And while I still love my Little Traveller, Lego isn't quite as big a part of my life right now.
But my DnD characters definitely are. And I've been playing with Hero Forge for my characters since the beginning, but then I discovered a tutorial about using their screenshot tool to then colour the images in Photoshop. Cue a whole new obsession.
After the first couple took me upwards of an hour and a half, I have it down to probably about 45 minutes now... depending on complexity.
I started playing around with coloured backgrounds, wallpaper for my laptop, that kind of thing. Which led me to the idea of adapting that design into a blog header, which then led to the blog header above. Which, while simple, I'm pretty proud of. And yes, I know that the green background doesn't have a correspondingly themed character, but there's reasons for that.
So, from left to right...
- Demyan - human noble cleric of Loviatar, Goddess of Pain
Demyan is my dumpster fire. He's a total disaster and I could not love him more. He's a noble, worships a Lawful Evil goddess, a Grave Domain cleric who will definitely let you go unconscious before he bothers to heal you, has the upmost of contempt for most people and as such considers himself above everyone else... in short he's a total prick. But he's also insightful as fuck and protective of children and people who have won his favour. He's also one of the first characters that appeared in my head after I invented an NPC in a game and he just never left, just sat there insisting that I make him into a character. His personality only appeared when I played in a game with way too many other people, about half of which I didn't especially like playing with for various reasons. So it was too much fun to not show my displeasure via my character (without being a dick about it).
- Belben - halfling arcane trickster rogue
My very first character, Belben will always be my favourite. He's also the reason I'm obsessed with halflings and have played five different halflings so far. And although it doesn't show in who he is now, his original DNA came about because I was reading a lot of Dashiell Hammett books and wanted an investigator character. He's a member of the enormous Beestinger clan, grew up in a bakery (and that was before I learned how to make bread), has five older sisters (although he never feels like "the baby"). While he could rob you blind, he's not that kind of rogue, he's much more interested in your secrets. He can also walk into a room and totally "Sherlock Holmes" the shit out of it. And I will say that my decision to give him Winged Boots was the best decision I ever made. He's my little bumblebee.
- Rain in the Night - tabaxi monk
If all of my characters are some part of my personality turned all the way up to 15, Rain is my impulsiveness/impatience. He'll be fine up to a point and then he'll get bored and do the dumb thing. This is also aided by the fact that as a cheetah themed tabaxi (bipedal big-cat person) and a monk, he can, when necessary, run up to 270 feet inside six seconds (or 49km/h), which now includes along vertical surfaces and across water. I now tend to dig much deeper for character names, but he was literally named because I was making him at night during a big rainstorm.
- Khurg - champion orc fighter and barbarian
Khurg is my big dumb boy. He's the character I've played mostly either when I've already played or run a particular adventure or I can't be bothered. Alternatively, sometimes I just want to play someone uncomplicated. I picked orc for him especially so that he was mechanically dumber than he could otherwise have been (since orcs have a -2 to their intelligence stat). He's also a character that partially showed up after me running a series of adventures that all had orc or ogre or other big dumb NPC characters. I also get to his character/voice by pushing my lower jaw forward and grunting... it just works. He's also the character that I had to include, even though he doesn't match his colour swatch, because everybody loves Khurg. And yes, he has "Friendly" embroidered into the front of his overalls... originally that was a piece of stone, but then I did a Christmas adventure and decided that one of Santa's helpers embroidered that for him.
- Oceanus - water genasi sailor and coastal druid
Oceanus (Oh-see-ann-us... not any other variation of how you might pronounce that particular name, thank you very much) is Southern. My accept repertoire isn't enormous... I can do a decent accent from the American south though. And by decent, I mean often terrible, but a bad real world accent makes for a workable DnD accept. It also makes him often more laid back than I might otherwise play characters. He's also has a little bit of Big Dad Energy. I didn't want to play him that way, but maybe because I play him mostly with people roughly two decades younger than me, it's just what happens.
- Masika - former pirate fighter and storm sorcerer
She was supposed to be my bad girl, my bitch, my character who didn't give a fuck and wasn't nice. But something happened to Masika when she travelled across the desert with a bunch of idiots, then continued to hang out with them for months and months and months. She ended up caring about them. And kind of ended up as either the bitchy older sister or occasionally the slightly exasperated and authoritative mother of the group. Well, except for the pretty but insane human girl PC she ended up fucking... their relationship has been weird and on-again, off-again, but still incredibly important to who both of those characters are now. She also has possibly the shortest temper of all my characters. If you fuck with what's hers, she will end up in spectacular fashion. She also once shaved her head after an altercation with an NPC. And in the most recent game we played, the reason we had to leave the city we'd been in before the start of the game was that Masika had an affair with a married noblewoman and needed to get out of town quick.
- Nightingale - drow elf bard violinist and dancer
Surprisingly to the people who know how I play DnD, it took me 822 days to actually play a bard. Because, honestly, I think bards are incredibly boring. Or rather the scope of potential character concepts for them is very restrictive. And the subclasses aren't hugely varied in the way that they are for a rogue for example. So much so that taking any of three different subclasses wouldn't actually have changed my character concept in the slightest. Nightingale is also my first drow. Not for any particular reason, but personally I'd probably rather play a half-elf than a full elf. She also has a vague and non-specific Eastern European accent. And honestly, it took me a little while to work out who Nightingale actually was. Distilled down to her essence, she's a relapsing addict, she's someone who knows that she shouldn't Do Bad Things, but also knows that sometimes Doing Bad Things are the only way to get things done. Interestingly she's a character who will use sex and sexuality but isn't particularly interested in it (as opposed to, say, Masika), possibly because being a drow in the surface world, she's been fetishised and objectified by (mostly) men, but she comes from a culture where men have no real power.
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