COVID Character: Laverne

All things must end, even this COVID Character retrospective. In order to go out with a bang (and not a whimper) I have decided to end on a high note with perhaps my most favorite character of my COVID gaming career.

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Laverne

Aliases: None
Pronouns: They/them, but really any/all
Character Concept: Leshy seem cool. I'll play one of those!
Character Stats: 8th level NG Fungal Leshi Alchemist, Scroll Trickster, and Criminal
Campaign: The Fall of Plaguestone/Age of Ashes
System: D&D 5E
Campaign Status:Abandoned

 

"I would DIE for Laverne."

 

I often have no idea what I'm doing when I'm making a character. When that happens, I look through the book and try to find an interesting combination of things or a new ancestry/class/etc. that I've never had the chance to play before.

Pathfinder 2E has a lot of character options--which I like and appreciate, even as I am constantly overwhelmed by them. One of these is the leshy. They're sapient plant people. There's a bunch of different subtypes, including gourd people (you can store stuff in your head), and fungal leshy (which, yes, okay, fungi and plants are different, but it's a magical fantasy world of myth and whimsy, so we can ignore scientific accuracy just a bit here).

The second I saw the fungal leshy, I was like, "I'm gonna play one of those!"

And so, Laverne! They're a little mushroom person who is incredibly cute, disarmingly cheerful, upbeat, and enthusiastic. Despite this optimistic personality, Laverne was a little bit sketchy. They had a criminal background and would do a little breaking and entering and similar should the situation require it. Despite that, they were much beloved by everyone in the party, probably because I played up the, "I'm just a silly little person, don't mind me!" whenever I got the chance.

Laverne was an alchemist, which was a character class I never played before. I enjoyed alchemy at low level, but found it frustrating at higher level. Everyone else in the party seemed to outpace me in power and "doing cool stuff" fairly quickly. This was good for them, of course, but much less so for me. I think the big reason for my frustration is that the game wants you to specialize in the type of alchemy you do, but Laverne was more of a generalist. So I got a lot of little things as opposed to one big thing.

This turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise, because it gave Laverne lots of little levers to pull, no matter what situation they found themselves in. I doubled down on this aspect of the character by taking scroll trickster (which lets you make low level spell scrolls and create minor magical effects) and also by grabbing every low level magical item that the other party members didn't want and cramming them in Laverne's bag of holding.

This led to the most fun aspect of the character, which I privately called my, "Swiss Army Mushroom" time. Do we have a problem? Let's see what I've got in the bag! Do I not have exactly what I need in the bag? Let's see if I can cobble something together with random bits I find in the bag!

The most memorable example of how Laverne worked went a little something like this: We encountered a really nasty monster, which we of course tried to fight. It kicked our asses and sent us scrambling to a safer part of the dungeon. While the party licked our wounds, I reached into my bag to see if I could find anything that would help us defeat the monster.

Eventually, I settled on the following plan: I took the decapitated head of a spider we had previously beaten and filled it with the nastiest ingested poison I had on my person. Then I used a scroll that I found to cast a spell on the spider head to make it look like the most pristine, highest-quality spider head anyone had ever seen.

We walk back into the monster's lair and I apologize profusely to the monster for disturbing it. Then I present the spider head to the monster. The monster is overcome with how delicious the spider head is, promptly devours it, and is poisoned. Then the rest of the party jumped it from the shadows.

I don't want to say that it was no match for us after that (because, holy crow, greater barghasts are scary), but it was slightly weaker, and we needed all the help we could get!

There's a lot more I could talk about with Laverne: Like how they and Jora, our Champion of Desna became the unofficial parents of the rowdy, half-orc twins in the party. Or how I used their Criminal background make nice with some bandits who had been paid to ambush us (which raised a lot of questions!). Or how I helped the party to win a dance battle in the Mwange Expanse. 

Maybe another time!

