caught at a disadvantage again. Deshara survived by joining various gangs and stealing from wealthy businesses, although he would betray any group that ended up hurting actual people in the process of their crimes.

Quirks: he loved coming up with fake names, even when the situation most likely didn't call for it, partially because he was embarrassed that his parents gave him a girl's name :smalltongue: His favorite way to criticize/insult others was with 1st-person impressions ("I'm Teela and I'd turn my back on an angry dragon if I thought I stepped on a dandelion") and his favorite way to keep people off their toes was to get into an argument with Groga (who allegedly knew that he was a puppet while Deshara didn't).

Campaign: the party consisted of Deshara, a TN Elf Druid named Teela, a NG Orc Barbarian named Kort, and a LN Human Ranger (archery, first favored enemy Undead) named Aluren. We decided that Teela, Kort, and Aluren had been hunting a vampire lord for months together off-screen, but that the actual game would start with Deshara meeting up for the first time and joining them out of convenience.

Teela and Kort ended up spending less time in the game killing monsters and more time keeping Aluren and Deshara from killing each other :smalltongue: Aluren would get mad at Deshara for things like hiding illegal weapons from various cities' guards, Deshara would get mad at Aluren for things like insisting that magistrates had the "right" to execute non-violent criminals.

The greatest Deshara moment that I can think of is when he accidentally got the party embroiled in a civil war within a Baatorian syndicate :smallbiggrin:

The party has chased a BBEG to his lair in the City of Chains, and we were about to kill him when we were blindsided by the BBEG's Gelugon sponsor. The Gelugon spirited us to his own headquarters in Stygia, had his soldiers try to drown us in cauldrons that would turn us into devils loyal to him after our mortal bodies died, but Dehsara spent much of the time trying to troll his captors with one of his infamous Groga-fights. The devils decided to drown Deshara first, but as one of the Osyluths was dragging him, Deshara challenged him "You think he's having you do this because he doesn't know?" taking a shot in the dark that the Osyluth had betrayed his employer somehow and hoping to make it sound like the Osyluth was in danger if he continued with his instructions.

This shouldn't have worked because Dehsara's Bluff and the Osyluth's Sense Motive were about the same. Even if Deshara could scare the Osyluth strongly enough that he would want to go on the run from his employer, Deshara probably couldn't convince the Osyluth strongly enough that he would want to go on the run right that second, and it wouldn't stop the heroes from getting killed.

Deshara: Natural 20
Osyluth: Natural 1

When the DM regained the ability to speak, he decided that the Osyluth had already been orchestrating a coup against his Gelugon employer and that Deshara's bluff had convinced him to accelerate his timetable to "right now." He sent out a telepathic message to the other Osyluths in the room that were loyal to him and ordered all of them to turn invisible. Within seconds, half of the Osyluths not part of the coup were trapped by Walls of Ice and Dimensional Anchors and the other half were standing dead still listing for the invisible traitors.

The party managed to escape in the confusion, hid in the compound for a few hours rather than freeze outside (as the compound itself was designed to be hospitable, if not necessarily comfortable, to the non-Gelugons who served the bosses), and weren't caught by the recently-betrayed Gelugon until just after Teela regained her Druid spells for the day :smalleek: Three "1d3 Unicorns" and an "Animal Growth" under the command of a Wild-Shaped Tyrannosaurus later, the Gelugon decided to cut his losses and offered to have our BBEG killed if we would find the traitors in his organization before his own overlords found out.

We technically agreed, but managed to do a lot of damage to the Gelugon's operation that we - quite easily - pinned on the Osyluth. We spent weeks of gameplay on that storyline, and the DM had ad-libbed the whole premise around one die roll :smallbiggrin:

[Threadnaught]

Five Dash H Dash Four Dash D Dash Zero, or 5-H-4-D-0. This unit's designation is not "shadow", it is 5-H-4-D-0.

Warforged Artificer masquerading as a robot, with a goal of destroying a planar empire. It has yet to erase it's own existence from a data center, but will try once it gains the necessary resources.
The greatest irony about the character, besides all Warforged characters now having robot voices, is that he's a full power Artificer in a low-magic game.

His robot voice is a put on, but it seems to have stuck with all other Warforged in the group. Keith Baker would be annoyed.

[Brendanicus]

Hugh Walton, a level 5 Wizard from a one-off my friends had at college.

The Fluff

Hugh was an incredibly paranoid wizard who was terrified of demons and took up adventuring to stop the inevitable demon apocalypse. I should mention now that there were no outsiders whatsoever in the one-off and I knew that going in.

He always was convinced that any given person he met could be a demon or demonic agent in disguise. This resulted in me rolling a Knowledge: The Planes check upon meeting anybody to determine whether or not they were a demon. (While this sounds annoying, I didn't announce most of the rolls. Since I had a ton of ranks in Knowledge: The Planes, I assumed that if Hugh studied another PC or a random Orc and rolled above a 20 for his check, he determined that they weren't demons).

