Alright, now that I’ve got a couple D&D games under my belt, I can answer this. When it comes to favorites, for me it works the same way as text RPs; whatever character(s) I got to use/play the most and thus develop the most. I’m on the discovery writer end of things, so it’s rarely whatever I played last.
So if you would indulge my ranting, come along with me on my journey to find my current favorite.
Kenneth Firehair - The Topper Bandit
Game: Trouble on the Rail-Away
The Story
First up is the Topper Bandit, a lone ranger/wandering sheriff mixed with a Robin Hood-esque character and some Ned Kelly influence. Someone who travels from town to town ensuring true justice is carried out. Even if that means robbing banks and derailing trains to make things right. Oh, and he’s known as the Topper Bandit because he wears a large top hat over his head with eye holes cut into it. Topper is another name for the top hat. Can’t be a big name in the West without a fun name right?
Race and class wise, he was a level six Fire Genasi Rogue (Scout, 3 levels) and Fighter (Gunslinger, 3 levels). A friend wanted to try out DMing, so he was made for this one-shot test run. It was using the train tavern from Seeker’s Guide to Twisted Taverns, though all I was told was that this game took place on a fantasy steam engine. So I, and almost everyone else, went with gunslinging cowboys.
What was supposed to be one session stretched into three and we never got to the main event of the one-shot. Kenneth never even got to wear his hat-mask. But they did fight a big fire elemental, in which Kenneth remained inside the monster since he’s fire resistant and it kept missing him horribly. Yes, having just guns as the only viable attack option did not work out in that fight. Kenneth still did the most damage.
The real issue was a last minute decision the DM made regarding our characters. In that all of them were working for a crime family, had just finished a big job, and were given tickets to this train for a vacation. We didn’t know this until the session started and some of the players missed that stated info entirely. As you can imagine, figuring out why Kenneth had any involvement, and to not act against the party, became an issue. One player left mid-game in the first session, one character thought that Kenneth was a traitor and was trying to find and kill him, one was trying to not be murdered by an angry criminal for them botching the job Kenneth told them not to take, and Kenneth jumped off the train.
I’d like to write and explore this character more as he is pretty fun. Also very visually funny, it’s a shame his hat and clothes got turned to ash in the fight.
Zacha Sabereye - The Catgirl Tax Collector
Game: Infinite Taverns
The Story
To set things straight right away, no, Zacha was not known as the catgirl tax collector in-universe. That’s just the fun nickname I like using for introducing the character out of game. Especially since I knew those words coming out of my mouth would mess with the DM hard. As in hit by a freight train hard. And it did. And it was glorious.
Right, back on topic.
“I am Zacha of the Sabereye, enforcer of oaths, collector of dues, and serving hand of the throne.”
A level three female Leonin Paladin (Oath of the Crown [re-flavored as Throne in game]), Zacha was designed to be a subversive character. The game’s pitch was that our party is stuck in a series of infinite taverns. You try to leave and you find yourself in another tavern. There was also some seven deadly sins theming, in which all of our characters would be tested on. Aside from messing with my DM by using an anthro-race, which was out of character for my typical designs, I decided to make it seem as though I was throwing my DM a bone (tax collector - greed; Leonin - pride). Plenty of things for them to be tested on.
Only, Zacha is not greedy nor all that prideful. Yes, there is pride, but she’s a public servant. She’s there to help the people as much as the Throne. When she goes to businesses or people for their taxes, she audits them first, tells them ways to file things better to pay less in taxes, ways to better track and run their business, etc. and then collects. And even then, she finds that the people are charged too much and believes she knows the correct amount needed by the Throne to run the kingdom, trying to get them to change the tax law. She might look like the Sheriff of Nottingham, has the power and authority to destroy so many, but she’s kind, caring, and understanding. Far more the reformed Zacchaeus than anything else (and yes, she’s short just like Zacchaeus…but short by Leonin standards was still six feet tall). Truly, such a tax collector can only exist in fantasy (
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Before I tell you some of the fun things that happened, I need to talk about stats. I’m someone who stats characters based on their personality and story, to try and force the mechanics to match that and not the other way around. I know how to properly stat things, I know very well how to minmax like the best of them. But I don’t care about that. So Zacha, despite being a paladin, had 0 (10) Charisma. Her highest stat was technically intelligence (2, 15), but it was tied effective with strength (2, 14) and wisdom (2, 14). Yes, she’s a mess. Just like the game.
Like Kenneth, I only got to use her for three sessions. One of the other PCs was the Spanish Inquisition, but they were too intimidated by a muscle-bound lion girl and back off immediately after trying to convert her. Zacha had to stop this same person from murdering another party member (“I know not where we are, but I will still enforce the basics of law.”), and also stop them from robbing the tavern (“The church always making excuses to steal things from the people. What more could we expect?”). Yeah, that player didn’t stick around long because of Zacha.
She also broke part of the lore/story of the game by auditing the tavern’s guest sign-in book. I’ll leave it up to your imagines as to how. Though the last important thing that happened to her in that game was getting made a fool of by a tumbleweed.
