It's normally the one thing people don't want to hear about, especially not in detail.
All of us know the guy who talks until he's forcibly stopped about his Werewolf character, and all of us probably know the feeling of having to try to get through that Werewolf is not as cool as he thinks and that he's not the first to think of a Get of Fenris Lupus Ahroun.
This thread is for gushing about your favorite PC (or pet NPC) until it would get you shit on anywhere else. Whether or not it's a Mary Sue, edgy, a special snowflake, a lolrandumb walking party kill, that one kitsune bard everyone tries to subtly keep out of roleplaying or just Urist Beardhammer, the level 1 dwarf fighter whose entire character is summed up in his race and class, tell us about it.
Layer on the detail and the autism. It's rare that people really go on end about their characters here, and if anyone shits on you, chances are they've had some kind of pubescent sex fantasy tiefling or edgy Vampire character in their history too.
Tell Us About Your Character
Oh, where do I start?
Here's my problem: I'm the middle child of a grognard, engaged to the daughter of a grognard (rip man. You get to miss the shit shows). "Appropriate equipment" does not exist: I roll, you loot and if that means you pull a +5 adamantium dagger from the guts of a rat, then you get it. Wealth by level is a laughable concept: you're as rich as the story and your IC smarts says. If that means you have no money at 20th level, or you get a few thousand extra because your character actually earned it, then so be it. "The Devs said X" is cause for me to hit you with the rulebook. Your character will die: give me a reason that isn't stats to keep them alive.
The last one is important.
Every character has bonuses and penalties built in, and every single set up tells a story. In systems that don't give me advantage/disadvantage mechanics, I play a +0/-0 game with it. In systems that do, I ignore the limits on both, because there will be a story. and it will be shown on the sheet in the only way that roll players respect: hard numbers.
For an Eclipse Phase group that never happened, I created Fumiko, Titanian cop and async. Also, oppai loli fetish fuel with an edgy past that involved being raised from birth to be a wife to a pedophile. Her primary plotlines were dealing with her ex husband trying to get her back, coming to terms with having a truly alien yet understandable alien in her head, amd making sure she made it to her therapy appointments on time while trying to bypass the lock on her uterous so she could get pregnant again.
Her secondary plotline was firewall.
Kitsuki Sakura, created less than a week ago for an L5R game that crashes before the first session. Special little snowflake that proved her willingness to protect others at a young age. Also, married to her sworn enemy while raising the kid her now dead first lover knocked her up with. Then there's the man that killed said lover, additional family... I need another post.
Where was I? Ah, Sakura. Additional family drama, and she's getting really ready to kill her husband. After she burns a few favors to send her kid to the Bayushi courtier school.
For VtM, a malk who specializes in being a Gothic lolita pro Dom. Also, was embraced by the sabbt before she sold them out and was claimed as an abandoned childe by the man that was going to be prince of Tacoma. She was going to be fun, but the game never happened because the ex of one player gave her PTSD about the game (imagine playing your character with a knife held to your throat. You have to describe how your character is being raped by theirs. Now do this multiple times)
But my favorite to date, who proves that a Monty haul campaign can still work in the modern era of "Mandatory Magic Items" and "do not give the players more wealth than this or bonus higher than this": Sarah. Pathfinder rogue in a game that turned Mythic the second session. One of the few characters I ever got to play. Daughter of two innkeepers, secretary to a mob boss, and painter. And that's before she turned 18. Thanks to Ultimate Campaigns investment rules, time travel that I didn't know would happen, and the DM being a CPA, she had a net worth of 14 billion and change GP before I got kicked out of my parents house. There were entire small nations who depended on loans drawn against her bank account. So she was only able to withdraw a few million before the bank needed to shift assets (like entire palaces) around.
But that's not important, because it didn't matter what shopping list of magical items I drew up, I still had to find sellers. So don't worry bout WBL, only people who care more about their numbers than your game will get ticked.
Sarah adventured to find new inspiration for her painting. It started innocently enough: discovering an art forger, breaking and entering with other artists, rendering a very artistic revenge, and making a lot of money.
Next post!
The one character I still want to play the shit out of is Naomi Ramsey, an exercise in how even the most overdramatically described splat combination with Magical Eastern Mysticism and Melissa Uran "art" (South-Facing Yin-Aspected Devil-Tiger) can be played as a mental teenager with superpowers.