His first exchange with the quest-giver went as follows:

Hugh: "I was told that we would be fighting demons. Are there any demons?"

NPC: "No."

Hugh: "...Excellent."

The Crunch

Simply put, Hugh was ridiculous. Despite being a core-only Wizard in a one-off (Which essentially made him a worse Sorcerer because he couldn't change spells), he broke 2 out of the 3 combat encounters in epic fashion.

There was one part when we had to sneak into a small Orc encampment and rescue a hostage. We nominated our Rogue to go in first and see what he can find, but not before Hugh made him invisible (You should have seen the DM's face when I told him what I cast. Not pleased that somebody was going to break his encounter. He wasn't mad or anything though). Thanks to Invisibility, the Rogue manages to easily dispatch the guards the Orcs had (Most of them were asleep). The Rogue then used a torch to burn most of the Orcs alive in their sleep. The only survivors were the chief and the hostage. None of this would have happened if not for a single second-level spell.

The climax of this adventure was fighting a Young Adult Red Dragon. We spent a solid half-hour IRL preparing our tactics and how we would breach its lair, what spells to use and how we would attack it, etc.

That boss should have killed us all. However, since I was out of useful spells at the outset of the fight (I used them all buffing the party) I offhandedly decided to cast Blindness on the dragon. It somehow worked. The spell crippled her, and she was dead the next round, only able to get a single Fireball off. However, many of us are inexperienced players, so only after the game did we realize that we forgot to factor in the dragon's spell resistance, blind-sense, and that the DM rolled for a Will save instead of a Fortitude save, which the dragon would have made.

Hugh Walton was so powerful that he broke 4 laws of physics with one 2nd-level spell.

The Conclusion

Despite having dominated and broken the game, everybody loved Hugh (Especially the Rogue for obvious reasons). The DM actually made the the main-quest-giving NPC for his next campaign. It was a really fun, if coincidentally easy session.

I'm also never allowed to play a Wizard again :)

[Vhaidara]

Leah Sparitine, a character I just made for a Curse of the Crimson Throne.

A human noble, daughter of a Taldori noble house, Leah Sparitine was raised to be married, but in her free time, she practiced swordplay. Her life was uneventful until one night, when she was seventeen. A vampire who had harbored a grudge against her family for years launched an assault upon their estate, slaughtering her family. She entered her father's chamber to witness their duel, and when the vampire had won, she rushed forward and picked up her father's blade, Valinia, and ran the vampire through. Weakened as it was by the fight with her father, her blow was a fatal one. But as the monster collapsed into mist, it lunged forward and struck her, tearing a wound open in her neck.
The next morning, a group of men arrived. They were Scarlet Sentinels, bodyguards for hire. Her father had suspected the vampire would strike, and had hired these trained warriors. But they arrived a day late. Leah was the only member of her family left alive. The only remnants of her house were herself, her father's blade, and her own signet ring. The Sentinels, knowing that they had failed their duty, so they took the girl in. Noticing her natural brilliance, they placed her under one of their spellblades, who taught her the basics of identifying magic. Meanwhile, her training in the duelists art continued, though she was now training under the elite tutelage of the Sentinels.
Last year, on a mission to Korvosa, she fell in love with the son of a merchant her mentor was hired to protect, Marcus Abrang. With her mentor's blessing, she stayed to serve as bodyguard to the young Marcus. Six months later, they were betrothed, and she gave him her signet ring. Last week, she discovered that he had been seeing another woman behind her back, and she struck him before fleeing the house. Six days ago, the Watch found his body, minus her ring.
Now, she wanders the city, alone, suspected by Marcus' father of his murder, searching for her ring before she can leave the city and return to the Sentinels.

Now, the Crunch

Leah is a Harbinger whose maneuvers are going to focus on Scarlet Throne and Cursed Razor. She was human, but the vampire's attack afflicted her with a lesser form of vampirism. She is now a Dhampir, though she does not realize it. To further this connection, she is a Crimson Countess Harbinger. She has yet to use a Cursed Razor maneuver, and she has only used her Crimson Claim once, which was in a duel where she was provoked to raging, furious combat (handled IC with another player). When she uses Crimson Claim, as the damage is dealt, her opponent's blood appears in her mouth, bloodying her fangs. As the campaign continues, she will slowly realize that there is something seriously f***ed up with her. Especially after the first time she turns into a big puddle of blood on the ground. That's going to be a shocker.

[PolymeraseJones]

I only got into DnD last year, so my favourite character has to be my first: Meike, female human Inquisitor of Iomedae, playing in a half-homebrewed Kingmaker campaign. An ex-paladin trainee headhunted by the Inquisition, her reason for helping found a nation in the greenbelt was a semi-secret mission to establish an Inqusition presence in the area.