 

 

COVID Character: Revna

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Revna

Aliases: Gudrun's Creepy Brother
Pronouns: He/him
Character Concept: No Eldritch Blast Warlock
Character Stats: 6th level NE Human/Reborn Hermit Pact of the Tome Warlock
Campaign: Gray Skies/Gray Seas
System: D&D 5E
Campaign Status:Abandoned

 

Hoo, this guy.

 

Our GM crafted a bespoke D&D world based on the Old Norse peoples and their legends. The inciting incident of the game occurred 15 years previously, when an undead army sacked the capital city of Nidaros and killed the king. Things had been not great, but mostly stable since then. Our village was ruled by Jarl Fritjof (also known as the Bloodeye) who was a huge jerk, and everyone in the party had caused him offense or problems in some way (which was easy to do).

The campaign started with a blót to give thanks for the arrival of spring. The villagers went out in their boats to catch whales for sacrifice. In the midst of that, a ship crewed by undead warriors with iron staples in their chests arose from the depths of the sea to attack us. From that point forward, we became Jarl Bloodeye's most expendable problem solvers, sent forth to gather information on what was going on and find the people responsible.

Along the way, we dealt with local politics, some werewolves with a grudge, the cult of Níðhöggr (the serpent that gnaws at the heart of the world), a group of beekeepers who worshiped/served an insane and murderous dryad, our families, and our complex interactions with one another.

Revna did not start out particularly well-defined for this campaign. I knew that I wanted to play a creepy warlock, and I knew that I didn't want to give that warlock Eldritch Blast. The reason for the second choice is I had been in parties with warlock players before, and that's all they ever cast. 

Instead, I chose Create Bonfires, and cast that spell all the time.

Revna started out as the weirdo that nobody likes. He didn't get along with anyone, didn't really talk, and lived by himself in a cave just outside of the village. He had a sister, Gudrun, who was apprenticed to Grandmother Spinner (the powerful, incredibly ancient, village seer), who could occasionally shame him into being somewhat human. He didn't like anyone, didn't want to help anyone, and had forsaken the gods to serve The Tender of the Dreaming Gyre, an abomination whose true visage had driven Revna slightly insane.

I learned a lot more about Revna as I played him, and can now provide you with a more complete, much more emo, backstory: Revna was a sickly child who was expected to die in infancy. His father (the town abusive drunk), hated him the moment he was born, did the "I have no son" thing, and insisted on naming his new son "Revna," which is a girl's name. Ironically, Revna's father died at sea "mysteriously" but Revna survived, growing up to be a sickly, awkward, and creepy child that no one liked. 

He was groomed to be apprenticed to Grandmother Spinner, since he was frail and also creepy. Grandmother Spinner rejected him out of hand, and so he broke with all tradition and found someone/thing else that would accept him as its servant. 

All of that was fine, and good enough, and I thought Revna was fun and cool to play. But then he died, and he became even more amazing than before. 

While fighting the Cult of the Gnawer, Revna took a sword to the guts and went down. Constitution was Revna's dump stat, so he blew all of his Death Saves and died. While everyone mourned and I considered what to make for my next character, the GM took me aside and told me about the Reborn template. For those that don't know, this template makes you kind of undead, in that you don't need to sleep, eat, or drink and you get bonuses for remembering things from your past life.

I agreed to this, and Revna sat up, screaming and puking up a mix of black fluid and white worms. The players were horrified and, certain that he was actually undead, tied him to the back of a horse and carted him back to civilization.They eventually released him and found him to be much more talkative (if a bit of an emo edgelord), reasonably astute, and more likely to be helpful to their overall goals than not. They grudgingly decided to keep them.

Revna's role in the party was really interesting. To supplement Create Bonfires, I got additional spells that helped with battlefield control. I also took the warlock benefit that meant I could see perfectly in the dark. This, plus my Reborn benefits, Misty Step, and Invisibility, made me the infiltrator, investigator, and rogue for a party that didn't have one. 