Naomi was a perpetual sore loser who wanted friends, but wanted them on her terms - when someone didn't act like she wanted, she pushed them away, and this resulted in an isolated, bitter and selfish person who really thought at some level that other people thought they were too good for her.
She hooked onto the whole "geek girl" boom for people who'd love her and support her no strings attached, but it failed because she was obviously being half-assed about it, and as such she went on a trip to Japan like all of her weeaboo friends had done in the hopes of finding some kind of new purpose or hobby.
She embarrassed herself in her first few classes and after that stopped turning up, locking herself in her gaijin house room for two months before she got to know she'd been kicked out of the study and had gotten her visa suspended, wasting thousands of her family's dollars on nothing when her parents already resented her for being 24 and jobless, and she decided to get piss-fucking drunk and see where it ended.
It ended in the Yellow Springs, where Yu Huang was supposed to hand her soul over to the Stygian Deathlords - but Madness and Happenstance couldn't agree on whether it'd been suicide or an accident, and Yu Huang pocketed her soul while they were bickering.
Naomi had too many people on her high school hit list (an actual, physical notebook) to die that easily, though, and managed through pure entitlement and fury to claw her way out of the Hell of being Skinned Alive (where she'd ended up because she lived off of taking affection and giving only bullshit back).
She was met by a bunch of Devil-Tigers who were relatively happy with how she didn't immediately try to kill them, but less happy about having a Westerner Kuei-Jin to deal with - but killing a Kuei-Jin for such a half-assed reason is not what the Devil-Tigers do, and she was sent back to San Francisco on a rescheduled night plane with only the very most basic ideas of what the fuck a Dharma was.
Back there, she started using her powers for petty revenge and making pocket money, making a friend or two with the local Kindred just to not get killed, and ended up shacking up with a bunch of other people with their own little tricks and a will to make money off it (which turned out to include a lot of really fucky people, for example a Striker Mokolé called Fernando, who looked like a fried Mexican backpacker kid and who everyone assumed was high all the time, a neurotic were-cockroach, a Mountain Guardian Gurahl biker who later made a contract with a demon and a heroin-banging Unseelie Satyr).
In short, she's just an insecure bully who wants friends and allies, but without having to skimp on her own indulgence. She's quick to turn to intimidation, violence and deranged plans involving irresponsible use of supernatural powers (she once hijacked a Caucasian Mafiya chapter by killing the boss, stealing his money and documents, using it to set up a dinner with his subordinates and then showing that she could take a bullet to the heart right in front of everyone), and is probably the fundamentally least sympathetic (though definitely pathetic) character I've played.
She's just competent enough to be redeemable, as well as caring about her friends and allies, but at the core of it she's just a fedoroid who wants gory, edgy and painful revenge for tiny slights in the past, using a lineup of Black Wind, Demon Shintai, Iron Mountain and just a single dot of Ghost-Flame Shintai, all in pursuit of a garbled and barely functional version of the Devil-Tiger Dharma.
I just remembered that she also had a fair bit of Yin Prana. The GM was being generous with Disciplines, because no matter how crazy a Kuei-Jin can be, they need some juice to stand up to characters like the Murderbear, who once knocked a Pentex guard's head clean through his ribcage and pelvis. Crinos is, indeed, the solution to every problem.
A lot of money: 10,381 GP to be exact. I bought a bag of holding and some nice equipment.
This was the prequel adventure the DM and I ran to shown the others how to play with the style our dad taught us. For we are Grognard, Sons of Grognard, who Gamed Uphill Both Ways IN THE SNOW with 30 other people in college.
Then we ran through keep on the borderlands. Best line comes from Sarah
>just killed the cook.
>nobody from the room next door is responding
>pick up empty soup cauldron, walk to other door
>yell "chows here!"
>bandit opens door, looks at me.
>"i have never seen you before."
>"I'm new, I started earlier."
>Bluff check is 18 roll +6 bonus
>bandit leans over
>"what are you serving?"
>"PAIN!"