Nípha the Terrible
Game: Infinite Taverns
The Story
The snowman magician who’s bad at magic. A level 3 Druid of the Arctic Circle of Land, who had negative wisdom and zero intelligence. Oh yes.
One of my younger sisters was also a player in Infinite Taverns. She played a living tumbleweed known as Sir Tumbles, a level 3 Rogue Scout. Tumbling is a mechanic in D&D and it’s Dex based, so Sir Tumbles was all about that Dex, Acrobatics, and Athletics. Sir Tumbles, as you can imagine, was a wild card and decided to assassinate their potential NPC guide because he thought their name was stupid. Zacha tried to arrest them when it became apparent that they were the one who attempted murder, but Sir Tumbles did what tumbleweeds to best and tumbled right on through her. He escaped and was completely separate from the party.
Due to no one other than my sister and I being able to make it for a forth session, I decided to make a last minute secondary character to join Sir Tumbles. Nípha the Terrible, a small, anxious, but ever curious snowman on the search for his mom so he can learn to do all her magic tricks. He doesn’t know he was made as a distraction so the magician could escape. All he knows is that he disappointed the crowd, disappointed mom by extension, and is off to find her to become good at magic.
He and Sir Tumbles became fast friends and their antics swiftly became too much for the DM. Bless his heart, but in our idle boredom we moved our icons off into the void portions of the map and acted like they managed to get into said void. The DM played along…and they found an M23 Grenade Launcher. My snowman thought it was pan flute and got a natural 20 in performance, so he made music out of it somehow. Sir Tumbles, smarter than the snowman, tried to use the weapon to kill this blind buy they came across. Except the tumbleweed rolled so bad, he shot himself…Which did nothing (good Dex save), because he’s a tumbleweed, and the grenade flew straight through his body. The two left that tavern as friends, armed with a grenade launchers and some sunglasses they stole from a blind man.
It’s a good thing we never had any combat that session. All the spells he has are useless for combat. He even has Skywrite prepped, and they’re underground. He worked hard to earn that title of terrible.
He’s probably my best character performance voice-wise. He was a lot of fun and I would love to write or play him more. But that was the last session of Infinite Taverns. No one could get the schedule to work and, if we did, one of the other players planned on burning everything down. They couldn’t handle the idea of Sir Tumbles being in possession of an infinite ammo grenade launcher.
Aelmesse Shryne & Bageard
Game: Untitled
The Story
A mutual fellow was looking for volunteers to test his DMing skills. He wanted some practice and to flesh out more of his world before presenting a campaign to the desired players. So it was going to be a series of small, unconnected one-shots. I volunteered because there are few players out there who will make a DM learn really quick where their boundaries lie.
For this, I decided to create a buddy-cop comedy duo; a human cleric and a warlock mimic who don’t know they both serve the same entity. The cleric often tries to convert the mimic and waxes about how great their deity is while the mimic pushes it off and tries to steal/reuse the cleric’s offerings to her god as gifts to his patron. And of course, all the other antics they get up to working together.
Now if you’re looking at this and wondering how I got two full characters in, I didn’t. The human cleric was the main character, the warlock mimic acts more like a pet or Steel Defender. Basically a young mimic who’s a weak warlock, so very limited in spells and extra abilities. And movement, actions, etc. is shared between them. That way it was more balanced.
This concept ended up becoming Aelmesse Shryne, a fifth level human (normal, not variant) cleric of the Peace Domain, and Bageard the Warlock Mimic. Now, the DM set up most of how Bageard would function, so I think he’s only a level two warlock on the mechanical end. No subclass yet, but I’m likely going to make a custom subclass for him.
The lore and backstory I’ve written about these two and the entity they serve is too long to post here. But here’s something in brief about their god/patron.
Deity stuff
Khanok/Kayin - A powerful entity that wishes to become a true god. For what purpose is unknown, but he has enacted a plan of the eras to accomplish this goal.
To his faithful he is known as Khanok, the caring god of housing/dwelling, community, caretaker of the poor, and commerce. A god who is not only patron and guardian of the city Kanokory but is its very founder. For Kanokory is his home and all who live there are his guests.
However, beyond Kanokory’s walls he is known as something quite different. For where his agents of faith fail, his conscripted servants will do. Warlocks under the tyranny of a cruel, greedy, hungry patron that goes by many names. Most of which revolve around some variation of name “KN.” If one can get the Warlock to say his name.
The two are quite the serious goofballs. Aelmesse is a small woman carrying around a large alms box in her arms everywhere she goes. Imagine those large treasure chests in pirate media, but it’s being carried by someone who just barely above five feet tall and a hundred pounds wet. And that is what everyone sees when she comes walking into town.
In the incredibly short time they were used, they accidentally convinced a colony of carpenter ants into thinking that Bageard was a god. And also causes the local river to become a party raver, glowing multi-colored bright lights to see better in the dark rain.