In time, Revna mostly won the trust of the party. Only Helvig, a down-to-earth family man and barbarian, disliked him with any intensity. Helvig's player and I assumed that, had the campaign continued, Helvig and Revna would have an epic magic vs. sword duel on a lightning-struck mountaintop somewhere. Alas, that never happened!

 

 

COVID Character: Sarth Hen'Hannar

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Sarth Hen'Hannar

Aliases: None
Pronouns: He/him
Character Concept: The Grey Mouser
Character Stats: 5th level Dual-Classed Human CN (3 Swashbuckler/2 Bloodrager)
Campaign: Rise of the Runelords
System: Pathfinder 1e
Campaign Status: Ongoing

 

This guy is weird, okay.

 

The concept for Sarth has been floating around in my brain ever since I read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories back in the day. Sarth is an obvious nod to the Mouser, and I have written a few short stories of him that never went anywhere. I also played him in a LARP years ago, which never went anywhere, either.

We were starting up Rise of the Runelords, and I didn't have an idea for a character, so I decided to take Sarth out of his box, dust him off, and play him. I started out as a Fighter, because Pathfinder was and is nearly impenetrable to me, especially at higher levels. 

Things went off the rails pretty quickly after that.

Sarth loves fighting, so much so that when he is badly injured or when he faces a (to him) challenging opponent, he starts cackling like a madman out of the sheer joy of it. This caused at least one player to remark that Sarth was a barbarian, actually. I had never considered that (barbarians in D&D and D&D adjacent games always default to shirtless, buff, angry people with axes, and not small, slight, laughing people with rapiers). I liked it, though, so I dual-classed into barbarian as soon as I was able to. 

Somewhere down the line, when I was slightly more comfortable with the system, I asked the GM if I could switch from fighter/unchained barbarian to swashbuckler/bloodrager. These were, in effect, much more complicated versions of the same thing that fit his character pretty well. The GM let me do so, and now I have a lot more interesting things to do in combat...provided I remember to parry, occasionally.

Sarth is also Chaotic Neutral. This is a new thing for me, because alignments are a) silly and b) hard, and Chaotic Neutral seems doubly so, at least for me. Previous iterations of CN I have seen portrayed tend to be wacky/insane/obnoxious, and I tried not to go that route.

 

As a result, Sarth is a man with a lot of problems. I think he suffers from some kind of mental regulation disorder and is an adrenaline junkie. When he's on an adventure, he's somewhat more focused and practical, because he's riding an emotional high. When he's not on adventures, he drinks too much, acts a little strangely, and engages in self-destructive behavior in a desperate attempt to stay "up". 

He does, however, have something of a moral code that he tries to stick to. He made himself the personal minder of the one actual Evil character in the party, sticking by him to limit the damage that person caused and to kill them if they ever crossed the line. He refuses to fight fleeing or helpless enemies, though that's mostly because they're not a challenge. If you're on an adventure with him, he will do right by you, even if he really, really, really hates you, because that's what you have to do to survive.

Sarth also--and I honestly don't know where this came from--has a thing for monster girls. That lady that's turning herself into a demon? Yes! That ghost lady in the cursed manor? Yup! The lamia that we haven't met yet, but that I've heard is coming up? I'm already putting on my cologne, bay-beh!

Like I said, he's a bit of a weirdo.

COVID Character: Gwynn Delgado

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Gwynn Delgado

Aliases: The Korvosan Drifter
Pronouns: She/her
Character Concept: Living out my best Dark Tower life!
Character Stats: 1st level LE Half-Elf (Drow) Gunslinger
Campaign: Curse of the Crimson Throne
System: Pathfinder 1e
Campaign Status: Abandoned

 

I love Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so if a game lets me play a gunslinger, well sir, I'm going to be playing that gunslinger. Thanks, Paizo!