>sneak attack with the pot, win initiative for the surprise round
>slaughter an entire barracks in a single round
After wiping a goblin horde attack and killing an ogre (not my kill, that was the sword and board and greatsword fighters holding the line like badasses - always optimize the builds of young first timers, it makes it easier on them and keeps them hooked longer), we just fast forwarded to the actual plot: playing observer to a group of epic level adventurers sent out by the king to check on something. Before leaving, I leave a nice deposit in the bank and an investment in the local mafia -half interest into the investment, other half into the bank.
Of course shit happens, we need a problem to fix! Said shit was the elemental balance of the world getting fucked, and us being flung 300 years into the future. The DM runs the numbers twice. He didn't want me to lose that investment, but he needed to know the scale. It came back bigger both times, with a difference of about 8 billion.
Thus began an epic quest cut short by an psychologicaly abusive mother who got the cops on her side. Which sucks, because the "building a school" arc was getting interesting: our recruitment of an epic level wizard as a teacher might have caused a war...
So that's the most impressive numbers regarding Sarah. Never mind she had to roll a save versus painting when presented with a scene of beauty or deep meaning (I wanted a painter rogue. I put the bonuses from that into painting). But what I remember most was a painting she was working on before adventuring, the one that helped her discover an art forger: a young woman, hands empty, bleeding, and cupped, with the symbols of the settings gods in a ring around her. All the symbols were upside down.
Also, playing Sarah taught me that if you play an artist in 3.PF, Draconomicon, appendix A, table A-12 Depictions is your best friend. Roll a few times and mix em up.
My groups have a habit of over explaining their characters, going really deeply into backstory, and things like that.
Comparatively, i do not. I did once, but most of it got ignored anyways, and probably for the better.
So my current character is a simple half orc barbarian. He's got low mental stats, is named "Waagh", and calls weapons "Dakka".
Obvious warhammer reference is obvious. But i've found him the most fun to roleplay so far because i'm not bound to the rest of the party as some sort of leader. My other character was supposed to be a punchmonkey, as i was totally new, but by some combination of genre savvy and common sense, i ended up the party face, despite having horrendously low int and charisma.
So i'm currently enjoying being a simple barbarian. My first exploit with him was against a gnoll captain. See, i have a lot of weapons (because orks always want more dakka). Currently, i'm carrying a greatsword, greataxe, and heavy pick. When i attacked with the greatsword, my DM said i impaled, but didn't kill the guy. So i screamed in his face. He screamed back, with a mad smile on his face. He was enjoying himself, as was i. So i left the greatsword in his gut, pulled out the greataxe, and decapitated him.
Its the stupidest, simplest, memiest character. Yet its the one i've had the most "fun" with in recent memory, because i got to act out what i wanted from the character.
I think my favorite character was a Warforged Monk named Clarke. Our party started out in an Orc slave camp, and as we were camping in the woods shortly after escaping, Clarke decided to make "a hearty stew" out of random stuff he gathered for his newfound friends in order to impress them. It actually turned into a rather delicious tea that Clarke later managed to refine to the point that it had mild healing properties, and we'd brew and sell it as a hangover cure when we needed a bit of extra cash (it was extremely popular with Dwarves, for obvious reasons)
>dwarves
>hangover cure
Lad, the only cure for a hangover is more drink.
I'm currently playing in an F-Zero campaign.
>Name: Issac Von Mises
>Race: Human
>Age: 28 years old
A German engineer who got into the F-Zero Grand Prix on a dare, and ended up enjoying it enough to make it his new hobby. The man loves to tinker with various devices, and always keeps his trusty graphing calculator nearby.
>Vehicle: The Arctan
Made entirely from scratch by Issac himself, this F-Zero machine is one of the stranger vehicles on the track. Despite its incredibly shoddy appearance, it is surprisingly study, and boasts a modular design. Issac designed it this way to make it easy to switch out gadgets that he constructed for his vehicle, such as the magnetic harpoon, which he uses to turn any chase into a fishing trip.
>F-Zero campaign
That sounds pretty bitchin'.
>"Appropriate equipment" does not exist: I roll, you loot and if that means you pull a +5 adamantium dagger from the guts of a rat, then you get it.
You don't seem to understand the Treasure Type rules.
Or common logic, for that matter.
It is indeed, bitchin'. Going fast with a bunch of nerds that also like going fast is the best.