Unlike the other games, which were virtual and over voice calls, this one was purely though text. The DM was busy, so it was supposed to be more of a casual reply. Except the DM took a very long time and then got upset at me, due to my character(s) being too proactive for his liking. And due to many other issues, like dark vision not working in rain because rain would be considered a thick wall, I and the other players left the game. We re-established the game elsewhere and put up a rotating DM system. Each player gets a chance to run a one-shot; every player can be the DM to fill in for someone else as needed.
Because I’m the most improv of the group and could spin up a game faster than the rest, I went first. Our group had to rescue Clifford the Big Red Dog from the clutches of Dr. Moreau the Pied Piper. Which we just wrapped up after…seven months of play, when I thought it would take three in the text format. Whoops.
So Aelmesse and Bageard’s story isn’t over yet, but it is going quite slow. I do really like them, but that’s hard to convey without dumping dozens of pages of lore. Yet that slow pace did mean there was someone else I ended up discovering faster…
Prackash Ordiway - Mr. Return to Slime Man
Game: Tales of Drakkenheim
The Story
Prackash Ordiway, the man who broke the world and the DM.
If you’re in the D&D world, you might have heard of a third-party game called the Dungeons of Drakkenheim. Our DM, the same one from the train, was one of their Kickstarter backers and really loved this setting. He ran it with an IRL group for about twelve sessions, but due to scheduling and life conflicts, that game dissolved. But he still really wanted to run a game in this setting and, with the digital copy of the expansion material and VTT elements in Roll20, decided to invite me and a couple of others for a virtual campaign.
And that expanded material is important, because it had the custom Apothecary class. I have a fondness for the weirder and more scientific stuff, like the Artificer, and this sent my creative juices going. For a brief rundown, my DM heard them described like this, “they’re Artificer software running on Warlock hardware.” That also focus on some of the oft neglected aspects of D&D (acid, poison, disease) and given buffs and other abilities to that.
We were starting at level one, so my character was a human variant Apothecary with the Mutagenist subclass. Mutagenists being the subclass experimenting with their own bodies to become the perfect lifeform. And my boy, well, to put it simply, thought Return to Monke didn’t go back far enough. It was time to go all the way back to the Primordial Ooze, origin soup.
In this setting, one can only have magic if they’re born with it. Magic is passed on through bloodlines. The first human magic users were all warlocks, with their magic and patron’s physical traits passing down to their offspring. My character, due to the existence of blood magic (I had considered multiclassing into Blood Hunter), had come to the theory that all humans could do magic once long ago. Because all humans evolved from a primordial ooze and blood was once a slime, a symbiotic slime. And this slime still had the magic of that primordial ooze in it, which is what allowed humans to do magic.
But in those ancient days, to gain more power, these slimes were sacrificed in a blood pact with those evil patrons. And ever since, humanity’s bloodline was diluted into worthless water. Those who could do magic carried diluted and corrupted blood. Thus, he sought to restore humanity back to its proper place. Cure them of the corrupted bloodlines, bring the blood slime back and have their blood be thicker than water once again.
Despite this insanity, Prackash Ordiway was still a doctor. As one player described him, “He’s just standing there, being sane!” There were clear undertones that something was wrong with him, but he was so polite and caring otherwise that he was difficult for them to figure out.
When they got attacked by bandits and barely survived, the cleric wanted to cut off part of the captive bandit’s thumb and let him go. That way the bandit could still do work but no longer use a weapon effectively. Prackash put up a hand to stop the cleric and asked her if she wanted the bandit to feel the pain or if cutting off the thumb was more important. He then numbed the bandit from pain and helped ensured it was wrapped up and wouldn’t get infected before they sent the bandit on their way. It’s these sort of things he keeps doing all the time throughout the game.
Did they just have to kill someone’s friend who turned into a monster? He asks them how they want the body to be handled and what rites they prefer to be used. Does daily health checks and asks for very little pay in return, despite everything costing double to triple rate.
As far as the party was concerned, Prackash was there to find a cure to Contamination. A new and horrific disease and series of mutations caused by the crystals of the setting. While this goal was true, part of this cure was returning humans back to that earlier state when their blood was a sort of slime. But he’s stuck in his research, so he came to Drakkenheim to raid the wizard tower, which most certainly held answers.
Like most of my characters, since he was very proactive and had clearer goals than the rest, most of the party followed him. He accidentally became the defacto leader…which neither he, nor I, realized as first. It became very evident that he was the party’s glue when he left for part of the day and the other three where by themselves. They fell apart immediately and the party’s Ranger almost kill the Bard.
We only managed to get in about 11-12 sessions before things fell apart and the game ended early. But there are so many stories I could tell about Prackash and what he did. Like how he managed to tango with 4/5 factions and two separate NPCs important for quests, reaping the rewards for two factions by completing that same quest, satisfying/getting away with a third, getting the other faction to help against the one he did not satisfy, and made several series of deals and political alliances and backstabs…all with negative charisma.
Oh. And if the game had continued, probably would have caused a world war and change the entire political landscape of the world. Before that, the most impressive thing I thought he was going to cause was a 9/11 event. But uh, yeah, stories for another time.
And there will be more stories, because I plan on writing shorts for him and all the others. So stay tuned, there’s always more where this comes from.