Lies, Damn Lies

Roleplaying, characters I've played-part 2

The summer time brought two of my favourite characters so far.

for Nick's WFRP campaign we created character in their second careers. Both Ant and myself ended up with Vampire hunters, who had reached the career in different ways. I played a halfling with absurd ranged prowess, and Ant a human killing machine. We decided that we probably knew each other, and indeed Gollina, or girl as she was to become known, the baber surgeon would probably have helped us out in the past. Our names? Max and Felix.

It occured to me that the career of vampire hunter was a little strange, especially for two characters who had never been to Slyvania. After a bit of improvisation in one session between Ant and myself it soon became clear. Max and Felix were idiots. Exceedingly dangerous idiots who would kill anyone at the first sign of being a vampire, but idiots nontheless.

There was a reasonable indication that the campaign was meant to be dark. And dark it probably was for anyone who met Max and Felix, who brought destruction in their wake. Including:

-Killing an old man for the crime of shooting at us when we broke into his house. He was probably evil
-Killing a mayoral candidate with poison given by his clearly criminal opponent. He candidate was probably evil.
-Finally encountering a vampire.... and allying with it, declaring it a force of utter good. The vampire was definitely evil.

Max and Felix were astonishing fun to play as- absurd beings who were not actively malevolent only because they simply were not smart enough to be so.

The other character played over the summer was Isawa Chomei, who I had a lot of fun with. One of the cute things about L5R is that you can roleplay a character who has absolutely no desire to be doing their current task, but is compelled by society. In other campaigns this often doesn't make sense- why wouldn't they just leave? In Rokugan the social structure is such that if your superiors tell you to do something you pretty much have to do it.

This led to Chomei. A lecherous shugenja, he was a bit of a court mandarin, spending most of his time socialising, and making friends with women. Sadly, he was also married, and his wife got increasingly frustrated with him, causing several scandals at court. So Chomei was sent away from his beloved Phoenix lands, and forced to help an Emerald magistrate. This set up a lovely tension- my character was genuinely ready to run away during the final fight of the campaign, because he was tired of having to fight people all the time (being a Tensai he had appropriate spells despite not being a fan of fighting- he knew all the water spells he needed to), and also he had tried to sleep with the nemesis of the campaign... All in all, a fun character play.

I have two current characters. One is a zealot of Ulric. I have to say, its not a particular stretch for me to play boisterous over the top characters, although this is my second religious fanatic. Albert is a devout, loud man, prefering to go the straight forward way. Sadly he has been forced to take the path of deception recently, and feels a bit bad about it. Still, he is in Estalia now, and is a friar, his goal is clear. Defeat the forces of evil, certainly, but bring the cult of Ulric to Estalia as well! I'm liking Albert a lot: he's no idiot, even though he can act like one occasionally, and is a lot of fun to play.

Finally Jake is the first WOD:mortals character I've played. Its really fun to play a vanilla human- its possible to apply real life experience. Having initally thought of an idea of a lazy student who was funded by his parent, I discovered everyone else had gone the same route.... A little more thought gave me a boxer who wanted to be famous. After foolishly indulging in match fixing he has been asked to quit, and has gone back to the course he dropped out of at university, media studies. Seeing an opportunity to be on television, even if its only internet television, he jumped at the chance. He has since encountered disturbing things- not a man to think about the supernatural, Jake has never really defined his belief in the strange, but is forced to deal with it now. He's a man who will tend to stoop to violence without too much trouble, after all its what he's done for most of his life, but isn't necessarily bad natured. He has a foul tongue, but thats more due the company he used to keep. He's a bit lonely now- most of his friends were in boxing after all, and he finds the lazy students he's been saddled with mostly frustrating. Still he persists, hoping for a way out of his situation.


I hope this round up of characters was vaguely interesting- there was no point behind it, maybe to organise my own thoughts on playing characters. Roleplaying is something that comes mostly naturally to me,

Labels: my life, roleplaying

posted by Mr K @ 10:54 am