Our party consists of the following:
>Engineer McBuildsstuff (me)
>Super Sassy Space Italian
>Dark Bison™
>Shrodinger's Weeb
>The Announcer, with his alter ego, The Color Commentator
My current character is a beast rider kit fighter in AD&D 2e named Roran. Rides a wolf, comes from a tribe in the forest that's a mix of Celtic and Mongolian, wearing Mongol type armor and blue swirly tattoos. He's got a large bastard sword and a broken bow, still trying to replace it and still rather sullen about it.
He's currently holding a grudge after being tortured at the hands of the Drow, seeing one basically makes him rage and charge in for revenge, still not sure if he's fought or killed the one that originally tortured him, but they all rather look alike anyways.
He's also not much a fan of magic, being that the main baddies of the campaign are Zentarum wizards. Stinking clouds and evil artifacts everywhere.
He's also rapidly feeling less and less bad about missing an orc that lopped off the druid's leg as a result. The druid has been very combative towards him for little reason, even causing damage, and is rapidly draining any esteem he feels towards her position due to that. Any more and there's no guarantee his hand will be stayed.
>pic related, from a drawthread a while back
I'm gonna be playing VTM for the first time, I learned the system and have been looking for a game for about 6 years now.
I'm going to be making a Kiasyd that's completely engrossed in riddles and the answers to them, being an autistic fuck where he'll try and relate every problem with a riddle.
Finding good Kiasyd art is near impossible though.
I've been playing for the time that you've been reading up on the lore, and let me give you a bit of advice.
Do not play that character. Kiasyd are notoriously hard to get to share motivations with the rest of the party, hard to roleplay properly, stand out a lot, have a very restrictive concept, don't share many themes with the vampire horror genre and bring unneeded Changeling elements into the game.
Just reading the lore, you might think they're cool. They're not, and I've come to hate them. Their Discipline is silly abusable, their themes clash with the game, they're special by definition and they're not really fun to play, not to mention they're usually prone to solo play and thus dull and demanding for other players.
There's a reason there are 13 standard clans and 7 of those in the Camarilla. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and play something easier first - basically, the 13 standard clans minus Malkavian, Gangrel, Assamite, Tzimisce and Ravnos.
I'm really not trying to kill your fun. I've just been playing Vampire a shitton, and I've never seen a Kiasyd (or Nagaraja, or Child of Osiris, or Ahrimane, or...) character that hasn't been stopped dead by the points above, just for the player to realize that the clan or bloodline isn't actually fun in practice even in spite of all the bullshit. They're narrow, unfitting concepts that pose a lot of trouble for the other players and GM, with only the reward of the power balance being skewed towards a character who's unrewarding from a roleplaying perspective.
Please don't do it. There are few enough Masquerade players already, and I can guarantee you're going to get very disappointed if you play Kiasyd.
only good thing ive seen in this thread
>Jack Miles
>best but unattentive gun in the west
>carries a family revolver
>his father killed many men with it
>"You know how many men this revolver done killed? Well, I can't count that high, but I'll tell ye it's more than you can guess!" was his battlecry
>shot a spider on instinct when it flew into his face
>shot an invisible target in the head with a mix of luck and BEST GUN IN THE WEST
>insanely lucky shooting rolls
>playing a Harrowed, a possessed corpse that eats raw meat
>got lynched by the sherriff when he slept with her daughter
>killed the sheriff after being possessed
>went to his daughter for clothes, convinced her to let him off the hook because
>BEST GUN IN THE WEST
>set fire to a bar
>blamed indians, it worked
>running with a mad scientist
>mad scientist runs his mouth too much
>shoots him in the ankle
>That Guy playing the mad scientist fucks off into the desert to die
>BBEG is a steampunk cyborg
>first shot, called to the head
>3 raises (a crit)
>bullet bounces off
>gets knocked out after being filled with holes and is buried alive
>the entire time his worst enemy was Desert Ticks, these giant dog sized ticks that crawl in your mouth and eat you from the inside out
>just can't hit them for shit. Kill everything else damn near instantly though
What Changeling things are brought up? I'm talking about the V20 Kiasyd, not the ones that are genuinely just vampires with fae blood. I don't see how their discipline is abusable to be honest, aside from things such as fae sight which is completely the ST's choice on whether or not to bring this sort of thing up.
Kiasyd are already well separated from the Sabbat, the idea that this would clash heavily with EVERY party, is a little silly.