Gwynn shares more than just her profession with Roland Deschain. Like him, she is uncompromising in her decisions and wholly focused on her end goal. She believes in law and order (and, conveniently, sees herself as the just and proper arbiter of both), but she will absolutely walk right over you if you are bleeding to death between her and your goal.

Gwynn was one of a triad of characters I made to challenge myself. I wanted to play "evil" characters that could still work and play well with others. I subscribe to the belief that alignment in D&D (and adjacent games) is pretty silly, but also that there's a big difference between player character evil and Big Evil Bad Guy Evil. Like, yes, I'm a bastard. You all know I'm a bastard. But that guy over there wants to nuke the moon, and I will work with you to stop him. Because I have my own selfish reasons for not wanting the moon to be nuked. 

I also thought that Gwynn could have a bit of a narrative arc--similar to Roland's--where she went from jaded, single-minded loner to someone who was ever so slightly more optimistic and able to rely on her friends. And also to have friends. 

Alas, the campaign ended shortly after the first chapter. Which is too bad, because I had just introduced the core conflict of my character and I was waiting to see whether they would keep letting me tag along or whether they'd knife me in the back.

The inciting incident for the conflict could not have been better set up if it had been intentional. Here's what happened.

In chapter one, the players are brought together by their mutual hatred of Gaedren Lamm, who is a small-time crime boss who had wronged them in some way. Our plan was to track him down and kill his ass dead. 

The GM decided to expand upon this introduction a bit. Apparently, in the actual game, you go immediately to Lamm's house, kick in his door, and fill him full of stabs. In our game, we went from place to place tracking down a person who knew a person who knew a person who knew where Lamm lived. 

We finally get to the dockside, split-level shanty where Lamm is holed up and we prepare to go in for the kill. I commandeer a rowboat and start ferrying people over to the lower entrance of the shanty, at which point we are attacked by Lamm's pet alligator! 

 

The battle doesn't go great. We win, but our cleric is down, our sorcerer is out of spells, and everyone else is pretty beat up. I managed to get through the battle unscathed and also stabilized the cleric. Naturally, I stepped out of the boat and announced that I was going to go put N bullets in Lamm (N = as many as it takes for my rage to subside).

The other players inform me of our plight, and I calmly tell them that I had gotten all the way here, and I wasn't leaving without gunning Lamm down. I also point out that if we leave and come back, Lamm will have moved operations and we'll have to find him all over again.

The sorcerer makes a very persuasive argument, and I agree to withdraw. We, of course, lose Lamm, but we stumble into the second chapter of the adventure in which we find out the king has died. We also get hired on as mercenaries for the new queen. 

At some point, the cleric wakes up, and finds out that I was willing to leave them behind to kill Lamm. An argument ensues! 

What happens after that? We'll never know!

 

COVID Character: Luca Tartaglione

Special NPC Edition!

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Luca Tartaglione

Aliases: Big Luca, The Phone Guy
Pronouns: He/him
Character Concept: Random mafioso who became a major NPC.
Character Stats: Mafia enforcer and...secretary, oddly enough.
Campaign: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Ed.
Campaign Status: Complete!

 

Two of the player characters in my Call of Cthulhu campaign were a mafia princess and her "uncle" (actually her father's best friend and one of his long time criminal associates). As a result, the game developed two major plot threads: The actual plot of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and what we liked to call the Italian Soap Opera, which featured bootlegging, mafiosi, gang warfare, and toxic relationships.

For a variety of reasons, the players spent a lot of time rubbing shoulders with the mafia princess' father and his "legitimate business associates." They also spent a lot of time calling the mansion to talk to the mafia princess and to see if she was free to go on occult investigations with them.

Luca started out as a joke character whose sole function was to answer the phone whenever the players called. And that was it. 

But then the players started interacting with Luca more and more and, as a result, he got a lot more characterization and screentime. By the end of the campaign, he was the most beloved of my stable of NPCs--so much so that the players threatened to riot and quit the game the second they thought I had killed Luca in a firefight.

