Reverb Gamers: Let me tell you about my character!
Question #6: Describe your all-time favourite character to play. What was it about him/her/it that you enjoyed so much?
There are two, really. One was as a player character, the other as an NPC. The player character was Dimitri Eminescu, a Moldavian folklorist turned superhero (for certain definitions of superhero). The non-player character was - and is - Thunder Lies Dreaming, whose background can't really be usefully compressed, but who was full-on anachronistic crazy, and a joy to play.
I played Dimitri as speaking with a Russian-esque accent. His first superpower was to pick up ambient information from around him, in much the same way as the Drummer in Planetary. He picked up a few more from other sources along the way. The campaign he was in was well under way by the time I joined it, so there was plenty of information for him to catch up on. Dimitri was very pragmatic, very sanguine, and given to minor eccentricities. Toward the end of the campaign, he was a representative to the UN on behalf of the super-powered people of the world, which I think suited him well. I really enjoyed playing Dimitri, and even though he's gone on to create new universes, I do sometimes think of him as still being in New York, arguing Slavic mythologies over pickles and beer.
Thunder Lies Dreaming started out as a player character when I was a teenager, in one of those multi-planar, multi-setting, Rifts-esque "campaigns" that are completely impossible to recount to anyone else without sounding like you found a patch of good mushrooms, and ate the lot. He was a drow. He had multi-coloured hair, a green trenchcoat, a pair of misfiring pistols, and a special ability to get into bizarre trouble, and apparently a tendency to hop from one world to another when the going got too hot. To this day, actually, I don't know if that was a capability of the character, or a habit of the DM's when he ran out of plot. So when I was looking for a creature to epitomise "chaotic good" in the campaign world I created in my early 20s, he came right to mind.
In his modern incarnation, then, he was one of two creatures left over when an ancient chaotic good plane sealed itself away from the multiverse in order to likewise seal away its lawful evil counterpart. He's full-on chaotic, and fantastic to play, not least because he could be so incredibly frustrating for the player characters to talk to. He'd hare off on tangents, insist on weird and temporary rules of conversation, sometimes leave you to talk to his answering machine (a cupboard full of stuffed, dressed, animated mice who spoke with one high-pitched multi-toned voice) instead, and maintained that his cat was a being of ancient and terrible power. She is, admittedly, but that was hardly the point.
Some of Thunder's plotlines have been resolved by now, so he doesn't have to be quite such an Avatar of Chaos & Good anymore. He's still fun to play, but it's not the full-on gonzo how-can-I-dodge-that-question-in-the-most-bizarre-way-possible style. Fortunately, my current main campaign is set ten thousand years before, and Thunder's earlier incarnation, Rêve de la Tonnere is in full flight. So I get to do it all over again.
Posted by Drew Shiel at January 14, 2012 11:12 PM
