For All the Games I Gamed Before
This is possibly the dorkiest thing you’ll read all weekend.
I make no secret for my love of rolling the funny-shaped dice, and since I've been missing the gaming group I left behind I decided to share with you all a list of characters played since 2005.
Skorzeny (Wushu): My friend Conrad Deitrick could rattle off games of Wushu like nobody’s business. If you’ve never gamed Wushu, pretty much all you need to know is that it is a Narrativist game where you get extra dice if you in some way incorporate the sound of pumping a shotgun (KA-CHICK) into the description of your character's action. For this game Conrad used Palladium’s MUTANTS DOWN UNDER sourcebook from THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES game.
Skorzeny was pretty much a copy of that guy with the gyrocopter from THE ROAD WARRIOR. He flew an airship. The airship blew up. He went in search of another airship with a band of furries. Somehow an army of robots got involved.
Fleshbox (d20 Mutant & Materminds): This was a modern-day superheroes game. I don’t remember the name of Fleshbox’s secret identity. His story was that he was a medic in Iraq, turned night-shift morgue attendant who got infected by some kind of alien nano-goo that transformed him into a weird amalgam of Mr. Fantastic and John Carpenter’s THE THING. (His initial concept was Mr. Fantastic but gross.)
He was basically a shape-shifter, and I loved flipping through the rulebook searching for superpowers to twist and make gross.
The Fright (Spirit of the Century): I love Spirit of the Century. It’s a great game for pulp action.
The Fright was an undead gangster who worked as the chauffeur for another character, a Lovecraftian Dr. Fate, named Dr. Occult. In other words, a meat-shield that went knuckle to knuckle with extra-dimensional blasphemous foes. He said things like: “Jeez. Will you shut your tentacled yap for a second, I’m trying to listen to the ballgame here!” and “Hey Doc, you want a sandwich?”
(In SotC each character has taglines and if you work the line into the game you get extra dice.)
Battlechimp (Spirit of the Century): A monkey in a battle-suit with the firepower of a tank and a robo-voice like Stephen Hawking. He enjoyed making fun of the “Lord of the Jungle” character played by Matt Cody. I don't remember any of his taglines, but I do remember it said "the only surviving member of The Simian Six" on his character sheet.
Hagan Selkirk (d20 Star Wars): I’m not a big fan of the Star Wars Universe and the less I know about it the better. (Really, Storm Troopers are just clones? That sucks.) My favorite iteration of the setting for RPGs was West End Games' version.
Hagan was a trigger happy, former Imperial recruit, turned Jedi-in-training. He was loosely based on Terence Hill's Trinity character from the Spaghetti Western series.
Click to viewA curious fact: Whenever I leave town during an ongoing game, the GM takes great delight in turning my characters into villains. It happened in 2002 with my fur-coat wearing, staff-o-Power wielding, half-Elven rogue/sorcerer Lenehan, and, if the rumors are to be believed, it’s happening now to Hagan.
How many times do I have to say this? They’re not bad people. They’re just misunderstood!
John Dalt/Muzzlehatch (Homebrews): These characters weren’t as interesting as the systems they gamed in were: "Tombstone" and "Fortune's Fool" (both designed by Jay Stratton of Pantheon Press).
“Tombstone” was a “dead-in-the-west” game so violent and with a character mortality rate so high that my wife would ask “Did you get shot in the face?” every night when I came home from playing it.
John Dalt was a portly gunfighter. He got shot in the face.
“Fortune’s Fool” used a tarot deck instead of dice (maybe there were one or two) and was set in a fantasy version of 16th century Europe. Muzzlehatch was a Dwarven munitions expert. He blew things up and wore a voluminous coat and a sombrero.
Make of these what you will.
As everyone knows it’s a proven fact that one’s fondness for certain character-types in RPGs is the only true window into that person’s soul.