I leaned into this pretty hard and made Luca completely beloved in-universe as well. While he was recovering in the hospital after surviving that firefight, soldiers from rival mafia families sent him flowers and paid him visits. He was just that nice!

I played Luca as one of those semi-gentle giant characters. He was very nice, good with kids, friendly, and all that, but if his boss told him to break your legs, he would do it. He also came across as a little dim, but the players eventually realized that he had a lot more going on upstairs than anyone had initially guessed. They were a little shocked to realize that Luca knew they were investigating strange stuff, and that he was even able to point out weird little clues that they had missed.

RON: You knew about that?
LUCA: Well, you guys ain't exactly subtle!

I have to say that I liked Luca very, very much. Playing him was a joy, and if I could think of a reason that he could arrive on the scene...well, he arrived on the scene. I miss playing him (and that whole Call of Cthulhu game, if I'm being honest), but I'm glad that he got to survive to the end of the campaign with his sanity and personality intact!

COVID Character: Stephen Clark

Special NPC Edition!

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Stephen Clark

Aliases: None
Pronouns: He/him
Character Concept: Last minute sibling for another NPC
Character Stats: Dreamer and Painter of Spooky Things
Campaign: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Ed.
Campaign Status: Complete!

 

I decided to take a break from posting characters that I've played to non-player characters I've created for games I've run. Don't worry, there's only two of them. This character is the first.

 

The first campaign I ran during COVID (chronicled on this very blog) was Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. In the first part of the campaign, the players tangle with, and ultimately bring down, the local chapter of the Silver Twilight Lodge.

 

One of the plot threads players can follow up on is the disappearance of James Clark, a young lawyer and new member of the Silver Twilight Lodge who goes missing shortly before the game starts. For unclear reasons (i.e. the module doesn't actually say why), he's been imprisoned in the lodge's creepy, secret basement, listening to the screams of poorly-resurrected undead and slowly going insane.

 

James became a much more integral character to the campaign's story--in part because I made him a friend of one of the investigators and in part because the players liked him and wanted to help him. He's supposed to be quietly shuffled off to an asylum at the end of chapter one and never thought about again, but instead he (and his girlfriend) got dragged along on various missions and pumped for information about the Silver Twilight Lodge.

However, James' sanity was very, very fragile, and it was easy to get him to have a breakdown. The players were also interested in getting James' family to help him out with his condition, so that they didn't feel like they were abandoning him to the world. I quickly made up his younger brother Stephen, a reclusive artist who lived in New Hampshire. I also decided to make Stephen a latent psychic, who was suffering horrifying nightmares now that Cthulhu was stirring in his slumber. In order to make sense of his nightmares, Stephen drank a lot of absinthe and painted very disturbing works of art. 

 

I decided to make Stephen transmasculine, because why not? I based some of his backstory on the real life artist Gluck (who seems have been non-binary, if I'm reading the history correctly). I also used a picture of Gluck as the character art for Stephen.

Stephen was just a bit better put together than his brother, and was happy to be his occasional minder. Over the course of the campaign, he created a bunch of artwork loaded with hints and foreshadowing. The players made good use of these in planning their actions over the course of the campaign.

COVID Character: Casimir Daggerford

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Casimir Daggerford

 

 

Aliases: Norbert J. Casimir, IV (They named the dog Daggerford)
Pronouns: He/him
Character Concept: "I want to play something really different!"
Character Stats: 3rd level CG Loxodon Artificer (Armorer) and Archaeolgist
Campaign: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
System: D&D 5e
Campaign Status: Ongoing

 

We decided to play D&D again, and I decided that I wanted to play something unusual. I had never played an artificer before, and the idea of playing an elephant person sounded really appealing (though I almost went with a tortle instead). 

 

I had been playing some...let's call them "ethically challenged" characters previous to this, so I also decided to go back to my comfort zone and play someone who was basically a good person. Casimir started out as Neutral Good (my default D&D alignment), but quickly shifted to Chaotic Good when he hid under the table to avoid the first fight.