She started out as somewhere in the Lawful Good range, very serious and stoic, pious and a complete workaholic. Over the course of the campaign she became the go-to character when it came to squeezing someone for information, with an intimidate bonus only rivaled by our bard. She never yelled or threatened to do it, though - her weapons of choice were an icy stare and a perfect poker face. It turns out she was the perfect foil for both our trollish manipulator of a Bard and our extremely-LG Paladin of Iomedae. Without meaning to, we'd made an almost-perfect kirk-Spock-McCoy trio, and a lot of fun was had RPing their interactions.

By the end, she'd shifted to Lawful Neutral, the result of several somewhat-shady "the ends justifies the means" episodes (she agreed to sacrifice a few enemies to a knowledge spirit in exchange for intel on the BBEG). As a result her relationship with Iomedae and the Paladin got a little rocky at times, but she always kept herself from slipping any further down the slippery slope. She had also become the head of our country's internal security agency and secret police force, and inspired an OOG running gag where we joked we tossed any NPC we didn't like in a soviet-style gulag.

[AnonymousPepper]

Not mine personally, but I as a DM love him. I know I talk about him all the time but now I actually have an excuse to.

Avenal is a devout worshiper of Asmodeus from the diabolic nation of Cheliax on Golarion. He is not, however, a very bright one - in fact, his INT and WIS scores are both a whopping 7. That's not the twist; the twist is that he's a Paladin. An actual, ordinary LG Paladin (I made him eat a feat tax for it, Heretic of the Faith, but otherwise let it slide as usual). He has basically no ranks in Knowledge (Religion) but is nonetheless eternally devoted to Asmodeus. When the obvious contradiction is pointed out, he launches into sermons about how the Big A's true nature has been lost to the ages and twisted by less-scrupulous followers, sermons he fully believes in.

Once, while riding in a cab through the streets of Waterdeep (all settings exist in my campaign), the cabbie was actually an agent of the Church of Bane, riding him into a trap. The group's Bard noticed the winding and out-of-the-way path the group was taking, and immediately questioned the cabbie, who, thinking quickly, ultimately confessed to intentionally taking long routes in order to inflate his fares. Avenal was having none of that. He started preaching a heartfelt and sincere sermon to the hapless cabbie about doing one's duty and doing one's part to make the world a better place (much to his confusion, since the cabbie, a devotee of Bane, noted the Asmodean holy symbol), a sermon that lasted so long and was so intense that the Oracle of Lathander was debating dropping a Silence on the cab so they could ride in peace. The Bard actually plugged his ears, and for once in his life Avenal passed his Perception check and smacked him for it, physically grabbed onto his wrists, and kept going. Of course, this distracted the party enough that the cabbie got them to the designated spot for the ambush, but that's beside the point.

On another occasion, the party's Artificer remembered that the Church of Mystra - who had offered to assist them in their quest - in Waterdeep is run by a NE necromancer, and decided to tell the party. But he didn't want to tell Avenal, for fear that he'd open his mouth at the wrong time, so he promptly pulled out a coin, chucked it as far as he could when Avenal wasn't looking, and asked him if he'd be kind enough to fetch it for him. He failed his Perception, his Sense Motive, AND his Wisdom check, and trundled off to find it. This happened twice, while the Artificer talked. In another instance of the party blatantly taking advantage of his stupidity (although this was sort of ingenious), the Artificer discovered a Phantasmal Killer trap in a house - and instead of defusing it himself, he simply sent the Paladin to trip it, since he's immune to fear. The Paladin saw the most terrifying thing possible to him... and just went "eh" and kept walking with a spring in his step.

Another thing this guy did was, during an adventure on the Isle of Kortos, the party walked up to a mansion where they had solid evidence there were kidnapped people being taken by malevolent Tainted Scholars. He insisted on waiting outside fifteen whole minutes, knocking every five, before finally agreeing to go inside - first announcing himself as he went in, as politely as he possibly could.

He does take advantage of his immunity to fear quite a bit, though. Avenal was summoned to the Cheliaxian embassy in Waterdeep - reminder: nobody back home likes him one bit for obvious reasons - as cheerfully as could be, walked right up to the ambassador, took a withering Intimidate (think high 40s) from her, and just kind of... "eh." Which prompted the ambassador to mutter something under her breath about Paladins before trying a different tack.

Avenal also takes his duties as a master of contracts and bookkeeping, as per Asmodean doctrine, very seriously. He wrote the party fake identification to get them into an archaeological dig site being run by the Red Wizards on Xen'drik, and it worked perfectly until inspected by the actual Red Wizard in charge of the site, who nat20'd it. And when the party, with the help of an NPC Archivist+Hathran, busted down the first act's Red Wizard BBEG (where incidentally he gave precisely zero damns and just kept right in said high-level wizard's face and beat him to death with a sharp stick) in the middle of a prison (they were on a rescue mission at the time), his first action was to note down the names of all the guards in the prison and all the freed inmates and make sure every single one of them got home/was punished correctly.

The guy literally derps his way across the planes and manages to kick ridiculous amounts of behind all while being dumb as a rock and operating in flagrant but blissfully ignorant disregard for everything his god actually stands for, and it's the greatest thing.