Any motifs you like using for your characters?

[mr-mercer]

I've been thinking about motifs lately: little things that you associate with particular characters or events. It could be anything: certain colours, a theme song, an associated animal, basically anything that makes you think of the thing in question. I would rather like to hear about the motifs you've used that you want to talk about.

For instance, the current character I'm using is Silas Redthorn, a neutral half-orc fighter with an emphasis on heavy armour and weapons. All of his equipment, forged by his now deceased uncle, has a white and red colour scheme (intended to be reminiscent of ash and cinders, as at one point I wanted to multiclass him as a brass dragon sorcerer). I also have Naill Ferrum, a chaotic good wood elf warlock who I tend to associate with birds of various kinds, as his pact master is a great old one referred to as Aunt Nightingale, though the spells she grants tend to have more in common with corvids than anything else (e.g. leaving a trail of black feathers, causing the shadows of wings to appear on the ground as a cawing echoes throughout the room, etc). I'm thinking of eventually turning an iteration of him into a bladelock with an emphasis on spears, as his more cinematic uses of eldritch blast tend to take the form of spears already.

Do you guys do anything like that, or am I just weird?

[Freed]

I do that a lot.
Like, I have a character that I associate with Falcons and the color blue.
If you want to expand on these things, you could try using IMEs.

[JAL_1138]

I don't know if this counts, but my bards almost all (over)dress like rich idiots in garish (often deliberately mismatched) colors and patterns, and wear the most ludicrous oversized hats with feathers in them they can possibly find. The more weapon-oriented ones tend to dress quite a bit like 16th-century Landsknecht mercenaries.

[Cluedrew]

Not very often, because it is all a mater of description the details would be missed to point them out. Now my character's general appearance probably was chosen for a very particular reason, but I tend not to do a lot of details. So I might have a character with long hair, but never actually say what colour it is.

Now if there is a very particular importance behind something, then yes I will.

[daniel_ream]

Roger Zelazny's descriptions of the Trumps Major of Amber are the ne plus ultra of this trope. Each character has their own colours that they use (sometimes unconsciously) in clothing, livery or decorating, and specific symbols as well.

This is really just a softer form of heraldry, but in a world where lone heroes are more prevalent than dynastic noble houses it serves the same purpose.

[raspberrybadger]

Since my players constantly rename my NPCs anyway, I've taken to doing something sort of similar. I take some concept that I want them to use as the name, and then come up with visual quirks that go with that. That way their name goes along with the publicly presented character concept.

When I make a PC though, I often make the visual stuff fit the personality of the character as best as I can, which half the time ends up being more low key and so on. The other half the time it looks more like heraldry though.

[Stealth Marmot]

My aasimar bard had a veil motif. She would wear a mask/veil over the bottom half of her face most of the time (We played with the Appearance stat, she had a 20) and would take it off only when performing.