Their look and how they act is most of the reason why I enjoy them though, and while I can definitely understand the idea behind saying that this is incredibly limiting, I don't think that this is always a bad thing, I've always playing specialist characters, and I believe a kiasyd would be a great example of this, I prefer having my character be limited rather than being some kind of master of none
And you never saw the table entries that said "go to this table". If the dice chain leads there, it leads there. I have seen treasure rolls hand put a +5 adamantium weapon at level one before. I've also seen them generate a barrel of fertilizer.
You say " iillogical!", I say "story time."
Tell me, /pfg/, have you ever had an IC romantic relationship with another PC without it being awkward?
No, but I've had relationships with NPCs.
>shot a spider on instinct when it flew into his face
>shot an invisible target in the head with a mix of luck and BEST GUN IN THE WEST
I love this. 10/10 would play with
I have two groups, each with a minimum of one character I'm gonna talk about- the first being the longest.
>Group One: Pathfinder (Kill Me)
Tiefling Alchemist4/Druid3 (Everyone else is a martial, so I've become the guy they go to for magic bullshit)
His backstory is that since he's a Tiefling (Generic crimson-skin with devil horns) he was abandoned by the mother on the step of a church, who then gave him over to an arcane college because fuck that evil shit. He basically grew up in the alchemical lab, helping the resident crazy old man make his crazy bullshit potions. Due to a natural resistance to fire, it made the kid (Now named Viktor) quite useful.
Eventually the old man died, and nobody else could really tolerate his presence, so he stayed in the lab, doing his own thing. One day he accidentally blew up a tower, and was forced to leave. So, he started traveling. He made his way around the continent, going from college to college, and since they have no real way of saying "DON'T ACCEPT THIS PERSON," and he has a natural aptitude for magic, he always gets accepted- and then kicked out.
Due to his heritage and his eccentric nature, he has more or less forgotten the reason he's been traveling, and has settled into searching for the ultimate way to create "The Philosopher's Tap," a magical device that could create any kind of drink/potion.
This led him to join up with the group and take on some adventuring in the proper way, instead of traveling over not-Eurasia with a whole lot of explodey expensive stuff. After some moderate success with his alchemical abilities in multiple dungeons, raiding some graves, and managing to get himself a thick enough winter coat, he escaped into the wilds for some time to become closer to nature, hoping to know more so that he may create the magic device- and thus he gained levels in druid.
Continuing on:
So, by "escaped into the wilds" I mean he was basically just having a breakdown and running a straight line from the town to the place the party had to go, all while trying to become closer to nature. The party had to take the long way for safety's sake, and it took them more than twice as long as it did for me.
He met a Treant/Ent who was really fucking slow, and due to speaking weird (I bullshitted that he spoke in a broken russo-slav accent because he knew around 7, 8 languages and it fucked with his head) it took a day to actually figure out where the nearest druids were. Once he did figure it out, he quickly made his way to them to learn their ways.
Now, the DM was not exactly druid-centric, so he basically made it a hippy commune with added magical shit. My character ran around in a forest bordering the tundra in nothing but a loincloth, screaming about being one with the forest.
After some time, he gained his first proper level in druid. This entire ditching the party was the DM's idea because "you can't just gain levels in druid without self-reflection in nature" and I rolled with it.
His animal companion ended up being a red sheepdog named Magnús. Together with this dog, he joined up with the party once more, and attacked Ravenscraeg peak or whatever the fuck, from the Jade Regent Campaign. Long story short:
Next post, that shitty ass dungeon and why I like the party, the dm, but not the system.
I'm going to try and shorten any bits that aren't quite necessary
>People chain incident (Arrival)
We arrive at the base of the cliff, and begin walking up the rickety stairs. We get some horse-sized wasp thing to piss off, and we got to around halfway up before some ninja tengu attack us. We get them to piss off too- or we think so at first. So then, the rogue has the idea to spread out so that there's a square empty between each one of us in the party, so none of us can get flanked when we realize they're just going invisible. Dog's at end of chain. Dog gets picked up by the ninjas, and almost tossed off the cliff.
