coming later

The monster terrorist ∞

Just some random notes that have no real home.

From 2005-08-14 or earlier.

This character was developed for a new game with a new group. I knew all of the members of the forming party, but most of them I had not played with before. The GM was fairly new to GMing and had a headfull of ideas on roleplaying and some modifications he wanted to do to it.

It was an interesting time – an opportunity to play with a bunch of people I hadn’t previously played with, a GM who has some unique ideas (including a new world) and a custom roleplaying system (which I was extremely apprehensive about).

I approached the entire affair with some lust, but at a fair distance (as with all new things). We as a group decided on a set of things: Our characters were all from the same town, we all knew eachother when we were kids, we became famous in our youth and we split up for a time. We also decided that character generation should be done while we’re all together in order to create balance in the characters.

We discussed (nearing argument) where we were to have grown up, what types of characters would work well together, the timeline of events in our childhoods (like how we met and how we became famous) as well as helping eachother out with names / nicknames.

It was during this character creation discussion (which took 2 or more sessions to sort out) that I brought up a concept from another game (Nephilim): The Chinese portrait. The Chinese portrait attempted to flesh out the etheral personality of a character by linking that persona to a set of objects. This was done with a quick question/answer list of items. Understanding one’s character is generally an automatic thing for experienced gamers, but there is also a distinct possibility that they fall into the rutt of creating a character that acts and feels like every other character they’ve made. The idea behind the portrait is to have the character personality in mind and then answer a set of questions as fluidly as possible. The end result is a set of answers that are subtly appropriate as a set and act to recreate the spirit of the character when read.

Each person did a Chinese Portrait for their character, and it turned out quite well.. each player was better able to understand their persona after having answered these questions. In fact, the questions tended to raise ideas about the character which would not normally have been thought of until later in the game itself.

Here is the Chinese Portrait for my character. By the time I had my portrait done I already had most of a character timeline generated. Our characters were meant to be the ‘hero type’ right from the start of play, so my portrait to indicate some of the inner turmoil from my character’s past training.

TODO – Table to be created one day

Of our group of friends, my character was the youngest. He had observed a girl being beat on by a known bully, and decided to pounce on him to defend her. In return for his chivalry, he too received a sound beating. The two of them were rescued by several other kids and the bully was chased off. We became fast friends.

TODO – To be continued one day. But let’s face it, probably not.