So, who's Casimir? Well, he's a former archaeologist and current artificer. He's a good natured guy who gets along well with others, is a team player, and is just a little bit too full of himself. He's happy to expound upon any topic he knows anything about with little provocation. He started out as a history buff and a healbot, with little in the way of other useful skills. Now that he's gotten his 3rd level artificer specialization, he's going to reinforce our very thin front line with his teched up armor and his THUNDER GAUNTLETS!

We have recently completed the second chapter of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. So far in this campaign, we met Volo (yes, that Volo). Casimir fanboyed over Volo and got him to sign one of his books. Once that was done, we did a little favor for Volo in return for a promised payout of 100 gold.Of course, it turned out that Volo was strapped for cash, so he gave us the deed to a haunted manor in one of the nicer sections of Waterdeep.

Casimir had some previous experience with creepy tombs and ancient ruins, but had thus far never seen any ghosts or spirits of any kind. He repeatedly told his companions that the manor wasn't haunted because ghosts don't exist.

 

Cue the ghosts showing up and Casimir leaping into the dragonborn's arms, Scooby-Doo style.

 

We dealt with some of the ghosts, as well as with a big mess that someone had made in the basement of the manor. We have gone on to start work on renovations, pay off the various city guilds, and make plans to turn our new home into a tavern. 

I'm sure that's going to be the focus of chapter three!

 

COVID Character: Echo Kennedy

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Echo Kennedy

Aliases: None
Pronouns: She/her
Character Concept: A badass space pirate
Character Stats: A space pirate of questionable badassitude
Campaign: The Pirates of Drinax
System: Traveller 3rd Edition
Campaign Status: Abandoned

I have had intermittent interest in Traveller over the last while, so when someone expressed interest in GMing a game, I was happy to jump in and make a character.

Traveller character creation is interesting, fraught, and semi-legendary. It's game where you can die during character creation. At least, you could in earlier editions. Now you just have expensive surgery, live, and start the game even deeper in debt than you were previously.

(Cue that faction of the OSR gnashing and screaming about how "the wokes" have made Traveller into a kiddy game, I guess.)

Echo was one of the rare characters who started and ended character creation with her chosen career. I had heard that we were playing The Pirates of Drinax, so I made a space pirate. Easy peasy. I came out the other side of the process with some decent stats, gear, cash, and some ship shares, as well as one of the dullest backstories of the group.

I was slightly envious of "Two-Toes" a guy in our group who had washed out of the military, been a cop, was a drug addict, had a very sketchy background, and lost most of his toes due to frostbite on some backwater planet. Now that's a guy with characterization you can sink your teeth into!

Pirates is a classic, sandbox campaign that is (I think) also a good introduction to the game and the setting. the first part of it was pretty fun, if a bit "lead by the nose," (common with introductory adventures). We were given an awesome ship by the king of Drinax to go and do stuff in his name, ostensibly to Make Drinax Great Again. We spent most of our time planet hopping, trading to buy fuel for more planet hopping, and tracking down information on this other group of pirates that were causing problems.

Echo nearly died when she did not move quickly enough to avoid being shredded by something analogous to a Vulcan cannon. But our (very dodgy) doctor pumped her full of drugs and slapped her in a suspension tank, so she got better.

Despite the fun we were having, the game did not cater to the needs of the group. We prefer a lot more freewheeling, role-playing ridiculousness in our games, and Traveller is...not that...The biggest point of contention was that doing trade deals hinged entirely on making skill rolls and not on chatting up customs officials, befriending merchants, or finding good deals. It also required a lot of math and record keeping, so much so that we started calling it, "The Spreadsheet Minigame."

We wound up making a decent amount of cash money for our exploits, but we felt the storytelling elements of the game were rather thin. So we switched to Patfhinder.