Tiefling tries to save dog by pushing a ninja, but that sends both the ninja and the dog off the cliff. The dog bites onto the ankle of the ninja, I grab the ninja's wrists. Paladin (Aasimar) grabs my hips. Ninja tries to push Paladin off by grappling him over. Catfolk Rogue grabs that one's ankles. We all go over.
We survive through good rolls, the ninjas are crippled to shit and killed easily.
>Paladin gets one-hit after we clear most of the fort so we leave and come back with a barbarian (Dwarf, Minmaxed to shit, met in a fighting ring)
>Rogue and Ranger go stealth it up atop the fort
>Barb and I don't care for stealth/suck at it, so we decide to just bust down the front door
>Manage to get door open after a lot of bashing/bombs
>10 Mercs all look at us, feel slightly scared because we already cleaned house once
>3 ninjas attack us from nowhere
>Dog trips one, I slash its throat and scream about law of the jungle
>Dwarf insta-kills the other two each time he gets to attack
>Mercs run away
>We feel like gods and loot shit
>Werebear boss/miniboss that killed paladin gets woken up by how insane we are
>We prep plan to swing weapons on outer side of door, knock him off cliff
>He has the same plan on the inner side
>Stalemate for a few rounds
>He fucks off to find the rogue and ranger
>Next post: A bear and a cliff
>Be Alchemist/Druid with massive ranged bonuses
>Loot a blowgun from ninja
>Loot some poison (sedative) from the ninja
>Prep 10 darts
>Bear chases rogue and ranger down back to entrance, gets engaged with Barbarian
>Pump four darts into him, he fails the con check on the last one, falls asleep
>Dump the rest of the poison down his gullet after he fell asleep
>Strip him
>Light him up with lantern oil
>Toss him off cliff instead of trying to fight him
>Continue onward
>Party is trapped in room with monks and ninjas, my character's been deafened so he's just recovering in the corner
>Party deals with problem, mostly
>One left
>Ninja-woman with fire-weapons that deal shit damage, but decent fire damage in comparison
>Manages to get the rest of my party to hide in other rooms
>I get up and recovered, and am left with ninja woman to fight
>Prepare to be hurt badly
>"After your racial modifiers come in, you take two damage"
>Iamagod.jpg
>Splash damage her to death because aiming's overrated anyway
>Brag about being ninjakiller #1
>End of last session, which will resume next time the DM comes back from Bumfuck, Montana
Oh, and my character for the other group, which actually gets to meet, is Michael, the Tiefling (this time only for elemental buffs) Knight. Ultra valorous, very Deus Vult.
So far he has:
>Captain America Charging Star into the side of a boss's head, with his Paladin bro on the other side doing the same
>Become a beyblade by standing on top of his own shield and having it tossed by the barbarian, spinning wildly (making his balance check by miles, btw), then decapitating the owlbear who was currently mauling our Druid
>Red-hot kick/Dynamic Entry'd a bandit on the city walls after having been tossed up there, while carrying the druid's wolf companion under one arm and screaming DEUS VULT
Last we met, the session ended with him taking on the bandit's leader in 1v1 combat.
Correction: INSANELY bitchin'.
My current character is a bard/sorcerer who's an actress and violinist known throughout the region. What's not known is that she's currently working as a member of a secret organization that intend to plunge the world into chaos by replacing the current gods with elementals bestowed with divine power.
She's been travelling with the party undercover in order to disrupt not only keep an eye on them but also to disrupt her own organization's efforts as she wants to cause as much chaos and confusion as possible.
Her side goal is finding a copy of a play which may or may not exist but she is convinced that during her youth she read it. Which is made even more confusing to her and her superiors as one of the organization's many secrets is that my character doesn't actually exist at all. Nobody is sure what or how anything she does occurs but it does.
Man, that sounds wild. And crazy fun.
also
>My character ran around in a forest bordering the tundra in nothing but a loincloth, screaming about being one with the forest.
I loled
My current game is "NPC D&D" where we are the npc's that outfit, give quests to and live under the PCs. depending on how well we do our jobs, the pc's have varying degrees of success.
We all have several characters we run for obvious reasons, but my main is a dwarven craft-master that is a 20th level expert. He currently helps run a newly founded dwarven kingdom after the pc's helped stem the tide of an invasion of orcs and goblins. When the pc's found a subsection of the elemental plane of earth made entirely of precious/utilitarian metals and gems, he leveraged his political power to help build a permanent portal to that plane and set up defenses.
