Origins of a Person

[Psi]

This is the second thread I wanted to start pertaining to members and their characters. I chose to use person instead of character because for some of us out characters become a person. We could actually hold a conversation in our head (or aloud) with them.

So, pick one or two of your most used or favorite characters and tell how you came to think them up and make them. Pick interesting ones! Some of you have too many characters as it is (NINMY!!!!) so try to keep it to one or two.

I'm just interested in seeing how some of the character's mine meet came to be created and what was the inspiration for their creation.

As with the other thread, I'll post after everyone else.

[The Strategist]

Disclaimer: The character descriptions discussed in this post are the original concepts, not those edited and downplayed for the sake of a more balanced role-playing experience in this community.

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I think my characters as a whole reflect who I am, or at least my perception of myself.

First, The Strategist. I came up with the nickname, and subsequently my character's name, after taking a test associated with the book Strengths Finder 2.0

My top strength was that I was Strategic, so I adopted that as my nickname. The Strategist was the first fleshed out character I came up with, as far as I can remember. Combined with my love with strategy games such as Supreme Commander and Civilization, I grew into a better long-term planner who pays little detail to the immediate struggles and conflicts, instead opting to focus on the big picture, using subtlety and indirection, and even inaction in some cases, to plant the seeds of my indisputable victory. In that account, I let those who wish me harm spend great degrees of time and energy trying to figure out what I'm up to, and playing their goldfish games (read: very short-term) trying to hurt me. I let them play their predictable games, while subtly turning them against one another and disrupting their efforts in ways so indirect they make me look perfectly innocent at best, or in possession of supernatural powers at worst (and yes, I was accused of that a few times.) My namesake character enjoys these same qualities, and is a major (and often invisible) force driving the story forward.

Enter the exact opposite: Cecil. He is a mute brute of a man, enclosed in a very conspicuous set of armor. He rushes forward in battle, virtually indestructible. Since no force can affect him, he needs no strategy and instead focuses on charging in and destroying any and every opposition in his way. He was born as an anti-Strategist: an impulsive brute living as a forever silent servant. Strong and indestructible as he may be, he has no independence or freedom of choice.

Enter Glinda, whose namesake was taken from the Wizard of Oz. For those unfamiliar with the story, in the Wizard of Oz, Glinda is the Good Wizard of the South, who gives Dorothy the Silver Shoes and directs her on her path to defeat the Wicked Witch of the West. My character is more Wicked Witch than Good, however, and represents multiple ideas: the outcasts and victims of war, the force of change, self-transformation (metaphorically and literally.) She is the leader of the victims who were twisted and transformed by the war. She was also created as a counterparty to balance The Strategist's power and influence. Cast out of their homes, the Corrupted struggle everyday to establish a new place in the world, and have developed survival skills and a great will to fight, not to mention some extremely dangerous powers that keep growing stronger with time.

The Corrupted were then established as a faction, the biggest wild card in what may otherwise be a generic war story between technology and magic.

With the Global Forces and Mages already at war, the Corrupted needed another faction to bring an uneasy balance of power: enter the Chosen Ones. A religious order that believes the signs of the end of days have mostly been fulfilled, and that the Corrupted should be slain. All the while, the Chosen Ones provide a safe haven for those who wish to avoid the insanity of war, regardless of political association or creed. With a virtually unlimited number of potential converts and refugees wishing to escape the war arriving from all over the world, this faction would be diversified and dangerous enough to unleash great devastation if anything triggered unrest among their ranks.

Finally, the other characters were created to represent a quality, or set of qualities, I believe have significance:

President David (leader of the Global Forces): Leadership, wisdom, age
Takeshi (telekinetic Corrupted warrior): The power of mind over matter, intelligence, efficiency
Peter Eden (leader of the Chosen Ones): Faith, hope, tranquility, religion
Vincent (merchant of Magic items): commerce, greed, lies, resourcefulness

And others who have not been fully fleshed out, but hopefully will be one day to create a fuller world.

[Psi]

Strategist: So do you remember the first time using Cecil, Glinda, and The Strategist in an RP? Looking back on it, did their designs work out to help you play them like you wanted to?

It's really interesting how it spawned from one moment and that one book. Do you think they would have come to be if you didn't read that book? Would you still have characters today that resembled the ones you have now?

[The Strategist]

To be honest, they were never designed with RP in mind. I had the character concepts come to mind in one form, but then they started to grow and change as time went by. I have multiple scenarios in mind in which several characters meet, in both friendly settings and in combat, as well as several outcomes to each encounter. It helped me explore the qualities that have an effect on me, as well as how they relate to one another. I'm working on creating a love/hate angle, as well as a minor good vs. evil subplot (light vs. darkness?) to contrast with the overall morally gray settings and characters.

[zandyne]

I've never RPed with you but...well for character creation, it comes from fairly idle thoughts, usually the world or some tangent they are vaguely associated with are created first. Some are actually based off of something else, take for instance, Dantalion. I was simply browsing the name of mystical creatures and the name was pretty interesting, so I read the article. For the actual character though, I took some artistic license. Dantalion is actually indirectly connected to another set of characters who had their own story plotted out.

This story/nonexistent project is something called "Suit of Bones" which features Jack Graves and the Skull King (Jacob Rhynes) in a "paint by numbers" murder story entailing how a very demented man runs around performing rituals to obtain occult power for his own reasons. Jack and SK are of course opposing ideals; though SK loses the battle on the physical plane and ironically enough ends up Jack's invisible and unacknowledged "guardian." There are some other literary devices which helped make up their interactions/characters, but those are subjective as they are not concrete because I've not actually made an in-depth version of the "Suit of Bones" story.

*As the name of their story implies, the story was based off a card deck and from my own day-dreams at school in trying to tell a story by only using the cards.

[TrueBlue©]

I think my character, my main one, isn't a deep reflection of my inner strengths or anything silly like that. True was first born as an author insert in a seriously demented, script formatted parody of Power Rangers. The idea behind her, a little me-character that ran around established universes causing problems, has been around for as long as I can remember. I think everyone has one of those, you know? When I was nine or ten, True was "Saber," a 3000-year-old cyborg girl that could turn into a velociraptor, and she lived on a magical floating island where everyone could turn into dinosaurs and everyone was named after the weapon they specialized in, even though Saber actually wielded katanas.

Then, one day, I learned what a Mary Sue was, and I realized that I had the "Oh, Looks Like My Characters Are ALL Mary Sues" Disease. I wasn't RPing until I was 14, and by then, the Power Skillet had been invented and Saber was already just True's third soul. I tried to work it to where each soul represented some part of me, but they really don't.

In conclusion, True is just me saying whatever comes to mind, and bending that into an RP post.

[Psi]

Oh wow, I thought the first RP character would have been just made to rp with, that's how I did it.

It's pretty cool to see how some started from stories and got converted or turned into a character for RPing with. It makes me feel like I'm backwards T____T. Many of my characters started just to rp with and turned into a story.