Moradin personally blessed his forge hammer and he may be being called on to build an artifact with the pc's.
OK here we go...
My favorite pet NPC:
System: shadowrun 4e
They are an elf trap built around social skills and infiltration.
Their back story starts as them being the boy\girlfriend of a runner. Doesn't know much about their sugar daddy's job until they accidentally honey pot a Johnson during a meeting in a club.
From then on the BF used them as negotiation enhancer, then honeypot, then drug mule, then as distraction, etc until they are basically the runner groups fine ass mascot. End up being severely mistreated up to having cyber and bioware installed against their will to make them more useful.
Then one day a run goes south, BF lands in an evo prison, rest of grouped croaks.
They go into hiding, get a decent fake identity and tries to live a normal life as an art student.
Flash forward to the actual game.
The PCs need info on the particular run the trap's group fucked up and eventually find them. They frefreak out but agree to cooperate if the PCs leave them alone afterwards.
Every one agrees, but the orc shaman falls for them and really wants to get his dick wet in that sweet boy pussy.
They eventually start dating, because the trap is serious broken goods and laps at the attention.
On the first major date, the shaman wants to show off his magic dick and use the traps essence to shape his ally spirit to symbolically be their "child".
He TREMENDOUSLY fucks up the ritual and accidentally summons an elder spirit that claims her soul as his property.
Some bargaining later, the shaman gets to keep his fuck toy, but they end up being the living avatar of a crazy and powerful spirit...
They continued to be a major mover and shaker from that point on, getting progressively more insane
Oh and the traps runner name is cheshire. I love "her"
My favorite character that I've ever played was in a long running Dungeon World game. They were a Metamorph, which is a really neat class, especially with Doppelganger from the start, which the GM let me take.
Power wise they were essentially The Thing, though multiplying would have taken much much longer, but I never bothered with that anyways. A sort of amorphous, shape-shifting meat blob, a writing mass of muscle, bone, sinew, fangs, tongues, claws, and eyes, that could take the form of, well anything really, but mostly animals, including humans, posing and blending in with various societies.
The setting was filled with cultists and abominations and dark gods and all sorts of shit like that, so that influenced the character's backstory.
What I eventually came up with was, many centuries ago, there was a group of cultists who worshiped the flesh. They sought to create a god, Carnibus Rex, a magical being comprised of flesh, that would absorb and consume all life into one mighty organism. The cultists basically alchemied a bunch of animals, including one of the cultist's child, together, creating the abomination. But the thing they created, though not retaining many memories, had little bits and fragments from all the life forms that went into it, and it remembered, on a primal level, what the cultists had done to all the things that went into it, and then lashed out, killing the cultists, though not absorbing them. It then, instead of deciding to absorb everyone, go around, explore the world, blend in, infiltrate, and multiply.
The creature's been living in many places, many situations. Whether it joins a wolf pack, or a king's court as a eunuch monk, or perhaps a wandering adventurer, or maybe living alone as a spider in the woods, or even just pretending to be a tree. Eating and consuming flesh when it needs to, but often times just blending into different life styles.
I didn't really play the character as evil, but I didn't really play them as good either. Chaotic neutral I guess, they had flecks of both.
See, whenever the character was in a situation for too long, after a few years, things would eventually fall apart. There would be some big disaster, some fight, usually with a lot of people ending up dead. Sure, sometimes it would just be coincidence, these things do happen. Sometimes, maybe it's because someone catches on to it's monstrous nature, maybe someone sniffs out something 'off' about them. A lot of the time, even if the character wouldn't consciously admit this, it was self-destructive though. Sometimes that self destructiveness manifested as letting the disguise, the persona slip, but sometimes it would just be more old fashioned destructiveness. Back stabbing, betrayal, manipulation, that sort of thing.
See, this character was still an animal, an intelligent one at that, just like you or me on the inside, with the same basic wants and needs. Desires to be comfortable, to be accepted, to fit in and be liked. To be part of a community, a species, a family, all of it. But this character didn't realize this, or didn't admit it at any rate. They saw themselves as something decidedly 'else', something 'other.'
When people started to get close, when bonds really start to form, and this thing gets comfortable with them, it starts to think, deep down, "These people don't really like _me,_ they like this false persona I've created. These nice people, who I care about, genuinely, have grown to love this false construct, this character I'm posing as, if they knew what i really was, they would be horrified."
And so it starts to seek distance from these people, destroy their bonds. Unconsciously, of course. Partially to soften the blow, "if they grow to dislike this person, it will be okay if they disappear, or die, or turn out to be a horrible monster," partially to lessen the pain, the contrast between being loved as the false persona but reviled as their true self, and partially as a comfort zone thing, "These people would hate the real me, so let's make them hate the fake me, so I know the feeling of being hated."
And this is sort of what I was talking about, with a little bit of chaotic evil, and a little bit of chaotic good. The character has a somewhat sweet, helpful, chaotic good disposition. Sneaking sweets to children, not ratting out teenagers to authority, generally friendly, if a bit of a tease and sarcastic, sort of a loner, intentionally likes building an air of mystery about themselves. But when people start getting really, truly close, they get destructive and do very cruel things. Not to mention that they do, y'know, eat people. Without much provoking either. They're capable of doing bad things to good people, they could hide amongst murdering highwaymen as easily as they could among a group of nuns running an orphanage, it's a distance/closeness thing.
This was generally the character arc they went through in the actual campaign. When I was introducing the character, I had a general description of what they would look like in their initial human disguise, mysterious, attractive, rogue-like adventurer, youthful looking yet with a sense of age, yet also immaturity, clad in bizarre black, form-fitting hide armor, dark long curly hair, but I wasn't sure on gender. I had been sort of leaning towards a guy, but I figured it didn't matter much, I planned on changing it often, flipped a coin, and ended up having them show up as a chick.
The problem was, one of the people in our party had just started playing a hard-core templar, Viktor, who was very anti-heresy, anti-abomination, anti-shapeshifting cannibal meat monster, etc. So even though the rest of the party found out about her nature by the end of the session (it was an impressive introduction, thanks to some lucky dice rolls, she showed up at the last second and saved the party from a bunch of cultists who were about to kill them, and did so in a very horrifying, spectacular manner), they had to keep him in the dark (for the scene in question, I had managed to get his helmet turned around on his head, and by the time he got it fixed the fight was over).
So things continued like that for a while, a few members of the party distrusted Carnibus (though no one ever actually learned it's true name), but gradually, over time, warmed up to them, and came to trust them. But Viktor never found out, which became a bit of a running joke, an additional role-play challenge, keep Viktor from finding out about Carnibus. To add to that, in order to make things more complicated/ironic, the guy playing him decided that Viktor was developing a crush on Carnibus, which the party found really entertaining. I'd established the character already as a shameless flirt (I mean, when it's a shapeshifting Thing-like meat monster, you kinda have to play up the whole sex-horror thing, it's only natural), so I just sort of went with it.
And that's what triggered my character eventually leaving. There was a session that had started out really comedic, but towards the end got REALLY fucking intense, way more than I think anyone, including the GM intended. Viktor and Carnibus kind of came to a point of conflict, Viktor interrogating her about her past, to the point where there was almost like, disturbingly rapey undertones to the scene. But immediately after that, when Carnibus got away, Viktor made this big dramatic apology, even took off his helmet for the first time, and Carnibus ended up leaving the party there, staying behind in this weird pocket world with some mask-faced monster thing, telling the party to leave.
People were tired so we ended the session there, I kinda wanted to roleplay it out a bit more, to establish what exactly Carnibus was planning to do in that place, but it wasn't important then so we left it at that. I wanted to bring Carnibus back later, but the campaign sort of fell apart before I ever got to.
I really love the character though, even aside from their performance in that campaign, which I thought was really cool. They're a sort of perfect tabletop character. Their backstory is a good blend of specific and open ended, giving me plenty of room to add whatever background details I need, or want for character fluff, and giving the GM plenty of opportunity for plot hooks and the like. They're powerful, but in an interesting, very specific, yet flexible way.Their powers encourage creativity really well. And the body horror aspects make them really really memorable. And as powerful as the character is, the character is pretty passive and likes to hang back, so they don't steal the spot light, and let someone else take the spotlight most of the time. In general, their personality is in a good place where it's distinct and memorable, but can fit into most settings. I feel pretty confident that I could play this character in ALMOST any party, and it would work.